Collapsing Commodities or Lavish Offerings? Understanding Massive Metalwork Deposition at Langton Matravers,Dorset During the Bronze Age–Iron Age Transition

The discovery of 373 intact and broken tin‐bronze socketed axes accompanied by 404 fragments in four pits at Langton Matravers collectively represents one of the largest hoards found to date in prehistoric Britain and Ireland. They were very probably never meant to be used as axes as the very high levels of tin they contain would have made them brittle. Many were poorly finished, with the majority still containing their casting cores. The axes are typologically dated to the Llyn Fawr metalwork phase (c.800–600 BC) and span the Bronze Age/Iron Age transition, when the production, circulation and deposition of bronze appear to have been substantially reduced throughout north‐west Europe. By placing the Langton Matravers hoard(s) in a broader metallurgical, material and archaeological context, existing theories for this phenomenon, such as the preference for iron, a collapse in bronze supply, or the sharp devaluation of a social or ritual ‘bronze standard’, are evaluated. It is proposed that the Langton Matravers axes belong to a short phase in the centuries‐long processes underlying the changing roles of bronze and iron.     

The Rolt Memorial Lecture 2017: Conserving the Waterways Heritage

ABSTRACT

This article describes the work of the Canal & River Trust in managing and conserving the heritage assets and the wider historic environment of the Trust's waterways in England and Wales. Various types of heritage assets are described, and the ways in which these assets are managed, including via archaeological recording, along with conservation-led repairs to historic engineering structures and other historic waterway-related buildings, are considered. New directions that offer effective and efficient ways of dealing with heritage assets are examined.     

Some food offerings from Ur,excavated by sir leonard woolley,and previously unpublished

As a result of excavations at Ur by Woolley (1923–1934) food debris was recovered and is now reported on. Plant remains include chickpea, six-row barley, wheat, pea, dates, perforated crab apple rings and possible flat bread. Of special interest are the chickpeas which are among the earliest found in lowland Mesopotamia and the crab apple rings which have not been found before in ancient deposits in the Near East. Of the mammals, caprovids seem to have been most important as food offerings. The occurrence of tunny fish vertebrae was unexpected.The preliminary analysis of some inorganic residues is so far inconclusive although it is possible that one of the residues may originally have contained salt.     

Cottages and the Country House: Power,Paternalism and Protest in Elsecar

In the period c.1790 to 1870, the small rural hamlet of Elsecar, near Barnsley, was transformed into an extensive industrial village, with a thriving economy based on iron and coal. Most of this development was instigated, controlled and financed by the local landowners, the 4th and 5th Earls Fitzwilliam. As well as being passionately interested in the practicalities and potential of industrial development, the Earls also looked to the welfare of their workers, providing a wealth of benefits including pensions, sick pay and purpose-built industrial housing. Using a historical approach based on a variety of source material, this paper explores the Earls’ provision of workers’ housing as a way in which to consider wider themes of power, control, inequality and resistance as they were expressed both in the physicality of the houses themselves, and in the cultural meanings which were attributed to them by contemporary observers. The paper argues that workers’ housing functioned as a visible embodiment of power relationships within Elsecar and, because of this, it continues to have a significant resonance in the modern world.