Territorial Patterns in Bronze Age Wessex

Abstract

The work presented in this paper arose from an attempt to study society and economy in England during the period conventionally referred to as the Early and Middle Bronze Ages. The discussion of questions of this sort is traditionally supposed to be less reliable and important than taxonomic studies aimed at the construction of a relative chronology; this is largely because the basic assumptions of typology have not been questioned very much recently. The establishment of an absolute chronology has also been a major object of research, but now that the Mycenaean import horizon has finally collapsed (Newton and Renfrew, 1970) there is a vacuum which is hardly filled by the handful of radiocarbon dates available. We have the vaguest of ideas about what was actually happening in terms of people, but our understanding of when it was happening, and in which order, is only marginally better. Most information has come from the contents of burial mounds, but the topographical aspects of the barrows have been neglected, despite the immensely valuable information collected by Grinsell for much of southern England, including lists of all known barrows and what has been found in them. Without this information, this kind of study would have been impossible. Grinsell's maps of round barrow distributions in Dorset (Grinsell, 1959, maps 2 and 4) and Wiltshire (Grinsell, 1957, maps IV and V) suggest that even on one geological solid (in this case chalk) there are great differences in the densities of these monuments, that bell- and disc-barrows are not distributed at random, and that a study of the sizes and types of cemetery might prove rewarding, although maps at this scale can only provide general indications.

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