Social landscapes

In 1960 a rock climber found a small Middle Bronze Age pot wedged in a cleft in the rock halfway down the eastern face of Crow’s Buttress, a granite outcrop on the southern edge of Dartmoor in Devon (Pettit 1974, 92). The Middle Bronze Age was a period during which extensive field systems were constructed on Dartmoor (Fleming 1988). As we shall see later in this chapter, these have often been thought to indicate the intensification of agriculture and an increasing concern to define land ownership in response to population pressure (e.g. Barrett 1980a; 1994, 148–9; Bradley 1984, 9; Yates 2007, 120–1; English 2013, 139–40). Such models imply the commodification of the natural world: the landscape is viewed primarily as a resource for economic exploitation. Yet this small pot calls such assumptions into question, for it can surely be best interpreted as an offering to spirit guardians or ancestors associated with a striking natural rock formation. This hints at a quite different way of engaging with and understanding the landscape. In this chapter we will explore the links between people and landscape, beginning with the monumental landscapes of the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age, moving then to consider what the appearance of field systems during the Middle and Late Bronze Age tells us about human–environment relationships during the later part of the period, and finally considering some of the ways in which animals were incorporated into the social worlds of Bronze Age communities. Funerary and ceremonial monuments of various sorts are the most eye-catching feature of the Early Bronze Age landscape and have dominated our interpretations of the period. By contrast, as we have seen in Chapter 4, settlement evidence of this date is relatively sparse. This, and recent isotope analyses of Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age inhumation burials (Jay et al. 2012; Parker Pearson et al. 2016), suggest a significant degree of residential mobility.

Introduction: Identity and alterity in Bronze Age Britain and Ireland

In 2004, excavation in advance of the construction of a bypass around Mitchelstown in County Cork uncovered a number of pits on the banks of the Gradoge River (Kiely and Sutton 2007). On the bottom of one of these pits, three pottery vessels and a ceramic spoon had been laid on two flat stones. The pots had been deposited in a row: at the centre of the row was a small vessel that clearly models a human face with eyes, a protruding nose and ears, and, at the base of the pot, two feet (cover images). Oak charcoal from the pit returned a date of 1916–1696 cal BC. This find calls into question one of the basic conceptual building blocks that underpins our own contemporary understanding of the world—the distinction between people and objects—for it hints that some artefacts may have been imbued with human qualities and agentive capacities. This book is about the relationship between Bronze Age people and their material worlds. It explores the impact of the post-Enlightenment ‘othering’ of the non-human on our understanding of Bronze Age society. As we shall see, there is in fact considerable evidence to suggest that the categorical distinctions drawn in our own cultural context, for example between subject and object, self and other, and culture and nature, were not recognized or articulated in the same way during this period. So too contemporary forms of instrumental reason—encapsulated in a particular understanding of what constitutes logical, practical action and in the distinction we make between the ritual and the secular—have had a profound effect on how we view the Bronze Age world. Our understanding of the Bronze Age has undoubtedly changed dramatically since Christian Jürgensen Thomsen first popularized the term in his famous formulation of the three-age system in 1836 (Morris 1992). The very notion of a ‘Bronze Age’ foregrounds concepts of technical efficiency and advancement that doubtless chimed with the preoccupations and cultural values of Thomsen’s audience in the industrializing world in the nineteenth century.

Object biographies

In September 1886, John and Richard Mortimer excavated a large barrow at Garton Slack, East Yorkshire (Mortimer 1905, 229). At the centre of the barrow lay the inhumation burial of a young adult male. A flint knife, a clay button, and two lumps of yellow ochre had been arranged behind his head; at his left hand were two quartz pebbles and fragments of two boar’s tusks, while the scapula of a pig had been laid on top of his ribs. One detail of this burial seems particularly alien to contemporary eyes, however. When the body had begun to decompose, his mandible was removed and placed carefully on his chest, and a miniature Food Vessel inserted into his mouth. Here, a pot replaced an element of the human self and the physical boundary between person and object was elided: the open mouths of both pot and body worked as channels through which relationships flowed in processes of communication and commensality. This chapter will explore the relationship between people and objects in the Bronze Age. The Bronze Age saw the introduction of new technologies, notably metalworking, which had a significant impact on concepts of personhood and identity. A greater diversity of materials was employed than in previous centuries, including visually striking substances such as amber and faience, while more ‘mundane’ materials such as bone were used to make a new and wider variety of objects, particularly during the later part of the period. Such objects were incorporated into new contexts too, notably settlements and burials, and our interpretation of these finds—especially those from burials and hoards—has had a significant impact on our understanding of the period. We will start by examining objects from Early Bronze Age contexts, focusing in particular on burials, before moving on to consider what technologies such as metalworking and cloth production can tell us about the construction of concepts of the self in the Middle and Late Bronze Age. During the early part of the period, artefacts such as copper-alloy daggers, bone pins, pottery vessels, and stone tools were buried with the dead.

The living house

In the winter of 1995–6, a Late Bronze Age house was excavated at Callestick in Cornwall (Jones 1998). This showed an interesting sequence of activities on its abandonment. First, the timber posts that had supported its roof were removed and the sockets of those at the centre of the building were filled with materials that included charcoal, pottery, quartz, and fragments of rubbing stones. The low stone wall that originally surrounded the structure was pushed into the interior of the building, and a series of quartz blocks were placed across the doorway, as if to prevent access. The roundhouse was then filled with a deposit of clay containing stone, charcoal, quartz, pottery, flint, and an inverted saddle quern. Parts of a large decorated jar were placed just left of the doorway. Finally, a ring of quartz stones was arranged around the edge of the building, inviting visual comparison with the funerary cairns of earlier centuries. This sequence of activities in many ways seems quite alien to us, for we have quite different experiences and understandings of house and home. The past two centuries have seen mass movements of people on an extraordinary scale as a result of war, urbanization, global differences in the distribution of wealth and opportunity, and a range of other factors. At the same time, dramatic social and political change has resulted in the perceived fragmentation of communities. All this has had a significant impact both on our relationship with the houses we live in, and on the concept of home itself (Allan and Crow 1989; Spain 1992; Birdwell-Pheasant and Lawrence-Zuniga 1999). Home may now be a transitory place, a state of mind evoked by the judicious arrangement of a few meaningful objects, but at the same time the idea of home remains highly emotive. High house prices in contemporary Britain and Ireland reflect the significance of the home in the cultivation of self-worth, emotional security, and social position. The materiality of the home evokes an aura of permanence in a world of change, acting as a lieu de mémoire in which ideas of personal and family history can be created.

Conclusion: The flow of life in Bronze Age Britain and Ireland

It is evident from the discussion in previous chapters that the projection into the past of dualistic conceptual frameworks that sharply distinguish subject from object, for example, or culture from nature, is problematic. Instead, the evidence suggests that the Bronze Age self was not constructed in opposition to an external ‘other’. Things outside of the body, such as significant objects, formed inalienable components of the person, while parts of the human body circulated in the same exchange networks as objects. The self was constituted relationally, so that the social and political position of particular people depended on their connections with others. Special places, too, were sedimented into the self, forming an inextricable part of personal, family, and community histories. The Bronze Age person can therefore be viewed as a composite—an assemblage of substances and elements flowing in and out of the wider social landscape. Indeed, it is interesting to note how ideas of substance may have changed from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. Neolithic technologies—notably the grinding and polishing of stone axes—made evident the qualities of the material itself: polishing enhanced the colour, texture, and geological inclusions of such objects, rendering visible their very essence and origin (Whittle 1995; Cooney 2002). By contrast, bronze was made of a mixture of materials and its constituent elements were hidden. The production of composite objects also became more frequent during the Bronze Age (Jones 2002, 164–5), for example the miniature halberd pendant made of gold, amber, and copper alloy from an Early Bronze Age grave at Wilsford G8 in Wiltshire (Needham et al. 2015a, 230). Sometimes particular components of such items were concealed: the conical pendant or button from Upton Lovell G2e in Wiltshire comprised a shale core covered with sheet gold (Needham et al. 2015a, 222–5). This need not indicate an attempt to deceive others into believing this item was made of solid gold, however, for shale was itself used to make decorative items and was evidently a valued material during this period.

Fragmenting the body

In 2002, the extraordinarily wealthy inhumation burial of a single adult male was discovered less than 5 kilometres from Stonehenge in Wiltshire. The Amesbury Archer, as he soon came to be known, was buried sometime between 2380 and 2290 BC (Fitzpatrick 2011), and he was accompanied by an array of grave goods including three copper knives, a pair of gold ornaments, five Beaker pots, seventeen barbed and tanged arrowheads, two stone bracers, a shale belt ring, and a possible cushion stone for the working of metal objects. The appearance of single burials with grave goods at the beginning of the Chalcolithic has long been interpreted as indicating the emergence of an ideology of the individual (e.g. Renfrew 1974; Shennan 1982). The objects buried with the Archer have been viewed as a direct reflection of his wealth and status, and the discovery seems to support established views of Bronze Age society as increasingly hierarchical—dominated by individuals who drew political power from success in long-distance exchange, control over specialist technologies such as metalworking, and prowess in hunting and warfare (Needham 2000a; Needham et al. 2010; Sheridan 2012). It has frequently been recognized, however, that such evolutionist narratives in fact present a reductionist reading of the evidence (e.g. Petersen 1972; Petersen et al. 1975, 49; Brück 2004a; Gibson, A. 2004), and detailed evaluation of human remains from both mortuary contexts and elsewhere indicates considerable variability in the treatment and perception of the human body (Sofaer Derevenski 2002; Gibson, A. 2004; Brück 2006a; Fitzpatrick 2011, 201–2; Appleby 2013; Fowler 2013, ch. 4). We will return to consider the significance of grave goods in Chapter 3; here we will focus on the treatment of the body both in Bronze Age mortuary rites and in other forms of social and ritual practice. As we shall see, the bodies of the dead were manipulated in complex ways that indicate the existence of concepts of the self that differ profoundly from those familiar from our own cultural context.