Introduction

It is during the Middle Bronze Age in southern Britain that archaeological field evidence for settlement and cultivation becomes readily available for study. This evidence comprises earthwork enclosures and lynchet systems. Childe regarded the apparent changes in agricultural practices indicated by these field remains as representative of an ‘agricultural revolution’. He evoked a comparison between an earlier state where the ‘warriorherdsman's wife’ had ‘tilled a little wheat and barley with the hoe’, with the emergence of ‘villages of a size and permanence hitherto unprecedented in Britain’ and their accompanying field systems (Childe 1947, 186–9).

The distinction between a prehistoric archaeology dominated by burial and ceremonial monuments, and one dominated by settlement sites and the earthwork remains of cultivation is still drawn today (Bradley 1984, 160). The explanation for the apparent transformation needs careful consideration. At base, this distinction is partly a matter of archaeological visibility. Settlements and cultivation have occurred in all the periods since the Neolithic, and whilst writers such as Childe and Curwen regarded Neolithic and Early Bronze Age settlement to be of a non-permanent and shifting character associated with a heavily pastoral economy (Childe 1947; Curwen 1938), this view is at least questioned, if not totally rejected today. We must be certain of the processes which render settlement and agriculture so visible in our later prehistory and then set about explaining those processes. This will be the main theme of this chapter.

Introduction

It is now more than twenty years since the origin of the British Iron Age was debated in terms of either invasion or indigenous development. Hawkes (1959) established a subtle temporal and spatial classification of the British material, which mapped its suggested continental origins and indigenous development. However, the general application of the ‘Invasion Hypothesis’ was soon challenged (Clark 1966), and the specific treatment of the British Iron Age in these terms was criticised in detail by Hodson (1960 and 1964). Both Hodson and Hawkes accepted the basic premise, that analysis depended upon matching cultural traits over time and space. By this means Hodson established the claim that the British Iron Age contained a core of cultural traits (the ‘Woodbury Culture’), whose origins lay within the indigenous Bronze Age.

Not only did both writers accept that a ‘cultural’ analysis was the valid framework within which to work; they also operated within the terms of national archaeologies. It is from this perspective that movement of peoples between (say) Wessex and East Anglia may be presented as an ‘indigenous’ process, whilst movement between the Pays de Calais and Kent was an ‘invasion’. Neither set of assumptions stands particularly close scrutiny today. Our study of Cranborne Chase has been regionally based. This has not assumed that the region defines the spatial extent of some closed social system. Our treatment of the region has been to take it as a relatively arbitrary area of topography, within which certain social practices were executed, and through which we may examine the history of those practices. Such practices contributed towards local systems of social reproduction.

The title and subtitle of this book have been selected with special care, and this is the obvious point at which to explain why they were chosen. This volume presents the main results of a project which took its own authors by surprise. Our fieldwork in Cranborne Chase, on the edge of the southern English downland, began as a contribution to landscape archaeology, and also owed something to the tradition of culture history. The subtitle of this volume sums up the original intention of that research, but as the project developed, our work took a different course.

Although the title reflects this change in the character of our research, this work was never intended as a comprehensive regional study. The original nucleus was the excavation of a Bronze Age site at South Lodge Camp, which began in 1977. This site was selected, not because it was situated in Cranborne Chase, but because work in the 1890s had documented a large body of diagnostic material (Excavations IV, 1–41).

Introduction

The Later Neolithic can be considered as the period between the last long barrows in the study area and the development of henge monuments. It has a most distinctive flint industry and at least two traditions of decorated pottery: Peterborough Ware and Grooved Ware. It begins around the middle of the third millennium be and extends to about 1800 be, when this material began to be replaced by elements of the Beaker complex. At the same time, the tradition of individual burial in round barrows gained considerably in importance. The situation is so complex, however, that the period division must depend on the general currency of Beaker material, rather than its first appearance.

We ended the last chapter with the building of the Cursus complex. This chapter investigates the ways in which that monument and its associated long barrows influenced later developments, for the Cursus seems to have been as important in its relict state as it was when newly built. In the first part of this chapter we consider the distribution of settlement in relation to the sequence in the Hampshire Basin, and investigate how far everyday activity was influenced by the existence of this zone of complex monuments (Fig. 3.1). Then we report the results of two excavations undertaken close to the Cursus. One site overlay the Cursus itself, and its spatial organisation seems to have been determined by the position of the earlier earthwork; a second site alongside this earthwork contained two groups of pits, whose rather specialised contents may again reflect the importance of this monument.

The archaeology of social reproduction

The main themes of our title, Landscape, monuments and society, often appear to be specific areas of archaeological interest. Monuments, for instance, are analysed in terms of their form and structural history, and the landscape provides a context for the distribution of monuments, revealing their spatial organisation and ecological setting. But what of society? If anything, society appears as the ghost in the machine, whose archaeologically verifiable existence is still contested. Let us therefore look at the relationship between society, the landscape and the monument.

Since the work of Gordon Childe, archaeologists have tended to treat ‘society’ as a system of institutions which are mapped by their material remains. Cultural archaeologists defined the social realm as a relatively closed set of shared beliefs. It was the acceptance of those beliefs which established cohesion between a society's members and the practical application of belief systems which produced regular patterns of material association (Childe 1956). The application of this rather straightforward idea has led to the chronological and geographical ordering of artefacts and monuments. Such ordering has appeared to reflect the nature, history and extent of a given belief system; and the categorisation and mapping of archaeological material in these terms remains part of the conceptual framework of British archaeology.

By now there have been numerous criticisms of such an approach to archaeology. One of the more sustained critiques has been developed by Renfrew (1977). He notes that the definition of cultural types has depended upon norms, arbitrarily drawn from rich assemblages of material.

Introduction

The rather traditional division drawn here between the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age is simply one of convenience. It allows us to focus upon the development of round barrows, the construction of which show an essential continuity with developments during the previous period. However, henge monuments are no longer constructed in our area, and the barrows evidence a monumentality with an almost exclusive emphasis upon the dead. It is the changing emphasis in the practices associated with monumentality which is the issue here, rather than a simple technological division in the artefact sequence (Fig. 4.1).

Burgess has suggested a series of period divisions for the second millennium be (Table 4.1) in which his Mount Pleasant Period (c. 2150–1700 be) sees the introduction of copper, and then the full adoption of bronze metallurgy (metal Stages I-IV), along with most of the ‘steps’ of Beaker development (n.d. [1980]; 1980, 71; 1986). Although there remain considerable doubts about the detail of the Beaker chronology in Britain (see Longworth in Wainwright 1979b, 90), it seems most likely that the main currency of this material pre-dates 1700 be. The Beaker and early metal finds from the region are discussed below and, although sparsely represented, they are likely to have been contemporary with the final history of the Wyke Down henge. It is also probable that they fall within the period of use of the Knowlton henges.

Cultural behaviour derives from capacities for learning, decision making and problem solving. As biological endowments these reside in the individual. Consequently, explanations for cultural behaviour require explicit reference to decision making by individuals. Bold statements indeed. Perhaps safe in a purely theoretical paper or at the end of a book, but I foolishly made these in my introduction! Did the archaeological studies live up to such extravagant claims? It is not for me to judge.

To conclude this work I want briefly to review my two archaeological studies and draw out the type of prehistoric world I am envisaging. I also wish to emphasise certain elements of the archaeological approach I have advocated.

I have suggested that explanations in archaeology can be improved by explicit reference to the individual decision maker. However, I have not stipulated that this should take any particular form. Indeed, I myself have been rather flexible. In my study of Mesolithic foraging I built a model for decision making by an individual and used that as a methodological tool. This is perhaps the most explicit reference. In the Upper Palaeolithic study, however, I concentrated on understanding the ecological and historical context in which the decision makers would have been operating and then, using a conceptual rather than a quantitative model for decision making, made reference to individuals tackling patch-choice problems. We might also note that each study focused on rather different elements of the decision-making process. When studying Mesolithic foraging, I concentrated on information acquisition from past experience and other individuals. But in the Upper Palaeolithic study greatest attention was paid to cue use and the creative manipulation of past experience.