Middle Iron Age
Hillfort contains a number of storage pits, and a selection of human burials, including the sequence of man, partial woman and child from one pit. Domestic has been found including including decorated pottery, worked bone objects, metal knives and binding, spindle whorls, animal bones, charred plant remains.
The burials indicate a variety of rites:
separation of particular bones (skulls and long bones in particular) and their careful burial in pits and other features elsewhere, and from the cut marks either assisted disarticulation or deliberate sacrifice.
The village contains much the same elements as in the Early Iron Age including:
Trade and communications
There is more evidence of ironworking during the Middle Iron Age. Trade and communications are shown by the increasing number of imported quernstones, although most of these come from the local Culham greensand.
Settlement
There has been some drift of the settlement away from the hillfort to the south-west; virtually no evidence of the Middle Iron Age has been found north of the modern road, but the Middle Iron Age settlement covers a similar-sized area.
Houses and settlement layout
From the limited excavations there seems to be less zoning of activities, but some evidence of planning, or at least of keeping houses at a regular distance from one another. This is most evident on the west of the settlement around Hill Farm itself. All of the Middle Iron Age roundhouse gullies are of two or more phases, implying a reasonable length of occupation on the same site; there was a probable aisled roundhouse within the completely exposed gully in the Visitors Car Park, which appears to have had an inner ring of posts and possibly a stake wall around the outside (a row of close-spaced small posts survives at one point).
Population expansion
These enclosures are interpreted as part of a general pattern of expansion of population and settlement in the Middle Iron Age, planting settlements on the edge of the floodplain, often to specialise in animal husbandry, using the rich floodplain resource for grazing and the rearing of cattle and horses.
Iron Age metalwork
The tradition of metalwork in the river continues throughout the Iron Age (eg 6 socketed spearheads of the Early Iron Age found at the junction of the Thames and Thame). A sword has also been found in a pond at Little Wittenham itself.
