Prospects and potential in the archaeology of Bronze Age Britain
This paper argues that although our discipline focuses increasingly on thematic research programmes, period-based approaches remain a valuable way of understanding the particularities of the social practices we study. Different aspects of the archaeological record including settlement, burial, landscape and material culture are examined in turn to identify a series of possible questions for future research. Why study the Bronze Age? Although the Neolithic and Iron Age are the most popular areas of study in British prehistory today, the last ten years have seen an encouraging upturn in the number of those with a research interest in the British Bronze Age. Some might argue that the maintenance of traditional period-based specialisms runs the danger of creating inward-looking communities of scholars who fail to recognise the real periods of change in the past (cf. Bradley 2001), and many archaeologists now eschew such specialisms in favour of problem-oriented approaches that address particular themes over longer timeframes. While this approach has its appeal, it remains true that a broad understanding of the wider cultural context within which a particular set of practices emerged is indispensable. In my own research, for example, I have found that some of the activities that took place on the abandonment of Bronze Age settlements make sense only when compared to certain elements of contemporary funerary rites (Bruck 2006a). In other words, the meanings created in one arena of practice may be drawn on, elaborated and subverted in other contexts because they form part of a more general understanding of how the universe and its constituent elements work. In the sense, then, that categories of archaeological analysis can never be more than heuristic devices, I would therefore argue that in certain cases, at least, a continued interest in the ‘Bronze Age’ as a topic of research is both warranted and valuable. Of course, some might suggest that the Bronze Age has already lost its identity. Barrett (1994a) has argued that the Earlier Bronze Age is simply the latest manifestation of ‘Neolithic’ forms of lifestyle, while the Later Bronze Age sees the emergence of the sorts of organised and domesticated landscapes that characterise the Iron Age and later periods. With this broad division into ‘Earlier’ and ‘Later’ prehistory cleaving the Bronze Age in two, there has been something of a ‘Neolithicisation’ of the Earlier Bronze Age, while many of the interpretative frameworks applied to the Later Bronze Age are strongly influenced by studies of the Iron Age (see also Bradley 2001). Certainly, few volumes have focused specifically on the Bronze Age in recent years – particularly in comparison with the Neolithic and Iron Age; indeed, papers addressing aspects of the Late Bronze Age were recently published as part of a volume entitled The Earlier Iron Age in Britain and the Near Continent (Haselgrove and Pope 2007), suggesting that the significant continuities across the first millennium BC in particular aspects of the archaeological record continue to challenge traditional period-based research frameworks. The question therefore remains: do we still have a Bronze Age that can be BRUCK BRONZE AGE REVIEW VOL. 1, NOVEMBER 2008 www.britishmuseum.org/bronzeagereview/1 24 identified as a coherent entity with its own character and, as such, should researchers in this area attempt to develop their own unique set of research questions and theoretical frameworks? Part of the answer lies, I believe, in the obvious and oft-discussed point that the raw materials required to produce bronze are not widely available: the long-distance connections so evident throughout the Bronze Age mean that the social relations, concerns and cosmological systems of Bronze Age communities were, in fact, quite different to those of the Neolithic and the Iron Age – even though good evidence for long-distance exchange can be identified during periods such as the Late Neolithic. This is recognised in recent research that addresses anew the character and organisation of Bronze Age exchange, a topic that has languished since the 1980s due, perhaps, to the apparently insoluble contradiction between giftand commoditybased economies (see Rowlands et al. 1986). Drawing on the work of anthropologist Mary Helms (e.g. 1988), recent research by Needham (2000) and Van de Noort (2006), for example, considers the social and political significance of both exotic objects and the activity of travel itself. They argue that foreign objects (and those who travelled abroad to obtain them) were imbued with cosmological potency, providing one of the underpinnings of temporal power (see Kristiansen and Larsson 2006 for a similar discussion of exchange relations in continental Europe and Scandinavia). Many questions remain, however. To date, there has been a focus on the role of exchange in the reproduction of chiefly power (see Bruck 2006b). Certainly, exchange facilitated the creation of an order of value that allowed the worth of people to be estimated (a process that took place throughout Bronze Age society and not solely at the top). However, it also provided a means of thinking through other forms of inter-personal relationship, social boundaries, and the temporal cycles and spatial relations that underpinned social and material reproduction. Perhaps more importantly, the dichotomy between gifts and commodities requires critical re-evaluation (cf. Carrier 1995): this is based on the modern Western distinction between economy and society, and I would argue it has hampered rather than enhanced discussions of Bronze Age exchange. Indeed, if recent studies of the British Bronze Age have tended to avoid the problematic issue of exchange, it is also true that research has lately tended to focus on social interaction, tradition and change at the level of the local (a point that Bradley 2001 also makes). Dissatisfaction with the structural-Marxist models of the 1980s (which tended to produce broad-brush and, one might argue, androcentric models of the evolution of warrior societies) has meant that some writers (myself amongst them) have moved to the opposite end of the spectrum, taking an all too insular approach that focuses on the details of the British evidence without reference to Continental developments. Notwithstanding important exceptions (e.g. Needham et al. 2006; O’Connor 2004; Sheridan and Shortland 2004), a greater level of familiarity with overseas material is surely required amongst scholars working on British Bronze Age material, particularly amongst the younger generation. Doubtless this trend is in part a result of the move away from artefact studies to a focus on monuments and landscapes (B. Roberts, pers. comm.); research on Bronze Age material culture inevitably requires scholars to address overseas connections in a way that studies of landscapes, for example, do not. This is an issue we shall return to below.
Material metaphors: The relational construction of identity in Early Bronze Age burials in Ireland and Britain
This article challenges the traditional assumption that the European Early Bronze Age saw the emergence of an ‘ideology of the individual’. It argues that the Early Bronze Age self was constructed ...
Capturing Crime in the Antipodes: Colonist Cultural Representation of Indigeneity
This chapter adopts a Southern criminological lens, which allows the authors to explore how colonialism has been constructed and depicted in museums within both regional and urban Australia. By studying spatial and historical silences in Australian museums, this chapter offers a consistent frame to chronologically chart Anglo-Australian depictions of Indigeneity, imperialism and violence wielded by the state. As this chapter will argue, museums can often reflect Westernized (white) conceptualizations about Indigeneity and the state violence involved in colonization, which actively re-enforces popular views and influences sociopolitical visions of identity, the state and justice.