Reassessing Community Cemeteries: Cremation Burials in Britain during the Middle Bronze Age (c.1600–1150 calbc)

Edward Caswell,Benjamin W. Roberts

doi:10.1017/ppr.2018.9

Abstract

The Middle Bronze Age (c. 1600–1150 calbc) in Britain is traditionally understood to represent a major funerary transition. This is a transformation from a heterogeneous funerary rite, largely encompassing inhumations and cremations in burial mounds and often accompanied by grave goods, to a homogeneous and unadorned cremation-based practice. Despite a huge expansion in the number of well excavated, radiocarbon dated, and osteologically analysed sites in the last three decades, current interpretations of Middle Bronze Age cremation burials still rely upon a seminal paper by Ellison (1980), which proposed that they comprise and represent an entire community. This paper analyses 378 cremation sites containing at least 3133 burials which represent all those that can be confidently dated to the Middle Bronze Age in Britain. The new analysis demonstrates that relatively few sites can be characterised as community cemeteries and that there are substantially more contemporary settlement sites, though few contemporary settlements are in close proximity to the cemeteries. The identifiable characteristics of cremation-based funerary practices are consistent across Britain with little evidence for social differentiation at the point of burial. It is also evident that only a minority of the population received a cremation burial. There is a substantial decrease in archaeologically visible funerary activity from the preceding Early Bronze Age (c. 2200–1600 calbc) and a further decrease in the proceeding Late Bronze Age (c. 1150–800 calbc) in Britain. This is comparable in form, and partially in sequence, to Bronze Age funerary practices in Ireland and several regions in North-west Europe.

Highlights

The Middle Bronze Age (c. 1600–1150 cal BC) in Britain is characterised in broad archaeological narratives by the major expansion of settlements and bronze and gold metalwork hoards throughout Britain, as well as the construction of field systems in central and southern England (Darvill 1996, 108–32; Bradley 2007, ch. 4; Yates 2007; Cunliffe 2013, 266–7)
The interpretation that Middle Bronze Age funerary sites throughout Britain are representative of community cemeteries – groups of cremation burials that are associated with a specific community and contain all members of that community – can be traced back to a seminal paper by Ellison (1980)
Despite the immense increase in the excavation and radiocarbon dating of Middle Bronze Age cremation burials over the last 35 years, and the refinement and widespread application of osteological analyses on cremated bone, there has been no reappraisal of the community cemetery interpretation

Summary

Introduction

The Middle Bronze Age (c. 1600–1150 cal BC) in Britain is characterised in broad archaeological narratives by the major expansion of settlements and bronze and gold metalwork hoards throughout Britain, as well as the construction of field systems in central and southern England (Darvill 1996, 108–32; Bradley 2007, ch. 4; Yates 2007; Cunliffe 2013, 266–7). It was initially thought that urned cremation burials had been deposited in an earlier phase of the Bronze Age, this was based solely on the relative paucity of their grave goods These social evolutionary interpretative schema were soon supplanted by the development of a Bronze Age temporal framework based on pottery typo-chronologies. Abercromby’s (1912) landmark corpus of British and Irish pottery formalised many Bronze Age pottery types and identified an ‘overhanging rim’ type, which later became the Collared Urn type (see Longworth 1961; 1984) and the ‘Deverel-Rimbury’ forms (Abercromby 1912, 7–14) These were attributed to the Middle and Late/later Bronze Ages, respectively, and both contained cremation burials. There is little osteological detail in the late 19th or early 20th century research on the cremated remains, many of which were not retained

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