Gerhard Bersu, a German archaeologist who had been driven to Britain following discrimination by the Nazis,[2] was commissioned in 1938 by the Prehistoric Society to excavate the site in order to improve knowledge of early British settlement sites, which were until then poorly understood.[3] A settlement had been identified at the site through aerial archaeology by O.G.S. Crawford almost twenty years previously, when he had seen a circular enclosure as a cropmark.
Bersu worked at the site from 12 June to 18 September 1938, and 12 June to 19 July 1939. He dug a network of 4-5m wide parallel trenches, one after the other, across the site. By this method he was able to identify a large roundhouse and several other domestic features such as corn-drying frames, granaries, and storage pits. The postholes of the roundhouse enabled Bersu to argue that these structures were the common domestic building type of the Iron Age; prior to his work it was thought that people lived in clusters of pit-dwellings in the ground.[4]
Through Bersu's identification of animal bone and cereal grains, he convinced other archaeologists to re-evaluate the large holes they had found as storage pits.[3] Though he only excavated around 190 pits, Bersu estimated that there were roughly 360 more unexcavated ones further underground.[3] He posited that since the storage pits could only be used for a limited amount of time before pests and putrefaction set in, they were often replaced by new pits, with only around 12 being open at a time.[3] Stratified layers of loose chalk, humus-soil, burnt and unburnt flints, small potsherds, bones, and powdered ash showed evidence of the pits being refilled as soon as new pits were dug.[3]
During his identification of timber post remains, Bersu was able to assemble a ground-plan of the main roundhouse. It was composed of four elements: two outer rings of post-holes (with a max diameter of 15 m), another concentric ring of post-holes (1.5-2 m further in), a group of posts in a square formation (4 m from the inner ring), and a gap (3 m wide) in the east side of the two outer rings marking the entrance.[3] However, Bersu had difficulty deciding what the configuration of a reconstruction would look like.[4]
When war broke out in 1939, work stopped and Bersu was interned on the Isle of Man. He never returned to the site and post-excavation work was never fully completed. Regardless, Bersu's discoveries inspired excavations like West Harling and Itford Hill when it came to the identification of Iron Age settlements.[2]
