This report details the results of excavations within an early Bronze Age barrow cemetery in 1994. The barrow provided a rare opportunity for examining in detail Bronze Age funerary practices and associated ritual activity in a lowland context in the English Midlands. In addition, a rich group of metalwork finds was discovered - two gold armlets and a copper dagger. The evidence at Lockington poses some interesting questions - why were there grazing animals in the palisaded enclosure immediately before the construction of the mound? and why was there no body with the deposit? The authors offer answers to these questions and discuss the barrow in a regional context.
Excavation of a Scheduled burial mound on Whitehorse Hill, Dartmoor revealed an unexpected, intact burial deposit of Early Bronze Age date associated with an unparalleled range of artefacts. The cremated remains of a young person had been placed within a bearskin pelt and provided with a basketry container, from which a braided band with tin studs had spilled out. Within the container were beads of shale, amber, clay and tin; two pairs of turned wooden studs and a worked flint flake. A unique item, possibly a sash or band, made from textile and animal skin was found beneath the container. Beneath this, the basal stone of the cist had been covered by a layer purple moor grass which had been collected in summer. Analysis of environmental material from the site has revealed important insights into the pyre material used to burn the body, as well as providing important information about the environment in which the cist was constructed. The unparalleled assemblage of organic objects has yielded insights into a range of materials which have not survived from the earlier Bronze Age elsewhere in southern Britain.
The destruction and deposition of metalwork is a widely recognised phenomenon across Bronze Age Europe. Weapons were decommissioned and thrown into rivers; axes were fragmented and piled in hoards; and ornaments were crushed, contorted and placed in certain landscapes. Interpretation of this material is often considered in terms of whether such acts should be considered ritual offerings, or functional acts for storing, scrapping and recycling the metal. This book approaches this debate from a fresh perspective, by focusing on how the metalwork was destroyed and deposited as a means to understand the reasons behind the process. To achieve this, this study draws on experimental archaeology, as well as developing a framework for assessing what can be considered deliberate destruction. Understanding these processes not only helps us to recognise how destruction happened, but also gives us insights into the individuals involved in these practices. Through an examination of metalwork from south-west Britain, it is possible to observe the complexities involved at a localised level in the acts of destruction and deposition, as well as how they were linked to people and places. This case study is used to consider the social role of destruction and deposition more broadly in the Bronze Age, highlighting how it transformed over time and space.
Humans occupy a material environment that is constantly changing. Yet in the twentieth century archaeologists studying British prehistory have overlooked this fact in their search for past systems of order and pattern. Artefacts and monuments were treated as inert materials which were the outcomes of social ideas and processes. As a result materials were variously characterized as stable entities such as artefact categories, styles or symbols in an attempt to comprehend them. In this book Jones argues that, on the contrary, materials are vital, mutable, and creative, and archaeologists need to attend to the changing character of materials if they are to understand how past people and materials intersected to produce prehistoric societies. Rather than considering materials and societies as given, he argues that we need to understand how these entities are performed. Jones analyses the various aspects of materials, including their scale, colour, fragmentation, and assembly, in a wide-ranging discussion that covers the pottery, metalwork, rock art, passage tombs, barrows, causewayed enclosures, and settlements of Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain and Ireland.
The Raunds Area Project investigated more than 20 Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in the Nene Valley. From c 5000 BC to the early 1st millennium cal BC a succession of ritual mounds and burial mounds were built as settlement along the valley sides increased and woodland was cleared. Starting as a regular stopping-place for flint knapping and domestic tasks, first the Long Mound, and then Long Barrow, the north part of the Turf Mound and the Avenue were built in the 5th millennium BC. With the addition of the Long Enclosure, the Causewayed Ring Ditch, and the Southern Enclosure, there was a chain of five or six diverse monuments stretched along the river bank by c 3000 cal BC. Later, a timber platform, the Riverside Structure, was built and the focus of ceremonial activity shifted to the Cotton 'Henge', two concentric ditches on the occupied valley side. From c 2200 cal BC monument building accelerated and included the Segmented Ditch Circle and at least 20 round barrows, almost all containing burials, at first inhumations, then cremations down to c 1000 cal BC, by which time two overlapping systems of paddocks and droveways had been laid out. Finally, the terrace began to be settled when these had gone out of use, in the early 1st millennium cal BC. This second volume of the Raunds Area Project, published as a CD, comprises the detailed reports on the environmental archaeology, artefact studies, geophysics and chronology.
How did past communities view, understand and communicate their pasts? And how can we, as archaeologists, understand this? This volume brings together a range of case studies in which objects of the past were encountered and reappropriated.
The idea of prehistory dates from the nineteenth century, but Richard Bradley contends that it is still a vital area for research. He argues that it is only through a combination of oral tradition and the experience of encountering ancient material culture that people were able to formulate a sense of their own pasts without written records. The Past in Prehistoric Societies presents case studies which extend from the Palaeolithic to the early Middle Ages and from the Alps to Scandinavia. It examines how archaeologists might study the origin of myths and the different ways in which prehistoric people would have inherited artefacts from the past. It also investigates the ways in which ancient remains might have been invested with new meanings long after their original significance had been forgotten. Finally, the author compares the procedures of excavation and field survey in the light of these examples. The work includes a large number of detailed case studies, is fully illustrated and has been written in an extremely accessible style.
The Oxford Handbook of the European Bronze Age is a wide-ranging survey of a crucial period in prehistory during which many social, economic, and technological changes took place. Written by expert specialists in the field, the book provides coverage both of the themes that characterize the period, and of the specific developments that took place in the various countries of Europe. After an introduction and a discussion of chronology, successive chapters deal with settlement studies, burial analysis, hoards and hoarding, monumentality, rock art, cosmology, gender, and trade, as well as a series of articles on specific technologies and crafts (such as transport, metals, glass, salt, textiles, and weighing). The second half of the book covers each country in turn. From Ireland to Russia, Scandinavia to Sicily, every area is considered, and up to date information on important recent finds is discussed in detail. The book is the first to consider the whole of the European Bronze Age in both geographical and thematic terms, and will be the standard book on the subject for the foreseeable future.
The exotic and impressive grave goods from burials of the ÔWessex CultureÕ in Early Bronze Age Britain are well known and have inspired influential social and economic hypotheses, invoking the former existence of chiefs, warriors and merchants and high-ranking pastoralists. Alternative theories have sought to explain the how display of such objects was related to religious and ritual activity rather than to economic status, and that groups of artefacts found in certain graves may have belonged to religious specialists. This volume is the result of a major research that aimed to investigate Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age grave goods in relation to their possible use as special dress accessories or as equipment employed within ritual activities and ceremonies. Many items of adornment can be shown to have formed elements of elaborate costumes, probably worn by individuals, both male and female, who held important ritual roles within society. Furthermore, the analysis has shown that various categories of object long interpreted as mundane types of tool were in fact items of bodily adornment or implements used in ritual contexts, or in the special embellishment of the human body. Although never intended to form a complete catalogue of all the relevant artefacts from England the volume provides an extensive, and intensively illustrated, overview of a large proportion of the grave goods from English burial sites.
Social Orders and Social Landscapes marks a new direction in research for Eurasian archaeology that focuses on how people lived in their local environment and interacted with their near and distant neighbours, rather than on overarching comparisons of archaeological culture complexes. Stemming from the 2005 University of Chicago Eurasian Archaeology Conference, the papers collected here reflect this new research agenda, though the way in which each author addressed the theme of the conference, and thus the book, was strikingly varied. This diversity arises out of the field’s intellectual flux driven by the principled engagement of the rich analytical traditions of the Soviet/CIS, Anglo-American, and European schools. Despite the variability in approaches and subject matter, several key themes emerged: 1) the reinterpretation culture categories by examining particular aspects of social life; 2) the role social memory plays in the production of landscape and place; 3) the influence of the built environment on societies; and 4) the ways in which economic considerations affect social orders and landscapes. The result is a book that helps to re-image Eurasia as a complex landscape fragmented by historically contingent and shifting ecological and social boundaries rather than a bounded mosaic of culture areas or environmental zones. “Scholarly research on Eurasia was transformed by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Entire areas and fields of research became accessible to European and American scholars for the first time, resulting in the emergence of new centers specializing in primary field investigations throughout the vast, politically transformed landmass of Eurasia. One such center is the University of Chicago that has recently sponsored two large international conferences on Eurasian archaeology. Social Orders and Social Landscapes is the product of the second Chicago conference held in spring 2005. The editors of the volume should be proud of their efforts that have resulted in such a broad ranging and prompt publication. The articles encompass a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including archaeology, history, art history, palynology, and zooarchaeology; extend chronologically from Neolithic and Bronze Age times to the formation of national identity in Turkey in the early 20th century; and range geographically from Europe to China. Several articles reconstruct basic subsistence activities; others analyze distinctive settlement types and political and cultural frontiers, including the assimilation and emergence of new, self-defined ethnic groups and the selective adoption of new systems of religious belief. What unites this diverse collection is their consistent emphasis on the social construction of reality and the production of social landscapes and memories that altered perceptions of the physical world and mediated the practical activities that here have been convincingly reconstructed from the archaeological record. In so doing, rigid stereotypes are questioned and novel interpretations persuasively advanced. Early Bronze Age pastoralism on the south Russian steppes did not consist exclusively of herding animals nor was it combined, as it was later in the Iron Age, with the pursuit of agriculture; rather, D. Anthony and D. Brown suggest that at least in the Samara river valley the herding of animals occurred along side the intensive gathering of wild, nutritionally rich plants. The kalas of ancient Chorasmia are not cities, nor even proto-urban formations, but rather are large, heavily fortified enclosures meant to repel attacks of armed nomadic cavalry. They represent a continuation of a distinct Central Asian settlement pattern that began in the Bronze Age and that formed the center of a landscape divided into contiguous, self-contained oases. The Mongols not only herded livestock, but also farmed, fished, hunted, and traded throughout the vast area that they had conquered, uniting most of Eurasia into a single, economically integrated system. New perspectives proliferate throughout this richly detailed and extremely broad ranging collected volume.” — Phil Kohl, Professor of Anthropology and the Kathryn W. Davis Professor of Slavic Studies at Wellesley College “ “Social Orders and Social Landscapes” is a stimulating addition to the still small literature in English making the rich datasets from the archaeology of Eurasia widely accessible to Western scholars. The authors of the eighteen chapters analyze data from China to the Mediterranean, from the fourth millennium BCE through the fourteenth century CE, with the tools of art and architectural history, text analysis, paleobotany and paleozoology, and anthropological theory, among others. The product of a conference at the University of Chicago, this book fulfils the goal of the graduate student organizers to apply interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the archaeology and history of the Eurasian landmass in local terms through a focus on “how people lived in their local environments.” In the decade and a half since the end of the Soviet Union, scholarly communication has broadened and the mutual influences have stimulated many new and thought provoking views on the Eurasian past. This book is an exemplary product of the new scholarly discourse.” — Karen S. Rubinson, Research Scholar, Department of Anthropology, Barnard College, Columbia University
