ABSTRACT
My interest in ritual and domestic life goes back to an experience that happened in 1977. Together with John Barrett, I was excavating a Middle Bronze Age enclosure and cemetery at South Lodge Camp in Southern England (Barrett et al. 1991: 144-83). The site was located on a private estate and when our project began we were surprised to discover that our team was not the only one working there, for this was the ‘secret’ location where a television series about life in the Iron Age was being filmed (Percival 1980). It was a programme that traced the fortunes of a group of people living in a reconstructed prehistoric village. It was represented as a sociological exercise, but it was also an attempt to see how far archaeological interpretations of later prehistory could be put into practice.
