< Main Page Chapter 10 The First Industrial Revolution One of the most obvious developments during this period is the increase in the number of bronze artifacts. What was happening was that the industry was becoming much more commercial and one can almost speak of mass-production. By the end of the Bronze Age most craftsmen could expect to own metal tools but the tools 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 and merchants. What at the beginning of the period was a prestige material conferring status on those who owned metal objects, by the end it was common. A new form of metal, leaded bronze, was being introduced which allowed greater ease in casting although it slightly reduced the hardness of the metal and must have accentuated the trend towards mass-production. As a reaction to the increasing `commonness' of metal objects, a class of status objects like cauldrons and weapon paraphanalia that go with a warrior class - helmets, armour, shields and new types of swords and spears - appeared. Bronze in these forms and in its decorative configurations continued into the succeeding periods while iron was gradually introduced for more utilitarian functions. The introduction of metal provided a method of concentrating wealth. Before it appeared, surplus was channelled into conspicuous construction in the service of ritual and religious ceremony. With metal, wealth could become personal and it could be used for display in terms of armour, weapons and, a little later on, chariots and horse furniture. Once metal was generally available, it became a prestige material that was desired for whatever reason 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 trading development. In the Bronze Age, craftsmen developed into merchants who took their place in the upper echelons of society in a strata that was probably somewhere between the farmer and the noble class. During the period, for the first time we are beginning to recognise agricultural settlements on the ground in lowland parts of the British Isles. Earlier we only knew the Neolithic sites already described in lowland Britain and those in the north like Skara Brae in Orkney and the stone-walled fields of Ireland. Presumably they are visible in the islands of the north because the climate made it necessary to be thoroughly sheltered from the weather so substantial dwellings had to be built and, again, on islands where space was restricted it would not be possible to move to fresh pastures whenever the land became exhausted so people just had to stay put in the same place in permanent dwellings. Perhaps the method of agriculture was not so intensive in the south with more emphasis on pasture and the use of manure in small cultivated plots, something which seems to have developed in Wessex when the supply of new land was exhausted in the later Neolithic period. Up to that time, they could move when the land became used up. An enclosure too large for a cultivated field was examined at Martin Down in Hampshire. It is rectangular and encloses 0.8 ha. and is surrounded by a `V'-shaped ditch 2.1m to 3.1m deep with an internal bank, some 0.6m high. In the northern side is a wide gap with two others in the southern and eastern sides. This place may have been created for cattle/sheep farming. Even larger divisions of the landscape are evident elsewhere on the chalk downs. They are defined by linear ditches that show up from the air. The term `ranch boundaries' is used for them and suggests animals and large `spreads' as in Texas and may indicate both a pastoral use of the land and boundaries relating to ownership. A section was dug across a ditch at Snail Down in Wiltshire (Thomas) and it proved to be `V'- shaped, 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 and other moors in south-west England where they are known as reaves and were built as stone walls. These field systems are also dated to the earlier part of the second millennium BC. At Gwithian on St Ives Bay in Cornwall two smaller superimposed Bronze Age systems were found in excavation with the evidence of cross-ploughing in one of the fields and the use of the spade as well as an ard together with evidence of the use of seaweed for manuring. Finds of metal hoards have helped to demonstrate the possible age of a few of these fields but in most cases they are almost impossible to date closely. But a hoard of gold objects buried in a field bank near St Ives comes from the Middle or Late Bronze Age and bronze hoards have been discovered at Lulworth Cove in Dorset and at Ebbesbourne Wake in Wiltshire in similar field boundaries. Complete Celtic field systems appear to be bounded by long, straight boundaries, many of them being the linear ditches mentioned above. Some archaeologists suggest that these were the primary divisions of the landscape into large blocks that were then sub-divided into workable units. If this is true, than we must be looking at an organised, communal effort. Leaders of society and/or owners of the land could well have controlled it and this might suggest an increasingly stratified society during the second millenium BC. The term `celtic fields', originally coined for regular systems of small rectangular enclosures in the Iron Age is now used for the phenomenon in other periods as well. From the second millenium BCE and lasting well in to the first millenium BCE we see an unprecendated period of economic expansion in the agricultural sector in southern England. The evidence comes largely from the so-called `grey literature', the volume of mainly unpublished material generated by commercial archaeology firms. This research points up the development of large-scale animal rearing and lowland field systems along coasts, estuaries, beside the main rivers and in the Fenland, demonstated in over 300 Bronze Age field systems. ( Yates) Habitation sites in the form of farmsteads have been excavated in this period. One is Thorney Down (Stone, PPS), four and half kilometres or so south of Salisbury. It consisted of a rectangular enclosure bounded by a bank and outer ditch with an area of around a quarter of a hectare on which stood nine circular huts. Among them were pits, perhaps for storage and cooking-holes and a number of other postholes were perhaps for structures like drying racks. Finds included a Deveril-Rimbury globular urn, a spearhead and a bracelet. The most extensively-excavated site is Itford Hill (Burstow and Holleyman), four kilometres north of Newhaven in Sussex where there are eleven huts, each within an enclosure platform cut back into the hillside. A hollow way (sunken track) approaches the site from the west where the excavated remains of the huts consist of a ring of postholes, some with a central post and entrance porch. Of them the largest is 6.7m in diameter but there is no trace of a hearth in any of them. The environmental evidence shows that amongst the products of the settlement were cattle, sheep and barley. Also in Sussex, six and a half kilometres north-west of Lewes, is Plumpton Plain (Holleyman and Curwen) where two Bronze Age settlements were examined. Site A, the earlier 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 had 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. Dating for these `Itford Hill' type sites had been obtained by radiocarbon determinations and seem to span the period from about 1000BCE to 800BCE 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 that 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, a task 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 especially if the ground is sprinkled with water. They show up because they are filled with topsoil that is a slightly darker colour than the surrounding sub-soil surface and are known as features. Before they are excavated, a plan of the site on which they are marked and numbered is drawn using a scale of 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 plan is drawn pin-pointing features with the aid of two measuring tapes from pegs placed in a rectangle around the excavation where they are not likely to be disturbed by the work. Also placed on one side would be a concrete plinth from which levels can be taken. This plinth would have its height above sea-level worked out from the nearest benchmark shown on an OS map. It is very important that the position of the site can be related to and marked onto the relevant Ordnance Survey map of the area. Nowadays, it is also possible to make use of GIS (Geographic Information System) a software tool that can map sites and also catalogue and analyse other relevant digital geographical data. Usually, a particular area of the excavation area is placed in the hands of an archaeological supervisor whose job it is to carry out the work needed in his/her area. This involves supervising the diggers, ensuring that the drawings, photographs and other records are kept and making sure that finds and soil samples are properly labelled and despatched to the excavation HQ. The method of excavation is by emptying the features of topsoil using trowels, hand shovels, buckets and wheelbarrows. Finds and samples from different contexts are placed in numbered trays. Contexts are single environments encountered in the excavation and can include individual postholes or the layers in postholes, pits and ditches. A hearth is a context, for example, so is a floor surface, a grave is one context while the soil in the grave and the skeleton another. Each context is recorded on a computer input sheet so that the information collected is in a standard form. Finds are entered on a finds sheet. Together with the site drawings, these records are the responsibility of the supervisor. In an excavation of a Bronze Age farmstead there is little stratification apart from that within individual features like pits or ditches. If a section is required it can be produced temporarily and removed after it has been drawn. In the excavation HQ, finds are collected, processed and packed for transport while the records are collated and data computerised. This forms the archive which, with the finds and the information returned from the laboratories that process the environmental and other samples is all that will remain of the site after the excavation is finished and the area backfilled. It is the data that will be used to write the final excavation report. (Excavation techniques: Renfrew and Bahn) Environmental evidence can consist of pollen, wood, charcoal, plant remains, insect remains, animal bones, mollusc shells and coprolites. The pollen remains, of course, can be used to identify the plants growing in the vicinity of the site, both domesticated and wild. Charcoal is used to identify the timber and it can also be used for radiocarbon determinations. Plant remains can include nut shells and other actual bits of plants thar survive in anerobic (oxygen-free) contexts, while the use of the animal bones and mollusc shells is self-evident. Coprolites are invaluable in the study of diet, both of humans and animals. Humankind's interaction with the environment is a two-way process involving the effect of the environment on people's behaviour, more important in earlier times perhaps, and its effect on their environment, more important in later times. The type of settlement, the type of house, the type of clothing that they wore were influenced almost entirely by the environment while the institution of farming and man's domination over the plant and animal kingdoms are examples of his influence. These areas have been explored to some extent but there are areas that are still hardly studied. In particular, the spectrum of animal and human diseases in the past have probably changed greatly during Neolithic and more recent periods, and at times have clearly been critical to cultural progress and to settlement. The same could be true of plant diseases. We remember BSE and foot-and-mouth and the Dutch elm disease of a few years ago that devastated parts of the British countryside. It is probably true to say that nothing has remained unchanged in the natural world since the appearance of man and that even the environment of the Bronze Age was radically different from that of the primeval countryside. Huts in the Bronze Age farmsteads in lowland England, as we have seen, 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 usually 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 done in fire-pits that would be used for the baking. Excavators talk of storage pits but they were clearly also later used as rubbish or even ritual pits. Further west in areas where stone was used instead of timber, the remains of twenty-four circular huts can be seen surviving on the surface as at Grimspound on Dartmoor where they stand inside a massive granite enclosure, three feet high and nine feet wide, large enough to contain the animals as well Characteristic of mixed farming was the range of products. It was the type of farming that was best suited to the conditions and technology of the time where the crops and the animals complemented each other and so provided the range of products. Crops provided some fodder for the animals and the animals provided manure for the crops. It lasted a long time and is still a common activity in some places in the world today. This particular period is important in the history of agriculture because the traditions of an agricultural system that lasted for two thousand years were being refined. Not only in this country, of course, the process was happening on the Continent as well. A system was being created that was adapted to supplying 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. Ale was made from the barley or some other grain. Dyes were vegetable colours from wild plants. Timber for housebuilding and probably a host of other uses for which we have no archaeological evidence would have come from the managed woodland. 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 1500BCE 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 and horses. Horses, prestige animals, are thought to have been introduced into Ireland at the end of the third millenium BCE. 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 animals. Salt may have been used for flavouring food. At Fengate near Peterborough debris from salt extraction was found in the ditches. Incidentally, it is thought that domesticated sheep did not develop fleeces until the Bronze Age. Before that time the wool had to be plucked like goat hair. Evidence for arable farming apart from the remains of the crops themselves that 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 with an upper and a lower stone 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. They are succeeded by bronze ones later in the period. For storage of grain, pits have been suggested but it it has also been said the `spare' postholes discovered on excavation could have been the foundations of above-ground granaries. In some cases 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 had 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 BCE and suggest that woven cloth was now the norm. This evidence is reinforced by the increase in number of pins at the same period used, presumably for fastening shawls and kilts. 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 used for the purpose. 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 employed. Another, but less efficient method of dressing leather, was 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 proved 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 particular 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 lives, 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 try to understand the people first then, hopefully, we shall begin to understand the things that they left behind them. 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. 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 a good deal of the material that can be picked up fieldwalking would be difficult to assign definitely to either period. 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 little evidence to suggest that this happened until the end of the second millenium BCE. For this reason flint/stone axeheads survived into the later period. On the Continent there was almost an industrial revolution after c1300BCE. It was a jump in the scale of production as we can see from the number of metal goods that are found as hoards buried in the ground and a development of techniques that allowed some pieces of metalwork to become works of art during the Iron Age. These techniques included the casting process in which the object was first modelled in wax that was later replaced in the mould by metal (the cire perdue process), and the addition of lead to the bronze that made for ease of casting. Sheet bronze was used for armour, vessels, helmets and chariots while leaf-shaped swords, spears, socketed axeheads, scabbards, and a range of agricultural and carpenter's tools appeared. All this brought about a great increase in trade. At the same time, people began to feel the need to defend themselves with more than just weapons and stockaded forts were built. Renewed contacts with the Continent led to the refreshment of the native bronze industry and the introduction of new metal types like the true leaf-shaped swords or flanged-tanged swords, leaf-shaped spearheads and spearheads with peghole fixings instead of loops and socketed axeheads. They were copied directly from central Europe bronzesmiths whose products were being shipped to Britain. Two such cargoes have been found by the South West Maritime Archaeology Group in wreck sites on the seabed off Salcombe in Devon which have been dated to the thirteenth century BCE. One carried 53 artefacts while the latest discovery yielded 259 copper ingots and 27 tin ingots together with three gold bracelets, a bronze leaf-shaped sword and three possible stone slingstones. The paddle-driven vessel could have been up to 40 feet long with a beam of eight feet and a crew of fifteen. Another find nearby of eight Bronze Age artefacts might be the remains of a similar wreck. It has been suggested that this increase in the number of weapon types and military gear enhanced the status of the aristocracy who took on a `warrior' persona and who, perhaps like contemporary well-to-do people, wanted to keep up with the latest fashions 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 customers they represented, leaving the copper miners of central Europe with a yawning hole in their markets which they filled by supplying European schools of metallurgy who produced a fresh range of goods inspired by the Aegean - corselets, helmets. cups, bowls and buckets - and marketed them to the chieftains of western Europe who seem to have been omnivorous in their appetite for new things. Clay moulds for casting objects were now in common use but metal moulds were also used. British smiths had mastered the casting of sockets and rivet-holes and the production of large and complex objects and by the beginning of the Iron Age they had also mastered the `lost-wax (cire-perdue) technique' which was used for casting on the handles of buckets and cauldrons. Leaded bronze was introduced, 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 holes in the ground for safe-keeping by itinerant merchants and usually consisted only of finished objects. During 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 waiting and the smith would sit down on the spot and make them. 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. Irish objects include gold bracelets, dress-fasteners, torcs and earrings of twisted gold bars. Gold objects may also have been imported from the Continent. 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. Their hoards have been found at Caister-on-Sea containing two bracelets and two dress-fasteners and at Sporle, also in East Anglia, containing gold bracelets. These objects appear to be of Irish origin. Students of Bronze Age metalwork love to classify and there are a 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 after the Wilburton Hoard from Cambridgeshire, running from c950BCE to c750BCE and the second after the Ewart Park hoard from Northumberland and runs on from c750BCE. In the Wilburton phase the first true swords were introduced from the Rhineland and all 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 c900BCE 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, the earliest examples being imports from which a British variety was developed. Various tools that were current earlier had been of the type that fitted into a handle with a tang but subsequently socketed forms became customary. 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 c750BCE, retained a good many of the designs of the Wilburton period but added innovations like the improved sword known as the Ewart type with a longer and more elegant blade. Looped spearheads had gone out of fashion. A new technique of using beaten bronze sheet to make buckets, cauldrons and ceremonial shields was introduced and these objects were produced for the prestige market. Flesh-hooks, used for hooking meat out of a cauldron were another product for the aristocratic market. They are more common in Ireland than in Britain and, indeed, most may have been made there. Cauldrons were 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 produced in the British Isles were made only of very thin beaten bronze sheet and so could not have been used in battle and Irish examples found in bogs suggest that wooden or leather shields were used for that purpose. These 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. We should mention again the strange term `Carp's Tongue' which is a variety of sword with a parallel-sided blade that narrows suddenly for about a third of its length to a sharp point and gives the name `Carp's Tongue Complex' to an associated group of material which appears in founders' hoards in the Thames valley and in Kent. This material is often explained as evidence of the importation of large amounts of scrap material from the Continent at a time when iron was coming into use there and 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 Down, Ebbesbourne Wake in southern Wiltshire which 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. More complex casting processes for swords, sword chapes, spearheads and spear ferrules were carried out using clay moulds and it is likely that these `swordsmiths' were static, being based near suitable deposits of clay. In this regard, 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 from Europe, 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. Emphasis on military gear in 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) found it necessary to arm themselves. So if they needed to defend their persons with weapons then it might be that they needed to defend their homesteads as well and if we look around at the excavated settlements of the time we do find evidence that this was being done with banks and ditches and palisades. . On the Continent, to which the aristocrats looked for the latest advances 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 south-west Germany. This period in Europe 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 consisted of simple enclosures of banks and ditches as at Ivinghoe in Buckinghamshire where the rampart is revetted front and rear with timber framing. Here the discovery of quantities of Late Bronze Age metalwork enabled the excavators to place the site in its chronological context. Another site is that of Dinorben in North Wales which had similar timber-revetted ramparts built of clay. Later sites are in Dorset, in Herefordshire, in Yorkshire and the hillforts in Scotland of Finavon in Angus and Dun Lagaidh in Ross and Cromarty. They all belong to the eighth century BCE. 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 the unease in society was not a phenomenon limited to one or a few areas. Attempts have been made to link it with a climatic deterioration with high rainfall and the formation of a blanket of peat on the highlands of the west of Britain and in Ireland. This 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. It was true of Bodmin Moor and Dartmoor where the margins of cultivation retreated to lower levels. Shrinkage in available cultivatable land is thought to have brought about competition for what was left between the chieftains that led to intercine warfare. Whether this deterioration and the subsequent growth of bogs led to the deposition of sacrificed human beings in bogs that occurred a little later on in the Iron Age is a question that is still debated. Other sites that might have been devised to save encroachment on fertile shorelands and also had a defensive capability are the crannogs which were basically artificial islands built in lakes or meres close to the shore and 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 provided behind the house or the crannog was reached 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 established, 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 earlier period. 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. This was necessary 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 1000BCE. 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 manner just as they are used today. Although Flag Fen, like other crannogs, looks like a defensive site, it may not have been built with that primary function in mind. (Pryor) 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 but below this was a belt of open grassland in which the majority of the settlement on the moor took place. People were involved with pastoral farming and their settlements were concentrated on the southern side of the moor. They consisted of enclosure walls inside which were scattered huts and gardens. Stone-built hut and garden wall foundations can still be seen on the ground at places like Ryder's Rings and Legis Tor. Unenclosed settlements can be seen in the same way 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 types of 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 the moor where Rippon Tor and Blissmoor are examples. Many of these sites were long-lived, still in use in the first millenium AD. 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 stone huts has been found and the structures 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 storage chamber. This sort of feature is more typical of the Iron Age and is known as a souterrain. Similar Iron Age huts in Shetland, beside the beach at Sandwick on Uist, have produced more than a thousand sherds of pottery, layers of midden, consisting of limpet and whelk shells, a shale bracelet, painted pebbles and evidence for metalworking. After the site was abandoned, a burial was placed on the site dating from between 120 and 390AD. The site is now preserved by the Council for Scottish Archaeology. In recent years attention has been drawn to a number of Late Bronze Age sites containing unusually thick stratified deposits that contrast markedly with the meagre layers that are found on most late Bronze Age sites. One such excavated site 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 examined, stratified deposits up to two metres in depth and rich in artifacts have been found that indicate that this area of the settlement was in use between c1000 and 750BCE. It was then covered by a deep midden containing at least 50,000 cubic metres of materials which contain a long sequence of deposits extending the site history to c600BCE. The function and morphology of the settlement seems analogous to settlements on the Continent rather than in Britain. Regular cut building terraces, specialised work-areas and paved roadways and its overall extent are quite unlike features on most British sites. Artifacts found there include bronze knives, razors, awls, pins, a needle and fragments of sheet-bronze vessels. Many crucible fragments, pieces of slag, dross and fine whetstones provide evidence for metal-working. Worked bone included antler material while shale and amber made into jewellery has been recovered. Bucket urns of around 1000BCE are at the beginning of the sequence of pottery while the end of the sequence is marked by angular pottery coated with haematite to simulate bronze or decorated with white linear patterns. Frequently, food deposits survived inside the pots. Environmental remains include animal bones, grain, seeds, insect remains and mineralised coprolites. So far, the best interpretation of the site is as a manufacturing and trading centre. Potterne's chronology is matched by a different kind of Late Bronze Age site unearthed just outside Reading on each 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 verandas. Remains of steam baths (saunas); 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 were unusual and have prompted the suggestion that they were trading places since their size would probably have not allowed them to be viable simply as agricultural settlements. There are problems about the chronological junction between the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age which seem to bother some 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. As a result, few settlement sites were assigned to the late Bronze Age, and all that seemed to be straightforward about the time were the metal sequences. These anomalies are gradually being solved by re-assigning certain features of the time from one period to the other. Deveril-Rimbury pottery seems to have been at its best during the period 1400-1000BCE and this is sometimes referred to as its `classic' period. 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 after about 1000BCE until c750BCE by simplified forms of barrel and bucket urns. Then, when new forms appear the most obvious are large, angular bowls that are not natural pottery shapes and are clearly imitations of metal situlae (sing. Situla) which are bucket-shaped vessels made of sheet bronze. These pots were sometimes burnished with haematite, the ore of ferric oxide which is reddish-brown in colour. Further excavation and study of the pottery from Potterne in particular 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 54BCE, 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 48 kilometres east of Salzburg. During the many hundreds of years when miners were digging salt out of galleries in the mountain a cemetery grew up alongside the village. This is Hallstatt where one of several salt mines in the area was located during the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Its cemetery lies on a narrow spur of land so narrow that it could only expand in one direction, along the spur. At first the villagers practised cremation but later on, in the Early Iron Age (seventh and sixth centuries BCE), the period to which most of the graves belong, the rite changed to inhumation arranged so that all the early graves are at one end and the late ones at the other of the ridge and each chronological period between is largely restricted to a particular part of the spur. This horizontal stratigraphy has made it possible to test out theories on the typological development of brooch types and place them in a typological sequence. As these brooches are discovered widely in Europe, it provides relative dating for the contexts where they are found. At first the villagers practised cremation but later on, in the Early Iron Age (seventh and sixth centuries BCE), 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 BCE. 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 residential site of the period is the Wasserburg on an island in the Federsee lake in southern Germany. In a second phase the island was reoccupied c1000BCE when nine large tripartite houses were built of timber logs with internal wattle-and-daub dividing walls They were 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 and they made cloth and built dug-out canoes with which they fished in the lake. The site is one of a number in and around the marshy margin of the lake which remind one of the situation 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, remained 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 spread 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 BCE 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 a port at Mount Batten, a headland on the south bank of the Plym estuary in Devon (Cunliffe). On the promontory, fieldwork has produced a great deal of prehistoric pottery and metalwork belonging to this period. Analysis of this material shows that foreign tools and other bronzes were being imported as early as 800BCE. The site is located only twenty kilometres 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. So the prehistoric port of Mount Batten could be the unidentified port of Ictis referred to by classical writers. Up to now, this has usually been assumed to be St Michael's Mount near Penzance but the evidence from Mount Batten is stronger 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 (Cunliffe). 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 and the agricultural products of Wessex, like wool, 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 be a route across the southern North Sea from the Rhineland. Such a route could probably only have been possible if the voyagers coasted down the Frisian coasts and postponed the crossing until they reached the latitude of present-day Flushing where it was shortest. So far no port or site in eastern Britain has been identified but, on the analogy of the site at Mount Batten, we must expect 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 c1300BCE. 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 the hull was 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). A half-scale replica has been made of this boat which was launched in early 2005. In this replica the withies used to stitch together the planks in the original are replaced with polyester rope but otherwise authentic materials have been used. 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. At 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 1350BCE. 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 800BCE. In these examples of boats we seem to have a long-standing tradition of boat-building in Britain during the Bronze Age. Whether these particular boats were capable of crossing the Channel we cannot say but there clearly were boats of the time that could accomplish the journey. Perhaps boat-building was a very 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 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 probably a limit to the size of vessels that could be propelled by oars at the time but boats of this size could have coped with the quantity of goods carried across the Channel or perhaps coasted around the southern shores of the North Sea. However, they would not have compared in size with ships that were coming from the Mediterranean to the British ports for tin. Movement of goods across country was presumably along tracks. We have already mentioned the cordurouy tracks in the Somerset Levels but, of course, long-distance tracks must have existed as well but the difficulty is to identify them and, having done so, date 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 Berkshire Ridgeway, the complex of tracks along the limestone hills from Bath to Lincoln and east Yorkshire, part of which is known as the Cotswold Way, Pottergate south of Lincoln, 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 Jedburgh 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 dateable about their appearance today. They often consisted of more than one trodden path because travellers chose the driest way at a particular time of the year and state of the ground. From the air, 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 up or down the hill to spare the horses that could not cope with gradients that are possible for modern traffic. All that can be said about their date is that they were made at a time when the valleys were too marshy for travel and this was certainly true in the Neolithic. An 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 the possible remains of two bridges, one Bronze Age and the other Iron Age have been unearthed. The Bronze Age one consisted of two lines of timbers on opposite 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 1400BCE. 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 1000BCE. This area appears to have been a focus of activity during the Bronze Age which may be related to the presence of an important river crossing at this point. There cannot have been many other bridges across the prehistoric Thames at the time. The discovery that bridges could be built of this length at the time suggests that certain points, at least, were fixed in the pattern of cross-country routes and acted as nodal points. Whether these crossing points were also riverine trading settlements 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 inland trading sites should not have existed during the Bronze Age as we suspect from the Potterne evidence. They certainly existed not much later on in the Iron Age. It is interesting to compare this late Bronze Age period with the late-Victorian Age in Britain which was also a time of significant changes. Both have advances in transport, in the Bronze Age, horse trappings announce the arrival of the horse while rowing boats signal river and perhaps coastal travel; both have significant increases in trade, in the Bronze Age the overseas ports and the trackways and routeways and the bridge at Dorney; both have a technological revolution and an expansion of agricultural activity particularly in southern England; and both seem to have had a significant increase and/or concentration of populations. What we might call the Developed Prehistoric period as compared with what came earlier starts before 1000BCE and ushers in a time which is becomes more and more comprehensible to the archaeologist. o On the Continent, at La Tène, a place where a timber double bridge was built over a river flowing into Lake Neuchatel in northern Swtzerland, there was a lake-side Iron Age settlement. In 1857 the waters of the lake were lowered 2m and several rows of wooden piles were seen, remains of the two bridges and houses along the shore. Later excavations in 1885 turned up a large amount of Iron Age metalwork, both of iron and bronze. Since then some 2500 objects have been found, mainly metalwork, including 166 swords, some with decorated scabbards, 270 lanceheads and 22 shield bosses, 385 brooches, iron tools and many human and animal bones. Most of the weapons were without traces of wear. The place has been interpreted as a site where votive offerings were thrown into the lake and has given its name to the second major division of the European Iron Age succeeding the Hallstat (see above). This La Tène period is subdivided into La Tène I, 480-220 BCE; La Tène II, c220-120BCE and La Tène III c120BCE-Roman Conquest. Round Barrows [LINK] main page [LINK] After 700BCE [LINK]