Fragments of the Bronze Age

The Destruction and Deposition of Metalwork in South-West Britain and its Wider Context

Matthew G. Knight

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781789256987
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

1

Piece offerings: approaches to the destruction and deposition of Bronze Age metalwork

A peace offering and a piece offering

In March 1993, a peace ceremony was held in southern Ethiopia (Pankhurst 2006; Girke & Pankhurst 2011). It took place at a site of past conflict and several tribes were involved to ensure there was a collective approach to peacekeeping. The event took place over three days and involved three main stages, each accompanied by a series of processes, prayers and rituals embedded with meaning. The first involved anointing leaders and their ritual staffs; this was followed by the destruction and burial of three spears and then the exchange of gifts. It is the destruction of the spears on which I want to focus. These spears were brought by leaders from several groups and the tips and edges were blunted with rocks by the various leaders, within a shelter. The tips were arranged facing west towards the setting sun to symbolise evil being warded off and during the process these weapons were personified and treated as perpetrators of past conflict, banished through a series of chants (Pankhurst 2006, 254). Finally, the spears were taken 500 metres from the site to a termite mound where the wooden shafts were snapped in half and placed on the mound for the insects to devour. Sanctions were set in place against anyone digging up the spears. The final stage of the ceremony, the giving of gifts, involved the exchange of hide bracelets and fatty necklaces as well as agricultural implements to symbolise commensality and the replacement of weapons with productive tools (Pankhurst 2006; Girke & Pankhurst 2011). This represented a one-off event, designed to ensure a commitment to peace was established and maintained, entangling communities in a performative act.

About 3000 years ago, at a freshwater pool on Dartmoor in south-west Britain spearheads were also destroyed and deposited. The Late Bronze Age copper-alloy hoard from the evocatively named Bloody Pool comprised four incomplete spearheads and four fragments of socketed spear ferrules that would have fitted to the end of a wooden spear shaft (Fig.1.1; Tucker 1855, 84–5). Three of these spearheads were large, possibly ceremonial objects, and each was deliberately broken straight across the widest part of the blade, removing the upper blade and tip. This involved heating the spearheads on a fire and striking with a hard, probably blunt, object to create a sharp, straight fracture (Knight 2019a, 261–5). The sockets and blade edges were also possibly intentionally damaged; the ferrules are similarly fragmentary. The three largest spearheads had rivets in place indicating they may have been attached to the shaft when deposited; the ferrules also indicate the spears may have been deposited complete, or perhaps with broken shafts. We can only speculate whether the spears were heated and broken at the site of deposition or whether the pieces were brought to the site from elsewhere before they were sunk into the pool. This process of destruction and deposition conveys a symbolic nature that might be interpreted as a sacrifice of weapons following a conflict (cf. Coombs 1975; Mörtz 2010; 2013; 2018), a votive offering to the place or to deities (Fox 1973, 120), or, considering the Ethiopian ceremony, a peacekeeping act.

Figure 1.1: The hoard of broken spearheads from Bloody Pool, Devon (RAMM-F005) (photo: author, courtesy of Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter)

The Ethiopian ceremony is not intended as an analogy for understanding the Bloody Pool hoard; instead the comparison between two superficially similar destructive acts that are so temporally, geographically, and culturally different serves to emphasise two important points. The first is that the destruction and deposition of objects are culturally embedded, performative processes. They are undertaken in particular ways in accordance with specific beliefs for specific purposes and connect those involved through social action. These may be related actions or undertaken at different times. In turn, the destruction event and eventual deposition allow the reproduction of social values that establish, reify and transform beliefs and relations between people (cf. Bourdieu 1977).

The second point is a crucial reminder that what we find archaeologically is very much only a partial record of the event of destruction and deposition and we cannot hope to understand the full event from the surviving material evidence. The Ethiopian peacekeeping ceremony is interesting because archaeologically all we might uncover is three blunted spearheads, perhaps with remnants of shafts if we are lucky, seemingly isolated from an ephemeral structure 500m away. We would have no indication of why the place was chosen nor the purpose of the event or the array of rituals, gift-giving and social interactions that underpinned and contributed to the overall ceremony. Although this allows us to conceptualise the Bloody Pool hoard as a similarly complex social event that linked people, place and objects, it will always remain conceptual. However, the surviving broken spearheads do allow us to reconstruct the processes and physical acts of destruction and deposition that can imply the significance of such an event. It is a focus from this perspective that I feel is important in understanding such actions.

Destruction and deposition of Bronze Age metalwork

‘…it is no longer possible to maintain any clear distinction between the ritual and functional aspects of metal deposits, for both made considerable use of broken objects’ (Bradley 2005, 164)

Of course, the destruction and deposition of objects is conducted in innumerable ways and for diverse reasons at different times, serving economic, religious, social and/or political purposes. Bronze Age metalwork was no exception. These practices are widely recognised across Europe and have been the focus of much interest. This book furthers study of this phenomenon, but with a focus on how metal objects were destroyed and deposited, as much as why.

Throughout I draw on studies from across Europe, but my main area of focus is Britain. Here metalworking began around 2450 BC, with artefacts produced in copper and gold and, from about 2200 BC onwards, copper alloys. These artefacts have been found in a range of conditions and contexts. Daggers were burnt and buried with bodies. Swords and spears were decommissioned and thrown into rivers. Pins and bracelets were crushed, twisted and contorted and placed in certain landscapes, and axes were smashed to pieces and deposited in hoards of hundreds of objects. From individual complete objects to hoards of fragments, from pieces in settlement pits and ditches to curated burial associations, there was clearly no one way to treat and deposit metal objects. These were processes that were linked to and perhaps governed by their eventual context and associations, be that with people, objects, monuments, settled places or natural landscapes. With increased metal-detecting activity in Britain, finds reported through the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) in England and Wales and the Treasure Trove Unit in Scotland are offering an unprecedented resource of material to be understood. Couple this with increased developer-funded activity and improved excavation techniques and scientific analyses, and we are able to disentangle and illuminate some of the previously hidden complexities of prehistoric depositional actions. Similar situations can be observed across Europe.

How, then, should we interpret destruction and deposition? Firstly, we must recognise we are studying two separate practices, even if they are sometimes closely linked (cf. Brandherm 2018, 48). An object does not have to be destroyed to enter the ground. If it is damaged, the destruction of an object may occur shortly before the event of deposition, as might be the case for an object burned on a pyre with a body before burial, or objects may be manipulated at one site and transported to their final depositional location. The meanings behind the treatment of an object and its eventual deposition could therefore be quite different. Secondly, if we accept that these practices were diverse and contextual, then we must also accept that we will be left with a range of acceptable interpretations depending on the situation under study. These need not be mutually exclusive, and they certainly should not be treated as a ‘one-size-fits-all’. Whilst traditional analysis, beginning in the 19th century, often viewed broken, bent and burnt Bronze Age metalwork as abandoned scrap (eg, Evans 1881), a greater appreciation of object biographies, depositional contexts and broader practices increasingly demonstrates that the destruction and subsequent deposition of metalwork served a wider range of functions (eg, Hansen 1994; 2016; Turk 1997; 2001; Bradley 1998; 2005 145–64; 2017, 124–41; Chapman 2000; Fontijn 2002; 2020; Chapman & Gaydarska 2007; Becker 2013; Woodward & Hunter 2015; Brandherm 2018). Depositions have commonly been seen through the lens of an opposing ritual-profane dichotomy, but this is too simplistic, especially when it comes to broken objects. Broad concepts of what was considered appropriate for selectively depositing objects applied (cf. Needham 1988; Fontijn 2002), but these were individual actions that show a surprising amount of diversity, which remains underexplored. Within the Bronze Age, there were shifts in the types of objects and materials that were destroyed and different ways of doing this at different times and in different places. Whilst much material culture was deposited (and occasionally destroyed) in prehistory, in this book I focus specifically on metal objects because a range of observable damage was inflicted upon some of them in almost every context in which they are encountered throughout the Bronze Age. This allows for a cross-contextual analysis; however, with the exception of large fragmented hoards, there are relatively few dedicated studies of damaged metalwork, and none to my knowledge that examine it across different contexts.

Moreover, there has been limited attention to examining the destruction and deposition of metalwork as fluid and changing practices that are culturally specific. A rare example is Christopher Hoffman’s (1999) study of deliberately broken metal objects in Chalcolithic, Late Bronze Age and Iron Age Spain. Hoffman highlights three instances of destruction and deposition within a relatively close geographical area in Majorca, which indicates changing reactions to how and why metalwork should be destroyed and deposited over time. In the Chalcolithic, he pinpoints a copper ingot that had been deliberately chiselled in half with each piece deposited in a different village; Hoffman (1999, 114–5) suggests the breakage required specialised tools, energy and metallurgical knowledge whilst separation and deposition served as a method for linking different individuals or communities, what we might now refer to as ‘enchainment’ (following Chapman 2000 inter alia; see below). In the Late Bronze Age, a sword piece with its corners hammered up and a deliberately blunted socketed axehead plugged with the blade of another axehead were deposited in association under the entranceway of a Majorcan talayot (a stone built tower); although typically considered a ‘scrap’ deposit, Hoffman (1999, 116–7) suggests the carefully executed process of damaging these objects indicates the process was undertaken by a skilled metalworker and the deposit may have been an act of safe-keeping or concealment or served a symbolic purpose as part of social reproduction. He contrasts this with the ecstatic, less sophisticated actions undertaken on metal artefacts deposited in a funerary context at Son Matge during the Iron Age: ‘ornamental bronze tintinabula were hit with heavy objects and crushed, lead plaquettes were bent in half, iron spears were twisted in half and bent into coils’ (ibid., 118). These actions are considered a fundamental part of the associated burials. Thus, Hoffman emphasises the potential of combining an analysis of destructive and depositional practices with the spatial and temporal context to enable insights into the changing expression of prehistoric social and technological agency. Furthermore, it illustrates that over a long period of time, multiple reasons may emerge for the destruction of metalwork within a given region, something that I will expand upon in the present study.

Hoffman’s study hints at the range of interpretations one might apply to the metalwork destruction and deposition, though it is by no means exhaustive. The key explanations that recur through studies of deliberately damaged metalwork in the Bronze Age include:

•Destruction for recycling, recasting and scrapping

•Fragments possessing a pre-monetary function

•Enchainment and social exchange

•The death of people and objects

•Ritual damage, sacrificial offerings and ‘killing’ objects

This range of interpretations are briefly considered here largely in relation to Bronze Age Britain. These are not presented as mutually exclusive – indeed breaking or damaging an object may serve multiple purposes – but capture the diversity of approaches towards explaining the destruction of metalwork.

Destruction for recasting, recycling and scrapping

The deliberate fragmentation and reduction of objects for recasting or recycling is one of the most prolific explanations for the large fragmentary hoards of metalwork deposited across Europe (eg, Evans 1881; Briard 1965; Burgess 1968; Eogan 1983, 3–4; Brandherm 2018; Wiseman 2018). Ethnographic studies in Africa, Indonesia and India, for instance, have all identified situations where worn and broken objects form part of exchange systems (Rowlands 1971, 211–2; Lahiri 1995, 125–6); old and damaged objects were traded with a metalsmith either as raw material or in exchange for new objects. Rowlands (1971) highlighted the seasonality associated with these actions; worn-out objects were often brought back towards the end of a season and Rowlands used this as a possible explanation for the accumulation of used and broken objects in Late Bronze Age hoards (ibid., 212). Many hoards during this period consist of fragmentary objects, casting waste (eg, casting jets and slag) and ingots and metallurgical analyses have indicated high rates of recycling were ongoing by the final stages of the Bronze Age (Northover 1982a). Physical evidence for this comes with the occasional identification of objects melted into ingots. Consequently, hoards of predominantly fragmented objects, so-called ‘scrap hoards’, have been seen as the result of reduction for the casting process with these hoards representing the stock of metalsmiths or the abandonment of worn-out material. This theory has recently garnered strength for Late Bronze Age fragmented hoards in England and Wales through Rob Wiseman’s (2018) modelling of the available PAS data which indicates that hoards of fragmented objects were randomly broken and accumulated; by the Ewart Park metalworking assemblage (c. 920–800 BC), Wiseman suggests 85–95% of all bronze in circulation was ending up in hoards. This mea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• The Prehistoric Society Research Papers
• The Prehistoric Society Research Papers
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Author
• Abstracts
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Foreword, by David Fontijn
• 1. Piece offerings: approaches to the destruction and deposition of Bronze Age metalwork
• 2. Making sense of the pieces
• 3. Burnt, broken and buried: the Chalcolithic–Early Bronze Age, c. 2450–1500 BC
• 4. Selective destruction: the Middle Bronze Age, c. 1500–1150 BC
• 5. Mass destruction and minor destruction: the Late Bronze Age–Earliest Iron Age, c. 1150–600 BC
• 6. Destruction and deposition of metalwork in south-west Britain in its wider context
• 7. Final fragments – what do the pieces tell us?
• Bibliography