Building communities and creating identities in the first millennium BC

From football stadium to Iron Age hillfort. Creating a taxonomy of Wessex hillfort communities

“…Perhaps most notably, Collis assumes that hillfort ramparts were built primarily for defence and protection during a crisis. It has been argued convincingly elsewhere (Hingley 1984;Bowden and McOmish 1987;Sharples 2007) that the construction and maintenance of hillfort boundaries, rather than simply being for defence, may in fact have been an arena in which relations of dominance and subservience could be negotiated and reinforced. In these terms, the motivation for hillfort construction was more likely to have been a result of community prestige rather than a reaction to a crisis.…”

“…Rather than individual football spectators, the appropriate scale used here to study Iron Age hillfort communities will be the household. While it is now generally accepted that the later prehistoric household was unlikely to have been an independent productive unit (Moore 2007;Sharples 2007;Davis 2012;Hill 2012) it was still the key focus of social relationships. As Hill (2012, 250) has argued, these relationships could often be messy and entangled, simultaneously operating in local or wider social networks.…”

“…The hierarchists regard hillforts as the elite residences of kings or chiefs and as the military strongholds and central places of social, economic, political and religious systems (Cunliffe 1984). On the other side are the levellers, who see hillfort societies as very communal in emphasis and ideology, lacking marked social distinctions (Collis 1981;Sharples 1991;Hill 1996). Although polarized, both of these positions are perfectly legitimate frameworks for understanding later prehistoric hillfort-using societies in Wessex and are dependent, in part, on whether one agrees that relatively complex prehistoric societies could only have operated as hierarchies or whether other social forms were possible.…”

“…In Dorset, there are more than 30 such sites ranging in size from less than two hectares to more than six hectares. Maiden Castle is one of the largest and most extensively excavated (Wheeler 1943;Sharples 1991). Originally constructed around 500 B.C., a single timber and earth rampart and ditch defined an area of 6.4 hectares (figure 4, Phase 5).…”

“…Others, such as Danebury (Cunliffe 1995) and Maiden Castle (Sharples 1991), were probably centres of large, permanent, settled communities. In this paper I seek to explain this variable development and use of Wessex hillforts.…”