Hierarchies or heterarchies of settlement and social organisation in landscapes
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2016-05-11

The evidence from National Mapping Programme and other aerial photography rectification, geophysical survey and extensive commercial developer-funded archaeological investigations indicates that during the later Iron Age and Romano-British periods, there was often marked diversity in settlement size and form, not just between different areas, but at an intraregional
level too. Settlements ranged from small individual enclosures, some of ‘D-shaped’ or ‘banjo’ form; through to larger ‘ladder’, ‘clothes line’, ‘agglomerated’ or ‘nucleated’ enclosure groups, villas, and small towns. Though some diachronic trends are apparent, it is nonetheless clear that this diversity did not simply reflect chronological differences.
What does this evidence therefore represent? Is such variety a product of hierarchical social structures, from small family groups in individual farmsteads through to wealthier individuals and communities in larger settlements; or were these relatively heterarchical rather than hierarchical societies, with a much ‘flatter’ social structure? Are such binary distinctions too
simplistic, and what can the evidence for agricultural and craft production tell us? Can social differentiation be simply ‘read off’ from material remains, and is ethnohistoric evidence from
medieval and contemporary ‘peasant’ or small-scale societies of any relevance? Were factors such as seasonality, locale, gender and other social differentiations also important, and the impact of the Roman conquest? This paper critically interrogates the evidence for hierarchies and heterarchies for the later Iron Age and Roman periods in northern England.

Adrian M. CHADWICK (University of Leicester)