The Queerly Departed

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Colwill
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Physical Body ◽  
Archaeological Material ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Iron Age ◽  
Gender Performances ◽  
Gender Archaeology

This chapter explores four remarkable burials in Late Iron Age Scandinavia, looking beyond the static scene uncovered at the point of excavation to the funerary processes that created the sites. The majority of the graves discussed here have been associated with the magico-religious practice of seiðr; the chapter therefore also explores the evidence for connecting this practice with transgressive gender performances, taking into account the problematic literary evidence as well as the difficulty in interpreting the archaeological material. Based on an analysis of these burials, the chapter argues that an approach to gender archaeology which moves beyond assumptions of a fixed binary inherent to the physical body can only enrich our understanding of the past.

scholarly journals Hillforts, rocks and warriors

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 154-165
Author(s):  
Javier Rodriguez-Corral
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Iron Age ◽  
The Bronze Age

During the Late Iron Age, monumental stone statues of warriors were established in the northwest of Iberia, ‘arming’ landscapes that ultimately encouraged specific types of semiotic ideologies in the region. This paper deals with how these statues on rocks not only worked in the production of liminality in the landscape – creating transitional zones on it –, but also how they functioned as liminal gateways to the past, absorbing ideas from the Bronze Age visual culture up to the Late Iron Age one, in order to create emotional responses to a new socio-political context.

scholarly journals Making Space for Past Futures: Rural Landscape Temporalities in Roman Britain

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-342
Author(s):  
Andrew Gardner ◽  
Lacey Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Rural Landscape ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Alternative Futures ◽  
Roman Britain ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Iron Age ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
The Future ◽  
Material Record

In this paper, we seek to explore the ways in which landscapes become venues not only for manipulations of the past in a present, but also for shaping possible futures. Considerations of temporality and being in the landscape have been more strongly focused on the past and social memory than the future, anticipation and projectivity, but these are vital considerations if we are to preserve the possibility that past people imagined alternative futures. A fruitful archaeological context for an exploration of past futures can be found in the choices people made during the late Iron Age and Roman period in Britain, which has an increasingly rich and high-resolution material record for complex changes and continuities during a period of cultural interactions and imperial power dynamics. More specifically, recent research into the architectural and material practices evident on rural settlement sites and across landscapes forces us to challenge preconceptions about the reactive/reactionary culture of rural societies. Case-studies from Kent and the West Country will be deployed to develop the argument that in the materializing of time, the future has a very significant part to play.

Artefact studies in Late Iron Age and Roman Britain: a blast from the past?

Antiquity ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 86 (331) ◽  
pp. 258-260
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Ponting
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Roman Britain ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Iron Age

Memories of the Past in Roman Britain

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zena Kamash
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Memory Process ◽  
Roman Britain ◽  
Social Instability ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Iron Age ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation

After setting out the history of memory studies and the role of archaeology in these studies, this chapter examines three realms of memory in Roman Britain: the burial of memories; the reorganization of landscapes and memories; and the building of religious memory. First, I explore how burying people and objects can be part of the memory process, focusing on embodied actions and the use of legendary topographies in the landscape. I then examine how different memory communities responded to major periods of landscape reorganization, linking this to wider discussions about the creation and maintenance of identity in Roman Britain. Finally, I explore the Romano-Celtic temple phenomenon. I argue that the construction of temples was linked to the kinds of memory-making that are particularly prevalent in times of social instability, a phenomenon seen as part of a broader set of processes that began in the late Iron Age.

Manching Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Settlement Dynamics and Urbanization in Iron Age Central Europe

2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 459-490 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Wendling
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Flood Plain ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Iron Age ◽  
Urban Status ◽  
Characteristic Scheme ◽  
Flexible Model ◽  
Settlement Evolution ◽  
Standard Development

Traditionally, research on late Iron Age societies of Central Europe has to some degree focused on large fortified settlements oroppida, presumably ranking at the top of the Celtic settlement hierarchy. Theoppidumof Manching in Upper Bavaria has in the past been seen as a paradigmatic example of pre-Roman transalpine urbanization, in both chronological and functional terms. However, both its dating and its topographical position in a shallow flood plain of the Danube justify a distinction from contemporaneous or successive fortified ‘towns'. Recent studies have identified another particular type of settlement – large unfortified centres of crafts and trade – as a major feature of prehistoric urbanization. Again, Manching and its pre-fortified stages of urban development reveal a characteristic scheme of eastern Celtic settlement evolution that eventually breaks with a standard development when a massive rampart is constructed. Based on recent research at Manching and its hinterland, and taking into account the dynamic character of urbanization, a flexible model of urban evolution is developed here. This model allows for a comparative and quantifiable notion of variable degrees of local and supra-regional urban status.

scholarly journals Between Roundhouse and Villa: Assessing Perinatal and Infant Burials from Piddington, Northamptonshire

Britannia ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 195-219
Author(s):  
Claire M. Hodson
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Skeletal Development ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Poor Health ◽  
Infant Survival ◽  
Roman Britain ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Iron Age ◽  
Growth Changes ◽  
Age And Sex

AbstractThe discovery of perinatal and infant individuals is common in the excavation of Iron Age and Romano-British domestic sites. In recent years, the discovery of many such burials has led to interpretations of infanticide and unceremonious disposal. Although this has been a widely discussed phenomenon, much of the literature has focused on the funerary context, and the biological age and sex estimates of these individuals, with little consideration of the palaeopathological evidence. This article provides a detailed analysis of 17 perinates/infants from the late Iron Age/early Roman site of Piddington, Northants. It discusses the skeletal evidence for poor health and growth, and highlights the potential of these remains to reveal alternative insights into perinatal and infant death. Evidence of growth changes and pathological lesions were identified, suggesting that these individuals experienced chronic episodes of poor health that affected their skeletal development. The study explores the implications of these findings within the context of Iron Age and Roman Britain. At Piddington, the death of these infants is not associated with the cultural practice of infanticide, but occurred due to poor health, highlighting the precarious nature of infant survival in the past.

scholarly journals Hillforts, rocks and warriors

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 154-165
Author(s):  
Javier Rodriguez-Corral
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Iron Age ◽  
The Bronze Age

During the Late Iron Age, monumental stone statues of warriors were established in the northwest of Iberia, ‘arming’ landscapes that ultimately encouraged specific types of semiotic ideologies in the region. This paper deals with how these statues on rocks not only worked in the production of liminality in the landscape – creating transitional zones on it –, but also how they functioned as liminal gateways to the past, absorbing ideas from the Bronze Age visual culture up to the Late Iron Age one, in order to create emotional responses to a new socio-political context.

Commemorating Dwelling: The Death and Burial of Houses in Iron and Viking Age Scandinavia

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianne Hem Eriksen
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Viking Age ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Iron Age ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Burial Mounds ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Social Markers ◽  
Deceased Individual

Current debates on the ontology of objects and matter have reinvigorated archaeological theoretical discourse and opened a multitude of perspectives on understanding the past, perspectives which have only just begun to be explored in scholarship on Late Iron Age Scandinavia. This article is a critical discussion of the sporadic tradition of covering longhouses and halls with burial mounds in the Iron and Viking ages. After having stood as social markers in the landscape for decades or even centuries, some dwellings were transformed into mortuary monuments — material and mnemonic spaces of the dead. Yet, was it the house or a deceased individual that was being interred and memorialized? Through an exploration of buildings that have been overlain by burial mounds, and by drawing on theoretical debates about social biographies and the material turn, this article illuminates mortuary citations between houses and bodies in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. Ultimately, I question the assumed anthropocentricity of the practice of burying houses. Rather, I suggest that the house was interwoven with the essence of the household and that the transformation of the building was a mortuary citation not necessarily of an individual, but of the entire, entangled social meshwork of the house.

Home Truths from Travellers’ Tales: On the Transmission of Culture in the European Iron Age

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daphne Nash Briggs
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Special Interest ◽  
Roman History ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Doctoral Thesis ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Iron Age ◽  
Part Time ◽  
The Many ◽  
Research Students

I must have been one of Barry’s first research students in Oxford when he took over supervision of my doctoral thesis in 1973. Central Gaul and its coinage in the late Iron Age were still frontier areas for research for a British student and I had come to them from Classics and Roman history, with a special interest in coinage but with no experience whatever of archaeology. I am eternally grateful to Barry for his kindly and enthusiastic guidance as I completed my thesis on time and for his encouragement to continue afterwards with research into Iron Age economy and society. He invited me to give my first public paper at the landmark Oppida conference at Rewley House in 1975 (Nash 1976) and we jointly supervised a number of research students while I was at the Ashmolean Museum as Assistant Keeper first of Roman, then of Greek coins in the Heberden Coin Room, which I left in 1986 to pursue another career as a Child Psychotherapist. I doubt I would have had the energy or self-discipline to return to part-time, freelance study of Iron Age Italy in its wider European setting a few years ago had Barry not greeted a draft of something I had written on French prehistory with, ‘Don’t stop now!’ and sponsored my application for an Honorary Research Associateship at the Institute of Archaeology at Oxford. With this chapter based on work in progress I would like to thank him for all his support over the years, and celebrate a long association. Re-reading some of Barry’s recent books with this paper in mind I found I kept wanting to engage him in conversation in the many places where, with an enviable narrative freedom that it is difficult to imagine in the academic archaeology of thirty years ago, he evokes the reality of people’s lives in the past, whether it be Pytheas’ journey to the frozen north (Cunliffe 2002) or the Celtic raiding mentality (Cunliffe 1997: 88–9) or wondering whether old fighters living in the Fayum oasis in the mid-third century BC told ‘their incredulous children stories of the fertile Danube plain or the pine-clad slopes of Mount Parnassos remembered from the time when they had camped in its shadow waiting to pillage Delphi’ (Cunliffe 1997: 182).

Iron Age and Roman Enclosed Settlement at Winchester Road, Basingstoke

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-97
Author(s):  
Richard Massey ◽  
Matt Nichol ◽  
Dana Challinor ◽  
Sharon Clough ◽  
Matilda Holmes ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
Field Boundary ◽  
Crop Processing ◽  
Late Iron Age ◽  
Middle Iron Age ◽  
Grave Goods

Excavation in Area 1 identified an enclosed settlement of Middle–Late Iron Age and Early Roman date, which included a roundhouse gully and deep storage pits with complex fills. A group of undated four-post structures, situated in the east of Area 1, appeared to represent a specialised area of storage or crop processing of probable Middle Iron Age date. A sequence of re-cutting and reorganisation of ditches and boundaries in the Late Iron Age/Early Roman period was followed, possibly after a considerable hiatus, by a phase of later Roman activity, Late Iron Age reorganisation appeared to be associated with the abandonment of a roundhouse, and a number of structured pit deposits may also relate to this period of change. Seven Late Iron Age cremation burials were associated with a contemporary boundary ditch which crossed Area 1. Two partly-exposed, L-shaped ditches may represent a later Roman phase of enclosed settlement and a slight shift in settlement focus. An isolated inhumation burial within the northern margins of Area 1 was tentatively dated by grave goods to the Early Saxon period.<br/> Area 2 contained a possible trackway and field boundary ditches, of which one was of confirmed Late Iron Age/Early Roman date. A short posthole alignment in Area 2 was undated, and may be an earlier prehistoric feature.

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