14th September 2011, 05:43 PM
P Prentice Wrote:banana gullies are widely published and are easily recognised as bona fide features often containing the same kind of material culture as one often finds in the terminal ends of penannular gullies - quite different to the crescent shaped features left by trees - although the jury is still out as to their actual use and meaning
Hate to say I'm with Jack on the banana gullies - they tend to have a gently-sloping side and a really messy vertical side, which upon further investigation invariably turns into the rest of the tree-hole - people tend to give up digging them too soon since the bit in the middle of the tree-hole does, to be fair, usually look like clean natural unless you have the benefit of seriously stripey natural. You're right about the finds though, you often get a nice sample of what would have been lying about on the ground-surface at the time but has since been lost elsewhere due to weathering/ploughing etc.
You're not one of those people who actually believe the structured deposit b***ocks in relation to ring-gully terminals are you? - whereas a more rational explanation is that that's the handiest place to dump the trash when its p***ing with rain and it's your turn to take it out and you've made the mistake of living in a house with no windows (best circumstantial evidence for roundhouses being windowless by the way). If they were making some sort of gift to the gods one would think they could come up with something better than a few bits of smashed crockery and dog-chewed bones, and distinguish the 'structured deposit' from the rest of the floor.... Same applies to ditch terminals - a dump of stuff in the end is a good indicator that the ditch had a fairly substantial above-ground barrier on one side which they had to go past before they could get shot of that unwanted fridge/Iron Age equivalent - notice how modern fly-tipping usually happens just inside fields, not halfway along the hedge....whatever the palaeoanthropologists or whatever say, I'm pretty certain basic human nature hasn't changed all that much over the millenia, people have always in general been pretty lazy unless there's someone with a pointy stick or a taxman to encourage them to be otherwise....:face-stir: