A shallow pit containing the disturbed remnants of a placed pottery vessel was located in the centre of the round-house. The pot has the appearance of a cremation burial, but no burnt bone was found in the sieved samples. Instead, two tiny crumbs of un-burnt mammal bone were identified. Whether or not this pot originally contained cremated bone, which has not survived the acid soils, its central position defines it as a ritual deposit apparently significant to the owners of the round-house. It is possible that the placed pottery deposit itself was intended to commemorate the construction of their building and, if it was a burial, to link it directly with their ancestors. This type of offering has been postulated elsewhere for buried human remains and other placed depositions within round-houses, as ‘foundation deposits’. Alternatively the deposit may have been placed during the lifetime of the settlement.

If the place deposit did originally contain cremated bone, which on balance seems unlikely (given survival of cremated bone from Early Iron Age cremations in Area 10), then a possible parallel for the use of a Middle Iron Age pot for a cremation comes from Mucking, near Thurrock in Essex. Here an ‘omphalos jar’ in a sandy, therefore usually characterised as Middle Iron Age fabric, was found with cremated bone. <1>