Monument record TR 34 NE 257 - Bronze Age Enclosed Settlement, St Margaret's at Cliffe

A significant group of features located on a ploughed south-east facing downland slope comprising a bronze age settlement with a round-house and associated pits, ditches and gullies. The round-house would have likely have been one of a group of buildings suggested from various post and stake-holes around the site. It was represented by regular settings of post and stake-holes, 5.92 m in dia, in a shallow curving terrace. It had an entrance on the south-eastern side and its roof would have projected almost to the ground on the hillward side of the terrace. No evidence was found for a drainage gully. From the evidence of the post and stake-holes the round-house had been rebuilt at some stage. It is of the “double-ring” round-house tradition and currently there appear to be few published parallel for this type of building in Kent.

Internally there was as a scatter of stake-holes representing various divisions within the house during its phases of use. Careful examination of the chalk rubble floor found no evidence for a hearth or any sign of surface burning and so this probably represents an ancillary building. When the round-house was finally abandoned it would seem that it was not used as a rubbish dump or for subsequent habitation as only four flint flakes and five fragments of pottery were found. Later reuse of the site in the bronze age is implied by a large irregular pit which may have been used as a water storage pit.

A little evidence for the economy of the settlement was found in the form of charred cereal grains, occasional animal bones and marine shells. This suggests that grain production and animal husbandry took place, supplemented by the resources from the sea-shore. The presence of non-fossil shell in some of the pottery found on the site backs-up this suggestion and may also indicate the production of pottery on the site. (1)

<1> Canterbury Archaeological Trust, 2002, Report on an Archaeological Watching Brief on the Deal-Dover Bulk Supply Water Main (Unpublished document). SKE12191.