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Excavations at Hartshill Copse in 2003 uncovered evidence for Late Bronze Age settlement, securely dated to the 10th century BC, associated with long alignments of closely set posts: prehistoric landscape features with few known parallels. Extensive sampling of the settlement remains yielded quantities of burnt flint and plain Post Deverel-Rimbury...
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... It also requires new skills in judgement and the many stages of producing an iron artefact are very demanding upon the smith. This suite of new skills does, in spite of the possible evidence from Hartshill Copse (Collard et al. 2006), seem to be associated with the advent of All Cannings pottery and the demise of the "bronze standard". Whether this represents the arrival of a new "cultural package" from Hallstatt Europe or is an indigenous development is not clear but, like All Cannings pottery and Early Iron Age society as a whole, the new technology places an emphasis on locally available resources. ...
This research set out to investigate the nature and extent of prehistoric human activity in the Vale of Pewsey, Wiltshire, a relatively poorly understood area located between the Marlborough Downs and Salisbury Plain. This was to be achieved through a combination of archival reassessment, aerial photographic interpretation and non-intrusive fieldwork. It became obvious that the Vale was the location for a considerable density of Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age sites, many of which were so called “midden” or “black-earth “sites, and this dissertation concentrates on this period. A survey of some 240 square km of the Vale was undertaken and the results analysed in the context of the few black-earth sites in the area that had previously been investigated. A number of well preserved sites dating from this period were identified and surveyed for the first time and fragments of the late prehistoric landscape defined and discussed.
Recent interpretations of Casterley Camp as a hill-top enclosure of this period were investigated and challenged as a result of fieldwork. The nature of the Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age subsistence system and society in this area are discussed and ethnographic comparables offered. The formation and meaning of black-earth sites and the role of these sites in the contemporary society discussed. The apparent uniqueness of the concentration of sites in the Vale of Pewsey is considered by comparison with other areas of Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age activity in southern Britain and, finally, suggestions for future work in the area are made.
... Therefore, in order to fully comprehend the production of iron blooms in this period, an understanding of the type of furnace used in iron smelting is necessary. Unfortunately, remains of Iron Age and Romano-British furnace structures are rare: most sites only present ceramic evidence, scattered at the base of the furnaces (Collard et al., 2006). Whilst this evidence can provide us with information on the diameter of the furnace base for example, it does not inform us about other structural dimensions such as the thickness of the walls, the position of the tuyère, the full height of the walls, and the diameter of the top of the furnace. ...
The material record for bloomery furnaces in Iron Age and Roman Britain is fragmentary and, because of this paucity of evidence, the reconstruction of the ceramic structures used in iron production is difficult. Experiments have nevertheless been carried out to explore the working parameters and efficiency of iron smelting in bowl furnaces (small structures with little structure above ground level, interior measuring about 30 cm in height) (Craddock, 1995; Girbal, 2013) and shaft furnaces (height c.1m) (Smith, 2013; Crew, 2013; Doonan and Dungworth, 2013; Tylecote and Merkel, 1985; Tylecote and Wynne, 1958). These experiments aimed to clarify which furnace is more efficient for iron smelting and therefore what method was most likely used in Iron Age and Roman Britain. It is theorised that iron smelting furnaces developed from bowl structures to shaft structures over time, as smelters sought furnaces which could reach higher temperatures and create more reducing atmospheres (Dungworth 2013; Tylecote and Merkel, 1985; Tylecote and Wynne, 1958). These experiments suggest that the shaft furnace was used as it could meet these requirements. This study looks at the working conditions of a shaft furnace at an intermediary height - between that of a bowl furnace and of a shaft furnace - in order to understand its working parameters and to consequently better understand the progression from a bowl to a 1m high shaft structure.
... A number of contenders have been proposed as the earliest place for the manufacture of iron in Britain ( fig. 2). At Hartshill Copse, Upper Bucklebury, Berkshire (Collard -Darvill -Watts 2006) hammer scale was found in a late Bronze Age context dating from the 10 th century BC. Other early iron production sites include Aldeby, southern Norfolk, where furnaces and slag were found during a watching brief along with later Bronze Age and early Iron Age pottery (Trimble 2001). ...
... These locations provide access to already well estab lished European communication networks and although independent insular innovation is possible, iron objects and perhaps iron production itself may have arrived by these routes and that "connections across regions (are) implied by the sharing of new technologies and artefact types" (Webley 2015, 126). Cunliffe (1995) has proposed that the Atlantic seaways of western Britain may have been a conduit for the introduction of iron technology from the European continent, which appears to correlate with the distribution in Britain of later Bronze Age iron objects and Carp's tongue style swords (Collard -Darvill -Watts 2006). A cluster of such swords in northwestern France also supports Cunliffe's (2005, 72) idea of zones of influence and contact. ...
Over the last decade, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of projects and discoveries relating
to Iron Age iron in the UK. These include the discovery of one of the earliest smelting furnaces at Messingham,
North Lincolnshire, an extensive industry along the Thames Valley and finds of iron objects including
swords and spearheads within the graves of the Arras culture of Eastern Yorkshire, for example at
Pocklington. There has also been an encouraging increase the number of PhD theses being undertaken
in UK universities on early iron objects and their production and deposition, including those supervised
and examined by the writer. This contribution will consider the origins of iron production in Iron Age
Britain and the relationship between iron production, its uses and the deposition of iron artefacts within
the landscape in the light of these recent discoveries.
Iron – Britain – Early Iron Age – smelting – deposition
... This includes three sites in Yorkshire, although none is entirely unproblematic in terms of the dating. These three sites encompass: Castle Hill, Scarborough, where an iron rod was excavated in the same pit context as a Late Bronze Age (Ewart Park metalwork phase) bronze socketed axes of Type Yorkshire (see Collard et al. 2006, 413 for analysis and discussion); three pieces of iron from ditch fills at the hillfort at Grimthorpe (Stead 1968, 166 nos 5-7) of which two were found within or just above a deposit dated to 1150-400 cal BC (2640 ± 130 BC; NPL-136; see Collard et al. 2006, 413); and two iron pins from the fortified hilltop settlement at Staple Howe dating from 753-402 (68.2%) and 765-350 (95.4%) cal BC (Dent 2010). The recent excavation of an iron furnace and substantial quantities of iron slag at Greetwell Hall Farm, Messingham, Scunthorpe which is securely radiocarbon dated to c. 780 -590 cal BC provides the earliest evidence for iron production in northern England, and potentially in Britain (Pitts 2016). ...
Radiocarbon dates have been obtained from a log-coffin burial excavated in 1864 by Canon William Greenwell from a ditched round barrow at Scale House, near Rylstone, North Yorkshire. The oak tree-trunk coffin had contained an extended body wrapped in a wool textile. The body had entirely decayed and there were no other extant grave goods. In the absence of other grave goods, Greenwell attributed the burial to the Bronze Age because it lay under a ditched round barrow and had similarities with log-coffin burials from Britain and Denmark. This attribution has not been questioned since 1864 despite a number of early medieval log-coffin burials subsequently being found in northern Britain. Crucially, the example excavated near Quernmore, Lancashire in 1973, was published as Bronze Age but subsequently radiocarbon dated to
ad
430–970. The Rylstone coffin and textile were radiocarbon dated to confirm that the burial was Early Bronze Age and not an early medieval coffin inserted into an earlier funerary monument. Unexpectedly, the dates were neither Early Bronze Age nor early medieval but
c.
800
bc
, the cusp of the Bronze Age–Iron Age transition in Britain. The burial at Rylstone is, therefore, one of only two sites in Britain, and is unparalleled elsewhere in north-western Europe at a time when disposal of the dead was primarily through dispersed cremated or unburnt disarticulated remains.
... The ironworking at Hartshill, Berkshire dating to c.1000 BC represents by far the earliest dated evidence for iron in Britain and is broadly contemporary with the earliest phase of iron use on the near Continent (Rovira 2001;Collard et al. 2006;Gomez de Soto and Kerouanton 2009). It pre-dates early ironworking sites as at nearby Cooper's Farm, Berkshire (Fitzpatrick 1995; and Potterne (Lawson 2000), the few iron objects found in Llyn Fawr bronze hoards such as the eponymous find (Collard et al. 2006, table 6, fig. ...
... A4-7). Although the evidence is fragmentary, the earliest iron objects and iron production correlate closely in distribution and date with these regions (see Collard et al. 2006, fig. 19 for distribution). ...
The discovery of 373 intact and broken tin-bronze socketed axes accompanied by 404 fragments in four pits at Langton Matravers collectively represents one of the largest hoards found to date in prehistoric Britain and Ireland. They were very probably never meant to be used as axes as the very high levels of tin they contain would have made them brittle. Many were poorly finished, with the majority still containing their casting cores. The axes are typologically dated to the Llyn Fawr metalwork phase (c.800–600 BC) and span the Bronze Age/Iron Age transition, when the production, circulation and deposition of bronze appear to have been substantially reduced throughout north-west Europe. By placing the Langton Matravers hoard(s) in a broader metallurgical, material and archaeological context, existing theories for this phenomenon, such as the preference for iron, a collapse in bronze supply, or the sharp devaluation of a social or ritual ‘bronze standard’, are evaluated. It is proposed that the Langton Matravers axes belong to a short phase in the centuries-long processes underlying the changing roles of bronze and iron.
... The first iron was worked in Anatolia in approximately 2200 BC (when bronze working initially arrived in Britain), but remained a very minor component of metallurgy for many centuries. Iron working probably started in Britain in approximately 1000 BC (Collard et al. 2006), but it did not become common for another 300 years. Such a time lag gives the lie to the old Three Age System in which it was thought that a new superior technology would quickly displace the old. ...
There is room for considerable cooperation between archaeology and neuroscience, but in order for this to happen we need to think about the interactions among brain-body-world, in which each of these three terms acts as cause and effect, without attributing a causally determinant position to any one. Consequently, I develop the term social ontology to look at how human capabilities of mind and body are brought about through an interaction with the material world. I look also at the key notion of plasticity to think about not only the malleable nature of human brains, but also the artefactual world. Using an example from the British Iron Age (approx. 750 BC-AD 43), I consider how new materials would put novel demands on the bodies and brains of people making, using and appreciating objects, focusing on an especially beautiful sword. In conclusion, I outline some possible areas of enquiry in which neuroscientists and archaeologists might collaborate.
... Even from an empirical point of view, they have Y2 taken on a life that has dislocated them from the technological stages they were supposed to defi ne. Thus, the start of the Iron Age in Britain is normally placed around 800 B.C., yet traces of ironworking – both smelting and forging – are known from ninth-and even tenth-millennia B.C. contexts, as at Hartshill Copse, Berkshire (Collard et al. 2006); and copper axes were in circulation during the later Neolithic (the end of the " Stone Age " ). Periodisation should at best be a heuristic device, creating temporal blocks within which to hang the study of practices and processes – a categorisation that makes manageable the study of large and complex data. ...
... Furthermore, single radiocarbon dates can provide little more than a broad date range. Nonetheless, the application of radiocarbon dating to burnt residues on the interior surfaces of vessels is now an established direct dating method Collard et al. 2006). ...
... Both Rams Hill and Taplow consisted of a series of palisades and dump defences. The enclosure at Castle Hill has contemporary settlement 200m away on the plateau below the hill, and a similar situation may exist at Taplow (Collard et al. 2006). In both cases concentrations of contemporary metalwork have been recovered from the reaches of the Thames that they overlook. ...
... Apart from structural evidence, there is increasing evidence from the distribution of artefacts and small pits etc how the use of buildings reflect both cosmological and practical aspects of design. This is especially striking for example at Hartshill Copse (Collard et al. 2006). There is also growing evidence of external as well as internal living, as at Mingies Ditch and Weir Bank Stud Farm. ...
... To a large extent craft would have been carried to in ordinary houses -or in some cases house-like buildings were perhaps built as workshops. For example there is excellent evidence of this at Hartshill Copse where there is very good evidence of different stages of metal working being carried out in two adjacent roundhouses which also had complementary characteristics in terms of the quantity and character of other finds (Collard et al. 2006). But in general it is very difficult to distinguish purposebuilt workshops. ...
Este artigo analisa a deposição de cerâmicas em contextos funerários da Idade do Ferro bretã. O enfoque será dado à região de Yorkshire durante os séculos IV-II a.C., discutindo dados obtidos em um total de cento e vinte e três sepultamentos. O artigo começa com uma discussão sobre os contextos dos achados cerâmicos, incluindo uma discussão de sinais de usos prévios dos artefatos em ritos de comensalidade. Em seguida, aborda o uso de estratégias mnemônicas durante os sepultamentos, com foco particular na quebra intencional de vasos. Em terceiro lugar, a discussão examina, ainda, os perfis das pessoas sepultadas com tais artefatos, em particular no tocante ao seu sexo e idade. Nesse sentido, procura indicar a existência de certos padrões de distribuição — particularmente entre indivíduos do sexo feminino em idade adulta—, variável significativamente conforme a faixa etária em ambos os sexos. O artigo argumenta, por fim, que a deposição de cerâmicas em sepultamentos indica uma realidade de relativa fluidez e compartilhamento entre os gêneros na esfera funerária. Paralelamente à análise central, a discussão oferece também uma avaliação crítica do debate historiográfico sobre a estética das cerâmicas da Idade do Ferro bretã.
