Iron Age Site Description (1979)
The Iron Age Site Description has been presented much as written in 1979, though with its discussion of chronology and its associated finds synthesis removed. This section now offers a commentary on some aspects of this site phase in the light of the archaeological work that has taken place since. Much has changed in archaeology since 1979, when Iron Age studies were being conducted in a very different intellectual and informational climate than today. The interpretation of site data in the west Midlands was severely hampered then by the lack of other sites for comparison, and there was no clear understanding of the norms of later prehistoric sites in the region. The fieldwork strategy would be very different today, and some aspects of the 1979 site interpretation during post-fieldwork would also be handled differently today, as discussed below.
In the Site Description other aspects of Iron Age sites are covered, which are now considered central. These include the potential inherent symbolism of the material culture assemblage (Hill 1995), special importance of certain materials (e.g. iron; Hingley 1997) and artefact types (currency bars; Hingley 1990), and the significance of the underlying social organisation (Hingley 1984), and social change (Sharples 2007; Hill 2007) for understanding the physical development of Iron Age sites (Knight 2007; Moore 2007a).
© Internet Archaeology/Author(s)
URL: http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue28/3/3.3.html
Last updated: Wed July 21 2010