ABSTRACT
The early Iron Age in Atlantic Scotland is dominated by field monuments, essentially brochs, duns and island duns, and forts. Wheelhouses too may have been part of the range of settlement types in use by the end of the first millennium BC but, since they evidently continued to be constructed and occupied well into the first millennium AD, consideration of them will be deferred until a later chapter. This emphasis upon field monuments, as opposed to material culture, has sometimes been criticised as prejudicing a proper understanding of the social and economic aspects of early Iron Age society. The fact is, however, that the field monuments are quite exceptional in their surviving number and monumentality of construction, which rightly require attention and explanation. The potential for establishing regional sequences in material culture from long occupational sequences, however, has not been fully realised, and other aspects of artefact studies, not simply typology and chronology, but their social or cognitive aspects, have only very recently been addressed.
