Little Woodbury facts for kids

Little Woodbury is an ancient place near the city of Salisbury in England. About 2,000 years ago, during the Iron Age, people lived here. Archaeologists have studied this site to learn about daily life long ago.

Discovering Little Woodbury

Little Woodbury is located about 2 kilometers (1.25 miles) south of Salisbury. It is also about 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) north of Odstock village.

Who Found It?

An archaeologist named O. G. S. Crawford first spotted the site from the air. This was almost 20 years before any digging began. He saw a circular shape in the fields, which was a cropmark. A cropmark is a pattern in crops that shows hidden features underground. This mark suggested there was an ancient settlement below.

The Prehistoric Society then asked Gerhard Bersu to excavate the site. Bersu was a German archaeologist who had to leave his home country because of the Nazis. He was known for his new ways of digging up ancient settlements. Before his work, archaeologists did not know much about early British homes.

Digging Up the Past

Bersu started digging at Little Woodbury between 1938 and 1939. He dug many parallel trenches across the site. This careful method helped him find important features.

He was able to identify a large roundhouse. He also found other features related to daily life. Bersu found the holes where wooden posts once stood. These postholes showed that roundhouses were common homes in the Iron Age. Before his work, some thought people lived in holes in the ground.

Bersu also found animal bones and cereal grains. This helped him understand how people lived and what they ate. He showed that many large holes found by other archaeologists were actually storage pits for food.

A Lasting Impact

Work at Little Woodbury stopped in 1939 when World War II began. Bersu was held in a special camp on the Isle of Man. He never returned to the site. The full report on the findings was never completely finished.

However, the discoveries at Little Woodbury were very important. Bersu's work changed how archaeologists thought about ancient people. It made them more interested in the everyday lives of people long ago. The roundhouse, thanks to Bersu, is now a key part of understanding prehistoric sites.