Symbols of power, prestige goods or vibrant materials? Rethinking gold, jet and amber grave goods in Early Bronze Age Britain.

Supervisors:

Dr Rachel Crellin rjc65@le.ac.uk
Professor Oliver Harris

The project forms one strand of the Leverhulme Funded Research Leadership Award, A New History of Bronze. This project explores how the emergence and use of copper and bronze metalworking in this period created new possibilities for crafting, leadership and violence. This PhD forms an essential component of the project by adding a new understanding of the role of other materials in the changing worlds of the Early Bronze Age.

In traditional archaeological accounts, the emergence of metalworking is the catalyst for social change: it acted as an early form of finance creating inequalities and hierarchies – in the wake of this, violence is assumed to have increased as people fought over access to, and control of, metals. The European Bronze Age, from this perspective, is a period of metalworkers, chiefs, and warriors, all of whom are usually presented as men; women are either absent or subjugated. These accounts depend upon modernist assumptions about wealth, power, and leadership which cannot be easily projected onto the deep past. 

In the Early Bronze Age in Britain new burial practices emerged, amongst the many burials from the period some stand out as different. These standout burials often contain rare materials such as gold, jet and amber, often clustering in the Wessex region surrounding Stonehenge. This has been taken by archaeologists to indicate that these ‘stand out’ burials represented an early social elite; the grave goods acting as symbolic evidence of the individual’s wealth and power. Alternatively others have thought about these grave goods as so-called ‘prestige goods’ – items of value that marked their ‘owners’ as different.

This PhD will gather together data on the deposition of prestige grave goods made of amber, gold and jet from across Britain. By synthesising and analysing this data, the project will be able to establish which materials occur where, and their association with different kinds of bodies and practices. Rather than adopting simplistic models of hierarchy and ‘elite’ status, the PhD will aim instead to offer a complex and nuanced understanding of how particular materials, in particular forms, were used to articulate different kinds of identity in the Early Bronze Age. This approach will tack between data analysis and comparison across regions and specific analyses of grave deposits. Throughout the PhD the analysis will be informed by a thorough engagement with archaeological theory, in particular new materialist approaches to objects and their role in the production of past worlds.