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Ideas that archaeology gave up along the way…
The history of science, it has been said, is the history of its abandoned ideas. This is as true of archaeology as it is for the ‘hard’ sciences. The progress of archaeology and its gradual adoption of a specifically material culture based means of examining and understanding the past is one of constantly changing methods of explanation, of finding new links and discarding old ones and of finding new ways of looking at old data.
It is always instructive to read old excavation reports to see how some very basic ideas proved to be completely wrong. The pits commonly found on British Iron Age sites, for instance, were once interpreted as underground dwellings, as excavations appeared to reveal hearths within them; they were accepted as dwellings as no other features were recognised on many of these sites in which the occupants might have lived. Following a number of important excavations in the 1930s and 1940s – especially Gerhard Bersu’s (1889-1964) work in 1938-9 at Little Woodbury – it became clear that Iron Age dwellings were mostly circular, timber-framed buildings that had simply not been recognised by earlier excavators; the ubiquitous pits were used for storage and rubbish disposal. The ‘pit dwelling’ was thus relegated to the realm of discarded hypotheses, although it is salutary to recall that I was still being taught about them in all seriousness as a schoolboy in 1970, showing how persistent outmoded ideas can be and how they can continue to form part of a general education.