EHG5448 - Excavation - Bracara Road, Culduthel

An area excavation was undertaken by Highland Archaeology Services in 2017 following evaluation trenching (see EHG5447) in advance of housing development at a green field site (now Bracara Road) located alongside the A8082 South Distributor Road at Culduthel, Inverness. The excavation fieldwork identified the heavily truncated remains of a substantial timber roundhouse and an adjacent four-post earthfast structure. The arrangement of other postholes and small pits is tentatively interpreted to reflect part of an enclosure or compound that surrounded these timber structures. The morphology and plan-form of the timber structures indicates that they are likely to reflect a single phase of settlement-related activity on the site during the later prehistoric period. A suite of AMS radiocarbon determinations obtained for stratified charred plant remains provided a wide range of calibrated 2σ dates that range between the middle Neolithic (c 3347-3098 cal BC) and the middle Iron Age (c 181-43 cal BC). To compound these wide-ranging dates, no significant artefacts were recovered from the excavated features and stratified finds were restricted to a very small assemblage of burnt bone. In combination, the meagre dating evidence does not provide any clarity regarding the chronology of the roundhouse or its associated four post structure, although a date towards the end of the 1st millennium BC is considered most likely, albeit on the basis of the configuration of the roundhouse entrance structure and the dating of a number of 4-Post structures on the adjacent Culduthel Mains site. The archaeological evidence for settlement related activity on the site, although poorly preserved, is consistent with more extensive evidence for multi-period prehistoric settlement related activity at Culduthel, previously recorded at the adjacent Culduthel Mains Farm site. The evidence increases the perceived extent of the area of late prehistoric settlement and our understanding of its arrangement, character and chronology. <1>