Note 302 — Chapter III

Professor B. C. A. Windle (Remains of the Prehist. Age, p. 257) affirms that excavations in the stronghold of Eggardun in Dorsetshire have proved that ‘pit-dwellings were in use in the Pre-metallic period’; and he remarks (ib., p. 258) that there was ‘no trace of any metallic object in the pits examined by Stevens at Hurstbourne or in those at Standlake’ in Oxfordshire. It is shown on p. 97, infra, that there is no sufficient reason for referring Eggardun to the Neolithic Age: bronze was discovered at Standlake (Archaeologia, xxxvii, 1857, p. 368), which, according to Pitt-Rivers (Excavations in Cranborne Chase, i, 20-1), bore such an ‘exact resemblance to the [Romano-British] Woodcuts village’, that, in his judgement, ‘further excavations would have proved it to have been of the Roman or Late-Celtic period’: Romano-British pottery was found in the pits at Hurstbourne; and Dr. Stevens himself (Parochial Hist. of St. Mary Bourne, 1888, p. 34) only claimed that ‘the flint implements ... establish that the site, if not the dwellings, was occupied by the people of the Neolithic Age’. Professor Boyd Dawkins (Vict. Hist. of ... Hants, i, 262) rightly refers the dwellings to the Iron Age.

Bone weaving-combs, which were found in pit-dwellings at Highfield, near Fisherton in Wiltshire, evidently belonged, like the querns with which they were associated (J. Stevens, Parochial Hist. of St. Mary Bourne, p. 25), to the Early Iron Age (cf. Sir J. Evans, Ancient Stone Implements, 1897, p. 251, and Reliquary, N. S., vii, 1901, p. 115); and although Professor Boyd Dawkins (Early Man, &c., p. 268) pleads that the pottery, which was ‘ornamented with incised curves’, was ‘not turned in the lathe’, that does not prove that it was made in the Neolithic or even the Bronze Age (see p. 244, infra); while the ‘curves’ suggest that it was Late Celtic.