Defining the Individual

During the 1985 excavation at Maiden Castle (Sharples 1991a), a large grain storage pit cut into the back of the rampart of the Early Iron Age hillfort was excavated. About half way down the fill of that pit the left femur of a mature adult was exposed. This bone was lying in a relatively sterile soil layer and it was not marked by any special finds or careful constructions; in many respects it could easily be dismissed as a discovery with little significance. Fifty years ago such bones would have been regarded as accidental losses, simply rubbish conveniently disposed of in a handy receptacle. It could be an indication that excarnation was the general means of disposal and that this occurred close to or actually inside settlements, but it might also indicate the accidental disturbance of human remains in graves located at the hillfort. In recent years we have come to understand that these deposits are much more significant. A number of archaeologists (Whimster 1981; C. Wilson 1981; Cunliffe 1992) came to realize that the presence of human remains on Iron Age settlements was a distinct cultural tradition characteristic of central southern England. The work of J. D. Hill (1995b) has enhanced our understanding of this phenomenon by emphasizing that the deposition of human remains is part of a complex suite of actions which involves the arrangement of different categories of material in carefully placed deposits. The process of deposition was clearly intimately involved in the definition of social relationships in the Iron Age of central southern England. It is difficult to imagine that if we, as archaeologists, could immediately recognize a human bone, our ancient pit diggers could not. The placement of this bone was a deliberate act, and the location of this deposit was carefully chosen. Hill (1995b) has shown that these pit deposits were carefully structured. Human remains are normally found in layers that are largely sterile, but a pit chosen for the deposition of human bone will normally have fills containing other carefully selected deposits. These mark the pit as a bank of socially constructed material.

Creating a Community

In the summer of 1979, when I was working on my undergraduate dissertation in the National Museum, I became involved in an interesting piece of field-work that has direct relevance to the material that we are going to examine in this chapter. A Mrs MacDonald came into the museum to enquire whether some objects she had in her possession were of any archaeological significance. She had been encouraged to make this visit by a recent television programme where the presenter discussed and exhibited objects that were similar to those in her possession. She explained to the curator that the objects had been found by a family member during ploughing and had been kept in the kitchen drawer for the last two decades, though they were often brought out for the children to play with. She then removed, from her shopping bag, a gold bracelet and a gold ‘dress fastener’ of distinctive Late Bronze Age type. This had the immediate effect of rendering the museum curator speechless—these were in the days before metal detecting had become a popular hobby, and new finds of this significance were seldom made. The most recent discovery of comparable objects was in the nineteenth century. Further discussion of the nature of the discovery revealed that the location of the find was still remembered; it was just behind the farmhouse. It was also thought that other objects were discovered at the time, but these were discarded, as they were not so interesting. As there was a possibility that objects were still present in the field it was decided that a team would be sent by the museum to explore the finds location. I was dispatched, with two other students then working in the museum, and a metal detector, purchased specially for the occasion, to see what we could find. I have to say that metal detecting must be one of the most boring pastimes ever invented. In our youthful enthusiasm, we decided to be thorough and systematic. We set out a grid that covered the area where the gold had been discovered and began work.

Wessex in Context

In this book I have attempted to create a new agenda for the study of Britain in the last millennium BC. The book consciously sets out, in its structure and content, to direct attention away from the nature of the archaeological record towards the nature of past human societies. This does not mean I am not interested in the archaeological record, and readers will have noted there is a considerable amount of detail in the text, perhaps too much for some people; but the data has to be examined in relation to the people who lived in a particular place at a particular time: ‘the archaeologist is digging up, not things, but people’ (Wheeler 1954b: v). The objective has been to outline the overall constraints of place and time (Chapter 2) and to see how these created a distinctive archaeological record that differed not only from other areas of Britain, but which varied significantly within the region. I examine how people created communities (Chapter 3) and explore how the mechanisms used to organize human relationships, within that society, changed through time. These changes were partly brought about through events outside their control, but always in a way that was affected by their own particular circumstances. I consider how the most ubiquitous architectural form in later prehistory, the house, was used to structure social relationships on a daily basis in relation to the family, and how this provided a template for thinking about the world (Chapter 4). The analysis concludes with an examination of how these societies considered individual freedom and connectedness, and how the complex variability of individual agency provides an internal dynamic to social change that was influenced by external events, but not led by them (Chapter 5). When I originally conceived of this book the structure was reversed: I started with the individual and worked up to the organization of the larger landscapes. At first sight this may sound a more sensible way of presenting the evidence, moving from small-scale structures to large-scale processes, but during the writing of the book I found this did not seem to work.

The Landscape Context

The archaeological landscape of Wessex is one of the best known in Europe. There are very few students of archaeology who have not been taken to see sites such as Stonehenge, Avebury, Maiden Castle, and Danebury. Most archaeology departments insist that an in-depth knowledge of the region is essential for the training of an archaeologist, and as a student at Glasgow in the 1970s, one of the most distant departments from the region, it was considered a prerequisite for me to visit Wessex. I was loaded on to a coach and after a long journey I arrived at Devizes, where we stayed for a week of site and museum visits. I remember very little of what we saw, certainly the sites named above, but I do remember that I was tremendously excited by certain road signs. As we drove across the landscape I was confronted by names that were exotically familiar: All Cannings Cross, Gussage All Saints, Tollard Royal, and Overton Down. These names were exotic, particularly for a northerner brought up on names like Milngavie and Auchenshuggle, but very familiar since they cropped up frequently in the lectures and text books that were a feature of my course. It should be stressed that this course was untouched by the new ideas of statistical and behavioural studies that were so popular in other universities. My lectures were dominated by site and sequence and at this time, the late seventies, the sites that were available to us were the sites of Wessex that had been excavated and published by the great excavators of the previous generation. Today I am regularly involved in two trips to the region for the undergraduates studying archaeology at Cardff University. The first trip involves a visit to the hillforts of Maiden Castle and South Cadbury and the chalk figure at Cerne Abbas. These visits are very site focused and involve standing around listening to me giving a lecture on the context of hillforts—when they were built, what they were for, their distribution and the specific sequence of the particular site we are visiting.

The House as a Cosmology

One of the most popular sub-disciplines of archaeology is experimental archaeology, the re-creation of items, structures, and practices of past societies in the present day. This area of study has a long pedigree in Continental Europe, but was a relatively late development in Britain. One of the pioneers of this approach was Peter Reynolds, who created the Butser Ancient Farm Research Project to explore life in the Iron Age (Reynolds 1979). When it was set up, in the 1970s, experimental archaeology was undertaken with full scientific rigour. Important goals included the quantification of resources required to create a house, the management of ancient breeds of domestic animals, the productivity of Welds of ancient cereals, and the function of pits. All these tasks were carried out with a critical attention to detailed data recording and scientific rigour. More recently, experimental archaeology has become geared towards the general public, and though Butser Farm has retained a scientific core to its activities it also caters for a wider public, providing both knowledge and entertainment about past societies. I had a brief experience of this work in 1977 when I took part in a week-long Weld school at Butser Farm, organized by Glasgow University. This was a key period in the development of the Iron Age farm. The original farm had been created on a spur near the top of Butser, specifically away from easy public access and in a very exposed location. Public interest in the experiment had become difficult to manage and a new site had just been located in the Queen Elizabeth Country Park, a much more accessible location near the main road from Portsmouth to London. The new location was designed to be a public amenity that would attract visitors to the Country Park and represented a move from ‘Laboratory to Living Museum’ (Reynolds 1979: 93). The main job we were to undertake was to help with the construction of a large roundhouse that would form the centre of the new farm. Two previous timber houses had been built up on the hill, but both had been fairly modest affairs; one was based on a house plan from Wheeler’s excavation at Maiden Castle, the other was slightly larger and based on the excavation of a house in the Balksbury enclosure, Hampshire (Reynolds 1979).

Introduction

This book covers the first millennium BC in central southern Britain, or Wessex, a period and an area of considerable importance in understanding the evolution of human society in north-west Europe. Wessex is one of the most intensively studied areas in European prehistory and has a rich and varied archaeological record that provides a finely textured view of a past society that is just beyond the reach of the historical sources. This book was begun a long time ago and has emerged due to a number of different stimuli. My first significant involvement with Wessex was as a result of my employment as Director of the English Heritage excavations at Maiden Castle in Dorset. During this period I lived in Dorset and became very familiar with the archaeology of this county and the neighbouring county of Wiltshire. The excavations were written up promptly (Sharples 1991a, 1991c) and I was also able to produce a couple of short papers (Sharples 1990b, 1991b) on related issues. These papers were part of a series of publications that came to define a new archaeological understanding of the Wrst millennium BC. They provide a context for the creation of this book that is worth exploring. In the middle of the 1980s, understanding of the Iron Age of Wessex was dominated by the views of Professor Cunlifie, which were widely disseminated in a range of publications, but most comprehensively in his book Iron Age Communities in Britain (Cunlifie 1991, 2005). He presented a picture of Iron Age society where dominant elites lived within hillforts and each hillfort controlled a clearly defined territory. These permanently occupied settlements acted as central places that absorbed cereals and animal products from dependent communities in the surrounding landscape and exchanged these basic foodstuffs for materials not available in the region. The communities in hillforts controlled contact with neighbouring territories and were closely tied to ports, through which Continental trade was channelled. As the Iron Age progressed, the territories become larger and the hillforts become fewer until distinct tribal units ruled by kings become recognizable in the Late Iron Age.