The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

• 100 • Timothy Champion
Figure 6.4 Pottery of the Post-Devetel-Rimbury
undecorated phase.
Source: Bradley et al 1980, Fig. 11
Figure 6.5 Simplified plans of Mucking North Ring (left) and Lofts Farm
(right).
Source: (left) Bond 1988, Fig. 3 (right) Brown 1988, Fig. 4
shale and amber, and evidence for metalworking.
Sites such as this may have been key links in the
exchange system that brought exotic materials into
Britain and reworked them and redistributed them
into the interior.
In the later period, after 900 BC, a distinctive
feature of the settlement evidence of eastern
England is a class of defended enclosure, commonest
in the region of the lower Thames estuary, but
spreading as far north as Thwing, Yorkshire. They
were surrounded by impressive defences of timber
and earth, with external ditches; some show precisely
geometric plans, circular at Mucking North Ring
(Bond 1988) and square at Lofts Farm (Brown 1988),
both in Essex (Figure 6.5). An excavated example at
Springfield Lyons, Essex (Buckley and Hedges 1987),
shows a carefully organized interior plan with a large,
circular house. There was a large deposit of
metalworking debris, including mould fragments for
swords, in one of the ditch terminals, but no other
evidence for metalworking anywhere on the site.
In southern England, from Sussex to the chalk
downlands of Wessex, the evidence is rather more
plentiful. Cremation burials with Deverel-Rimbury
pottery, either in small barrows or flat cemeteries,
continue to the beginning of the first millennium
BC, though they are now more common in the river
valleys and the coastal lowlands than on the higher
chalk downlands where most of the burials of the
Earlier Bronze Age had been located. These areas
were densely settled, but by the end
of the Bronze Age human
exploitation had turned areas such as
the New Forest (Hampshire) and the
Dorset lowlands into acid and
unproductive heathlands. Settlement
sites have survived better on the chalk,
and some can be placed in their
context of an evolving agricultural
landscape. At South Lodge, in
Cranborne Chase, Dorset (Barrett et
al. 1991), a small settlement developed
in a pre-existing field system. One of
the most fully excavated sites is at
Black Patch, East Sussex (Drewett
1982), where five circular structures
were located on one settlement
platform (Figure 6.6). These have