23rd June 2012, 08:22 PM
The comments about 'undated' pits were fairly serious - on big sites with lots of Neo pits (the recent Nosterfield publication springs to mind) the undated ones tend to be not really talked about but assumed to be broadly 'contemporary' (allowing for the 2000ish year spread), and at Marton-le-Moor (will get published eventually-honest!) there was nothing of any other period on the whole site so it was a pretty fair bet they were all Neo/Beaker. Even on finds-rich pit sites in Northern England only around 40% of pits actually have finds. However, there are other sites where there are vast numbers of unexplained features on the site plan - the WYAS monograph for Ferrybridge only mentions about half a dozen Neo pits on the whole job, without explaining what all the other ones were.... On small sites there are often isolated 'undated' small pits with no obvious associations or finds - how many of you can honestly hold your hands up to ever spending C14 budget on them? To judge by the little experiment I've just been doing an awful lot of those random small holes in the landscape are early prehistoric and pretty much everywhere. Perhaps we're asking the wrong questions - the model of there being lots with pot in around sites like henges may hold true, but that is partly because they are around henges (and hence more likely to be found) and full of pot (and hence more likely to be dated). What happens across the countryside in between? If there are lots of pits with no finds in them, why is that? The real research problem is identifying them in the archaeological record - HERs aren't searchable by 'undated pit' since they don't tend to get mentioned in site reports and certainly not in HER entries.....
As a slight side issue, why are there usually earlier pits under or close to barrows and the like? They usually seem to comfortably pre-date the monument, so what's going on? Why switch from 2 thousand years of occasionally digging a small hole to suddenly building a damn great mound and never digging another pit? - broken shovel syndrome?
As a slight side issue, why are there usually earlier pits under or close to barrows and the like? They usually seem to comfortably pre-date the monument, so what's going on? Why switch from 2 thousand years of occasionally digging a small hole to suddenly building a damn great mound and never digging another pit? - broken shovel syndrome?