The transmission of new ideas: Archaeological evidence for implant and dispersal

A well-documented example of the implant and dispersal of a new idea of continental origin in Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries A.D., the Shaped Gable, enables us to follow the multiple strands of its progress in terms of time/space trajectories, as patterns to be set against a background of the whole economy and higher culture of Britain at that time. These time/space patterns can be used effectively as analogies in studying the space and time dispersal of cultural idea units in Iron Age Britain.