Middle Bronze Age Settlement Research Articles

Victoria Ginn and Stuart Rathbone, eds. Corrstown, a Coastal Community: Excavations of a Bronze Age Village in Northern Ireland (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2012, xv + 301pp., 142 illustr., pbk, ISBN 978-1-84217-464-7)

Victoria Ginn and Stuart Rathbone, eds. Corrstown, a Coastal Community: Excavations of a Bronze Age Village in Northern Ireland (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2012, xv + 301pp., 142 illustr., pbk, ISBN 978-1-84217-464-7) - Volume 17 Issue 1

A marine/terrestrial integration for mid-late Holocene vegetation history and the development of the cultural landscape in the Po valley as a result of human impact and climate change

Integration of pollen data from both marine and terrestrial cores contributes to the understanding of the timing of the climatic and human forces that shaped the cultural landscapes in the Italian peninsula. This paper focuses on the relation between natural and human landscapes, and the development of the cultural landscape from the Bronze Age to the medieval period and modern times. Two records were studied within independent projects, first the marine core RF93-30, from the central Adriatic, with a sediment source area including the Po valley and which spans the last 7,000 years, and secondly, material from the site of Terramara di Montale, a Bronze Age settlement on the Po plain, which was occupied from approximately 3550–3200 cal. b.p. The original chronology of the marine core was developed by using the magnetic inclination of the secular variation record and two 14C dates carried out on benthic and planktic foraminifera at depths of 527 and 599 cm. Its pollen record shows a gradual irreversible trend towards increasing aridity since 5700 cal. b.p. and, just after around 5100 cal. b.p., a Picea decline and a Quercus ilex type increase indicate less cool conditions. Human impact introduces rapid changes, such as the decrease of Abies alba, thinned by the reduction of precipitation and further cleared before or during the Early Bronze Age, followed by the fall of oaks. The latter started after around 3900 cal. b.p., and became evident at around 3600 cal. b.p. The gradual increase in signs of open landscape and woodland clearance correspond to the onset of Middle Bronze Age settlements in the Po valley, and to the development of the cultural landscape in the region. The impact of the terramare people includes woodland management by coppicing, and division of the territory into a patchwork of pastures and fields. Dry environments are indicated mainly by Cichorioideae, resulting from the continued human pressure, and these spread since the Recent Bronze Age. Of the possible causes for the decline of the terramare, we suggest that climate would have been less important in the decline than in the onset phases. The later cultural landscapes are mainly indicated by the trends of the Olea, Juglans and Castanea (OJC) records, besides those of cereals. At around 700 cal. b.p., the “chestnut landscape” spread while modern times are shown by the finds of Zea mays.

Afyonkarahisar Orta Tunç Çağ Yerleşmeleri

Afyonkarahisar'da W. Lamb tarafından 1935 yılından başlayarak iki dönem sürdürülen Kusura Höyüğü kazısı haricinde Orta Tunç Çağı ile ilgili bir yerleşim alanı henüz kazılmamıştır. Bu nedenle bu bölgede kısıtlı olan Orta Tunç Çağ yerleşmeleri hakkındaki bilgilerimize ışık tutması amacıyla 37 adet OTÇ yerleşimi üzerine yaptığımız değerlendirmeleri burada sunmaktayız.

Radiocarbon Evidence from the Middle Bronze Age Settlement At Portella (Aeolian Islands, Italy): Chronological and Archaeological Implications

This paper deals with radiocarbon determinations from the Middle Bronze Age site of Portella on the island of Salina (Aeolian Archipelago, Italy). The available14C evidence is taken into account, in a simple Bayesian model, in order to explore the issue of the absolute chronology of both the settlement and the stage of the local cultural sequence to which Portella belongs. A high date is proposed for the start of the Aeolian (and Sicilian) Middle Bronze Age: 1556–1422 cal BC (95.4% confidence), with a a most likely (modal) date of about 1450 cal BC. Further, the analysis suggests that the Portella phase is likely to have been a very short one, with a span of 0–65 yr (68.2%) or 0–131 yr (95.4%). The archaeological implications are explored. The relation of these results to the evidence of ceramic phasing is also considered. Since Aegean datable ceramic imports are documented in Aeolian/Sicilian Middle Bronze Age contexts, the connection between Portella's chronology and the absolute dating of one of the Aegean phases (namely, Late Helladic IIIA1) is also investigated.

Middle Bronze Age Settlement Patterns in the Western Galilee, Israel

During the Middle Bronze Age (MB) II period (ca. 1750–1600 B.C.), Tel Kabri, located in the western Galilee, Israel, was the center of a thriving polity with economic and cultural connections to Egypt, Cyprus, and the Aegean. While Kabri and some neighboring sites have been partially excavated, the rise and fall of the polity has not been clearly understood. We present evidence from the Kabri Archaeological Project (KAP) to reconstruct shifting settlement patterns, demography, and aspects of trade in the Kabri hinterland from MB I to Late Bronze Age (LB) I. We argue that Kabri, in the northern part of the Acco plain, follows a different developmental trajectory than does the site of Acco and its hinterland in the southern part of the plain. Acco was urbanized early in MB I and developed a mature hinterland that persisted throughout MB II and into LB I. Kabri did not begin to bloom until late in the MB I period. Its rapid rise during MB II was accompanied by the abandonment of village sites far from the center of the polity and the fortification of nearby settlements. These efforts to consolidate power and to maintain the flow of goods into the center did not last long, and the polity of Kabri soon collapsed.

Water management in Minoan Crete, Greece: the two cisterns of one Middle Bronze Age settlement

The two earliest structures of Minoan Crete that may be considered as large cisterns were both built in the first half of the second millennium BC (the time of the first Minoan palaces) at Myrtos-Pyrgos (Ierapetra). A considerable feat of engineering and social management, they remain a most unusual attribute of a Minoan settlement, all the more so since the Myrtos river is/was available to supply water at the foot of the hill of Pyrgos. This paper presents these cisterns, briefly, in terms of geology and technology, the history of their use and re-use, and their relevance to understanding the culture and society (at local and regional levels) of Crete in the time of the Old Palaces, as well as their possible contribution to the political and military history of the period. I then review possible precursors of, and architectural parallels to, the Pyrgos cisterns at Knossos, Malia and Phaistos (none of which has been proved to be a cistern), and the later history of cisterns in Bronze Age Crete. Since only three others are known (at Archanes, Zakro and Tylissos, of Late Bronze Age date), the two cisterns of Myrtos-Pyrgos are an important addition to our still rudimentary knowledge of how the Bronze Age Cretans managed their water supplies.

Un habitat du Bronze moyen à Cournon-d'Auvergne (Puy-de-Dôme) : nouvelles données sur la dynamique de l'Âge du Bronze moyen sur la bordure méridionale du Massif central

The purpose of this article is to present the results of a rescue excavation preceding the building of a store in the suburbs of Clermont-Ferrand. An area of 5600 square metres was cleared, revealing 73 domestic structures. The spatial analysis carried out shows that the structures dating back to the Middle Bronze Age are predominantly to be found in the northern part of the area. Although their distribution has not led to the identification of any building plan, linear grouping has shown empty spots which could be linked to the installation of above-ground structures. Two carbon dates indicate that the Middle Bronze Age settlement may date back to a period extending from the end of the 17th century to the 16th century BC, i. e. the turning point between the first Middle Bronze Age and the second Middle Bronze Age. The cultural characteristics of this settlement are based exclusively on the study of ceramic elements. The specific cups and platters with handles found there are evidence of Italic influences, probably transmitted via southern groups of the Middle Bronze Age.

Monuments and Memories Set in Stone: a Cornish Bronze Age Ceremonial Complex in its Landscape (on Stannon Down)

Three seasons of archaeological fieldwork were carried out in 1998–2000 by Cornwall Archaeological Un within the Imerys Stannon China Clay Works, Bodmin Moor. The first two seasons involved the excavation of an Early Bronze Age cairn group and Middle Bronze Age and Middle Iron Age settlement activity. The third season on the Northern Downs involved the evaluation a number of cairns, field systems, and palaeoenvironmental sites.The cairn group consisted of three earlier Bronze Age ring-cairns and two ‘tailed’ cairns. One ring-cairn continued to be used as a ceremonial monument in the Middle Bronze Age and was reused during the Iron Age as a dwelling. An artefact assemblage including Bronze and Iron Age pottery and stonework was recovered. Two prehistoric beads one of faience, the other of amber, were also found.Ten Bronze Age radiocarbon determinations spanning 2490–1120 cal BC and two Iron Age determinations (370–40 cal BC) were obtained from three of the cairns. Two pollen columns on the Northern Downs were also dated. Significantly, a series of eight determinations was obtained from a single column, which provided environmental information from the Mesolithic through to the early medieval period. The radiocarbon dating showed that impact on the vegetation of the Down commenced during the Neolithic, with larger-scale clearance during the Bronze Age. Widespread open grassland was established by the Middle Bronze Age.It is suggested here that use of space within the cairn group was structured and that the cairns formed a monument complex which was part of a wider landscape cosmology, involving groupings of particular monument types and the referencing of rocky outcrops and tors.The investigations on Stannon Down were important as an opportunity to study an Early Bronze Age ceremonial landscape and reconsider how later Middle Bronze Age and Iron Age peoples on Bodmin Moor might have engaged with and interpreted the materiality of earlier prehistoric monuments.

Between 'The Desert and the Sown': The Hauran as a Frontier Zone in the Middle Bronze Age

This paper is based on data gathered by the University of Sydnry Hauran Research Project. It attempts to demonstrate that the expansion and nature of the Middle Bronze Age settlement pattern identified in the Hauran resulted from interaction between communities whose lifestyle varied on the continuum between nomadism and sedentarism. By practising a variety of subsistence strategies, some made possible by the implementation of water management systems, these communities developed a small-scale settlement hierarchy, centred on key fortified sites or 'gateway communities', which allowed the local region to interact with the wider Middle Bronze Age world.

Settlement, Landscape and Social Identity: The Early‐Middle Bronze Age Transition in Wessex, Sussex and the Thames Valley

In southern England, the end of the Early Bronze Age is marked by the appearance of archaeologically visible farmsteads and field systems. This paper explores and critiques the widespread idea that these changes are the direct result of a need to intensify agricultural production. Such discussions have implicitly drawn on evolutionist images of economic maximization and environmental exploitation that do not sit easily with our knowledge of other aspects of Bronze Age society. In this paper, I shall consider economic change as a consequence rather than the cause of wider changes to the social fabric at this time. A review of the Early and Middle Bronze Age settlement evidence provides insights into how society became transformed over the period and begins to hint at some of the reasons why subsistence practices changed so visibly.

Alambra: A Middle Bronze Age Settlement in Cyprus. Archaeological Investigations by Cornell University 1974–1985. By John E. Coleman, Jane A. Barlow, Marcia K. Mogelonsky, and Kenneth W. Schaar.

<i>Alambra: A Middle Bronze Age Settlement in Cyprus. Archaeological Investigations by Cornell University 1974–1985</i>. By John E. Coleman, Jane A. Barlow, Marcia K. Mogelonsky, and Kenneth W. Schaar.

Ritual and rationality: some problems of interpretation in European archaeology

This paper argues that the conception of ritual employed in both archaeology and anthropology is a product of post-Enlightenment rationalism. Because it does not meet modern western criteria for practical action, ritual is frequently described as non-functional and irrational; furthermore, this designation is employed as the primary way of identifying ritual archaeologically. However, this evaluation of ritual action must be questioned. Contemporary modes of categorizing human practice are not untainted by socio-political interest but enable the reproduction of certain forms of power. It is argued that many other societies do not distinguish ritual from secular action. In fact, what anthropologists identify as ritual is generally considered practical and effective action by its practitioners. This is because different conceptions of instrumentality and causation inform such activities. For archaeologists, use of the concept of ritual has resulted in a serious misapprehension of prehistoric rationality such that ‘secular’ activities (for example subsistence practices) are assumed to be governed by a universally-applicable functionalist logic. In order to address this problem, what is required is an approach that explores the essential difference between prehistoric rationality and our own notions of what is effective action. A discussion of some finds from middle Bronze Age settlements in southern England will provide a working example of how one might begin to move towards this goal.

Ritual and Rationality: Some Problems of Interpretation in European Archaeology

This paper argues that the conception of ritual employed in both archaeology and anthropology is a product of post-Enlightenment rationalism. Because it does not meet modern western criteria for practical action, ritual is frequently described as non-functional and irrational; furthermore, this designation is employed as the primary way of identifying ritual archaeologically. However, this evaluation of ritual action must be questioned. Contemporary modes of categorizing human practice are not untainted by socio-political interest but enable the reproduction of certain forms of power. It is argued that many other societies do not distinguish ritual from secular action. In fact, what anthropologists identify as ritual is generally considered practical and effective action by its practitioners. This is because different conceptions of instrumentality and causation inform such activities. For archaeologists, use of the concept of ritual has resulted in a serious misapprehension of prehistoric rationality such that ‘secular’ activities (for example subsistence practices) are assumed to be governed by a universally-applicable functionalist logic. In order to address this problem, what is required is an approach that explores the essential difference between prehistoric rationality and our own notions of what is effective action. A discussion of some finds from middle Bronze Age settlements in southern England will provide a working example of how one might begin to move towards this goal.

Houses, Lifecycles and Deposition on Middle Bronze Age Settlements in Southern England

This paper explores how the lifecycles of Middle Bronze Age settlements were intimately related at both a practical and metaphorical level to the lifecycles of their inhabitants. Many settlements of this date appear to have been single-generational sites. Building sequences and other changes in the use of settlement space can be understood within a framework that explores how the demographic, social, and economic circumstances of a site's occupants changed over time. However, the lifecycle of the settlement was not only related to that of its occupants in practical terms; each was also a symbolic representation of the other. For example, such acts as the deposition of whole quernstones or animal burials in pits and ditches may have been carried out at critical points in the lifecycle of a settlement, its structures, and its inhabitants. The notion that settlements had lifecycles introduces the possibility of anthropomorphic symbolism in house architecture, a suggestion that may help to explain the presence of a standardised house form during the Middle Bronze Age. Yet, despite the formality of the architecture, there was considerable diversity in how space was actually used within the round-house. Likewise, variability in other aspects of these settlement sites suggests that, although cultural ideals may have existed, in practice the developmental cycle of each household group depended on a particular set of social and material circumstances as well as on household members' commitment to communal tradition.

Australian Excavations At Marki, Cyprus

From November 1998 to January 1999 the Australian Cyprus Expedition continued work at the Early to Middle Bronze Age settlement of Marki Alonia in central Cyprus. Dr Jenny Webb and I were once again fortunate in having an enthusiastic and talented team of students from five Australian universities - over 100 students from around the country have now participated in this project.

Water and Human Settlement in the Balikh Valley, Syria: Investigations from 1992–1995

This landscape survey of the Balikh Valley in Syria straddles the limit of rain-fed cultivation. Features such as canals, low density “field scatters,” smaller sites, ancient roads, and relict river channels enable the boundary between ancient rain-fed cultivation and irrigation to be approximated. By coupling the evidence from such features with archaeological site survey, I suggest that water supply in the Balikh River constrained total settlement, and therefore population, to a limited size. During the phase of nucleated Early and Middle Bronze Age settlement, nodal settlements formed a focus for the limited pattern of irrigation canals. Settlement patterns dispersed during the later Bronze Age and Iron Age, and the landscape started to fill with numerous smaller settlements. In the Hellenistic/Roman period a major canal probably supplied much of the central Balikh Valley with irrigation water. During this phase region-wide canal systems apparently dictated the settlement pattern, which in certain cases spread out into formerly unirrigated areas away from the immediate alluvial plain.

PROBLEMS OF PHASING: A RECONSIDERATION OF THE BLACK PATCH MIDDLE BRONZE AGE ‘NUCLEATED VILLAGE’

SummaryThe Middle Bronze Age settlement complex of Black Patch, East Sussex, originally considered to represent the remains of a single phase ‘nucleated village’, is here reconsidered as representing the remains of two chronologically distinct settlement units. The dangers inherent in overlooking sequence and assuming contemporaneity for all archaeological features revealed within the course of a single excavation, are outlined.

The Development of the Italian Bronze Age: Evidence from Trentinara and the Sele Valley

AbstractStudy of the site of Trentinara in 1977 resulted in the identification of the first known Middle Bronze Age settlement in the area of ancient Paestum. This discovery not only adds a significant element to the occupational history of the Paestum area but, when considered together with the data concerning Bronze Age occupation of the Sele plain that are collected here, also provides a tentative basis for estimating settlement density and continuity of cultural development during the 2nd and early 1st millennium B.C.

Second Thoughts on ‘Mycenaean’ Pottery in Ithaca

When I wrote my report on the excavation of Polis, Ithaca, the leader of the expedition had suggested that in Ithaca, Early Bronze Age pottery had persisted till the closing phases of the Late Bronze Age, which meant that Ithaca was a backward little place well away from the broad stream of contemporary culture. I thought it possible that there was another lag after the Late Bronze Age, and I called certain vases ‘Mycenaean,’ taking fabric to be the determining factor. My paper was written in 1932, but not published till 1942, and long before then I was sure that we were both wrong. Mr. Heurtley wished to account for the presence of fifty Mycenaean sherds in an Early Bronze Age Settlement at Pilikata. It is true that no Middle Bronze Age settlement has yet been found in Ithaca. That may be our bad fortune, or the island may have been uninhabited in the centuries before 1500 B.C., as it was in the sixteenth century A.D. It seems simpler to admit disturbance by any later diggers of foundations or seekers of wells, than to postulate an iron curtain between Ithaca and both its nearest neighbours, Kephallenia and Leukas, in the Middle Bronze Age. After all, Early, Middle, and Late Bronze Age sherds were found together in Area VI at Pilikata, and no house plans have resulted; some disturbance seems inevitable.