A History of Ancient Britain (37 page)

It was the sheer quantity of the metal in circulation as the Bronze Age approached its climax that prompted archaeologists to question whether it could all have been for practical purposes.
Here, then, was the inspiration for the application of gift-exchange theory – the realisation that somewhere along the line the wealth associated with the control and possession of bronze had
become divorced from its utility as a metal. Once objects of bronze were being treated as a kind of proto-currency, those individuals with the power to obtain them simply wanted more and more. As
so often happens where human nature is involved, enough was never enough.

The Neolithic, the New Stone Age, had been about much more than just objects and structures made of stone. The people living through it were hardly to be defined by a raw material alone. Rather
the Neolithic encapsulated the revolutionary technology of farming as well as whole new systems of belief and entirely new ways of looking at the world and the cosmos. Far from simply being
obsessed with a technology, a population of busy farmers struggled to come to terms with what it meant to be alive in a mysterious universe. Likewise the period of time archaeologists have labelled
the Bronze Age was about much more than a preoccupation with a golden-coloured metal. In fact that metal was only a symptom of humankind’s overall condition during those particular centuries
of our ancient history.

Part of the story of the Late Bronze Age seems to be steady change – a deterioration, in fact – in the climate of Britain and perhaps other parts of northern and western Europe as
well. While there had been a ‘golden age’ – of weather as well as social relations – lasting for hundreds of years, it seems that after perhaps 800
BC
or so things began to take a rapid turn for the
worse. In the latter years of the Bronze Age there was more rain, winters were longer and colder and the
summers shorter and cooler.

Whole swathes of farmland in upland zones and throughout northern Britain – particularly in Scotland – became less and less fertile, less and less productive. For a population that
had expanded during the good times, this steady reduction in the amount of available farmland posed some obvious problems. As time went on the still-productive lowlands, as well as lands further
south, came under increasing pressure from dispossessed communities that had found their own territories no longer capable of supporting them.

During the Bronze Age there had been a trend towards laying out large-scale field systems, like those that still survive at Deckler’s Cliff, at East Portlemouth in Devon. This had
certainly been the practice in upland areas like Dartmoor. But in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age these fields were steadily abandoned.

The way in which people lived on the land began to change as well – possibly as a direct result of the changes in the climate and soil fertility. While it was not universal across the
whole of the landmass of Britain and Ireland, settlements in many areas became more substantial. During the Late Bronze Age, more and more people seem to have felt the need to build with massive
timbers or stones. As the buildings became heavier, with a greater presence in the landscape, so too the homesteads and villages were often surrounded by ditches, banks and palisades. Communities
seem to have been drawing in upon themselves, staking more visible claims on what territory they believed was theirs. Farmland was also more and more defined by boundaries. Where before there had
been chaotic scatterings of fields, increasingly the landscape of the Late Bronze Age featured pre-planned layouts that were the product of co-ordinated efforts to formalise claims on the available
land.

Approaches to death underwent changes as well in the Late Bronze Age, particularly in southern Britain. Just as in every other age, the majority of the dead were likely disposed of by leaving
their corpses exposed in the open, possibly in special places, where nature could take its course. But from at least the Neolithic period, some people’s remains were selected for careful
treatment. During much of the Bronze Age the predominant fashion, when it came to those special individuals, had been for burial in and around round barrows that acted as focal points in the
landscape. But as the centuries wore on it seemingly became more common for those
ritually significant bodies to be cremated, and the fragments buried inside pottery urns.
Whole cemeteries grew up, known to archaeologists as ‘urn fields’, and their apparently egalitarian nature – with all of those special dead treated the same way – suggests
yet another change within society. Where rich burials, filled with weapons and jewellery, declared the status of the dead person loud and clear, the spread of urn fields might mean the power of a
hitherto wealthy elite was on the wane.

All across the board it seems people living through the later years of the Bronze Age were facing altered circumstances – perhaps even some kind of burgeoning crisis. While there was still
plenty of bronze in circulation, it came from different sources than before. The cargo of the Salcombe wreck contained metal that had its origins not in Britain but on the Continent. From 1000
BC
this seems increasingly to have been the case. The Great Orme was still a busy source of copper in 1500
BC
– and for several centuries to
come – but more and more of the metal changing hands in Britain was imported rather than native.

In fact by the end of the period the production of items fashioned from home-grown material had apparently ground to a halt – replaced by metal originating from all over western Europe.
There is something oddly familiar about this Late Bronze Age dependency on imports. Today Britain frets about the kind of nation she has become – one that makes next to nothing and depends on
imports from abroad. It seems that 3,000 years ago it became a land that looked abroad for its metalwork, the substance upon which so much was based. Despite the presence of tin in Cornwall and
resources of copper in northern Wales and elsewhere, by 1000
BC
many people preferred to acquire their bronze from European sources. It is yet another demonstration of how
complex their relationship to the metal had become. What mattered most was not that the object was made of bronze. Much of the real cachet lay in its source, where and from whom it had been
obtained. There is something almost deliberately awkward or contrary about what was going on. Often it is in those areas furthest from any natural sources of copper and tin – south-eastern
England, for example – that the largest volumes of hoarded bronze are found. People in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, on the other hand – parts of the country where bronze could easily
have been made locally – preferred to import the stuff from abroad.

It was not just the source of the bronze that changed, either. The things people were doing with their belongings changed too. Where before they
had accompanied the dead
in their graves, in the later centuries of the Bronze Age objects made of the precious metal were increasingly deposited in special locations in the landscape, and never reclaimed. For reasons not
fully understood, individuals or communities began burying valuable metal objects in holes in the ground, or throwing them into bogs, streams, rivers, lochs and lakes. Deposits of valuables had
been made in the preceding centuries as well; but as the Bronze Age approached its climax, the practice intensified to the point where it almost smacks of collective madness.

It is hard to come up with hard and fast rules for what people thought they were doing by discarding precious things, but in general terms metal tools were buried on dry land, jewellery and
other personal effects went into bogs and weapons were cast into rivers. And they were not being discarded individually either: whole collections of items that must have represented huge material
wealth to their erstwhile guardians or owners were being put out of reach of man.

For long it was suggested that hoards on dry land represented efforts to lay aside stores of valuables – savings that could be dug up and used at a later date. Archaeologists imagined they
were finding those deposits that had remained in the ground only because bad luck had prevented their rightful owners returning to collect them. Understanding what was going on is not made any
easier, either, by the use of the word ‘hoard’, with all its connotations of a store set aside as security against a future need. In many, if not most, instances the objects were being
put away for ever, never to be reclaimed.

More recently it has been accepted that the story must often be more complicated than ‘hoarding’ in the manner of squirrels laying down winter supplies of nuts. Given that so much
material was being consigned to fast-flowing rivers or to the deep sediments of bogs and marshes, surely it was never the intention to see such items again. Rather than being set aside for a rainy
day, they must have been intended for the gods alone.

Much of what was going on in the Late Bronze Age of Britain has been interpreted as human responses to a time of crisis. Set against a backdrop of worsening climate and reduction of fertile
land, the changes to settlement patterns and burial practices – and the new sources of and final destinations for the bronze itself – begin to suggest societies fighting to find new
identities to replace old, as well as new ways to live with themselves and with one another.

Cast into eternity within one hoard are two objects that reveal another
factor that came into play during the first millennium
BC
. In 1913, during
the construction of a reservoir at Llyn Fawr, in the Cynon Valley in south Wales, workmen began finding scores of bronze objects in the waterlogged peat. In the end they recovered more than 60
artefacts, including a large cauldron, a spearhead, many socketed axes, chisels, sickles, horse harness equipment and razors.

Long before the decision to make it into a reservoir, Llyn Fawr was a small, naturally formed lake. Looming over the water on one side, and giving the place a palpably gloomy air, is a steep,
heather-covered slope. All in all the lake has the appearance of a watery stage in front of a dark purple backdrop. It seems that, well over two and a half millennia ago, a Bronze Age community had
chosen the overshadowed depths of Llyn Fawr as the final resting place for a collection of their most valuable possessions.

The items within many hoards are deliberately broken – as though to underline the fact they are no longer the property of any living community. Those found at Llyn Fawr, however, were
deposited in generally good condition. Furthermore many of the pieces are of the highest quality and may have come originally from several locations across Britain and Continental Europe. The
cauldron is particularly fine, formed of four beaten plates of bronze joined together by scores of rivets. Those encircling plates are in turn secured to a circular base and the whole is fitted
with a pair of individually cast circular bronze handles from which the cauldron would have been suspended.

Cauldrons are loaded with meaning and significance that goes way beyond their function as cooking vessels. Such objects have traditionally been seen as powerful symbols of fertility and of
regeneration, so that to partake of food prepared in such a vessel was to be counted into a ceremony that celebrated the giving and the taking of life itself. That such an item – and such a
beautifully made and clearly valuable example – was chosen to be thrown for ever into the dark waters of a lake is an indication of powerful magic and belief at work.

Throughout much of Britain’s ancient history water was seen as special, magical in its own right. The smooth surface of a lake like Llyn Fawr, darkly transparent yet simultaneously
reflecting land and sky, may once have seemed like a portal between worlds – one belonging to the living and the other to the dead, the immortal and the gods.

The Llyn Fawr hoard is on display in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, and it is breathtaking. The cauldron is instantly captivating – for
its sheer scale
alone, too big to be encircled by a man’s arms – as are the axe heads of various sizes and weights, edges worn and chipped by much use. But it is some of the smaller pieces that seem to
have more to say. The bronze razors are especially moving, given that they imply the life of someone interested in the finer points of personal grooming, the need to appear in a particular way in
order to fit in.

But while the vast majority of the items are of bronze, archaeologists have placed the Llyn Fawr hoard at the beginning of another age entirely. There among all the familiar golden-hued finery
are two very special items – a socketed sickle and a sword – made not of bronze but of iron, some of the earliest iron objects found so far in the whole of Britain. The Llyn Fawr hoard
is therefore especially precious to archaeologists since it seems to straddle the two technologies.

The little iron sickle is particularly revealing because its creator quite obviously sought to make it appear as though it were made of bronze. For one thing he bothered to form a raised central
ridge or spine running down the centre of the curved blade. Such a feature would have been necessary to strengthen a cast bronze sickle but was completely redundant on one of hammered iron. For
another he fashioned a socket, to receive the end of a wooden handle, by painstakingly hammering and shaping part of the iron into a hollow tube. Although the socket gives the finished article much
of the appearance of one cast in bronze, it would have been infinitely easier – not to mention more practical – to have beaten out a simple tang that could have been slotted into a
notch cut in a wooden shaft. It is altogether fascinating. Either the ironsmith was keen to make his sickle appeal to a customer familiar with the shapes and forms of bronze tools, or he was a
bronzesmith determined to make the new material mimic the finished products he was used to casting in the old familiar metal.

Some archaeologists have consigned the Llyn Fawr hoard to a period they call the Earliest Iron Age. While the earliest iron objects in Europe were actually being made in the eastern
Mediterranean, around modern-day Turkey, from approximately 1200
BC
, their spread into northern Europe and Britain took several centuries.