British Iron Age settlement chronologies: a view from Danebury hillfort

Summary

Traditional approaches to the Iron Age have constructed complex chronologies based on artifact typologies, mainly pottery and metal, with radiocarbon long being neglected. Such views are now untenable, with recent Iron Age research showing that typological dating produces sequences that are regularly too late. Furthermore, regional syntheses anchored by chrono-typologies fail to provide a robust analytical methodology for better understanding the nuances of the settlement landscape and social dynamics.

This paper will explore the interim results of the Leverhulme-funded "(Re)Dating Danebury hillfort" project, which aims to use radiocarbon dating and Bayesian modelling to gain better understanding of the timing of construction, remodeling, and abandonment of Danebury hillfort and nearby sites, and to investigate how the archaeologically visible transformations at the different Iron Age sites relate to one another chronologically across the region. This new artifact-independent chronology is being used critically to reassess the existing pottery sequences and the social interpretations produced by the original Danebury project, and also to develop fresh perspectives on the settlement dynamics of the area.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The short and the long of it: combining timescales

Keywords

Spatial Coverage