Iron Age landscape and society The settlement patterns

Abstract

That the character of settlement across Iron Age Britain was far from uniform is well known, although Hawkes’ (1931, fig. 1) plotting of the distribution of hillforts was not expanded upon for many years, with key studies such as Harding’s (1974) The Iron Age in Lowland Britain and the early edition of Cunliffe’s (1974) Iron Age Communities in Britain lacking distribution maps of settlement types. Cunliffe’s (1978, fig. 16.2; 1991, fig. 20.6; 2005, fig. 4.3) eventual mapping of four settlement character areas across Britain was therefore a seminal piece of work, although the whole of eastern England fell within a single zone characterized by ‘villages and open settlements’, while Bradley (2007, fig. 5.14) suggested that eastern England was a landscape of ‘open and wandering settlements’ (Fig. 3.1). In contrast, Hill (1999; 2007) has suggested that while the East Midlands and his ‘northern Anglia’ (Norfolk and northern Suffolk) were characterized by clusters of agglomerated settlements and large ‘open villages’, parts of his ‘southern Anglia’ (i.e. what is referred to here as the Northern Thames Basin) has ‘little evidence for densely settled communities’ in the Middle Iron Age. He suggested instead that the ‘apparently empty areas’ in ‘southern Anglia’ were ‘probably exploited economically and agriculturally in a much less intensive manner by relatively few permanent settlements . . . and, especially, by people visiting them’ (Hill 2007, 22). Hill’s (2007) view that ‘southern Anglia’ was a sparsely settled and peripheral area has not, however, stood the test of time and what is in fact striking is just how much Iron Age settlement has been discovered there through recent developmentled archaeological work. The most intensively investigated area, at Stansted Airport and the nearby new A120, for example, comprised a landscape littered with small enclosed farmsteads consisting of one or two roundhouses associated with a small number of four-post granaries (Havis and Brooks 2004; Timby et al. 2007a; Cooke et al. 2008). The character of these settlements is clearly suggestive of permanent occupation, while their density suggests that this was far from an empty landscape that was seasonally exploited by outsiders.