ABSTRACT
There is no immutable threshold for defining the transition from earlier to later Iron Age that would be equally applicable to all regions of Northern Britain. In the Atlantic North and West, an obvious horizon is the decline of monumental buildings, the dismantling of broch towers and the construction within or around them of secondary buildings of lesser proportions. This may have taken place between the second and third centuries AD, in a process that need not have been synchronous across Atlantic Scotland. The position of wheelhouses in the sequence is pivotal. Though Armit (1996) described their internal architecture as preserving the tradition of monumentality, wheelhouses are the very antithesis of the external display of monumentality represented by brochs. Because their occupation still appears generally to have been successive to brochs, they will be here considered as a trailer to the later Iron Age in Atlantic Scotland.
