Assessing Iron Age Marsh-Forts

This volume assesses marsh-forts as a separate phenomenon within Iron Age society through an understanding of their landscape context and palaeoenvironmental development. These substantial monuments appear to have been deliberately constructed to control areas of marginal wetland and may have played an important role in the ritual landscape.

Iron Age marsh-forts are large, monumental structures located in low-lying waterscapes. Although they share chronological and architectural similarities with their hillfort counterparts, their locations suggest that they may have played a specific and alternative role in Iron Age society. Despite the availability of a rich palaeoenvironmental archive at many sites, little is known about these enigmatic structures, and until recently, the only acknowledged candidate was the unusual, dual-enclosure monument at Sutton Common, near Doncaster. Assessing Iron Age Marsh-Forts considers marsh-forts as a separate phenomenon within Iron Age society through an understanding of their landscape context and palaeoenvironmental development. At the national level, a range of Iron Age wetland monuments has been compared to Sutton Common to generate a gazetteer of potential marsh-forts. At the local level, a multi-disciplinary case-study is presented of the Berth marsh-fort in North Shropshire, incorporating GIS-based landscape modelling and multi-proxy palaeoenvironmental analysis (plant macrofossils, beetles and pollen). The results of both the gazetteer and the Berth case-study challenge the view that marsh-forts are simply a topographical phenomenon. These substantial Iron Age monuments appear to have been deliberately constructed to control areas of marginal wetland and may have played an important role in the ritual landscape.

Summary ;

Chapter 1: Assessing Iron Age marsh-forts - an introduction ;

Chapter 2: The British Iron Age, hillforts and marsh-forts - Literature Review ;

Chapter 3: Methodology and Resources ;

Chapter 4: Marsh-forts in a landscape context ;

Chapter 5: North Shropshire’s marsh-forts ;

Chapter 6: The Berth – a marsh-fort in its landscape context ;

Chapter 7: The Berth – stratigraphic sequencing and radiocarbon dating ;

Chapter 8: The Berth – Palaeoenvironmental Reconstruction ;

Chapter 9: Assessing Iron Age marsh-forts – Discussion and Conclusions ;

Bibliography ;

Appendix 1 – Radiocarbon dates ;

Appendix 2 – Samples weights and volumes ;

Appendix 3 – Full species lists

• By (author) Shelagh Norton

"'Norton has delivered a solid study on an elusive subject and succeeds in putting forward a convincing framework for studying marsh-forts in the future as a more common site type and, in some cases, important centres in hillfort-dominated landscapes. Their position in their waterscapes is both deliberate and meaningful. Adopting these proposals for marsh-forts will certainly have an impact on the perception of, and stimulate fresh input into, future research in the British Iron Age.' - Marion Uckelmann (2023): Antiquity Vol. 97 (395)'Overall, this work provides a welcome investigation of a poorly understood site type within prehistoric archaeology. The application of landscape archaeology and palaeoenvironmental reconstruction techniques provides a wholistic approach to the understanding of the landscape setting of the Berth and is a welcome example of best practice into the investigation of wetland landscapes.' - Tudur Davies (2022): Archaeologia Cambrensis Vol. 171 'Well written, -illustrated, and -referenced, this is a helpful addition to the literature on this part of the later prehistoric settlement record.' - Ian Ralston (2022): —

‘Well written, -illustrated, and -referenced, this is a helpful addition to the literature on this part of the later prehistoric settlement record.’ – Ian Ralston (2022): Current Archaeology, Issue 390

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‘Overall, this work provides a welcome investigation of a poorly understood site type within prehistoric archaeology. The application of landscape archaeology and palaeoenvironmental reconstruction techniques provides a wholistic approach to the understanding of the landscape setting of the Berth and is a welcome example of best practice into the investigation of wetland landscapes.’ – Tudur Davies (2022): Archaeologia Cambrensis Vol. 171

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‘Norton has delivered a solid study on an elusive subject and succeeds in putting forward a convincing framework for studying marsh-forts in the future as a more common site type and, in some cases, important centres in hillfort-dominated landscapes. Their position in their waterscapes is both deliberate and meaningful. Adopting these proposals for marsh-forts will certainly have an impact on the perception of, and stimulate fresh input into, future research in the British Iron Age.’ – Marion Uckelmann (2023): Antiquity Vol. 97 (395)

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