The Later Bronze Age site at Black Patch consisted of hut platforms and enclosures set in a system of rectangular fields. The settlement area is overlooked by round barrows. Area and sample excavations of the settlement revealed circular huts and activity areas within a C-14 date range ofioyo ± yo bc-830 ± 80 be. Extensive economic data in the form of seeds, animal bones, foreign stones and artefacts were recovered. These formed the basis of an economic resource-area analysis undertaken around Black Patch and other contemporary occupation sites on the South Downs. From this an economic activity model is proposed.

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From ethnography and social anthropology ‘the prehistorian learns how particular peoples adapt themselves to their environments, and shape their resources to the ways of life demanded by their own cultures: he thus gains a knowledge of alternate methods of solving problems and often of alternative ways of explaining artefacts resembling those he recovers in antiquity. Study of ethnography will not as a rule … give him straight answers to his queries. What it will do is to provide him with hypotheses in the light of which he can resume his attack on the raw materials of his study’ (Clark, 1957, 172). Such a controlled use of ethnographic parallels has recently been applied successfully in the spheres of art and burial practices (e.g. Ucko, 1969, 262 and references there cited) but not as yet to the study of prehistoric settlement patterns or economy. In this paper it is hoped to show how the consideration of ethnographic parallels can help us to reach some possible alternative interpretations of two classes of excavated evidence: the pits and the two-, four-, five- and six-post-hole structures found mainly on Lowland Zone Iron Age settlements in Britain. These, usually interpreted in the literature as storage pits, ‘drying-racks’ and ‘granaries’ have been taken to be characteristic features of the ‘Woodbury Type’ economy of the earlier pre-Roman Iron Age in the Lowland Zone (Piggott, 1958, 3–4 and Bowen, 1969, 13–5), bearing in mind that ‘the type site must be clearly distinguished from the economy, and the economy itself seems to have been as variable as possible within the rather narrow Iron Age technical limits, (Bowen, 1969, 13).

Summary. An extensive urn cemetery associated with a complex flint platform, excavated by Max Dacre between 1966 and 1970, included burials of late Neolithic, Early Bronze Age, Middle Bronze Age (‘Deverel-Rimbury’) and Late Bronze Age date. The cemetery developed organically from a late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age focus which had evolved around one or more large sarsen stones.The pottery sequence is of particular interest. The chronological precedence of all the barrel urn types of Central Wessex has been demonstrated for the first time and the Deverel-Rimbury phases contain pottery which relates both to the local Wessex sequence and to the Lower Thames Valley assemblages. The later Deverel-Rimbury phases also include vessels of the post-Deverel-Rimbury tradition and the final burials were interred in Late Bronze Age jars.Analysis of the associated cremations gives some indication of the age and sex structure of each phase of burials, although identification proved difficult owing to the post-incineration process of pulverization to which the remains had been subjected in all phases. The existence of a range of age groups and both sexes in each phase serves to confirm the hypothesis that modular units within such later Bronze Age cemeteries represented the burial places of individual small social groups.The urn cemetery developed gradually over a period of 1500 years (from c. 2100 to 600 BC).

The structures and artefact patterning of the Bronze Age settlement at Thorny Down are re-examined in the light of newly discovered documentation from the original excavation. Two phases of settlement are recognized, the earlier one pre-Deverel-Rimbury. Analysis of artefact patterns allows the functional interpretation of different structural types. Four settlement units can be identified, similar to recurring modules previously defined on Middle Bronze-Age sites in southern England.