Houses - Round and Rectangular

Dating back at least as far as the later Neolithic (c. 2500BC), as distinct from 'long' rectangular houses on the Continent, buildings in later British prehistory were largely round - a markedly different building tradition that has often drawn interpretative parallels with African-type compounded settlements. This need not however imply anything concerning their quality as 12-15.00m diameter roundhouses (as were not uncommon during the Iron Age) would have been very substantial and be of a scale normally associated with large 'halls'.

The roundhouses of the Bronze Age tended to be smaller and those associated with the fieldsystem's settlements are only 4.5-6m across.

Unlike in the Iron Age roundhouses were usually not surrounded by ditches to collect the run-off water from their roof eaves. These ditches often ended up catching quantities of household refuse. As a result, far fewer finds tend to be directly associated with buildings of the Bronze Age. They often occur in distinct pairs suggesting their complimentary interrelationship (storage and living; female and male divisions, etc.) and that only when combined did they form a household. Note that doorways of all these buildings faced southward which, together with evidence of burial rites, would suggest that this was the prime landscape orientation.

In the course of the 1996 campaign, a truly extraordinary building was found on the Barleycroft site - an aisled longhouse, 15m long and 5.75m wide. Dated by radiocarbon techniques to c. 1200BC, this is one of only a handful of unequivocal later Bronze Age/earlier Iron Age buildings of this type in Britain. It appears to have succeeded a pair of roundhouses. The fact that its aisle posts stood independent of the central ridge supports (i.e. not keyed together) would indicate that its builders were not familiar with sophisticated carpentry. It would, nevertheless, have been very impressive. Situated within its own ditched compound suggests that its resident family was of relatively high status. Some confirmation for this could be inferred from the fact that metalworking moulds, probably relating to either the production of bronze spears or swords, were recovered from an adjacent well.