Planned Hillfort Interiors

Abstract

For many years excavations within British prehistoric settlement sites were largely confined to selective sampling of a very limited nature since this approach, it was thought, offered the best chance of locating an intensively occupied area from which dating evidence and perhaps even the ground plan of a structure might be recovered. More recently, with the results of a small number of large-scale area excavations to draw upon, it has become possible not only to examine the plans of individual buildings in isolation but to identify standard structural designs used repeatedly on the same sites and, further, to learn something of the overall disposition of structures within the settlement plan. This increasing body of evidence is beginning to reveal, as analogy with historic and existent settlements might anticipate, a basic dichotomy between those which grew and those which were created. To establish a terminology, we should first recognize the essential distinction between asettlement planand aplanned settlement. All settlements have a plan, but not all were consciously planned. Many will have resulted from gradual growth over a period of time, developing from a nucleus to which additions and replacements were made as required (i.e. in the parlance of urban geographers,organic settlements). Accordingly, their plans should not normally be expected to display any great degree of orderliness and will be particularly unlikely to incorporate a systematic pattern of streets.