- Chapter Five -
increasing signs that monocausal explanation will be insufficient in the case of the
defences that have been described as calcined. At least three causes can be advanced,
one being essentially the same process as that just described. In other examples, the
calcined cores of fortifications may simply be a product of the materials employed,
and natural changes to them, as Nicolardot (1974) has proposed for examples near
Dijon, Burgundy, France. The argument that, in some instances, the solidification of
the wall-core materials represented by calcination may have been deliberately
intended has been given renewed impetus by observations and analyses during
excavations at the Cite d' Affrique in Lorraine, France, where the charcoal-free
calcined mass, consisting of limestone and clay locally heated to 1,200 degrees
Celsius, is underpinned by a heavily burnt network of timbers. It is argued to have
been formed intentionally as the foundation for a vertically faced wall which
surmounted it (Duval et al. 199 I).
Dump ramparts, contrastingly, necessitate much less by way of formal internal
structure, and constructional materials may have been varied, although not with
complete indifference to the engineering consequences of settling and slumping. The
range of skilled labour required to construct them would also have been much reduced.
Individually, some of the most massive and imposing of such earthworks
are to be found in France, where ramparts of the Fecamp series (see Biichsenschiitz,
Chapter 29), initially identified north-east of the Seine by Sir Mortimer Wheeler
(Wheeler and Richardson 1957), on occasion comfortably exceed 10 m in altitude.
There are a few comparable sites in southern Britain (Cunliffe 1991). Many of the most
substantial of such enclosures seem relatively close in date to the local appearance of
the Roman army, and may be argued to relate to missile, especially artillery-launched,
warfare; but the techniques of constructing glacis banks are demonstrably far older
in some areas (Cunliffe 1991).
At many sites, the present-day surface configuration of fortifications is, however,
an inadequate guide to the constructional methods originally employed. In numbers
of instances, this may simply be due to subsequent collapse and slumping. However,
present-day profiles may result from remodelling during the Iron Age which saw
dump ramparts erected over the delapidated remnants of antecedent walls, both in
Britain and in continental Europe (Ralston 1981; 1992 for instances in France).
In other areas, it can be argued that the desire for protection from sling-warfare
in particular was achieved by multiplying the number of individually less grandiose
fortification lines in close proximity; such multivallate works reach their apogee in
southern British sites like Maiden Castle (Dorset) (Figure 5-5). This argument, that
multivallation provides defence in depth, has never been wholly satisfactory, for
example because the outer ditches, shielded from defenders within the fort by the
intervening banks, effectively provide dead ground in military terms. In the case of
the Chesters fort in East Lothian, Scotland, a small multivallate fort is overlooked by
a higher ridge in close proximity (Megaw and Simpson 1979, fig. 7.76). In such
instances, the rationale behind the construction of these close-set barriers may well
lie outside the purely military domain.
Fortifications were frequently fronted by ditches, which penetrated either only
superficial deposits or were dug down into the living rock. These, and other less
formal quarry-scoops, often (although not universally) formed a principal source
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