Systematic Irregularity; hidden in plain sight

When you start an excavation, or make an original observation, it may become your responsibility to give things a name, which is not as easy as it might seem. 

I inherited an archaeological site named Orsett “Cock”, the Cock in Question was the local pub, a perfectly reasonable and appropriate idea for archaeology in 1976, when google was just a spelling mistake.

It was working on the Orsett enclosure report, as I preferred to call it now, that I had to start naming parts of theoretical model structures, although I also floated an idea that I decided to call Systematic Irregularity.[1]

While it is my understanding that this idea exists in other forms, as an archaeologist doing detailed work on built environments, I had perceived that engineered structures were never square or rectangular, an observation that applied to both to foundations of small buildings and to layout of large ditched enclosures.

The original plans of six Little Woodbury 4 post structures [2]

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? 

Dumbing down the past.

Dumbing down through abstraction.

In two previous posts, [ 1 + 2 ] I have demonstrated that one of the central images of British Prehistory, the Wessex Roundhouse, is a construct which does not accurately represent the evidence.  It is not a discovery, or rocket science, I just read the relevant reports and looked at the plans and sections.

While I am happy to call these roundhouse constructs dumbing down, what to call the scholarship they generate presents a problem, since it represents the application of presumably perfectly acceptable theory to an imaginary data set. 

Archaeology is often at its best and most incisive when it has borrowed from other disciplines, but left to their own devices some academics have wandered off through the dewy system to delve into ideas about the relationship between people and built environments. But perhaps sometimes they just look at the pictures.

It is possible for anthropologists to study the relationship between people and their built environments; the humans can be questioned and observed, and the spaces inspected. In such a study, we might also wish consider factors of age, status, and gender, as well as more complex issues pertaining to the ownership and creation of spaces.

In anthropology, a theory, a set of ideas or a cosmology which explain the patterns of behaviour associated with particular places can be developed through the study of people and spaces. 

However, in Archaeology the people we study are dead and their spaces destroyed, or they usually are after we have finished with them....

Roundhouse Psychosis

In the previous post I explained why the large Wessex style “roundhouse” as illustrated and rebuilt is a fiction which is not supported by the evidence.  To be fair to all concerned, it never was a “peer reviewed” idea, but like the artists reconstruction that decorate the front of some archaeological texts, it has a far greater impact on our collective perception of the past than any sterile rendition of the evidence. 

The problem is that Roundhouses are more than just infotainment, a bit of harmless hokum for Joe Public, they are taken seriously, not only by those who commission and build them, but also by academics, and even fellow archaeologists who are obliged to shape their reports around this simplistic construct.  While dumbing down the academic system lightens everybody’s load, it is not good for the long term mental health of the profession, who have responsibility with ‘doing’ the day to day archaeology.  We like to think what we do is meaningful, making a contribution, and that we are collectively getting somewhere, it is about the only reward you will get.

As a field archaeologist, writing up sites, I had realised that the simplistic roundhouse only made sense if ignored a lot of the actual evidence from these structures, and, the majority of the structural features from elsewhere on the site.  Furthermore, those aspects of the evidence that reflected the archaeology of other published sites [roundhouses] were deemed particularly significant, reinforcing the cycle of belief.  Thus, apart from square four post granaries, circles are generally the only acceptable shape for a prehistoric buildings; both excavation and post-excavation were approached with same expectation, and to some extent purpose, of finding roundhouses.

Debunking the Iron Age Round House

Is Prehistory is more or less bunk ?

In 1916, when archaeology was in its infancy, the industrialist Henry Ford expressed the view that History is more or less bunk, so what he would have made of Prehistory would probably have been unprintable.[1]  However, perhaps as an engineer, his concerns were elsewhere, solving the problems in the present and helping to mould the future.

In his remark, we might perceive a fundamental dichotomy of science v arts, but while this is clearly simplistic, there is a certain resonance for archaeology which sits, sometimes uncomfortably, between the two. Much of what is important, incisive and certainly less bunk in archaeology originally came from outside, from the borrowing of scientific techniques from other disciplines.  Further, in Henry Ford’s prejudice one might also perceive a divergence between practical v theoretical, or practitioners v academics; for archaeology, the latter are often from an “arts background”, and by creating the past in their own image, have divested Prehistory of its engineers, architects, builders; a prehistoric built environment fabricated almost entirely from bunk.

In the West, Archaeology is fairly new discipline, not much older than the motor car, but prehistory is not vital, and so nobody cares if you get it wrong or make it up. Unlike engineering, archaeology can be a faith based study, with objectivity, and even the evidence being secondary, what is important is belief in the narrative and its institutions.  In archaeology things can be true because people believe them, not because they are supported by the evidence. 

This is hard concept to grasp if you come from another discipline, or importantly, if you believe in the intellectual integrity of archaeology, but ideas about ancient building are a classic case in point.

Is Post-processual archaeology a form of religion?

Anyone who has excavated a complex prehistoric archaeology site will have realised that they are quite difficult to understand. Some archaeologists, faced with deciphering this complex phenomenon, decided the easiest thing to do was abandon objectivity, go beyond the empirical limits of the evidence, and simply ‘make up’ something to explain it, redefining the terms of reference for archaeology to allow them to do this. For convenience, I will use the term ‘Post-processual’ for this new archaeology [1], although this term covers quite a wide and very complex can of worms.
Among university academics, these post-processual archaeologists are in the probably unique position of being paid to invent knowledge to cover those topics currently beyond our understanding, especially in those areas where objective knowledge is impossible. 
Traditionally, this is the province of religion, whose prophets have special insights beyond our shared objective reality, and whose texts can testify to events that transcend normal physical laws. While priests can report on opinions and beliefs of prophets, and even gods, at least they have some written records to work with; professors of prehistory can profess a detailed knowledge of the minds of people who left no records at all, and use it to explain the physical evidence.
Is it time to reclassify this form of archaeology as a religion, differentiated from mainstream scholarship, and fund it accordingly?

The archaeology of perception

This is my favourite cartoon; it is by the late Bernard Kliban, a New York cartoonist, and one of the founding fathers of the modern cartoon, and in my opinion, a genius of his art. Sometimes the world becomes so strange and distorted, that it takes cartoon to get it into perspective.

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.

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.

20. Everything you ever wanted to know about postholes – but were afraid to ask

I was once asked by the head of an archaeological department,“What is the difference between a stake hole and a posthole?” If you don’t know, may I suggest you read my previous article first; this article is for advanced students who have grasped the basic idea: Postholes held posts that supported a vertical load.

Had the head of an archaeology department told me he had never excavated a posthole, I would not have been the least surprised. Many academics may have little contact with real soil, and may not even get muddy at work. Apparently it's not part of their job description. So they may never have enjoyed lying on the ground with their arm lost down a deep and narrow posthole, excavating mostly by feel, and struggling to get the loose soil out from the bottom of the hole (an old fashioned ladle is ideal), which may account for the lack of scholarship on the subject.

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.

11. A Strange Receding Past

The past is much further away than it used to be. The rapid change in our culture over a few generations has disconnected people from the countryside and agriculture, as well as from the skills, crafts, and materials of previous generations. The past will always be mysterious, because the vast majority of it leaves no trace and is ‘invisible’ to archaeology. These invisible bits, like buildings, we have to make up or imagine.


Increasingly, the past has become the realm of theory, abstract thought, and introspection for archaeologists operating in the wide-open spaces of our ignorance. Novel theoretical approaches are borrowed from other subjects with obscure and unfamiliar vocabularies, and these are used to conceptualise our lack of understanding. If all else fails in the strange world we are reconstructing, archaeologists pass off what we don't understand as ‘ritual’. It therefore passeth all understanding and can be used to justify all manner of absurdity.




How the original palimpsest at Mucking in Essex was ‘solved’. A: All features. B: Roundhouses & (4-post?) structures located. C: Simplified Plan. D: Reconstruction [1]

9. Building - it's just not that simple

Archaeology is based on the understanding that artifacts can tell you much about the culture and individuals that created them. We don't have buildings to study, but the simple models and realisations of the prehistoric built environment, and the visual information they convey, are entirely at odds with the evidence from the study of other key technologies.


Building is a key technology; the traditional sedentary mixed farming model of the rural economy is possible only with the appropriate built environment. Southern England can provide abundant good quality timber for building, and, historically at least, building has been an important method by which society, or individuals, express themselves. Buildings protect people, activities, processes, and materials from the environment, including other people. If individuals or groups in a society gain disproportionate control over these resources, they will require a larger built environment.

8. Who would live in a house like this?

Since roundhouses were first defined 60 years ago, a consensus has emerged as to how these buildings were built, and how they should look. Physical reconstructions have become quite common. Since prehistoric post-built roundhouses never survive above floor level at best, on what are these reconstructions based?

Visualising the past: Which is which? Roundhouse or African mud hut?

7. Seeing is believing.

In 1817, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an English poet and philosopher, came up with a theory about the readiness of people to accept ideas that are clearly fantastic and unreal when engaging with the arts, and the phrase "willing suspension of disbelief" entered the language. Television and literature are obvious examples, where we are prepared to suspend our critical faculties and our everyday model of reality in return for entertainment: We know it's not real, but we are prepared to forget that, in return for the emotional experience the medium induces.


This is particularly true of the visual media, which do not come close to our real visual experience of life; yet we are happy to accept images far removed from our reality. Images are powerful – “worth a thousand words” -- as the proverb goes, because they can convey large amounts of information very quickly, are easily memorised and recalled, and are capable of eliciting an emotional response. Images are far more powerful than text. Much of what people know about the world beyond their immediate experience, they absorb through visual media.

6. Little Woodbury’s bastard children

Roundhouses were real buildings, and the plans of their foundations are characterised by the geometry and accuracy that any large timber frame structure requires. The obligatory search for circles in posthole palimpsests has inevitably thrown up other slightly oval and irregular patterns that are still interpreted as ‘roundhouses’.
I will illustrate this difficult point with examples produced by former colleagues in Essex. At least they were aware of my views, and so have had some chance to defend themselves. For the record, I will offer an alternative view of what they found in a later blog.

5. Roundhouses and other circular arguments

One the most fundamental and frustrating truths about archaeological excavation, tacitly accepted by practitioners, is that on most sites, a significant number of features will never be properly understood or explained.


The 1939 Little Woodbury excavation has proved to be a watershed for many aspects of archaeology of Southern England, not least because Bersu could explain and interpret the majority of the features he found, and in so doing provided the first model of the built environment of prehistoric Britain.