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

The Later Bronze Age
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do not tell us much about the social context of manufacture and usage, and even their location
does not always coincide with the distribution of finds of similar finished objects.
Two examples can illustrate some further problems in understanding the production and use
of bronze. At Flag Fen, many of the items deposited in the water were of poor quality, and
unsuitable for functional use; one of the swords was a miniature. Some items were of tin, and
there is also nearby evidence for the casting of tin. It is probable that these items were made
specially for deposition; their form seems to have been more important than their technical
quality, and they had no ‘use’ except to be deposited. The second example concerns the role of
axes in the Later Bronze Age. There are many hoards that contain a large number of axes, many
of them broken; at the end of the Bronze Age, there is a particular type of socketed axe found in
considerable quantities in Brittany and southern England. These ‘Armorican axes’ are highly
standardized in size and weight, and show little sign of use; some are even made of pure lead.
They were produced as standard quantities of metal, for their value as a commodity for exchange
rather than as functioning axes, and pose the question whether the large numbers of axes found
from earlier phases may have been used in the same way. These examples suggest that caution is
required in inferring a utilitarian function from form, or assuming modern concepts of quality,
and that archaeologists should in general be careful in trying to apply concepts derived from
modern economic systems to the Bronze Age.
The major factors influencing the presence of bronzes in the archaeological record are the
patterns of prehistoric deposition and modern recovery. One common method of describing
them, using terms such as stray finds, settlement or river finds, or hoards, reveals more about how
and where the objects were found than about how or why they were deposited. Many items are
found on their own, without further archaeological context; little can be said about such ‘stray
finds’, but this may be due mostly to the circumstances of recovery. Finds from settlement sites
are rare, consisting mainly of small or broken items, which might be understood as casual losses,
but some such finds suggest more deliberate deposition. The dump of metalworking material in
the ditch at Springfield Lyons was a deliberate ritual act, and the finds of metal from a ditch at
Petters Sportsfield, Surrey, may have been a similar ritual deposit associated with the abandonment
of the site (Needham 1990).
One important locus for deposition was in watery places such as rivers, lakes and bogs (Bradley
1990, 97–154). These may be called hoards if they are found together, for instance in a dried-up
fen or a drained lake, but they were assembled as a result of many individual acts of deposition
over a long period, made with the intention that the items should not be retrieved. We have
already seen the evidence from Flag Fen; there are other concentrations of metalwork elsewhere
in the Fens, in the River Thames, in lakes such as Duddingston Loch in Edinburgh, and many
other wet places. Previous explanations invoking casual loss in transit or battle must be rejected,
and we must recognize a deliberate practice of ritual deposition. Items selected for such deposition
were a carefully selected and unrepresentative sample of the available repertoire of bronze, and
the meaning associated with individual forms was obviously very significant. The possible
implications of such a practice of votive deposits are discussed below.
The final type of bronze find to be considered are the hoards found on dry land. These
appear to be deposited in a single act, and therefore raise two separate questions: about the
reasons for assembling the collection and the reasons for depositing and not subsequently
recovering it. Some of these hoards have been classified on the basis of their contents: ‘personal
hoards’ are the ornaments assumed to have been owned by an individual; ‘craftsmen’s hoards’
contain the tools of a specialist such as a carpenter or metalsmith; and ‘merchants’ hoards’ include
newly finished items awaiting distribution. Many hoards, as we have seen, contain scrap or axes
representing an exchange commodity, and these were assembled as part of the process of recycling