WTF Is It Now?!?

WEIRD FIND AT IRON-AGE FORT
The most baffling settlement ever unearthed from iron age Britain was revealed by English Heritage archaeologists yesterday, inside a prehistoric fort on former marshes by the Humber estuary.

Eerily spick and span, the rows of rectangular wooden buildings have yielded an almost complete lack of artefacts, remains or even litter, apart from one macabre find - fragments of crushed human skulls.

Guarded by stone and wooden pallisade defences, the complex also had a ceremonial gateway, vast by the standards of 600-400BC when it was built by the largely farming tribes of what is now South Yorkshire.

"It is extraordinary, like a kind of ghost village which can scarcely ever have been inhabited," said Robert Van der Noort, of Exeter University, whose students are excavating the site at Askern, near Doncaster, with a team from Hull University's archaeology department.

The £200,000 dig at Askern, a former pit village, has also established that the defences form the biggest marshland fort in Britain. Henry Chapman, of Hull University, said: "The building techniques and architecture of the ramparts closely resemble those of early iron age hill forts. But there are no hills here, so the impassable wetlands were used instead, to create an impregnable site."

Whether the silent, scrubbed central buildings were quiet religious shrines, or something more sinister, may be established by further trenches due to slice through the flat, formerly agricultural turf. David Miles, chief archaeologist of English Heritage, said: "We will fund further excavations next year with the aim of resolving the enigma of this site." - Read more here.