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One of the most puzzling phenomena of the European Bronze Age, is
that many communities buried or otherwise hid large numbers of
valuable bronze objects, but never returned to retrieve them. This
book focuses on the metal finds of one small European region, the
southern Netherlands and the adjacent part of North Belgium.
Fontijn considers the question of why so many elaborate bronze
objects have been found in watery locations in this landscape, such
as rivers, streams, and marshes, while so few have been found in
the controlled excavations of local settlements and cemeteries. He
looks at the evidence for the selective deposition of metal
objects, and discusses the "cultural biographies" of weapons,
ornaments or dress fittings, and axes respectively. He considers
how different depositional contexts might be related to the
construction of various forms of social identity, such as male or
female, or of belonging to local or non-local communities. He also
looks at the way the land itself may have been defined and
structured by the act of object deposition.
The hills overlooking the north flank of the Rhine valley in the
Netherlands are dotted with hundreds of prehistoric burial mounds.
Only a few of them were ever investigated by archaeologists and
even nowadays the many barrows preserved in the extensive forests
of the Utrechtse Heuvelrug are the oldest visible witnesses of a
remote but largely unknown prehistoric past. In 2006, a team of
archaeologists of the Ancestral Mounds project of Leiden University
set out to investigate these age-old monuments. Parts of two mounds
at Elst in the municipality of Rhenen were excavated and numerous
finds collected by amateur archaeologists were retrieved and
studied. As a result, the research team was able to reconstruct the
formation and histories of this barrow landscape from 2000 BC
onwards. Contrary to what was initially thought, the Elst barrows
appeared not to have been situated within a separate ceremonial
landscape but were rather closely linked with the world of daily
living. Throughout the Bronze Age and Iron Age, people had been
"living near the dead." The finds discussed in this book include a
rare example of an Early Bronze Age burial mound, examples of
pottery deposition, remains of a Middle Bronze Age
"Hilversum-Period" settlement and many indications for mundane and
ritual uses of the barrows in the later Iron Age. Dr David Fontijn
is associate professor in European prehistory at Leiden University
and senior research fellow at the TOPOI excellence cluster in
Berlin. His research focuses on the Bronze and Iron Age and was
awarded several prizes including the Praemium Erasmianum study
Prize for his book Sacrificial landscapes .
This volume of Analecta Praehistorica Leidensia focuses on how
local communities in prehistory define themselves in relation to a
bigger social world. Communities from the deep past managed to make
a living in landscapes we tend to perceive as inconvenient, build
complex and elaborate monuments with relatively simple tools, and
by shaping their landscape carved out a place for themselves in a
much bigger social world. The contributions in this volume
underscore how small worlds can be big at the same time.
This volume of Analecta Praehistorica Leidensia focuses on how
local communities in prehistory define themselves in relation to a
bigger social world. Communities from the deep past managed to make
a living in landscapes we tend to perceive as inconvenient, build
complex and elaborate monuments with relatively simple tools, and
by shaping their landscape carved out a place for themselves in a
much bigger social world. The contributions in this volume
underscore how small worlds can be big at the same time.
Europe is dotted with tens of thousands of prehistoric barrows. In
spite of their ubiquity, little is known on the role they had in
pre- and protohistoric landscapes. In 2010, an international group
of archaeologists came together at the conference of the European
Association of Archaeologists in The Hague to discuss and review
current research on this topic. This book presents the proceedings
of that session. The focus is on the prehistory of Scandinavia and
the Low Countries, but also includes an excursion to huge
prehistoric mounds in the southeast of North America. One
contribution presents new evidence on how the immediate environment
of Neolithic Funnel Beaker (TRB) culture megaliths was ordered,
another one discusses the role of remarkable single and double post
alignments around Bronze and Iron Age burial mounds. Zooming out,
several chapters deal with the place of barrows in the broader
landscape. The significance of humanly-managed heath in relation to
barrow groups is discussed, and one contribution emphasizes how
barrow orderings not only reflect spatial organization, but are
also important as conceptual anchors structuring prehistoric
perception. Other authors, dealing with Early Neolithic persistent
places and with Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age urnfields, argue
that we should also look beyond monumentality in order to
understand long-term use of ritual landscapes . The book contains
an important contribution by the well-known Swedish archaeologist
Tore Artelius on how Bronze Age barrows were structurally re-used
by pre-Christian Vikings. This is his last article, written briefly
before his death. This book is dedicated to his memory. This
publication is part of the Ancestral Mounds Research Project of the
University of Leiden.
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