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Identifying Structures
When investigating a site, the archaeologist's first priority will probably be to find and record its edges, its
internal lay-out, and identify structures such as walls, banks, ditches and hollows. Only then may these be
interpreted as defences, houses, roads, pits, kilns and many other types of structure.
Ancient structures are rarely preserved in a state where they are easily recognisable. Most structures in
Prehistoric, Roman and Medieval Britain were made of organic materials such as wood and have rotted away
completely, leaving only the holes in the ground where the upright timbers were positioned (post-holes), or where
horizontal timbers supported walls (beam slots). In some cases stone foundations still exist, but they may be
extremely fragmentary and damaged or altered by later activity such as stone robbing. It is more common to find a
fragment of a structure than a complete one; and these are often difficult to make sense of. Even standing
buildings such as castles and churches may have been altered, damaged or restored to the point where what we see
today is very different to what they looked like when they were built.
In order to achieve an archaeological interpretation, the remains of the structures must be carefully recorded.
This data is used to reconstruct a plan or three-dimensional drawing of what the structure was most likely to have
looked like when it was created or last altered. Post-holes are usually joined in a dot-to-dot style exercise to
produce a plan of a building - it is easiest when the post-holes form a recognisable plan, are all similar in size
and depth, and represent an obvious edge to the structure such as by surrounding a floor deposit. Very often this
is not the case and we are presented with a myriad of post-holes, stake-holes, small pits, ditches and fragmentary
walls - all affected by later disturbance. With careful structural and dating analysis, the archaeologist may be
able to make sense of this tangle of evidence - but usually the less clear-cut the evidence is, the more
conflicting the interpretations that are possible.
Return to Evidence.
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