The Iron Age in South Essex, UK.

Palaeo/Meso Neo Bronze Roman Saxon Med Post-med
HOME

The Iron Age (750 BC - 43 AD).

There are some dramatic changes, which mark the Early Iron Age in south Essex. Most notably the circular enclosures, which had been such prominent features in the landscape during the Late Bronze Age, were no longer occupied. In some locations, like the site at South Hornchurch, field systems were abandoned possibly due to soil exhaustion. By contrast a field system at North Shoebury appears to have developed and expanded from the Late Bronze Age into the Early Iron Age.

Middle Iron Age settlement at Mucking is represented by numerous roundhouses set within a system of fields tracks and enclosures. A major settlement at Uphall Camp (above) was situated on a gravel spur above marshy ground to the east of the River Roding in Ilford. The site was surrounded by a bank and ditch, which enclosed an area of 24ha making Uphall the largest site of its kind in Essex and one of the largest in England. Much of the enclosure is now built over, but excavations have revealed roundhouses, rectangular structures and stock enclosures. The enclosure would have contained many buildings along with small fields, paddocks yards and other open spaces as this painting by Frank Gardiner shows.

Late Iron Age pottery includes elegant round-bodied bowls often with curvilinear and stamped decorations like this example from Canewdon.

The Late Iron Age saw the first use of coinage in Britain and the areas around the Thames estuary were at the forefront of this development. Some if the earliest coins were cast in 'Potin' (a kind of bronze with a high tin content). A hoard from Corringham is one of the earliest and also one of the largest collections of these types of coinage ever found it contained 2,300 coins. Also in the Late Iron Age salt Iron Age salt production began to take on an industrial scale with the new forms of production which created 'Red Hills' which in the subsequent Roman period became one of the most characteristic archaeological sites around the Essex coast. Elsewhere contemporary sites such as Gun Hill, near Tilbury, seem designed for the management of large numbers of livestock with droveways linking pasture and stock enclosures.

A Late Iron Age cremation burial from North Shoebury, the cremated bone was placed outside the pots, which are amongst the earliest wheel thrown, probably held offerings of food and drink. The back bone of a pig was also present in the grave, the remains of a substantial offering of meat.

Highly characteristic of the very end of the Iron Age in south Essex are a series of triple ditched enclosures, two of these have been excavated in advance of gravel extraction and/or development at Moor Hall, Rainham and Orsett Cock, Thurrock others are known as cropmarks. The Orsett site is the most extensively investigated and was provided with substantial defences and an elaborate gate structure.

A hoard of seven spearheads was recovered from one of the ditches. The Orsett enclosure appeared to have been attacked and its defences partly destroyed but it was not certain whether the attack was the result of tribal warfare or one of the effects of the Roman Invasion in AD43.