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The Excavation of Maiden Castle, Dorset, Second Interim Report
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2012
Extract
It may be recalled that the excavation of Maiden Castle, Dorset, has been undertaken by the Society of Antiquaries and the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society for two main reasons: first, because Maiden Castle is typical; and secondly, because it is at the same time exceptional or even unique. It is typical as representative in position and kind of a very large number of prehistoric fortress-towns in and about the region of Wessex, and its extensive exploration may be expected, therefore, to provide a firm basis for a further inquiry into this notable manifestation of urban development in the later prehistoric period. It is exceptional and, as to its great double entrances, unique in the scale and complexity of its defence-system; and in this respect may be regarded, not merely as the product of an era, but as the monument of some intensely individual and remarkable mind—in Thomas Hardy's words, ‘some remote mind capable of prospective reasoning to a far extent’. Indeed, the hackneyed word ‘personality’ can perhaps be applied more easily to Maiden Castle than to any of the many earthworks which in other regards have an equal claim to investigation.
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- Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1936
References
page 266 note 1 Arch. Journ. lxxxviii (1931), 70 ffGoogle Scholar.
page 266 note 2 Arch. Journ. xci (1934), 32 ffGoogle Scholar.
page 266 note 3 Kindly identified by Dr. James Phenister of the Geological Survey.
page 268 note 1 Antiquity, v (1931), 64Google Scholar.
page 268 note 2 There is some uncertainty both as to the technique and as to the source of the material used in this red-coated ware, and the practice may not indeed have been uniform. It is certain, however, that the distribution of the ware is cultural and not geological. I am indebted to Mr. Kenneth Oakley, F.G.S., for examining this problem and for a report which will be published on another occasion.
page 268 note 3 With fuller knowledge of the Wessex material, I have moved the terminal date on from the ‘200 B.C. or a little later’ suggested last year. Incidentally, an Iron Age B migration to Britain about 100 B.C. would find a ready historical explanation in the disturbed condition of Gaul at that time. The Cimbric invasions were then in full swing, and in the year 103, if Mommsen's amendment of Livy, Epitome lxvii (in Veliocassis for bellicosis), be accepted, the Cimbri and Teutones were actually ravaging Normandy. The concentration of an almost unmodified Iron Age B culture in a region by nature so unattractive to normal prehistoric settlement as the marshy Somerset plain suggests in itself a sudden arrival under duress. On the other hand, the association of the main arrival of Iron Age B with the Cimbric disturbances would not of course rule out the possibility of other and earlier extensions of the same or an allied culture into the Cornish peninsula from Brittany and the Atlantic littoral.
page 274 note 1 It is worthy of note that neither the ultimate palisade nor the preceding exposed revetments of chalk and limestone can be said to have formed a parapet in the normal sense of the term. The exposed chalk-wall facing of rampart 4 must have risen to a continuous height of at least 6 ft., and the deep-set timbering of the palisade of rampart 6 must have projected to a somewhat similar height. Moreover, the palisade lined the inner crest of the bank and was therefore fronted, not backed, by the platform on the summit. It is thus clear that both revetment and palisade must equally have been unfitted as cover for defenders in action on the rampart, and can only have been devised to prevent the easy egress of livestock within the camp, or possibly (as Mr. A. W. Clapham suggests to me) as an additional wind-break on this stormy site. An instructive analogy is provided by the embanked town of Wal-Wal in Abyssinia, where the palisade is similarly on the inner side of the bank (see Antiquity, ix, 1935, 481).
page 275 note 1 See Déchelette, J., Manuel d'archéologie, ii, pt. 1, p. 125Google Scholar, and pt. 2, p. 703; Götze, A. in Zeitschrift für Etinologie, 1900, p. 416Google Scholar; de Saint-Venant, M. J., in Congrès international d'anthropologie et d'archéologie préhistoriques, Paris, 1900, p. 428Google Scholar; and Bersu, G. in Fundberichte aus Schwaben, neue Folge, i (1922), 46Google Scholar.
page 275 note 2 Proc. Prehistoric Soc. 1935, p. 146Google Scholar.
page 277 note 1 On the southern side, within the entrance, a heap of disarrayed limestoneblocks doubtless represented an equivalent feature here.
page 280 note 1 Antiq. Journ. xv (1935), 269Google Scholar.