Relational Identities and Other-than-Human Agency in Archaeology 2018

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Finding Objects, Making Persons

Fossils in British Early Bronze Age Burials

Joanna Brück and Andrew Meirion Jones

Imagine the scene: archaeologists gathered in a windswept corner of the British countryside have excavated a spectacular Bronze Age burial, accompanied by numerous grave goods, and are giving a summary of their findings to members of the local press. At this juncture a commonplace trope is drawn upon: the individual buried is described as a person of great significance on the basis of the quantity and quality of the grave goods. One case in point is the discovery in 2002 of an individual in Amesbury, Wiltshire (Fitzpatrick 2011:5)—dubbed for the media the “Amesbury Archer”—who is described as “one of the most lavishly furnished bell beaker burials yet found in Europe” (Fitzpatrick 2011:208). This trope—reading significance from the grave goods that accompany burials—is so ingrained in archaeological thinking that we see not only off-the-cuff declarations to the media but the formalization of these ideas in archaeological theory. In the past, archaeological analyses of mortuary practices have assumed fixed and readable identities for the dead; processual reconstructions of social organization from mortuary variability data were founded on this fundamental principle (e.g., Binford 1971; Brown 1971; Saxe 1971; Tainter 1975). This concept has been thoroughly critiqued, particularly for the British Bronze Age (Parker Pearson 1999; Fowler 2004), and both authors have played a role in this discussion (Brück 2004; Jones 2002).

Archaeological thinking concerning mortuary practices is now well developed, and, as a discipline, we are acutely aware of the relationship between the archaeologist-as-interpreter and excavated mortuary assemblages (Fowler 2013), so why do we still so often see grave goods as a direct reflection of the social status of deceased individuals? This is not an easy question to answer, but we suspect it may result from the fact that Early Bronze Age mortuary practices are one of the few instances in British archaeology where we can observe a closed context containing a burial and accompanying grave goods (the other obvious example is Anglo-Saxon burials, where similar assumptions are at play; Williams 2006). Here, we question the simplistic assumption that the key role of grave goods is to communicate an individual’s status, focusing on one category of grave good in particular—fossils—that allows us to critically rethink such simplistic formulations of individual identity.

In this chapter we examine a group of burials dating to the later part of the British Early Bronze Age (ca. 1900–1500 BC). Single (and occasionally multiple) burials in earthen barrows accompanied by a suite of grave goods, including fossils, are typical of this period (Woodward 2000). Since the earliest antiquarian investigations of barrows, the Early Bronze Age dead have been burdened with a variety of different representational loads: they have variously been understood to represent druids (Colt Hoare 1812), shamans (Piggott 1962; Woodward 2000), and individuals (e.g., Shennan 1975) but perhaps most commonly chiefly elites (Piggott 1938; Renfrew 1974). The artifacts that accompany these burials, including highly decorated pottery, copper daggers, and ornaments of gold, amber, jet, and other materials, have been read as “prestige goods” (Bradley 1984:68–95) or “symbols of power” (Clarke et al. 1985). More recently, they have been described as an example of “supernatural power dressing” (Sheridan 2008; Sheridan and Davis 2002). Such terms evoke the “go-getting” individuals of the Reagan-Thatcher era and highlight the Western sensibilities that underpin our assumptions regarding identity and personhood in this period of prehistory.

Two issues are at stake here that we wish to question: the tacit and comfortable assumptions that Euro-American notions of individuality existed in prehistoric Britain (see also Fowler 2004) and that burial assemblages can be simply read as representing status and prestige for the person buried. Both notions are underpinned by the implied assertion that contemporary Euro-American ontologies are universal, with assumed distinctions between person and world and between active subject and inert object, so that grave goods are viewed as nothing more than passive reflections of the power and wealth of the deceased.

Persons and Networks

One way we can question the universality of contemporary notions of the person is by examining how personhood is constituted in other historical contexts. Chris Fowler has pursued this strategy in a number of important publications (Fowler 2004, 2010, 2016). Fowler (2004:23–52) argues that persons are often considered composites made up of a variety of different substances, including mind, body, and soul. He takes a comparative approach to the composite person, delineating a variety of ways of being a person in a series of different ethnographic and historical situations, and identifies dividuality, partibility, and permeability as key aspects of the composite self. We are sympathetic to this kind of approach and have previously explored these ideas in relation to Early Bronze Age burials (Brück 2004; Jones 2002, forthcoming).

Another strategy we have previously pursued is to recognize the significance of material practices in the performance of personhood (Brück 2004; Jones 2002). Our work draws on the pioneering approaches of John Chapman and Bisserka Gaydarska (Chapman 2000; Chapman and Gaydarska 2007). Chapman and Gaydarska emphasize the importance of the twin practices of fragmentation and accumulation—practices that serve to relate, connect, or enchain people together as they divide up (fragment) or bring together (accumulate) materials in different ways. These kinds of practices imply the relational forms of personhood of the kind discussed by Fowler (though they may also be found in contexts where individual modes of personhood are practiced). We find these kinds of approaches extremely fruitful (see also papers in Alberti et al. 2013; Watts 2013). While we applaud previous discussions of the problems we have raised above, which have identified relational forms of personhood in prehistory as an antidote to the rampant characterization of prehistoric burials as representative of Euro-American individuals, in this chapter we wish to ask: Can we go further than this? Is it possible to move beyond the assertion of prehistoric personhood as relational? Is it possible to provide a more detailed picture of relationality?

Fossils in Early Bronze Age Burials

In this chapter we attempt to explore these questions by examining the occurrence of fossils in British Early Bronze Age burials. Fossils are an unusual category of grave good (Leeming 2015), but it is evident that they cannot simply be interpreted as “prestige goods” or indices of status, and they remind us that Early Bronze Age people’s understanding of their place in the world was surely different from our own. As we shall see below, the discovery of fossils in mortuary contexts requires us to reconsider some of the fundamental dualisms on which contemporary Western models of the individual are based. It calls into question the perceived boundaries between subject and object, self and other, and culture and nature and hints that landscapes and their constituent elements were sedimented into Early Bronze Age forms of personhood. Concepts of the individual familiar from our own cultural context presuppose that the human self is set apart from (and is superior to) the natural world, including inanimate objects (Morris 1991), but the examples we discuss suggest that this was not so in the Early Bronze Age.

Even in the contemporary Western world, however, the superiority of the human subject has increasingly been called into question. A number of authors have argued for a post-humanism that displaces humans from their central position and recognizes that humans occupy a world that intersects with other agencies—animal, vegetal, and environmental (e.g., Braidotti 2013; Coole and Frost 2010; Olsen 2010). Ethnographic studies of the relationship between people and environment indicate that the “natural” world is often understood to have what we would consider “cultural” origins (the product of ancestral acts, for example) and that plants, animals, and other natural phenomena are persons who engage in particular forms of social relationships with humans (e.g., Descola 1996). As we shall see, the presence of natural and modified fossils in Early Bronze Age barrows and mortuary deposits, along with the production of fossil skeuomorphs, suggests that fossils may have been viewed as crafted objects linked to earlier ancestral periods and, as such, were cosmologically charged. The treatment and deposition of fossils in Early Bronze Age burials call conventional concepts of agency and the “individual” into question, suggesting that agency was not considered solely a property of the human subject or indeed an intrinsic attribute of particular beings. Instead, it was relationally constituted in the spaces of intersubjective engagement among people, places, and things.

In the course of research for this chapter, we identified seventeen sites where fossils were deposited as grave goods or deliberately incorporated in some other way into a burial monument. These included crinoids, belemnites, ammonites, echinoids, and fossil sponges. The majority of sites are in southern and eastern England, particularly Wiltshire, Dorset, Kent, and East Yorkshire, where fossils commonly occur in the local Chalk geology and in other strata of Cretaceous and Jurassic age. Yet the way these objects were incorporated into the graves suggests that they held particular social significance. Perhaps the most extraordinary example of such a discovery is that recorded by Worthington G. Smith in 1887 on the Dunstable Downs in Bedfordshire (Smith 1894; figure 10.1). Smith was not present when the burial was first uncovered, so precise contextual information is not available; however, enough is known to suggest that fossils were deliberately included as an important component of the mortuary deposit. The grave was found beneath an earthen barrow and contained the bodies of a young woman and a child around five years old (Smith 1894:334–38). The woman was laid on her right-hand side in a crouched position, and she was “clasping the almost perished relics” of the child. In and around the grave were approximately 200 fossil echinoids (Ananchytes ovatus and Micraster coranguinum), and Smith’s reconstruction drawing reproduced in figure 10.1 suggests that these may originally have formed a ring around the burial. Other finds from the grave included a quartz pebble, a pottery vessel, animal bone, and a large quantity of worked flint.

Figure 10.1. Inhumation burial of a young adult female and child with echinoids from the Dunstable Downs, Bedfordshire. Source: Smith 1894:frontispiece.

The Dunstable example is unusual for the number of fossils it contained and the way they appear to have been arranged around the body, though we must treat this burial with caution: it is possible that the numbers of fossils may have been exaggerated (Leeming 2015:19). In contrast, other burials tend to include a much smaller number of fossils. Details of their depositional context suggest that, in general, fossils were incorporated into Early Bronze Age burials in one of two key ways. In many cases, particularly in southern England, they comprised elements of composite necklaces—objects whose beads were made of fossils and other natural materials with interesting properties such as amber, shale, jet, and shell, alongside manufactured materials such as faience. The primary inhumation burial of an adult female at Arreton Down, Isle of Wight, was accompanied by one segmented faience bead, three beads of chalk, and another five fossil beads—four of Porosphaera globularis, a late Cretaceous sponge, and the fifth made from a fragment of unidentified fossil shell (Alexander et al. 1960). The well-known central inhumation of a possible female from the Manton barrow (also known as Preshute G1a) in Wiltshire produced an extraordinary array of objects (Cunnington 1907). These included a grape cup (a type of small ceramic vessel we discuss further below) behind the head; a copper alloy dagger, 3 copper alloy awls, 1 shale bead, 1 stone bead, and 1 chalk bead in front of the feet; a possible ceramic lip plug close to the chin; and a second dagger with an amber pommel, a gold-mounted amber disc, a gold-mounted halberd pendant (a miniature version of a contemporary Central European weapon), a shale bead decorated with gold bands, 150 other shale beads, 5 other amber beads, and a single fossil crinoid bead, all behind the head and shoulders. The excavators state that the beads were not around the neck of the body but lay in a series of rows over one another, indicating that they remained strung together on deposition.

It is evident from this that the precise location of objects—including fossils—in the grave was very carefully choreographed. The positioning and association of objects hint at the construction of relational narratives of identity. The crouched inhumation of an adult near Minster in Kent (Anon. 2007) was accompanied by a jet armlet, an amber bead, and a second bead of polished fossil sponge with a dentalium shell placed through it—a striking and deliberate act of connection and assemblage. Barrow G61a at Amesbury in Wiltshire produced a number of burials, including a cremation burial in a rectangular grave (Ashbee 1985; figure 10.2). The cremation burial (an adult of indeterminate sex) had been arranged in a clearly defined pear-shaped heap. A small ceramic vessel containing an amber bead, fossil crinoid, and two flint flakes was placed upright at the tapering end of this deposit. An amber-colored beaver incisor was found standing against the pot. Under the pot there was a bronze awl and seven additional beads of amber, faience, red steatite, and cowrie shell. Such careful acts of juxtaposition spoke of links between the living and the dead, referencing particular activities and locating fossils in networks of association that defined the place of the dead in the social world.

Figure 10.2. Grave goods accompanying the cremation burial from Amesbury G61a (Ashbee 1985:fig. 39). 1: miniature vessel; 2 and 9: amber beads; 3: crinoid; 4 and 6: cowrie shells; 5 and 8: segmented faience beads; 7: quoit-shaped bead of steatite; 10: beaver’s incisor; 11: bronze fragment; 12: bronze awl.

In many of these cases, fossils are found with materials that may have been considered to have magical powers. Ann Woodward (2002) and Alison Sheridan and Mary Davis (2002) have pointed out that amber and jet—materials that were frequently used in the composite necklaces found in southern England—have unusual properties. Both are electrostatic and, unlike other materials of geological origin, they float, can be burned, and are warm to the touch; amber also gives off a distinctive resinous smell when burned. Likewise, the luminous and reflective characteristics of gold and the luster of shell may have been considered to confer animacy to objects made from these materials (Conneller 2011; Saunders 2011). If so, then Early Bronze Age composite necklaces should not be viewed as decorative trappings. They were not merely a reflection of the wealth and status of their owner but served as potent items in their own right (Woodward 2000:116–19). The role of these necklaces was not simply to adorn the living and the dead but to impart certain qualities and powers to those who wore them. Yet such powers were not intrinsic to these objects but must be understood in relational terms. It was their positioning within a particular network of materials, activities, practices, and relationships that made them effective, as indicated in the literal “stringing together” of beads of different materials into necklaces.

This theme of juxtaposition emerges again in our second group of finds, mainly from northern England: fossils that appear to have formed an element of collections of unusual natural objects. Perhaps the best example comes from Langton in north Yorkshire (Greenwell 1877:138–39). Here, under a barrow, was the inhumation burial of an elderly woman lying on her right side with her head to the southwest. In front of her waist was a small group of objects, lying close together as if they had originally been contained in a bag. They included three copper alloy awls, a worked boar’s tusk, a worked beaver’s tooth, a pierced animal tooth fragment, a pierced nerita shell, three cowrie shells, a fragment of dentalium shell, a fish vertebra, a jet bead, and a fragment of fossil belemnite. In Scandinavia, similar collections of “odd” items found in a number of Bronze Age burials have been interpreted as the toolkits of shamans or other religious specialists (e.g., Glob 1974:116; Kaul 1998:16–20). It is certainly possible that these were collections of magical objects owned and used by the deceased during life, but they might also have been brought together specifically for the funeral rite or been gifts from mourners. Whatever the case, it seems likely that these were viewed as powerful things whose particular properties made them effective elements of the social world. Some of the items from Langton were pierced and may have been worn on the body or displayed in other important locations, perhaps because they were thought to have apotropaic powers. We would therefore argue that in the British Early Bronze Age, items we would regard today as inert, “natural” objects were considered to have agency.

The process of assembly that resulted in these interesting groups of objects—necklaces in the south and bags of special items in the north—is worth exploring further. The bundles documented among indigenous American groups in the nineteenth century and more recently provide a potentially useful parallel (Pauketat 2013a, 2013b; Zedeño 2008). These were collections of important sacred objects, often kept carefully wrapped. Bundles were considered to be powerful and animate; some were regarded as persons and even as ancestors. Their constituent elements spoke of the histories of their caretaker-guardians and the groups to whom they belonged. The opening of bundles, addition of new items, and intergenerational transfer were all hedged with ritual, as such acts of disclosure and transformation could result in dramatic changes to existing social relationships.

The process of citation (Jones 2007, 2012) involved in the creation of bundles can help illuminate the social role of similar assemblages in the Bronze Age. The choice of certain objects—those that evoked memories of places, people, and events—and their juxtaposition with other objects created narratives through which particular forms of identity could be constituted. The source of some of these materials has been investigated. For instance, Bronze Age amber is thought to have come from the Baltic, although some may have been found on the beaches of northeast England (Beck and Shennan 1991), while jet and shale objects are known to derive from particular geological deposits on the Yorkshire and Dorset coasts, respectively (Sheridan and Davis 2002). The shells also traveled some distance; most of the burials examined here were at least 20 or 30 miles from the sea. Animal bones may have referenced more local landscape settings, calling to mind significant people, activities, and relationships, although items such as beavers’ teeth may have spoken of other qualities—the ability to move with ease between land and water, for example, or “human” characteristics, such as the capacity to build structures and alter the landscape (see Woodward 2000:118; Hill 2011). As such, the materials incorporated into Early Bronze Age assemblages spoke of different landscape contexts and material properties—the familiar and the foreign, fire and water, land and sea, aboveground and belowground—as well as specific social practices and the relations they sustained (Goldhahn 2012).

Interestingly, the fossils themselves are all from local or near-local sources. Fossils such as ammonites, belemnites, crinoids, and echinoids are common in Jurassic and Cretaceous strata, including the Chalk on which most of these sites are located. The inhumation burial of an adult male at Rudston in East Yorkshire, for example, produced an ammonite fragment, which had been placed in front of his face (Greenwell 1877:249). This burial is located on the Chalk, and the ammonite is unlikely to have come from far away. At Painsthorpe Wold in the same county, a group of objects, including a beaver’s incisor, fossil Gryphaea arcuata, flint borer, knife and flake, and a lump of decayed organic matter, were lying together in front of the chest of an adult female inhumation (Mortimer 1905:132; figure 10.3). This burial, too, is located on the Chalk. However, Gryphaea arcuata fossils do not occur here; they are found in another, very specific horizon in the local stratigraphy, the Lower Lias shales a few hundred meters to the west. It is interesting to consider in what context these and other fossils would have been encountered during the Early Bronze Age. Tilling the soil for the production of crops, sourcing flint for tools, building barrows, and digging pits for the deposition of event-marking or place-making materials are perhaps the most likely activities to have resulted in the discovery of fossils. In this sense, then, fossils were already bound into particular junctures of space, time, and memory as soon as they were unearthed.

Figure 10.3. Group of objects placed in front of the chest of the adult female inhumation burial in grave C, barrow 98, Painsthorpe Wold (Mortimer 1905:plate 41). 1: beaver’s incisor; 2: fossil Gryphaea arcuata; 3: flint borer; 4: flint flake; 5: flint knife.

As such, the assemblages of interesting objects and materials of which fossils formed a part acted as a means of “mapping” the world and its constituent relationships. They evoked places, events, and practices and—in the case of the necklaces at least—literally strung them together to create relational narratives of identity (Barrett 1994:121–22). The arresting colors of materials such as jet and amber (Jones 2002) may have called to mind origin myths or other cosmological references, while other chains of association linked materials and people across both space and time. Woodward (2002) and Sheridan and Davis (2002) have noted that jet, shale, and amber beads were often old on deposition, suggesting that they may have been heirlooms. Fossils and other “natural” items were also curated. For instance, the ammonite fragment from the burial at Rudston (Greenwell 1877:249) was worn, and Paul Ashbee (1985) suggests that the beaver’s incisor from Amesbury G61a described above may also have been old when it was placed in the grave. It is easy to suggest that these were powerful and significant objects, curated over many years. Yet agency was not intrinsic to these items (or their owners) but emerged in the generative potential of juxtaposition. So, too, the forms of identity created in the interstices of such networks were not fixed but were constituted in performances of collection, arrangement, and disassembly (Jones 2012). As such, these assemblages of special objects were not solely about connection but also dealt with disruption; items such as fossils and materials such as amber and jet allowed people to encounter and engage with boundaries between land and water, familiar and exotic, surface and depth (cf. Randsborg 1993:124). These were collections of objects that evoked particular cosmographies, and it is therefore no surprise that they were incorporated into narratives of the social world.

Certainly, the evidence discussed here suggests that other conceptual boundaries—notably, that between nature and culture—central to Western post-Enlightenment philosophy were articulated quite differently and were almost certainly not recognized as such in the British Early Bronze Age. In particular, the way fossils and similar items were encountered, incorporated, and manipulated speaks of a different way of understanding the natural world. As we have seen, fossils are just one of a range of what we would today consider inert natural materials to be included as grave goods during this period. Unworked quartz pebbles are another material often found in Early Bronze Age burials. For example, the cremated remains of a young adult male from a ring cairn at Holmesfield, Brown Edge, near Totley in Derbyshire was accompanied by four pieces of struck flint and a single quartz pebble (Radley 1966), while a quartz pebble, bone pommel, and bone toggle found in the cremation deposit in cist 1 at Beech Hill House, Coupar Angus, Perthshire, were all burned, suggesting they had accompanied the deceased onto the pyre (Stevenson 1995:204). Like amber and jet, quartz has unusual properties; it sparkles in the sunlight and emits a bright white spark—triboluminescence—when struck. These potent qualities are undoubtedly one reason why it was so often incorporated in the monuments and graves of the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age (e.g., Darvill 2002; Bradley 2005). Other interesting “natural” materials were also deposited in Early Bronze Age graves. A cremation burial from Stockbridge Down in Hampshire produced a series of quoit-shaped beads made from fragments of stalactite from caves in the Mendip Hills 50 miles to the west (Stone and Gray Hill 1940; Sheridan and Shortland 2003). The discovery in caves of human remains, complete pots, and other votive deposits dating to this period suggests that these were considered otherworldly and liminal locations (Chamberlain 2012), places where strange rocky formations evoke the flow of water, just as fossils resemble other “frozen” animate entities. The deposition of beads made from stalactites would have provided one way of appropriating and re-contextualizing some of the power of these places.

Fossils, too, clearly elicited considerable interest when they were encountered. A pond barrow at Down Farm on Cranborne Chase in Dorset was sited so that its center point lay directly above a large, earth-fast ammonite (Martin Green, personal communication, 2013; figure 10.4). Occasionally, fossils were deliberately incorporated into flint artifacts during the knapping process. Barrow C44 at Driffield in East Yorkshire had been disturbed prior to excavation, but finds included a barbed-and-tanged arrowhead containing a fossil Terebratulid of a type that John Mortimer (1905:289) tells us is rarely found in this area; the maker of this object may have been responding to the particular visual and textural properties of this piece of flint.

Figure 10.4. Earth-fast ammonite at the center of the pond barrow at Down Farm. Courtesy, Martin Green.

The extent to which Early Bronze Age people worked, manipulated, or transformed fossils and similar objects is also worth considering. Often, they were used in their “natural” state; the fossil sea sponge (Porosphera globularis) from the middle ditch of a triple-ditch round barrow at Haynes Farm, Eyethorne, Kent, had a natural perforation to the center (Parfitt 2004), while the segments of crinoid stem that accompanied a cremation burial from a barrow at Chilcompton in Somerset formed naturally perforated cylinders that were probably used as beads (David Mullin and Jodie Lewis, personal communication, 2014). In these cases, the “natural” world produced items that resembled crafted objects. We cannot say how they were thought to have come into being, although they were perhaps considered to have been made by nonhuman others, such as spirits or ancestors. If so, then they may have been seen as possessing some of the powers of those beings, agentive qualities in some ways analogous to the curative and apotropaic properties thought to have been held by fossils in more recent times. During the Middle Ages, fossils were termed thunderstones, fairy loaves, snakestones, and devil’s toenails, among other things. In more recent times, folk traditions in many parts of northwest Europe view fossils as powerful artifacts that could prevent milk from turning sour, ensure that a child was not taken by fairies, or protect a home from lightning (Oakley 1965; McNamara 2007).

In other cases, fossils from Bronze Age contexts have been altered. The bead of fossil sponge from the inhumation burial near Minster in Kent (Anon. 2007) mentioned above had been polished, while the cremation burial of a child from Blake’s Firs, Easton Down, near Allington in Wiltshire was accompanied by two quoit-shaped beads of sandstone, one shale barrel bead, and a pierced fragment of belemnite (Ride 2001). The shells, teeth, and other “natural” items from the Langton grave described above were in some cases worked and pierced and in other cases left unmodified. In the Early Bronze Age, then, the boundary between naturally made and culturally made objects was hazy, if it was drawn at all; the “objects” of the natural world were not lacking in social meaning and agency but were part of dense networks of relational associations that gave them particular potency.

Echinoids and Accessory Cups

We now consider the relationship between “made” and “natural” objects in more detail, focusing in particular on artifacts that resemble fossils. The creation of fossil skeuomorphs hints that fossils themselves may have been considered crafted objects, fashioned by ancestors or other mythical beings in the past. Moreover, the skeuomorphic character of certain Early Bronze Age grave goods speaks of the significance of networks of meaning like those described above; the character of both persons and objects was constituted in relational terms. A skeuomorph is an artifact that has been made to resemble another. Skeuomorphs are usually crafted from different materials than the objects they mimic but retain visual references to structural or functional aspects of the originals. Such artifacts illuminate the ways humans strive to understand the world relative to objects and practices that are already familiar. The act of producing skeuomorphs may also have been thought to imbue those objects with the qualities and powers of other things. The similarities between the decorative schemes applied to Early Bronze Age funerary ceramics and basketry have long been recognized (e.g., Manby 1995), and flint copies of copper alloy daggers have also become a renewed focus of discussion in recent years (Frieman 2012).

Interestingly, similar relationships can be discerned between fossils and other categories of Early Bronze Age grave goods. Fossils procured from local chalk and flint deposits provided templates for skeuomorphic forms. There are, for example, remarkable formal similarities among fossil crinoid stems, segmented faience fusiform beads (Sheridan and Shortland 2003), and shale and jet disc beads. The crinoid from Preshute G1a was strikingly similar in shape and size to the shale beads with which it was found (Cunnington 1907:8–9). Such items may have been seen as beads fashioned by the ancestors; in northern England, crinoids were known as “St. Cuthbert’s beads” in the Middle Ages and were strung together to make rosaries (Lane and Ausich 2001). The use of faience to make skeuomorphs of crinoids is interesting. Sand—the main ingredient of faience—comes from the shoreline, much like shells, amber, jet, and shale. The production process for faience involves combining sand, fire, and water, a cosmogenic act that elides the cultural and natural worlds. It is possible that fossils were considered to have been crafted in a similar way in the mythical past by ancestors or other supernatural beings. By replicating that process and by wearing faience beads on the body, Bronze Age communities could harness the generative potential of a range of significant materials.

Other types of fossil skeuomorphs can also be identified. Nicholas Thomas (2005:26) draws our attention to a miniature cup from the central grave in barrow 2, Snail Down, Wiltshire. He suggests that this resembles in form and decoration the fossil sea urchin, or echinoid, Micraster coraginium, commonly found in the Upper Chalk geology. The vessel is a simple square-sided cup form decorated with pointed-tooth comb decorations (Longworth 2005:166). These form a series of linear decorations running vertically down the body of the pot and closely resemble the tuberceles of a fossil echinoid. Tuberceles are the sockets on the surface of the sea urchin that articulate with the spines. They are especially prominent in fossil specimens, as the spines are no longer in existence. These tuberceles cover the circumference of the sea urchin in a series of vertical lines radiating out from the peristome, or mouth, of the animal.

We find Thomas’s observation intriguing and would like to explore it further in relation to other examples of miniature cups found in Early Bronze Age mortuary contexts, specifically the peculiar variants known as “grape cups.” This class of vessel is decorated with a series of appliquéd balls with a grape-like appearance and is particularly common in regions dominated by Cretaceous Chalk geology. Firsthand analysis of examples in the Devizes Museum allowed us to examine in detail the manufacture of grape cups. Where the “grapes” had fallen out or been removed, it was possible to work out how these pots were decorated. The appliquéd balls were inserted into a series of small divots that cover the surface of the pot, creating the grape-like appearance. A good example is the vessel from Windmill Hill (Annable and Simpson 1964:nos. 234–35, 49). The articulation between the small holes on the surface and the balls of clay inserted into these holes is similar to the articulation between the tuberceles and spines of echinoids. Indeed, the appliquéd balls of clay covering the grape cups radiate over the surface of the pot in exactly the same way as the spines of a sea urchin (figure 10.5a and b). Given the common appearance of fossil sea urchins in the Upper Chalk geology and the fact that this is a particularly regional form of highly decorated miniature cup, it is possible that these fossils offered a template for the manufacture of the vessels.

Figure 10.5. Grape cup from Upton Lovell barrow G2e (photo Andrew Jones) alongside a drawing of an echinoid typical of the Purbeck Group of south-central England (Arkell 1947:fig. 29).

Such skeuomorphs highlight relationships of similarity; properties of materials were drawn on and modeled from one context to another (cf. Conneller 2013). The peculiar forms of fossils were mimicked in a range of materials, including clay and faience. The forms of fossils were also crafted and physically incorporated into other things—worked into beads and used as elements of composite necklaces or, at Down Farm, forming the earth-fast centerpiece of a pond barrow. Skeuomorphs underpin the relational and performative character of meaning making and underline the argument presented here that Early Bronze Age grave goods were not simply indices of wealth and prestige. Instead, these objects were relational agents within dense networks of meaning that highlight the permeability of the boundary between made and found objects and call into question any attempt to separate “culture” and “nature.”

Human-Fossil Relations in the British Early Bronze Age

What do these examples of the use of fossils in the British Early Bronze Age tell us about people’s relationships with the environment? Did they view them as specimens of extinct animal or plant species, as we do today, or as curious components of the underlying local geology? As Richard Bradley (1998) has previously pointed out, we cannot expect prehistoric peoples to have encountered natural specimens like fossils in the same way we do today, with detailed knowledge of science (geology); this understanding only began to emerge in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet Early Bronze Age metalworkers would have been familiar with the principle of casting. This process of rendering one material in the form of another is very similar to the formation of fossils. As casts of once-living things, fossils may have been perceived as crafted objects rather than natural specimens and for this reason may have been selected and incorporated into the lives of Bronze Age people.

Chantal Conneller (2011) offers an illuminating discussion of the working of fossils during the Magdalenian and Aurignacian periods of the French Upper Palaeolithic. At the Grotte de Trilobite, Arcy-sur-Cure, Yonne, France, trilobite fossils were pierced for suspension while a beetle-like form was also carved in stone, suggesting a material response to the forms of beetle-like trilobites. At the Grottes de Jaurias, Girone, and Isturitz, Basse-Pyrénées, France, there is evidence for the working of fossil bones of Halitherium (an extinct species of Eocene dugong). Conneller argues that these bones were procured and worked precisely because they were unusual and were recognized as the bones of a strange animal species. She suggests that during the Palaeolithic, fossils may have been viewed as spirit animals emerging from stone, emphasizing the mutability and animacy of what we consider to be an inert material; and she compares the use of fossils to the depiction of animals in cave art: “In cave art, animals were glimpsed in the process of trying to emerge and the act of painting intentionally brought them forth. Fossils, by contrast, lay hidden within the flint or chalk, and it was often the act of procurement or of flintknapping that would inadvertently reveal them” (Conneller 2011:98). The appearance of fossils and their resemblance to known phenomena seem to have been particularly important, for example, the formal similarities between trilobites and beetles; these properties of formal similarity seem to have been drawn upon during the Upper Palaeolithic. The extent to which fossils were recognized as similar in form to living marine animals in either the Palaeolithic or the Bronze Age is, of course, unknown but remains an intriguing question. However, the juxtaposition of Early Bronze Age fossils with bones, teeth, shells, and magical materials such as amber suggests that they may have been viewed as “things” with similar animate properties or with similar origins in once-living beings.

Barrows as Assemblages

We have considered particular grave groups as assemblages and emphasized parallels with North American practices of bundling (Pauketat 2013a; Zedeño 2008). While we are not arguing that there are precise and fixed parallels between our material and the practice of bundling as described by Timothy Pauketat and Maria Nieves Zedeño, we believe the principles of assembling and assemblage (commonly witnessed in bundle making) are worth further scrutiny in relation to the composition of Early Bronze Age barrows (see also Jones 2012:126–36 for a related argument).

Native American bundles were powerful because the potent materials they contained were gathered together and brought into relation with each other (Pauketat 2013a, 2013b; see also Chapman 2000). A similar argument can be made for the collections of materials from which barrows were built and of which fossils were a component in the British Early Bronze Age. In thinking about how these materials were assembled, it is important that we consider each element of the assemblage. As we remarked at the beginning of this chapter, traditional accounts have tended to define specific identities for the dead buried in Early Bronze Age barrows. Arguably, this is a legacy of antiquarian practices of barrow excavation that tended to focus on the burials themselves at the expense of the architecture of the barrow (Last 2007). A consequence of this is that the dead tend to be analytically cauterized from the barrows in which they are buried. This is mistaken. When we examine barrow assemblages without the shackles of Euro-American ontologies, we begin to realize that they are ontologically complex assemblages (Jones 2012, forthcoming ) composed of human and animal bone, chalk, earth, stone, turf, and a variety of other materials including fossils, each of which may have had specific meanings based on, for example, origin, color, or technical properties. From this perspective we might think of barrows as highly charged and architecturally complex assemblages.

In such a context, fossils take on a particular significance. They emerge from the earth and in this form might have been incorporated into barrow architecture. Smaller fossils might have been added to necklace assemblages, as their properties of color and shape resonated with other materials used in bead manufacture. In the most striking cases, fossil forms were drawn upon to make skeuomorphs in clay and faience. The Early Bronze Age person was ontologically entangled with and related to these curious elements of the earth, grounding the individual in the local geology, from which fossils were derived and the materials that made up barrows were excavated. Rather than “power dressing,” the various elements of the grave assemblage and the barrow situated the person in narratives of belonging and genealogy. In effect, the fossils allow the agency of the natural world to be enfolded within the personhood of the individual buried. In Pauketat’s (2013b) terms, these deposits are not only bundles of time but also of space.

Conclusion

Fossils are curious and powerful materials brought from the earth, inadvertently encountered while building earthen barrows, digging for flint, and during other projects. They were drawn upon to make skeuomorphs in clay and faience, they were deposited in assemblages of special objects, and they were one of a number of heterogeneous materials incorporated into barrows during (and sometimes after) their construction (see also Jones forthcoming). Fossils in these contexts are not simply worked but are worked into barrow construction. There is a family resemblance between skeuomorphism as a process and processes of physical incorporation during the Early Bronze Age, with fossils included as elements of necklaces and similar collections of special objects, added to the suite of objects with the burial, and incorporated in the physical makeup of barrow architecture itself. How and for what reason(s) were these physical properties articulated and incorporated together? We raise the possibility that the process of bronze casting and the formation of fossils share physical similarities, and both may have been viewed as crafted objects in and of the ancestral past. In each of these cases, fossils were not treated as symbols or symbolic equivalents; rather, they were drawn upon because of their physical properties, as physical equivalences.

The deposition of fossils in mortuary contexts allows us to counter anachronistic narratives that conjure Early Bronze Age burials as settings in which the expression of individual status and wealth was the primary concern. Such finds clearly cannot be described as prestige goods; nor were they particularly “exotic” or visually striking objects. Instead, they were a significant component of practices that involved the “bundling” of materials and things. We have noted that materials such as jet, amber, and quartz may have been assembled in these contexts because of their animate qualities and suggest here that this may also have been the case for the selective incorporation of fossils. These “natural” specimens were incorporated into assemblages at various different scales, from the intimacy of the grave itself to the architectural structure of the mortuary monument. The processes of juxtaposition, accumulation, and disjuncture located both the living and the dead in cosmological schemes that described the order of things in relational terms. The arrangement around the body of objects and materials that invoked different places and practices was part of a narrative that mapped the social world but also embedded the person in an assemblage of material agents. We argue these were animate material agents that played transformative roles in mortuary ritual, their particular qualities and powers drawn out in the practices of production and consumption in which humans and other beings were engaged. They speak of the social significance of the “natural” world and the grounding of social identity in place.

The shared properties of made and unmade objects indicate that generative potential was located not solely in the human realm; skeuomorphic relationships between fossils and artifacts such as faience beads and grape cups suggest that ontological distinctions were not framed in terms of “culture” versus “nature” but more in terms of the equivalence of forms. Indeed, the formation or “crafting” of objects such as fossils (perhaps in the ancestral past) and their reworking hints that the dichotomies that underpin the individualizing ideologies of the modern Western world—culture/nature, subject/object, animate/inanimate—did not form a recognizable element of Bronze Age cosmographies. Fossils are but one of many curious materials that demonstrate the potency of the natural world and hint at forms of personhood and ontology very different from those familiar from our own cultural context.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Peter Brück for information on the likely sources of the fossils discussed in this chapter and to Martin Green for the photograph of the ammonite at Down Farm. AMJ is particularly grateful to Paul Reilly, Louisa Minkin, and Ian Dawson for discussions about fossils and skeuomorphs.

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10 Finding Objects, Making Persons