Bronze Age Death, Ritual and Metalwork

Question 1

Round barrow cemeteries

Answer 1

• Early and Middle Bronze Age
• DIfferent forms of barrow inc. pond, round, ring
• Located along ridge lines, referencing natural features and earlier monuments
• Form lines, groupings and cemeteries e,g, Barrow Hills in Oxfordshire -lineages?

Question 2

Late Neolithic Monuments

Answer 2

• Still in use into the EBA e.g. henges such as Stonehenge and Arbow Low - these became the focus for round barrows
• The Broadmayne round barrow complex near Dorchester in Dorset was orientated to an earlier Neolithic bank barrow.

Question 3

The Stonehenge visual field

Answer 3

-GIS-based analyses of the barrow groups around Stonehenge by Anne Woodward & colleagues suggest that the barrows were carefully sited on ridgelines so that the largest number possible would be visible from Stonehenge itself.
-The Stonehenge Cursus barrow group clearly
referenced the line of the Neolithic cursus. GIS & viewshed analyses have been used to show the views of barrows from Stonehenge &
between each other

Question 4

Famous barrow groups

Answer 4

-Normanton Down (including Bush Barrow), Oakley Down,

Question 5

Bush Barrow

Answer 5

• Wilsford G5 bowl barrow of the Normanton Down barrow group, in view of Stonehenge
• High status - one of the burials which led to the idea of a Wessex Culture
• Included a stone macehead, gold studded dagger handle, gold lozenges
• One of a series of apparently high status barrow burials in the vicinity of Stonehenge that led to the idea of a ‘Wessex Culture’ – one or more powerful early to middle Bronze Age lineages that seem to have enjoyed considerable wealth and influence.

Question 6

Upton Lovell, Wiltshire

Answer 6

• Round barrow, dated to 1900-1700 BC
• Adult male w/ cloak sewn with 36 bone points and a bone point necklace, gold artefacts and metalworking tools - goldsmith or shaman?

Question 7

Cremation burials

Answer 7

• EBA >MBA, inhumation burials within round barrows or cists are replaced with cremation burials, placed in Food Vessels or Collared Urns
• Bodies burnt on a pyre, often with animal remains -inefficient wood/fuel wise, but forms a spectacle
• Ethnographic examples from India/Indonesia - cremation funerary rites consist of many distinct stages

Question 8

Cranborne Chase

Answer 8

• Wyke Down - barrow cemetery references natural mounds and hollows - did Bronze Age people believe these features to be ancestral mounds?
• Evidence for mummification practices

Question 9

Cists and cairns

Answer 9

• Upland/SW/N Britain, funerary structures consisted of stone-lined cists, either in flat graves or within cairns
• Cremation burials often placed within urns in more formal cairns, but more often juts as a few handful of bone in some clearance cairns

Question 10

Stone Monuments

Answer 10

• MBA- use of small stone circles, stone settings, cists and cairns in upland Britain e.g. Gower peninsula in Wales, Big Moor in Derbyshire or Brats Moss in Cumbria

Question 11

Ringlemere, Kent

Answer 11

• Late Neolithic Henge that was the focus for deposits including Grooved Ware vessels
• Series of pits were the focus of deposits including complete Beaker Vessels
• Barrow mound thrown up inside the henge, and gold cup deposited in the mound
• Other ‘fancy’ cups known e.g. gold from Rillaton and Ringlemere, amber from Hover and 2 shape cups from Farway in Dorset
• Cups had continental affiliations, along with incense burners and incense cups, and had a very limited distribution in Britain

Question 12

Late Neolithic Wedge Tombs

Answer 12

• Mainly in W/S Ireland
• 500-550 survive
• Entrances face SW
• Finds = barbed and tanged arrowheads, beakers and coarseware pottery
• 2500-2000 BC

Question 13

Necklaces

Answer 13

• Jet spacer necklaces and jet buttons had a limited distribution, mostly in Scotland and N England
• Faience beads also uncommon

Question 14

Irish cremation

Answer 14

• Predominant rite between 2400 and 800 BC
• Also present in BA ring ditches and round barrows with cremation burials as a primary burial
• EBA cremation burials in cists
• Small number of Irish BA cremation burials interred in Urns or Food Vessels
• Small number of Irish BA inhumations recorded

Question 15

Irish Stone Circles

Answer 15

• Often associated with other monuments e.g. cairns, stone rows and 2 stone circles at Beaghmore, Co. Tyrone
• Stone circles feature of some Irish henge sites
• Ireland also had pit and/ or timber circles, where pits contained EBA pottery

Question 16

Seahenge

Answer 16

• Timber structures at Holme-next-the-Sea, Norfolk
• Lie North of a series of prehistoric monuments, including a group of round barrows
• Low circle of eroded wooden posts, surrounding a large central wooden tree stump which seems to have been inverted
• Hole bored in the tree stump for dragging and parts of the rope survived, made of braided honeysuckle
• Cut marks of bronze axes used to trim the timbers survived
• Dendro and 14C suggests central stump felled 2050 BC and outer posts 2049 BC
• Small, cramped natural of the space within the circle, almost certainly for a burial
• West of the circle - possible timber trackway and East - possiblly another timber circle
• Tradition of tree-based practices?

Question 17

End of ritual practices?

Answer 17

• By Middle Bronze Age, large ritual complexes seem to have been falling out of use & ritual practices and deposits increasingly associated with houses, settlements and fields
• By the Later Bronze Age, formal burials (cremations or inhumations) have become rare
• Huma bodies increasingly deposited in pits, ditches and middens, often as disarticulated/semi-articulated remains

Question 18

Collared Urns

Answer 18

• Ireland and Britain - many EBA-MBA cremation burials took place in Food Vessels and especially Collared Urns, often inverted and sometimes containing so-called ‘pygmy cups’ or incense vessels
• Collared Urns also fund in some settlement contexts

Question 19

Deverel-Rimbury

Answer 19

• Appeared 2000-1200 BC in Southern England, some heavily decorated, on domestic sites and in cremation burials
• Elsewhere, plainer, simpler urns and jars in use
• LBA pottery from 1200-800 BC coarser, relatively plain urns and jards
• Still gaps in pottery chronologies for the lBA-EIA transition outside southern England

Question 20

Great Orme

Answer 20

• Site in North Wales
• Malachite ore extracted by extensive series of large shafts and smaller adits
• So extensively worked and re-worked in later periods that some archaeologists did not believe copper extraction could have taken place on such a scale there in prehistory until reliable 14C dates of c.1400-1000 BC obtained

Question 21

Metalworking

Answer 21

• Ethnographic examples and experimental archaeology has suggested smelting methods for small-scale prehistoric metal working
• One or two piece moulds of carved stone used to mould bronze artefacs such as axes and sickles
• Bronze alloyed with tin, lead and arsenic
• Lost wax process often used for manufacture of clay moulds

Question 22

Spread of Metallurgy

Answer 22

• Some initial copper working occured during Beaker period and may have occurred with movement of people and/or ideads in the Chalcolithic (2400-2200 BC)
• Metal mixed and traded from hand to hand over many centuries and many km away from where it was mined - hard to source later bronze
• Originated in Northern Europe/Asia? Baltic,

Question 23

Smithing

Answer 23

• Full time specialists

- Work on a seasonal basis?

Question 24

Gift exchange

Answer 24

• Bronze not simply a commodity;
• Social value (in marking out gender, age & status differences) more important than economic value;
• Bronze objects circulated as gifts not commodities;
• Competitive gift-giving as a means of acquiring status;
• Prestige goods economy not a market economy

Question 25

Exchange networks

Answer 25

-There may have been emerging semi-formal links
between elites of Atlantic Europe, with gift giving of
metalwork, amber, etc as part of these.
Other potential explanations for movement of objects &
materials include:
• Warfare & raiding;
• Commodity trade – objects as goods;
• Intermarriage, & exogamous female burials

Question 26

Irish gold hoards

Answer 26

-Some Irish gold objects seem to have been items of personal ornamentation such
as dress fasteners/clasps,
bracelets, torcs & pins.
-Many of these have been relatively isolated finds, some in bogs but also in dryland locations.
-Some may have been finders hoards, originally intended to
be reclaimed.

Question 27

Coggalbeg Hoard

Answer 27

• From Co. Roscommon
• First recorded association of lunula and gold discs
• Important implications for the dating of discs and lunulae as discs were seen as representing the earliest Beaker period sheet gold with lunulae believed to date somewhat later
• This hoard, however, suggests that there was a period of overlap between the two styles of early goldwork from 2300-1800 BC

Question 28

Gold Working Techniques

Answer 28

-Earlier Bronze Age objects such as bracelets/armlets,
lunulae and gold discs were made from hammering
and shaping sheet gold.
-Around 1200 BC new gold
working techniques were developed by twisting bars or strips of gold, after which time a wide variety of torcs were made

Question 29

River deposits

Answer 29

• Thames - rapiers, swords, spearheads, an axe head and bronze shields recovered with variations in deposition over time
• LBA Irish bogs and river contain swords, spears, shields, including elaborate ‘non functional’ forms

Question 30

Wet vs Dry burials

Answer 30

• EBA hoards - single weapons and weapon hoards in wet locations
• Dryland hoards dominated by axes, tools such as awls and personal items of ornamentation
• Complete weapons in wet locations and fragments of weapons in dry locations

Question 31

Dryland Hoards

Answer 31

• Metalwork hoards sometimes found in pits and other dryland contexts
• Often contain bronze axes, palstaves, tools and other items, sometimes of gold
• Some are scrap or finders hoards but others may have been placed deposits

Question 32

Flag Fen

Answer 32

• Peterborough - long running excavations of both wet and dryland sites from the late 1960s-1980s
• Bronze Age field systems, including a large trackway running eastwards towards Fen edge
• Appears to be associated with a timber causeway running approximately 1km across what was once swamp and open water, towards an artificial platform or island created by timber piling
• Finds include animal bone, pottery and metalwork including spears, swords and flesh hooks
• Due to waterlogging, many wooden objects survived, e.g. a hammer, axe haft and cart wheel
• Deliberate, symbolic or ritual depositions?