Bronze Age Settlement and Subsistence

Question 1

Celtic Fields

Answer 1

• Recognised in 1920s through aerial photography
• Appear as earthworks in the southern English downlands e.g. Charlton or Overton Down
• Created in the Middle Bronze Age (1700-1500 BC) but reworked in the Iron Age and Romano-British period

Question 2

Evidence of Field Systems

Answer 2

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Question 3

Gwithian, Cornwall

Answer 3

• 1800 BC, earliest evidence of bounded fields in Britain
• Criss-cross patterns of ard marks associated with terraced fields
• Also a wooden building within a stake built enclosure
• Earliest phases of occupation associated with distinctive pottery decorated with slate combs
• Finds include decorated stone, perforated whelk shell, a copper awl, bases of pots and fragmented querns- deliberately placed?
• Open fields farmed for barley and other cereal with woodland used for roofing and bedding and seaweed used to maintain soil
• Fields worked for hundreds of yeares
• Later phase (1500-1200 BC), 4 cremation pits found at edge of field boundary
• Spade cultivation and livestock farming became more important
• Six wooden buildings, 3 with pebble-lined hearths belonged to this phase
• Child remains under the floor of one building
• Buildings later destroyed

Question 4

EngLald

Answer 4

• Looking at field systems in England 1500-1200 BC

- Most orientated to NE or SE

Question 5

Deverel-Rimbury pottery

Answer 5

• became widespread across central-southern England from 1600 BC-1100 BC
• Overlapped with other forms such as Collared Urns

Question 6

Bronze Age Roundhouses

Answer 6

-Substantial roundhouses appeared in Middle Bronze Age

Question 7

Intensification or extensification?

Answer 7

• • Cranbourne Chase- no evidence of intensification in agriculture within BA field systems around settlements such as South Lodge
• This suggests field systems were not about economic intensification in response to rising populations but were related to widespread change in tenure and how land was viewed - extensification, rather than intensification

Question 8

Cosmology of Field Systems

Answer 8

• Marked degree of co-axiality e.g. at Salisbury Plain: Social or cosmological significance to this?
• Clocks - because they structured people’s daily activities, mvoements and practices
• Calendars - because people’s seasonal and annual routines were played out through fields (spring plantings, autumn harvests and culling)
• Compasses- because the physical structures of fields, ditches, trackways and hedges were a means by which people orientated themselves and navigated around landscapes and claimed familiarity over the world

Question 9

Trethellan Farm

Answer 9

• Cornwall
• Evidence of deliberate abandonment deposits and other related practices associated with a series of MBA roundhouses
• Houses may have had life cycles
• Foundation or ‘closure’ deposits - often involved metal objects, loom weights etc

Question 10

Brean Down

Answer 10

• Rocky Limestone peninsula in Somerset near Weston-super-Mare
• Preserved earthworks of a prehistoric field system and round barrows
• Earliest activity - palaeosoil with flints and 3 bealer sherds
• Oval stone building later constructed - associated with some Beaker but also later sherds
• Building dated to 1730-1515 BC
• Possible a craft or storage structure
• Next major phase of occupation included at least two roundhouses with stone footings, 1420-1000 BC, indicating occupation for many generations
• Objects associated with salt production in which brine is boiled down in small trays on pedestals

Question 11

Down Farm Bronze Age settlement, Dorset

Answer 11

• MBA roundhouses and domestic finds assemblages from this site on Cranbourne Chase are typical of Bronze Age settlements in C and S England
• The rectangular building in one phase less common

Question 12

Reaves

Answer 12

• Low stone walls incorporating earth and turf
• Sometimes visible on the surface of low banks - ephemeral
• Some are more prominent, as they are formed of granite boulders - sinuous
• Watershed reaves may have been significant boundaries in prehistory
• Often formed part of extensive prehistoric field systems
• Some form coaxial field systems, where fields, smaller enclosures & roundhouses are visible from the air, in low light or snow

Question 13

Roundhouses or ‘hut circles’

Answer 13

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Question 14

Darmoor settlement types

Answer 14

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Question 15

The Shoveldown Project

Answer 15

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Question 16

Cairnfields – clearance & cultivation?

Answer 16

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Question 17

Ring and Boulder Cairns

Answer 17

• In some parts of upland Britain such as Cumbria, there are also small ring cairns & boulder cairns (stone placed on natural earthfast boulders).
• A response to the landscape?

Question 18

Late Bronze Age major enclosures

Answer 18

-e.g. Mucking North Ring, Carl Wark or Carlshalton

Question 19

Springfield Lyons

Answer 19

• Large LBA enclosure with a prominent wooden gatepost structure and a probable palisade as well as a bank and ditch
• Site later reused as an Anglo-Saxon settlement and cemetery
• Perforated clay slabs and pottery found
• Evidence for bronze smelting with bronze slag and broken sword moulds deposited near enclosure entrance in ditch terminals

Question 20

Pit alignments

Answer 20

• Seem to have deliberately incorporated & physically referenced the positions of earlier MBA round barrows
• Even extensive excavation of pit alignments, as at Ling Hall Quarry in Warks. rarely finds much artefactual material.
• Most pits are empty, or with only scraps of bone and pottery. A small number contain placed deposits, however.

Question 21

Gardom’s Edge, Derbyshire

Answer 21

-LBA & EIA cairns & boundaries
-Although created by clearance, cairns were often semi-formal in design
-Some associated with flint & chert artefacts & in a few instances handfuls of cremated bone.
-Linear boundaries often incorporated earthfast boulders, sometimes changing course to do this.
-Larger earlier stones followed by smaller clearance.
-Several roundhouses
also excavated
-The roundhouse had 6 large postholes forming its entrance, & surrounding stakeholes. LBA pottery found in some PHs
-In a later phase, possibly after the use of the building as a commemorative act, a low stone rubble bank was constructed around it, with large boulders and a metalled surface later placed on top of where the 6 large entrance postholes had been

Question 22

The Gray Hill Landscape Research Project

Answer 22

• Robbed stone-lined cists
• Several types of stone boundary
• Possible later prehistoric, co-axial field boundaries

Question 23

Ceramics

Answer 23

• Only from the Middle Bronze Age that substantial differentiated assemblages of ceramics appear, with various different forms used in everyday cooking, eating and storage
• Some ‘domestic’ Beaker Assemblages are known

Question 24

Fengate

Answer 24

• Pryor interpreted field systems in functional terms, for handling ships-There were also human and animal burials from the ditches & unusual artefact deposits including metalwork
• Flag fen basin - thousands of hoof prints and piss mire more likely to be herds of cattle than flocks of sheep
• Bradley Fen - extensive MBA-LBA field system and associated settlement
• Field blocks associated with one or two roundhouses each, along with granaries, watering holes & animal burials, including one person placed tightly crouched in a large posthole
• Person placed head down in pit with their hands bound, placed deposits in waterholes including the sawn off prow of a dugout canoe
• Complete but buried skinned female aurochs buried tightly crouched in a pit and cattle bone deposits in pits

Question 25

Burnt Mounds

Answer 25

• Common across Britain and Ireland from the Bronze Age onwards
• Characterised by sometiems extensive deposits of burnt and fire-cracked stone
• Usually found close to watercourses and can survive as earthworks in upland parts of Britain and Ireland
• Sometimes found associated with central stone, timber or wicker-lined troughs or with pits
• Main uses proposed for them are cooking/feasting, or as saunas/ritual ‘sweat lodges’
• Brewing and animal hide/fleece preparation are also possibilities
• Sometimes butchered and burnt animal bone is found in burnt mounds

Question 26

LBA abandonment

Answer 26

• Some upland settlements and field systems appear to have been abandoned by LBA -result of Europe wide climatic change?
• Climate got wetter and colder in Britain and Ireland, and pear formation increased significantly
• Others argue that although changes occurred, impact on settlement is exaggerated
• C14 dates suggest that populations began to decline before climatic deterioration and that social and economic shifts can explain changes