Recent Iron Age Discoveries in Oxfordshire and North Berkshire

Extract

An early volume of the Society's Proceedings contains Stephen Stone's record of his archaeological observations in the parish of Stanlake, Oxfordshire, and the immediate neighbourhood. The record as published is of a mixed nature, and at times it is quite difficult to disentangle the various periods to which the subject of his explorations belonged, though through no actual fault of his own, but rather because, at the date at which he wrote, archaeological knowledge had not advanced to a point at which an exact interpretation of the material was possible. Thus his account of a British village is almost inextricably mixed up with that of what we can now recognize to be circular trenches of a Bronze Age culture, and their close proximity to one another has perhaps added to the confusion. At the present day we can clearly realize that we have to do with two distinct cultures, even though actually they may not have been separated by any great distance of time; and that in spite of the fact that the pottery found in the British village is passed over with the barest notice, and only a few pieces have been preserved to give us a clue to its character. But that the village belonged to the Iron Age is established both by the description of the pits from which it came and also by the recovery from one of these pits of an iron knife complete with bone handle (pl. iv, 1), such as can be closely paralleled by a specimen from the Marne region. Two vases are preserved in the Ashmolean Museum (pl. iv, 2): one formerly in Mr. James Parker's collection is labelled Stanlake, and one given by Stone's executors came probably from this same site; though not very distinctive, both serve to corroborate the evidence of the knife. Vases obtained by Rolleston from a site in the parish of Wytham, Berkshire, fall into the same category (pl. iv, 3).