Little Woodbury

Little Woodbury is the name of an Iron Age archaeological site in Britford parish, near Salisbury in the English county of Wiltshire [1]. The site lies about 1+1⁄4 miles south of the centre of Salisbury and 1 mile north of Odstock village [1]. It was partially excavated in 1938 and 1939 by Gerhard Bersu [1]. A settlement had been identified at the site through aerial archaeology by O.G.S. Crawford almost twenty years previously [1]. Bersu worked at the site from 12 June to 18 September 1938, and 12 June to 19 July 1939 [1]. He dug a network of 4-5m wide parallel trenches across the site [1]. By this method he was able to identify a large roundhouse and several other domestic features such as corn-drying frames, granaries, and storage pits [1]. The postholes of the roundhouse enabled Bersu to argue that these structures were the common domestic building type of the Iron Age; prior to his work it was thought that people lived in clusters of pit-dwellings in the ground [1].