When did the round house fall out of vernacular use throughout Britain and Ireland?

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The names and dates of these archaeological periods can be contested, but as a preliminary, we are concerned here with the:

  • Nordic Bronze Age (c. 1700 BCE - c. 500 BCE)
  • Pre-Roman Iron Age (c. 500 BCE - c. 1 BCE)
  • Roman Iron Age in northern Europe (c. 1 CE – 400 CE)
  • Germanic Iron Age / Early Christian Ireland (c. 400 – 800 CE)

Kerry L's suggestion of Harding's book The Iron Age Round-house: Later Prehistoric Building in Britain and Beyond (Oxford, 2009) was a sound one; the book does shed light on the question. Unfortunately, physical evidence is very limited. Harding makes these observations about the chronology of the round-house:

It would be easy to assume that the transition from pre-Roman to Roman Iron Age in southern Britain marked the change from predominantly circular building plans to rectangular ones.... [p. 146] ... circular structures in timber and stone in the native tradition, and involving a full range of sizes from relatively small huts to houses of more monumental proportions, continued to be built throughout the Roman occupation in those regions of Britain that were on the outer periphery of the Romanized province. In the so-called 'core' region and the 'inner periphery', the situation is not nearly so clear. [p. 169]

In the 3rd and 4th centuries the circular building tradition remained firmly integral to the estate pattern.... The persistence of the round-house tradition in some areas might be attributed to tacit conservatism, but the late resurgence of round-houses suggests a more deliberate revival of a symbol of native identity.... the evidence is surely sufficient to indicate that round-houses in Britain were not a last-gasp survival of an earlier tradition but a conscious revival of it. [p. 169-170]

We have already seen the earlier appearance in southern Britain of rectangular buildings, whether introduced initially before the Roman occupation or adopted more widely in consequence of it. By the 7th century AD parts of southern Scotland were coming into contact with another tradition of rectangular architecture, introduced by Anglian settlers. [p. 192]

In northern Britain round-houses of substantial size, whether in timber or more monumentally in stone, appear to have enjoyed a long currency from the mid 1st millennium BC to the early 1st millennium AD, whereas in southern Britain the large, timber round-house is essentially a feature of the Late Bronze Age and earlier pre-Roman Iron Age. [p. 275]

... Early Christian [Irish] round-houses differed in technical details from those of the earlier Iron Age. [p. 198]

Apart from the competing rectangular models associated with the Romans, circular forms were also followed by cellular, figure-eight (ventral), and composite (enclosed) forms.

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