The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

• 64 • Alasdair Whittle
Figure 4.1 Reconstruction of one of the phases of occupation at Loch Olabhat, North Uist (Alan Braby).
Some archaeologists consider that more houses will be detected as more fieldwork is undertaken,
and that more would have been found were it not for the destructive effects of subsequent landuse.
Until now, however, post-built structures have remained rare as research has increased. The
staple fare of the settlement record are artefact scatters, often existing only in the top- or ploughsoils,
and pits, pestholes, stakeholes and other features dug into the subsoil. Hurst Fen (Suffolk)
is a larger example of a group of pits, while Peacock’s Farm, set beside a small river, has lithic
scatters on a sand ridge, with small spills of rubbish down its side (Smith et al. 1989). These
presumably represent camps or bases, of varying duration in any one episode, though in these
cases certainly for repeat visits. Shelter is likely to have consisted of skin tents or other light
structures that have left little or no subsoil trace.
This is the kind of context to which the Coneybury pit, described above, belongs. The Neolithic
inhabitants of Britain moved repeatedly through woodland, making clearings and abandoning
them, following cattle herds in particular, and tending—but not always on permanent watch
over—stands of cereals. Settlement was based on mobility, or at most on very short-term sedentism.
The frame that contained these movements was provided by the created landscape. Monuments
were important parts of that frame, and no doubt names of places and paths were others. The
wooden trackways of the Somerset Levels indicate how mobility may have been structured. The
Sweet Track, for example, was built just before 3800 BC (Coles and Coles 1986). It runs for at
least 2 km across wet fen, to take people and perhaps animals out to a small island of dry land.
The carefully built single-plank walkway would have needed much timber, but could have been
constructed quite quickly by a small group of people. Its significance seems to have been marked,
even consecrated, by the deliberate deposition of a rare jadeite axehead beside it. The Sweet