Note 534 — Chapter IV

I am glad to find that I have the support of Mr. C. H. Read (Guide to the Ant. of the Bronze Age, p. 78) and Mr. Reginald Smith (Guide to the Ant. of the Early Iron Age, 1905, p. 122), who unhesitatingly refer the Dorsetshire hill-forts in general to ‘the Bronze, and possibly, in some cases, the Neolithic period’. Mr. H. St. G. Gray strains Pitt-Rivers’s doctrine when he argues (Index to Excavations in Cranborne Chase, 1905, p. xix; Proc. Somerset. Archaeol. and Nat. Hist. Soc., 3rd ser., ix, 1903 1905, p. 28) that, without excavation, it is idle to express any opinion as to the age of a camp. He says that ‘Caesar’s Camp’ at Folkestone ‘was always considered to be pre-Roman before Lane-Fox excavated it and proved it to be of Norman construction’ This remark is incorrect (see Excavations in Cranborne Chase, iii, p. xi), and, even if it were true, would only prove that less was known about the principles of construction of prehistoric British camps in former days than now. I cannot conceive how anybody could on a priori grounds suppose ‘Caesar’s Camp’ to be pre-Roman, even if he had only seen the plan on the 25-inch O. S. map. Of course I freely admit that, without excavation, it would be generally (though not always) idle to express any opinion as to the particular prehistoric epoch to which a fort belonged.

Dr. Joseph Anderson (Scotland in Pagan Times,—the Bronze and Stone Ages, p. 139, with which cf. D. Christison, Early Fortifications in Scotland, 1898, pp. 350-3, 380-1) observes that no one Scottish fort ‘can be assigned with certainty to the Bronze Age’; but it is nevertheless morally certain that many did then exist.

Mr. R. Burnard (Vict. Hist. of ... Devon, i, 366) remarks that it is unsafe to infer from the fact that Cranbrook Castle, in the valley of the Teign, contained pottery of Bronze Age type, that it belonged to that period; for such pottery was also used in the Early Iron Age. Certainly it was; and so also were bronze implements (see pp. 266-7, infra); but, as a rule, the discovery of Bronze Age pottery, or bronze implements, unaccompanied by objects of the Early Iron Age, is enough to raise a presumption, which in most instances would be correct, that the site was occupied in the Bronze Age.