Boom town Britain: The case for an urban-like settlement horizon at the north-western edge... скачать в хорошем качестве

Boom town Britain: The case for an urban-like settlement horizon at the north-western edge...

James O’Driscoll & Gordon Noble (University of Aberdeen) The study of early urbanism has been slow to develop in more peripheral regions such as Ireland or northern/western Britain, where large-scale population centres are not thought to have existed until the late first millennium AD. The large hillforts of these regions are thought to represent Late Bronze Age monuments and their dense internal settlements a result of multiperiod occupation. However, our on-going remote sensing surveys and excavations at the massive, densely populated hillfort of Tap o’ Noth in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, has begun to dramatically challenge this assumption, marking the site as the largest known native settlement of Late Roman Iron Age/early medieval (c. AD 200–600 AD) period of these regions. This is a period traditionally seen as a ‘Dark Age’, where physical or textual evidence for domestic settlement is difficult to identify, making the discovery of a complex, urban-like community of exceptional importance. Excitingly, Tap o’ Noth is not an isolated example, with a number of other morphologically comparable hillforts hinting at a previously unidentified settlement horizon that could be key to our understanding of the development of the social entities and kingdoms of the early medieval period of northern/western Britain and Ireland. This paper will outline and discuss the potential rise and fall of this previously unknown urban-like settlement horizon and question if these sites fit into broader narratives of early urbanism in north-western Europe.