Water has always influenced where and how people have lived. In southern Britain during the Bronze Age, the transition to a more settled life-style would have affected how a community accessed water. It is mooted that these changes led to new ways of thinking and this study will consider both the functional and symbolic treatment of water in the context of contemporary communities. In a landscape in which field boundaries became more prominent, the watery 'edge' created by rivers, streams and marsh can be shown to have strongly influenced the behaviour and inhabitation patterns of the community. By the end of the Bronze Age the evidence suggests that water had become a significant conceptual and 'spiritual' element in people's lives. The new evidence from the study area, i.e. the adjoining coastal zone and downland block of West Sussex and East Hampshire, focuses on these issues. In particular, a contextual study investigates the deposition patterns of metalwork and the role and place of 'burnt mounds' in Bronze Age society is considered. A study of the bore-hole logs and hydrology of the region demonstrates how later post-Medieval abstraction has significantly lowered the water table. An assessment is made of how this may have impacted on the riparian environment of the study area and reduced the riverine flow in the modern era. This new approach has proved important to the contextualisation of the Bronze Age landscape. From about 800 cal. BC southern Britain underwent a landscape transformation and re-organisation. These changes occurred alongside an initial increase in metalwork deposition practice followed by an abrupt curtailment of this behaviour. Was climate change involving increased precipitation rates, a factor or component of the changes seen in the archaeological record for the 9th and s" centuries BC? A critique of the evidence is undertaken.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:567595 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Dunkin, David John |
| Publisher | University of Reading |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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