Broxmouth Sharples Final Review

The Prehistoric Society Book Reviews AN INHERITED PLACE: BROXMOUTH HILLFORT & THE SOUTH EAST SCOTTISH IRON AGE BY I ARMIT AND J MCKENZIE Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 2013. 592pp, 264 figs, 74 tables, ISBN 9781908332059, hb, £35 Scottish Archaeology has been waiting a long time for this volume. The work at Broxmouth in South East Scotland largely took place between September 1977 and November 1978 and involved the almost complete excavation of a lowland hillfort that was first identified through aerial photography. An initial detailed interim report was published as Edinburgh University Department of Archaeology Occasional Paper 2 (Hill 1978) and then an amended version (Hill 1982b) was published in a volume on the Later Prehistoric Settlement in South East Scotland (Harding 1982), which included several papers which either dealt directly with the material from the site (Barnetson 1982; Cool 1982), or provided discussion stimulated by the results (Hill 1982a). This was an important period in the development of later prehistoric studies in Scotland. Aerial photography had only just begun to be applied systematically to the rich agricultural lowlands of eastern Scotland and they were revealing an enormous complexity of material that transformed understanding of the period and the region. Broxmouth was one of a number of excavations during this period, which could be described as the beginning of Rescue Archaeology in Scotland. Contemporary excavations included Dryburn Bridge (Triscott 1982) and St Germains (Alexander and Watkins 1998) both in East Lothian, but the excavations at Broxmouth were the most significant in terms of the size of the area examined, the prolonged period of excavation, the quality of the stratigraphic record and the recovery of substantial and exceptionally rare assemblages of finds. The publication of the final volume is therefore a landmark occasion for Scottish archaeology. The interim reports contained reasonable amounts of information and provided a bedrock for discussion of the later prehistory of the Scottish lowlands over the last two decades (Harding 2004), but much of the detail was missing and no other excavation has come near to the importance of Broxmouth in the intervening decades. This book was completed by a team based in the University of Bradford who are unconnected with the original team of excavators and post excavation specialists. Some of the reports are more or less unchanged from the originals, whereas others are recent reappraisals of the evidence. The site was well excavated and recorded; however, the passage of time has not surprisingly led to some losses and irreconcilable differences with the original interpretations, while fundamental developments in archaeology in the intervening period have altered our approach to the record. On the positive side recent changes in approaches to radiocarbon chronology mean we have a large number of radiocarbon dates that have been analysed using a Bayesian approach, which provides chronological precision only dreamed off when the site was first dug. On the negative side environmental sampling was in its developmental stages when the site was excavated, and the later loss of the limited number of soil samples recovered, means that there is no carbonised plant assemblage to provide information on the arable economy of the settlement. Despite this the resulting 538 page volume provides a substantial contribution to the later prehistoric archaeology of Scotland that will take some time to fully digest. The primary importance of the Broxmouth campaign was that it provided a large area excavation of a typical lowland hillfort, which had been completely flattened by centuries of intensive cultivation. The area excavated covered almost all of the interior of the enclosure, a very large part of the surrounding complex multivallate boundary, including the three entrances to the east, west and south west, and an area to the north of the enclosure that contained a contemporary cemetery. The effects of agriculture have been severe and much of the interior had been truncated by ploughing. However, a number of houses could be identified in the interior and the repeated alteration and reconstruction of the enclosing boundary provided traps that preserved occupation deposits and allowed the accumulation of thick middens. The settlement sequence preserved within the western boundary provided the crucial key to the interpretation of the site and was only identified by the extensive area excavation. The site is unique in northern Britain outside the Atlantic Province in providing a substantial bone assemblage that not only provides our first detailed picture of the agricultural use of animals in Lowland Scotland, but also insights into a key economic value as an important assemblage of bone artefacts and waste from bone working was found. The bone preservation also crucially enabled the identification of the external cemetery and the recovery of human burials and bones from the settlement area. In this review I have only a limited amount of space to examine a number of the issues raised in the report. Boundary chronologies The enclosing boundary at Broxmouth is an important part of the story of the hillfort and the excavations commendably examined a large area of the boundary. Unfortunately the rampart was destroyed around most of the circuit with only small patches surviving, largely on the west side of the hill where it had subsided into earlier features. In the Broxmouth sequence published earlier by Peter Hill (1978; 1982a) nine phases (I-IX) were identified and these included Neolithic activity and Post Medieval ploughing, but this account reduces these to seven phases, which all belong to the Iron Age, more or less. In the new sequence phase 1 comprises the palisade with evidence for external settlement, phase 2 comprises a univallate then bivallate enclosure with two entrances to the east and west, phase 3 comprises four sub-phases of enclosure with two entrances to the east and south west, phase 4 comprises settlement evidence which accumulated on the west side of the inner ditch, phase 5 comprises midden overlying these structures and the external cemetery, phase 6 comprises the settlement that survives in the interior and a refurbished inner bank. Finally phase 7 comprises an isolated Early Christian burial. One of the main features of this account is a detailed absolute chronology based on 158 radiocarbon samples and this is a major contribution to research that places Broxmouth well ahead of any other hillfort in Britain. It is important to note that though the later prehistoric occupation of the hill appears to last almost a millennium from 640/570 cal BC through to AD155/210, the construction of the hillfort boundary appears to begin about 490/430 cal BC and finishes just before 295/235 cal BC. This is a period of approximately 200 years, confirming previous Bayesian analysis which suggests many of the monumental phases of British Prehistory are actually very short-lived phenomena (Whittle et al, 2011). Using the southern English terminology, the hillfort was created at the beginning of the Early Iron Age and was actively rebuilt throughout the early part of the Middle Iron Age. This is actually very similar to the time-line proposed for southern English hillforts (Sharples 2010). The construction of the first hillfort at Danebury, Hampshire, is for example, dated to the middle of the fifth millennium cal BC (Cunliffe 1996) and the main phase of boundary construction died out in the third century cal BC, when the internal settlement became the focus for expansion and reorganisation. The close similarity in the chronological development of these two geographical distant hillforts (that is Danebury and Broxmouth) is surprising given the development of very distinct regional differences in the British Iron Age and it is of considerable importance that comparable sequences are obtained in future research on other hillforts in Britain to establish whether this is a national pattern. There are several significant changes to the sequence earlier proposed by Peter Hill (see above). The palisade has moved from phase IV, in the middle of the sequence of hillfort ditches, to the beginning of phase 1. Hill had argued that the internal settlement contained houses belonging to three separate phases; phase II, an unenclosed phase at the beginning of the later prehistoric occupation, and phases VII and VIII at the end of the occupation. Here Armit and McKenzie argue that these all belong to one, which is phase 6. Peter Hill initially thought the Broxmouth palisade was integrated with the major reorganisation of the boundary, (his phase IV), that occurred when the western entrance was closed and a new south western entrance was created. This was based upon ‘it’s known relationships in the western part of its circuit, on its incongruity with the period III gateways and on its coincident alignment with the period IV gate’ (Hill 1978, 27). However, he revised this interpretation in 1982 where he suggested, ‘It is likely to have formed a freestanding stockade enclosure built either before or after the earthwork defences of Period III’ (Hill 1982a, 184). Its original position within the boundary sequence was a crucial part of the assault on the Hownam sequence, a chronological sequence based on excavations undertaken by Piggott in the 1950s and 1960s, which was being undertaken at the time of the excavations (Harding 2004, 54). Hill and others argued that complex sequences had been over simplified and that palisades, where identified as crop marks, could not be claimed to be evidence for an early LBA/EIA phase of activity. Clearly the rephasing by Armit and McKenzie has much broader implications as it reintroduces the possibility that palisades indicate a primary phase of boundary creation in the Border region and that major enclosures could appear in the landscapes earlier than previously understood. This seems to make sense and I am happy to accept this suggestion.

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