Wessex Hillforts after Danebury: Exploring Boundaries

Hillforts have acted as a catalyst for thinking about Iron Age society in its widest sense since the earliest interests in the period. That these are the most visible and numerous reminders of that distant past across much of Europe has been a magnet and focus for fieldwork that has served as a balance to the artefact-based typological studies and occasional rich burials that dominated early and much of more recent continental European Iron Age studies. Hillforts are significant and impressive places within landscapes; they were in the Iron Age and still are now, and as such they provoke questions at the most basic level of archaeological reasoning. Avoiding the ‘why’ question as being an inevitable dead end, it can be reformulated to assess the evidence that we have for how Iron Age people used, understood, and interacted with these massive structures with which they obviously invested so much time and effort in building and maintaining. Reviewing this evidence, which is partly what I intend doing in this chapter, requires a parallel discussion of how that evidence has been brought to life through its changing interpretations over the years. European hillforts are the subject of a recent account by Ian Ralston (2006) in which he focuses on them as ‘fortifications’. The reason for this, he claims, is that although there are probably between 20,000 and 30,000 hillforts in Europe, ‘only a tiny number of sites have been the subject of extensive excavation—and this fundamentally conditions what can be said about them’ (ibid.: 20). Given that it is ‘extensive excavation’ which is likely to cover hillfort interiors, as opposed to the numerous small-scale diggings into ramparts, Ralston’s evidence-based account is understandably biased towards ramparts and, hence, ‘fortifications’. This immediately positions Barry Cunliffe’s work at Danebury as important not just within a Wessex and British context but also on the European stage. It is not just the proportion of the interior excavated and the wealth of material found but also, of course, Barry Cunliffe’s interpretation of the evidence that has enabled not only him, but Iron Age studies generally to move beyond the constraints of hillforts as defensive places.