Archaeologists discover roundhouses forming one of Britain's earliest and largest open settlements

© Nathaniel Hobby

© Nathaniel Hobby

© Nathaniel Hobby

© Courtesy Durotriges Project

© Courtesy Durotriges Project

© Courtesy Durotriges Project

© Courtesy Durotriges Project

© Courtesy Durotriges Project

© Courtesy Durotriges Project

© Courtesy Durotriges Project

© Courtesy Durotriges Project

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© Courtesy Durotriges Project

© Courtesy Durotriges Project

The discovery of the last houses Dorset residents would have dwelled in before their lives changed forever has left archaeologists anticipating new insights into the way people lived before and after the Romans arrived in Britain.A large, previously unknown prehistoric town – dubbed Duropolis in honour of the Durotriges tribe who once filled it – belies the “myth” that people lived exclusively in protected hill forts during prehistoric times and the first decades of the common era.Paul Cheetham, a co-leader of the annual Big Dig excavation in the area near Winterborne Kingston, says the remains of 16 roundhouses point to hundreds more homes in the town.“These inhabitants lived in this fertile farmland, away from the traditional hill forts we are all used to hearing about,” he says.“This is a big open settlement, probably one of the first that the Romans encountered when they arrived.“This year we’ve moved down from our previous site onto an area where we thought that the settlement would be of this period.“On the hillside here we’ve found an earlier Iron Age, Bronze Age and Neolithic settlement and a later Bronze Age settlement going up to about 100 BC.“We also found later, Roman occupation – a small Roman villa that dates to the 3rd century.“But this crucial [prehistoric] period of interaction and transformation is the one period we’ve actually been missing.“We could see from our geophysical surveys that there was lots of settlement activity and there were lots of roundhouses here. We’re trying to plug that gap in our timeline.”Archaeologists aim to deduce the movements of the inhabitants of Maiden Castle, who moved on from the large hill fort, near Dorchester, at some point during the 1st Century BC.“They are pre-Roman house structures – the last that inhabitants would have been living in before the Romans arrived,” says Dr Miles Russell, Cheetham’s fellow organiser.“We know that there are around 200 of these across this area, so we’ve got ourselves a prehistoric town or proto-urban settlement.“What we’ve discovered is extremely significant for the whole of southern Britain because in the past archaeologists have tended to look at really obvious sites like Maiden Castle.“What we have here is an extensive open settlement, not a hill fort. So it wasn’t visible as a settlement from the earthwork on the landscape.“Big Dig is part of a large landscape survey trying to understand the transition from prehistory to history, so we’re looking at the indigenous population here at the end of the Iron Age to see exactly what happens to them when the Romans arrive – how Roman they become, how do they react to becoming part of a larger empire, what sort of new goods are they using, how religion changes, how settlement changes…all those really sort of critical things to try to understand about empire building and being part of a larger world.“The area that we’re investigating, if you multiply that from the whole zone that’s being looked at in the geophysical surveys, we’ve probably got somewhere between 100 and 200 roundhouses, which makes this one of the larger open-air settlements for the period.“If you think of this area as being like a mini-town, this is where a large slice of the society is living at the time that the Romans arrive.”Hundreds of inquisitive locals visited an open day in the finale to this year’s dig, eager to find out more about a site where the discovery of animal bones sparked national press reports suggesting the presence of, possibly held by an ancient Celtic population.“It’s one thing to find where they were burying their dead and where their religion was carrying on, but to find out where they were living helps us to really understand them – the things they were eating, the everyday activities that they were conducting,” says Dr Russell.“We can piece together our understanding of what life was like here at the moment the Romans arrived.”Three museums to see finds from prehistoric Britain in:A Prehistoric Landscape: Archaeology of the Mid Cheshire Ridge explores the earliest human history of the Sandstone Mid Cheshire Ridge up to the Roman invasion in AD43, displaying the museum's important pre-historic collections alongside new research from the Habitats and Hillforts Landscape Partnership Scheme and several community projects. Until October 25 2015.A variety of "spectacular" objects feature in the current Prehistoric People exhibition, including flint tools, metal swords, jewellery, examples of rock art and more. Until September 27.Galleries featuring objects from the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic periods in the Prehistoric Galleries, many of which were originally collected by JR Mortimer, one of the most important amateur archaeologists of the 19th century.