The intentional destruction of Bronze Age metalwork prior to deposition is frequently recognised within assemblages, but rarely forms the focus of study. Furthermore, most research focuses on why metalwork was deliberately destroyed without considering how this process was undertaken. This thesis therefore analyses how metalwork might have been intentionally damaged and uses this to better interpret why. The material properties of bronze are considered alongside past research into the use of different implements, before a series of experiments are presented that explore how one might best break a bronze object. A better understanding of the methods by which Bronze Age metalwork might become damaged means one can identify intentional damage over that sustained accidentally, through use or post-deposition. This culminates in a Damage Ranking System, which can be utilised to assess the likelihood that damage observed on archaeological specimens is the result of intent. The Damage Ranking System is applied to Bronze Age metalwork from South West England (i.e. Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset). The catalogue of metalwork from this region was recently updated, highlighting instances of deliberate destruction that would warrant further study (Knight et al. 2015). The present research builds on this catalogue and involved analysis of complete and damaged objects from across the study region and from throughout the Bronze Age. Approximately 1300 objects were handled and studied and set within the Damage Ranking System alongside a contextual analysis of the findspots. This allowed trends in damage and depositional practices to be observed, demonstrating increased intentional destruction throughout the Bronze Age. It is shown that the deliberate destruction of metalwork throughout the Bronze Age related to the construction of personhood and emphasised links with other regions of Bronze Age Europe. This research demonstrates a new approach to the material that has wide-reaching applications in future studies.

This dissertation presents the results of an archaeological investigation into the environmental strategies of emergent aggregated societies in coastal Lebanon over the course of the Early Bronze Age (c. 3200-2400 BCE). The Early Bronze Age marked not only the rise of large-scale urbanized polities in neighboring regions of Mesopotamia and, to a lesser extent, the Southern Levant, but it took place during the dramatic climate variability of the Middle Holocene. This dissertation uses the analysis of microbotanical and ground stone tool data to assess agricultural strategies, land use, and plant processing technologies at two settlements along the Lebanese littoral during this time of political and climatic upheaval. By comparing phytolith data, stone tool use-wear and microbotanical residues from grinding tools from the sites of Sidon and Tell Fadous-Kfarabida, this project reconstructs local plant and stone environments and the choices that populations were making about those resources over time. It concludes that selectivity between conservative and innovative plant management technologies allowed these settlements to maintain small-scale local networks built into the landscape and to participate with, while resisting incorporation into, growing urban and state economies nearby.

Feasting and shared drinking are long suspected to have been practiced in Anatolian settlements during the Early Bronze Age (EBA). New drinking vessels of metal and ceramic seem meant for drinking together with others. Platters and bowls seem intended to display food and vessel handling. No study has examined these practices in detail. This is largely because of a lack of evidence for the production of special beverages, for instance wine, beer, or mead. The Early Bronze Age is a period of intensifying personal distinction. It is characterised by developments in metallurgy, craft production, long-distance exchange, and at some sites, monumental architecture. Yet how EBA Anatolian communities were organised is unclear. A lack of writing and a limited number of seals suggest that there was no central administration within settlements. This contrasts with contemporaneous sites in southeastern Turkey and in Mesopotamia, whose metallurgy, craft production, architecture, and other developments were overseen by temple and palace complexes. This thesis uses feasting and drinking as a way to examine the social complexity of EBA Anatolian sites. It compiles evidence for these activities in both north-central and western Anatolia. It analyses the incidence of different drinking and pouring shapes across sites, and qualitatively assesses vessel features and the contexts in which they are found. This thesis also evaluates the role of drinking and feasting within settlements. It assesses the settings where drinking and feasting was practiced, together with other indices from each site. Two theoretical models are used to evaluate these activities. One details how the use of objects facilitate social relationships. Another specifies how communities may be organised. Both models provide a wide spectrum for assessing the drinking, feasting, and organisational evidence from sites. These models allow for variation: in how drink and food are used to form social relationships, and also in social complexity. The approach is able to distinguish between different organisational and social strategies across sites and regions. This detail is key for beginning to understand Anatolia's unique development during the period.

No description available.

A metalsmith�s ability to turn stone into metal and mould metal into useable objects, is one of the most valuable production industries of any society. The conception of this metallurgical knowledge has been the major catalyst in the development of increasing socio-political complexity since the beginning of the Bronze Age (Childe, 1930). However, when considering the prehistory of Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, it is noted that the introduction of metallurgical activity, namely copper and bronze technology, did not engender the increase in social complexity witnessed in other regions. It is suggested that the region is anomalous in that terms and concepts developed to describe and define Bronze Ages by scholars working in other regions, lack strict analogues within Southeast Asia. Muhly (1988) has famously noted the non-compliance of Southeast Asia to previous models, "In all other corners of the Bronze Age world-China, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, the Aegean and central Europe-we find the introduction of bronze technology associated with a complex of social, political and economic developments that mark the rise of the state. Only in Southeast Asia, especially in Thailand and Vietnam, do these developments seem to be missing" (Muhly, 1988:16). This "rise of the state" is associated with the development of hierarchy, inequality, and status differentiation, evidence for which, it is argued, is most explicitly articulated in mortuary contexts (Bacus, 2006). Evidence would include an intra-site restriction in access to resources, including prestige goods, and ranking, a vertical differentiation, often related to interment wealth. Thus the introduction of metallurgical technology saw copper and other prestige goods, used to entrench authority and advertise status (Coles and Harding; 1979). Such evidence has so far been absent in Bronze Age, Southeast Asian contexts. Accordingly, the usefulness of the term "Bronze Age" for describing and defining Southeast Asian assemblages has been questioned (White, 2002). However, the Ban Non Wat discovery of wealthy Bronze Age interments, with bronze grave goods restricted to the wealthiest, has furrowed the brow of many working in the region, providing evidence to at least reconsider this stance. Despite its obvious importance in shaping Bronze Age societies around the globe, and now, significance in Northeast Thailand, very little is known of the acceptance, development, and spread of tin-bronze metallurgical techniques during the prehistory of Southeast Asia. Only a handful of investigations of archaeological sites in the region have investigated the use of metals beyond macroscopic cataloguing. Utilising an agential framework, the Ban Non Wat bronze metallurgical evidence has been investigated as an entire assemblage, from the perspective of the individual metalsmith, in order to greater understand the industry and its impact upon the society incorporating the new technology. Furthermore, mortuary data is investigated by means of wealth assessment, as an insight into social form throughout the corresponding period of adoption, development and spread of metallurgy. The bivalent study of society and technology has shed light on the development of socio-political, and economic complexity during Bronze Age Southeast Asia, and in doing so, outlined the direct impact the metalsmiths themselves had on the supply, spread and functioning of their important industry. Variabilities in grave �wealth,� have been identified at Ban Non Wat. A further situation not previously encountered in Bronze Age Southeast Asia, is the restriction of bronze goods, in death, to differentiated, wealthy individuals. The existence of such individuals suggests that society during this period was rather more complex than regional precedents would suggest. I contend that it is the introduction of metallurgy, and in particular, the nature in which it was conducted that engendered these developments. Therefore, when considering the traditional course of developing social-political complexity during the Bronze Age, it now seems that Thailand at least, is potentially, not that anomalous.

The archaeological landscape of Upper Burma from the middle of the first millennium BC to the Bagan period in the 13th-14th century AD is a landscape of continuity. Finds of polished stone and bronze artifacts suggest the existence of early metal-using cultures in the Chindwin and Samon River Valleys, and along parts of the Ayeyarwady plain. Increasing technological and settlement complexity in the Samon Valley suggests that a distinctive culture whose agricultural and trade success can be read in the archaeological record of the Late Prehistoric period developed there. The appearance of the early urban �Pyu� system of walled central places during the early first millennium AD seems to have involved a spread of agricultural and management skills and population from the Samon. The leaders of the urban centres adopted Indic symbols and Sanskrit modes of kingship to enhance and extend their authority. The early urban system was subject over time to a range of stresses including siltation of water systems, external disruption and social changes as Buddhist notions of leadership eclipsed Brahmanical ones. The archaeological evidence indicates that a settlement was forming at Bagan during the last centuries of the first millennium AD. By the mid 11th century Bagan began to dominate Upper Burma, and the region began a transition from a system of largely autonomous city states to a centralised kingdom. Inscriptions of the 11th to 13th centuries indicate that as the Bagan Empire expanded it subsumed the agricultural lands that had been developed by the Pyu.

<p>In this essay I aim to examine how the landscape of Mönsterås might have looked like during the Bronze age in order to get a better understanding of the house urn that C J Ekerot found in a cairn in Fälle. Mönsterås is an area which has a quality of permanence, from Stone Age to Iron Age with its culmination during the Bronze Age. I will discuss the use and symbolic meaning of the house urn. The house as a symbol during the Bronze Age seemed to have had an important place in the cosmology. I will also discuss the importance of cairns, especially in the archipelago areas. The cairns have had an obvious connection to the sea throughout the Bronze age and scientist have argued that one of the reason could be that the sea was associated with the dead.</p>

Evidence suggests that purple dye was produced on the islet of Mitrou, a Bronze Age and Early Iron Age site in central Greece. The goal of this study is to determine the chronological and spatial patterning of Murex shells in order to better understand the emergence of dye manufacture. The research hypothesis is that Murex dye production was related to the rise of a visible political elite and that the scale of production was large enough at Mitrou to have exceeded the needs of the household, thus providing a cash crop for this elite to obtain imports from the Eastern Mediterranean. Multi-layered statistical analyses were employed to test this two-pronged hypothesis. The first hypothesis that Murex dye production was related to the rise of the elite at Mitrou was confirmed by a series of chi-squared analyses. Based on site-wide estimates of original Murex population, the second hypothesis that dye production exceeded domestic scale cannot be rejected. Since we know the prehistoric Mycenaeans produced very ornate, multi-colored and often banded garments, it is possible that Murex dye was produced at Mitrou to color raw wool for the production of thread, which could then be embroidered on fabric or traded as such. If it was in fact colored thread that was being produced, the site-wide estimates suggest that dye production could have exceeded domestic levels at Mitrou and dyed thread could have been a lucrative trading commodity.

<p>In this bachelor essay an attempt is done, to recreate a probable Bronze Age landscape on Gotland, with GIS as a tool. The landscape on Gotland is situated with many different monuments dated Bronze Age, such as cairns and stone ships. In creating of the maps, two possible shorelines contemporary with the Bronze Age have been calculated and marked on the maps. Furthermore, peat lands have been drawn upon the maps, by using the information from geological maps.</p><p>A landscape variable have been compared between Bronze Age places and Early Iron Age houses; the soil type. On Bronze Age places gravel is the most common, while moraine marl is the most common on places with Early Iron Age houses.</p><p>From a selection that were made, all Bronze Age places where within 3 km from the water, either the recreated shoreline or peat land. On the maps both Early Iron Age houses and Bronze Age places seemed to have a connection with water.</p>

The following paper focuses on the transitional period between the Middle Bronze Age (MBA) and the Late Bronze Age (LBA) in the Southern Urals, Russia. GIS-based analysis of Bronze Age settlement patterns in the Kyzil Area points to a number of important findings. The study concludes the demographic impossibility of an autonomous development scenario of the Sintashta – Srubnaya-Alakul cultural transformation, rejects the presence of ‘proto-city’ or urbanization developments in the region during the Bronze Age, and points to the shift to a more collective form of control over natural resources during the LBA period. The study also examines the spatial distribution of ‘kurgan’ cemeteries in the area. Among other things, this thesis illustrates how settlement pattern studies can add to and complement the heavily burial data - driven research, often relied upon in the archaeological analysis of the Eurasian Steppes.