‘Held in Place’: Round Barrows in the Later Bronze Age of Lowland Britain

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic study of later Bronze Age practices at round barrows – features that are typically seen as emblematic of the Early Bronze Age in Britain. Examining the evidence from 87 excavated round barrows in the east of England, it adds subtlety and empirical detail to previous discussions about the changing role of funerary monuments over the course of the 2nd millennium bc. A wide variety of activities was undertaken at existing round barrows in the later Bronze Age. Burials were added, the monuments themselves were augmented and replicated, they were often actively built into land boundary systems, and settlements were located close to them. The findings not only attest to the continued (if shifting) significance of round barrows in the later Bronze Age, they also contribute substantially to wider debates about the character of life during this period in lowland Britain – the shifting relationship between ‘ritual’ and ‘everyday’ practices, and the processes by which mobile communities began to settle down. More broadly, this investigation adds to a growing body of work that explores the multi-temporal qualities of later prehistoric landscapes.

The logics of enclosure: deep‐time trajectories in the spread of land tenure boundaries in late prehistoric northern Europe

“…Moreover, there is a pronounced local particularity in relation to the landscapes that the land tenure boundaries divided. They emerged from landscapes that had already been altered by previous generations and were partly determined by existing earthworks, such as barrows and hillock burials (Bradley 2002: 76; Cooper 2016: 295, 303‐5; Løvschal 2014 a : 731, 736), and natural features, such as river systems, which operated as broad‐scale landscape divisions prior to the mid‐second millennium BC (Bradley 2019; Johnston 2005).…”

The Fields that Outlived the Celts: The Use-histories of Later Prehistoric Field Systems (Celtic Fields orRaatakkers) in the Netherlands

“…On the macro-scale, the potential for obtaining meaningful results is in no small part dependent on the preservation conditions for evidence of past agricultural practice, which could provide essential data on crops sown, fallow and crop-rotation cycles, manuring strategies, etc (Klamm 1993, 50, 80). Consequently, the fact that, at the aforementioned recently excavated Someren and Herkenbosch fields, no charred botanical macroremains were recovered 2016) hampers any supra-regional comparison of crops cultivated or fallow cycles. Moreover, a more methodological study into the origins and compositions of the charred macro-botanical remains in Celtic field sediments (Arnoldussen & Smit 2017) suggests that such remains were most probably brought onto the fields as fortuitous elements of household waste (as, or in, manure) rather than reflect crops and weeds grown locally (Müller-Wille 1965, 93;Arnoldussen 2012, 43-6;Arnoldussen & Scheele 2014, 60-1).…”

Fields, Ritual and Religion: Holistic Approaches to the Rural Landscape in Long‐Term Perspective (c.1500 BC–AD 1086)

“…Ritual is detectable in such forms of evidence as the deliberate deposition of artefacts, perhaps primarily metalwork in these periods, and of human remains. For later prehistory, there has been a long discussion on the impossibility and inadvisability of separating ritual and pragmatic elements of life (Brück ; Fontijn ; Bradley ; Cooper ). Practices of deliberate deposition carried on into the Roman (Derks ; Fulford ) and early medieval periods (Hamerow ; Sofield ) as a complement to the emergence of more formalized religion, although there is more scepticism regarding the interpretation of (especially metalwork) hoards as ritual depositions in these periods.…”

“…The relationship between middle–late Bronze Age field systems and earlier Bronze Age barrows and cairns has been investigated (Cooper ). It is clear that areas where later Bronze Age or ‘prehistoric’ field systems occur correlate broadly with areas of surviving funerary monuments (compare Figs.…”

“…The rather scattered deposits of human bones, metalwork or other placed deposits within field boundary ditches might take on an extra significance in this case. Field systems have a complicated relationship with barrows (Cooper ), although it is true that by the time fields were being constructed in numbers, ostentatious burial monuments went out of construction (Bradley et al . , 173), so that the dead were given a more dispersed or less visible burial.…”