The Early Bronze Age in Wessex

Abstract

The work on which this study is based was originally undertaken with a view to examining the cultures of the geographical area usually comprised in the term ‘Wessex’ in the period immediately following the Beaker phase. For a great many years a remarkable series of grave-groups have been known, incorporating elements (often spectacular in their implication of material wealth) which were peculiar to the area under discussion, and loosely assigned to the Middle Bronze Age. It was clear from the outset that a study of these groups would throw a great deal of light on trade relations, both internal and overseas, and it also seemed likely that in them might be found a culture equivalent chronologically to the Food Vessel phase of northern England, intervening (in a ceramic sense) between the beakers and the cinerary urns and forming a final phase of the Early Bronze Age—a phase which had already been postulated in the typological series of bronze implements, but which had not reached the dignity of a definite culture.The evidence examined in this paper supports the existence of such a culture in Wessex in the final phases of the Early Bronze Age. It is a highly individual culture whose origin lies in an actual ethnic movement from N. France. The nature of the evidence,—finds from the richly-furnished graves of chieftains—presents us with a view of the material equipment of an aristocratic minority. The basic folk culture appears, from the slight evidence available, to have been similar to the food-vessel culture of the greater part of Britain north of the Thames at this time, but it becomes clear that in Wessex there was; superimposed on this somewhat uninteresting and unenterprising substratum, an intrusive ruling class whose delight in barbaric finery led them to open trade connections not only with their Breton homeland, but with central Europe and Scandinavia, and whose imports of bronze tools and almost certainly of actual craftsmen laid the foundations of the peculiarly individual metallurgical achievements of the British Middle Bronze Age.

Landscape in the Longue Durée

“…BC (32). Piggott (1938) in a very influential paper interpreted the evidence given above as a link between the Farway necropolis and a wider Early Bronze Age Wessex culture of central southern England that he 251 pebbLes in an originaL affLuent society 2 5 1 understood as arising from an intrusive elite from Brittany. The Farway barrows, like those of his broader Wessex culture, were the burial places of a chiefly elite with long-distance contacts exemplified by the presence of exotic materials and stylistic influences in the grave good assemblages.…”

“…;Cunliffe 2001;Kristiansen and Larsson 2005: 125). Piggott (1938) had singled out about 100 elite burials in Wessex, virtually all on the chalk downlands, and these remained the focus of discussion and were linked to another Early Bronze Age elite, with richly furnished graves, in Brittany. They are all dated to a period of 600 years from about 2000 to 1400 BC.…”

Daggers in the West: Early Bronze Age Daggers and Knives in the South-west Peninsula

“…Copper and subsequently copper alloy, daggers/knives have a long chronology, from the earliest Beaker graves (Fitzpatrick 2011, 210) through to the middle of the 2nd millennium cal BC (Needham 1996), when largescale barrow building ceased. This chronology lent itself to successive attempts to create typological series that would enable sites with daggers/knives to be put within a temporal framework that could assist with the dating of other forms of artefact (for example, Montelius 1908;Piggott 1938). ApSimon (1954) identified two series of daggers within the post-Beaker and Wessex graves.…”

The Recent Discovery of Gold Pins in the Ridgeway Gold Pommel

“…Tumulus de Cruguel, Morbihan {Revue Archeologique (1890), pp. 320-2; Piggott (1938), p. 100, No. 24).…”