Published to coincide with the 18th Annual Conference of the Association Francais d'etude de l'age du fer, which took place in 1994 in Winchester, this book brings together 32 essays (in English) exploring some of the most recent work in Wessex archaeology.

The Iron Age in Northern Britain examines the impact of the Roman expansion northwards, and the native response to the Roman occupation on both sides of the frontiers. It traces the emergence of historically-recorded communities in the post-Roman period and looks at the clash of cultures between Celts and Romans, Picts and Scots. Northern Britain has too often been seen as peripheral to a 'core' located in south-eastern England. Unlike the Iron Age in southern Britain, the story of which can be conveniently terminated with the Roman conquest, the Iron Age in northern Britain has no such horizon to mark its end. The Roman presence in southern and eastern Scotland was militarily intermittent and left untouched large tracts of Atlantic Scotland for which there is a rich legacy of Iron Age settlement, continuing from the mid-first millennium BC to the period of Norse settlement in the late first millennium AD. Here D.W. Harding shows that northern Britain was not peripheral in the Iron Age: it simply belonged to an Atlantic European mainstream different from southern England and its immediate continental neighbours.

This fully revised fourth edition maintains the qualities of the earlier editions whilst taking into account the significant developments that have moulded the discipline in recent years.

The earthwork forts that crown many hills in Southern England are among the largest and most dramatic of the prehistoric features that still survive in our modern rural landscape. The Wessex Hillforts Survey collected wide-ranging data on hillfort interiors in a three-year partnership between the former Ancient Monuments Laboratory of English Heritage and Oxford University. These defended enclosures, occupied from the end of the Bronze Age to the last few centuries before the Roman conquest, have long attracted archaeological interest and their function remains central to study of the Iron Age. The communal effort and high degree of social organistation indicated by hillforts feeds debate about whether they were strongholds of Celtic chiefs, communal centres of population or temporary gathering places occupied seasonally or in times of unrest. Yet few have been extensively examined archaeologically. Using non-invasive methods, the survey enabled more elaborate distinctions to be made between different classes of hillforts than has hitherto been possible. The new data reveals not only the complexity of the archaeological record preserved inside hillforts, but also great variation in complexity among sites. Survey of the surrounding coutnryside revealed hillforts to be far from isolated features in the later prehistoric landscape. Many have other less visible, forms of enclosed settlement in close proximity. Others occupy significant meeting points of earlier linear ditch systems and some appear to overlie, or be located adjacent to, blocks of earlier prehistoric field systems.

Wessex -- the ancient counties of Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire, Hampshire and Berkshire -- is remarkable for its economic and social cohesion as a region, and for the extraordinary wealth of its ancient remains. In this authoritative survey, Barry Cunliffe sets the great monuments and famous sites in their full cultural context. His chief concern, however, is to interpret the landscape of the region, and the people who over so many centuries created it. In his hands it becomes an archaeological artefact as eloquent as Avebury and Stonehenge themselves.

In contrast to Continental Europe, where the Iron Age is abundantly represented by funerary remains as well as by hill-forts and major centres, the British Iron Age is mainly represented by its settlement sites, and especially by houses of circular ground-plan, apparently in marked contrast to the Central and Northern European tradition of rectangular houses. In lowland Britain the evidence for timber round-houses comprises the footprint of post-holes or foundation trenches; in the Atlantic north and west, the remains of monumental stone-built houses survive as upstanding ruins, testimony to the building skills of Iron Age engineers and masons. D. W. Harding's fully illustrated study explores not just the architectural aspects of round-houses, 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.

Wessex is famous for its coasts, heaths, woodlands, chalk downland, limestone hills and gorges, settlements and farmed vales. This book provides an account of the physical form, development and operation of its landscape as it was shaped by our ancestors. Major themes include the development of agriculture, settlements, industry and transport.

Excavations of a large part of an extensive Iron Age settlement carried out between 1997 - 1998 at Covert Farm located near Crick in northwestern Northamptonshire.

Seeks to establish what we now know (and do not know) about Earlier Iron Age communities in Britain and their neighbours on the Continent. The authors look at how communities of the Late Bronze Age transform into those of the Earlier Iron Age, and how we understand the social changes of the later first millennium BC.

Excavations of a large Iron Age farming settlement in Northamptonshite spread across five sites, four studied here (The Lodge, Long Dole, Crick Hotel and Nortoft Lane, Kilsby) with Covert Farm, Crick studied in Volume I (9781784912086).