Professor Tom Moore

So there's a huge diversity.

Perhaps most people will think Iron Age hill forts.

And we kind of think hill forts are the typical Iron Age settlement.

But even then, hill forts are incredibly varied.

Well, the roundhouse is the kind of standard structure that people live in throughout the Iron Age, although they themselves are also incredibly diverse from quite monumental structures that we see in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, really big timber-built roundhouses to smaller structures such as stonewalled roundhouses in Northern England in the later period.

But yes, the roundhouse is the kind of standard structure.

I mean, that is in itself interesting as why there's that kind of

tendency to build round houses, which tells us something about how those households worked, for instance, perhaps even about the way they understood their space in a kind of more symbolic way.

So, I mean, it was the main habitation for probably a household.

It was communal living.

There's very little evidence that they were divided into sort of different rooms or any spaces like that.

So, and it's where most of the activities would have taken place within perhaps the doorways through the lights, you know, so that's...

where everything is going on one of the interesting things that's always been fascinating if somewhat controversial is this sort of orientation of the doors of houses because they faced east or southeast a lot of the time so there's big discussion about whether that's to avoid wind direction coming from the southwest so it keeps you your house less windy and cold but also the light is coming from the east but also there's a kind of that tendency towards the southeast might be having something to do with symbolic orientation between towards the sunrise for instance

Yes, again, you know, it's a little bit difficult to generalize, but certainly for, I mean, there is actually quite a change over much of particularly southern Britain from the early Iron Age.

That's a period from about 800 BC through to about 400 BC where we have more unenclosed settlements.

just a scatter of roundhouses, so perhaps just a few households.

So you're talking very small populations.

And then as we move into the period after about 400 BC, people live in what we would call small enclosed farmsteads.

So they're digging ditches around their settlements.

And again, those are perhaps just one or two roundhouses, so small households.