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

The Earlier Bronze Age
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Identities also switched in emphasis from individual variations within a geographically uniform
material culture to regional expressions of belonging. Changes in metalwork, with regional styles
of palstaves, and in pottery, with the introduction of regional urn styles and Deverel-Rimbury
styles, heralded a new regionalism. The increase in size and robustness of houses, and the
elaboration of food storage, preparation and consumption also point to a new emphasis on the
household group and their intimate domestic rituals and routines. Finally, the treatment of the
dead was changing from burial or cremation in big groups of large mounds to cremation without
grave goods in small cemeteries behind the settlements. The role of the dead had altered from
being visibly commemorated ancestral guardians of the wider communities’ pastures to local
markers of a new sense of place fixed on the homestead. As the transition to the Later Bronze
Age approached, people’s very nature was changing, as personal identities were defined less by
lineage and more by territory. Control over land counted as much as control over people.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following for permission to use information and illustrations: John
Barrett, Colin Burgess, Mike Hamilton, Jon Humble, Niall Sharples, the Ashmolean Museum,
Batsford, Blackwell, English Heritage, Orion Press and Sheffield City Museum.
Key texts
Barrett, J.C., 1994. Fragments from antiquity: an archaeology of social life in Britain, 2900–1200 BC. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Burgess, C., 1980. The age of Stonehenge. London: Dent.
Burgess, C. and Miket, R. (eds) 1976. Settlement and economy in the third and second millennia BC. Oxford: British
Archaeological Reports 33.
Clarke, D.V., Cowie, T.G. and Foxon, A., 1985. Symbols of power at the time of Stonehenge. Edinburgh: HMSO
for National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland.
Kinnes, I. and Varndell, G. (eds) 1995. ‘Unbaked Urns of Rudely Shape’: essays on British and Irish pottery for Ian
Longworth. London: British Museum.
Parker Pearson, M., 1994. Bronze Age Britain. London: Batsford/English Heritage.
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