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]

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.

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.