Beyond Barrows Europe Is Dotted with Tens of Thousands of Prehistoric Barrows
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Vaart & Wentink (eds.) & Wentink Vaart der Louwen,Van Fontijn, Beyond Barrows Europe is dotted with tens of thousands of prehistoric barrows. In spite of their ubiquity, little is known on the role they had in pre- and protohistoric landscapes. In 2010, an international group of archaeologists came together at the conference of the European Association of Archaeologists in The Hague to discuss and review current research on this topic. This book presents the proceedings of that session. The focus is on the prehistory of Scandinavia and the Low Countries, but also includes an excursion to huge prehistoric mounds in the southeast of North America. One contribution presents new evidence on how the immediate environment of Neolithic Funnel Beaker (TRB) culture Beyond Barrows Beyond megaliths was ordered, another one discusses the role of remarkable single and double post alignments around Bronze and Iron Age burial mounds. Zooming out, several chapters deal with the place of barrows in the broader landscape. The significance of humanly-managed heath in relation to barrow groups is discussed, and one contribution emphasizes how barrow orderings not only reflect spatial organization, but are also important as conceptual anchors structuring prehistoric perception. Other authors, dealing with Early Neolithic persistent places and with Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age urnfields, argue that we should also look beyond monumentality in order to understand long-term use of “ritual landscapes”. The book contains an important contribution by the well-known Swedish archaeologist Tore Artelius on how Bronze Age barrows were structurally re-used by pre-Christian Vikings. This is his last article, written briefly before his death. This book is dedicated to his memory. Beyond Barrows Current research on the structuration and perception of the Prehistoric Landscape through Monuments edited by ISBNSidestone 978-90-8890-108-9 Press Sidestone D. Fontijn, A. J. Louwen, ISBN: 978-90-8890-108-9 S. van der Vaart & K. Wentink Bestelnummer: SSP120500001 Artikelnummer: SSP120500001 9 789088 901089 Beyond Barrows Sidestone Press Beyond Barrows Current research on the structuration and perception of the Prehistoric Landscape through Monuments edited by D. Fontijn, A. J. Louwen, S. van der Vaart & K. Wentink © 2013 Authors Published by Sidestone Press, Leiden www.sidestone.com Sidestone registration number: SSP120500001 ISBN 978-90-8890-108-9 Photograph cover: C. Cronberg, Swedish National Heritage Board, Lund Cover design: K. Wentink, Sidestone Press Lay-out: F. Stevens / P.C. van Woerdekom, Sidestone Press Contents Beyond Barrows – an introduction 9 By David Fontijn Inventions of Memory and Meaning. Examples of Late Iron Age Reuse of 21 Bronze Age Monuments in South-Western Sweden Tore Artelius † Part I - Beyond monumentality 41 Memorious Monuments. Place persistency, mortuary practice and memory 43 in the Lower Rhine Area wetlands (5500-2500 cal BC) By Luc W.S.W. Amkreutz The centrality of urnfields. Second thoughts on structure and stability 81 of Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age cultural landscapes in the Low Countries By Roy van Beek and Arjan Louwen Part II - Orderings of funerary locations 113 Döserygg and Skegrie. Megalithic centres in south-west Scania, southern 115 Sweden By Magnus Andersson and Björn Wallebom Post alignments in the barrow cemeteries of Oss-Vorstengraf and 141 Oss-Zevenbergen By Harry Fokkens Bronze Age barrow research in Sandy Flanders (NW Belgium): an 155 overview By Jeroen De Reu and Jean Bourgeois Part III - Zooming out: barrows in a landscape 195 A history of open space. Barrow landscapes and the significance of heaths 197 – the case of the Echoput barrows By Marieke Doorenbosch Ways of Wandering. In the Late Bronze Age Barrow Landscape of the 225 Himmerland-area, Denmark By Mette Løvschal Part IV - Monument buildingan evolutionary approach 251 The Bet-Hedging Model as an Explanatory Framework for the Evolution 253 of Mound Building in the Southeastern United States By Evan Peacock and Janet Rafferty In memory of Tore Artelius BEYOND BARROWS – AN INTRODUCTION By David Fontijn A few years ago, I visited a group of prehistoric burial mounds in a forest on the Veluwe, a beautiful region in the centre of the Netherlands. The barrows have never been excavated and were reported to be almost undamaged, in spite of the fact that they must be thousands of years old. Fortunately, the barrows are protected national heritage and I was happy to find them in good condition. Trees had been removed from the mounds and precautions had been taken to make sure that new ones could no longer take root easily. However, at a small distance of the mounds, but outside the protected heritage zone, parts of the forest recently had been extensively deep-plowed. If there were any archaeological features relating to those mounds, these now would be severely disturbed (Fig. 1). This anecdote reveals a fundamental archaeological problem. Europe is dotted with hundreds of thousands of prehistoric monuments like megalithic tombs, cairns or earthen burial mounds. Although many of them are important in the Fig. 1. Traces of extensive plowing at the barrow excavations of Apeldoorn – Wieselseweg 2009. In the foreground the broad grayish black traces of the forest plow just a few meters outside Barrow 1. A feature related to this barrow was found 30 m southeast of the barrow foot and remained out of reach of the plow (behind the photographer). It is likely that more of these features were present in the vicinity of the barrow (photograph: Quentin Bourgeois). fontijn 9 modern landscape, we often do not know much about the prehistoric landscape that they were part of. For the Netherlands, numerous barrow excavations have yielded a substantial body of knowledge on the monuments themselves (e.g. Glasbergen 1954; Modderman 1954; Van Giffen 1943). However, excavation of the immediate surroundings of those mounds is surprisingly rare (carried out for far less than 10 %) and for many parts of Europe knowledge of the environment of barrows is lacking. This makes it hard to say anything on the role these monuments had in the landscape of the past. Were they preferably built close to houses or in separate funerary zones of the landscape? How did they fit in the orderings of farming landscapes of later prehistory? This lack of knowledge on the environment in which barrows were situated also has profound consequences for heritage management. If we understand the role of barrows in prehistoric landscapes, we will get an idea of how the area around burial mounds was ordered. It may then become possible to predict what sort of archaeological features are to be found in the surroundings of burial mounds. Zones around barrows with a high archaeological potential can then be selected as areas that ought to be protected as heritage. The question of the role of barrows in the prehistoric landscape is one of the key issues of the Ancestral Mounds research project of Leiden University (for example Bourgeois, Q. 2013; Doorenbosch 2011; Fontijn et al. 2013). To discuss this problem in an international setting, a session was organized at the annual meeting of European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) in The Hague (3rd of September, 2010). This volume derives from that session and presents contributions by most of its speakers. In addition, there are a few contributions that did not figure in the original EAA session, but fitted in well. In what follows, the research problem is introduced and something of the outcome of the following chapters is discussed. By way of introduction – the case of the Low Countries Let me introduce the problem by means of a specific case study. The Netherlands is one of those regions in Northwest Europe where prehistoric barrows have been researched relatively well. In some regions (like the southern Netherlands), this was done in numbers that are representative enough to make general statements on trends in barrow building. Although excavation was practically always confined to the mound itself, sampling and investigating pollen from barrows yielded important information on the vegetation around them (e.g. Casparie and Groenman-Van Waateringe 1980; Waterbolk 1954; see also Doorenbosch this volume). Already in the 1950’s, Waterbolk was able to present a broad overview on the sorts of environments in which burial mounds were situated in the Netherlands – showing (among other things) that barrows were often situated in heath environments (Waterbolk 1954). This was done at a time when hardly anything was known on where and how people lived in this environment. Interestingly, it was one of those rare occasions when the excavation included a larger area than just the mound itself, that traces of Middle Bronze Age longhouses were found (in Elp in the northern Netherlands; Waterbolk 1964). Another large-scale excavation, the one at Angelslo-Emmerhout, also uncovered traces of numerous Bronze Age houses in the proximity of a megalithic tomb of the Middle Neolithic Funnelbeaker Culture 10 beyond barrows (TRB) and Late Neolithic burial mounds (Arnoldussen and Scheele 2012; Kooi 2008). A comparable situation was found during large-scale excavations in West- Frisia, in the west of the Netherlands (Bakker et al. 1977). Such impressive, landscape-scale excavations may have steered the general notion that in the Middle Bronze Age, people apparently lived very close to (their) burial mounds. In the early 1990’s, Roymans and Fokkens (1991) expressed the relation between barrows and houses in a model that was to become very influential both in the Netherlands and in Belgium and France (e.g. Brun et al. 2005). They worked from the premise that there was a conceptual link between households and burial locations that was expressed in the Middle Bronze Age landscape in a different way than in the Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age. In the former, a barrow was a collective funerary monument for a household, built close to the house it belonged to.