Double-ring Roundhouses, Probable and Possible, in Prehistoric Britain

Abstract

It is now more than a decade since Avery & Close-Brooks (1969) and Musson (1970) recognized that some roundhouses which, at first sight, appeared in the archaeological record to have been single-ring buildings were most probably of double-ring construction. Using the excavation-plans of timber roundhouses at the Bronze Age settlements on Shearplace Hill in Dorset and Itford Hill in Sussex as the mainstays of their arguments, these writers gave reasons for believing that the ring of postholes, which constituted the principal archaeological evidence for the buildings in question, had held the uprights of an internal roof-supporting structure, while a separate, concentric, external wall, set some distance outside that post-ring, had received a more meagre earth-cut foundation, which in some cases had either ‘disappeared’ or ‘escaped detection’. These particular roundhouses had each stood on a terraced platform, and it is likely that this had afforded their ground-plans a measure of protection against at least mechanical weathering, with the result that ‘tenuous traces’ of an outer wall-groove survived in the chalk-bedrock of the House A platform at Shearplace Hill, while at Itford Hill the extent of the ‘trodden chalk’ areas of some of the floors supplied a vital clue.

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