Barrow Landscapes Across the Channel (2500–1600 BC)

Abstract

It was easy to choose the title of this chapter. Over a span of almost a thousand years, which embraces the late Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and early Bronze Age periods in local chronologies, the archaeological record of northwest Europe takes a distinctive form. Round barrows are widely distributed and are found on both sides of the English Channel and the North Sea. At the same time there are few regions in which the dwellings of the living population can be identified and studied in any detail. There is good evidence for long-distance contacts illustrated by the movement of artefacts and raw materials, and analysis of human bones suggests that certain individuals travelled in the course of their lives. Even so, the best indications of these networks are provided by the contents of the graves. There is a danger of taking this state of affairs literally. Any account that summarizes the distribution of funerary monuments is subject to certain biases. Although barrows play a prominent part in the archaeology of the later third and earlier second millennia BC, there were many burials without mounds. There are also regions in which earthworks are preserved and others where they have been destroyed. For example, in lowland England major concentrations of round barrows have been documented on the chalk of Wessex and Sussex, but it has taken aerial photography, supplemented by development-led excavations, to show that they occurred in equally high densities on the Isle of Thanet which commands the entrance to the Thames estuary. On the opposite shore of the Channel there is a great concentration of round barrows in Flanders and another on the gravels of the Somme (Fig. 4.2; De Reu et al. 2011). Again they have been discovered from the air, but in this case comparatively few have been excavated and dated. There is a striking contrast with the situation across the border in the southern Netherlands where round barrows still survive. Even there research has shown that many examples were levelled in the nineteenth century (Bourgeois 2013).