Year: 1979
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Although earlier research had defined the existence and character of two continentally-inspired Middle and Late La Tene burial rites in restricted zones of eastern Yorkshire and south-eastern England and had suggested the presence of a third alien tradition of warrior inhumation, little attention has previously been given to the methods of burial used in all other parts of Britain during the pre-Roman Iron Age.In order to rectify this situation an exhaustive classified catalogue listing all known formal deposits of Iron Age human remains from insular sites has now been compiled and forms the basis for a broader discussion of conventional funerary customs and more complex sacrificial and votive practices involving human subjects than has hitherto been possible.A principal result of the work has been the identification of three distinct native inhumation traditions from central southern England, southern Dorset and Cornwall, and the recognition that these share a set of distinctive ritual characteristics that confirm their common insular origin.The same ritual preferences can also be identified m the context of Arras Culture burials in Yorkshire and demonstrate that the latter rite was the product of a more complex fusion of native and continental practices than has hitherto been envisaged.The method of burial used m all remaining areas from the Late Bronze Age until the Roman Conquest remains archaeologically invisible, but i t is now suggested that this also took the form of inhumation and was the cultural progenitor of the four regional traditions that eventually replaced or augmented i t .10. were carried out with similar results at both Maiden Castle (A.1.15)and Hod Hill (A.1.14)in Dorset.In recent years the trend towards extensive area excavation has led to the examination of increasingly large groups of pits which in turn have begun to yield further evidence that pit=burial may have been a regular, rather than an exceptional, practice.At Maiden Castle at least seven adult skeletons were found in the fillings of conventional storage pits and a similar number were recorded at Danebury, Hants, between 1971 and 1973 (A.1.20).Increasing numbers of groups of two or more burials have also been reported from open settlements throughout the region, although none of these has yet compared with Christon, Avon, where no less than 11 of a total of 65 pits yielded adult skeletons (A.1.2),or Gussage-all-Saints with 11 adult and 33 infant pit-burials (A.1.10).Evidence obtained before the Second World War tended to indicate that the majority of pit-burials were concentrated on the chalklands of central Wessex, with only the thinnest scatter of examples extending to the northwest and north-east.While subsequent work has confirmed that northern Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire still have the major share of the known examples, an increasing number of new discoveries demonstrates that the overall distribution covers a much wider area, extending from Dorset m a north-easterly direction as far as Northamptonshire and possibly Norfolk (Fig. 2, ).No conventional pit-burials have ever been recorded to the west of the River Parrott, however, and a similar dearth in south-eastern England is broken only by examples from a single site at Broadstairs, Kent (A.1.22).Although the burials from Hardingstone (A.1.27),Twywell (A.28) and Hunsbury (A.1.26),Northants, and Roudham, Norfolk (A.1.23)show a strong northerly extension in the eastern part of the region, there
Author: Rowan Whimster
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W85080238