<<However, these seem to stop producing new forms either in the late fourth century or early in the fifth. dating is notoriously difficult here because of the absence of any later coinage. We do find some pottery which is almost certainly fifth or sixth century in date, but it is almost exclusively badly made and locally produced - they tend to be hand made, organic tempered and bonfire fired>>
Aadvark, can I take it from this quote that it is possible that no pottery is found in Britain at all for the fifth and sixth century? For instance, how does one distinguish rough domestic pottery for any particular period? I assume from your phrase “almost certainly” that none of this pottery is securely dated by stratigraphy.
[QUOTE]Originally posted by M J Harper: Aadvark, can I take it from this quote that it is possible that no pottery is found in Britain at all for the fifth and sixth century? For instance, how does one distinguish rough domestic pottery for any particular period? I assume from your phrase “almost certainly” that none of this pottery is securely dated by stratigraphy.
No. Pottery is found which dates to the fifth and sixth century. It falls into 2 categories - well made imports, which tend to be confined to certain sites, predominatly high status sites or coastal sites with trading links to the mediterranean and very badly made crude pottery, which does not survive well because it is usually badly fired. The first sort is well dated, and often comes from north africa and the eastern mediterranean. the hand made stuff is less easy to date, but has been excavated in well stratified contexts which clearly indicate that it is post Roman in date, and in some cases has been associated with radiocarbon dated material. Because it is so badly made, it rarely survives intact to be excavated, and may have been more widespread than we currently believe. However, the overall amounts of pottery of this date are much smaller than the Late Roman period, indicating that there is less pottery used, presumably indicating a greater reliance on organic containers, which do not survive well in most archaeological deposits. Why do you ask?
Don't worry about the name - was just being a scurrilous gossip anyway!
Where did Roman villa estate workers live? See the Gadebridge Herts report, where the excavated evidence shows they did indeed occupy the aisled building there. Then there's the Little Oakley villa, Essex (published by me yonks ago as an EAA monograph) which had evidence of a number of timber buildings with occupation debris both in the near vicinity of the villa building itself and our fieldwalking and that of an amateur group recovered evidence of another two settlements within shouting distance. The same appears at a number of villas in the same areas...
I don't follow. People will leave occupation debris wherever they live. But where are the houses? Aisled halls for estate workers thrown up around the new villas, like bunk houses for ranch hands, tell us nothing about where the workers were born and brought up, nor where they were to rear their own children.
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if you read the posts above, this is dealt with there
Sorry, aardvark, I can't see it. Please say it in words of one syllable: what does the plenty of evidence for Iron Age pottery and settlements say: 10,000 settlements at 20 per... or 100,000 settlements at 20 per... or some other orders of magnitude?
Where did Roman villa estate workers live? See the Gadebridge Herts report, where the excavated evidence shows they did indeed occupy the aisled building there. Then there's the Little Oakley villa, Essex (published by me yonks ago as an EAA monograph) which had evidence of a number of timber buildings with occupation debris both in the near vicinity of the villa building itself and our fieldwalking and that of an amateur group recovered evidence of another two settlements within shouting distance. The same appears at a number of villas in the same areas...
I don't follow. People will leave occupation debris wherever they live. But where are the houses? Aisled halls for estate workers thrown up around the new villas, like bunk houses for ranch hands, tell us nothing about where the workers were born and brought up, nor where they were to rear their own children.
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if you read the posts above, this is dealt with there
Sorry, aardvark, I can't see it. Please say it in words of one syllable: what does the plenty of evidence for Iron Age pottery and settlements say: 10,000 settlements at 20 per... or 100,000 settlements at 20 per... or some other orders of magnitude?
Sorry old boy, but the posts in which MJ pointed out the error in my calculations and my agreement that you would need 100,000 settlements at 1 every 145 hectares appear to have disappeared. There's no need to get snarky about it though! I cited examples where the known settlement density of an area was well above the number needed to meet this. bear in mind also that I did not take into account the thousands of hillforts we know of and the things called oppida, both of which would have contained considerably more inhabitants
I can't see your point with regard to villas though. There is evidence that villa workers lived in outbuildings forming part of the main complex, regardless how nupalatable that may be for your arguments, whilst on some of villas there is evidence for workers complexes, which do contain houses. Your comment about aisled buildings and bunkhouses shows way too much interpretative prejudice. An aisled building could have housed numerous people, including families, in relative comfort. Pauls point about the concentrations of finds in the vicinity of villas is that they probably mark the site of workers dwellings or settlements. had they been excavated, they might well have produced the houses you require
<<Sorry old boy, but the posts in which MJ pointed out the error in my calculations and my agreement that you would need 100,000 settlements at 1 every 145 hectares appear to have disappeared.>>
I know you think we're flogging a dead horse but it's a very important horse. My own view is that there are ten-to-twenty thousand villages and they're all missing. Your view is that there are 100,000 hamlets and that none of them are missing. In a manner of speaking.
<<I cited examples where the known settlement density of an area was well above the number needed to meet this.>>
But this is the part we insist on flogging. Archaeologists define a settlement wherever they turn up signs of human activity. When they don't find any actual houses they assume they are there but that they have disappeared (wattle and daub will do that) or...just haven't been found. It's not of great moment to an archaeologist because he works on your paradgim that there are 100,000 hamlets...and this is just one of them.
<<bear in mind also that I did not take into account the thousands of hillforts>>
A case in point. You assume there are thousands of hillforts and that people lived in them. That alone might account for several hundred thousand people. We don't. We assume nobody lived in hillforts -- en masse, people might have occupied them temporarily from time to time.
This is why operating paradgims are so important. When you are dealing with a very incomplete jigsaw puzzle, it is the paradigm that fills in the missing pieces. Of course that applies to us as well but on "where people lived" I think the evidence is with us. In a negative sort of way.
Ditto the pottery. It is as easy to fill the missing centuries as it is to denude them depending on what you assume will be there.
PS Can anyone tell me what the censorship policy is on this site before this disappears? I am beyond bafflement.
Was just looking for the simplest possible terms. So lemme see if I've got this straight:
a) The total pre-Roman population was in the region of 2,000,000. b) This figure is based on normal, practical considerations and what is known of Britain's political and economic status, because an exhaustive survey has never been done (and isn't likely to be) that would enable us simply to tot up. c) The farmsteads that have been found would accommodate something like 20 people each. d) Therefore, there must have been, in rough terms, 100,000 tiny settlements scattered everywhere, less than a mile apart. e) The statistical extrapolation from a few representative areas where this settlement density has been observed is consistent with the foregoing assumptions. That is, there is plenty of evidence to corroborate the model of pre-Roman settlement.
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Your comment about aisled buildings and bunkhouses shows way too much interpretative prejudice.
According to the consensus of archaeologists, that is, who can only say "this seems reasonable to us". Is there any direct evidence that families, as opposed to labourers, were accomodated in the villa out-buildings as a rule?
If not, the could-have-beens, which-is-more-likelys and might-well-have-dones can only be settled in terms of the paradigm. So, since the paradigm itself is under scrutiny, we must admit this evidence can not resolve the matter.
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Pauls point about the concentrations of finds in the vicinity of villas is that they probably mark the site of workers dwellings or settlements.
Yes, that's what I thought: "mark the site". I have something to say about this, but can't post it up right now.
Originally posted by Innocent Bystander: a) The total pre-Roman population was in the region of 2,000,000. b) This figure is based on normal, practical considerations and what is known of Britain's political and economic status, because an exhaustive survey has never been done (and isn't likely to be) that would enable us simply to tot up. c) The farmsteads that have been found would accommodate something like 20 people each. d) Therefore, there must have been, in rough terms, 100,000 tiny settlements scattered everywhere, less than a mile apart. e) The statistical extrapolation from a few representative areas where this settlement density has been observed is consistent with the foregoing assumptions. That is, there is plenty of evidence to corroborate the model of pre-Roman settlement.
Yes and no. I was being extremely conservative with my estimations of population size - a single roundhouse could easily house 20 people, so a settlement of 4 roundhouses could contain more than 20. Even at a figure of 20 per settlement, you only require a v low settlement density to reach 2 million
But this is the part we insist on flogging. Archaeologists define a settlement wherever they turn up signs of human activity. When they don't find any actual houses they assume they are there but that they have disappeared (wattle and daub will do that) or...just haven't been found. It's not of great moment to an archaeologist because he works on your paradgim that there are 100,000 hamlets...and this is just one of them.
<<bear in mind also that I did not take into account the thousands of hillforts>>
A case in point. You assume there are thousands of hillforts and that people lived in them. That alone might account for several hundred thousand people. We don't. We assume nobody lived in hillforts -- en masse, people might have occupied them temporarily from time to time.
Where are all these sites with large concentrations of material but no evidence of settlement. Cite me examples.
As for the hillforts. We know there are thousands of them. They are pretty hard to miss. And when they are excavated, they susally contain evidence of settlement, and ofter prolonged settlement, with roundhouses replacing earlier ones, rubbish pits dug and re-dug. It's not rocket science. Why then persist in ignoring it? Because it doesn't meet the requirements of your paradigm?
Not at all, Aardie, as I have pointed out where everybody lived does not effect what they were speaking. But I am surprised by your lack of 'feel' for the evidence (which is, even you would agree, somewhat on the impressionistic side).
Hence, on the question of hillforts, you would surely have to concede that whatever they were for, they were not 'for' settlement. Finding the odd round house is really neither here nor there when we are trying to track down the population.
Similarly with your hamlets. If I were to say to you, "OK, list me those sites in the pre-Roman British lowlands that have revealed a hamlet, that is at least ten (OK, five) dwellings in close proximity showing contemporaneous permanent occupation," you would not be able to produce fifty. I doubt that you could produce ten.
If modern villages were extant in the Iron Age and Roman periods, we would have the material evidence (listed above) to show it. Whilst it is always dangerous to make sweeping generalisations, it is fairly safe to say that this is not the case.
"Fairly safe" looks like a chink in the armour; and in logic, a chink is as good as a chasm.
You also mentioned folk "who were incredibly unbelievably tidy". But since nowhere is currently reckoned to have been continuously inhabited for more than about 1500 years -- that is what you're saying, isn't it? -- isn't there at least a prima facie case for saying archaeology doesn't know what, say, 5000 years of continuous occupation would look like?
If a place is continuously occupied and rebuilt on -- "rubbish pits dug and re-dug" -- surely the debris is going to be disturbed or obliterated in a completely different way from any site that was abandoned. How are the statistical results going to be skewed if discarded articles have plenty of opportunity to be either reclaimed or cleared away? How do we know what number of people is implied by a number of pottery sherds if the time over which they were deposited has always been grossly underestimated?
Is discontinuous evidence evidence of discontinuous occupation? Isn't there a danger that sites on the outskirts of town are treated as representative of the whole locality? If it is assumed that all settlements are scattered about, then it's fair to assume that the ones we can get at are representative. I know a hill top near where I live is treated this way: people moved into the area... people moved out... new people moved in... But what if sites like these were always marginal -- sometimes occupied, sometimes, not, as economic fortunes ebb and flow -- while the majority always lived just where they do now?
Most settlements so far studied have been outside of villages -- not surprising since the presently occupied villages are presently occupied; though I seem to remember the very first test pit in the first Time Team Big Dig uncovering an Iron Age hearth in someone's garden -- so isn't the bulk of archaeological evidence inadmissible as a test of the paradigm?
To put it another way: since "roundhouses and villas they are almost invariably directly associated with significant quantities of waste material" and "concentrations of fieldwalking finds probably mark the site of settlements" (not forgetting that these sites were abandoned and therefore never cleaned up) and since villages and towns are generally more built-up now than ever before, then it is likely that the oldest 'halo' of waste material, close to oldest buildings, has long since been ploughed up, rubbed out and built over.
Add to this that, for all we know, home-made pottery was most common and has had longer to deteriorate than the post-Roman rough stuff...
aardvark Wrote: Why then persist in ignoring it? Because it doesn't meet the requirements of your paradigm?
Perhaps the principle reason we are suspicious of the Roundhouse/Small, Scattered Settlement model is that, once again, it rests upon a catastrophist understanding of the nature of change: Once upon a time people did things different; then some sort of catastrophe occurred and, quite suddenly, they all started doing things as we do them now.
(Of course, over time and generations of researchers, all manner of qualifications get lain over the “quite suddenly” bit, but the basic model remains consistent with the original catastrophist proposal).
As you probably know by now, our understanding of how change occurs is more uniformaterian – a position we believe better-supported by scientific first principles. We always start with a picture of yesterday that is more or less the same as our impression of today because stasis is what is always favoured by Occam’s Razor.
We do agree that catastrophic change does occur, but it requires very strong evidence and should be associated with definable laws (Y must change suddenly, wherever coincident with circumstance X).
We suspect that the evidence of Britain’s rapid and universal transformation from one farming system and settlement pattern to another will collapse if subjected to epistemological critique. That is, the evidence will turn out to be ambiguous at best, and nothing concerning the causal nature of the hypothesized events will be applicable to any similar set of historical circumstances.
Now our suspicion may prove wrong. But, should that prove to be so, the established case will only be the stronger for our examination. Truth has nothing to fear from rigorous application of the scientific method.
Yes and no. I was being extremely conservative with my estimations of population size...
Since it's only the roughness of the figures you wish to quality, I'll take that as a 'yes' to the structure of the argument. So what about that?
quote:
b) [The 2,000,000] figure is based on normal, practical considerations and what is known of Britain's political and economic status, because an exhaustive survey has never been done (and isn't likely to be) that would enable us simply to tot up.
Why are not "normal, practical considerations" eschewed as "too much interpretative prejudice"?
(What value is there in landscape archaeology, by the way, unless we can apply common sense to people's interactions with the landscape 100 years ago... 1,000 years ago... 10,000 years ago...? Sounds like "what is is what was".)
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e) The statistical extrapolation from a few representative areas where this settlement density has been observed is consistent with the foregoing assumptions. That is, there is plenty of evidence to corroborate the model of pre-Roman settlement.
This is fine where the paradigm is assumed to be true: as it must be for you lot to get on and do any work. Within your own terms, it is perfectly reasonable to say "there is plenty of evidence" because it is all stacking up in your favour.
But "all" is a relative term. Doubling the evidence for such-and-such a phenomenon is very positive from your perspective. But if that means you have now excavated 0.2% of sites rather than 0.1%, it presents a very different picture.
The statistical model that 'confirms' small, scattered settlements • works on a tiny dataset; • supports a total figure arrived at by what ought be considered unsound means; • is susceptible to a large systematic error if indeed the majority of the evidence is obliterated by or still lies beneath modern towns and villages.
The model itself can not answer this last point. If pre-Roman settlements were scattered about between the existing villages then we do not have direct archaeological evidence of the vast majority of them. It is not the evidence but the model that rejects the alternative claim that we would expect a paucity of evidence if villages have hardly moved since deep antiquity (if ever).
And the model is neither supported nor unsupported by the data.
Where are all these sites with large concentrations of material but no evidence of settlement. Cite me examples.
You do not blink when you say "concentrations of finds in the vicinity of villas probably mark the site of workers dwellings or settlements. Had they been excavated, they might well have produced the houses you require." but this (and the whole Portable Antiquities Scheme) is an admission that signs of human presence are assumed to be signs of settlement without the actual, direct evidence.
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you would surely have to concede that whatever they were for, [hillforts] were not 'for' settlement.
By that I think he means it is not the general mode of living of the population at large. If anything, they are more likely to be high status sites -- with which "they usually contain evidence of settlement, and often prolonged settlement..." is perfectly compatible -- which occur like the Roman villas and Norman castles just outside the villages, occupied by a minority of the population and abandoned when their time was up.
So... since the problem of the evidence for the general population has been dispensed with -- "we have plenty of evidence" in terms of one paradigm, but what we have in no way refutes the alternative paradigm -- let's return to the stone houses for a minute:
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archaeologists are obsessed with the idea that the Ancient Brits lived in wooden dwellings so look for post-holes. It never occurs to them that it is overwhelmingly likely that the Ancient Brits lived in stone houses and used the same stone foundations over and over again.
If by stone houses you mean houses made of stones, such as would have been cleared from fields over the centuries, then might you not be talking about nothing much more than dry stone walling? Would there necessarily have been any stone foundations? I suspect other readers balk at the suggestion of stone houses because they picture masonry houses... and that's not the same thing at all.
Everyone does rather assume that wood is cheap and plentiful, but since the primeval forests were cleared thousands of years ago... and there were very strict laws about who was allowed to cut what wood where... and one of the Stuart kings (I think) had his own hedgerows surveyed to see how much timber he didn't have to pay for to maintain his fleet... there are reasons to think that timber was a pricey commodity.
MJ, perhaps you could explain the situation at West Heslerton for us then?
An interesting case. The English Heritage website mentions
"...well preserved deposits including a number of Late Roman structures interpreted as possible shrines[/B}... [B]landscaped by construction of a number of broad flat terraces, prior to the building of a remarkable structure measuring c 16 x 11 metres... a series of bread-ovens had been built into one side of the valley, and large quantities of oyster and mussel shells were associated a with large, poorly defined, timber structure built across the valley entrance. This would not be out of place in a Roman town, but is unusual in a rural setting where despite the presence of a number of unusual structural remains there is no clear evidence of long-term or substantial settlement. The reworking of the valley, incorporating built terraces up to a metre high, and the presence of both the structures and a well, seems to represent a ritual complex which also includes a series of worn pebble paths running from the spring in the north up through the centre of the valley."
"The Late Roman buildings were very carefully dismantled after AD 410, after which there is evidence of continued activity in the main structure represented by a series of shallow pits cut through the chalk floor... The presence of a series of very late coins, crude ceramics, and, elsewhere on the site, ceramics of early Anglo-Saxon form but late-Roman fabric, indicate continuity, perhaps related to the ritual use of space rather than reuse of structures... By AD 500 the settlement extended over an area of c 25 hectares, incorporating different zones devoted to housing, craft and industry, and to agricultural processing... By AD 650 the settlement had contracted to a point where it covered only the area of the late Roman enclosures in the southern half of the site... By this time the scale of the cavity floor buildings seems also to have increased... The finds include one of the largest assemblages of animal bone ever recovered (more than 750,000 fragments), and evidence of trade in the form of glass vessels, ceramics, metalwork, and quern stones imported from the Rhineland... The settlement was finally deserted... by about AD 850."
This is clearly an account of a special development for ritual and industrial purposes whose economy proved to be unsustainable, perhaps capped off by an accidental fire:
"extensive deposits of burnt daub and ashy material show that there was a great deal of burning associated with the desertion of the site.
A far cry from an "organic", low status, agricultural village.
Unfortunately, the site also says West Heslerton "has also contributed significantly to our understanding of the Roman/Saxon transition and the from Early/Middle Saxon transition". It doesn't bode particularly well if such an singular and unrepresentative site is pivotal in our general understanding of these transitional periods.
This is clearly an account of a special development for ritual and industrial purposes whose economy proved to be unsustainable, perhaps capped off by an accidental fire:
That's not the conclusion of a conference of some 50 archaeologists:
"... was generally seen more as one of continuity of place, with a dichotomy between `late Romans' and the new settlers;" (Antiquity, 2001)
"... was generally seen more as one of continuity of place, with a dichotomy between `late Romans' and the new settlers;"
The new settlers didn't last very long. The place was abandoned.
The original suggestion was that wood was high status and stone (stones) low status; to which you offered West Heslerton as a counter-example; but which completely bears out the original claim.
The original suggestion was that wood was high status and stone (stones) low status; to which you offered West Heslerton as a counter-example; but which completely bears out the original claim.
How? Around 140 of the 200 structures in the post roman development were SFBs.
