The Research in Retrospect

In some respects this project was the successor to the research published in 2007 as The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland, but there are significant contrasts between the books. The results of development-led archaeology have played a central role in both, but they have influenced their contents in different ways. When the earlier book was published it was among the first to draw extensively on fieldwork undertaken as part of the planning process. To some extent the course of that research was unpredictable, for it was not clear how far the results of the new excavations and surveys would diverge from what was already known. All that was certain from the outset was that a large amount of new information had been collected and that very little of it had entered the public domain. There was a disparity between the conventional archaeological literature—journal articles, monographs, and regional syntheses—and the great majority of reports, which were prepared for planning authorities and commercial clients. Those documents were difficult to trace and sometimes difficult to access. What the project showed was that such sources were vital to any understanding of the past. It also demonstrated that at least some of the orthodoxies on which public policy depended were inconsistent with the results of work that had already taken place. The same problem affected teaching and research, for they rarely took account of the new sources of information. In retrospect, the earlier project may have influenced later research in a way that had not been foreseen. It did not, and could not, offer a completely new version of British and Irish prehistory, as it was written at a time when many excavations were still in progress—the fieldwork associated with road-building in Ireland is a good example. In any case the dissemination of information in the archaeology of these islands was so inefficient that particularly in England it was difficult to find out what had been done. Tracing the results was an even harder task, and it was not completely successful.

The Expansion of Settlement (1100–250 BC)

The previous chapter addressed an important period of change, but this would not have been apparent to the scholars who devised the Three Age Model. The most important developments between 1600 and 1100 BC were most clearly evidenced in the ancient landscape and registered to a smaller extent by the metalwork finds on which the traditional scheme depends. The same is true of the evidence considered in this chapter, for it cuts across the conventional distinction between the Bronze and Iron Ages. It begins in a period when bronze was still the main metal, but also considers a time when a new kind of raw material was employed. Similarly, it ends part way through the phase usually characterized as ‘Iron Age’, so that the drastic economic and political transformations that communities experienced in the late first millennium BC can be considered separately. These provide the subject of Chapter 7. By the late Bronze Age, evidence for settlements and houses is fairly abundant, and some sparsely used parts of the landscape were occupied for the first. This expansion—which continued into the Iron Age—is associated with new agricultural techniques and a wider range of crops. The nature of settlements suggests an emphasis on small household groups as the basic unit of society. New kinds of focal sites also appeared, which may have been used for assemblies and public ceremony. They include hillforts in upland regions, while other communal centres may have played the same role in lowland areas. Meanwhile, the trend towards less elaborate burial practices that had begun during the middle Bronze Age spread increasingly widely. Investment in funerary monuments was generally modest, and mortuary rituals displayed social distinctions in relatively subtle ways. While prestige objects were rarely placed with the dead, the deposition of metalwork in rivers and other places in the landscape increased. These metal artefacts have provided the basis for studies of long-distance interaction, and their styles have been used to define three geographically extensive traditions, in Atlantic, Nordic, and central Europe. Other ritual practices that developed during this time involved feasting and cooking.

Late Foragers and First Farmers (8000–3700 BC)

This chapter spans an important period division. It considers both the ‘Mesolithic’ hunter-gatherers of the study area, and the first ‘Neolithic’ farmers. The relationship between them is one of the most important issues to be investigated by prehistoric archaeology, but it is also one of the most contentious. The period between 8000 and 3700 BC saw the change from a reliance on wild resources to a new subsistence economy based on the ownership of domesticated plants and animals. It must have involved completely new forms of social organization. The transition between these phases occurred at different times in different parts of north-west Europe, but in all instances it is where two distinctive kinds of scholarship impinge on one another. To some extent the distinction between these kinds of research is determined by the kinds of evidence that are available. For the most part Mesolithic activity is characterized by hearths, scatters of stone tools, shell middens, and other food remains. In some regions there are graves, but traces of domestic buildings are comparatively rare. There is little sign of more monumental structures. The Neolithic period, on the other hand, is characterized by durable wooden houses, enclosures, mounds, and stone-built tombs, and by a much wider range of artefacts. This contrast has implications for the kinds of research that can be undertaken. With notable exceptions, students of the Mesolithic are most concerned with food production, settlement patterns, and lithic technology and place a particular emphasis on ecology and adaptation. Specialists on the Neolithic period do not neglect these fields, but they are also able to consider monumental architecture. Because they can draw on a wider range of data, their studies extend to ritual and social organization in a way that is more difficult to achieve in the archaeology of foragers. That contrast has become even wider with recent increases in the scale of fieldwork. Mesolithic sites contain comparatively few subsoil features and are difficult to detect by remote sensing or sample excavation.

Total Landscapes (250 BC to the Early Roman Period)

By the late first century BC, most of north-west Europe had been incorporated into the Roman Empire or had fallen under its shadow. This has profoundly affected how the late Iron Age is perceived and studied. Being able to view peoples and places through written sources and coin inscriptions means that the archaeology of the period is often approached very differently to those discussed in previous chapters, with greater emphasis on historical events and causality. The chronology encourages this. Late La Tène sites on the Continent can now be dated to within a generation or so, anchored by a growing number of dendrochronological fixed points (Kaenel 2006; Durost and Lambert 2007), although similar precision is rarely attainable in northern Europe or in Ireland and northern Britain, which rely largely on radiocarbon dating. The prevailing narrative for the late Iron Age in central Europe, Gaul, and southern Britain—essentially the areas that later became part of the Roman empire—is one of increasing hierarchy, social complexity, political centralization, urbanization, and economic development. These changes are seen as bound up with increasing contact with the Mediterranean world, leading up to the Roman conquests of the first centuries BC and AD. This is contrasted with the situation in northern Britain, Ireland, and ‘Germanic’ northern Europe, which are assumed to have been more tradition-bound and resistant to change. As we shall see, recent excavations do not necessarily contradict this narrative, but they do suggest that the picture is far more complex. Not all developments can be fitted into the story of growing social complexity, whilst to assume that Roman expansion was the most important factor at work at this period is to see events through the eyes of Classical writers (Bradley 2007). It is important to understand late Iron Age societies in their own terms, rather than just as precursors to provincial Roman societies. Many influential approaches to the period—from core–periphery models to the current emphasis on the agency of client rulers (Creighton 2000)—suffer from teleology as a result of having been constructed with half an eye to explaining the pattern of Roman expansion.

Changes in the Pattern of Settlement (1600–1100 BC)

The Three Age Model has outlived its usefulness, but even now it is difficult to see how it can be replaced. The beginning of the Bronze Age is sometimes termed the Chalcolithic, and the transition to the Iron Age has also been treated as distinct phase, but a still greater problem is how to acknowledge the changes that came about during the later second millennium BC. Some of those developments are considered here. When Coles and Harding wrote The Bronze Age in Europe over thirty years ago, there seemed to be a solution to the problem. They divided this phase into an ‘earlier’ and a ‘later’ Bronze Age (Coles and Harding 1979), acknowledging the important developments that happened part way through the period. These concerned settlements, houses, food production, mortuary rituals, and metalwork, although the significance of these elements differed from place to place. In their view the important division happened at about 1300 BC. They may have been influenced by Eogan’s review of Irish Bronze Age metalwork, which adopted a similar terminology, although he dated the transition to 1200 BC (Eogan 1964). In 1990 a similar division was proposed for the British Bronze Age, but that was based on developments in the pattern of settlement that began around 1500 BC (Barrett and Bradley 1980). It is revealing that subsequent accounts of Irish prehistory have reverted to a more complex chronological scheme based on successive styles of metalwork, whilst British researchers who used the terms favoured by Coles and Harding were unable to agree when a change from an ‘earlier’ to a ‘later’ phase occurred. Different versions favour starting dates of 1500 BC (or a little before) or 1100 BC (Bradley 2007, 178–81). Anthony Harding published a more recent account of the European Bronze Age in 2000 and it is revealing that the two-fold division of this period no longer plays a part. The chronology is based on the typological schemes worked out by Montelius, Reinecke, and their successors, and on radiocarbon and tree-ring dating (Harding 2000).

Regional Monumental Landscapes (3700–2500 BC)

By about 3700 BC every region of the study area had been settled by farmers (Fig. 3.1), although there must have been local differences between the areas that were colonized by immigrants and those where the indigenous population had changed its way of life. The expansion of agriculture would extend little further and, when it did so, it would be mainly a feature of Fennoscandia. In some of the regions discussed here farming had already been practiced for between a thousand and fifteen hundred years. That was certainly true in the Rhineland, the southern Netherlands, and parts of France, but in other areas it had been adopted only recently. Such was the case in the northern Netherlands, Jutland, Britain, and Ireland, but by the period considered in this chapter the process was virtually complete. Not only did these parts of the study area have different histories, there were significant contrasts in the roles played by local monuments. For the most part such structures were not a feature of the earliest Neolithic period, although even here there were significant contrasts. In the Rhineland, the earthwork enclosures of the LBK were associated with the last settlements in that tradition, and in certain cases may even have taken the place of houses that had been abandoned. In Brittany, on the other hand, the first stone monuments seem to be closely related to the oldest evidence of farming. There was a significant difference between developments in those two regions. From the beginning, the LBK had been associated with enormous longhouses, but on the Atlantic coast of France early settlers may not have occupied such impressive structures. Here stone monuments, especially menhirs, could have been erected from the outset. A similar contrast was found in other regions studied in Chapter 2, but it is even more apparent in the phase considered now, for this was a time when enclosures and mounds were built at an increasing pace. There is little evidence of houses except in Scandinavia, Ireland, and the Northern Isles of Scotland.

Setting the Scene

In 2008, the Danish prehistorian Kristian Kristiansen considered the need for an ‘archaeology of Europe’. The article was one of a series in which he discussed intellectual developments in the discipline. His argument is directly relevant to our project. Kristiansen (2008) identified a series of changes in the practice of archaeology and, in particular, in the scale at which research has been conducted. Such changes reflected broader theoretical trends in the discipline. There was the alternation between ‘rational’ and ‘romantic’ approaches that had been identified by Andrew Sherratt (1997). It operated on a twenty-five to thirty-year cycle and extended from the nineteenth century to the present day. There was a political cycle in which prehistoric archaeology was influenced to varying extents by broader developments in contemporary society. In particular, it was coloured by different conceptions of cultural heritage, beginning with the rise of the nation-state. Finally, there was a funding cycle to which these features were closely related. At different times research was confined within modern borders, or scholars were encouraged to work in larger teams and over a more extensive area. All these trends could be illustrated by the scope of regional, national, and international journals and by the languages in which the results of the research were published. Such issues were particularly relevant to intellectual history. Kristiansen suggested that the adoption of particular theoretical perspectives was closely related to that question of scale. Approaches which looked for general patterns among prehistoric societies tended to discuss large regions, as might be expected of projects which adopted a comparative approach. They were characterized by rationalism, and in Britain, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia were influenced by American processual archaeology. At the same time the emphasis on large-scale regularities existed in a certain tension with approaches coloured by romanticism. They showed a greater concern with the practices and beliefs of individual communities and are sometimes described as post-processual. Because these different approaches were favoured at different times, it was hard to bring them into alignment, so that the work of one generation might be geographically extensive, while its successors would focus on a single region.

Barrow Landscapes Across the Channel (2500–1600 BC)

It was easy to choose the title of this chapter. Over a span of almost a thousand years, which embraces the late Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and early Bronze Age periods in local chronologies, the archaeological record of northwest Europe takes a distinctive form. Round barrows are widely distributed and are found on both sides of the English Channel and the North Sea. At the same time there are few regions in which the dwellings of the living population can be identified and studied in any detail. There is good evidence for long-distance contacts illustrated by the movement of artefacts and raw materials, and analysis of human bones suggests that certain individuals travelled in the course of their lives. Even so, the best indications of these networks are provided by the contents of the graves. There is a danger of taking this state of affairs literally. Any account that summarizes the distribution of funerary monuments is subject to certain biases. Although barrows play a prominent part in the archaeology of the later third and earlier second millennia BC, there were many burials without mounds. There are also regions in which earthworks are preserved and others where they have been destroyed. For example, in lowland England major concentrations of round barrows have been documented on the chalk of Wessex and Sussex, but it has taken aerial photography, supplemented by development-led excavations, to show that they occurred in equally high densities on the Isle of Thanet which commands the entrance to the Thames estuary. On the opposite shore of the Channel there is a great concentration of round barrows in Flanders and another on the gravels of the Somme (Fig. 4.2; De Reu et al. 2011). Again they have been discovered from the air, but in this case comparatively few have been excavated and dated. There is a striking contrast with the situation across the border in the southern Netherlands where round barrows still survive. Even there research has shown that many examples were levelled in the nineteenth century (Bourgeois 2013).