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

• 10 • Ian Ralston and John Hunter
learning, and competing demands on academic staff time, have brought about the need for
students to acquire a basis of knowledge on which academic staff can confidently build, and on
which perceptions and hypotheses can be set. In some senses, this volume is a practical reaction
to the requirements of late twentieth-century higher education—the need to draw together and
make accessible basic themes and to provide opportunities for students to obtain and begin to
question current views.
The text is divided into chronologically linked chapters, each of which is designed to stand in
its own right, but with overall chronology running in a single calendrical sequence, thus avoiding
the admixture of uncalibrated radiocarbon dates and calendrical dates obtained from historical
sources that students, plunged into the discipline for the first time, tend to find confusing.
Throughout, these chapters are framed in terms of chronologies in calendrical years, from whatever
source (including radiocarbon) the dates were originally obtained. The sole exceptions are the
remoter periods of prehistory, where dating depends substantially on radiocarbon determinations,
for which calibration procedures are as yet relatively untried.
This is a wide-ranging volume, which breaks new ground in the chronological span of its
coverage for the geographical area under consideration. Fifty years ago, its scope, dependent on
the breadth and depth of archaeological research that underpin its contributions, would not have
seemed either appropriate or achievable to many of the archaeologists of the time. Ten years ago,
the chapters might have read very differently and the available range of the archaeological data
for some chapters would have been distinctly less. The central difficulty faced by all the contributors
has lain in determining how to wrestle with the expansion of knowledge, the changing
interpretations and the wealth of data, to bring it into a condensed form. As a result, the chapter
structures were specifically engineered to make this possible. Individual contributors were asked
to address specific elements within their own specialisms, namely principal chronological
subdivisions; major and typical data types; changing perceptions since the Second World War;
relevant advances in archaeological science; key sites and assemblages; current perceptions and
the British evidence in a wider geographical framework. The aim was to encourage a degree of
consistency throughout the volume in regard to the subject matter, but not in the least to force
authors to approach this from any particular theoretical perspective. This standardization of
content but not of approach, discussed briefly above in relation to recent developments in
archaeological theory, has been allowed neither to smooth out the characteristics of individual
periods, nor seriously to impinge on individuals’ perceptions of what they considered important
to lay before the reader.
There are inevitably some differences in the way in which contributions to this book sit within
a much wider geographical framework. In those dealing with early prehistory, southern connections
are uppermost, not least because Britain was for long a north-western peninsula of the continental
landmass, whereas later periods have European links of different strengths, and from different
directions, from western continental coastlands in the Later Bronze Age to Norse Scandinavia.
In the Roman period, contrastingly, Britain was an outlying province of a continental-scale Empire.
During the periods considered in the final chapters, the influences are even wider and the context,
latterly that of British imperial expansion, almost global.
There is no common database that can supply a consistent set of material for all periods. The
archaeological records for most periods exhibit idiosyncratic or high-profile remains that in some
instances drew early antiquarians to them—such as stone circles, villas, brochs—and started the
process of cultural definition that provides the near-inescapable framework for the chapter subdivisions
employed here. Much of the way in which archaeologists define culture periods still
reflects the traditional responses initially attributable to early antiquarians, and to historians’ subdivisions
for most recent periods. Whilst the development of a much securer chronological