Burrough Hill

Burrough Hill is an Iron Age hillfort in Leicestershire, England, where the University of Leicester is conducting excavations. The main period of occupation was from about 100 BCE to 100 CE, although a few Neolithic, Bronze Age and late Roman artifacts have also been found. For a hillfort to produce so much evidence of Roman period occupation is unusual; presumably the Romans frowned on native chiefs living in fortified settlements.

I was struck by the number of large storage pits on the site, which make it look like a village of Late Woodland Indians (900 to 1600 CE). This makes me curious about why Iron Age Britons used storage pits. This is not the best way to store food; above-ground granaries have many advantages. Pits were used by people who wanted to leave stored food behind while they traveled elsewhere, so you find a lot of them among semi-sedentary people who only occupied their main villages for part of the year. You could also use pits to hide things. Thus, within the Powhatan Confederacy of Virginia, Chief Powhatan's own village had no storage pits, since he wanted to show off his wealth; however, the villages of some of his subjects had lots of pits, presumably because they wanted to hide part of their harvest from Powhatan's tribute collectors. I wonder which applied in Iron Age Britain.

Magnetometer map of the site. Most of the black dots are large pits. Click on this and enlarge it and you can also see traces of round houses within the fort -- for example within Trench 6 -- and other buildings outside the entrance.

Digging the foundation trench of a round house.

This large pit, by the entrance, had a skeleton in the bottom, and a lot of interesting artifacts: