mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== Great sites: Little Woodbury Everyone thought that prehistoric Britons lived in holes in the ground rather than houses, until a German refugee began to dig a site in a Wiltshire field On the south side of the city of Salisbury in an unremarkable ploughed field lies one of the most important Iron Age sites ever dug. In fact, most of the prehistoric remains are still there, unexcavated, waiting for the day when the ground-breaking excavation that stopped 60 years ago may one day, perhaps, resume. There is nothing much to see here now - no walls, no earthworks, not even a sign to tell the curious visitor what lies under the ploughsoil. Yet this field is the location of Little Woodbury, an Iron Age enclosed settlement containing a large domestic roundhouse that has become - for British archaeologists - the archetype of a later prehistoric farmstead. The excavations that took place here in the summers of 1938 and 1939 changed the look of prehistoric Britain. It is hard to imagine that before this site was dug, no one thought of Iron Age or Bronze Age farms as containing roundhouses or surrounded by a bank and ditch. Incredibly, most people had actually assumed that people in pre-Roman Britain lived in holes in the ground rather than houses - that is, in what have now been identified as storage pits. They thought this, despite the fact that roundhouses are depicted on Trajan's Column in Rome and had been discovered at the Glastonbury and Meare lake villages before the First World War. Little Woodbury changed that view forever. The site was discovered by the aerial archaeologist OGS Crawford in the years after the First World War, its circular boundary ditch showing up as a dark cropmark from the air. It was recognised as a settlement, and was chosen for excavation by the `Young Turks' of the Prehistoric Society - Grahame Clark, Stuart Piggott and Christopher Hawkes - who were then pioneering an interest in prehistoric daily life and economy. Previously, archaeologists such as Mortimer Wheeler had been more interested in grand narratives of invasion and cultural change, and the details of `ordinary life' had largely been overlooked as less interesting or important. Looking for life There had, of course, been excavations of Iron Age settlements before but most of these had simply followed the course of ditches, or had dug individual pits and not what was around them - hence the theory that people lived in holes in the ground. At Little Woodbury, an attempt was made for the first time to excavate the settlement as a whole, allowing a more accurate picture of the site to emerge. It was not an open-area excavation in the modern sense, but one in which wide parallel trenches were dug across the site one after the other, and their individual plans brought together and interpreted at the end of the excavation - a major innovation in itself. The man chosen by the Prehistoric Society to lead this work was Gerhard Bersu, a German archaeologist who had already had experience of recovering posthole timber buildings at prehistoric settlements on the Continent. A former director of the Romisch-Germanischen Kommission, a leading German archaeological organisation, he had been stripped of his post by the Nazis and forced to flee the country on account of his anti-Nazi views. He arrived as a refugee in this country in 1937. Bersu was one of the first to realise that prehistoric houses were made of timber, leaving behind postholes as evidence of their existence. Using his parallel-trench technique, he eventually uncovered the complete plan of Little Woodbury's large roundhouse and excavated many other features. For the first time in Britain mundane evidence such as animal bones, seeds and carbonised grains were sought in a systematic way. Bersu was able to demonstrate once and for all - not only through his excavated evidence but also by ethnographic parallels from the Balkans - that holes in the ground on settlement sites were not homes but pits for the storage of food. Eccentric vision This is not to say that Bersu got everything right. His conception of what a roundhouse actually looked like was - to modern eyes - decidedly eccentric. At first, he saw it as a curious multi-gabled affair, then later as a kind of wigwam with no walls and a relatively flat roof. It was all a far cry from the simple conical roof supported on a low circular timber wall that has been the accepted norm ever since Peter Reynolds completed his reconstruction experiments at Butser Ancient Farm in Hampshire a couple of decades ago. Bersu's grand plan to reconstruct the details of Iron Age daily life and economy also failed (in the main) to bear fruit, as the excavation was cut short by the Second World War and post-excavation work was never completed in full. Bersu himself was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man, along with many other German, Austrian and Italian refugees including the architectural historian Nicholas Pevsner and the great Iron Age art expert Paul Jacobsthal. He carried out a number of excavations on the island, but he never returned to dig in southern England and no-one took up his baton. Over 30 years was to separate Bersu's dig and the resumption of large-scale area excavations of Iron Age settlements in the 1970s with important work in Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire and Wessex - especially by Geoffrey Wainwright's excavation at Gussage All Saints that was meant to be a `new Little Woodbury'. Setting a path But the original Little Woodbury excavation was anything but a failure. Not only was the roundhouse immediately accepted as the normal form of prehistoric domestic architecture, but Bersu's quest for the minutiae of daily life such as animal bones and plant and insect remains, together with his original and sophisticated use of ethnographic parallels, presaged many of the techniques and interests of Iron Age archaeologists from the 1960s to the present day. Ritual and religious aspects of roundhouses and settlements have become fashionable in recent years, but the basic objective of most Iron Age archaeologists remains that of Bersu - understanding the daily lives of prehistoric people. This is the chief legacy of his transformative pre-war excavation in that nondescript Wiltshire field. JD Hill is Curator of the British and European Iron Age Collections at the British Museum br arch 2000