A rst Wessex 1 date from Wessex

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Stuart Needham1 , Mike Parker Pearson2 , Alan Tyler3 , Mike Richards4 & Mandy Jay4
The furnished barrow burials of Wessex represent a maturation of the Beaker rite during the Early Bronze Age in Britain. Many of these burials were unearthed centuries ago, when archaeology was at its most eager and insouciant, but happily for us there were often a few careful recorders on hand. Thanks to their records, the modern scientists engaged in the Beaker People Project can still follow the trail back to a museum specimen and obtain high precision dates as in the case of the Wessex 1 grave from West Overton in Wessex reported here.

Keywords: Britain, Brittany, Wessex, Overton Down, Bronze Age, Beaker, radiocarbon dating

The Wessex Culture

A radiocarbon date has been obtained for the rst time for a grave belonging to the Wessex 1 grave series and coming from Wessex itself, courtesy of the Beaker People Project (hereafter, BPP). The Wessex Culture (more latterly, Wessex grave series) was rst dened by Stuart Piggott in a seminal publication (Piggott 1938). It served to recognise that funerary accompaniments of the mature Early Bronze Age in central southern Britain (the Wessex region) included a new range of specialist equipment involving varied, often exotic, materials such as amber, jet, faience, gold, tin and new levels of craftsmanship. The Wessex series featured both ornament-dominant graves, presumed to be those of females (most were recovered by antiquarian excavations) and dagger-graves, presumed to be those of males, as well as less easily categorised graves. Piggott was able to show that the emergence of the
1 2 3 4

Langton Fold, North Lane, South Harting, West Sussex, GU31 5NW, UK Department of Archaeology, University of Shefeld, Northgate House, West Street, Shefeld, S1 4ET, UK 22 Albert Road North, Malvern, Worcestershire, WR14 2TP, UK Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany; Department of Archaeology, Durham University, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK

Received: 8 February 2010; Accepted: 24 February 2010; Revised: 3 March 2010

ANTIQUITY

84 (2010): 363373

http://antiquity.ac.uk/ant/84/ant840363.htm

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Wessex Culture was linked to the appearance of similar rich graves in certain other parts of Europe, notably Armorica (ancient Brittany) and Central Europe, and that the phenomenon in general related to the emergence of elites capitalising on inter-regional trade in metals and exotics. He also ventured that the Wessex graves represented an elite that had imposed itself from Armorica, where very similar styles of dagger have been found, but the notion of wholesale introduction has found less favour in more recent decades (e.g. Needham 2000). When Piggott was writing, the chronology of the Early Bronze Age in Britain and Europe was condensed and still wholly dependent on a chain of regional interconnections to the historically-dated cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean. It was only some while after the advent of radiocarbon dating that it became clear that the links used for cross-dating were sometimes spurious and that the beginnings of the Early Bronze Age in Europe reached back centuries earlier than Piggott could then have envisaged. Even so, today many important series of graves are still relatively poorly dated. Sometimes, as in Armorica, this is because of the decay of critical skeletal materials in adverse environments, and sometimes this is because diagnostic burials were mainly found by early barrow diggers who did not retain the skeletal remains, or who saw little purpose in recording them well. Fortunately, however, occasional pioneering excavators, such as Thomas Bateman, John Thurnam and John Mortimer in Britain, kept and labelled at least the skulls. Their respective collections, well curated for over a century, now offer a rich harvest of information with the development of more rened radiocarbon dating and a range of other new analytical techniques, not relevant to this paper but central to the BPP (see papers in Larsson & Parker Pearson 2007: esp. Chapters 8-10; Jay et al. in press).

Radiocarbon programmes
Over the course of the later twentieth century radiocarbon dates have accumulated in an ad hoc fashion from new excavations of burial sites and have proved to be of varied quality and sometimes disputable relevance. Some are individually good results, nevertheless, and have helped in the building of an outline chronology (Table 1), but few have had any direct bearing on the chronology of the Wessex Culture which therefore continues to rely on typological comparisons and association patterns. Opinion has been divided on both the longevity of the Wessex grave series and the extent to which the distinction between Wessex 1 and Wessex 2 rst suggested by Arthur ApSimon (1954) was truly a matter of chronological sequence. The rst date dealt with below is salient here. Similarly, there has been uncertainty over whether there was signicant temporal overlap between the early stages of Wessex and the burials of the climax Beaker phase (Period 2 in Table 1) some of which are early bronze dagger burials lacking a Beaker. The second date published below bears on this issue. The limitations of ad hoc dating are now beginning to be turned around with much more targeted dating programmes, such as that by Anna Brindley and Jan Lanting on Early Bronze Age burial deposits (both inhumations and cremations) from Ireland (Brindley 2007) and that by Alison Sheridan focusing on, inter alia, graves containing faience beads (Sheridan & Shortland 2004). These targeted campaigns, made possible in large measure
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Table 1. Summary chronology for the southern British Chalcolithic, Early Bronze Age and Middle Bronze Age.

Period 1 (Chalcolithic) Period 2 (Early Bronze Age) Period 3 (Early Bronze Age) Period 4 (Early Bronze Age) Period 5 (Middle Bronze Age)

2450Inhumation Beaker (pioneering phase Early Beaker 2200/2150 ssion horizon)

Copper: Moel Arthur

2200/2150- Inhumation Beaker/Food Vessels/at Climax Beaker Earliest bronze: 1950 bronze daggers Brithdir (Butterwick-Masterton Mile Cross series) 1950Cremation Food Vessels/Urns/Wessex Early Urn Willerby 1750/1700 1 (Bush Barrow series) 1750/1700- Cremation 1550/1500 1550/1500- Cremation 1150/1100 Urns/ Wessex 2 (Camerton-Snowshill series) Deverel-Rimbury and related Urns Middle Urn Arreton

Late Urn

Acton Taunton Penard

Dating is based on calibrated radiocarbon determinations. The less precise limits given allow for poor stretches of the calibration curve. There is some simplication for example, Urns (in-urned cremation burials) may start towards the end of Period 2 and there was a late facies of Beaker burial into Period 3.

by the development of the reliable dating of burnt bone (Lanting et al. 2001), are already beginning to provide a much better temporal structure for the enormous and varied burial record of this period in Britain and Ireland. Such a targeted campaign had been attempted earlier by Ian Kinnes and colleagues (Kinnes et al. 1991) for burials of Beaker tradition, but unfortunately this came before more recent improvements in radiocarbon dating techniques. For this reason, it was considered essential when setting up the BPP to budget for the highprecision dating of a good proportion (c . 40 per cent) of the skeletal remains selected for other isotopic analyses aimed at yielding information on diet, nutrition and mobility. The tiny size of bone samples now required has helped allay curatorial concerns about irreparable damage to valuable and sensitive human remains. The BPP, although focused primarily on Beaker type burials, has also taken in examples of earlier, later and temporally overlapping non-Beaker burials. These provide a broader backdrop against which to assess the Beakerspecic results, and, within this remit, opportunities have been seized to sample burials worth dating in their own right.

A pivotal grave
The Wessex 1 grave in question is the presumed primary burial in West Overton barrow G1 (project reference SK 291), which lies close to The Sanctuary timber/stone
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Date range Periodisation (cal BC)

Predominant Main distinctive burial rite burial traditions

Simple description

Metalwork traditions

A rst Wessex 1 date from Wessex

Figure 1. Map of Overton Hill showing barrow West Overton G1 in relation to The Sanctuary, the barrow cemetery and other near-contemporary monuments. Avebury lies 2.5km to the north-west. Barrows are labelled with the parish-based numbers (Grinsell 1957: nos. 1-8, West Overton parish; nos. 23-30, Avebury parish).

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circle to the south-east of Avebury in north Wiltshire (Figure 1; see Cleal 2005 for a recent review of the barrow concentration in the Avebury district). It was excavated by Sir Richard Colt Hoares team on 2 August 1814 but, despite good publication for the time (Hoare 1819: 90), the identity of the associated objects had become uncertain before the material reached Devizes Museum in 1878. Two decades earlier, Thurnam had randomly picked three objects known to be from quite separate sites and illustrated them as if they constituted the West Overton G1 group (Thurnam 1860: 329; Davis & Thurnam 1865: section XXIII, gure on p. 7; Annable & Simpson 1964: 52). Hoare (1819: 90) described the associated artefacts as . . . a small lance, a long pin with a handle and a little celt all of brass, but there was no accompanying illustration, nor does one survive amongst the unpublished Philip Crocker drawings in the Wiltshire Heritage Museum, Devizes. Fortunately a friend of Hoare and fellow antiquarian, the Reverend John Skinner, participated in the excavation and made detailed notes on the burial rite and grave goods, including sketches; these survive in the British Library (Additional Manuscript 33648: esp. folios 2, 57 & 59). Skinners records leave no doubt that two of the three objects mentioned by Hoare may be identied in the Stourhead collection at Devizes (Figures 2 & 3). Most diagnostic chronologically is a small bronze at axehead of Willerby type (Annable & Simpson 1964: cat. no. 299), found widely across Britain in hoards and as single nds, but only rarely placed in graves, most famously at Bush Barrow (Wilsford G5, Wiltshire; Needham 1988). The second extant object is a crutch-headed bronze pin (Annable & Simpson 1964: cat. no. 360; Rohl & Needham 1998: 125, g. 26, no. 56), an infrequent type characteristic of the mature Early Bronze Age, but found in graves of both Wessex 1 and 2 series. Skinners sketch of the third and still missing bronze object shows it to be a tanged knife with a leaf-shaped blade and apparently a single off-set rivet through its broad tang. This appears to belong to a broad-tanged subset of a series of small tanged blades of the Early Bronze Age which are variously termed knives or razors. Skinner in fact adds a fourth object not mentioned by Hoare: a portion of deers horn, measuring a foot (British Library Additional Manuscript 33648, folio 2); this object also appears with the other three in a plan of the grave group (Figure 4). The burial was in a large oblong grave cut into the chalk beneath the large mound and was evidently enclosed in a tree-trunk cofn (Hoare 1819: 90). The body, identied as that of an elderly male of tall stature, was lying on its left side with exed legs and head to the east facing south (Figure 4). Skinner shows the four objects in a diamond formation a foot (300mm) in front of the face; the right hand was between the group and the individuals face. Hoare and his team re-buried the skeletal material unearthed in the many barrows they opened, but John Thurnams interests in the craniology of the ancient British led him to reexcavate some of the Cunnington/Hoare barrows to retrieve the skulls and West Overton G1 was among them (excavation 1854; Thurnam 1860: 329; Davis & Thurnam 1865: section XXIII, pl. 11). Thurnams collection passed ultimately to the Duckworth collection, Cambridge University, thus allowing thorough re-evaluation and sampling in the context of the BPP.
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A rst Wessex 1 date from Wessex

Figure 2. Revd John Skinners watercolour sketches of the three bronze objects from West Overton G1. c The British Library Board, Add. 33648, f.59. Scale 100%.

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Result and assessment

The radiocarbon measurement obtained from bone collagen is 2020-1770 cal BC (95% probability) or 1950-1780 cal BC (68%) (3550+35 BP; SUERC-26203 (GU 19959)). While this can be claimed to be the rst direct date from Wessex for a grave with a diagnostic Wessex 1 artefact the axehead a few other nds have already begun to chart the absolute dating of this grave series and, more generally, of Period 3 to which they are assigned. In particular, the cremation burial at Breach Farm, Llanbleddian, Glamorgan, which contained inter alia a very similar small axehead, has been dated recently on the cremated bone to 2020-1690 cal BC (95%), 1920-1755 cal BC (68%) (3520+ 60 BP; GrA-19964; Brindley 2007: 367; Needham & Woodward 2008: 51). Two burials from Ireland with daggers of Armorico-British type or inspiration, from Topped Mountain, Co. Fermanagh and Figure 3. The West Overton G1 objects extant in Wiltshire Heritage Museum, Devizes. Drawings Stuart Needham. Grange, Co. Roscommon, have yielded Scale 50%. comparable dates (Brindley 2007: 85, 125; Needham & Woodward 2008: 50). Back in central Wessex, a grave from Norton Bavant Borrow Pit, Wiltshire, includes a dagger combining features of this style with others from the Camerton-Snowshill type found in Wessex 2 graves which are believed to belong to Period 4. This potentially transitional grave has been dated on the unburnt human bone to 1870-1620 cal BC (95%), 17501645 cal BC (68%) (3410+35 BP; BM-2909; Needham 1996: 132). These and other less directly relevant radiocarbon dates give a good conrmation that graves of the Wessex 1 series, allied graves and metalwork of the Willerby tradition all key constituents in dening Period 3 date within the rst quarter of the second millennium cal BC. The very few radiocarbon-dated graves diagnostic of Wessex 2 (Camerton-Snowshill series) do indeed indicate a later era (Burleigh et al. 1976), but as early-run determinations, sometimes on material of uncertain origin, they are of limited value in relation to the more precise chronologies that are now emerging. In addition to the issue of Wessex grave chronology, the West Overton date broaches a similar problem relating to Early Bronze Age axeheads. Despite being the most abundant metalwork type of the period, sequencing axeheads has depended on typology in conjunction with critical associations particularly in hoards. However, their absolute chronology has remained insecure because of their virtual exclusion from graves and other contexts viable for dating. As it happens, it was possible to select another rare axe-containing grave as part of the BPP (project reference SK 213), the axehead this time being of the Aylesford type (class 4B in Needham et al. 1985) a southern British type belonging to the preceding
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Figure 4. Revd John Skinners watercolour sketch of the disposition of the body and the grave goods in West Overton G1; in addition to the three bronzes, the portion of deers horn is shown. c The British Library Board, Add. 33648, f.57).

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Figure 5. Grave group from Shuttlestone Plantation, Parwich, Derbyshire. Weston Park Museum, Shefeld. Drawings: Stuart Needham. Scale 50%.

typological stage of late Period 2. A deep grave under a barrow at Shuttlestone Plantation, Parwich, Derbyshire, contained a presumably crouched inhumation of a man in the prime of life and of ne proportions laid on his left side (Bateman 1861: 34); he was accompanied by remains of skin clothing or a shroud, ferns, a bronze dagger, a jet bead and a circular int (lost) in addition to the axehead (Figure 5; Bateman 1861: 34-5; Smith 1957: GB.19; Vine 1982: 221). Metalwork of the Mile Cross tradition, which includes Aylesford axeheads, has been placed close to the turn of the third/second millennia BC (Needham & Woodward 2008: 7, g. 3). The radiocarbon date is in reasonable accord: 2150-1960 cal BC (94%), 2140-2020 cal BC (68%) (3680+30 BP (SUERC-26172 (GU-19924)).

Conclusion
The new radiocarbon results presented here, two of many more generated by the BPP, illustrate how the project is poised to clarify further the chronological structure of the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age in Britain. In the BPP and other recent programmes, the matter of obtaining high-quality radiocarbon dates in some quantity is seen as essential underpinning. This is not just for the sake of getting chronologies as accurate and detailed as possible; more rened chronologies should serve to specify much better the interrelationships between given ritual practices and will thus directly affect interpretation of the social realities of the period. The BPP results themselves will inevitably be loaded towards the early part of the total burial sequence and there remains a pressing need for more concerted dating campaigns on Wessex and indeed other graves, such as those accompanied by Food Vessels. Wessex should not be considered paramount, but it is essential that we can place it reliably
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in order to rene our understanding of the British sequence and implied social changes and, moreover, to clarify the much vaunted continental connections.

Technical Note on radiocarbon methodology

The dates were obtained on bone collagen extracted at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology laboratories in Leipzig, using standard procedures which included the use of ultraltration (Brown et al. 1988). The pre-treated collagen extracts were then dated at the SUERC AMS facility. The 13 C values for SK 291 and SK 213, as obtained from the Leipzig facility, were -20.9%o for both samples indicating that there was no marine resource consumption by these individuals. The calibrations given are based on OxCal v. 3.10 and IntCal04 (Bronk Ramsey 2001; 2005; Reimer et al. 2004). Acknowledgements
The Beaker People Project is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and led by one of the authors (MPP). We are grateful to the British Library for permission to publish Figures 2 and 4 and for help in accessing Skinners manuscripts. The late Ken Annable facilitated study of the objects in Devizes Museum, and Pauline Beswick, those in Shefeld Museum. The sampling of skeletal material from West Overton G1 and Shuttlestone Plantation were facilitated respectively by Mercedes Okumura, Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, Cambridge University (Duckworth Collection) and Gill Woolrich, Weston Park Museum, Shefeld (Bateman Collection). Andrew Chamberlain gave vital reassurance that the skeletal remains sampled corresponded with those described in the original accounts.

References
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