Bronze Age Connections

New and exciting discoveries on either side of the English Channel in recent years have begun to show that people living in the coastal zones of Belgium, southern Britain, northern France and the Netherlands shared a common material culture during the Bronze Age, between three and four thousand years ago. They used similar styles of pottery and metalwork, lived in the same kind of houses and buried their dead in the same kind of tombs, often quite different to those used by their neighbours further inland. The sea did not appear to be a barrier to these people but rather a highway, connecting communities in a unique cultural identity; the 'People of La Manche'. Symbolic of these maritime Bronze Age Connections is the iconic Dover Bronze Age boat, one of Europe's greatest prehistoric discoveries and testament to the skill and technical sophistication of our Bronze Age ancestors. This monograph presents papers from a conference held in Dover in 2006 organised by the Dover Bronze Age Boat Trust, which brought together scholars from many different countries to explore and celebrate these ancient seaborne contacts. Twelve wide-ranging chapters explore themes of travel, exchange, production, magic and ritual that throw new light on our understanding of the seafaring peoples of the second millennium BC.

This innovative volume draws on a range of materials and places to explore the disparate facets of Bronze Age society across the Nordic region through the key themes of time and trajectory, rituals and everyday life, and encounters and identities. The Bronze Age in Northern Europe was a place of diversity and contrast, an era that saw movements and changes not just of peoples, but of cultures, beliefs, and socio-political systems, and that led to the forging of ontological ideas materialized in landscapes, bodies, and technologies. Drawing on a range of materials and places, the innovative contributions gathered here in this volume explore the disparate facets of Bronze Age society across the Nordic region through the key themes of time and trajectory, rituals and everyday life, and encounters and identities. The contributions explore how and why society evolved over time, from the changing nature of sea travel to new technologies in house building, and from advances in lithic production to evolving burial practices and beliefs in the afterlife. This edited collection honours the ground-breaking research of Professor Christopher Prescott, an outstanding figure in the study of the Bronze Age north, and it takes as its inspiration the diversity, interdisciplinarity, and vitality of his own research in order to make a major new contribution to the field, and to shed new light on a Bronze Age full of contrasts and connections.

The end of the Bronze Age and beginning of the Iron Age was the period of a historical turning point for the relationship of the Aegean and the Levant. THe two regions were closely related to each other and benefited mutually in this period. THe transmission of the alphabet from the East to Greece and the appearance of Mycenaean-style pottery in the East illustrate the cultural borrowings in both directions. The volume presents updated studies on both regions and questions of bilateral relationships regarding archaeological, historical and linguistic aspects. THese studies shed light on the pivotal periods of both regions: when Greek poleis were formed, with the culture related to it, and when the political and social situation in the Levant took its form, influencing the entire first millennium BCE. In the linguistic part, the volume includes papers showing possible linguistic relations and mutual borrowings in the triangle of Semitic, Greek and Anatolian languages. IN the archaeological and historical parts, the studies deal both with case studies from Anatolia, Greece and Palestine and the synthetic issues regarding the 'big' questions. THe book also presents the possible benefits of the usage of scientific methods in historical reconstruction - analysis of isotopes and ancient DNA samples. THese new techniques offer a useful tool, expanding our way of exploring the past.

This book considers the early copper and copper-alloy metallurgy of the entire Circum- Alpine region. It introduces a new approach to the interpretation of chemical composition data sets, which has been applied to a comprehensive regional database for the first time.

The archaeologist and Bronze Age metal specialist Dr Jay J. Butler (1921-2014) was a kind, warmhearted man, averse to hype and ostentation, who was happy to share his knowledge in non-academic language both with professionals and interested amateurs. But woe betide anyone who might use the evidence to draw unwarranted conclusions… A cosmopolitan American, he demonstrated that people in the Bronze Age maintained contacts that reached well beyond today’s national frontiers. In practicals with his students he acquainted them with, for instance, the difficulties of bronze casting: prehistoric artisans were far more sophisticated than previously thought. He started taking samples for metal analyses, initiated international collaborative projects, and widened his students’ horizons by taking them on trips abroad to visit excavations and museums. His eventful life was linked to many themes: immigration that is welcome only inasfar as it is lucrative, racism, exploitation of the poor, religious fundamentalism, a devastating world war, information being doctored or suppressed, lack of humanity and neglect of common courtesy. With Jay Butler’s demise, the world lost an enthusiastic, authoritative and accessible archaeologist.

The Middle Bronze Age (MB IIA) in Canaan set the stage for many of the cultural, political, and economic institutions in the ancient Near East. Theoretical models for the analysis of complex societies examine textual, pictorial, and archaeological evidence.