The Origins of Hilltop Enclosures. Late Bronze Age hilltop sites in Atlantic western Britain

This paper presents a territorial analysis focused on a sample area in the inner region of Abruzzo, delimited by the Gran Sasso and the Sirente mountain ranges and characterised by strong geomorphological irregularities. Archaeological data from the Final Bronze Age/ Early Iron Age to the beginning of the Romanization process are analysed through a computer-based approach, using CAD, DBMS and GIS. Published data about this region are quite disjointed, both for methodological reasons and for various interferences in the archaeological record. These aspects influenced the landscape analyses proposed in previous studies and the hypothesis about the territorial exploitation patterns during the pre-Roman times. Research has been mainly concentrated on sites with better visibility, such as fortified hilltop sites and necropolises, frequently compared to the Roman settlement pattern, based on valley floor sites along the main pathways. Nevertheless, recent surveys suggest that these data should be reconsidered, taking into account both the presence of other kinds of sites (such as the Iron Age/Archaic period small rural sites localised in the valley floor) and continuity in the settlement pattern up to Roman times. The available archaeological data have been processed within a GIS, in order to investigate placement and visibility/intervisibility factors in hilltop fortified sites, starting from an expressly projected DEM. The territorial sample has been filtered using qualitative and quantitative parameters, proving that hilltop sites during the pre-Roman times were likely to control the natural catchment area. In Roman times, this pattern lost its mainly defensive character, with hilltop sites being abandoned, and was incorporated in the so called ‘paganus-vicanicus’ system, connected to the administrative subdivision gravitating on urban centres (coloniae and then municipia) and on new monumental cult places.

Bronze Age Hill Forts: New evidence for defensive sites in the western Tian Shan, China

The Late Bronze Age in Britain (c. 1250-750 BC) was a period of major economic and social reorganisation: agricultural and settlement patterns, funerary and depositional practices all saw significant change. This book examines the evidence for the occupation and enclosure of hilltops in Atlantic western Britain during this formative period. Focussing on why communities started to come together at this time to construct these impressive monuments, this book provides information about how these communities were organising the landscape during a time when the first effects of climatic deterioration were beginning to be felt. Concentrating on Atlantic western Britain (encompassing Wales, the Marches, and south-west England), it is shown that, far from being a peripheral region, communities here were looking west to Ireland, developing hilltop sites right across the landscape, providing a safe and central location for communal gatherings and pastoral farming activities.

Extreme wet conditions coincident with Bronze Age abandonment of upland areas in Britain

An investigation of the origins of cattle and aurochs deposited in the Early Bronze Age barrows at Gayhurst and Irthlingborough

This article examines the evidence for gardens in the Bronze Age landscapes of northern and western Britain. It offers an alternative perspective on the small field plots and unbounded areas of cultivated land by treating them as spaces that people inhabited with plants and animals, where environmental knowledge was learnt and controlled, and where social roles and identities were defined, maintained and contested. The excavated evidence shows that the biographies of houses are closely associated with those of the adjacent field plots. It also highlights the need to consider the ‘in-between places’ around the edges of buildings, along boundaries and in unkempt corners of fields. The coexistence of both domesticated and other plants demonstrates that gardens were not spaces dedicated to economic production in the terms that we understand today; rather they were places where people engaged closely with the botanical world and so gave it cultural value. The occupations of gardens and settlements were long-lived, if not necessarily continuous, and so provided the conditions in which more intensive strategies could be adopted, developing towards a more permanent and long-lasting commitment to place and landscape. Relations between people were structured through the contribution of gardening to activities such as the preparation and consumption of food, the provision of plants for medicinal and ritual purposes and the use of plots for keeping animals and as disposal areas for household refuse. These activities were closely controlled and, because of their cultural value, gardens were defined and their link to houses expressed as a means of negotiating social roles and identities within co-resident groups.

The article offers a glimpse into the potential of a series of recent LiDAR based explorations, in cases combined with geophysical prospections, pin-pointed excavation and radiocarbon dating of enclosures, to contribute to the better understanding of the anthropic modified relief morphology and layout of several hill-top sites from South-Eastern Transylvania dated in the Bronze and Iron Ages. The study area, which is mostly forested, gathers one of the largest concentrations of Late Prehistory and Protohistory earthworks known on the territory of modern Romania. The presented data opens the pathway for the further exploration of relevant themes such as: diversity of the functions played by enclosures, the sites’ level of interconnectivity and the existence of hierarchies. It also points out the general need for establishing more accurately the earthworks’ chronology, topography and occupation intensity.

Abstract

For over thirty years, work has been in progress on the petrological examination and identification of stone implements. This work, initiated in South-Western England, has as its object the determination of ‘early trade routes and other factors of economic and social importance in Neolithic and Early Bronze Age times’ (Keiller, Piggott and Wallis, 1941). During this period, eight regional reports have been published, five dealing mainly with South- Western England (Keiller, Piggott and Wallis, 1941; Stone and Wallis, 1947; Stone and Wallis, 1951 ; Evens, Grinsell, Piggott and Wallis, 1962; Evens, Smith and Wallis, 1972), one with Yorkshire (Keen and Radley, 1971), one with East Anglia (Clough and Green, 1972) and one with Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire (Cummins and Moore, 1973). In these and other publications (e.g. Fox, 1964; Fell, 1964) distribution maps are given for the products of the various axe factories. Such maps show the extent of dispersal of the factory products, but fail, in themselves, to give much information about trade routes and other factors. Group I axes are found in Yorkshire, some 550 km. from their source in Cornwall; Group IX axes are found a similar distance from their factories in Northern Ireland; and Group VI axes are widespread up to 500 km. from their Lake District factory sites.

Ditches, walls, and palisades are extant in continental Europe from as early as the Neolithic, but important aspects changed in the course of the 2nd millennium BC. A review of the spectrum of dated sites from Central Europe shows that the expansion of metalworking techniques preceded the widespread occupation of high ground. Hill-top sites at crossroads and river crossings proved to be a permanent feature, though shifts in location occurred frequently. The motivation for the construction of walls and ramparts was probably not uniform. Certain walls were clearly built to be seen from afar. Hence, they can be explained as signs of presence and/or prominence. In other cases the aspect of enhanced security deserves special attention. The wide variation in size and regional settings of hill-forts as well as the divergent traces of occupation invalidate any unitary explanation.

Climate deterioration and land-use change in the first millennium BC: perspectives from the British palynological record

After the western Britain and Ireland volcanoes and dykes became extinct an even bigger outburst of volcanic activity, to the west of the Rockall Bank, heralded the formation of a new plate boundary spreading ridge separating Greenland from Europe. Initially this volcanic activity was subaerial and the eruptions created ashfall downwind. The ash comprised fragments of volcanic glass, which exposed to water decayed into clay minerals. Across Britain the ash was transported by rivers to the southeast where it accumulated in the London Clay formation on which London is founded. This volcanic sourced clay was fired to manufacture the bricks from which, prior to the arrival of railways, much of the building stock of the city was built. An episode of global warming (‘the Paleocene/Eocene thermal maximum’) accompanied the release of hydrocarbons in the creation of the new plate boundary. Combined with the acidification caused by the decomposition of the ash, surface sands were turned into a hard ‘silcrete’ rock. As the underlying clays and sands were washed away, the silcrete layer foundered into slabs, known as sarsens. Suitably shaped sarsen slabs were revered by neolithic and bronze age communities as the bodies of ancestors while some of the largest of all slabs were transported tens of kilometres in the construction of Stonehenge. In Hertfordshire the silicification of gravel created puddingstone, contemporary with sarsen, and mined and carved by the Romans for manufacturing kitchen querns for grinding wheat. Sarsens are testimonial to the strongest episode of global warming in the last 66 million years, which resulted in the extinction of many species.

[full article, abstract in English; abstract in Lithuanian]
 The Southern Bohemian Region belongs to regions where many hilltop settlements had been built since the Early Stone Age. However, the first fortified systems were built in the Late Bronze Age, as hilltops, mountain peaks, and promontories were fortified using complex systems of ramparts and ditches. This phenomenon thereafter continued into younger prehistoric periods, especially the Early Iron Age, resulting in the foundation of hilltops in the Early Middle Ages, starting with the 9th century and frequently continuing in the form of castles and manor houses built in the Middle Ages and the Modern Period. This paper is not only an attempt to summarize and survey the use of hilltop sites and the continuity of settlements but also an effort to state their classification, characteristics, and function considering their practical, social and symbolical roles, which can be detected in both prehistoric (sophisticated fortifications with no practical use, relocation) and medieval (show of power, the question of defence) heritage.

Two round barrows were excavated in 1982–3 at Church Lawton near to the eastern edge of the Cheshire and Staffordshire Plain. One of the barrows was defined by a ring of nine glacial boulders and it is possible that these monoliths initially formed a free-standing stone circle. The remains constitute a rare example of the use of stone to enhance a Bronze Age barrow in the lowlands of central western England. Beneath the mound demarcated by the boulders were the burnt remains of a small, roughly rectangular turf stack associated with fragments of clay daub and pieces of timber. No direct evidence of burial was found within the monument. A radiocarbon date suggests that the structural sequence began sometime in the late 3rd–early 2nd millennium calbc. The other barrow was principally a two-phased construction and contained urned and un-urned cremation burials. A battle-axe was placed next to one of the burials. Radiocarbon dates obtained from the cremations and associated deposits indicate that individuals were being interred from the late 3rd or early 2nd millennium calbc, with the practice continuing until the middle of the 2nd millennium. The barrows formed part of a cemetery, consisting of three known mounds.

Excavated by Leslie Alcock in the 1950s, the inland promontory fort of Dinas Powys is widely cited as a type site for elite settlements of post-Roman western Britain. Alcock's interpretation and dating of the main defences as a Norman-period castle were effectively disproven in the 1990s, but the excavator's original chronology continues to be cited. Here, the authors present a revised chronology, integrating new radiocarbon dates and stratigraphic analysis to re-evaluate the history of occupation. The new phasing redates the main defences to the early medieval period, which aligns with the site's notable early medieval assemblage. The findings contribute to understanding of post-Roman western Britain and the (re)occupation of late antique hilltop sites more generally.