Chronology, Origins, and Aftermath

Abstract

Abstract Monumental and monolithic stone circles of the Neolithic, or their timber counterparts, can hardly provide a template for later domestic architecture. The earliest domestic roundhouses include ring-bank hut-circles of the earlier Bronze Age, and stake-walled roundhouses from unenclosed platform settlements of the second millennium bc. By the Middle Bronze Age a fuller range of timber roundhouses was in evidence in Northern and Southern Britain, some displaying a full range of architectural features such as post-ring, ring-groove, double-walls, and porches. In southern England, key sites like Shearplace Hill and Black Patch of the Middle-Late Bronze Age have been subject to reinterpretation. There has been a major review of Roman rural settlement, prompted by the scale of development-funded excavation, resulting in a diversification of recognized site categories, and superseding the older polarized town vs villa division. Problems of the transition to rectilinear domestic building are partly caused by visibility of building methods, and even the transition to stone foundations is more probably a change of materials than architectural innovation. In some regions roundhouses survive well into the Roman period, though not necessarily as a result of site continuity, and even in the late Roman period roundhouses on villa sites were complementary rather than subordinate to their rectilinear counterparts.