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Author: R. Alan Williams
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1803273798
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
The Great Orme copper mine in North Wales is one of the largest surviving Bronze Age mines in Europe. This book presents new interdisciplinary research to reveal a copper mine of European importance, dominating Britain’s copper supply from c. 1600-1400 BC, with some metal reaching mainland Europe - from Brittany to as far as the Baltic.
Author: R. Alan Williams
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1803273798
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
The Great Orme copper mine in North Wales is one of the largest surviving Bronze Age mines in Europe. This book presents new interdisciplinary research to reveal a copper mine of European importance, dominating Britain’s copper supply from c. 1600-1400 BC, with some metal reaching mainland Europe - from Brittany to as far as the Baltic.
Author: Matthew G. Knight
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789256984
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
The destruction and deposition of metalwork is a widely recognised phenomenon across Bronze Age Europe. Weapons were decommissioned and thrown into rivers; axes were fragmented and piled in hoards; and ornaments were crushed, contorted and placed in certain landscapes. Interpretation of this material is often considered in terms of whether such acts should be considered ritual offerings, or functional acts for storing, scrapping and recycling the metal. This book approaches this debate from a fresh perspective, by focusing on how the metalwork was destroyed and deposited as a means to understand the reasons behind the process. To achieve this, this study draws on experimental archaeology, as well as developing a framework for assessing what can be considered deliberate destruction. Understanding these processes not only helps us to recognise how destruction happened, but also gives us insights into the individuals involved in these practices. Through an examination of metalwork from south-west Britain, it is possible to observe the complexities involved at a localised level in the acts of destruction and deposition, as well as how they were linked to people and places. This case study is used to consider the social role of destruction and deposition more broadly in the Bronze Age, highlighting how it transformed over time and space.
Author: Richard Bradley
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789258200
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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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.
Author: Anwen Cooper
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789257484
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
Britain is internationally renowned for the high quality and exquisite crafting of its later prehistoric grave goods (c. 4000 BC to AD 43). Many of prehistoric Britain's most impressive artefacts have come from graves. Interred with both inhumations and cremations, they provide some of the most durable and well-preserved insights into personal identity and the prehistoric life-course, yet they also speak of the care shown to the dead by the living, and of people’s relationships with 'things'. Objects matter. This book's title is an intentional play on words. These are objects in burials; but they are also goods, material culture, that must be taken seriously. Within it, we outline the results of the first long-term, large-scale investigation into grave goods during this period, which enables a new level of understanding of mortuary practice and material culture throughout this major period of technological innovation and social transformation. Analysis is structured at a series of different scales, ranging from macro-scale patterning across Britain, to regional explorations of continuity and change, to site-specific histories of practice, to micro-scale analysis of specific graves and the individual objects (and people) within them. We bring these different scales of analysis together in the first ever book focusing specifically on objects and death in later prehistoric Britain. Focusing on six key case study regions, the book innovatively synthesises antiquarian reports, research projects and developer funded excavations. At the same time, it also engages with, and develops, a number of recent theoretical trends within archaeology, including personhood, object biography and materiality, ensuring that it will be of relevance right across the discipline. Its subject matter will also resonate with those working in anthropology, sociology, museology and other areas where death, burial and the role of material culture in people’s lives are key contemporary issues.
Author: Rachel J. Crellin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351869299
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 371
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Book Description
Change and Archaeology explores how archaeologists have historically described, interpreted, and explained change, and argues that change has been under-theorised. The study of change is central to the discipline of archaeology, but change is complex, and this makes it challenging to write about in nuanced ways that effectively capture the nature of our world. Relational approaches offer archaeologists more scope to explore change in complex and subtle ways. Change and Archaeology presents a posthumanist, post-anthropocentric, new materialist approach to change. It argues that our world is constantly in the process of becoming and always on the move. By recasting change as the norm rather than the exception and distributing it between both humans and non-humans, this book offers a new theoretical framework for exploring change in the past that allows us to move beyond block-time approaches where change is located only in transitional moments and periods are characterised by blocks of stasis. Archaeologists, scholars, anthropologists and historians interested in the theoretical frameworks we use to interpret the past will find this book a fascinating new insight into the way our world changes and evolves. The approaches presented within will be of use to anyone studying and writing about the way societies and their environs move through time.
Author: Leo Webley
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789251796
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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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.
Author: Mark Haughton
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040186106
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
This book explores and critiques the underlying assumption that a binary gender system and patriarchal norms were universal in Bronze Age Europe through a careful analysis of burial practice in Ireland and Scotland. Gender and Society on the Margins of Bronze Age Europe makes a decisive and critical intervention in the debate around the nature of gender in the European Bronze Age. Tacking between scales, from the detail of local practice to a major analysis of recently excavated and analysed skeletons, it argues that binary gender was far from universal in Bronze Age Europe, and consequently questions its broader importance. Unlike bronze technology, shared widely between communities across Europe, binary gender was an optional or negotiable part of Bronze Age life. The book goes on to assess the huge implications of this evidence firstly, for the history of gender, as it indicates that there was no simple linear trajectory to binary gender and patriarchy and secondly, by demonstrating that interconnectivity in Bronze Age Europe did not result in fundamental social and ideological agreement, undermining the idea of a shared Bronze Age society. At its core, the book reimagines how gender archaeology can be conducted, inspired by the sub-discipline’s radical origins and following a method rooted in the detail of local practice. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of the European Bronze Age, gender (pre)history, and gender archaeology. It connects with major themes in theoretical thinking across the humanities, particularly relating to posthumanism, assemblage theory, embodiment and gender.
Author: Nancy Edwards
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198733216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528
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Book Description
Research for and the writing of this book was funded by the award of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship. The period c. AD300--1050, spanning the collapse of Roman rule to the coming of the Normans, was formative in the development of Wales. Life in Early Medieval Wales considers how people lived in late Roman and early medieval Wales, and how their lives and communities changed over the course of this period. It uses a multidisciplinary approach, focusing on the growing body of archaeological evidence set alongside the early medieval written sources together with place-names and personal names. It begins by analysing earlier research and the range of sources, the significance of the environment and climate change, and ways of calculating time. Discussion of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries focuses on the disintegration of the Roman market economy, fragmentation of power, and the emergence of new kingdoms and elites alongside evidence for changing identities, as well as important threads of continuity, notably Latin literacy, Christianity, and the continuation of small-scale farming communities. Early medieval Wales was an entirely rural society. Analysis of the settlement archaeology includes key sites such as hillforts, including Dinas Powys, the royal crannog at Llangorse, and the Viking Age and earlier estate centre at Llanbedrgoch alongside the development, from the seventh century onwards, of new farming and other rural settlements. Consideration is given to changes in the mixed farming economy reflecting climate deterioration and a need for food security, as well as craft working and the roles of exchange, display, and trade reflecting changing outside contacts. At the same time cemeteries and inscribed stones, stone sculpture and early church sites chart the course of conversion to Christianity, the rise of monasticism, and the increasing power of the Church. Finally, discussion of power and authority analyses emerging evidence for sites of assembly, the rise of Mercia, and increasing English infiltration, together with the significance of Offa's and Wat's Dykes, and the Viking impact. Throughout the evidence is placed within a wider context enabling comparison with other parts of Britain and Ireland and, where appropriate, with other parts of Europe to see broader trends, including the impacts of climate, economic, and religious change.
Author: Anthony Everitt
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0593133218
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 457
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Book Description
A striking, nuanced biography of Nero—the controversial populist ruler and last of the Caesars—and a vivid portrait of ancient Rome “Exciting and provocative . . . Nero is a pleasure to read.”—Barry Strauss, author of The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium The Roman emperor Nero’s name has long been a byword for cruelty, decadence, and despotism. As the stories go, he set fire to Rome and thrummed his lyre as it burned. He then cleared the charred ruins and built a vast palace. He committed incest with his mother, who had schemed and killed to place him on the throne, and later murdered her. But these stories, left behind by contemporary historians who hated him, are hardly the full picture, and in this nuanced biography, celebrated historian Anthony Everitt and investigative journalist Roddy Ashworth reveal the contradictions inherent in Nero and offer a reappraisal of his life. Contrary to popular memory, the empire was well managed during his reign. He presided over diplomatic triumphs, and his legions overcame the fiery British queen Boudica who led one of the greatest revolts Rome had ever had to face. He loved art, culture, and music, and he won the loyalty of the lower classes with fantastic spectacles. He did not set fire to Rome. In Nero, ancient Rome comes to life: the fire-prone streets, the deadly political intrigues, and the ongoing architectural projects. In this teeming, politically unstable world, Nero was vulnerable to fierce reproach from the nobility and relatives who would gladly usurp him, and he was often too ready to murder rivals. He had a vision for Rome, but, racked by insecurity, he perhaps lacked the stomach to govern it. This is the bloodstained story of one of Rome’s most notorious emperors: but in Everitt and Ashworth’s hands, Nero’s life is also a complicated, cautionary tale about the mettle required to rule.
Author: Jane Kenney
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789256925
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
Holy Island is a small island just off the west coast of Anglesey, North Wales, which is rich in archaeology of all periods. Between 2006 and 2010, archaeological excavations in advance of a major Welsh Government development site, Parc Cybi, enabled extensive study of the islands past. Over 20 hectares were investigated, revealing a busy and complex archaeological landscape, which could be seen evolving from the Mesolithic period through to the present day. Major sites discovered include an Early Neolithic timber hall aligned on an adjacent chambered tomb and an Iron Age settlement, the development of which is traced by extensive dating and Bayesian analysis. A Bronze Age ceremonial complex, along with the Neolithic tomb, defined the cultural landscape for subsequent periods. A long cist cemetery of a type common on Anglesey proved, uncommonly, to be late Roman in date, while elusive Early Medieval settlement was indicated by corn dryers. This wealth of new information has revolutionised our understanding of how people have lived in, and transformed, the landscape of Holy Island. Many of the sites are also significant in a broader Welsh context and inform the understanding of similar sites across Britain and Ireland.
