Abstract
EACH succeeding season of Dr. R. E. Mortimer Wheeler's excavation of Maiden Castle adds to the impressive character of the picture of this corner of Britain in prehistoric tunes which he is reconstructing from the evidence revealed by the spade. The masterly survey of the history of the site from neolithic times, dated approximately at 4,000 B.C., down to the close of Roman domination in the late fourth century of our era, which he gave in his report on the excavations of 1935 to the Society of Antiquaries on February 27, concurs with the evidence of recent excavation elsewhere in showing that life in early Britain, at least in later prehistoric times, was an affair of much more highly organised and settled conditions than has been conceived, even when the story of ‘painted’ savages is sufficiently discounted. It may be that Dr. Wheeler is right when he sees in the improved and strengthened fortifications, with their elaborated stone-walling reinforcements, which appear at the beginning of the first century B.C., evidence of the driving force of the individual megalomaniac; but the existence even before this of a town of some five to six thousand inhabitants argues no mean standard of culture and considerable ability in ordering and administering the daily details of communal life. In describing the objects which accompanied the remarkable extension of urban fortification and show traces of what is here at Maiden Castle a new culture, Iron Age “B”, Dr. Wheeler suggests that the use of masonry may have come from the west; but it is significant that he does not find that the new culture arrived in any bulk. The population of Maiden Castle appears to him to remain unchanged, but dominated by an administration of an ambitious kind. A further season is to be devoted to the exploration of the site, when one of the principal tasks will be the exploration of the Roman eastern gate and the elaborate prehistoric structures which lie beneath.
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Maiden Castle, Dorchester. Nature 137, 392 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137392a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137392a0