ABSTRACT
The first step in resolving this problem must be to examine those settlements for which a late Bronze Age date could still be argued. With the elimination of sites like the Vinces Farm urnfield at Ardleigh (Longworth, i960) and the settlement at Mildenhall Fen (Clark, 1936), which can no longer be regarded as any later than middle Bronze Age, we are left with only a limited number of sites whose late Bronze Age occupation is attested either by radio-carbon dating or by the evidence of associated bronzes. At present, radio-carbon dates for this period are relatively few. The cemetery at Bromfield in Shropshire, outside the primary Deverel-Rimbury zone but otherwise evidently in an allied cultural tradition, has produced dates of 762 ± 75 and 850 ± 7 1 , suggesting that in some regions, at any rate, middle Bronze Age modes lingered on well into the first millennium. Following this lead, it may well transpire that other sites in the Deverel-Rimbury tradition might have to be reinstated to a lower terminal dating in due course. In Yorkshire, the timbers used in the construction of the Barmston dwellings in Holderness (Varley, 1968) produced radio carbon dates, centred upon 1010 b.c. and 950 b.c., for the establishment of the settlement, which may therefore have continued in occupation well into the late Bronze Age. Ironically, the pottery fragment found on the upper surface of the peat deposit on Site B at Barmston, from a variety of furrowed bowl, might otherwise have been taken to indicate an early Iron Age occupation contemporary with the classic Wessex settlements like All Cannings Cross. At Weston Wood, Albury, Surrey (J. M. Harding, 1964), a single date in the sixth century B.C. was obtained for a settlement, the late Bronze Age character of which is attested by a fragment of a bun-shaped copper ingot, comparable to the type found in late Bronze Age founders’ hoards. The pottery from Weston Wood may be compared in general terms to material from late Bronze Age sites in the south-east of England. Of these sites, one of the most outstanding is Plumpton Plain B, which yielded a number of distinctive pottery vessels and fragments, together with a fragmentary late Bronze Age winged axe (Hollyman and Curwen, 1935, Fig. 16). For the Plumpton Plain bowls, which are not especially like any of the early Iron Age range of bowls, C. F. C. Hawkes quoted parallel contexts in the Bronze Age IV phase of the Fort Harrouard (1935, 55, and Figs 11, 12), though he insisted at the same time upon their local manufacture. Also in Sussex is the settlement at Itford Hill (Burstow and Holleyman, 1957), where excavation revealed the posthole footings of more than a dozen small, and rather flimsy, circular huts, together with lengths of stockade trenching. Lacking conclusive metal finds, Itford Hill nonetheless
produced pottery of a sufficiently crude and indeterminate kind to assign it tentatively to the later Bronze Age.
