Bronze Age Connections
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Bronze Age Connections

Cultural Contact in Prehistoric Europe

Peter Clark

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Bronze Age Connections

Cultural Contact in Prehistoric Europe

Peter Clark

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About This Book

New and exciting discoveries on either side of the English Channel in recent years have begun to show that people living in the coastal zones of Belgium, southern Britain, northern France and the Netherlands shared a common material culture during the Bronze Age, between three and four thousand years ago. They used similar styles of pottery and metalwork, lived in the same kind of houses and buried their dead in the same kind of tombs, often quite different to those used by their neighbours further inland. The sea did not appear to be a barrier to these people but rather a highway, connecting communities in a unique cultural identity; the 'People of La Manche'. Symbolic of these maritime Bronze Age Connections is the iconic Dover Bronze Age boat, one of Europe's greatest prehistoric discoveries and testament to the skill and technical sophistication of our Bronze Age ancestors. This monograph presents papers from a conference held in Dover in 2006 organised by the Dover Bronze Age Boat Trust, which brought together scholars from many different countries to explore and celebrate these ancient seaborne contacts. Twelve wide-ranging chapters explore themes of travel, exchange, production, magic and ritual that throw new light on our understanding of the seafaring peoples of the second millennium BC.

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Publisher
Oxbow Books
Year
2009
ISBN
9781782973164
1. Introduction: Building New Connections
Peter Clark
Standing beside the great Roman pharos on the towering heights east of Dover at the south-eastern tip of Britain, the distant coast of Europe can be clearly seen, a thin strip of greenish brown evocatively set between sea and sky. Below, the port rattles and booms as a seemingly endless succession of ferries load and unload, huge steel behemoths towering over the cars and lorries they carry, forever plying backwards and forwards across the waves. Dover is Britain’s busiest port, with over fourteen million people passing through it each year, making the short sea crossing between England and France. This intimate connection has often been ambivalent, however; the great hills flanking the town are studded with the remains of gargantuan defences dating over many centuries, witness to times when the sea was a welcome barrier against continental threat rather than the populous highway it is today. Fittingly, it was deep below the streets of this bustling modern port that Europe’s oldest sea going boat was discovered in 1992; the Dover Bronze Age boat – built some three and a half millennia ago – now has pride of place in the local museum, and is a focus of intense international interest and study. In particular, it has stimulated a desire to better understand what connections might have existed between peoples on either side of the Channel in this distant time. Archaeologists have long been aware of similarities in Bronze Age material culture in the modern countries of England, northern France, the Netherlands and Belgium; what can these tell us about the nature of relations between these transmanche communities in the second millennium BC? The growing pace of research and new discoveries on both sides of the Channel together with the general public’s appetite for information suggested the need for a colloquium where new data could be presented and new ideas discussed in open forum. There could be no better place for a debate about ancient seafaring and maritime connections than the modern port of Dover.
Thus, in September 2006, over 180 people gathered at Dover’s Western Docks to attend some fifteen presentations by various scholars from Belgium, England, France, the Netherlands and the USA on the theme ‘Bronze Age Connections: Cultural Contact in Prehistoric Europe’. This volume brings together twelve of those presentations for a wider audience and for the benefit of those conference delegates who found difficulty in hearing the original presentations as huge waves crashed on the walls and roof of the conference venue (Fig 1.1).
The conference was the second such event organised by the Dover Bronze Age Boat Trust (DBABT), a registered charity set up in 1993, whose aims are ‘to protect, preserve and conserve for the public benefit the Dover Bronze Age Boat’ and ‘to advance the education of the public about all aspects relating to the boat, its design, construction, history, use and all other relevant matters…’. The first of these aims was achieved in November 1999 when an award-winning gallery of Bronze Age life was opened at Dover museum (Clark et al 2004), with the fully conserved Dover boat as its centrepiece. The Trust continues to monitor the condition of the boat and the gallery as part of its remit; similarly the ‘education of the public’ is a continuing responsibility, realised in many ways, such as the production of a documentary video, appearances on television and radio, public lectures, the organisation of school visits, guided tours of the gallery and so forth. In the same vein, and in recognition of the international significance of the find, the DBABT organised a major conference focussing on the Dover boat in 2002 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its discovery. With speakers from Denmark, England, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Wales, some 130 delegates attended the conference, whose proceedings were published in 2004 as ‘The Dover Bronze Age boat in context: Society and water transport in prehistoric Europe’.
Figure 1.1 Fierce storms lashed the conference venue during the two-day symposium
In the same year, a detailed technical monograph appeared on the Dover boat itself (Clark 2004a), the result of ten years of study by a large interdisciplinary team of specialists. The boat itself was found at the bottom of a 6 metre deep shaft during road construction in 1992, and has been dated to 1575–1520 cal BC (Bayliss et al 2004, 254). The surviving hull is around 2.2 m broad, and over 9.5m of the boat’s length was salvaged. The northern end of the vessel, for various reasons, could not be recovered at the time of excavation. The state of preservation of the boat was remarkable, with the toolmarks of its fabrication clearly visible, in addition to the survival of organic materials used to make the boat watertight.
In essence, the boat remains consist of four planks, hewn from logs of huge, straight-grained oak trees (Quercus sp.) without side branches (Fig 1.2). It has been estimated that such trees must have originated in close set oak forests, with at least 11m between the basal buttresses and the first appearance of branches. Such trees are very rare in Western Europe today.
Two flat planks form the bottom, each carved out of a half log, leaving upstanding cleats and rails allowing its jointing with other boat timbers (Fig 1.3). These bottom planks were joined together along a central butt joint, with transverse timbers and wedges hammered through the cleats and central rails. Curved side planks were stitched to the bottom of the boat with twisted withies of yew (Taxus baccata). These side planks also possess side cleats carved out of the solid wood. The timbers forming the end of the boat splay into a Y-shape, intricately carved from the main planks. This originally would have held a carved wooden board, reminiscent of a modern “punt”. There was clear evidence for the presence and some dimensions of this missing end board; there was also evidence for at least two other main structural timbers. On the top of the curved side planks was another row of stitches, cut through in antiquity. There were clearly two further side planks, and the boat had been deliberately dismantled (albeit partially) when it was abandoned. She had been made waterproof by pressing in a mixture of beeswax and animal fat into the stitch-holes and along the seams, where the stopping was overlain by pads of moss wadding, compressed and held in place by long thin laths of oak under the yew stitches. The boat had clearly been used extensively. Tool marks on its bottom (outboard) surface were differentially worn away, suggesting it had been beached regularly on a sand or gravel shore (though see Sanders 2007, 188–190 for an alternative view). The main timbers had split and were repaired by stitching wooden laths over the damage.
Figure 1.2 The Dover boat in situ
Figure 1.3 Schematic drawing showing main elements of the Dover boat’s construction
The rarity of the discovery, the complexity and precision of its manufacture, the quality of its preservation and the circumstances of its abandonment make the Dover boat a pivotal resource for the study of prehistoric maritime archaeology. Indeed, the implications of the find have had ramifications for the understanding of Bronze Age archaeology in general, something that was central to the study of the boat from the beginning; ‘The boat was made and used by people living three and a half millennia ago, and it was to better understand these people, their society and the world they lived in that was as much a focus of the analysis team’s work as the study of the vessel itself ’ (Clark 2004b, 1).
It was apparent even at the time of publication of The Dover Bronze Age Boat that the primary results of analysis were not the final word; ‘this volume does not attempt to be a final, definitive statement…; rather, it is a springboard for further study and a resource for the imagination’ (Clark 2004b, 2). That sentiment has indeed been borne out; the Dover boat has stimulated an extensive debate amongst scholars around the world that continues to this day (eg Boon and Rietbergen forthcoming; Coates 2005a; 2005b; Crumlin-Pedersen 2003; 2006; Fenwick 2006; 2007; McGrail 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Roberts 2006a; 2006b; Sanders 2007; Von der Porten 2006; Ward 2005).
The first Dover conference focussed largely on prehistoric maritime transport, the cultural perception of the boat and the concept of voyage, along with the environmental context of the find (Clark 2004c). At the same time, attention was drawn to the geographical location of the discovery, in England’s busiest port close to the shortest sea crossing to the continent. The nature of transmanche contacts in prehistory (a long-standing topic of interest; see Butler 1963, Briard 1965; Burgess 1968; Blanchet 1987) was reviewed in the light of recent discoveries, particularly from northern France (Clark 2004d), a study that was to provide the genesis of the theme for the 2006 conference. The boat has given physical form to the abstract notion of maritime voyaging and overseas social contact, contributing to a renewed appreciation of the nature and importance of sea travel to prehistoric communities.
Of course, whether the Dover boat itself ever crossed the sea to the continent will no doubt remain forever moot, though recent proposals have suggested avenues to further explore the technical possibility. At the time of writing, a re-assessment of the boat timbers is being undertaken, using alternative methodologies of analysis to those used previously in order to perhaps enhance our understanding of the vessel’s original form and potential capabilities (eg McGrail 2007; Crumlin-Pedersen and McGrail 2006). At the same time, an international partnership of archaeologists and heritage institutions is exploring the possibility of building a full scale reconstruction of the Dover boat (Clark 2008), which will allow the experimental assessment of various hypotheses in a series of sea trials, an approach that has proved fruitful for a number of prehistoric boats of different types and building traditions (eg Gifford and Gifford 2004; Gifford et al 2006; Vosmer 2003; Rouzo and Poissonnier 2007; Crumlin-Pedersen and Trakadas 2003). Notwithstanding these continuing studies, the vessel remains symbolic of the voyages that are known to have taken place in the Bronze Age from material culture recovered on either side of the channel and indeed from the sea floor itself. Examples include pottery (eg Desfossés 2000a, 191–195; Marcigny and Ghesquière 2003; note also the distribution of Trevisker ware from modern-day Cornwall and Devon right along the southern coast of England and across the sea to Basse-Normandie and Pas-de-Calais (Mariette 1961; Marcigny and Ghesquière 2003; ApSimon 2000; ApSimon and Greenfield 1972; Gibson forthcoming; Gibson et al 1997 )), metalwork (Blanchet and Mordant 1987; Muckelroy 1981; Needham and Dean 1987), styles of architecture (eg Desfossés 2000b, 63, figs 15 and 16; Desfossés and Philippe 2002; Lepaumier et al 2005; Mare 2005; Sys and Leroy-Langevin 2004) and jewellery such as the British-style gold torcs recovered from the sea floor off the coast of Sotteville-sur-Mer (Seine-Maritime; Billard et al 2005). In this respect the discovery of the boat has in part inspired a renaissance of study and research in the transmanche area. Terrestrial archaeologists have become more willing to incorporate the maritime dimension in their studies, whilst nautical archaeologists have become more sensitive to the cultural context of the vessels they study, a coming together of the ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ archaeological communities (Adams 2007, 219).
The increasing recognition of maritime archaeology as an integral part of ‘mainstream’ archaeological thinking seems to have been reflected in an improvement of the legislative and governmental protection of the maritime heritage in recent years, under the aegis of the respective national heritage agencies in the region. In Belgium, the Vlaams Instituut voor het Onroerend Erfgoed (VIOE) was formally recognised as the ‘preferred partner’ of the Belgian federal government with regard to maritime heritage research in 2003 (Pieters et al 2006, 8), whilst in France maritime cultural assets were formally ratified as part of the ‘Code du Patrimoine’ (French Heritage Code) in 2004 with responsibility for scientific research entrusted to the Département des Recherches archéologiques subaquatiques et sous-marines (DRASSM; Massy 2006). In England, English Heritage were given responsibility for maritime archaeology out to the 12 mile Territorial Limit off the English coast in 2002 (Oxley 2006, 46), and in the Netherlands the Rijksdienst voor Archeologie, Cultuurlandschap en Monumenten...

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