2016 A Monumental New Year

Ditched Enclosures in Neolithic Europe

I have to thank Víctor Jiménez Jáimez for raising me from the deep sepulchral gloom of my seasonal torpidity, to bring you news of his new website ; Ditched Enclosures in Neolithic Europe.

He has produced an excellent site that is not only technically accomplished, but also succeeds in conveying the physical scale and geographical spread of Neolithic enclosures. Using some of the latest information and modern methods of presentation it is an excellent introduction to the topic as a European phenomenon.  The site is completely non-profit, and is aimed at the general public, but would be a good introduction for archaeology students, as the Neolithic is a period that is best understood in a European context.

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? 

The archaeology of the Imaginary Spaces

One of the first things you learn as an archaeologist is that “History” is the study of specialist artefacts involving writing and other forms of recording, and that “Prehistory” is marked by the absence of such material. There is period we call “Proto-history”, in which “Prehistoric” issues are alluded to in later documents, providing plenty of scope for conjecture; ideas like “Druids” inhabit these spaces, along with more peripheral characters like Merlin and Arthur.
Narrative History on the BBC Television is a cultural phenomenon in its own right, and while Prehistory has always had the attraction of the mysterious, and offers the potential of a “Detective Story” format, in reality it has no recognisable narratives. Thus, I was very rude about “The History of Ancient Britain” series’ attempt to manufacture one, and so I greet the news of Neil Oliver's  “Sacred Wonders of Britain” with some degree of scepticism.   However, Neil is keen to get his retaliation in first;

 “We were at all times sensitive to one absolute truth – that it is quite impossible to put yourself in the mind of a Neolithic farmer, or to understand the thinking of an Iron Age druid.”

Good; this did seem to be lacking from the last outing into the past. However, as the program promises an exploration of Prehistoric sacredness, I suspect there is going to be a “but” in there somewhere.  Luckily there are experts on hand; in academia you get the “truth” you pay for.

Twelve reasons why Stonehenge was a building

Stonehenge was a building.  That’s it, no mystery. If it was a rectangle this would not be an issue, but British Prehistoric buildings are predominantly circular from this period onward. 
The rings of postholes at Stonehenge [Y, Z, Q, and R holes] are often ignored, or are thought to be redundant stone holes, but it is just one of a group of concentric timber structures known from various periods in British Prehistory.  Like Woodhenge, Durrington Walls, Mount Pleasant, and The Sanctuary, Stonehenge was a large timber building.  This was tentatively recognised by Tim Darvil in 1996, who called them Class Ei structures.[1]  

Notes & Queries; Sledges

My observation that a 7000 year old LBK longhouse from Olszanica in Poland had 2 wide doors [right], prompted the question was it a cart shed? I think I satisfied myself, and my readers, it was not; it is simply too early. I somewhat reluctantly concluded that perhaps sledges were the possible explanation.

Well, that simply was not good enough for Martha, who edits this site, so in an interesting case of role-reversal, and she set off to consider this in much more detail.

And I am so glad she did.

34. The Curious Case of the Lengyel Longhouses

There are some things that are just wrong, and Lengyel longhouses transcend odd, through strange, into weird; buildings should not taper. Well, not at 7°, they shouldn’t. It's just not a right and proper thing for them to do. At least two sides should be parallel, otherwise your roof will be in some way irregular. It is all very worrying for a structural archaeologist. So why would Neolithic builders, like those who created this example from Biskupin, Poland [left], [1] make a building with such an unusual shape?

21. Thrust, trusses, and not going down the aisle

Much of our experience of height and depth, the z axis of the space we inhabit, comes from the built environment, which has long since outstripped things like trees as tall objects in our lives. By contrast, in prehistoric Britain, when buildings were made of wood, it was difficult to create structures taller than the trees they were made of, and builders got on with the practical problem of creating width. This is one of the perennial problems of architecture, and an important thread in the narrative of the built environment. In this article we shall look at how builders solved the technical problems inherent in wide timber buildings, considering medieval buildings at the end of this process, and how this can be related to the archaeology of Neolithic buildings at the beginning.

19. The proper study of mankind is postholes

With all due apologies to Alexander Pope [1], and John Collis [2], postholes are quite important, but it is what they represent, the prehistoric built environment, that gives them their significance to archaeology.

An excavated posthole

The central importance of the built environment to archaeology, to its original inhabitants, and to builders was explored in a series of earlier articles, as was the basic problem of archaeological sites with lots of postholes that, once any roundhouses have been extracted, remain uninterpreted.

14. Snow, Earthquakes, and String Theory

2006 was a bad winter, with record snowfalls that killed many people. In Japan, over 60 people died in January. Many elderly people were killed trying to clear snow from their roofs, while others were crushed to death as their houses collapsed. "It's frightening," said one elderly woman in Asahi. "There were creaking sounds and I couldn't open the doors because of the weight of the snow."


Collapsing houses are not the first things that come to mind when we think about the effects of snow. In the U.K., we have civil engineers and architects who sort that stuff out. However, even modern buildings can be caught unaware by the climate, and snow, being made of water, is heavy.

The collapsed convention hall at Katowice, Poland, January 2006