9 - The Late Bronze Age

About 1000BC renewed contacts with the Continent led to the refreshment of the native bronze industry and the introduction of new metal types whose appearance in this country marks the beginning of the Late Bronze Age. These new types were true leaf-shaped swords or flanged-tanged swords, leaf- shaped spearheads and spearheads with peghole fixings instead of loops and socketed axeheads. These were derived from central Europe bronzesmiths. It has been suggested that the increase in the number of weapon types and military gear enhanced the status of the aristocracy who may have taken on a 'warrior' persona.

The change in the character and organisation of the bronze industry is clearly reflected in the composition of hoards. Metal was far more plentiful than it had been and this may be related to the collapse of the Aegean empires during the twelfth century BC and the subsequent loss of customers leaving the copper miners of central Europe with a yawning hole in their markets which they filled by turning more enthusiastically to customers in western Europe.

Clay moulds were now in common use and metal moulds were also used. British smiths had mastered the casting of sockets and rivet-holes and the production of large and complex objects. By the beginning of the Iron Age they had also mastered the 'lost-wax-technique' which was used for casting on the handles of buckets and cauldrons. Leaded bronzes were employed, possibly in the service of large-scale and speedy production of popular types of artifacts. Objects produced in this way for a mass market were often poorly-finished in contrast to the quality work done for more discriminating customers.

Earlier in the period, many hoards appear to have been deposited in the ground for safe-keeping by itinerant merchants and usually consisted of finished objects only. In the Late Bronze Age, founders' hoards are normal and many must have belonged to the itinerant smiths who probably set up workshops wherever there was a convenient supply of customers and fuel and traded, like the rogue in the Aladdin story, 'new lamps for old' receiving in exchange old and broken tools that could be melted down for refashioning into new. Many of the hoards consist almost entirely of broken objects of this sort. Presumably, new tools were produced only when there were customers.

The bronze-hoards never contain gold. Smiths who worked in the precious metal were in a different class to the itinerant bronzesmiths and were probably based at the sites where gold could be obtained by panning in a river or stream.

A good many of the gold artifacts seem to have been made by Irish smiths using their local gold supplies and imported into Britain. Gold objects may also have been imported from the Continent. Irish objects include gold bracelets, dress-fasteners, torcs and earrings of twisted gold bars.

We know nothing of the merchants who distributed the gold and it is quite possible that they dealt in a variety of other exotic goods and targeted only the aristocratic households. But they too left hoards behind them. Examples are from Caister-on-Sea containing two bracelets and two dress-fasteners and from Sporle, both in East Anglia, containing gold bracelets. All the objects seem to be of Irish origin.

Students of Bronze Age metalwork love to classify and there are bewildering variety of names for groups of objects and for types as well. Basically the metal in southern Britain is assigned to two main periods, both named after hoards.

The earlier is known as the Wilburton phase named after the Wilburton Hoard from Cambridgeshire and the later after the Ewart Park hoard. The earlier phase runs from c950BC to c750BC and the second from c750BC.

The Wilburton phase introduces the first true swords which were imported from the Rhineland and all these early examples have been found in the Thames which suggests that there was a trading settlement somewhere along its banks. From these Rhenish types was developed the British Wilburton sword which rapidly replaced the earlier rapier all over England. In Ireland rapiers continued to be used until c900BC but they had leaf-shaped blades in imitation of the swords.

Peg-holed leaf-shaped spearheads were another introduction from the Continent and were produced by British smiths alongside the traditional but modified looped variety. Another arrival was the socketed axehead, two early types being imports from which a British variety was developed. The types of craftsmen tools that were current were at first of the type that were fitted into a handle with a tang but later socketed forms were adopted from the Continent.

In the north of England the Wallington industry and the Poldar industry in Scotland were, like the Roscommon Phase in Ireland, more conservative than the Wilburton industry in England with its connections with the Continent.

Smiths of the Ewart Park period, from c750BC, retained a good many of the designs of the Wilburton period but added innovations like the improved sword which is known as the Ewart type with a longer and more elegant blade. The looped spearheads had gone out of fashion. A technique of using beaten bronze sheet to make buckets, cauldrons and ceremonial shields was introduced. These are more common in Ireland than in Britain and, indeed, most may have been made there. Cauldrons are of riveted sheet bronze with ring handles derived from an Etruscan type while the buckets were based on a central European 'Kurd' bucket improved by the addition of handles and a reinforced base- plate.

Bronze shields made in the British Isles were made simply of very thin beaten bronze sheet and so could not have been used in battle. Irish evidence found in bogs suggests that wooden or leather shields were used for that purpose. Metal shields were circular with either notched decoration or concentric ribs and rings of bosses. The best example of the latter type is from Lough Gur in Ireland although there is another almost complete example from Sutton in Norfolk. Flesh-hooks, used for hooking meat out of a cauldron are are another product for the aristocratic market.

I should mention the strange term 'Carp's Tongue' which is a kind of sword with a parallel- sided blade that narrows for about a third of its length to a sharp point. It gives the name 'Carp's Tongue Complex' to a group of material which appears in founders' hoards of that name in the Thames valley and in Kent. This material is often explained as the result of importing large amounts of scrap material from the Continent at a time when iron was coming into use there so that there was a large supply of obsolete bronze tools and weapons available.

Hoards found on the Continent can be very large indeed and so are a few of those found in Britain like the Isleham Hoard from Cambridgeshire but most contain just a few objects. An example of the more common hoard is the following from Elcombe Dowm, Ebbesbourne Wake in southern Wiltshire. It contained a cast bronze torc, seven cast bronze bracelets, seven penannular bracelets and two hooked terminal bracelets.

Some study has been done of methods of manufacture and it has been found that in Wales and south- western England stone moulds were used for casting axeheads and in the south-east metal moulds were used. Smiths depended on scrap a great deal and most perhaps used nothing else as their raw material.

More complex casting processes for swords, sword chapes, spearheads and spear ferrules were done in clay moulds and it is likely that these 'swordsmiths' were static, being based near suitable deposits of clay. It is worth noting that all clay mould fragments have come from settlement sites like the possible Late Bronze Age smith's workshop at Jarlshof in Shetland. Because of the use of clay, a 'swordsmith' could be more susceptible to changes in fashion and could quickly copy a new metal type like, for example, the latest sword, while the peripatetic 'axe-head smith' using stone or metal moulds was more conservative and may well have continued to use the same axehead moulds for the whole of his working life.

In Ireland the Ewart Park phase is matched by the Dowris tradition and in the north of England by the Heathery Burn tradition.

The emphasis on military gear amongst the prestige bronzework of the period might mean that society was not as peaceful as it had been and that chieftains and their adherents (if that is what the aristocrats of the time were) needed to defend themselves. If they had to defend their persons with weapons then it might be that they needed to defend their homesteads with banks and ditches and palisades. If we look around at the settlements of the time that have been excavated we do find some indications that this was being done.

On the Continent to which the aristocrats looked for the latest fashions in swords and fashionable household gear, we find that late-Bronze Age forts are common and are found in Poland at places like Biskupin and in south-west Germany. This period in Europe, incidentally, for you will come across the term, is known as the Urnfield Period because of the almost universal custom on the European mainland of cremating the dead and putting them into pits or in urns buried in the ground.

Late Bronze Age defensive sites in Britain consist of simple enclosures of banks and ditches as at Ivinghoe in Buckinghamshire where the rampart is revetted front and rear with timber framing. The discovery of quantities of Late Bronze Age metalwork enabled the excavators to place the site in its chronological context. Another early site is that of Dinorben in North Wales which similarly had timber-revetted ramparts built of clay.

Later sites are Hod Hill in Dorset, Croft Ambrey in Herefordshire, Almondbury in Yorkshire and the hillforts in Scotland of Finavon in Angus and Dun Lagaidh in Ross and Cromarty. These all belong to the eighth century BC.

Sites with palisaded defences are Navan in Co. Armagh, Craigmarloch Wood in Renfrewshire, Burnswark in Dumfriesshire, Huckhoe in Northumberland and Staple Howe in Yorkshire.

These sites are scattered all over the British Isles so the unease in society was not a phenomena limited to one or a few areas. Attempts have been made to link it with a climatic deterioration of high rainfall and the formation of a blanket of peat on the highlands of the west of Britain and in Ireland which resulted in an increase of ash, hornbeam and beech trees but also rendered untenable some of the higher agricultural land that had been brought into cultivation during the Early and Middle Bronze Age. The shrinkage in available cultivatable land is said to have brought about competition for what was left amongst the chieftains that led to warfare.

Whether this deterioration and the subsequent growth of bogs had anything to do with the deposition of sacrificed human beings in bogs that occurred later on in the Iron Age is a question to be debated.

Other sites that seem to have had a defensive capability are the crannogs which were basically artificial islands built in lakes or meres close to the shore that accommodated the residence of a single family. An island was built by sinking a ring of stout posts into the bed of the stretch of water selected and then filling the area within it with large boulders and clay. When the top of this mound broke the surface it would be levelled, reinforced with timber, surfaced with clay and used as the platform on which the house was built. Sometimes a small harbour was made behind the house which was approached from the shore by a causeway.

Areas along the shore close to the crannog were used as farmland and no doubt the inhabitants would have derived a proportion of their food from the fish in the lake. Once built, the crannog would remain in use for a long time. Not only by the builders but by people in later periods right up to the present day. No doubt the fact that the island was originally an artificial one was soon forgotten.

There are good examples of crannogs in the Irish lakes like Loch Gur where an example may date back to the Neolithic period, in the Scottish lochs and in Wales but few have been archaeologically examined. In Scotland, Milton Loch crannog and Carlingwark Loch crannog have been discovered to belong to the Iron Age but work elsewhere has discovered crannogs which originated in the late Bronze Age.

Rather unexpectedly, the most extensive work on a site of this sort was done in England at Flag Fen near Peterborough. The site is a large crannog, big enough to support a number of houses of a settlement. Something like a million logs were used to construct the platform. Timber was used because there is no stone in the Fen District and it makes Flag Fen a unique type of crannog. Radiocarbon dates suggest that it was built round about 1000BC. The houses on the platform were large, rectangular ones. This was a departure from the usual Bronze Age tradition of circular houses.

Environmental evidence reveals that wheat and barley were grown by the inhabitants on the shore and domestic farm animals were reared. Some of the most striking evidence from the site is concerned with the standard of the carpentry displayed by the craftsmen who built the platform and the houses, using adzes and chisels in the traditional way.

Although Flag Fen, like other crannogs, looks like a defensive site, it may not have been built with that as a primary function. Such a sizeable community occupies an area that if it were built on cultivatable land might have seriously reduced the area which could have been used for planting crops and grazing animals. The same suggestion has been made about crannogs in the lochs of Scotland where the narrow waterside fields were more fertile than many other areas.

Another area where waterlogging has preserved Bronze Age material but so far no Bronze Age crannogs is in the Levels of north Somerset where the distribution of trackways suggests a well-ordered system of communication. The major tracks were better-built and more sophisticated in designs than the minor ones. Amongst them is the Eclipse Track (c1500BC) which comprised over 1000 hurdles laid down to form a route between the island of Meare and the Polden Hills.

The Meare Track was a little earlier and was of heavy track construction on transverse bearers pegged into place on the raised mire surface by long stakes driven through holes in the planks and it had a substructure of birch and alder brushwood. It ran for two kilometres. Tinney's A track, c1200BC, consisted of a walking surface of bundles of brushwood which was pegged into place along the sides and in the middle.

It may be that the lack of crannogs in the Somerset Levels is due to the presence of the numerous low hills that dot the marsh and provided convenient sites for villages. Certainly the hills seem to be nodal points for the arterial tracks.

The farming settlements, either of single homesteads or hamlets, described in the last chapter are still typical of the later Bronze Age period but on the chalk a number of ditched enclosures at places like South Lodge in Dorset and Harrow Hill in Sussex have been shown by excavation not to be settlement sites and they may be related to the grazing of flocks or herds on the Downs.

In the south-western peninsula, several areas have been studied. Dartmoor produces the best evidence drawn from fieldwork and environmental study. Above 427m the high moor was already covered with blanket peat in the Late Bronze Age. Below this was a belt of open grassland in which the majority of the settlement on the moor took place. Many sites were involved with pastoral farming and these were concentrated on the southern side of the moor. They consisted of enclosure walls inside which were scattered huts and gardens. The hut and garden wall foundations can still be seen on the ground at Ryder's Rings and Legis tor.

Unenclosed villages can be seen at Stanton Down and Rough Tor on Bodmin Moor where the circular huts were linked together by low stone walls enclosing paddocks and gardens, Sixty-eight huts have been recorded at Stanton Down. On Dartmoor these unenclosed sites are found on the western slopes of the moor.

Isolated farms with adjacent stone-walled fields are found on the sheltered eastern side of Dartmoor. Rippon Tor and Blissmoor are two examples.

In Wales there are several inhabited caves of the period, most in the south but a good deal of work still needs to be done on open sites of the period.

At Mam Tor in Derbyshire in England a cluster of huts have been found and these are similar to others discovered in Yorkshire at Grassington, at Trapain Law in East Lothian and at Jarlshof in Shetland. Two of the huts at Jarlshof had a stone underground passage running out under the wall to an underground chamber. This sort of structure is more typical of the Iron Age and is known as a souterrain.

In recent years attention has been drawn to a number of Late Bronze Age sites that contain unusually thick stratified deposits that contrast markedly with the meagre collections that are found on most late Bronze Age sites. One such site which has been examined is at Potterne in Wiltshire.

The settlement is extensive. Although its approximate limits have been determined in three sides only, these show that it extends over an area of at least three hectares and almost certainly substantially more. In the areas excavated, stratified deposits up to two metres in depth and rich in srtifacts have been found. They indicate that this area of the settlement was in use between c1000 and 750BC. It was then covered by a deep midden which shows a long sequence of deposits extending the site history to c600BC. The midden contains at least 50,000 cubic metres of deposits.

The function and morphology of the settlement seem to be analogous to settlements on the Continent. Regular cut building terraces, specialised work-areas and paved roadways and its overall extent are quite unlike most British sites.

The artifacts found include bronze knives, razors, awls, pins, a needle and fragments of sheet-bronze vessels. The many crucible fragments, pieces of slag, dross and fine whetstones provide evidence for metal-working. The worked bone included antler material while shale and amber has been recovered that was made into jewellery. Bucket urns of around 1000Bc are at the beginning of the sequence of pottery while the end of the sequence is marked by angular pottery imitating metal vessels coated with haematite to simulate bronze or with white linear decoration. Frequent food deposits were found inside the pots. Environmental remains include animals bones, grain, seeds, insect remains and mineralised coprolites.

The chronology of this site is matched by a different kind of Late Bronze Age site unearthed just outside Reading on either side of a tributary of the River Kennet. It is thought that it could cover almost a hundred hectares and be the biggest Bronze Age settlement in the country. Dozens of timber and thatched houses have been found arranged in regular rows. Each house was nearly eight metres in diameter, some with extensions that may have been verandahs. The remains of steam baths that were tents in which water was poured over heated stones, find parallels in Ireland. Wells some four metres in diameter and a metre and a half deep provided water and in one of the wells the remains of a cart was found. Environmental evidence shows that wheat, barley and flax were grown.

Both these sites are unusual and have prompted the suggestion that they were trading places since their size would probably have not allowed them to be viable as agricultural settlements.

There are problems about the chronological junction between the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age which seem to bother archaeologists unduly. At one time the range of pottery known as Deveril- Rimbury was assumed to belong to the early Iron Age but now it is known to be Bronze Age; there are few settlement sites that can be assigned to the late Bronze Age; and all that seems to be straightforward about the period are the metal sequences.

These problems may eventually be solved by re-assigning certain features of the time from one period to the other as was done with the Deveril-Rimbury pottery.

The Deveril-Rimbury pottery seems to have been at its best during the period 1400-1000BC and this is sometimes referred to as the 'classic' period. The fine pottery produced during it is sufficiently individual for archaeologists to identify certain regional areas of production like the Trevisker group in Devon and Cornwall, the South Dorset Group south and west of the River Stour, the Cranborne Chase Group in south-eastern Hampshire and Wiltshire, the South Downs Group in Sussex and the Ardleigh Group in Essex and Suffolk. After the 'classic' period, these groups die out and are replaced in the period from about 1000BC until c750BC by simplified forms of barrel and bucket forms. When new forms appear the most obvious are large, angular bowls which are not natural pottery shapes and are clearly imitations of metal situlae (sing. situla) which are bucket-shaped vessels made of sheet bronze. The pots are sometimes burnished with haematite, the ore of ferric oxide which is reddish-brown in colour. Further excavation and study of the pottery from Potterne should be immensely useful in the task of understanding the pottery traditions of this latest period.

In the Midlands, Wales and much of the north, pottery gradually ceased to be important and many areas seem to have given up using it altogether, perhaps using wooden vessels instead.

In the northern isles, pottery continued to be common throughout the period and styles can be seen to be continuing until well into the Iron Age.

In order to understand the relationship between Britain and the Continent which becomes increasingly important from now on and culminates with Caesar's invasion attempt of 55 and 54BC, we need to cross the Channel and see what is happening in Europe during the latter part of the Bronze Age.

The chronology in Europe of the Urnfield cultures is based on a site in the Austrian Salzkammergut some thirty miles east of Salzburg. This is Hallstatt, where one of several salt mines in the area was located during the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age. During the many hundreds of years when the people were digging the salt out of galleries in the mountain, a cemetery grew up alongside the village. At first the villagers practised cremation but later on, in the Early Iron Age (seventh and sixth centuries BC) , the period to which most of the graves belong, the rite changed to inhumation.

Finds from the mine itself are preserved very well in the salty atmosphere. A good many pieces of clothing survive as well as basketry, fur, leather, wooden objects and, in one instance, the complete, clothed body of a saltminer who was trapped in a landslide.

In the 3000 graves in the cemetery the many grave goods provide a sequence of artifacts that have given Central European archaeologists a framework for dating the period. Hallstatt A is assigned to the 12th and 11th centuries and Hallstatt B to the 10th through to the 8th century BC. The first iron objects north of the Alps appear at this juncture and the Iron Age proper begins with Hallstatt C in the 7th century BC. It is the time when the first iron objects are imported into Britain and they are referred to by British archaeologists as Hallstatt C objects. In the Hallstatt D period, the final Hallstatt period, the most advanced peoples are found further west in Europe, in Burgundy, Switzerland and the Rhineland.

The scale of some of the urnfields in Europe can be surprising - up to 10,000 graves in some instances. An example of a settlement site of the period is the Wasserburg on an island in the Federsee lake in southern Germany. In a second phase the island was re-occupied c1000BC when nine large tripartite houses were built of timber logs with internal wattle-and-daub dividing walls. It was surrounded by a palisade with gate-towers. The villagers kept pigs, sheep, goats and horses and hunted deer, elk, wild pig, bear and beaver with wolfhounds. They made cloth and built dug-out canoes with which they fished in the lake. The site is one of a number of sites in and around the marshy margin of the lake which remind one of the site of Flag Fen in England.

As in Britain, it is a time when land boundaries were being laid out, which suggests that there was a need to define ownership of it and perhaps also suggests the increasing importance of the aristocracy in society who were establishing their hegemony in this way.

The enormous number of bronze objects at this time and the appearance of the iron industry demonstrates the importance of the craftsmen and the traders in society, catering not only for the rich and powerful with the military gear but also for ordinary folk like those in the Wasserburg by supplying them with metal tools.

The peasants, as always, remain anonymously in the background but it is these people who produced the food and many of the raw materials that society required, labouring in the salt mines and the copper mines of central Europe and living in the innumerable timber-built villages dotted across Europe.

Evidence for trade between Britain and Europe is provided by the appearance of European bronze types in Britain and pottery during the seventh century BC and by two shipwrecks at Langdon Bay and Salcombe in Devon of vessels carrying cargoes of scrap bronze. Study of this activity has shown that there were two routes into Britain. One was a western route from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic and another across the southern North Sea from central Europe and the Rhine.

We don't known how well this trade was organised but we can point to the port at Mount Batten, a headland on the south bank of the Plym estuary in Devon. On this promontory, fieldwork has produced a great deal of prehistoric pottery and metalwork belonging to this period. Analysis of this material shows that foreign tools bronzes were being imported as early as 800BC.

The site is located only twelve miles south of the rich ore-bearing rocks of Dartmoor where tin, copper, silver and gold ores could be found. Much of the journey from Dartmoor down to Mount Batten could be undertaken by boat along the lower reaches of the River Plym. The prehistoric port of Mount Batten could be the unidentified port of Ictis referred to by classical writers.

It has usually been assumed that this was St Michael's Mount near Penzance but the evidence from Mount Batten is strong and its position is more likely. Possible trading partners of the time could have been the people of Armorica (Brittany), the Kingdom of Tartessus in southern Spain, Massilia, a Greek colony on the site of modern Marseilles in southern France and the Phoenicians in modern Tunisia on the northern African coast.

Another place that could have functioned as a port at this time was Hengistbury Head. It was certainly important as one during the Iron Age when it had access to the heart of southern England via the rivers that flowed down into Christchurch Harbour. Finds from the Late Bronze Age now suggest that it could have been active earlier.

Such places are difficult to locate in the usual way because the volume of trade with Europe was not enormous at this time and, apart from the tin and other minerals available on Dartmoor it is not easy to suggest what other goods/materials could have been traded out of the country.

We mentioned above that there is thought to have been a route across the southern North Sea from the Rhineland. So far no port or site in Britain has been identified but, on the analogy of the site at Mount Batten, we must expect some time to find one, either in the Thames estuary or on one of the inlets in Essex or perhaps in the Wansum Channel in northern Kent.

If we turn to the subject of how goods were transported by water we find that the most important finds of ancient boats in Europe have been made in Britain.

The earliest finds are the three boats excavated at North Ferriby on the Humber River and carbon-dated to c1300BC. The most complete of these three vessels consists of the greater part of three oaken planks which comprised the bottom of the boat which is estimated to have been some 15.35m long when complete. The planks were stitched together with bindings of yew and were caulked with moss held in position with oaken laths. Cleats were left proud in each plank and holes cut through them. Through the holes transverse timbers were passed connecting the bottom planks together laterally. It has been calculated that the log from which the bottom planks were split must have had a diameter of at least 1.1m. The ends of the boats were closed with watertight transoms (horizontal timbers).

Remains of another boat were found in 1991 in the grounds of Caldicot Castle in Gwent, south Wales. Other planks were discovered nearby at the mouth of the River Usk and were parts of a sewn boat similar to those at Ferriby.

In Dover a substantial part of a boat was excavated in September 1992. It was about 9.5m long and is estimated to be some two-thirds of the boat's length. Again the boat appears to be in the same tradition as the Ferriby boat and dates to about the same time, around 1350BC.

At Brigg in north Lincolnshire a re-excavation of a boat structure produced the bottom of a flat- bottomed boat with sewn oaken planks with moss caulking and longitudinal laths at the plank seams and tranverse timber through cleats left proud in the planking. Although very similar to the Ferriby boat, her radiocarbon date is 500 years later, around 800BC.

In these examples of boats we seem to have a long-standing tradition of boat-building in Britain during the Bronze Age. Whether these craft were capable of crossing the Channel we cannot say but there clearly were boats of the time that could accomplish this.

Perhaps it was a conservative tradition for there does not seem to have been a great deal of development over the five hundred years between the Ferriby and Brigg boats but there perhaps was no great scope for development since the method of propulsion was by oars. Sail was not to come in for fifteen hundred years and there was a limit to the size of boats of this type that could be propelled by oars. Boats of this size could probably have coped with the quantity of goods carried across the Channel or the southern North Sea but would not have compared in size with ships that perhaps were to Britain coming from the Mediterranean.

Movement of goods across country was presumably along tracks. We have already mentioned the cordurouy tracks in the Somerset Levels but, of course, tracks must have existed elswhere but the difficulty is to identify them and, having done so, dating them.

There are certainly routes of great antiquity like the Ridge Way of the Berkshire Downs with its extension via the Chiltern escarpment into Norfolk known as the Icknield Way, the North Downs trackway, erroneously called the Pilgrims' Way, and its westward extension via Basingstoke known as the Harrow Way, the complex of tracks along the limestone hills from Bath to Lincoln and east Yorkshire, part of which is known as the Cotswold Way, the High Street running along the western escarpment of the Lincolnshire Wolds from Horncastle to the Humber and beyond, the Wheel Causeway which crosses the Cheviots from the North Tyne to the Jed and many others.

It is likely that a good many of these were in use during the Bronze Age but we cannot prove it because there is nothing necessarily ancient about them today. They often consisted of more than one path because travellers chose the easiest line at particular times of the year and state of the ground. The Icknield Way along the Chilterns shows this very well.

Where modern roads descend steep hills, one can often see beside the road a deep ditch or a number of ditches. These are the remains of the original track which would have chosen the easiest route down the hill to spare the packhorses that could not cope with the gradients that are nowadays possible for modern traffic.

A modern excavation that has thrown some light on overland Bronze Age travel is the recent one at the Eton rowing lake at Dorney in south Buckinghamshire. Here are the remains of two bridges, one Bronze Age and the other Iron Age. The Bronze Age one consisted of two lines of timbers on opposing banks of a prehistoric channel of the River Thames. The posts were oaken posts, up to 0.5m in diameter, some with carpentered joints to which the superstructure was attached. Radiocarbon dates produced an average figure of between 1300 and 1400BC.

During the Bronze Age a small barrow cemetery had been placed nearby and a later cemetery of crouched inhumations. In the Late Bronze Age an extensive system of fields and enclosures was built which have been dated to round about 1000BC. The area appears to have been a focus of settlement during the Bronze Age which may be related to the presence of an important river crossing at this point. There cannot have been many bridges across the Thames at this period.

The discovery that bridges could be built on such a scale at the time suggests that certain points, at least, were fixed in the pattern of routes and acted as nodal points. Whether these crossing points were also trading settlements on rivers we do not know but further excavations at Dorney and some work that has been done at Runnymede on the Thames may help to make this clear. Certainly, there is no reason why such places should not have existed during the Bronze Age.

It should be noted that the White Horse of Uffington, the figure cut into the chalk of a Berkshire hillside, that on stylistic grounds has usually been assigned to the Iron Age, has now been dated by the Optically-Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) method to between 1400-600BC and so belongs to the later Bronze Age.

8 - Consolidation
Contents
10 - After 700BC