- Chapter Five -
(Harding 1979). Although the sequencing of the construction of southern British
hill-fort defences in terms of a perceived response to invasion from continental
Europe played an important role in the fieldwork programmes of major students of
such sites like Hawkes (1931) and Wheeler (1943; Wheeler and Richardson 1957),
this paradigm of invasion and response has generally fallen from favour.
Other factors, regional or more local in impact, can certainly be argued to have
been of significance, on continental Europe as in the British Isles. These include the
demonstration of prestige or status on the part of their builders, or more particularly
the decision-makers who controlled their activities, and perhaps the need to give
physical definition to the limits of jurisdictions, social, ritual, economic or political.
More prosaic functions would include the separation of domestic livestock from
living and other quarters (Cunliffe 1991).
The enclosure of sites, and by extension the idea of fortification, developed in
Europe from the Neolithic period (Mercer 1989). During that timespan, enclosing
works already displayed considerable variation in their apparent strengths: from
simple palisades or stockades to massively enclosed sites. Neolithic archaeologists
have interpreted the purposes of enclosed sites as fulfilling a range of functions, of
which defence is but one.
By the Iron Age, enclosed sites, equally of variable apparent strength, were
already a recurrent feature of many areas of the Continent, and were constructed by
groups who, in so far as archaeological evidence permits their definition, were Celtic
speakers, as well as others which were not. The writer's guesstimate is that in excess
of 20,000 such sites survive unevenly distributed across non-Mediterranean Europe
south of Scandinavia, excluding the 40,000 or so raths and related works in Ireland
(see Raftery, Chapter 33).
Accruing evidence suggests that, in some areas, the construction, maintenance,
upgrading and use of fortified sites was near-continuous; in others such activities
appear to have been much more episodic (Cunliffe 1991; Audouze and Biichsen-
schiitz 1992; Biel1987). Instances of settlement preceding the act of enclosure, as well
as the contrary sequence, are both demonstrable archaeologically although in many
cases the evidence is not clear-cut. In some regions, enclosed upland settlements are
complemented by unenclosed sites (the Hohensiedlungen of German terminology) in
similar topographic locations. Nor is there any straightforward correlation between
fortification types and what can be discerned about styles of warfare, lending
credence to current doubts that military requirements were always uppermost in the
constructors' perceptions. Here a fundamental note of caution needs to be inserted,
for almost all detailed evidence is based on rampart cuttings which represent the
slightest of incisions relative to the overall length of enceintes, and the presumption
that the remainder of the fortification was built in equivalent style is no more than
that.
In general, although some fortifications may have had lean-to structures backed
against their inner margins, they served to enclose free-standing buildings. In other
cases, the internal areas show few traces of occupation and in these the enclosed
areas are considered to have served a variety of purposes including a range of agri-
cultural uses (such as the corralling of livestock), settings for ritual or display, and as
temporary refuges.