The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

The Earlier Bronze Age
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Wiltshire (see Chapter 4). We might think of them as fortified enclosures, built by Beaker invaders
who had taken over existing centres of ritual power, but such enclosures were probably ceremonial
spaces for crowds, herds and flocks. The construction of the Stonehenge circles took place
within a Late Neolithic circular enclosure and cremation cemetery. Such acts of appropriation,
and transformation from wood to stone, may have been designed to incorporate the places of
the ancients, rework ancestries and legitimize ancestral power, in much the same way as pagan
Saxon cemeteries were often sited on the funerary monuments of the Early Bronze Age.
Another indication of how the natural or given landscape was transformed into a social domain
is provided by the rock art of cup-and-ring marks found in northern England and Scotland
(Bradley 1993). These curious motifs, pounded onto natural rock faces, are problematic to date
and perhaps impossible to decipher, yet there is a patterning in their distribution. In certain areas,
the ring motifs are found at higher elevations than the cup marks, which are often found overlooking
lowland soils. The larger and more complex designs often overlook the most productive soils in
their localities and also are often found in areas with concentrations of henges and ceremonial
monuments. In certain stone cist burials within Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age cairns,
some of the stone slabs have been detatched from cup-and-ring mark surfaces and the carvings
are generally turned inwards towards the remains of the corpse, perhaps linking the deceased to
control of those places.
Barrow groups and cemeteries, as noted, were regularly sited in relation to earlier henges, long
barrows, cursuses, stone circles and standing stones. Many of these places of the dead seem to
have formed sacred landscapes that were devoid of contemporary settlements, such as the area
north-east of Peterborough. Many of these funerary landscapes seem to have been relatively
open and suitable for pasture, either on downland or river meadows. The barrow concentrations
may well have marked the summer grazing lands for cattle and sheep for different territories,
thus embodying the ancestral heartlands of different kin groups. Whilst pastoralism was an
important element of Early Bronze Age economy, crops of wheat, barley, pulses, oats and flax
were grown. Early Bronze Age cross-ploughing, presumably with a stone-tipped wooden ard, is
known from Gwithian in Cornwall (Megaw in Burgess and Miket 1976) and from Rosinish on
Benbecula (Shepherd in Burgess and Miket 1976). The lack of houses has led to conjecture that
people were semi-sedentary, if not nomadic, and thus largely pastoralists, yet the archaeologist’s
eye view, somewhere below ground level, probably underestimates the sturdiness and longevity
of these small homes.
The Earlier Bronze Age was a time of major expansion and clearance. Whereas evidence
from landsnails indicates that substantial portions of the Avebury, Dorchester and Stonehenge
areas were already largely cleared of forest, other areas were now being colonized and cleared
(Smith 1984). In the Midlands, the Millstone Grit of the Peak District was colonized by users of
Food Vessels and Collared Urns. Other uplands, such as Dartmoor and Bodmin moor, were also
utilized on a much greater scale than before (Fleming 1988). In these areas, as well as on the chalk
downlands and in the river valleys, long, linear boundaries established complex and fixed allotments
of land. Extensive and intensive use of the landscape on the Highland edge in eastern Scotland,
on a scale not previously apparent, is demonstrable from pollen analysis, anchored by radiocarbon
dates, in inland Aberdeenshire.
STONEHENGE AND OTHER MONUMENTS
The standing stones, stone rows and stone circles of the British Isles have been the subjects of
innumerable books, of which a few of the general surveys can be recommended (Burl 1983;
1993; Ruggles and Whittle 1981). Whilst most are thought to date to the Late Neolithic or Early