Barrow Builders
In this session we focused on the round mound-shaped tombs called ‘barrows’ in Britain. Evidence from across Europe and Eurasia suggests that, like many other things we’ve looked at, this method of honouring certain community members began in the Steppes and was gradually adopted further west.
We used the Amesbury Archer as an example. He may have been originally covered by a small mound, which was ploughed out centuries ago. Born in central Europe, his grave goods included copper knives made from Spanish ore. A number of other items with him were staus symbols, including two polished stone wrist-guards which in 2350 BC may have been a status symbol equivalent to a Rolex watch nowadays.
An excavation in 2004 at Ramsgate revealed another series of ploughed-out barrows which had been the focus for burials over a long period of time. Read the full report here.There were 20 people of various ages buried there during the Bronze Age and of these 8 were local, 7 were from Scandinavia and 4 were from southern Spain, which is an interesting reflection on contacts where by trade, through marriage alliances or prompted by some other phenomenon that we don’t yet understand.
The use of copper and bronze also spread at a time when not only carts, chariots and horses were becoming more widespread, but also when there appears to be evidence for many-oared boats with masts and sails, capable of tackling sea voyages. The tiny 18cm long golden boat found at Broighter in N.Ireland is a good illustration of this. Actual Bronze Age boats were found at Ferriby near Hull 1940s-60s, but their preservation has not been good. These too seem to have been capable of coastal voyages.
The same time of technological change also seems to indicate a time of shared ideas, maybe ideas that originated in the Proto Indo European homeland many millennia before. The idea of the sun being a wheeled chariot pulled across the sky by horses is one of these ideas. Another is the conceptualisation of the cosmos as an ocean, and of the Milky Way as a huge river. Yet another is the notion that the cosmos is ruled by a single supreme deity who is male, like the male ‘head of household’ on earth. The names used for this deity (Dyaus-Pitr in Sanskrit, Zeu-patr in Greek, Iu-pitr in Latin) all come from the same PIE root word that translates as ‘sky-father’.
The time of metallurgy has also given us a series of intriguing archaeological objects that are difficult to guess at the use of…..so we suppose they must have been used in rituals of some kind. Similarities in these existed over wide stretches of Europe. They include depictions of cart and chariot-like vehicles, in one case pulling a huge disc; numerous ways in which a ‘chariot wheel’ (circle divided into 4) appears as a design motif; and designs of concentric circles set into objects in ways that suggest they were more than a pattern ie they could represent a calendar system of some kind. The overall conclusion from these objects is that the priests or augers who were able to predict stellar events would have wielded huge power, something we know for a fact from the literate societies of the time in Iraq and Egypt.
A small number of people were given very special barrow burials at this time, and we looked at evidence from a series of these on the fringes of Salisbury Plain: Bush Barrow and Golden Barrow, as well as the enigmatic burial from Mold in Flintshire that yielded a golden ‘cape’ now in the British Museum. All of these were sadly dug up like potatoes in the 19th century with no concept of recording or preserving material, but even so they present us with a picture of a small minority given hugely rich grave goods. Whether these were kings (or queens), shaman or ore-dealers, or a mixture of all three, we can only guess.