This edited volume presents a selection of essays dedicated to funerary practices from Belgium to the north of Portugal. It aims at filling gaps in the documentation and helping to better understand the relationships between these Atlantic regions during the Bronze Age.
This volume of 33 papers on the Atlantic region of Western Europe in the first millennium BC reflects a diverse range of theoretical approaches, techniques, and methodologies across current research, and is an opportunity to compare approaches to the first millennium BC from different national and theoretical perspectives.
Sarunas Milisauskas· 1.1 INTRODUCTION The purpose of this book is four-fold: to introduce English-speaking students and scholars to some of the outstanding archaeological research that has been done in Europe in recent years; to integrate this research into an anthropological frame of reference; to address episodes of culture change such as the transition to farming; the origin of complex societies, and the origin of urbanism, and to provide an overview of European prehistory from the earliest appearance of humans to the rise of the Roman empire. In 1978, the Academic Press published my book European Prehistory which, typically for that period, emphasized cultural evolution, culture process, technology, environment, and economy. To produce a new version and an up- to-date prehistory of Europe, I have invited contributions from specialists in the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages. Thus while this version of European Prehistory is a new book, however, it still incorporates some data from the 1978 version, particularly in The Present Environment and Neolithic chapters. Like its predecessor, this edition is structured around selected general topics, such as technology, trade, settlement, warfare, and ritual.
This collection of papers by an international chort of contributors explores the nature of the maritime connections that appear to have existed in the Transmanche/English Channel Zone during later prehistory. Organised into three themes, ‘Movement and Identity in the Transmanche Zone’; ‘Travel and exchange’; ‘Identity and Landscape’, the papers seek to articulate notions of frontier, mobility and identity from the end of the 3rd to the beginning of the 1st millennium BC, a time when the archaeological evidence suggests that the sea facilitated connections between peoples on both sides of the Channel rather than acting as a barrier as it is so often perceived today. Recent decades have since a massive increase in large-scale excavation programmes on either side of the Channel in advance of major infra-structure and urban development, resulting in the acqusition of huge, complex new datasets enabling new insights into later prehistoric life in this crucially important region. Papers consider the role of several key archaeologists in transforming our appreciation of the connectivity of the sea in prehistory; consider the extent to which the Channel zone developed into a closely unified cultural zone during later Bronze Age in terms of communities that serviced the movement of artefacts across the Channel with both sides sharing widely in the same artefacts and social practices; examine funerary practices and settlement evidence and consider the relationship between communities in social, cultural and ideological terms; and consider mechanisms for the transmission of ideas and how they may be reflected in the archaeological record. Brings together leading scholars from the UK and northern Europe in a thought-provoking and revealing new examination of the relationship between communities in the ‘Transmanche Zone’ in the Bronze and Iron Ages. The premise is that the English Channel was a conduit for connectivity and exchange of ideas, artefacts and social practices and rather than a barrier or frontier that had to be overcome before such connections could be fostered.
Drawing upon his own extensive knowledge of European archaeology, Graeme Barker has impressively integrated the full range of archaeological data to produce in this book a masterly account of prehistoric farming in Europe on a unique scale. He makes use of modern archaeological techniques to reconstruct the lives of prehistoric farmers in remarkable detail. Not only do we now have a vivid picture of the prehistoric farmyard, but we know what animals were kept, how they were fed and why they were bred. Evidence for crops grown and techniques of cultivation and husbandry helps recreate the prehistoric landscape. Even the social organisation that determined the use of resources, and provided the crucial stimulus for agricultural change, can be relived. Graeme Barker develops his argument through analogies with the agricultural history of classical and medieval Europe and concludes that today's industrial farmers can learn much from the successes and failures of early European farming.
The Celtic languages and groups called Keltoi (i.e. ‘Celts’) emerge into our written records at the pre-Roman Iron Age. The impetus for this book is to explore from the perspectives of three disciplines—archaeology, genetics, and linguistics—the background in later European prehistory to these developments. There is a traditional scenario, according to which, Celtic speech and the associated group identity came in to being during the Early Iron Age in the north Alpine zone and then rapidly spread across central and western Europe. This idea of ‘Celtogenesis’ remains deeply entrenched in scholarly and popular thought. But it has become increasingly difficult to reconcile with recent discoveries pointing towards origins in the deeper past. It should no longer be taken for granted that Atlantic Europe during the 2nd and 3rd millennia BC were pre-Celtic or even pre-Indo-European. The explorations in Celtic from the West 3 are drawn together in this spirit, continuing two earlier volumes in the influential series.
Funerary Practices in the Second Half of the Second Millennium BC in Continental Atlantic Europepresents a selection of essays dedicated to funerary practices from Belgium to the north of Portugal. It aims at filling gaps in the documentation and helping to better understand the relationships between these Atlantic regions during the Bronze Age. Our knowledge of the Atlantic Bronze Age has increased considerably over the last thirty years, but the current state of research varies from one region to another of Western Atlantic Europe, with a marked dichotomy between north and south. The volume not only highlights the cultural characteristics of those Atlantic regions that are poorly represented in European syntheses on the Bronze Age, but also establishes the long-term relationships, if any, that were maintained between the regions of the Southern Atlantic area and those of the Northern Atlantic area.
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.
Found a few kilometres from Stonehenge, the graves of the Amesbury Archer and the Boscombe Bowmen date to the 24th century BC and are two of the earliest Bell Beaker graves in Britain. The Boscombe Bowmen is a collective burial and the Amesbury Archer is a single burial but isotope analyses suggest that both were the graves of incomers to Wessex. The objects placed in both graves have strong continental connections and the metalworking tool found in the grave of the Amesbury Archer may explain why his mourners afforded him one of the most well-furnished burials yet found in Europe. This excavation report contains a series of wide-ranging studies and scientific analyses by an array of experts and a discussion of the graves within their British and continental European contexts.
The prehistories of Britain and Ireland are inescapably entwined with continental European narratives. The central aim here is to explore ‘cross-channel’ relationships throughout later prehistory, investigating the archaeological links (material, social, cultural) between the areas we now call Britain and Ireland, and continental Europe, from the Mesolithic through to the end of the Iron Age. Since the separation from the European mainland of Ireland (c. 16,000 BC) and Britain (c. 6000 BC), their island nature has been seen as central to many aspects of life within them, helping to define their senses of identity, and forming a crucial part of their neighbourly relationship with continental Europe and with each other. However, it is important to remember that the surrounding seaways have often served to connect as well as to separate these islands from the continent. In approaching the subject of ‘continental connections’ in the long-term, and by bringing a variety of different archaeological perspectives (associated with different periods) to bear on it, this volume provides a new a new synthesis of the ebbs and flows of the cross-channel relationship over the course of 15,000 years of later prehistory, enabling fresh understandings and new insights to emerge about the intimately linked trajectories of change in both regions.
