Bronze Age metalwork hoards in the landscape of lowland Britain: a pilot study

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Until the recent expansion of developer-funded fieldwork in Britain, the clearest evidence of Bronze Age activity was provided by discoveries of metalwork, and it is this material which still dominates museum displays. That is particularly true of artefacts from the Middle and Late Bronze Ages (c.1500-800 BC) which date from a period in which burial mounds and cemeteries play a decreasing role. Finds of bronze and gold have attracted attention from the late 19thC, but generally are studied from two perspectives. They were initially employed to build a chronology because it seemed likely that collections of distinctive artefacts had been buried together on the same occasions. By comparing the contents of these hoards it was possible to subdivide the Bronze Age into a series of phases and even into a more complex sequence of industrial traditions whose validity has been confirmed by radiocarbon dating (Needham et al. 1998). This was an important achievement but it also created a problem, for little of this material was associated with other kinds of evidence, such as settlements burials or land divisions. Rather, finds of metalwork seemed to occur in isolation. For a while that was explained by adopting a functional approach to these finds which regarded them as the stock in trade of itinerant smiths, who had accumulated raw material for later recycling or who had stored newly made items before they were distributed to the customer. It was even argued that these people had worked in remote areas because they provided an abundant supply of fuel. Scientific analysis substantiated the connection between many, but not all, of these collections and the working of metal, but this approach all too easily encouraged the view that prehistoric metalworking was an industry that was organised on modern Western lines (Needham 2001; Barber 2003). Moreover there was no clear explanation of why so much material had been deposited but never recovered. Now it is possible to take another approach to the question. Larger numbers of Bronze Age settlements have been found and their distribution has widened, raising the possibility that metalwork hoards and single finds might have been attached to nearby settlements which had eluded discovery until recently. At the same time, it seems unlikely that many of these artefacts had been lost. Perhaps the hoards contained a specific selection of items that were intentionally committed to the ground as votive offerings, possibly by those engaged in working the metal. It seems likely that particular kinds of objects had to be deposited in particular kinds of places, weapons were normally committed to water and tools were placed in dry land. Work in Northern and Western Europe suggests that more subtle distinctions may also be discovered (Harding 2000, chapter 10; Fontijn 2003). Another reason for renewing the investigation of hoards and single finds is that new finds have recently come to light through discoveries by amateur archaeologists reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme as well as the growth of developer-funded fieldwork (Barber 2003). It is now much easier to study the manner in which both bronze and gold artefacts had been placed in the ground because fewer of these collections are chance finds, and more have been investigated by archaeologists (Department of Culture Media and Sport 2005). This makes it especially important to study the wider contexts of these discoveries. It seems possible that the deposition and transformation of the raw material were attended by social conventions of which archaeologists had not always been aware. Not only is there the possibility of contextualising metalwork deposits within the ancient pattern of settlement, it may be feasible to interpret the production of metal artefacts in terms that owe less to recent experience and are more appropriate to prehistoric society. If the pilot study provides satisfactory results I envisage a further grant application.