When tidal erosion on Cnip beach uncovered a well-preserved wheelhouse complex, it presented a rare opportunity to shed new light on this architectural phenomenon. This title sets out the results of the excavations, placing them in the wider context of the British and European Iron Age.

A fully illustrated study of Iron Age round-houses, which explores not just their architectural aspects but more importantly their role in the social, economic and ritual structure of their communities, and their significance as symbols of Iron Age society in the face of Romanization.

This book examines the widespread evidence for the removal, curation and display of the human head in Iron Age Europe.

The Iron Age in Northern Britain examines the archaeological evidence for earlier Iron Age communities from the southern Pennines to the Northern and Western Isles and the impact of Roman expansion on local populations, through to the emergence of historically-recorded communities in the post-Roman period. The text has been comprehensively revised and expanded to include new discoveries and to take account of advanced techniques, with many new and updated illustrations. The volume presents a comprehensive picture of the ‘long Iron Age’, allowing readers to appreciate how perceptions of Iron Age societies have changed significantly in recent years. New material in this second edition also addresses the key issues of social reconstruction, gender, and identity, as well as assessing the impact of developer-funded archaeology on the discipline. Drawing on recent excavation and research and interpreting evidence from key studies across Scotland and northern England, The Iron Age in Northern Britain continues to be an accessible and authoritative study of later prehistory in the region.

The Oxford Handbook of the European Iron Age presents a broad overview of current understanding of the archaeology of Europe from 1000 BC through to the early historic periods, exploiting the large quantities of new evidence yielded by the upsurge in archaeological research and excavation on this period over the last thirty years. Three introductory chapters situate the reader in the times and the environments of Iron Age Europe. Fourteen regional chapters provide accessible syntheses of developments in different parts of the continent, from Ireland and Spain in the west to the borders with Asia in the east, from Scandinavia in the north to the Mediterranean shores in the south. Twenty-six thematic chapters examine different aspects of Iron Age archaeology in greater depth, from lifeways, economy, and complexity to identity, ritual, and expression. Among the many topics explored are agricultural systems, settlements, landscape monuments, iron smelting and forging, production of textiles, politics, demography, gender, migration, funerary practices, social and religious rituals, coinage and literacy, and art and design.

Excavated plans of roundhouses may compound multiple episodes of activity, design, construction, occupation, repair, and closure, reflecting successive stages of a building's biography. What does not survive archaeologically, through use of materials or methods that leave no tangible trace, may be as important for reconstruction as what does survive, and can only be inferred from context or comparative evidence. The great diversity in structural components suggests a greater diversity of superstructure than was implied by the classic Wessex roundhouses, including split-level roofs and penannular ridge roofs. Among the stone-built houses of the Atlantic north and west there likewise appears to have been a range of regional and chronological variants in the radial roundhouse series, and probably within the monumental Atlantic roundhouses too. Important though recognition of structural variants may be, morphological classification should not be allowed to override the social use of space for which the buildings were designed, whether their structural footprint was round or rectangular. Atlantic roundhouses reveal an important division between central space and peripheral space, and a similar division may be inferred for lowland timber roundhouses, where the surviving evidence is more ephemeral. Some larger houses were evidently byre-houses or barn houses, some with upper or mezzanine floor levels, in which livestock might be brought in or agricultural produce stored. Such 'great houses' doubtless served community needs beyond those of the resident extended family. The massively-increased scale of development-led excavations of recent years has resulted in an increased database that enables evaluation of individual sites in a wider landscape environment than was previously possible. Circumstances of recovery and recording in commercially-driven excavations, however, are not always compatible with research objectives, and the undoubted improvements in standards of environmental investigation are sometimes offset by shortcomings in the publication of basic structural or stratigraphic detail.

Alternative Iron Ages examines Iron Age social formations that sit outside traditional paradigms, developing methods for archaeological characterisation of alternative models of society. In so doing it contributes to the debates concerning the construction and resistance of inequality taking place in archaeology, anthropology and sociology. In recent years, Iron Age research on Western Europe has moved towards new forms of understanding social structures. Yet these alternative social organisations continue to be considered as basic human social formations, which frequently imply marginality and primitivism. In this context, the grand narrative of the European Iron Age continues to be defined by cultural foci, which hide the great regional variety in an artificially homogenous area. This book challenges the traditional classical evolutionist narratives by exploring concepts such as non-triangular societies, heterarchy and segmentarity across regional case studies to test and propose alternative social models for Iron Age social formations. Constructing new social theory both archaeologically based and supported by sociological and anthropological theory, the book is perfect for those looking to examine and understand life in the European Iron Age. We are so grateful to the research project titled "Paisajes rurales antiguos del Noroeste peninsular: formas de dominacion romana y explotacion de recursos" [Ancient rural landscapes in Northwestern Iberia: Roman dominion and resource exploitation] (HAR2015-64632-P; MINECO/FEDER), directed from the Instituto de Historia (CSIC) and also to the Fundaçao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia [Foundation for Science and Technology] postdoctoral project: SFRH-BPD-102407-2014.

The SEARCH (Sheffield Environmental and Archaeological Research Campaign in the Hebrides) project began in 1987 and covers the ScotlandÍs Outer Hebrides. The aim of the project is to investigate how human societies adapted in the long-term to the isolated environment of the Outer Hebrides. The first major excavation on South Uist discovered that what was thought to be a shell midden at Cill Donnain was in fact a wheelhouse, a type of dwelling used in the period c.300 BC _ AD 500; under which lay the remains of a Bronze Age settlement. This settlement was partly investigated by Marik Zvelebil in 1991 and then later by Mike Parker Pearson and Kate MacDonald in 2003. The site itself is situated at the foot of a high steep-sided dune on the eastern edge of a large sand valley, close to the western shore of Loch Cill Donnain. The archaeological report of the excavation at the Cill Donnain wheelhouse shows that, in comparison with contemporary neighbouring settlements, it was unlikely that each was an independent unit and that they were linked by social and economic inter-dependency. The wheelhouse thus provides striking new evidence that contributes to developing theories about the social, material and economic life in the period. This volume presents the extensive archaeological evidence found at the site, including pottery, faunal remains and a variety of bone and metal tools, illustrating that the Cill Donnain landscape is rich in archaeological sites of all periods from the Beaker to the post-Medieval.

Archaeologists have long acknowledged the absence of a regular and recurrent burial rite in the British Iron Age, and have looked to rites such as cremation and scattering of remains to explain the minimal impact of funerary practices on the archaeological record. Pit-burials or the deposit of disarticulated bones in settlements have been dismissed as casual disposal or the remains of social outcasts. In Death and Burial in Iron Age Britain, Harding examines the deposition of human and animal remains from the period - from whole skeletons to disarticulated fragments - and challenges the assumption that there should have been any regular form of cemetery in prehistory, arguing that the dead were more commonly integrated into settlements of the living than segregated into dedicated cemeteries. Even where cemeteries are known, they may yet represent no more than a minority of the total population, so that other forms of disposal must still have been practised. A further example of this can be found in hillforts which, in addition to domestic and agricultural settlements, evidently played an important role in funerary ritual, as secure community centres where excarnation and display of the dead may have made them a potent symbol of identity. The volume evaluates the evidence for violent death, sacrifice, and cannibalism, as well as age and gender distinctions, and associations with animal burials, and reveals that 'formal' cemetery burial or cremation was for most regions a minority practice in Britain until the eve of the Roman conquest.