Seeing differently: Rereading Little Woodbury

Abstract

Briefly rehearsed here, with issues relating to Little Woodbury’s extraordinary wartime circumstances – particularly its societal orchestration and Gerhard Bersu’s ‘outsider’ status – previously addressed (Evans 1989) and also further outlined in this volume (by Harold Mytum), this contribution rather focuses upon its methodological technique and interpretation. Practicing a plan-based and distinctly component-type archaeology, with so few convincing prehistoric settlements then excavated within Britain, underpinned by Oelmann’s evolutionary Haus und Hof building ‘laws’ (1927), a wide range of ethnographic and historical sources were drawn upon. While fully acknowledging just what Bersu achieved there and how groundbreaking was the fieldwork, the paper raises questions of its evidential reasoning and involves critique: the absurdity of some of its great roundhouse reconstructions, the settlement-matrix factors that were ignored and the failure to appreciate the full complexity of the site’s sequence.