Roxby Iron Age Settlement and the Iron Age in North-East Yorkshire

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Abstract
Round houses and an enclosure, surviving parts of a nucleated settlement on boulder clay terrain at Roxby (near Staithes, north-east Yorkshire), discovered from the air in 1972, were excavated 1973–81. Most were dated to the immediately pre-Roman Iron Age, but one round house, standing in an area of marks of former cross-ploughing, had native Romano-British pottery, and in the last phase of ditch silting, sherds of sixth century AD Anglo-Saxon stamped ware. The economy was based on mixed farming, but two of the Iron Age houses also contained iron working comprising both smelting and smithing. These houses also yielded fragments of jet and glass and were interpreted as a repair workshop, rather than a production unit. Great structural detail had been preserved and was recorded. The houses were architecturally different and represent a significant addition to the prehistoric round house data. They lie in that part of the township of Roxby which escaped medieval ploughing, and probably represent a fraction of the total original settlement. This and other data in north-east Yorkshire show that an economy based on settled mixed farming, not on semi-nomadic pastoralism, was widespread across the boulder clay encircling the North York Moors.

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