8 - Consolidation

The term Wessex Culture is sometimes applied to the archaeological evidence provided in southern England by material from about a hundred rich burials. No settlements relating to this material have yet been found.

The burials are characterised by grooved daggers, pygmy cups, halberd pendants, perforated whetstones, bone tweezers, sheet-gold objects and dress pins which have their origin in Central Europe. One could suggest that the wealth which provided these expensive objects had in the past been used for building the great Wessex monuments like the henges, Silbury Hill and the stone settings. Now it was released from these duties and was being used by individuals for personal purposes like obtaining exotic materials and objects. Part was used for procuring these objects and part for building the large number of 'personal' barrows that appear in the Wessex landscape around special 'central places' like Stonehenge.

But this upsurge in personal wealth was not sudden: evidence of its gradual accumulation appears in the earlier round-barrow graves like those containing beakers some of which were accompanied by a little gold and some copper objects. Rich graves were covered by barrows but not all barrow burials were rich which means that we cannot equate one with the other. Perhaps we can suggest that the barrow signalled high status which could be attached to individuals who were not always well endowed with many worldly goods.

So what we are looking at in the Wessex Culture is not a complete culture but the most obvious facet of the culture that existed in Britain at the time. Much the same situation obtained across the Channel in Brittany where barrows cover graves that contain objects that are very similar to those in Wessex.

Dating for these richest graves is within the bracket of the first few centuries of the second millenium BC and after that we see a gradual decline in worldly goods although barrows are still used to cover the graves. At the same time cremations become more common and here we have the advantage of some radiocarbon determinations which provide a calibrated date of around 1400BC for three of these Wessex cremation burials.

The best-known example of the richer burials is Bush Barrow, one in a barrow cemetery on Normanton Down overlooking Stonehenge. It was vandalised and the grave goods removed by Colt-Hoare, an early nineteenth century antiquary, but most of the objects recovered are in the Devizes and British Museums. They include the possible remains of a shield, a flanged axehead, two daggers, a mace and the mountings from its haft, a small knife, a gold belt-hook and two sheet-gold plaques.

Other rich graves include those of women who seemed to rank in their wealth and the status of having a barrow over their graves with the men.

The presence of the metal is matched by exotic materials like amber, faience and the pins from the Únëtice region of Central Europe. The pygmy cups found with both the inhumations and cremations are of a variety of shapes and three of the types are described as 'grape' cups, Aldbourne types (sometimes with a lid) and the 'slashed' type with vertical slits all round the belly of the vessel. They can be decorated with motifs that date back to the designs on beakers that were common between 2600 and 1800BC.

In view of the lack of these objects outside graves at this time, it has been suggested that their presence in graves was representative of the practice of deposition rather than their general use. Certainly, as the practice continues, by the time of the later Bronze Age some of the grave goods look as though they would have been pretty useless for practical tasks so there may be something in this point of view. An example is the minute socketed bronze axeheads in the graves of that later period. By that time, by the close of the second millenium BC, the practice of raising barrows had ended. They appear again in the archaeological record but later on in the Iron Age.

You may come across terms used to distinguish different forms of Wessex barrows. They include the bowl barrow, the commonest type right through the period from the time of the Beaker burials which is in the form of an inverted bowl and usually has a surrounding ditch which nowadays may be completely filled with plough soil. Bermed barrows have a considerable space surrounding the mound between it and a ditch. The bell barrow has the narrowest berm, the disc the widest berm. In the case of the disc there are sometimes more than one mound and disc barrows often have a bank surrounding the ditch on its outer edge. Saucer barrows have very low, flat mounds usually between 18 and 27m in diameter surrounded by a ditch with an external bank. The ring barrows are simply a ring-ditch with an external bank and seem to be associated in Northumberland with cremation burial in urns.

Pond barrows have been recognised principally on the chalk in southern England and appear on the surface as regular circular depressions, anything from 9 to 30m in diameter, surrounded by a low bank. However, an excavation on an example near Stonehenge, at Wilsford, turned out to be a filled-in shaft over 30m deep which appears to have been a place where materials were deposited presumably as a ritual process connected with a belief in subterranean spirits. It did contain ropes and a bucket but it could not have been a well. If this construction is true of other pond barrows then they are certainly wrongly classified as barrows.

Other shafts are known from the period. One at Swanwick in Hampshire contained a wooden stake with traces of animal blood; at Kimpton in the same county another shaft stood alongside a later urnfield.

During the last hundred years, the sequence of metal objects found in this country mainly in graves and hoards has been used as a means of dating. Unfortunately it dates very little apart from the graves or hoards in which the objects are found for metal in other contexts like settlements where it would be more useful is very rare.

The sequence of Bronze Age metal objects in Britain runs as follows:

c2400-c1800BC Mainly copper. West European daggers, riveted knife-daggers, thick-butted flat axeheads.

c1800-c1650BC Experimental bronzes. Bush Barrow dagger, halberds, thin-butted flat axeheads.

c1650-c1400BC True bronzes. Ogival daggers, flanged axeheads, tanged spearheads, pegged spearheads.

c1400-c1000BC True bronzes. Palstaves, rapiers, looped spearheads.

C1000-c600BC Leaded bronzes. Socketed axeheads, leaf-shaped swords, leaf-shaped spearheads with peg-holes instead of loops, socketed sickles, woodworking gouges and knives, razors, carp's tongue swords, Hallstatt swords, cauldrons, shields.

One of the most obvious developments during the period is the increase in the number of bronze artifacts. What has happened is that the industry has become much more commercial and one can almost speak of mass-production. By the end of the period most craftsmen could expect to own metal tools but they are still not common finds on settlement sites probably because when they were broken or worn out they could be exchanged for new with the peripatetic smiths or merchants.

What at the beginning of the period was a prestige material conferring status on those who owned metal objects, by the the end was common. A new form of metal, leaded bronze, was introduced which allowed greater ease in casting although it reduced the hardness of the metal slightly. A class of status objects like cauldrons and weapon paraphanalia that goes with a warrior class - helmets, armour, shields and new types of swords and spears appeared. Bronze in these forms and in its use for decorative objects continued into the succeeding periods while iron was introduced for more utilitarian functions.

The introduction of metal was a way in which wealth could be concentrated. Before it appeared, surplus could only be channelled into conspicuous construction in the service of ritual and religious ceremony. With metal it could become personal at the same time as the status of certain individuals after their death was being recorded with a barrow.

Once metal was introduced, it became a valued material which was desired for whatever reasons by individuals who could afford it. This created the producer/customer system and a role for entrepreneurs and craftsmen. Something of the same sort must have existed before in the Neolithic with the flint- miners and the quarriers of stone and their customers but this did not lead to the same scale of development and the wide-reaching changes to society as did the metal.

In Britain we see only a pale shadow of the trading system that developed in the Mediterranean region. The fact that literacy did not appear here is a measure of how immature trade was but it did throw up craftsmen and merchants. They were probably too few to be described as a new social class but they are a symptom of the changes that were very gradually taking place in the agricultural society of the second millenium BC.

But there were changes taking place in the agricultural system too at this period. For the first time we are able to recognise agricultural settlements on the ground in the British Isles apart from the stone- built Neolithic sites we have already described like Skara Brae in Orkney and the walled fields of Ireland. Presumably these appeared in the islands of the north and in the west because the climate made it necessary to be properly sheltered there so substantial dwellings had to be built and on an island like Orkney where space was restricted it would not have been possible to move to fresh pastures whenever the land became exhausted so it was necessary to stay put.

In the south the typical agricultural practice was not so intensive with more emphasis on pasture and the use of manure on small cultivated plots, something which seems to have developed in Wessex when the supply of new land was exhausted in the later Neolithic period.

The first meaningful farming settlements in Wessex are recorded during the Early Bronze Age. Regular systems of rectangular fields can be demonstrated in southern Britain by the earlier part of the second millenium BC. At Winterbourne Abbas in Dorset the Poor Lot barrow cemetery contains a triple bell barrow which is overlying a corner of a small rectangular field that was part of a system covering the adjacent area. These small rectangular fields are known as Celtic fields. At Ogbourne Maizey Down in Wiltshire, a settlement enclosure sits on top of an earlier system of celtic fields.

Celtic fields were formed by the agricultural practice of the time which involved ploughing small patches of ground with a scratch plough or ard that had no mould board and so could not turn over the soil. What it did do was to scratch a furrow and this made it necessary for the ploughman to go over the ground twice so as thoroughly to churn up the topsoil. This he did by ploughing the second time at right-angles to his original furrows. It is called cross-ploughing. This practice resulted in the formation of small squarish fields.

On hill slopes where the evidence for them is usually found (they have been ploughed out elsewhere), lynchets formed. A positive lynchet is a bank of earth which accumulates on the downhill side of a cultivated field as the soil disturbed in ploughing gradually moves down the slope under the action of gravity. The denudation at the top edge creates a negative lynchet. Excavation has shown that celtic fields were normally surrounded by ditches like modern fields and this is the reason why they show up on aerial photographs. Others appear to have been bounded by stony banks that may have accumulated there by stone clearance of the surface of the field.

An enclosure that is too large for a cultivated field was examined at Martin Down in Hampshire. It was rectangular and enclosed 0.8 ha. and surrounded by a 'V'-shaped ditch 2.1m to 3.1m deep with an internal bank, some 0.6m high. On the northern side is a wide gap and two others on the southern and eastern sides. This may have been used as a paddock.

Larger divisions of the landscape are evident on the chalk downs. These are formed by linear ditches or ranch boundaries which show up on aerial photographs. The term 'ranch boundaries' suggests animals and large 'spreads' like in Texas and may indicate a pastoral use of the land or perhaps just boundaries relating to ownership of areas of the countryside. A section was put across one at Snail Down in Wiltshire and it proved to be a 'V' shaped ditch, 3.35m wide at the surface and about 1.5m deep with a bank on the southern side.

Similar landscape partitions can be seen on Dartmoor where they are known as reaves and are formed by stone walls. On Dartmoor and the other moors of the south-west of England, field systems using such walls are dated to the earlier part of the second millenium BC. At Gwithian on St Ives Bay in Cornwall not only were two superimposed Bronze Age field systems found in excavation but also the evidence of cross-ploughing in one of the fields and the use of the spade as well as an ard. Incidentally, there was also evidence of the use of seaweed for manuring.

Finds of metal hoards have helped to demonstrate the age of some of these enclosures but in most other cases they are almost impossible to date. A hoard of gold objects buried in a field bank near St Ives dates from the Middle or Late Bronze Age and bronze hoards have been discovered at Lulworth Cove in Dorset and at Ebbesbourne Wake in Wiltshire.

The Celtic field systems appear to be bounded by long, straight boundaries, some of them being the linear ditches mentioned above. Some archaeologists suggest that these were the primary divisions of the landscape into large blocks which were then sub-divided into workable units. If this is true than we must be looking at an organised, communal effort for it could not have been planned or carried out by individual farmers. Leaders of society and/or owners of the land could well have controlled it and this suggests an increasingly stratified society during the second millenium BC.

Habitation sites in the form of farmsteads have been excavated from this period. One is Thorney Down four miles or so south of Salisbury. It consisted of a rectangular enclosure bounded by a bank and outer ditch. Its area was around a quarter of a hectare on which stood nine circular huts. Amongst them were pits, perhaps for storage, cooking-holes and a number of other postholes. Finds included a Deveril-Rimbury globular urn, a spearhead and a bracelet.

Perhaps the most extensively excavated site is Itford Hill, two and a half miles north of Newhaven. Eleven huts were built within an enclosure platform cut back into the hillside. A hollow way (sunken track) approaches the site from the west. The excavated remains of the huts consisted of rings of postholes, some with a central post and entrance porch. The largest hut was 6.7m in diameter but there was no trace of hearths in any of the interiors. The environmental evidence shows that amongst the products of the village were cattle, sheep and barley.

Also in Sussex, four miles north-west of Lewes is Plumpton Plain where two Bronze Age settlements have been examined. Site A, the earliest of the two, consists of four embanked enclosures, each surrounding a hut and linked by trackways. Three of them have been excavated and each contained a circular hut, about 6.1m in diameter. None contained hearths but outside were cooking- holes containing charcoal and pot-boilers (stones heated and dropped into water). Site B was later, perhaps the successor to Site A. Pottery was of the Deveril-Rimbury style.

Excavation of such sites is done by the open excavation method in which a large area is stripped of topsoil and the features in the underlying surface excavated. Usually the stripping is done by a machine, often a JCB with a wide bucket which in the hands of a skilled operator can work to a tolerance of a couple of centimetres. This is followed by the laborious task of removing the loose debris left behind by the machine and cleaning off down to a clear surface. This is mostly done with trowels but hoes have been used.

Once the surface is clear and has been swept clean, any intrusions into this surface that have been made at any time in the past by postholes, pits and ditches will show up. They show up because they are filled with topsoil which is a darker colour than the underlying surface. These are known as features.

Before they are excavated, a plan of the site on which they are marked is drawn up. The scale used is usually 1:20. It is important that this is an accurate drawing for it will be the master plan for the excavation and will be amended and added to as further features are discovered.

The huts in these farmsteads were circular and timber-framed. Probably the walls were made of hurdling plastered with a mixture of clay, chopped straw and animal dung. This type of walling is referred to as wattle-and-daub and has a long history, still being used in the post-medieval period. The roof frameworks were undoubtedly timber and the roof covering, thatch of some sort, most probably straw. Fires appear to have been lit outside the huts and some of the cooking at least was done in fire-pits which would be used as ovens. The excavators talk of storage pits but they could equally well have been rubbish pits. Presumably the suggestion was made on the analogy of the pits found in similar sites of the Iron Age.

The range of products are characteristic of mixed farming, the type of farming which is best suited to the conditions and technology of the time where the crops and the animals complement each other in that the crops can provide some fodder for the animals and the animals provide manure for the crops. It was a type of farming that lasted a long time and is still a common method today.

The reason why this period is important in the history of agriculture is that the foundations of an agricultural system that was going to last for three thousand years were being established. Not only in this country, of course, it was happening on the Continent as well. The system was adapted to supply the farmer and his family with practically all his needs. Food, of course, which he could supplement with the collection of wild foods from the woods and hunting. Clothing was provided by sheep's wool or flax or nettles whose stems provided fibre for spinning. Waterproof material came from leather and sheepskin. Beer was made from the barley. Dyes were vegetable colours from wild plants. The timber for housebuilding and probably a host of other uses for which we have no archaeological evidence would have come from the managed woodland.

The principal crops for which we have archaeological evidence in the prehistoric British Isles are varieties of wheat and barley, flax, rye, oats and beans. Most authorities think there was a major increase in arable farming around 1500BC which may perhaps have been occasioned by an upsurge in population which required the production of more food than could be obtained from pastoral farming so that emphasis shifted towards the arable although still maintaining a balance of mixed farming.

For domestic animals the evidence is chiefly for cattle, sheep, goats, pigs as well as horses which are thought to have been introduced into Ireland at the end of the third millenium BC. In very broad terms we can say that the cattle were the draught animals, sheep and goats the dairy animals and the source of wool and pigs the meat animal. Salt may have been used for flavouring food. At Fengate near Peterborough debris from salt extraction was found in the ditches.

Evidence for arable farming, apart from the remains of the crops themselves which usually survive in a carbonised form, is sparse at first but becomes stronger as the centuries pass. Querns were used to mill the grain. The term saddle-quern is used to describe the shape of the earliest recognised form although a more advanced form appears during the Iron Age. For harvesting there is some dispute as to whether the ears were cut or plucked off the stalks but flint sickles are one of the commonest tools found on agricultural sites. These are succeeded by bronze ones later in the period.

For storage of grain, pits have been suggested but it it has also been said that the 'spare' postholes discovered on excavation could have been the foundations of above-ground granaries. Burnt areas have been claimed as the sites of drying ovens for grain at Itford Hill, Plumpton Plain and New Barn Down farming settlements, all in Sussex, but the most convincing evidence for them comes from the Iron Age. Most grain has to be dried before storage even if the climate was drier and warmer than it is today.

Finds of loom weights and spindle whorls become relatively common from the middle of the second millenium BC and suggest that woven cloth was the norm for fashionable wear. This evidence is reinforced by the increase in number of pins at the same period.

Leatherworking tools can be recognised in the shape of awls for making holes in the leather through which the leather 'strings' can be pushed for sewing the garment together. This is an ancient method and still in use today. In the earlier part of the period flint awls were still in use for the purpose. The dressing of leather in order to make it supple and prevent decay is still traditionally done by tanning using tannins derived from a variety of trees and shrubs. Oak was and is still used in this country but chestnut and larch-bark can also be used. Another, but less efficient, method of dressing leather is to smoke it over a slow-burning fire.

Archaeologists have been slow to recognise the achievement of the people of this time in developing an agricultural system and way of life that was as well-constructed and inherently stable as this one was to prove to be.

There are variations in the details of the system in different parts of the country but this was to be expected for people at the time were adept in taking advantage of every possibility of exploiting their environment. But, of course, they worked with the environment, they did not have the technology to do otherwise. This meant that everything around them played a part in their life, nothing was ignored as we ignore areas of our environment today.

Perhaps this makes it difficult for us to understand their attitude to the world around them. Certainly, there are archaeological finds and types of archeological evidence that are incomprehensible to us. The secret is to understand the people first then, hopefully, we shall begin to understand the things that they left behind them.

The use of stone and flint for tools continued for a long time after the appearance of metal but there are no important innovations in the technology. Polished stone objects continued to be produced including the perforated axe or mace-heads that are found in graves. Scrapers, like awls, are very ancient in origin, used for a range of purposes including preparing hides. The characteristic Bronze Age versions are round with a very fine pressure-flaking round the edge. Otherwise, the small-flint assemblages are similar to those of the earlier period so that barbed-and-tanged arrowheads, for example, can still be found and some of the material that is picked up fieldwalking is difficult to assign definitely to either period.

Much flint was still mined but it is uncertain how active the quarrying of stone in the western highlands of the British Isles continued to be. It is difficult to believe that it ceased entirely until the supply of durable metal axeheads became plentiful and we have no evidence to suggest that this happened until well on into the second millenium BC. For the same reason flint axeheads survived into the later period.

There has been a good deal of discussion about foreign contacts during the period of the first half of the second millenium BC. This has revolved around certain objects and materials. They are amber, faience, pendants, pins, bronze daggers and jadeite axeheads. All, (including the pins that are of particular types - ring or crutch-headed) are materials that could only have been afforded by the well-to-do.

Amber (fossilized pine resin) can be found along the Yorkshire coast where it is washed across the North Sea from the Baltic so the argument here is whether the amount of amber found in British graves is enough to justify a connection with the amber trade that we know operated along routes southward across Europe from the Baltic to the Únêtice area of Hungary, the Adriatic and the Mediterranean.

Faience is made from a mixture of silicate-rich clayey sand and salts of copper heated to a high temperature and it appears that it could have been manufactured in Britain, either in Cornwall or Scotland and made into blue beads. The traditional source of the material is Egypt but doubt has been cast on whether it supplied Britain.

The pendants, pins and bronze daggers are metal types that originated in central Europe in one of the Únêtice cultures. The pendants are halberd-shaped, like the shafted halberds of central Germany and so, the argument runs, their shape and the evidence of the amber (derived from the amber routes of Europe) could suggest contacts with central Europe. In the case of the bronze daggers, the similar attribution to central Europe rests on the decoration and the manner in which the dagger is fitted to its haft. It is rivetted to the handle which can be decorated with little bronze or gold nails. Many of these daggers were exported by the Únétice bronzesmiths to the copper-using peoples of Europe so that the appearance of daggers of this sort, perhaps quickly copied by British bronzesmiths, is not surprising.

Jadeite is a form of greenstone which can take a polish and if made thin enough is almost translucent. It is very hard and makes a good quality axe. Examples have been found in Britain ( more than 70) and in Brittany but so far no source has been identified for them. However it is likely to be somewhere in Europe. As far as in known, despite their more attractive appearance there is no contextual evidence to suggest that jadeite axeheads in prehistoric Europe were treated differently from those made out of more common rocks.

The evidence certainly suggests that there were foreign contacts but the objects/materials were those that were commonly traded across Europe at this time and there is no reason to believe the appearance of them in Britain makes Britain a special place. It should be thought of as one of the areas in Europe in which agricultural prosperity was producing a modicum of wealth that was being concentrated in the hands of an aristocracy who could thus afford to acquire some of the things that contemporary aristocrats in other parts of Europe were able to possess.

7 - Into the Second Millenium BC
Contents
9. The Late Bronze Age