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.

Stonehenge and the archaeology of the prehistoric roof

Postholes: cult or craft?

Most of the prehistoric archaeological sites of Britain, even Stonehenge, are covered with postholes, and it is my central contention that these posts were primarily the foundations of timber buildings. Further, since building is a rational process, postholes can be understood in terms of how posts were joined together to create roofed space.

Unfortunately, many academics have convinced themselves that some postholes are the product of a mysterious cult, whose rituals involved placing posts in the ground.

Despite considerable and ongoing research in this cult of postholes and their cosmology, the reasons for this strange behaviour are still not entirely clear. However, unlike the anthropomorphic polytheist religions evident elsewhere in Europe, adherents of these rituals, with remarkable prescience, seemed mainly to be acting out key themes from modern anthropology.

36. Being on the level about Prehistoric Masons.

I am going to tell you a secret. It is older, deeper, and infinitely more real than anything dreamt up by Dan Brown. Granted, it involves masons, pyramids, and ancient secrets, all the usual suspects. But don’t be alarmed, I am a field archaeologist, and we dig through the brown stuff all the time, and dark forces tend to cross the street to avoid us.


Secrets

The use of the word secret to describe undiscovered archaeology is nothing more than as simple truism, but it serves to heighten the sense of mystery, which I am happy to invoke in a spirit of ironic, but gratuitous, hypocrisy.

31. Primitive Rituals

I hope you read article no. 30. That’s where I let slip that ‘timber circles’ were buildings, some roundhouses were multi-storey, and Hadrian had a timber wall for while -- so you know I’m not here for the beer. But I wish we both down the pub; we could have a chat about all this, a dialogue where we could respond to each other. It would be good: I like you a lot already; you have had the good sense, taste, and intellectual interest to invest your hard won browsing time in reading this blog.

Speaking of beer, back in some golden summer of British archaeology, before the invention of health and safety, when the only unit of alcohol of note was a pint, muddy people would sit in pubs and have conversations about what they had just dug up, and what it all meant. If it was not obvious, at some point someone would say “it must be ritual then,” and we would all laugh, and then someone would be sent for to the bar for some more inspiration.

29. Bloody Scotland

History is just archaeology by other means, but writing things down, instead of committing them to memory, did not herald a whole new pattern of existence, it’s clearly bad news if you are a druid or a bard, but if you plough the fields and scatter - it is of passing interest, and if you own the lands being ploughed, its time to sack the bard and hire a scribe.

The stories we learnt at school about kings, queens, bishops, and knights are surprisingly relevant to the archaeology of the built environment, because great chunks of it were built at their behest; they were at the focal point of the history of medieval Scotland, which as we saw in the last article, was an economic and ecological disaster zone, subject to systemic violence between Highlands and Lowlands.

For several millennium agriculture had supported an elite, an aristocracy, who for most of our history owned the land, an ownership that extended a varying degree to the people who lived on and worked their land. While prehistory gives us a canvass onto which we can project a world where this might not be so, as soon as myth, then history, emerges, it’s men with swords that are calling the shots. Swords are not entirely symbolic in this context, they appear in the Bronze Age, [left [1]],and unlike arrows or spears, they are unambiguously weapons, and raised the technological bar for warfare; interpersonal violence was becoming the preserve of specialists.

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].