The Deverel-Rimbury Settlement on Thorny Down, Winterbourne Gunner, S. Wilts

A preliminary report on the discovery and partial excavation during 1936 of the Late Bronze Age farmstead or settlement site on Thorny Down, Winterbourne Gunner, in South Wiltshire has already been published. Sufficient material was there recorded to prove beyond question the approximate date of the site. This was assigned to phase B of the Late Bronze Age (c. 750 B.C.), the culture being that of the Deverel–Rimbury immigrants which for convenience was described as the Cranborne Chase culture, since it was so closely connected with the sites excavated by Pitt Rivers. Further, it was emphasized that this more westerly culture was distinguishable from such sites of similar date in Sussex as New Barn Down and Plumpton Plain in that the highly ornamented globular vessel appeared to be more characteristic of the culture than are the widely diffused barrel- and bucket-shaped vessels. Such local differentiation of ceramic forms during the Late Bronze Age is a well known feature of the period, and Mr C. F. C. Hawkes in his analysis of the Plumpton Plain pottery has called attention to the fact that the Late Bronze Age immigration was not a single event, but a multiple process, in which the Deverel-Rimbury family of urns need be no more than a component.The available evidence which is rapidly accumulating clearly points to the introduction at this period of a developed and highly organized agricultural system, one feature of which was the small enclosure or compound, a type of earthwork constructed as required either for human or for animal occupation.