The Scottish Borders comprises the historic counties of Berwickshire, Peeblesshire, Roxburghshire and Selkirkshire. Roxburghshire has long been an important study area for Iron Age southern Scotland. Early hillfort excavations were undertaken by Curle on Eildon Hill North, Rubers Law, and Bonchester Hill (Christinson 1894, 119, Curle 1907; 1910). After the Second World War a series of hillfort excavations undertaken by C M Piggott began to revolutionise our understandings of Iron Age archaeology, particularly hillforts. The first of these was at Hownam Rings which gave rise to the ‘Hownam Sequence’ (Piggott 1948).
The Hownam sequence was subsequently tested at Hayhope Knowe (Piggott 1949) and Bonchester Hill (Piggott 1950). In summary, the Hownam Sequence suggested a unilinear evolution from palisaded settlement to a fort defended by a single stone-built wall, and onto a multivallate fort, with later a non-defended settlement. This sequence became the foundation for subsequent work. In the pre-radiocarbon era, dating of such sites was compressed into a few centuries before the arrival of the Romans. Woden Law hillfort was also excavated around this time as was the hillfort at Chester Hill, Hundleshope, Peebleshire and the broch and fort at Torwoodlee, Selkirkshire (Richmond and St Joseph 1982; Keef 1946; Piggott 1951). Although emphasis was on the upstanding hillforts, work on other site types was also undertaken, such as palisaded enclosures, duns and unenclosed platform settlements.
This floruit of research in the Scottish Borders culminated in a conference in 1961, published as The Iron Age in Northern Britain (Rivet 1966). In this important research publication, Feachem classified the hillforts of the area, Jobey applied the scheme to Northumberland, and Stevenson discussed aspects of the artefacts and their cultural affiliations (all 1966).
After the conference and publication there was a general lull in excavations and during the late 1970s and 1980s emphasis was more on survey, from both the air and on the ground. This greatly amplified the number of known sites in the area and, as importantly, led to new insight into broader landscape use, such as the recognition of cord-rig agriculture (Halliday 1983; 1986) and the recognition of palisaded enclosures as a regular class of field monument in the Borders (Ritchie 1970, Harding 2017). Indeed, the regular occurrence of palisaded enclosures, ring-ditch houses and cord-rig agriculture were taken to be evidence of a contemporary and planned settlement system (Harding 2017). In areas like Hownam and Morebattle intensive survey ‘…resulted in a density of known sites that must approach very closely the most comprehensive that the archaeologist could expect to achieve, so that it should be possible to reconstruct the nature of the later prehistoric landscape more reliably here than in most other areas’ (Harding 2017).
The 1980s saw the next milestone – a conference in Edinburgh in 1981 on later prehistoric settlement in South East Scotland, published the following year (Harding 1982). Like the 1966 publication, this showcased research that was to become the new foundations for the region with discussions of settlement (Harding 1982; Hill 1982), farming (Halliday 1982; Barnetson 1982), artefacts (Cool 1982) and, crucially, updates on excavations at St Germains (Watkins 1982), Dryburn Bridge (Triscott 1982), Broxmouth (Hill 1982) and others.
Since the conference, ironically, there has been a significant dearth of modern excavations in the Scottish Borders with a shift in resource and focus to East Lothian and, to a lesser extent, Midlothian.