The famous assemblage of finery excavated by Edward Cunnington from Clandon Barrow, Dorset, in 1882 is usually held to be archetypal of the ‘Wessex culture’ and rich graves. Meticulous examination of the six artefacts and re-appraisal of comparative material casts a new light on the significance of the group. It does not represent a definable cultural package and instead points to a complex set of inter-relationships with ‘foreign’ lands achieved, above all, by plying varied maritime networks. Connections are shown to have run up the east coast of Britain, west towards the Irish Sea, and across the Channel to both Armorica and the Frisian coast. By contrast, links with inland Wessex were rather insubstantial. Questions are raised about the utility of the ‘Wessex’ label.

Although uncertain whether it was a grave group or some other ritual deposit, the assemblage can be seen in a positive light as a record of great exploits in distant travel. The material assembled came to stand for the success of the south Dorset community and its key personages as judged against the prime concerns of Early Bronze Age society. Its paramount importance is emphasised by the choice of site – a focally positioned, yet relatively isolated barrow within a dense monumental landscape and, moreover, a barrow that saw recurrent rejuvenation as part of a cycle of remembrance.

Having in mind that the knowledge of context is essential to the reading and interpretation of ancient images, this paper deals with unconventional iconographies displaying key elements of the funerary ideology among the peoples of Indo-European Hispania. Two main itineraries – over water and by air – which are not mutually exclusive, are considered in those transits to the Other World in a visual history that, by calling on ancestral memory, help to construct new Romano-Celtic identities.

This paper examines whether there really are fundamental differences between a Celtic model of social organisation and the observations made by J.D. Hill about PRIA social organisation in southern England. Hill's alternative model, which in his opinion seems to be fundamentally at odds with what can be learned from Celtic sources, is characterised by the importance of three main factors. These are the essentially ideological, east-facing orientation of Iron Age houses and enclosed settlements, the ideological boundedness of individual homesteads, and the household as the centre of production. Yet, an examination of the medieval Irish andWelsh literature reveals that these three fundamental characteristics also seem to define the societies described in the Celtic texts. However, while the household is the central independent social and economic unit, the medieval texts also put great emphasis on kinship, with kin-groups fulfilling important, complementary roles for the individual households. It is examined whether a kind of society that is not dominated by either households or kinship, but by both households and kinship, can successfully explain all the archaeological phenomena observable in PRIA Britain, including different ‘hillforts’ possibly fulfilling several different functions. The striking similarities that can be found between the kinds of societies proposed by Hill as inhabiting PRIA Britain and those described in the medieval Irish and Welsh sources force us to consider whether the Celtic should not better be returned to PRIA Britain, and whether the ‘different Iron Ages’ were not that different after all.

In this paper an attempt is made to integrate discussions on social and technological aspects of Copper Age metallurgy. The South-east European Copper Age is widely held to be characterised by newly emerging elites and a strong societal impact of metallurgy. It is shown that much of this discussion is influenced by the evidence of the exceptionally rich Varna cemetery in Bulgaria. This is not a suitable model for Copper Age social structure in general because Varna is an extremely short-lived phenomenon and may reflect aspects of culture and identity other than our search for social elites implies. In any case there is no comparable evidence throughout the rest of Copper Age Europe. In the Carpathian basin, for example, Copper Age society certainly did not know permanent hierarchies, centralised control over dispersed settlements units, or distinctions in personal identity other than age and gender. Against this background metallographic data are used to establish the state of knowledge of Copper Age metalworkers. There are similarities in overall approach, yet within this broad tradition two distinct horizons of metallurgical knowledge and practice can be distinguished. The reasons of the differences observed in casting technique and forging are discussed. Drawing on ethnographic data a model is presented to account for uniformity in the basic parameters on the one hand and the spread of innovations in Middle to Late Copper Age society on the other without social elites being in control of raw materials, metalworking, and exchange.

The Bell Beaker bracers, or wrist-guards, are traditionally thought to have functioned as archery equipment, protecting the arm against the sting of the bowstring. Their position on the body is therefore thought to have been on the inside of the lower arm. Through analysis of the position in which wrist-guards are found, we have come to the conclusion that they were, however, more often than not fastened to the outside of the arm, which leads us to consider a range of new possible uses and meanings for the bracers. With combined information from archaeological and ethnographic surveys we have come to think of the stone wrist-guard as an artefact that was associated with a martial, ideologically-laden activity in the Bell Beaker culture.

A petrographic analysis of 74 Ausonian (Late Bronze Age) sherds from the Acropolis of Lipari (Aeolian Islands, Sicily) was undertaken to ascertain whether they represent intrusive mainland Italian Subapenninian and Protovillanovan imports, as their typology might suggest, or were the products of an indigenous island economy. The sample included ‘impasto’ and painted pottery and was extended to include 15 Apenninian sherds from the preceding Milazzese cultural phase. The Acropolis has an almost unbroken stratified ceramic succession from the Middle Neolithic to the early historic period and the site is located in an island with a restricted, but well defined, volcanic geology. The petrographic evidence indicates that the Ausonian pottery is the product of the indigenous insular economy using both local and imported materials. This conclusion suggess that new ceramic forms were quickly transposed by the ‘native’ potters of Lipari to produce an indigenous ‘Subapenninian’ and ‘Protovillanovan’ range of wares.

This paper presents findings within Wyman Abbott's long-missing notebooks and other allied archival sources relating to his Fengate fieldwork during the early decades of the 20th century. Largely focusing upon its monuments, we here publish a manuscript concerned with his extraordinary, multiple-interment 'great' ringditch which is otherwise known from a paragraph's description in Hawkes and Fell's Antiquaries Jourual paper of 1945. Not only do these sources contribute to the further reconstruction of Fengate's renowned Bronze Age landscape, but, it is argued, the centralised multiple-lineage interment evident at his main ring-ditch site may well reflect upon the social organisation which also gave rise to Pryor's equally 'special' Flag Fen platform.

An increasing number of buildings are coming to light on prehistoric sites in Scandinavia that seem to be related to ritual, cult, or religious activities. This paper documents examples of such buildings from the Mesolithic to the Viking Period. The Late Meolithic cemetery at Skateholm provides evidence for structures associated with materials only otherwise found in grave contexts. Certain aspects of Early Neolithic long barrows and palisaded enclosures may infer ritual practices not directly of a funerary nature. The later Neolithic was marked in the cultural groupings of various regions by the construction of palisaded enclosures, wooden structures associated with graves, or pile dwellings, each often associated with a rich finds assemblage and frequent evidence for burning. These structures and their contents show obvious distinctions from the contemporary domestic settlement and burial sites with which they were associated. Bronze Age examples include rectangular stone walled and D- and C-shaped wooden structures placed beside burial areas and facing cairns. The latter forms continue into the Iron Age, for which few other clear examples of ritual structures are apparent, in spite of historical references. Those that have been identified seem to be associated with important central places. The site of Uppåkra, in southernmost Sweden, has produced an unusual small building set beside a hall around and within which were deposited hundreds of weapons and gold and glass objects. This relationship bears a striking resemblance to the description of the hall of Wodan at Valhalla in Norse mythology.

Excavation on the Thames floodplain in London revealed traces of Early Neolithic occupation and burial on a sand and gravel bar beneath alluvium. A large expanse of peat also buried by alluvium was recorded between these finds and the modern river Thames suggesting that the occupation was situated on or close to the foreshore. A single grave cut into the natural sand contained a poorly preserved crouched inhumation, possibly of a woman. The burial was accompanied by a fragment of carinated bowl, a flint knife, and other struck flints. A radiocarbon date from an oak retaining plank within the grave of 5252±28 BP (4220–3970 cal BC: KIA20157) makes this burial one of the earliest from the British Isles and the earliest known for London. A scatter of struck flint and pottery predominantly of Early Neolithic date was recovered from adjacent areas of the sand. A nearby hearth contained fragments of Early Bronze Age pottery pointing to later prehistoric activity nearby.

Charred plant remains indicate both the collection of wild plant foods and cultivated cereals in the Early Neolithic. Radiocarbon dating of the adjacent peat deposits indicated their rapid growth within the Middle Bronze Age with a marked decline in woodland cover at the start of the sequence and a rise in grassland and herb species. Cereal pollen then briefly became a significant component of the sequence before declining to more modest levels.

Developer-funded archaeology on the Isle of Sheppey resulted in the discovery of not one but two Neolithic causewayed enclosures on the same hilltop in very close (c. 300 m) proximity. In the later Bronze Age enclosures and cremation cemeteries were constructed immediately to the east, followed by Iron Age enclosures and, ultimately, field systems dating to the later Iron Age onwards.

A radiocarbon programme enabled the chronological sequence and hiatus between all of these events to be discerned, but the majority of this paper explores the physical, chronological, and social relationship between the two Neolithic causewayed enclosures. These were of different forms and, although on the same hilltop, they each seem to have had distinctly different viewsheds over the Thames and the Swale respectively. There are subtle, but potentially significant, differences in the material culture and deposition which allow exploration of the possible functions and role(s) of the two largely contemporaneous sites. Questions may be addressed such as whether they performed the same functions for two communities or had separate and distinct roles for a single community. Beyond the Neolithic, the paper also explores the nature of the later use of the hilltop. The Bronze Age enclosures, though agricultural in function, clearly seem to respect their Neolithic predecessors invoking a remembrance of space, which is lost by the Iron Age. The shift away from the special function of this landscape in the Neolithic to a subsequent agricultural use is explored, as is the hiatus in use and subsequent re-use of the area.

‘The huts are now roofless, the fires of the hearths quenched for ever, the fortifications levelled; yet these ruins have out-lasted the erections of more civilized times, and they still remain to tell us something of the busy population who hunted, tended flocks, tilled the ground, and quarrelled and fought, at a very distant period (in the valley of the Breamish)’. George Tate (1863, 302)

This paper describes the results of the South East Cheviots Project undertaken by the former Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME; now part of English Heritage) during the 1980s. An area of 66 square kilometres was analytically recorded, ranging from the Breamish Valley in the north to Alnham in the south and from Brandon in the east to Schill Moor in the west. The project recorded with metrical accuracy all forms of cultivation remains, field systems, and settlements of all periods (only the prehistoric evidence will be reviewed in this paper). This landscape approach has led to a greater understanding of settlement histories in these remarkably well-preserved uplands. Recent excavations undertaken by the Northumberland Archaeological Group (NAG) and Durham University, under the auspices of the Northumberland National Park Authority (NNPA), have helped to clarify and contextualise further aspects of the chronology of settlement and landscape change recorded by the SECP.

In June 2007 David Summers was digging in his garden at Wroughton (NGR SU 14778117), just south of Swindon, Wiltshire, when he noticed a small bifacial flint tool. Realising that it was something interesting he e-mailed photographs to Devizes Museum where the now-retired curator, Paul Robinson, identified it as a Lower Palaeolithic hand-axe. The implement is a small pointed bifacial tool, conforming exactly to Wymer's (1968) type F hand-axes; it measures 60 mm long, 47 mm wide and is 29 mm thick. The object is unrolled, suggesting that it had not moved far from the point where it was dropped, but is heavily stained. Nothing like it was known from the immediate area although hand-axes have been recorded from the summit of Hackpen Hill, 7 km to the south (Roe 1968) with others, including small implements, from one of the most prolific sites in Britain at Knowle Farm (Roe 1968) on the edge of Savernake Forest.

It was suggested that the present author might be interested in the axe and could perhaps tell him more about it. Some digital photographs were duly received and confirmed, with a caveat that the comment was being made from photos, that the object did, indeed, appear to be a small hand-axe. It was added to the County Sites and Monuments Record (SMR) and was also taken to the British Museum, where it was confirmed as a hand-axe. Nick Ashton, Curator of Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Collections, also commenting from photographs, considered that it certainly looked like a hand-axe but contributed that the back garden provenance was unusual and suggested that it may have been originally found elsewhere.