The destruction and deposition of metalwork is a widely recognised phenomenon across Bronze Age Europe. Weapons were decommissioned and thrown into rivers; axes were fragmented and piled in hoards; and ornaments were crushed, contorted and placed in certain landscapes. Interpretation of this material is often considered in terms of whether such acts should be considered ritual offerings, or functional acts for storing, scrapping and recycling the metal. This book approaches this debate from a fresh perspective, by focusing on how the metalwork was destroyed and deposited as a means to understand the reasons behind the process. To achieve this, this study draws on experimental archaeology, as well as developing a framework for assessing what can be considered deliberate destruction. Understanding these processes not only helps us to recognise how destruction happened, but also gives us insights into the individuals involved in these practices. Through an examination of metalwork from south-west Britain, it is possible to observe the complexities involved at a localised level in the acts of destruction and deposition, as well as how they were linked to people and places. This case study is used to consider the social role of destruction and deposition more broadly in the Bronze Age, highlighting how it transformed over time and space.

Explores the Irish Mesolithic - the period after the end of the last Ice Age when Ireland was home to hunter-gatherer communities, mostly from about 10,000-6,000 years ago. At this time, Ireland was an island world, with striking similarities and differences to its European neighbours - not least in terms of the terrestrial ecology created by its island status. To understand the communities of hunter-gatherers who lived there, it is essential that we consider the connections established between people and the other beings and materials with which they shared the world and through which they grew into it. Understanding the Mesolithic means paying attention to the animals, plants, spirits and things with which hunting and gathering groups formed kinship relationships and in collaboration with which they experienced life. The book closes with a reflection on hunting and gathering in Ireland today. The overriding aim of the book is to provide a point of entry into the lives of the Irish Mesolithic, to show the different ways in which people have lived on this island, and to show how we might narrate those lives.

Woven textiles are produced by nearly all human societies. This volume investigates evidence for patterned textiles (that is, textiles woven with elaborate designs) that were produced by two early Mediterranean civilisations: the Minoans of Crete and the Mycenaeans of mainland Greece, that prospered during the Aegean Bronze Age, c. 3000-1200 BC, contemporary with pharaonic Egypt. Both could boast of specialists in textile production. Together with their wine, oil, and art, Minoan and Mycenaean textiles were much desired as trade goods. Artistic images of their fabrics preserved both in the Aegean and in other parts of the Mediterranean show elaborate patterns woven with rich decorative detail and colour. Only a few small scraps of textiles survive but evidence for their production is abundant and frescoes supply detailed information about a wide variety of now-lost textile goods from luxurious costumes and beautifully patterned wall hangings and carpets, to more utilitarian decorated fabrics. A review of surviving artistic and archaeological evidence indicates that textiles played essential practical and social roles in both Minoan and Mycenaean societies.

Presents a thematic collection of papers dealing with the Stone Age and Bronze Age archaeology of the Ionian Sea, situated off the south western Balkan peninsula. It is based on an international conference held in Athens, Greece in January 2020. The eastern Ionian occupies a geographically complex area, which since the Pleistocene has undergone significant alterations due to tectonic activity and sea-level fluctuations. This dynamic environment, where islands, mainland, and sea intertwined to present different landscapes and seascapes to the human communities exploring the region at different times in the past, provides an ideal setting for their study from a diachronic perspective. This book deals thematically with the processes of circulation of people, materials, artefacts and ideas by examining patterns of settlement, burial and multi-layered interconnections between the different communities via land and sea. It investigates aspects of regional and interregional communication, isolation, collective memory and the creation of distinct identities within and between different cultural and social groups. It focuses on the islands of the Central Ionian Sea, offering new data from excavations and surveys on Zakynthos, Kefalonia, Ithaki and the smaller islands of the Inner Ionian Archipelago between Lefkada and Akarnania. The cultural interchange between the islands and the continental coasts is reflected in the volume with the addition of chapters dealing with contemporary sites in west Greece and southeast Italy. The Ionian, often regarded as 'at the fringes' of the Aegean, the Balkan and the central Mediterranean archaeological discourse, has lately offered new and exciting data that not only enrich but also alter our perceptions of mobility, settlement and interaction. The collection of papers in this book enhances theoretical discussions by offering a geographically and culturally comparative approach, ranging from the earliest Palaeolithic evidence of human presence in the region to the end of the Bronze Age.

Britain is internationally renowned for the high quality and exquisite crafting of its later prehistoric grave goods (c. 4000 BC to AD 43). Many of prehistoric Britain's most impressive artefacts have come from graves. Interred with both inhumations and cremations, they provide some of the most durable and well-preserved insights into personal identity and the prehistoric life-course, yet they also speak of the care shown to the dead by the living, and of people’s relationships with 'things'. Objects matter. This book's title is an intentional play on words. These are objects in burials; but they are also goods, material culture, that must be taken seriously. Within it, we outline the results of the first long-term, large-scale investigation into grave goods during this period, which enables a new level of understanding of mortuary practice and material culture throughout this major period of technological innovation and social transformation. Analysis is structured at a series of different scales, ranging from macro-scale patterning across Britain, to regional explorations of continuity and change, to site-specific histories of practice, to micro-scale analysis of specific graves and the individual objects (and people) within them. We bring these different scales of analysis together in the first ever book focusing specifically on objects and death in later prehistoric Britain. Focusing on six key case study regions, the book innovatively synthesises antiquarian reports, research projects and developer funded excavations. At the same time, it also engages with, and develops, a number of recent theoretical trends within archaeology, including personhood, object biography and materiality, ensuring that it will be of relevance right across the discipline. Its subject matter will also resonate with those working in anthropology, sociology, museology and other areas where death, burial and the role of material culture in people’s lives are key contemporary issues.

Much archaeological work is concerned with identifying gaps in our knowledge and developing strategies for addressing them; we perhaps spend less time thinking about how research should proceed when we already know, relatively speaking, quite a lot. ­The programme of dating causewayed enclosures in southern Britain that was published in 2011 as Gathering Time (Oxbow Books) gave us a new, more precise chronology for many individual sites as well as for enclosures as a whole, and as a consequence a far better sense of their significance and place in the story of the British Early Neolithic. Arguably, causewayed enclosures are now the best understood type of Neolithic monument. Yet work continues, and in the last few years new discoveries have been made, older excavations published and further work undertaken on well-known sites. Viewing this research within the new framework for these monuments allows us to assess where our understanding of enclosures has got to and where the focus of future research should lie. This volume originates from a Neolithic Studies Group meeting held in November 2019, which aimed firstly to showcase and explore the wide range of current work on causewayed enclosures and related sites, and secondly to assess what we still want to know about these sites in light of the monumental achievement of Gathering Time. ­The papers collected here comprise reports on recent development-led fieldwork, academic research and community projects, and the volume concludes with a reflection by the authors of Gathering Time.

This book focuses on the introduction of Neolithic extraction practices across Europe through to the Atlantic periphery of Britain and Ireland. The key research questions are when and why were these practices adopted and what role did extraction sites play in Neolithic society. Neolithic mines and quarries have frequently been seen as fulfilling roles linked to the expansion of the Neolithic economy. However, this ignores the fact that many communities chose to selectively dig for certain types of stone in preference to others and why the products from these sites were generally deposited in special places such as wetlands. To address this question, 168 near-global ethnographic studies were analysed to identify common trends in traditional extraction practises to produce robust statistics about their motivations and material signatures. Repeated associations emerged between storied locations, the organisation of extraction practices, long-distance distribution of products, and the material evidence such activities left behind. This suggests that we can now probably identify mythologised/storied sites, seasonality, ritualised extraction, and the use-life of extraction site products. The ethnographic model was tested against data from 223 near-global archaeological extraction sites, which confirmed a similar patterning in both material records. It was used to analyse the social context of 79 Neolithic flint mine and 51 axe quarry excavations in Britain and Ireland and to review their European origins. The evidence that emerges confirms the pivotal role played by Neolithic extraction practices in European Neolithisation and that the interaction of indigenous foragers with migrant miners/farmers was fundamental to the adoption of the new agropastoral lifestyle.

Ancient Greeks at War is a lavishly illustrated tour de force covering every aspect of warfare in the Ancient Greek world from the beginnings of Greek civilization through to its assimilation into the ever expanding world of Rome. As such it begins with the onset Minoan culture on Crete around 2,000 BC, then covers the arrival of the Mycenaean civilisation and the ensuing Late Bronze Age Collapse, before moving on to Dark Age and Archaic Greece. This sets the scene for the flowering of Classical Greek civilization, as told through detailed narratives of the Greek and Persian Wars, Peloponnesian Wars and the rise of Thebes as a major power. The book then moves on to the onset of Macedonian domination under Philip II, before focusing in detail on the exploits of his son Alexander the Great, the all-conquering hero of the ancient world. His legacy was the Hellenistic world with its multiple, never ending series of conflicts that took place over a huge territory, ranging from Italy in the west all the way to India in the east. Those covered include the various Wars of the Successors, the rise of the Bactrian-Greek and Indo-Greek kingdoms, the various wars between the Antigonid Macedonian, Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms, and later the onset of the clash of cultures between the rising power of Rome in the west and the Hellenistic kingdoms. In the long run the latter proved unable to match Rome's insatiable desire for conquest in the eastern Mediterranean, and this together with the rise of Parthia in the east ensured that one by one the Hellenistic kingdoms and states fell. The book ends with the destruction of Corinth in 146 BC after the defeat by Rome of the Achaean League. The conclusion considers the legacy of the Ancients Greeks in the Roman world, and subsequently.

A detailed report on the excavation of prehistoric features at Forteviot in eastern Scotland by the University of Glasgow's Strathearn Environs and Royal Forteviot (SERF) Project. Details include an extensive prehistoric landscape including a Neolithic cremation cemetery, large pit-defined enclosure, early Bronze Age henge monuments, and a Bronze Age dagger-cist burial. The monuments appear to have survived into the early historic period and were modified in the first millennium AD.

This memoir is not really about research questions or main conclusions. It tells the story of a boy growing up in Plymouth, Devon, getting excited about archaeology after visits to mainland Greece and Crete, trying to get into Greek archaeology and re-locating northwards into the Balkans, where he spent a career in prehistoric research. The chapters alternate between museum/university experiences and my major research projects. The experiences of working in that part of the world as the Third Balkan War was starting were dramatic and a history-style chapter is devoted to these beginnings. The Balkan prehistoric club in the west is a very small and select group so there is an intrinsic interest about how westerners did their archaeology there and how they interacted with local colleagues. There is also a sense of a ‘colonial relationship’ between westerners knowledgeable about theory and method, with well-stocked libraries and large research grants and easterners with little of the above. On a basic level, the memoir presents stories with implications for east - west relationships that will soon disappear from living memory. The ways that research projects originated and developed are strongly featured and there is a fund of anecdotes about prehistorians living and dead. The publication of this memoir records those fragments of the discipline’s history that are in danger of being lost forever. But my life story is not erased from this account, which is not an anthropological work but, rather, a participant account with a modicum of relevant personal details. The book providing the archaeological results is the publication Forging identities in the prehistory of Old Europe. Dividuals, individuals and communities 7000-3000 BC - a synthesis of academic research in Balkan prehistory. This memoir provides the insider story to the research results.

In this book we offer an exciting new perspective on a distinctive form of megalithic monument that is found across most areas of northern Europe. In order to achieve this we have abandoned outmoded typological classifications and re-introduced the term ‘dolmen’ to embrace a range of sites that share a common form of megalithic architecture: the elevation and display of a substantial stone. By critically assessing the traditionally assigned role of these monuments and their architecture as megalithic tombs, the presence of the dead is reassessed and argued to form part of a process generating vibrancy to the materiality of the dolmen. As such this book argues that the megalithic architecture identified as a dolmen is not a chambered tomb at all but instead is a qualitatively different form of monument. We also provide an entirely different conception of the utility of this extraordinary megalithic architecture – one that seeks to emphasise its building as articulating discourses of wonder as a broad social strategy. In this respect it is important to remember that many of these monuments were erected very early in the Neolithic and as a consequence of new people entering new lands, or social transformation. In short, dolmens are monumental constructions employing experimental and emergent technologies to raise huge stones, which, once built, enchant those who come within their spaces. Our claim is that dolmens were megalithic installations of affect, magical and extraordinary in construction and strategically positioned to induce both drama and awe in their encounter.

This book provides a general self-reflexive review and critical analysis of Scandinavian rock art from the standpoint of Chris Tilley’s research in this area over the last thirty years. It offers a novel alternative theoretical perspective stressing the significance of visual narrative structure and rhythm, using musical analogies, putting particular emphasis on the embodied perception of images in a landscape context. Part I reviews the major theories and interpretative perspectives put forward to understand the images, in historical perspective, and provides a critique discussing each of the main types of motifs occurring on the rocks. Part II outlines an innovative theoretical and methodological perspective for their study stressing sequence and relationality in bodily movement from rock to rock. Part III is a detailed case study and analysis of a series of rocks from northern Bohuslän in western Sweden. The conclusions reflect on the theoretical and methodological approach being taken in relation to the disciplinary practices involved in rock art research, and its future.

Textile production and the manufacture of clothing was one of the most essential daily activities in prehistory. Textiles were significant objects of practical use, and at the same time had cultural, social and symbolic meaning, crucial for displaying the identity, gender, social rank and status, or wealth of their users. However, evidence of ancient clothing is scarce due to unfavourable preservation of organic materials. Only occasionally are prehistoric textiles and associated implements preserved, mainly as a result of exceptional environmental conditions, such as waterlogged contexts like bogs, or in very dry or cold climates. In other cases textiles are sporadically mineralised, carbonised or preserved by metal corrosion. Textiles and leather can also be visible as imprints on clay.The beginning of textile manufacture is still vague, but can be traced back to the upper Palaeolithic. Important developments in textile technology, e.g. weaving, spinning with a spindle, introduction of wool, appeared in Europe and the Mediterranean throughout the Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age. This book is devoted to the early textile production in Europe and the Mediterranean and aims to collect and investigate the combined evidence of textile and leather remains, tools, workplaces and textile iconography.The chapters discuss the recent achievements in the research of ancient textiles and textile production, textile techniques such as spinning, fabric and skin manufacture, use of textile tools and experimental textile archaeology. The volume explores important cultural and social aspects of textile production, and its development.

This first of two volumes presents the archaeological evidence of a long sequence of settlement and funerary activity from the Beaker period (Early Bronze Age c. 2000 BC) to the Early Iron Age (c. 500 BC) at the unusually long-occupied site of Cladh Hallan on South Uist in the Western Isles of Scotland. Particular highlights of its sequence are a cremation burial ground and pyre site of the 18th–16th centuries BC and a row of three Late Bronze Age sunken-floored roundhouses constructed in the 10th century BC. Beneath these roundhouses, four inhumation graves contained skeletons, two of which were remains of composite collections of body parts with evidence for post-mortem soft tissue preservation prior to burial. They have proved to be the first evidence for mummification in Bronze Age Britain. Cladh Hallan's remarkable stratigraphic sequence, preserved in the machair sand of South Uist, includes a unique 500-year sequence of roundhouse life in Late Bronze Age and Iron Age Britain. One of the most important results of the excavation has come from intensive environmental and micro-debris sampling of house floors and outdoor areas to recover patterns of discard and to interpret the spatial use of 15 domestic interiors from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age. From Cladh Hallan’s roundhouse floors we gain intimate insights into how daily life was organized within the house - where people cooked, ate, worked and slept. Such evidence rarely survives from prehistoric houses in Britain or Europe, and the results make a profound contribution to long-running debates about the sunwise organisation of roundhouse activities. Activity at Cladh Hallan ended with the construction and abandonment of two unusual double-roundhouses in the Early Iron Age. One appears to have been a smokery and steam room, and the other was used for metalworking.

Au cours des quatre derniers siècles av. n.è. les sociétés d’Europe continentale de la culture dite de La Tène développent leur propre artisanat du verre. Cette période de mutations économiques et sociales saisissantes, où les centres urbains et les réseaux d’habitats hiérarchisés se déploient, connaît également une intensification et une diversification des productions artisanales et agricoles. De l’agriculture à la métallurgie, l’étude des spécialisations artisanales laténiennes révèle des changements techniques et économiques majeurs et précise les facteurs impliqués dans ces transformations socio-économiques.Presque exclusivement dédié aux ornements du corps, l’artisanat du verre celtique produit des perles et des bracelets. Longtemps considérés comme des objets de pacotilles, babioles qui ne pouvaient être que féminines ou enfantines, ces objets sont considérés ici sous leurs aspects économiques et sociaux. La méthode d’étude pluridisciplinaire développée, combinant l’étude contextuelle des objets, l’analyse élémentaire des matériaux et l’exploration des techniques avec des artisans verriers, a permis pour la première fois d’aborder ces objets à travers toute leur chaîne de production. De la fabrication du verre brut au Proche-Orient aux poignets des populations celtiques, l’étude des parures en verre celtiques révèle désormais les réseaux d’échanges et les savoir-faire que les sociétés ont développés pour leur production. Cette redécouverte de l’artisanat verrier laténien permet d’approcher les valeurs et les fonctions de signes des parures en verre, redéfinissant ces objets comme des parures de prix, destinés à la distinction sociale des individus, mais dont la production et les consommations semblent également évoluer parallèlement à la hiérarchisation de la société du La Tène.English abstractThis books focusses on Iron Age glassmaking through a socio-economic perspective. To do so, a multidisciplinary method has been established, combining archaeological data with archaeometry and technological approaches developed with modern glassmakers. It allows us to reconstruct, step by step, the commodity chain of this craft, only dedicated to beads and bangles productions, from the raw glass production, its transformation into items of adornments but also its distribution and its consumption processes by La Tène societies.By reconstructing this production system, the social and symbolic values of these ornaments can be better understood. Glass beads and bangles are luxury products and their consumption evolved alongside the hierarchisation of La Tène societies. This new research on La Tène Glass reveals conspicuous consumption practises depending on the organisation of goods networks with the Near East, but also specialised craftspeople and production structures only dedicated to the production of objects used for the distinction of individuals.

Au cours des quatre derniers siècles av. n.è. les sociétés d’Europe continentale de la culture dite de La Tène développent leur propre artisanat du verre. Cette période de mutations économiques et sociales saisissantes, où les centres urbains et les réseaux d’habitats hiérarchisés se déploient, connaît également une intensification et une diversification des productions artisanales et agricoles. De l’agriculture à la métallurgie, l’étude des spécialisations artisanales laténiennes révèle des changements techniques et économiques majeurs et précise les facteurs impliqués dans ces transformations socio-économiques.Presque exclusivement dédié aux ornements du corps, l’artisanat du verre celtique produit des perles et des bracelets. Longtemps considérés comme des objets de pacotilles, babioles qui ne pouvaient être que féminines ou enfantines, ces objets sont considérés ici sous leurs aspects économiques et sociaux. La méthode d’étude pluridisciplinaire développée, combinant l’étude contextuelle des objets, l’analyse élémentaire des matériaux et l’exploration des techniques avec des artisans verriers, a permis pour la première fois d’aborder ces objets à travers toute leur chaîne de production. De la fabrication du verre brut au Proche-Orient aux poignets des populations celtiques, l’étude des parures en verre celtiques révèle désormais les réseaux d’échanges et les savoir-faire que les sociétés ont développés pour leur production. Cette redécouverte de l’artisanat verrier laténien permet d’approcher les valeurs et les fonctions de signes des parures en verre, redéfinissant ces objets comme des parures de prix, destinés à la distinction sociale des individus, mais dont la production et les consommations semblent également évoluer parallèlement à la hiérarchisation de la société du La Tène.English abstractThis books focusses on Iron Age glassmaking through a socio-economic perspective. To do so, a multidisciplinary method has been established, combining archaeological data with archaeometry and technological approaches developed with modern glassmakers. It allows us to reconstruct, step by step, the commodity chain of this craft, only dedicated to beads and bangles productions, from the raw glass production, its transformation into items of adornments but also its distribution and its consumption processes by La Tène societies.By reconstructing this production system, the social and symbolic values of these ornaments can be better understood. Glass beads and bangles are luxury products and their consumption evolved alongside the hierarchisation of La Tène societies. This new research on La Tène Glass reveals conspicuous consumption practises depending on the organisation of goods networks with the Near East, but also specialised craftspeople and production structures only dedicated to the production of objects used for the distinction of individuals.