A scooped settlement is the habitation of an enlarged family or small community. Essentially, the settlement is created by digging into a hillside and the upcast is used to construct an enclosure; thus ‘scooped settlements’ are essentially another form of enclosure. The upper part of the interior is usually extensive enough to accommodate more than three houses. These settlements fall within a broader group of small enclosures, usually simply termed ‘settlements’, and are found broadly across southern Scotland, though the constructional details and layouts vary.
Typically examples of such settlements are found overlying the defences of forts throughout the region, and their dating to the later centuries of the 1st millennium BC and the beginning of the Roman Iron Age was demonstrated by excavations, such as those carried out by Piggott at Hownam Rings (Piggott 1948). The details of the chronological developmental sequence for Borders settlement forms, however, are now known to be non-linear and far more complex than the simple sequence recorded at Hownam Rings allowed (see Harding 1982; Armit 1999; Harding 2000).
While datable finds from scooped settlements are scanty and typically limited to coarse stone and crude ceramics, diagnostic artefacts are typically limited to those of Roman manufacture of the 1st or 2nd century AD. These finds often belong to the final phase of occupation, the notable exception being a brooch thought to be of 5th century AD date from Crock Cleuch in Roxburghshire (Steer 1961; Steer and Keeney 1947). However, it has proved impossible to convincingly demonstrate continuing occupation on any settlement through the 3rd and 4th centuries AD. The RCAHMS were content to assert that scooped settlements containing exclusively timber roundhouses do not post-date the Roman period (Steer 1961, 26).
A developed variation of the scooped settlements may be a sub-group of stone walled enclosures, often containing stone-built roundhouses and referred to as ‘crab-claw’ enclosures by Smith in his study of 1st millennium AD settlement in the Border regions due to the typical enlargement of the enclosure terminals (1990). Smith saw these structures, which are found overlying ramparts at Hownam Rings and Wood Hill, as strong candidates for mid-1st millennium AD settlements. As yet, with the exception of the brooch from Crock Cleuch, material of this date has yet to be recovered from any examples, but there is still too little data to be confident of their real chronology.