[1] A late prehistoric barrow ditch was located in the highest part of the Anglo-Saxon cemetery, on a false crest of the hill.

There was also evidence for Romano-British activity on the site, with a small circular pit 2 feet deep cut into the chalk, containing a few sherds of Roman-era pottery.

Warner, curator of Dover Museum, and the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments decided to implement a rescue excavation of the site.

[3] A lack of resources following the culmination of the Second World War meant that post-excavation work was delayed, and in 1963, the artefacts were transferred to the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Central London.

[4] In early 1994, proposals were put forward to construct another housing estate – termed "Castle View" – this time on the lower slopes of Long Hill.

Kent County Council's Heritage Conservation Group requested that archaeologists put in some evaluation trenches in Castle View to see if any outlying Anglo-Saxon graves would be destroyed by the development; undertaking the work in a single day in March 1994, South-Eastern Archaeological Services revealed 12 graves.

[6] With the advent of the Anglo-Saxon period in the fifth century CE, the area that became Kent underwent a radical transformation on a political, social, and physical level.

[7] Later Anglo-Saxon accounts attribute this change to the widescale invasion of Germanic language tribes from northern Europe, namely the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.

[14] The earliest excavation of Anglo-Saxon Kentish graves was in the 17th century, when antiquarians took an increasing interest in the material remains of the period.

The deepest was 0.76 m (2 ft 6 in) below, while the shallowest were 15–23 cm (5.9–9.1 in) below the modern surface, indicating that the Anglo-Saxon ground level was undoubtedly higher.

[21] Archaeogenetic research on a large sample of skeletons from the cemetery showed that most were identical to a reference group of Continental northern European (CNE) DNA samples when compared with a Welsh/British/Irish (WBI) reference group that showed genetic continuity from Britain's Iron-Age population.

Grave goods, including brooches and weapons, are in fact found on both sides of this family tree, pre-mixing and post-mixing (for example, in the youngest and mixed generation, we found both weapons, beads and pin, and their mother with a brooch).Adding in a third reference group, people from the Iron Age in present-day France, the researchers found more specifically that about half the genetic material matched the CNE profile, a quarter the WBI profile, and a quarter the western European profile, indicating that many of the people buried had ancestry in that region.