Bronze Age Barrows on the Heathlands of Southern England: Construction, Forms and Interpretations

ojoa_338 15..34 RICHARD BRADLEY AND ELISE FRASER BRONZE AGE BARROWS ON THE HEATHLANDS OF SOUTHERN ENGLAND: CONSTRUCTION, FORMS AND INTERPRETATIONS Summary. The Bronze Age barrows on the downs of southern England have been investigated and discussed for nearly 200 years, but much less attention has been paid to similar structures in the areas of heathland beyond the chalk and river gravels. They were built in a phase of expansion towards the end of the Early Bronze Age, and more were constructed during the Middle Bronze Age. They have a number of distinctive characteristics. This paper considers the interpretation of these monuments and their wider significance in relation to the pattern of settlement. It also discusses the origins of field systems in lowland England. crichel down, launceston down and beaulieu heath A large number of prehistoric burial mounds were excavated during the Second World War as their sites were taken over for use by the armed forces. Among them were the barrows on Crichel Down and Launceston Down on the Wessex chalk, and those on Beaulieu Heath in the New Forest. Both excavations were conducted by the same people. Stuart Piggott and Margaret Piggott worked together at Crichel Down, where the sites of a series of barrows were to be used as a bombing range (Piggott and Piggott 1944). Margaret Piggott also worked at Beaulieu Heath where the mounds were removed to make way for a military airfield (Piggott 1943). Again Stuart Piggott contributed to the excavation report. These projects were important as it was rare for so many barrows to be excavated in a single location, or for them to be explored by the same techniques. Of course the circumstances of the excavations imposed some constraints. At Crichel and Launceston Downs the work focused on 16 of the smaller Bronze Age barrows so that more monuments could be explored in the time available. When the site reverted to farmland in 1958, two larger mounds (Long Crichel Barrows 5 and 7) were completely excavated (Green, Lynch and White 1982). At Beaulieu Heath there were fewer limitations, but parts of the ten barrows were only sampled (Fig. 1). Work at Long Crichel Barrows 5 and 7 was more extensive than the earlier research, and when it was published the authors of the report were able to draw on the results of a number of projects that had taken place during the intervening years. As a result they paid more attention to the stages by which the structures were built. They also discussed the reuse of older graves. In doing so, they rejected the traditional view that the barrows were intended to house ‘individual’ burials. Instead each could be considered as a cemetery in its own right. OXFORD JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY 29(1) 15–33 2010 © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA. 15 BRONZE AGE BARROWS ON THE HEATHLANDS OF SOUTHERN ENGLAND Figure 1 Plans and profiles of two chalkland round barrows (Long Crichel 5 and 7) and two heathland barrows (Beaulieu 5 and 6). The mounds at Long Crichel were rebuilt and were associated with a sequence of intercutting graves. Those at Beaulieu illustrate a widespread structural sequence with a turf core and a gravel capping. Information from Piggott (1943) and Green, Lynch and White (1982). OXFORD JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 16 Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. RICHARD BRADLEY AND ELISE FRASER There have not been many projects of similar character in recent years as most excavations have investigated single monuments or have been concerned with barrows that had already been levelled by the plough. For that reason these particular sites retain a special importance. They are often mentioned in accounts of prehistoric burials, but, considering that the projects were conducted by the same people, the striking differences between their results have hardly been discussed. At a time when the character of Bronze Age burials is being reconsidered (Brück 2004; Last 2007) the problem needs to be investigated. The graves and their contents The more recent report on sites at Crichel Down draws attention to a feature that was mentioned only briefly in the Piggotts’ paper (Green, Lynch and White 1982). Many of the Beaker and Early Bronze Age graves had been reopened after an interval and often contained more than one body. Some of the burials seem to have been disturbed and not all the skeletons were complete; one of the primary graves included a small number of disarticulated bones belonging to another person. It seems possible that relics were removed from the original deposits and that others were introduced from outside. Apart from the containers that held cremated bones, there were not many grave goods at Crichel and Launceston Downs. Long Crichel Barrow 5 was associated with one anomalous deposit. Large fragments of a single decorated vessel were distributed between two different graves. The remainder of the pot was missing. Either it had been brought to the barrow in pieces, or parts were removed during the Bronze Age. One of the cremation burials from Barrow 7 posed a similar problem. It was inside two urns, one inverted over the other. The outer vessel was broken and may have been damaged subsequently, yet it was clear that its companion was incomplete when it came to the site. It is tempting to suggest that such items were heirlooms (Woodward 2002; Woodward et al. 2005). It seems likely that the missing fragments continued to circulate among the living. Both artefacts and human remains may have been treated in the same ways, and even those buried in graves could later be removed. There was little evidence of the same process at Beaulieu Heath where most of the barrows contained only one burial and almost all the associated artefacts were pots. There was nothing to suggest that any of the graves had been reopened. An amber necklace was found beneath one of the monuments. Since it was not complete, Margaret Piggott made the prescient suggestion that it was probably an heirloom (1943, 14). The mounds and their materials For the reasons mentioned earlier, the Piggotts’ excavations were limited to the smaller barrows on Crichel and Launceston Downs. That introduced a certain bias, but it was also revealing, for nearly all the structures they investigated belonged to just two phases: the Beaker period and the Middle Bronze Age. The Beaker burials could be associated with shaft graves, yet the covering mounds were inconspicuous. The Middle Bronze Age round barrows were built on a similar scale, but in this case they were associated with small pits containing cremations (Piggott and Piggott 1944). On the other hand, two of the Early Bronze Age monuments, Long Crichel Barrows 5 and 7, were quite distinctive (Green, Lynch and White 1982). Each was a prominent feature of the landscape and provided evidence of several phases of enlargement and modification. Barrow OXFORD JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 17 BRONZE AGE BARROWS ON THE HEATHLANDS OF SOUTHERN ENGLAND 7 may have begun as a small mound in the Beaker phase, but it ended as a considerable earthwork, 3 m high and nearly 30 m in diameter. Although it contained the remains of several people, it is clear that not every funeral resulted in the enlargement of the mound (Barrett 1991; Barrett 1994, chapter 5). Again there is a significant contrast between the sites excavated by the Piggotts. Individual barrows on Beaulieu Heath could be as large as those on Crichel Down, but fieldwork suggested a much simpler sequence of development. There was little to suggest that the more conspicuous monuments were created by augmenting older structures, and only one of the ten mounds had been enlarged. The structural sequence was equally simple, for in most cases an inner core of turf was covered by a layer of gravel (Piggott 1943). The barrows on Beaulieu Heath are distinctive because they provide such limited evidence for cremation burials: the dominant rite on Crichel Down at the time when they were built. On the other hand, two of the mounds covered timber structures which could have housed a corpse (Piggott 1943, 6–9, 17–19 and 24–5). Since these sites are located on acid soils it is possible that certain of them were associated with inhumations or with deposits of unburnt bones. Chronology There are no radiocarbon dates from either group of barrows but the associated artefacts are of types with an established chronology. The mounds can also be dated by comparison with a scheme recently published by Garwood (2007). Both methods provide similar results. Garwood distinguishes between three different phases: • In the first, between about 2400 and 2100 BC, inhumation burials were often placed in deep graves, some of which were later reopened. Not all were marked by mounds, and where barrows were built they were usually small and inconspicuous. (Later Neolithic/Chalcolithic) • The second phase took place between approximately 2100 and 1850 BC. It was characterized by larger, more complex monuments, some of which were built over the positions of flat cemeteries or enclosures. These barrows were considerably larger than their predecessors and were often reconstructed. Many of the graves were reopened to include inhumation and cremation burials. Any one mound might contain the remains of a large number of people. (earlier Early Bronze Age) • That contrasts with developments in Garwood’s final phase, which extends from 1850 to 1500 BC. Now newly built barrows were constructed in a single operation and were frequently associated with just one primary burial, usually a cremation.

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