Iron Age Hill Forts To Be Put On The Map

Although there are said to be in excess of 5,000 of them scattered throughout Britain, archaeologists have always been a bit reticent to admit that not enough research has been carried out on the country’s hill forts.

Hopefully that is about to change with news that the industry is hoping to draft an army of volunteers  to help map every ancient hill fort across Britain and Ireland. At the end of the project, it is hoped  to create an online atlas of these iron age remains.

Enthusiasts with a working knowledge of the period will be asked to identify and record features such as ramparts, ditches and entrances.  Professor Gary Lock, of Oxford University, said: "We want to shed new light on why they were created and how they were used."

Professor Lock, who has actually excavated some of the forts in England, said that despite their name archaeological evidence suggests they may not have been primarily used for military purposes.  "We have found pottery, metalwork and evidence of domestic activities like spinning and weaving, also of agriculture, crops like wheat and barley and of keeping pigs, sheep and cattle," he said.

It is a source of some surprise that with many important projects on the go, there has been little academic work carried out on hill forts, and their uses and regional differences across Britain and Ireland, the researchers say.

There are suggestions that they may have been meeting places for religious festivals or market days. Archaeologists are confident in saying that the oldest hill forts are in Ireland and Wales and could be up to 3,000 years old. The arrival of the Romans signalled the abandonment of many of the structures, but in areas that the Romans did not occupy they were used for longer.

The research will want to come out of this with information not only on well-preserved forts but also on sites where only crop marks indicate their existence. The idea is to build a free online database.
"We are hoping that local archaeology societies will get involved," said Professor Lock.

                                                 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_fort