ABSTRACT
Mount Pleasant, on the outskirts of modern Dorchester in the county of Dorset, was one of a number of extremely large embanked enclosures or ‘henges’ built at the end of the Neolithic period in Wessex (c. 2000 bc/ 2500 BC). It was partially excavated by Geoffrey Wainwright between 1970 and 1971, as part of a campaign of investigation which also included work at the henge monuments of Durrington Walls and Marden, both located in Wiltshire (Wainwright 1971, 1979; Wainwright and Longworth 1971). While the scale of the excavations undertaken at Mount Pleasant was somewhat more modest than that at Durrington, the results were remarkable for a number of reasons. First, although the bank and ditch of the henge were still vaguely discernible on the surface, excavation demonstrated the additional presence of a massive timber palisade, roughly concentric to and located within the earthworks. This palisade enclosure was subsequently dated to the years immediately after 1700 bc (c. 2000 BC), and its presence is related to the second unusual feature of the site, a rich pottery sequence running from the Neolithic into the Early Bronze Age. This in turn gave rise to some debate, since the ceramic assemblage appeared to demonstrate the contemporaneity of a number of different styles of Beaker pottery, and indeed of other traditions of Bronze Age artefacts, whose relationship had often been considered in exclusively developmental terms. This prefigured more recent concern over the dating of Beaker ceramics (Kinnes et al. 1991), and requires that some other relationship than a simple chest-ofdrawers sequence be hypothesised to explain the coexistence of these styles. As Simpson (1968, 202) notes, it is easy to gain an impression of orderly succession in the funerary context: Beakers followed by Food Vessels, followed by Collared Urns and so on. The significance of the Mount Pleasant sequence is that it necessitates a reconsideration of a number of structures and patterns in the archaeological evidence which have hitherto been assumed to be chronological or developmental in character.
