The hillforts of Britain and Ireland: how regionally varied are they?

Summary

Since the beginning of insular Iron Age studies, the nature and variability of the settlement record across these islands have been a principal matter of interest. This approach reached a zenith in the mid-20th century, in the schemes of Christopher Hawkes and Stuart Piggott. These set out to delineate different provinces and regions within Britain in which distinctive cultures could be recognized, in substantial part framed on the distributions of varieties of settlements, as depicted for example in the seminal map of the Iron Age in southern Britain, produced by the Ordnance Survey. The Atlas of Hillforts in Britain and Ireland Project is an AHRC-funded collaboration designed to collate standardized information on the c. 5000 sites of this type now known in Britain and Ireland, including more-recently discovered sites (e.g. through aerial photography), and also by eliminating earlier inconsistences in terminology amongst the different archaeological services across the islands. This contribution will allow a preliminary assessment of the impact of the new data on previous perceptions of regionality within British and Irish Iron Age studies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Historical Ecology, Heterarchy and Multitemporal Dynamics: Papers in Honor of Carole Crumley

Keywords

Spatial Coverage