An Examination of Late Prehistoric Settlement in North East England with Specific Emphasis on the Settlements of the Tees Valley

This thesis is a study of Iron Age settlement in north-east England with a focus on settlements in North Riding of Yorkshire and County Durham. Since the 1980s a series of excavations have suggested rectangular enclosures were the dominant settlement form in the Later Iron Age around 300BC with some settlements becoming open villages in the 1st century AD. Earlier writers had observed that the settlement morphology and agricultural practices in the Tees Valley were different to those in Northumberland. In the last 20 years developer funded sites have revealed settlements that have provided radiocarbon dates to propose a tighter chronology for the Iron Age. There have been no recent studies, however, to examine Later Iron Age settlement across the region using the newly available information. This thesis is an examination of Iron Age settlements of the Tees Valley (County Durham and North Riding) which is focused upon 26 excavated settlements including unpublished material and research at Street House. The study examines the structures and artefacts from these sites and includes a comparison of settlements of a similar date to the north, looking at Tyneside, and to the south, into the West Riding of Yorkshire. The thesis found that there are patterns of deposition of artefacts that are occurring in and around structures that are common throughout the three areas studied. It was noted that there is a variation in this pattern with different objects and a greater frequency of artefacts in the Tees Area than in either the Tyne or West Riding. A difference was also evident in the size, number and methods of construction of structures across the three areas. The conclusion of the study is that all of these differences are representative of different subregional identities based around Tyneside, Durham-North Riding and West Riding of Yorkshire.