The brilliance of using case studies

I study hillforts, they’re things on hills, or maybe not, (cf. this post) and there are really quite a lot of them.

Although it would be nice to include and investigate every single hillfort (and non-hillfort) site in Britain, the magnitude of this dataset renders it completely impossible. With over 3000[1] identified sites and many more than could, or should, be included, it would be difficult to merely list them, let alone conduct meaningful research using all of these sites. Instead, any research must be conducted with the use of case studies.

This may all seem fairly standard and straightforward – easy, right? You just pick your first case study as the ‘typical’ example for that time/place/region/culture etc etc, and use that as your patient zero[2], your starting point for comparison. However, one of the main motivating factors behind hillfort research (and indeed most archaeology) is that we don’t know what a typical hillfort actually was, or what this really means.

So how on earth do we pick our case studies? I don’t even know if I should be picking a site that’s on a hill or not. The beauty of archaeological case studies is that it actually doesn’t matter – you don’t need to pick a ‘typical’ site to make a meaningful comparison.

The ‘big-name’ hillfort that Iron Age archaeologists, and everyone else actually, always references is Danebury in Hampshire.

Danebury is not the biggest hillfort in Hampshire, let alone the southwest; it isn’t the most interesting; nor is it the most complex or even particularly typical of the area or period.[3] Is it however, one of the best-researched sites in Britain, of any age, which makes it a totally awesome case study. You can pretty much pick any other hillfort, and compare it to Danebury – whatever’s been researched somewhere else, it will have its research counterpart at Danebury.

It doesn’t matter if they don’t match, they probably won’t – but that gives you a brilliant indication of how well-travelled a certain artefact, or belief, or way of life was during the Iron Age. Britain in the Iron Age is beautifully regional (a big problem for another day, btw). It would take one person roughly 50 days (and that’s being fairly optimistic) to walk from Land’s End to John o' Groats [5]. And yeah, Danebury is not quite at Land’s End, but this country is quite big before the invention of cars and stuff (and things), so if you can match something between site A in Hampshire, and site B in East Anglia then it follows someone thought it was important enough to carry it that far, which is pretty useful information about life back in the day.

So Danebury may not be the best hillfort, but it’s totally awesome, because of how much we know about it, and all the exciting case studies you can build out of that knowledge.

More importantly, if you somehow don’t find this as exciting as I do, try Case-books instead. Sherlock Holmes has one.

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[1] Seriously? Seriously.

[2] Wait, isn’t that zombies?

[3] Or the prettiest⁴, or the cleverest.

[4]It is quite pretty.

[5] The fact that I know this fact is more or less indicative of the fact that I’m planning on walking this.