Changes in the Pattern of Settlement (1600–1100 BC)

Abstract

The Three Age Model has outlived its usefulness, but even now it is difficult to see how it can be replaced. The beginning of the Bronze Age is sometimes termed the Chalcolithic, and the transition to the Iron Age has also been treated as distinct phase, but a still greater problem is how to acknowledge the changes that came about during the later second millennium BC. Some of those developments are considered here. When Coles and Harding wrote The Bronze Age in Europe over thirty years ago, there seemed to be a solution to the problem. They divided this phase into an ‘earlier’ and a ‘later’ Bronze Age (Coles and Harding 1979), acknowledging the important developments that happened part way through the period. These concerned settlements, houses, food production, mortuary rituals, and metalwork, although the significance of these elements differed from place to place. In their view the important division happened at about 1300 BC. They may have been influenced by Eogan’s review of Irish Bronze Age metalwork, which adopted a similar terminology, although he dated the transition to 1200 BC (Eogan 1964). In 1990 a similar division was proposed for the British Bronze Age, but that was based on developments in the pattern of settlement that began around 1500 BC (Barrett and Bradley 1980). It is revealing that subsequent accounts of Irish prehistory have reverted to a more complex chronological scheme based on successive styles of metalwork, whilst British researchers who used the terms favoured by Coles and Harding were unable to agree when a change from an ‘earlier’ to a ‘later’ phase occurred. Different versions favour starting dates of 1500 BC (or a little before) or 1100 BC (Bradley 2007, 178–81). Anthony Harding published a more recent account of the European Bronze Age in 2000 and it is revealing that the two-fold division of this period no longer plays a part. The chronology is based on the typological schemes worked out by Montelius, Reinecke, and their successors, and on radiocarbon and tree-ring dating (Harding 2000).