Mapping Society: Settlement Structure in Later Bronze Age Ireland

Mapping Society: Settlement Structure in Later Bronze Age Ireland
Author: Victoria Ruth Ginn
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2016-01-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1784912441

This study examines Middle–Late Bronze Age (c. 1750–600 BC) domestic settlement patterns in Ireland. The results reveal a distinct rise in the visibility, and a rapid adaption, of domestic architecture, which seems to have occurred earlier in Ireland than elsewhere in western and northern Europe.

Bronze Age Worlds

Bronze Age Worlds
Author: Robert Johnston
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2020-10-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351710982

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.

Burials and Society in Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Ireland

Burials and Society in Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Ireland
Author: Cormac McSparron
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2021-05-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1789696321

This book describes and analyses the increasing complexity of later Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age burial in Ireland, using burial complexity as a proxy for increasing social complexity, and as a tool for examining social structure.

Exploring Prehistoric Identity in Europe

Exploring Prehistoric Identity in Europe
Author: Victoria Ginn
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2014-03-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 184217813X

Identity is relational and a construct, and is expressed in a myriad of ways. For example, material culture and its pluralist meanings have been readily manipulated by humans in a prehistoric context in order to construct personal and group identities. Artefacts were often from or reminiscent of far-flung places and were used to demonstrate membership of an (imagined) regional, or European community. Earthworks frequently archive maximum visual impact through elaborate ramparts and entrances with the minimum amount of effort, indicating that the construction of identities were as much in the eye of the perceivor, as of the perceived. Variations in domestic architectural style also demonstrate the malleability of identity, and the prolonged, intermittent use of particular places for specific functions indicates that the identity of place is just as important in our archaeological understanding as the identity of people. By using a wide range of case studies, both temporally and spatially, these thought processes may be explored further and diachronic and geographic patterns in expressions of identity investigated.

Hillforts, Warfare and Society in Bronze Age Ireland

Hillforts, Warfare and Society in Bronze Age Ireland
Author: William O'Brien
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 538
Release: 2017-07-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1784916560

This is the first project to study hillforts in relation to warfare and conflict in Bronze Age Ireland. This project combines remote sensing and GIS-based landscape analysis with conventional archaeological survey to investigate ten prehistoric hillforts across southern Ireland.

The Archaeology of Prehistoric Burnt Mounds in Ireland

The Archaeology of Prehistoric Burnt Mounds in Ireland
Author: Alan Hawkes
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2018-08-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 178491987X

This book details the archaeology of burnt mounds (fulachtaí fia) in Ireland, one of the most frequent and under researched prehistoric site types in the country. It presents a re-evaluation of the pyrolithic phenomenon in light of some 1000 excavated burnt mounds.

Bronze Age Settlements in the Low Countries

Bronze Age Settlements in the Low Countries
Author: Harry Fokkens
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2008-06-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1782975195

The Low Countries around the deltas of the river Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt have a long tradition in large scale archaeological research. This book brings together research from thirteen of the largest Bronze Age settlements described by their original excavators. These contributions are preceded by two introductory chapters written by the editors, providing a full overview of the state of Dutch Bronze Age settlement research, the key sites and the explanatory models current within it. Standards have been developed for the analysis of Bronze Age house plans and settlement sites and new models for the reading of the settled landscape. The rich data of the Low Countries also incorporate burial areas and deposition places. The findings presented can be seen to reflect the situation over a large area of lands bordering the North Sea.

Personifying Prehistory

Personifying Prehistory
Author: Joanna Brück
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2019-01-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0191080918

The Bronze Age is frequently framed in social evolutionary terms. Viewed as the period which saw the emergence of social differentiation, the development of long-distance trade, and the intensification of agricultural production, it is seen as the precursor and origin-point for significant aspects of the modern world. This book presents a very different image of Bronze Age Britain and Ireland. Drawing on the wealth of material from recent excavations, as well as a long history of research, it explores the impact of the post-Enlightenment 'othering' of the non-human on our understanding of Bronze Age society. There is much to suggest that the conceptual boundary between the active human subject and the passive world of objects, so familiar from our own cultural context, was not drawn in this categorical way in the Bronze Age; the self was constructed in relational rather than individualistic terms, and aspects of the non-human world such as pots, houses, and mountains were considered animate entities with their own spirit or soul. In a series of thematic chapters on the human body, artefacts, settlements, and landscapes, this book considers the character of Bronze Age personhood, the relationship between individual and society, and ideas around agency and social power. The treatment and deposition of things such as querns, axes, and human remains provides insights into the meanings and values ascribed to objects and places, and the ways in which such items acted as social agents in the Bronze Age world.

Settlement in the Irish Neolithic

Settlement in the Irish Neolithic
Author: Jessica Smyth
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2014-05-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 178297752X

The Irish Neolithic has been dominated by the study of megalithic tombs, but the defining element of Irish settlement evidence is the rectangular timber Early Neolithic house, the numbers of which have more than quadrupled in the last ten years. The substantial Early Neolithic timber house was a short-lived architectural phenomenon of as little as 90 years, perhaps like short-lived Early Neolithic long barrows and causewayed enclosures. This book explores the wealth of evidence for settlement and houses throughout the Irish Neolithic, in relation to Britain and continental Europe. More importantly it incorporates the wealth of new, and often unpublished, evidence from developer-led archaeological excavations and large grey-literature resources. The settlement evidence scattered across the landscape, and found as a result of developer-funded work, provides the social context for the more famous stone monuments that have traditionally shaped our views of the Neolithic in Ireland. It provides the first comprehensive review of the Neolithic settlement of Ireland, which enables a more holistic and meaningful understanding of the Irish Neolithic.

Celtic from the West 3

Celtic from the West 3
Author: John T. Koch
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Total Pages: 551
Release: 2016-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1785702300

The Celtic languages and groups called Keltoi (i.e. ‘Celts’) emerge into our written records at the pre-Roman Iron Age. The impetus for this book is to explore from the perspectives of three disciplines—archaeology, genetics, and linguistics—the background in later European prehistory to these developments. There is a traditional scenario, according to which, Celtic speech and the associated group identity came in to being during the Early Iron Age in the north Alpine zone and then rapidly spread across central and western Europe. This idea of ‘Celtogenesis’ remains deeply entrenched in scholarly and popular thought. But it has become increasingly difficult to reconcile with recent discoveries pointing towards origins in the deeper past. It should no longer be taken for granted that Atlantic Europe during the 2nd and 3rd millennia BC were pre-Celtic or even pre-Indo-European. The explorations in Celtic from the West 3 are drawn together in this spirit, continuing two earlier volumes in the influential series.