- Chapter Twenty-One -
resources (note also Cherbury camp, with its marshland defences down in the plain
(Bradford 1940; Arkell 1939».
Horse and vehicle gear similar to that being made by the mobile workers at
Gussage (note the distribution of the types to the north-west as far as Yorkshire) can
be found in context in hill-forts. At Hod Hill in Dorset, terrets were found as though
once hanging at the entrances to oblong huts (Richmond 1968: 20, fig. 13; Piggott
1986: 27); but these houses were not necessarily those of the charioteers - they
may have been those of men of more like ostler ranking. Richmond argued that huts
36A-37 were a chief's group as they had attracted concentrated ballista-fire
(Richmond 1968: 21f., fig. 14, and pers. comm.). It seems clear that extensive
excavation of hill-fort interiors (d. Danebury; Cunliffe 1986) is needed to clarify
Celtic social organization of the sixth century Be to first century AD.
In Somerset, the Glastonbury and Meare lakeside clustered settlements of the
third-first centuries Be seem again to have been specialized production communities,
Glastonbury for agricultural products, Meare more for industrial ones (especially
vitreous materials); but each has its individual ceramic tradition, and both are most
valuable for their well-preserved organic materials (Earwood 1993; Harding 1974:
35-6; Henderson 1989). There must be more such sites, but, as usual for Britain,
we have no hint of cemeteries used by these communities of, say, a dozen or more
families at anyone time. It is difficult to interpret artwork at Meare, where items may
be slightly faulty in making, or for reuse, rather than in current use by inhabitants.
Glastonbury may be better as evidence, with daggers, many brooches, horse and
vehicle gear comparable with Gussage and that of the Yorkshire chieftains (see pp.
383,395); both these lakeside sites are of great value for their well-preserved organic
materials, which are now providing valuable, fairly precise dating evidence for pieces
of artwork (e.g. wooden statuettes (d. Megaw 1971: pI. 12) and bowls Gope and
J acobsthal in press: pI. 313).
In Gaul, Duval (1986) feels able to speak of 'peaceful village chieftains' already
by the fifth century Be, and the flamboyant society was beginning to become
plebeianized, based more on a people's economy, all gradually working towards the
oppida. Among smaller grouped settlements some may have had the necessary
corporate organization to merit the term 'village', though this is difficult to show
from purely archaeological evidence. It is most clearly to be seen in immediately
pre-Roman Britain, and in Gaul a century earlier (Rivet 1958; Hallam 1964), the
position perhaps rather obscured by the 'villa-estate' system of the Roman world. In
the Celtic world the nobility were presumably countrymen - Rome tried to make
them townsmen, with limited success; only in the fourth century in Britain do we see
the real luxurious villas, the homes of the curiales and repositories of fine art, such
as the group centred on Cirencester, a provincial capital with rich town houses (Rivet
1958; Toynbee 1964: 86-7,145 ff.). Under Roman administration we can see the char-
acter of Celtic Britain changing.
In mid-Yorkshire we have one region where cemeteries and coeval settlements of
the fourth-second centuries Be lie closely together (Dent 1982, 1985; Stead 1991a).
At and around Wetwang and adjacent Kirkburn are cemeteries, large and small, of
uniformly middle-ranking people with their monotonously uniform iron involute
brooches (Dent 1990), but with a few much more special entombments of the