Fourth Report, 1972: part IV

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Thank you again to PWD for permission to reproduce abstracts from the Fourth Report for 1972.

"Reconstruction of the Period 2 Houses

The Period 2 hollow way narrowed where it ran between Houses 1 and 2, and came no closer than 1.5m to the lines of posts.  The traffic was presumably here being funnelled by a barrier, and it thus seems likely that the outer walls of the houses lay the beyond the lines of the post holes, which thus formed internal supports of the roof structure.  Absence of post holes for such an outer wall creates no difficulties, for the problems, experimentally observed, during the course of our excavations, of cutting small post holes in the oolite might well induce even builders accustomed to earth-fast posts to rely on walling framed on sleeper beams.  In House 5 two post holes in this outer position can be seen as additional evidence for a framed exterior wall: House 5 had no other postholes in this position and the two outer holes perhaps supported a special structure -- the largest house having the most imposing facade.  Between House 1 and House 3 a small square structure with a central posthole, perhaps to support a raised floor, projected beyond the lines of postholes into the roadway.  As can be seen in figure 6, however, the proposed outer walls of Houses 1 and 3 aligned with the south wall of this square structure, which thus continued the line of the street frontage. 

Suggested reconstructions of the longhouses are shown in figure 7.  The simplest method would probably have been to fit horizontal timbers (aisle plates) between the aisle posts on the longitudinal axes of the houses; as at Stonehenge, a plain mortice-and-tenon joint would suffice to join aisle post to aisle plate.  Reconstruction 2 shows one such interpretation with the addition of a substantial outer turf wall to support the ends of a common rafter roof.  Considerable quantities of burned daub from wattling were found around the houses and in the postholes.  This suggests that the outer walls were merely wattled screens, but these could conveniently have been framed on sleeper beams and could, even without earth-fast posts, have supported considerable weight.  But it is noticeable that the post-settings are paired symmetrically, and this suggests an alternative more complex upper structure.  The aisle posts could have been held together by tie-beams across the width of the house and the roof supported on couples at about 10’ centres.  Such a structure - a principal rafter roof - is shown in Reconstruction 1 and in the perspective and axonometric drawings in figure 7. Further elaboration of the roof structure is too hypothetical, but could include bracing and crown posts on the tie-beams.

House 1 and House 7 (see figure 3) preserved evidence of centrally placed hearth, and other houses may have been similarly heated.  The hearth in House 1 survived merely as the circle of scorched bedrock, and the erosion in other areas could easily have removed the evidence of fire. 

The hollow way continued as far as the end of the second bay of houses one and two.  No further trace of it could be found, and it is therefore possible that the entrances to these longhouses were lateral (see cover drawing).  At the east end of House 4 an additional posthole, 811, may have been for a gable door.  Apart from a streak of burning which might indicate that a porch stood on the north side of bay five in House 5, there was no other evidence for door positions, and there is so far very little trace of the subdivisions that are found in comparable structures on the continent of Europe (e.g. Waterbolk, 1964)."

Fourth Report 1972, part III: The Interior of the Hillfort 1972

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Thank you as ever to PWD for permission to post these abstracts from his 1972 Fourth Report. I'm afraid the Albergo Parker is not equipped with an A3 scanner so each A4 page has to be scanned and posted separately:

"An area 80 m long and up to 40 m broad was stripped behind the entrance passage (cuttings BI - BXII).  Stratigraphy in this area was slight, in many places less than 5 cm between turf and bedrock, but a number of the 180 postholes uncovered here can be placed in relative sequence: near the centre of the excavated area postholes 472 cut into and was later than a large posthole; further southwards posthole 529 - 534 were cut into a layer of small packed stones which sealed the tops of posthole's 544 - 547 and 516.  Postholes 529 - 534 formed part of an almost perfect post circle, whose postholes must be seen from their regularity as contemporary; it does not therefore follow that the postholes stratified earlier in the sequences were all of the same date, but this conclusion is indicated by the consistency of their layout: almost all formed pairs from 2 1/2 metres to 3.3 m apart, with similar spacing between the pairs.  

The structures represented by both these groups of postholes may be tied in with the phasing of the rampart.  Within the inturned entrance of the timber-laced rampart (Period 2) the excavations in 1970 exposed a hollow way, produced by traffic wear.  This hollowing continued on the axis of the passage to run between the alignments produced by the pairs of (earlier) post holes.  During Period 3b a cobbled road was laid against the entrance bastions and could be followed running into the interior of the hillfort.  These cobbles overlay the structures identified in figure 5 as "House 2" and "House 6", but curved to avoid the post circle, which must therefore have been in existence in Period 3b.  In the case of the rows of postholes to the west of the post circle (Houses 3, 4 and 5) no evidence of phasing was uncovered, but their alignment corresponded quite closely with that of Houses 1, 2 and 6, and all are thus assumed to form part of one settlement, whose plan consisted of houses set on either side of the road away from the Period 2 entrance.  None of the settings were completely regular.  House 2 and House 5 in particular contained pairs more widely spaced the other postholes in the group and House 3 and House 4 each had a pair of post holes stepped southwards of the general alignment. Post pipe packings survived in many of these post holes, and showed that the post might be placed eccentrically in the hole to compensate the irregularities in the spacing, but even this was not always sufficient to produce a straight row of posts.  Each could thus be argued that some or all of the "houses" shown in figure 5 were in fact separate contiguous buildings, perhaps of four or six posts as identified on a number of Iron Age sites (Stanford, 1970).  But between each "house" lay gaps greater than the spacing of pairs within each of the "houses": these gaps, together with the close correspondence in overall alignment within each "house" group in contrast with slight variations in direction between groups, make such a suggestion implausible.  Indeed, it has recently been argued that such variations in direction and construction within a single structure may indicate variations of function within the building - between house and byre, or between single and double storeyed portions of the house (Soudsky, 1969).  Arguments as to whether all the longhouses attributed to Period 2 were in fact strictly contemporary cannot be satisfactorily resolved: none of the buildings overlapped, and the suggested plan of the settlement (figure 6) reveals a regularity in the layout which very strongly indicates that all the longhouses were designed to form a single coherent settlement."