Simply put, the South East region can be divided into urban areas, coastal plains, lowland areas and upland areas. Unsurprisingly, in urban areas two thousand years of building and rebuilding have removed the vast majority of Iron Age evidence, particularly settlements and enclosures. Often only middens survive to be found in pockets of under-developed areas. Conversely, in the rural uplands upstanding earthworks such as hillforts remain untouched by the plough or modern development. In many lowland and coastal areas the plough and quarrying have been destructive forces. Modern ploughing, for example in East Lothian, has shaved away once-upstanding ramparts and negative features such as pits and burials. Ironically, because many Iron Age sites reused earlier settlement locations, evidence of earlier activity has been removed. Also, because the roundhouse tradition was of timber, many substantial buildings have left little, if any, trace for archaeologists to discover.
Soberingly, one of the largest excavated hillforts in our area – Broxmouth – is frequently touted as the most completely excavated hillfort in Scotland, and the place where we might expect to find the strongest evidence for Iron Age activity. However, the excavation actually demonstrated how little we might ever expect to survive due to the extensive truncation and removal of deposits both in the distant past and the present. Looking to the future, as demonstrated at the A1 Phantassie project, major infrastructural developments are now designed to avoid as much of the known archaeology as possible (LeLong and MacGregor 2007).
Land use and soil quality are also important factors in our analysis of survey data (Cowley 2009; 2016). Cropmark site densities are undoubtedly highest in areas of well-drained soils, while in some pasture areas past land use will have levelled sites that are unlikely to produce cropmarks. That said, such large-scale endeavours do allow a wider-landscape understanding and the discovery of previously known archaeology. It is likely that certain features, such as enclosures, were more common in some parts of the landscape than in others (Haselgrove 2009).