For almost a century a family of gold coinage derived from Gallo-Belgic A circulated in Britain. The conservatism within the imagery and colour during this time was extraordinary. However, around the mid-first century BC a significant change took place. In the south-east, to judge by hoard evidence, much of this earlier coin disappeared, to be replaced by two totally new families of imagery. These were derived from Gallo-Belgic F, a continental coin rarely found in Britain. The first series of issues are collectively called British Q (S5), and circulated in Hampshire and southern Berkshire. Within a generation these coins had legends added to them, and we see them hailing the names of the Commian dynasty (S6–7). The coinage of the west (W5–9; the ‘Dobunni’) also derived from British Q. Meanwhile, in the east, a second series began with British L (E5-6), from which derived the coinage of Addedomarus (SE7), the Tasciovanian dynasty (E7–8), as well as some of the gold of East Anglia (EA6–7).

Not only do we find two totally new families of imagery beginning, replacing the existing stock of gold coin, but there was also a noticeable shift in the colour of that gold coin. The dominance of yellow gave way to red. Alongside the gold, silver coins came to be issued more commonly. It was as if the yellow ternary alloy had been rent asunder into two completely new metals: red-gold and white silver.

The preceding chapters have presented some aspects of the archaeological record for Bronze Age Europe, and no simple summary can do justice to them. It is evident, however, that a number of distinct spheres of activity may be recognised in Bronze Age research. Some of these are ‘nuts-and-bolts’ approaches (i.e. site- and artefact-based), while others are more theoretical in nature. While the trend is from the former to the latter, in many countries the study of cultures, for the purposes of ethnogenesis and culture history, still reigns supreme.

• Typology and artefact studies. The enormous wealth of material culture in the Bronze Age naturally means that attention has focused on the products of the smith and the potter, sometimes to the exclusion of all other objects of study. Of the many examples which one could cite, the series Präistorische Bronzefunde (PBF) is preeminent. So far only one category of objects – swords – is even reasonably complete across Europe (and even there gaps remain), but others, such as metal vessels, are not far behind. There are, however, drawbacks to this approach. The objects, when drawn together on a page, lose their contextual information. It is also misleading to present only finds of bronze, when identical objects might be made in wood, gold or iron, or other materials.

• […]

Since no elixir of life has yet been discovered, all humankind continues to end up as dust, ashes and bones, to the great advantage of archaeology. Bronze Age people were no more successful than anyone else at discovering the secret of eternal life, and consequently there are a lot of them available for study in skeletal or combusted form. Estimates of their numbers are necessarily little more than guesses, but there is no doubt that the surviving buried population of the Bronze Age is much greater than that of the Neolithic, and probably on a par with that of the pre-Roman Iron Age. It is a huge resource for study.

Traditionally, the study of burials has been a popular activity for Bronze Age scholars, but over the years their preoccupations have changed. Originally the quest for grave-goods was all-important; these were then catalogued and divided into types. Later, this information was combined with that on age and sex, and with statistics on orientation and grave form, to produce ‘combination tables’ which aimed to show the associations of each object. This led directly to the production of chronological charts through the use of seriation techniques. En route, many individual studies of artefact types were possible, especially for unusual or well-represented types. Such studies have also led to the study of social status, intra- and extra-societal relationships, the evolution of social and political systems, and the relationship between archaeological artefacts and kinship structures.

General studies of burial have usually been concerned with the information potential of the evidence, and specifically with what burial can say about social organisation in the society from which the dead came.

For all the apparent lack of personal information that is available on the people of the European Bronze Age, much can be said about their appearance and identity as expressed through dress and ornament. One of the most abundant categories of material to survive is human skeletal material; another is the depictions of people and the remains of their clothing and ornaments. This chapter considers some of the types of evidence that provide information on the human beings who lived in the period and whose handwork, homes and graves have been examined in previous chapters.

Appearance

In terms of physical build, skeletal material gives good information on stature and robustness, and some indication of morphological features such as head shape. With the exception of the Ice Man, the reconstruction of facial characteristics has not yet had any impact on the buried people of Copper and Bronze Age Europe other than in Greece, but this line of approach has obvious potential.

Artistic depictions of people are of uncertain value, because naturalistic representation was frequently not the artist's aim. Thus one can no more imagine that all young men were the slender creatures seen in the Grevensv?ge figurines than that people in the Camonica valley were stick figures. Where there is equipment for fastening on or attachment to the body, such as rings, bracelets, corslets or helmets, all the indications are that size and physical type were not greatly different from those of modern populations; certainly the degree of variation is unlikely to have been much different from what can be seen at the present day.

If ‘no man is an island’, no group of people is an island either. Not only were contacts essential demographically for the maintenance of biological groups through provision of marriage partners, they were also a necessary element in the articulation of relationships between different members of the same community and between different communities. They served as channels for the movement of goods, and goods, i.e. artefacts, are the archaeologically concrete expression of relationships, as well as representing the supply of materials wanted for the maintenance of life.

What is being talked of here is trade, or more accurately exchange, since many, perhaps most, transactions that take place in pre-monetary societies cannot be considered commercial in the sense in which the term is understood today. Goods can move between different people, and between different groups or political units in a variety of ways, many of them not ‘economic’ at all. A range of commentators have shown how within the community most of these transactions are social in nature, depending on reciprocated giving (‘balanced reciprocity’) that reinforce particular relationships. On the other hand, exchange or procurement of goods outside the community might well witness the effects of bargain-hunting, the desire to get as good a deal as possible, perhaps at the expense of the exchange partner (‘negative reciprocity’). Both these cases assume that goods entered communities from outside, that they were available on some kind of supply network, and passed from supply or production area to consumer destination.

Bronze Age life was for the most part a life based in agricultural villages. Few of these villages possessed houses of special size or elaboration. In most parts of Bronze Age Europe they are unspectacular affairs, no more than clusters of pits and post-holes, or cooking places marked by accumulations of fired stones, discovered by chance during development work or the excavation of sites of a different period. The study of Bronze Age settlements is possible to differing degrees in different parts of Europe, as a result of differential survival and differential success at extracting the necessary information from the archaeological record. Spectacular discoveries in a few areas are balanced by an almost complete absence of known sites in others.

That the fugitive traces of Bronze Age house sites can reflect stable and long-lived settlement has been apparent since the work of Strömberg and Stjernquist on the settlement sites of Scania. Settlement traces which on the basis of a few good plans can be reconstructed to something much bigger can be found in many areas, and emanate from all parts of the Bronze Age. The remains of hearths, ovens and cooking places are often found; some were originally inside buildings, others outside. Analysis of the internal structure of Bronze Age settlements defined only by pits identified clusters that might correspond to original activity foci, probably houses and their associated activities (a cluster being a grouping of potentially contemporary features which represent a non-coincidental agglomeration).

Though the interpretation of spiritual matters in other societies is hard because of differences in culture and context, the facility for reflective thought and emotion is one of the features that distinguishes humans from animals, and shows every sign of having been an influential factor in all past societies. While it is impossible to enter into the psyche of prehistoric peoples or chart the psychological processes that led them to undertake particular spiritual journeys, one is justified in supposing that the processes existed, and that many aspects of material culture reflect these preoccupations.

It is common to refer these various processes and preoccupations to the catch-all terms ‘religion’ and ‘ritual’. What is certain is that particular mental and psychological states can produce particular effects in terms of material behaviour – for instance the building of churches, synagogues or mosques, or artefacts bearing symbols of known significance such as the cross. These effects are visible among the material records available to Bronze Age archaeology as much as in any other period.

What appear to be symbolic manifestations are widely found in Bronze Age Europe, in portable objects, in decorative motifs and in the art carved on to rock outcrops. The locations for activities that may loosely be described as cultic or ritual are harder to identify. Such activities may have taken place almost anywhere; certainly they did not require a built construction, and could have utilised natural features such as hilltops, areas with curious rock formations, groves, marshes and bogs, pools and lakes, caves or rock fissures, and rivers or streams.

The origin of this book lies in the publication and reception of an earlier work on the Bronze Age, The Bronze Age in Europe (1979), which J. M. Coles and I wrote in the mid-1970s. The work represented the first attempt to give a continent-wide (if necessarily superficial) account of a complicated set of materials, and remains the only such work. Though the critical reception was on the whole favourable, it rapidly became evident that as a tool for understanding the Bronze Age it was of limited use, framed as it was around a descriptive approach to the culture sequence in each area of Europe. In spite of this, many people continue to ask whether a revised edition of The Bronze Age in Europe will be produced. The answer is that, though it may be needed, the enormous amount of work which would be necessary to bring it up to date would be quite beyond the powers and wishes of its authors, who have other tasks to fulfil and interests to pursue.

Instead, I have felt for a number of years that what would be of much more use would be a work which sought to analyse different aspects of the Bronze Age on a thematic basis. Other commitments prevented me from starting it until 1994, and as I have proceeded I have often felt that the enterprise was a rash one. For a start, the sheer volume of material that has been produced in the last twenty years, and continues to pour out, is staggering.

Of the various materials and industries that were current during the Bronze Age, metals occupy a special place: not so much because they were especially important to the population of the period as a whole; more because of the association of the name with the assumed production of metal objects on a wide scale. During the 1500 years over which the Bronze Age lasted, metallurgical technology developed from the use of unalloyed copper and gold for simple objects that were hammered to shape or made in open moulds, to the creation of a large and varied repertory using a variety of metals. From the middle of the second millennium, very large numbers of objects were made, principally in tin-bronze but also in other alloys of copper, and in gold. Thanks to recent experimental and analytical work, most of the processes involved, and the places where they were conducted, are well understood. But many questions remain concerning the way in which metals were regarded and utilised in other than functional terms, how the objects into which they were made operated in the society and economy of the period, and what status was accorded those who carried out the work of procuring the materials and producing the objects.

A number of general accounts of metallurgical processes are available, though none is written purely from a Bronze Age point of view, or with the situation in Europe principally in mind. The works of R. F. Tylecote are commonly cited, but other valuable general accounts are those by Coghlan, Mohen, Ottaway and Craddock.

If Homer is to be believed, the Bronze Age Aegean was a world of heroes, whose eminence was measured less by their skills as diplomats than by their prowess on the battlefield. In terms of archaeological finds, this picture finds a reflection in the weaponry, armour and fortifications of the Late Bronze Age. It is a moot point whether one could have reconstructed the heroic age of Greece on the basis of such finds alone. In the barbarian world of Europe, where no literary aids are available, there is much to suggest a heroic era similar to that in Greece, even though the evidence differs in the two areas.

First and foremost, there are the weapons and armour of the period, which are comparable in quantity, if not in quality, to those of Mycenaean Greece. Next, there are the burials which contain such weaponry, usually seen as warriors' graves. And lastly, there are the fortifications of the period, whether built in stone (as in parts of the Mediterranean) or in earth with a wooden framework. The combination of these types of evidence leaves one in little doubt that group aggression, what may here be termed warfare, was a major preoccupation in Bronze Age life. Indeed, Treherne has suggested that the ‘warrior grave’ was the material residue of a ‘heroic’ mortuary ideology; the warrior hero can perhaps stand as a symbol of the age. All these types of evidence combine in the rock art of Scandinavia to give an imposing picture of the Bronze Age warrior (fig. 8.1).

In most of what has been presented in this book so far, the discussion has revolved around patterns of material culture and their relationship to various categories of human activity. This chapter, by contrast, is concerned with social inference; in other words, it seeks to elicit an interpretation of social aspects of the Bronze Age from the material culture. By ‘social’ aspects I mean the way society was structured, how power relations worked, how individuals operated within and reproduced the accepted norms of behaviour in their relations with others and with their residence or kin group, and how they expressed their identity in terms of gender, age and status. In the context of European Bronze Age archaeology, the sources of evidence for social organisation are few and capable of different interpretations. Despite the fact that material forms such as artefacts and sites cannot have occurred in a social vacuum, the reconstruction of a social past is inevitably based on the observer's subjective and experiential understanding of potential modes and means of organisation. In spite of the difficulties, it is therefore necessary to consider the implications involved in the creation of the material data, in terms of the articulation of society as a living entity. Since the archaeological record consists of artefacts, it is the role of artefacts that forms the basis of the discussion that follows.

The reconstruction of a social past, for the Bronze Age as for other periods, has gone through a number of phases.

While trade and craft production played an important part in the overall structure of economic life in Bronze Age Europe, for most people most of the time what mattered was the procurement of food and the production of commodities in the home. Smiths, traders, even warriors and heroes had to eat and be protected from the elements; and if they did not produce and process their foodstuffs themselves, others in their homes and villages must have done. Yet the study of this aspect of Bronze Age life is curiously underdeveloped. Perhaps because the remains of economic activities are mundane in nature they have attracted little attention, and a narrative account of the domestic economy is still barely possible. Only by supposing that the many gaps in the evidence can be filled in from similar evidence elsewhere, by building a composite picture, can a more rounded account be attempted.

Agriculture and food production

Peasant farming was the mainstay of Bronze Age life. The study of Bronze Age agriculture is based on a number of sources: artefacts, cultivation traces, field outlines and the remains of the exploited materials, plant and animal.

Artefacts

The tools that the prehistoric farmer needed were analogous to those needed by modern farmers, and revolve around the main processes of agriculture: tools to break the ground, remove weeds and bring up nutrients from the subsoil (spades, hoes, digging sticks and ards or ploughs); and tools to bring in and process the harvest (sickles or reaping knives, threshing and winnowing devices).

The attempt in the previous chapter to reconstruct aspects of social organisation was restricted to the individual, the group or the tribe, implying a geographically restricted area. Each tribal territory was, however, part of a wider continent. Though ‘Europe’ as a concept did not exist, the continent did: where no geographical barriers existed the inhabitants of one area had no reason not to be aware of their neighbours and of those neighbours' neighbours. Every person had a ‘world’ and a ‘world view’, but identifying the components of that view is not an easy matter. In particular, the identification of an overarching world that encompassed large parts of present-day Europe is something that has engendered intense debate.

Attempts at reconstructing a ‘Bronze Age world view’ can only ever be speculative in a Europe where the absence of literacy prevents mind-to-mind contact across the ages. Understanding is necessarily determined by familiarity with a variety of models relating to both past and present societies, derived from history and ethnography. Such models can provide several alternative views of the same society, though there may be others which are more appropriate though less well known (fig. 13.1).

Diffusion or local evolution?

Traditionally the European Bronze Age has been seen as some kind of appendage to the rich civilisations of the East Mediterranean. Most of the inventions which characterised the period were of Near Eastern origin, including metallurgy, wheeled transport, swords and body armour, and were thought of as spreading across Europe from the south-east, in classic diffusionist fashion.

This book is concerned with the history of human societies and the course of human interactions in Europe during the period that is traditionally called the Bronze Age, that is to say in absolute years the period of time between about 2500 and 800 BC. During this time, Europe changed from a continent settled by small farming and pastoral groups, strongly linked at the local level but only weakly linked, if at all, at broader levels, to one where it is possible to discern the existence of quasi-political groupings on a relatively large scale; from a society where individuals were powerful but did little to express that power in their material remains to one where the expression of status and power was extremely important; and from a society where the use of metal was rather rare and its circulation highly restricted to one where metals were a commonplace and vast quantities were produced.

The progress of these aspects of life and death was not, however, even across time or space. Nor were the processes outlined uniform in their manifestation. Europe is a large and geographically complex area (fig. 1.1), and the variety of its landscapes inevitably finds reflections in the patterns of activity of its inhabitants. It has also traditionally been seen as a melting-pot for the creation of ‘peoples’, that is to say ethnic identities. Although perspectives on both these aspects have shifted in recent years, it is undeniable that people reacted differently in different places and at different times to stimuli that from today's perspective look to have been similar or identical.

One of the most remarkable things about the artefactual record of the European Bronze Age is the enormous quantity of metalwork which was consigned to the ground. This phenomenon, the deposition of ‘hoards’ of bronze (fig. 10.1), is one of the most discussed, though least understood, aspects of the Bronze Age. Whatever explanation one prefers, the vast amount of wasted raw material and encapsulated labour that these finds represent is by any standard extraordinary. If they were utilitarian in nature, how could the societies involved afford to lose so much material? If they were votive, why were they deposited on such a large scale? In view of the complexity of the issues, it is likely that no single explanation will account for more than a proportion of the finds.

Bronze hoards, that is collective finds of whole or fragmentary bronze implements or pieces of waste and uncast metal, vary greatly in size and constitution. This variability can be followed in both chronological and geographical dimensions; attempts at discerning regularities in this material are usually only valid for a restricted area and period. Conversely, when one looks at the picture over wider areas and across chronological divisions, any impression of neat patterning dissolves. But this very diversity has provided fertile ground for the germination of ideas on the nature and significance of the phenomenon. The literature is large and the difference in views between scholars treating identical material striking, ranging from the minutely detailed examination of particular collections of material, notably by German writers, to contextual treatments such as those of Bradley.