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Lives in Land – Mucking excavations

Author : Christopher Evans

Publisher : Oxbow Books

Page : 585 pages

File Size : 39,39 MB

Release : 2015-12-31

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1785701517

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Book Description

The excavations led by Margaret and Tom Jones on the Thames gravel terraces at Mucking, Essex, undertaken between 1965 and 1978 are legendary. The largest area excavation ever undertaken in the British Isles, involving around 5000 participants, recorded around 44,000 archaeological features dating from the Beaker to Anglo-Saxon periods and recovered something in the region of 1.7 million finds of Mesolithic to post-medieval date. While various publications have emerged over the intervening years, the death of both directors, insufficient funding, many organizational complications and the sheer volume of material evidence have severely delayed full publication of this extraordinary palimpsest landscape. Lives in Land is the first of two major volumes which bring together all the evidence from Mucking, presenting both the detail of many important structures and assemblages and a comprehensive synthesis of landscape development through the ages: settlement histories, changing land-use, death and burial, industry and craft activities. The long time-gap since completion of the excavations has allowed the authors the unprecedented opportunity to stand back from the density of site data and place the vast sum of Mucking evidence in the wider context of the archaeology of southern England throughout the major periods of occupation and activity. Lives in Land begins with a thorough evaluation of the methods, philosophy and archival status of the Mucking project against the organizational and funding background of its time, and discusses its fascinating and complex history through a period of fundamental change in archaeological practice, legislation, finance, research priorities and theoretical paradigms in British Archaeology. Subsequent chapters deal with the prehistoric landscape, each focusing on the major themes that emerge by major period from analysis and synthesis of the data. The authors draw on archival material including site notebooks and personal accounts from key participants to provide a detailed but lively account of this iconic landscape investigation.



Romano-British Settlement and Cemeteries at Mucking

Author : Sam Lucy

Publisher : Oxbow Books

Page : 778 pages

File Size : 23,37 MB

Release : 2016-11-30

Category : History

ISBN : 1785702696

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Book Description

Excavations at Mucking, Essex, between 1965 and 1978, revealed extensive evidence for a multiphase rural Romano-British settlement, perhaps an estate center, and five associated cemetery areas (170 burials) with different burial areas reserved for different groups within the settlement. The settlement demonstrated clear continuity from the preceding Iron Age occupation with unbroken sequences of artefacts and enclosures through the first century AD, followed by rapid and extensive remodeling, which included the laying out a Central Enclosure and an organized water supply with wells, accompanied by the start of large-scale pottery production. After the mid-second century AD the Central Enclosure was largely abandoned and settlement shifted its focus more to the Southern Enclosure system with a gradual decline though the 3rd and 4th centuries although continued burial, pottery and artefactual deposition indicate that a form of settlement continued, possibly with some low-level pottery production. Some of the latest Roman pottery was strongly associated with the earliest Anglo-Saxon style pottery suggesting the existence of a terminal Roman settlement phase that essentially involved an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ community. Given recent revisions of the chronology for the early Anglo-Saxon period, this casts an intriguing light on the transition, with radical implications for understandings of this period. Each of the cemetery areas was in use for a considerable length of time. Taken as a whole, Mucking was very much a componented place/complex; it was its respective parts that fostered its many cemeteries, whose diverse rites reflect the variability and roles of the settlement’s evidently varied inhabitants.



Maritime Archaeology on Dry Land

Author : Richard Bradley

Publisher : Oxbow Books

Page : 306 pages

File Size : 26,15 MB

Release : 2022-05-19

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1789258200

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Book Description

This book is about two islands off the coast of Continental Europe, the seas that surrounded them, and the ways in which they were used over a period of three thousand years. Instead of the usual emphasis on finds in the intertidal zone, it focuses on parts of Britain and Ireland where traces of the prehistoric shoreline survive above sea level. It explores a series of Neolithic and Early Bronze Age sites which were investigated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and have been largely forgotten. These places were very different from the Iron Age ports and harbors studied in recent years. How can we identify these special sites, and what are the best ways of interpreting them? The book considers the evidence for travel by sea between the settlement of the earliest farmers and the long distance movement of metalwork. It emphasizes the distinctive archaeology of a series of coastal locations. Little of the information is familiar and some of the most useful evidence was recorded many years ago. It is supplemented by new studies of these places and the artifacts found there, as well as reconstructions of the prehistoric coastline. The book emphasizes the important role of 'enclosed estuaries', which were both sheltered harbors and special places where artifacts were introduced by sea. Other items were made there and exchanged with local communities. It considers the role played by these places in the wider pattern of settlement and their relationship to major monuments. The book describes how the character of coastal sites changed in parallel with developments in maritime technology and trade. The main emphasis is on Neolithic and Early Bronze Ages uses of the seashore, but the archaeology of the Middle and Later Bronze Age provides a source of comparison.



Europe's Early Fieldscapes

Author : Stijn Arnoldussen

Publisher : Springer Nature

Page : 230 pages

File Size : 43,21 MB

Release : 2021-10-05

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 303071652X

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Book Description

This volume focuses on the development of field systems through time and space and in their wider landscape context, including classical issues pertaining to past land use and management regimes, including manuring, water, land and crop management, and technologies such as slash‐and‐burn cultivation, and use of the ard and plough. This book provides the first comprehensive attempt to bring together and provide a comprehensive insight into the latest prehistoric fieldscape research across Europe. The book raises a broader awareness of some of the main questions and scientific requests that are addressed by scholars working in various fieldscapes across Europe. Themes addressed in this book include (a) mapping and understanding field system morphologies at various scales, (b) the extraction of information on social processes from field system morphologies, (c) the relations between field systems and cultural and natural features of their environment, (d) time-depths and temporalities of usage, and (e) specifics of the underlying agricultural systems, with special attention to matters of continuity and resilience and relation to changing practices. The case-studies explore how to best approach such landscapes with traditional and novel methodologies and targeted research in order to enhance our knowledge further. The volume offers inspiration and guidance for the heritage management of fieldscape heritage – not solely for future scholarly research but foremost to stimulate strategic guidance to frame and support improved protection of evidently vulnerable resources for Europe’s future. This volume is of interest to landscape archaeologists.



Bronze Age Worlds

Author : Robert Johnston

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 418 pages

File Size : 18,55 MB

Release : 2020-10-26

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1351710974

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Book Description

Bronze Age Worlds brings a new way of thinking about kinship to the task of explaining the formation of social life in Bronze Age Britain and Ireland. Britain and Ireland’s diverse landscapes and societies experienced varied and profound transformations during the twenty-fifth to eighth centuries BC. People’s lives were shaped by migrations, changing beliefs about death, making and thinking with metals, and living in houses and field systems. This book offers accounts of how these processes emerged from social life, from events, places and landscapes, informed by a novel theory of kinship. Kinship was a rich and inventive sphere of culture that incorporated biological relations but was not determined by them. Kinship formed personhood and collective belonging, and associated people with nonhuman beings, things and places. The differences in kinship and kinwork across Ireland and Britain brought textures to social life and the formation of Bronze Age worlds. Bronze Age Worlds offers new perspectives to archaeologists and anthropologists interested in the place of kinship in Bronze Age societies and cultural development.



The Arras Culture of Eastern Yorkshire – Celebrating the Iron Age

Author : Peter Halkon

Publisher : Oxbow Books

Page : 320 pages

File Size : 20,6 MB

Release : 2020-02-28

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1789252598

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Book Description

In 1817 a group of East Yorkshire gentry opened barrows in a large Iron Age cemetery on the Yorkshire Wolds at Arras, near Market Weighton, including a remarkable burial accompanied by a chariot with two horses, which became known as the King’s Barrow. This was the third season of excavation undertaken there, producing spectacular finds including a further chariot burial and the so-called Queen’s barrow, which contained a gold ring, many glass beads and other items. These and later discoveries would lead to the naming of the Arras Culture, and the suggestion of connections with the near European continent. Since then further remarkable finds have been made in the East Yorkshire region, including 23 chariot burials, most recently at Pocklington in 2017 and 2018, where both graves contained horses, and were featured on BBC 4’s Digging for Britain series. This volume bring together papers presented by leading experts at the Royal Archaeological Institute Annual Conference, held at the Yorkshire Museum, York, in November 2017, to celebrate the bicentenary of the Arras discoveries. The remarkable Iron Age archaeology of eastern Yorkshire is set into wider context by views from Scotland, the south of England and Iron Age Western Europe. The book covers a wide variety of topics including migration, settlement and landscape, burials, experimental chariot building, finds of various kinds and reports on the major sites such as Wetwang/Garton Slack and Pocklington.



The Fens

Author : Francis Pryor

Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing

Page : 459 pages

File Size : 14,27 MB

Release : 2019-07-11

Category : History

ISBN : 1786692236

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Book Description

A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. 'Francis Pryor brings the magic of the Fens to life in a deeply personal and utterly enthralling way' TONY ROBINSON. 'Pryor feels the land rather than simply knowing it' GUARDIAN. Inland from the Wash, on England's eastern cost, crisscrossed by substantial rivers and punctuated by soaring church spires, are the low-lying, marshy and mysterious Fens. Formed by marine and freshwater flooding, and historically wealthy owing to the fertility of their soils, the Fens of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire are one of the most distinctive, neglected and extraordinary regions of England. Francis Pryor has the most intimate of connections with this landscape. For some forty years he has dug its soils as a working archaeologist – making ground-breaking discoveries about the nature of prehistoric settlement in the area – and raising sheep in the flower-growing country between Spalding and Wisbech. In The Fens, he counterpoints the history of the Fenland landscape and its transformation – from Bronze age field systems to Iron Age hillforts; from the rise of prosperous towns such as King's Lynn, Ely and Cambridge to the ambitious drainage projects that created the Old and New Bedford Rivers – with the story of his own discovery of it as an archaeologist. Affectionate, richly informative and deftly executed, The Fens weaves together strands of archaeology, history and personal experience into a satisfying narrative portrait of a complex and threatened landscape.



The Social Context of Technology

Author : Leo Webley

Publisher : Oxbow Books

Page : 624 pages

File Size : 27,8 MB

Release : 2020-06-30

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 178925177X

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Book Description

The Social Context of Technology explores non-ferrous metalworking in Britain and Ireland during the Bronze and Iron Ages (c. 2500 BC to 1st century AD). Bronze-working dominates the evidence, though the crafting of other non-ferrous metals – including gold, silver, tin and lead – is also considered. Metalwork has long played a central role in accounts of European later prehistory. Metals were important for making functional tools, and elaborate decorated objects that were symbols of prestige. Metalwork could be treated in special or ritualised ways, by being accumulated in large hoards or placed in rivers or bogs. But who made these objects? Prehistoric smiths have been portrayed by some as prosaic technicians, and by others as mystical figures akin to magicians. They have been seen both as independent, travelling ‘entrepreneurs’, and as the dependents of elite patrons. Hitherto, these competing models have not been tested through a comprehensive assessment of the archaeological evidence for metalworking. This volume fills that gap, with analysis focused on metalworking tools and waste, such as crucibles, moulds, casting debris and smithing implements. The find contexts of these objects are examined, both to identify places where metalworking occurred, and to investigate the cultural practices behind the deposition of metalworking debris. The key questions are: what was the social context of this craft, and what was its ideological significance? How did this vary regionally and change over time? As well as elucidating a key aspect of later prehistoric life in Britain and Ireland, this important examination by leading scholars contributes to broader debates on material culture and the social role of craft.



The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland

Author : Richard Bradley

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 391 pages

File Size : 26,20 MB

Release : 2019-05-16

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1108329632

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Book Description

Sited at the furthest limits of the Neolithic revolution and standing at the confluence of the two great sea routes of prehistory, Britain and Ireland are distinct from continental Europe for much of the prehistoric sequence. In this landmark study, Richard Bradley offers an interpretation of the unique archaeological record of these islands. Highlighting the achievements of its inhabitants, Bradley surveys the entire archaeological sequence over a 5,000 year period, from the last hunter-gatherers and the adoption of agriculture in the Neolithic period, to the discovery of Britain and Ireland by travellers from the Mediterranean during the later pre-Roman Iron Age. His study places special emphasis on landscapes, settlements, monuments, and ritual practices. This edition has been thoroughly revised and updated. The text takes account of recent developments in archaeological science, such as isotopic analyses of human and animal bone, recovery of ancient DNA, and more subtle and precise methods of radiocarbon dating.



Later Prehistoric Settlement in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly: Evidence from Five Excavations

Author : Andy M Jones

Publisher : Archaeopress Publishing Ltd

Page : 380 pages

File Size : 29,21 MB

Release : 2021-10-07

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1789699584

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Book Description

Later prehistoric settlement in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly reports on the excavation between 1996 and 2014 of five later prehistoric and Roman period settlements. All the sites were multi-phased, revealing similar and contrasting occupational patterns stretching from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age and beyond.