Bronze Age Worlds

A Social Prehistory of Britain and Ireland

Robert Johnston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781351710978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Bronze Age Worlds brings a new way of thinking about kinship to the task of explaining the formation of social life in Bronze Age Britain and Ireland.

Britain and Ireland's diverse landscapes and societies experienced varied and profound transformations during the twenty-fifth to eighth centuries BC. People's lives were shaped by migrations, changing beliefs about death, making and thinking with metals, and living in houses and field systems. This book offers accounts of how these processes emerged from social life, from events, places and landscapes, informed by a novel theory of kinship. Kinship was a rich and inventive sphere of culture that incorporated biological relations but was not determined by them. Kinship formed personhood and collective belonging, and associated people with nonhuman beings, things and places. The differences in kinship and kinwork across Ireland and Britain brought textures to social life and the formation of Bronze Age worlds.

Bronze Age Worlds offers new perspectives to archaeologists and anthropologists interested in the place of kinship in Bronze Age societies and cultural development.

1
Introduction

Dowris

Two men dig—it is the 1820s, in an unremarkable potato field in the middle of Ireland, close to the meeting of four townland boundaries on Lough Coura, County Offaly (Figure 1.1). Their spades turn up some broken and greened pieces of metal amongst the peaty earth. These first pieces give unexpected motivation to the men’s labours, and rapidly a few objects become ‘at least a horse-load of gold-coloured bronze antiquities’ (Cooke 1847–1850, 424). The Dowris hoard, as the collection is now known, is the largest assemblage of Bronze Age metalwork from Ireland. The hoard comprises over 200 objects: swords and scabbard chapes, spearheads and a spear butt or butts, socketed axes and a hammer, gouges, knives and razors, cauldrons and buckets, horns and crotals, along with pieces of bronze and metalworking rubbing stones (Eogan 1983, 117–142). It was deposited in the tenth or ninth century BC (Becker 2012).

FIGURE 1.1 An extract from the 1840 First Edition Ordnance Survey 6 inch map for County Offaly. The location of the Dowris find is marked with a star (information from Coles 1971). © Ordnance Survey Ireland/Government of Ireland; Copyright Permit No. MP 0001620.

Published accounts of the Dowris discovery appeared a few decades after the event, with consequential divergences in reported facts and over its significance. Rev. Dr Thomas Robinson, an eminent academic astronomer, presented his account based on information from the Earl of Rosse, who held portions of the collection. Robinson placed the hoard in a cut-out bog where a Phoenician ‘travelling merchant’ had become stuck and forced to abandon his heavy load of commodities (Robinson 1847–1850, 242). Thomas Cooke, Crown Solicitor for County Offaly, claimed a first-hand account from one of the discoverers and, locating the discovery on dry ground, reasoned that the objects were the remains of a founder’s workshop:

In fine, the great quantity of things found, their variety, their being in an unfinished as well as in a finished state, the amorphous mass of spare metal, and the rub-stones, all tend to the conclusion that Dowris was the site of a manufactory of bronze utensils.

(Cooke 1847–1850, 439)

Robinson and Cook’s respective interpretations, the merchant’s misfortune and the founder’s safe-keeping, made common-sense of a wonderous assemblage.

A closed assemblage

Around the same time as the Dowris discovery, the curator of the Museum of Northern Antiquities in Copenhagen, Christian Thomsen, was classifying the museum’s collection of artefacts into chronologically sequential groups defined by the technologies of working stone, bronze and iron (Rowley-Conwy 2007). The three-age system that Thomsen adopted was not a new idea. Lucretius, writing in the early first century BC, used the three ages to describe the development of human culture, and the scheme was reasserted by French and Danish scholars in the eighteenth century (Trigger 1989). The difference between these and Christian Thomsen’s classification lay in the methodical way in which Thomsen approached the problems he faced: stone, bronze and iron were not utilised at the exclusion of one another, and there were many other materials, such as pottery, gold and wood, that occurred either intermittently or throughout prehistory. Thomsen began teasing these tangles apart by studying groups of objects that were found together in ‘closed assemblages’ such as graves or hoards. By comparing closed assemblages with one another, he was able to identify patterns in the variability of particular styles of artefacts within each period, and make a strong case for the integrity of the three-age model, which until then had been largely hypothetical.

The Dowris hoard provided a valuable closed assemblage with which prehistorians could apply Thomsen’s approach and construct classifications and chronologies for the Bronze Age in Ireland and beyond (Figure 1.2). The term ‘closed’ was a misnomer, since the analysis required scholars to draw relations between the objects within the hoard and finds from elsewhere in Europe. Building on a century of scholarship, George Eogan (1964) defined the Dowris Phase through its metalwork styles and technologies, mainland European associations and ways of life. He observed plentiful links between the bronze and gold objects found in Ireland and examples from Britain, and northern and central Europe. The Dowris bucket, on stylistic grounds, originated from southeastern Europe. While some of the gold neck ornaments and sunflower pins found in other Dowris-type assemblages, Eogan interpreted as Irish manifestations of southern Scandinavian and German types.

FIGURE 1.2 A small selection of the over 200 objects assembled at Dowris: including crotals, horns, swords, spearheads, axes and razors. © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

However neatly woven Eogan’s account of the Irish later Bronze Age, he had to accept that some threads lay looser around the edges of the pattern. Why was the metal placed in the ground? Eogan could not easily distinguish between utilitarian and spiritual purposes for hoarding, although he recognised the potential overlap between ‘crisis and cults’ (Eogan 1964, 311).

When Robinson and Cooke wrote their conflicting accounts of the Dowris discovery they appeared to at least agree on the utilitarian character of the hoard. It was either a travelling merchant or the remains of a metalworking workshop. Vere Gordon Childe restated these same attributions a century later when he distinguished between hoards hidden during times of unrest by bands of ‘travelling tinkers’ or the remains of the ‘village smithy’ (Childe 1930, 45). George Eogan was less confident that hoards could be entirely explained as collections of objects hidden during periods of crisis, noting instead the ritual or cult functions that might be responsible. Nevertheless, he remained supportive of Dowris as a workshop (Eogan 1964, 311). The interpretative tide was turning, and a few years later John Coles presented the variety and unusual character of the objects found at Dowris as an accumulation of votive offerings in a sacred bog: ‘the most convenient explanation of the objects from Dowris is that they represent a central offering place’ (Coles 1971, 164). This idea was repeated and amplified in subsequent writing (Becker 2013, 238; Cooney and Grogan 1994, 166; Gerloff 2010, 69), and Dowris has settled as one of the ‘unmarked natural locations in the landscape … returned to for the enactment of ritual depositions over generations’ (Leonard 2014, 69).

Dowris as kinwork

There are a variety of reasons to question the interpretation of Dowris as a gradual accumulation of offerings to a supernatural being. The designation of the findspot as a bog is problematic, since it is largely dependent on whose account you choose to believe. Thomas Cooke was especially clear on the matter, having been led to the location by a witness to the original discovery:

the fact must be recorded that the Dowris relics were not found in what can be properly denominated bog, but in the centre of a potato garden extending down the slope of a rising ground between the paddock and the moorland. A cock of hay has been left during the last winter between the place of the finding and the bog, so little of wet or quagmire exists there even now.

(Cooke 1847–1850, 435)

Unlike a river, a pool or a wetland, the bog-edge location would have made an unlikely spot for repeated offerings. Tellingly the objects were evidently recovered in a relatively tight group, given the short timeframe for their uncovering and removal from the field. While this does not preclude their deposition in a bog, it is less likely they were offerings made across years, decades or longer. By comparison, the finds from the Bog of Cullen, County Tipperary, which are also interpreted as an accumulative offering, were discovered during two centuries of turf cutting throughout the bog (Eogan 1983, 154).

I am also struck by curious symmetries in the Dowris assemblage that are difficult to interpret if the items accumulated over a long time period. There are 36 axes and 36 spearheads extant in museum collections, and the original estimate is that there were 44 spearheads and 43 axes. Of the 48 crotals (pendants), there are 20 with 12 neck ribs and 20 with 14 neck ribs. The fragments from five swords could be allied with the four large spearheads. Of the sheet-bronze vessels, there is one complete bucket and one complete cauldron. The horns are of two distinct types. The types have separate geographical distributions, divided between northeast and southwest Ireland. The single exception to this distribution is Dowris, where both types of horn were found together (Coles 1963).

These symmetries in the composition of the assemblage and the clustering of the objects in one location mean that Dowris was, at a time and place, a gathering of things and a gathering of persons. The spearheads and axes were the most numerous items in the hoard, and they were likely to have been everyday personal items—objects that people kept on their person. In support of this, the axes and spearheads have quite similar proportions of complete and slightly damaged examples. There is a logic to interpreting the 40 or so personal objects as the contributions from an equivalent number of persons with the hoard. It is a moot point whether or not the persons contributing axes and spearheads were individually present at the depositional event or if the hoard represented a process of collecting or gathering exchanges over time prior to deposition (e.g. Joy 2016). In a gift economy, things are parts of the persons that exchanged them (‘things and people assume the social form of persons’ (Strathern 1988, 145)), so the axes and spearheads at Dowris were co-present with the human persons with whom they were associated.

Animals were also amongst the relations gathered by the hoard, and they were present through some unusual objects: bronze horns and crotals. The graceful, curving horns, of which over 90 survive from Ireland, mimicked instruments made with cattle horns, which have not survived. John Coles (1963) classified the horns based on the slenderness of their form, the presence and style of decoration, and the ways in which they were played. The horns were used sufficiently frequently to become damaged, with two-thirds showing evidence for repairs. They were deposited in groups, up to 26 horns in the case of the Dowris hoard, and always in bogs. (Dowris may be the exception, if it was a bog-edge setting.) Coles (1965) suggested the horns formed an element in a wider ‘bull cult’ shared between communities as widespread as southern Scandinavia and Iberia. His key to linking this cult to Ireland was the 48 bronze crotals or pendants recovered from the Dowris hoard (Figure 1.3). The crotals are spherical or pear-shaped, hollow, and containing a small piece of bronze or stone, which rattles inside—or a ‘feeble tinkling’ according to Thomas Cooke (1847–1850, 431). They have a ring to enable them to be suspended, but few other clues to their function. To fit with the idea of a bull cult, John Coles argued the crotal might symbolise a bull’s scrotum and so represent the animal’s virility. John Waddell, while sceptical of the evidence for a ‘bull cult’, suggests the crotals might have been worn around the neck of a prize bull (Waddell 2010, 246), although the staples holding the suspension rings are not especially strong (Werner and Maryon in Eogan 1983, 136).

FIGURE 1.3 Three crotals from Dowris. The larger examples are c. 120 mm in length. © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

A reading of the early medieval Irish epic Táin Bó Cuailnge may influence these suggestions for the importance of the bull (Kinsella 1970). The stories centre on a raid by the armies of Connacht to steal the brown bull of Cuailnge. It is a misconception to imagine the animal as though it was the winner at a modern agricultural show. The bulls at the centre of the tales are begotten from two pig-herders who served their respective kings of Connact and Munster. The herders cast malign spells on each other’s pigs in a quarrel that leads them to take the forms of first birds, then undersea creatures, stags, warriors, phantoms, dragons, maggots and, finally, the white and brown bulls. The principal human hero of the tales, Cúchulainn, is both human and otherworldly, and takes on multiple animal forms in his war-fuelled furies. In an analysis of the stories, Erik Larsen (2003, 182) suggests of one section that the ‘ease by which the writers oscillate from man to cattle … indicates an identity ambivalent in its essence’. I am not using Táin Bó Cuailnge as an analogy for the tenth to ninth centuries BC, nor would I claim the stories have origins in the Bronze Age. The tales illustrate ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Gifts
• Part II Dwellings
• Part III Landmarks
• Index