Evidence of a Bronze Age farming community has been uncovered by a team of archaeologists.

The dig, in Hackbridge, was commissioned by Sutton Council as a follow-up to an archaeological dig in 1998 on adjacent land to the south of the site at Wandle Meadows, now the Bedzed site, which found evidence of a large-scale, Bronze Age settlement.

The work legally had to be undertaken before the building of an extension of Hackbridge Primary School could commence on the site, which has been vacant for a number of years but was previously utilised as a sewage treatment plant.

A group of four archaeologists from the AOC Archaeology Group spent four weeks excavating about 1.7 hectares of land. They used diggers and archaeological equipment to remove 1m of salt and earth before exploring the site by hand.

Several indicators that a small farming community lived there about 4,000 years ago were uncovered. Field boundaries dating to about 2,000BC, indicated by ditches dug to separate fields from each other, and holes for wooden posts, which would have been fence lines, used to tether animals or part of the wooden walls of a house were discovered.

No physical artifacts, however, were found dating back to the Bronze Age. Instead, bizarrely an almond Mars bar wrapper, a limited edition version of the popular snack, was found at the centre of the site inside a pit filled with rubble.

Archaeologist Les Capon, project officer at AOC Archaeology, said: “There may have been a small community of two or three families but we can’t prove they were living directly on the ground the school is going to be built on.

“Without evidence of a house on our exact site here or any dating evidence it is more deductive reasoning than proof. The evidence may live a couple of metres to the east or north just outside the area we are digging in.”

Construction of the new primary school is expected to start in April 2016, with the school to open in September 2017.