Posthole Archaeology; Function, Form and Fighting

In the previous post I posed the question what buildings does a moderately complex hierarchical agricultural society require, looking at aspects of agricultural buildings; this time I am looking at moderately complex hierarchical society, or at least that end of hierarchy that tends to represented in archaeology.
It is fashionable, and perhaps progressive, to talk of higher status individuals or elites, to avoid cultural bias inherent such terms as aristocracy.   However, I use the term in its original cultural context precisely to reference that bias, or understanding, and also is to imply a degree of continuity between Prehistory and History.
I am going to look particularly at the Late Iron Age fort at Orsett, Essex, [1] now lost to the latest incarnation of the junction it guarded 2000 years ago. [below].  It typifies all the problems of interpretation associated with archaeology that has been ploughed. It was clearly a fortification at some stage, and only the aristocracy, have the resources, interest and right to build such things. Systematic and sustained fighting, takes considerable resources, training and expensive kit. It was after all, what maintained them at the top of the divinely sanctioned heap, and some might argue it was their raison d’etre.

Posthole archaeology; function, form and farming

By the Bronze Age in British Isles, and certainly in terms of the proto-historic Late Iron Age, we have what historians might call petty kings and aristocracy, sometimes with a more wider regional and national institutions.  Although our museums have their weapons and treasures, architecturally, we have lost sight of the petty king in his palace and the homes of the aristocracy, always such a feature of our countryside.  
But this is just the tip of an iceberg of ignorance, since we know very little of the charcoal burner in his hut, and have no real notion of cart sheds or byres; only “roundhouses”, and, thousands upon thousands of uninterpreted postholes.
It is this functional deficiency that I hope to explore in series of posts, since it represents a serious gap in our knowledge of an area fundamental to understanding any culture.  One way of broadening thinking about function is to ask the question; what buildings does a moderately complex hierarchical agricultural society require? 

Why the Gods created slavery

Slavery, by common consent, is no longer viewed as ‘a good thing’, however, in the ancient world, it was seen as a perfectly natural and normal state of affairs.
For an archaeologist like myself, slavery is not primarily a race issue, it is to do with class, or status; take a close look at the ancient world, and a slave was merely the lowest rung on a remarkably steep social ladder.

In ancient Mesopotamia, it is ladder that goes all the way to heaven and the world of the gods; here the Great Gods created lesser Gods to be their slaves and work in their fields and gardens.

While nowadays, we expect somewhat more liberal attitudes among Gods, their next move was, one level at least, socially progressive, they freed the lesser gods from their bondage – by creating mankind to do their work.

30. Not going with the flow

I studied philosophy, so I know you are reading this, or at least you think you are, but I don’t know why, or whether you have done it before, and if so, how often. If you have read none of the proceeding 42,000 words, what I am about to discuss may seem a little unexpected, but I am trying not to repeat myself, and besides, those who have bravely trudged through it all deserve some reward, so I am going to give a brief glimpse of what's coming up in the next 30 posts, because from now on it’s going to get ‘interesting’. In terms of ‘why I blog’, this is my belated contribution to an interesting Internet discussion.[1] It also reflects my concerns about how I blog.
So, before we go any further, it's important we have a heart to heart about what’s going on here. We are meeting in rather unusual circumstances; my concern is what is going on in your mind when you read this, and you may be beginning to wonder about what’s going on in mine.

28. The Long View

Climate change and deforestation causing ecological collapse, recession, poverty, famine, lawlessness, religious and internecine warfare, foreign interventions -- Scotland certainly was a mess in the 17th and 18th Centuries.[1]. It was not a place you would want to visit, but luckily others have visited for you, and left accounts of their travels. Seeing the past through contemporary eyes is about as good as it gets, and it has become part of a highly specialised form of archaeology known as history.

26. Impossible Drains

All journeys start somewhere, even those in the mind, and the mental expedition exploring the uncharted depths of my ignorance that became Theoretical Structural Archaeology started at a site called Orsett ‘Cock’, to the north of the Thames in Essex.

The Orsett ‘Cock’ enclosure, Essex, during the 1976 excavation,
showing the position of buildings S1 and S9, discussed below.

The Orsett ‘Cock’ enclosure had, appropriately for an archaeological site, taken its name from a local hostelry, the ‘Cock’ Inn. The complete liability this would become in a Google search could not have been foreseen when the site was excavated in 1976 (hereafter to be known as the Orsett Enclosure, so as not to attract unwarranted attention). After a brief interim report,[1] the site vanished into the great black hole of unpublished sites known as ‘The Backlog’.

25. A world of Invisible Walls

How to account for things that are invisible is always tricky, as priests would no doubt testify, and in some respects archaeologists have a comparable problem to religions, in that what we are asking you to comprehend and visualise happened a long time ago. However, archaeologists, unlike priests, are happy to admit (if pushed) that what we are asking you believe is an educated guess, even if, as often the case, we have a story and we’re sticking to it with almost religious zeal.

For British prehistory the problem is that some significant pieces of the visual jigsaw have been destroyed forever, and they have become ‘archaeologically invisible’. I can tell what the woods and the trees looked like -- I have photos that must be fairly close – but the evidence for the human part, particularly the built environment where human life is played out, is somewhat sketchy.

24. Systematic Irregularity: Why almost nothing in the Celtic world was square

There are some things that are so obvious that nobody notices, and they pass without comment or explanation. About twenty years ago I noticed that almost nothing in the ancient Celtic world was square, so I named the phenomenon “systematic irregularity”, and published it, but ironically nobody noticed that either. [1]

So second time around, and now in colour, I give you Systematic Irregularity, a phenomenon which can be observed in many aspects of the prehistoric Celtic world, which is a problem, as I can’t show you everything that isn't square; but you can trust me – I’m an archaeologist.

We are all familiar with the restless flowing curves characteristic of Celtic decoration, particularly the Iron Age La Tène Style, exemplified by pieces like the Battersea Shield [left], not a place you would really expect an unnatural shape like a square; however, it goes much deeper than this.

23.Uncovered; Prehistoric Building Regulations

I want to show you something quite remarkable about prehistoric buildings that nobody ever noticed before, so you are going to be the first to know.

The previous article, which I’m sure you’ve read, looked at the roof geometry of circular buildings, and using simple theoretical models, demonstrated that large 16-17m roundhouses are probably at the technical limits of the design. We shall extend our simple model to include a theoretical longhouse, and compare the two forms to try and understand what advantages this challenging form of roof construction offers, with interesting results.

22. Iron Age Graphs; an important discovery

To be a theoretical structural archaeologist, you are going to have to understand (or at least believe in) Pythagoras, the sine rule, and pi; but there is no need to panic -- I think they still teach this to children, so it might be useful to have one to hand.


Digging holes for a living is an ideal place to hide from maths, not to mention reading and writing, but, unfortunately, Iron Age roundhouses only really make sense if you understand their geometry. Maths is important to help us model the nearly 2-dimensional evidence of prehistoric postholes, and encourages us to think 3-dimensionally about structures.

18. Credibility Crunch Hits Iron Age Building

The story of the Iron Age building boom of the later Twentieth Century starts with one man, Gerhard Bersu [left], driven to these shores by that most clichéd of archaeological plot devices, the Nazis. It is his initial speculations and concept of a roundhouse that has dominated thinking for seventy years. The concept has become an article of faith for many archaeologists, who, perhaps unwittingly, show a near religious belief in the veracity of his ideas about buildings.

However, religion and archaeology are unsatisfactory bedfellows, and anyone who has read articles 1-9 on this site will realise that I think it is time to return to the evidence and common sense, and to prick this aged speculative bubble.

16. Biskupin; A World of Wood Stolen by the Nazis

In 1933 Walenty Szwajcer, a local teacher on a trip to Lake Biskupin in Poland, noticed timbers in the lake. The following year Professor Józef Kostrzewski began a series of excavations that uncovered a large Iron Age settlement built of timber preserved in marshland at the edge of the lake. As more of the site was revealed, it became apparent that the scale of the find and its exceptional preservation made this one the greatest discoveries in the history of archaeology. The Poles were naturally pretty chuffed, and, sandwiched between Hitler and Stalin, they hadn’t got much else to be chuffed about in the late 1930s.

A plan of the settlement at Biskupin

15. Living in lakes and other perennial problems

Throughout Prehistoric Europe settlements were built on artificial islands in lakes. These varied in size from small towns to individual houses. These islands were usually constructed from timber piles and built up with local materials such as tree trunks, brushwood, clay, and stones. These artificial island settlements are known as ‘crannógs’ in Ireland and Scotland, where they are common in the Iron Age.

A modern reconstruction of an Iron Age crannóg on Loch Tay, Scotland [1].