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

The Later Bronze Age
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Figure 6.6 Plan of Black Patch Bronze Age settlement.
Source: Drewett 1982, Fig. 9
been interpreted as a single household cluster, in which different buildings had different functions,
such as sleeping accommodation for various members of the group, as well as being used for
eating, food preparation, craft activities and animal shelter. Small settlements made up of such
household clusters may have been typical of this region in the late second millennium, while
some fortified sites suggest the emergence of new forms of prestige (Ellison 1981).
Settlements of the early first millennium are less well known, but generally comprise unenclosed
clusters of round houses with a few small pits for storage and other purposes. A very different
type of site has recently been recognized in north Wiltshire, for example at Potterne and East
Chisenbury (McOmish 1996); these are very large middens, with high densities of pottery, animal
bone and metalwork. They must represent a regional type of high-status site, with an emphasis
on the social rituals of feasting. In some areas of the chalk downs, such as Salisbury Plain, long
bank and ditch earthworks were constructed, dividing the land into territories each containing
settlements, arable and pastoral land (Bradley et al. 1994). Towards the end of the Bronze Age,
many of these earthworks went out of use, but at some boundary junctions within this system
new enclosures were founded, and these played an important role in the emergence of the Iron
Age landscape with hillforts.
Further west, one of the most complex examples of Bronze Age land division has been
explored on Dartmoor (Fleming 1988). This upland block had been occupied earlier in the Bronze
Age, as cairns and stone rows surviving from that period show, but after about 1400 BC the
landscape was divided into a pattern of territories that all contained valley land, upland and
access to the open moor (Figure 6.7). The unenclosed moorland was separated from the lower
land by stone banks, called reaves, and other reaves divided up the territories and defined field
systems within them. Settlements were scattered through the territories. By the beginning of the
first millennium BC, this upland landscape had been abandoned; climatic deterioration, or human
over-exploitation, or a combination of both, had produced an increasingly hostile and peatcovered
environment. Settlements and field systems are known elsewhere in the south-west,
especially in the upland and marginal areas such as Bodmin Moor and Scilly. In the former, as on
Dartmoor, sites were abandoned towards the end of the Bronze Age, and in Scilly much of the
occupied area is now under water.