European Journal of Archaeology

ISSN: 1461-9571 (Print) 1741-2722 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yeja20

Peter Clark, ed., Bronze Age Connections: Cultural

Contact in Prehistoric Europe

Anders AB Högberg

To cite this article: Anders AB Högberg (2011) Peter Clark, ed., Bronze Age Connections:
Cultural Contact in Prehistoric Europe, European Journal of Archaeology, 14:1-2, 304-306, DOI:
10.1179/eja.2011.14.1-2.304

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/eja.2011.14.1-2.304

Published online: 18 Jul 2013.

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 304
Peter Clark, ed., Bronze Age Connections: Cultural Contact in Prehistoric Europe (Oxford:
Oxbow Books, 2009, 188 pp., illustr., pbk, ISBN 978-1-84217-348-0)
In 1992, a Bronze Age boat was discov-
ered in the modern harbour of Dover, UK
(Clark 2004a). The find was a sensation –
an elaborately constructed sea-going boat,
3500 years old and excavated in one of the
busiest and most well-known northern
European ports of today. The Dover Bronze
Age Boat Trust (DBABT) was set up the
year after with the aim to protect, pre-
serve and conserve for the public benefit
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the Bronze Age boat. Today the boat is on
display at the Dover Museum.
In 2002, the DBABT organized the
first conference focusing on the Dover
boat (Clark 2004b) and in 2006 a second
conference was held, resulting in this
anthology, Bronze Age Connections. The
book consists of twelve chapters written
by thirteen authors. Just over half of the
authors are based in the UK, the others
in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and
the USA. In his introduction, Peter Clark
presents the Dover boat and the topics
discussed in the book, all to do with travel
and contacts across the English Channel
and the southern North Sea.
In chapter two, Stuart Needham estab-
lishes a theoretical framework by intro-
ducing the theoretical and analytical term
‘maritory’ (p. 15), a term which puts the
maritime environment and maritime
affairs within a broader cosmological
context. Needham raises interesting issues
about the maritime environment and mar-
itime affairs, placing travel, contacts, and
interaction within a broad cosmological
context. In doing so he gives the reader a
theoretical framework for the case studies
presented in the book.
Jean Bourgeois and Marc Talon discuss
how the development of recent preventive
archaeology and other collective research
in France and Flanders has re-allowed
European Journal of Archaeology 14 (1–2) 2011
archaeology to define and identify the cul-
tural attribution of Bronze Age popula-
tions from Normandy to Flanders and to
consider them as one and the same entity.
Proceeding from studies of metal, pottery,
architecture, evolution of settlements, and
the development of field systems to a dis-
cussion of funerary rituals, Bourgeois and
Talon show how it has become more and
more obvious that both areas were part of
the same cultural context.
Liesbeth Theunissen (misprinted as
Theumissen on p. 60) gives an histor-
ical overview of the Hilversum culture
concept from the 1950s up to the present
day. Although archaeological research
over the years has deconstructed and re-
evaluated the Hilversum culture concept,
Theunissen shows that it still stands as a
unique archaeological culture defined in
social terms, with its core in the southern
Netherlands and Flanders.
Michel Philippe discusses the Canche
in France as the place of a possible cross-
Channel port. Based on a presentation of
sites dating from the Neolithic to Roman
times, the coastal area is discussed as a
long-term permanent base for maritime
connections across the strait.
The sea in the longue durée is the
subject for Barry Cunliffe in a study of
maritime interactions between south-
eastern Britain and the Continent in the
late second and first millennia BC. Cun-
liffe shows that the sea was no obstacle
to movement; instead it facilitated and
encouraged contact. In the second millen-
nium a cultural similarity had developed
between communities facing each other
across the English Channel and southern
North Sea, interpreted by Cunliffe as the
result of intensive and sustained commu-
nication.
 Reviews
Simon Timberlake takes on the subject
on copper mining and metal production in
the Early Bronze Age. Presenting studies
on excavated prehistoric copper mines as
well as modern experiments on smelting
and copper production, Timberlake dis-
cusses early copper extraction, metal-
working traditions and technology, and
the distribution of the raw material.
Chris Butler’s contribution is an attempt
to explain thousands of years of complex
flint knapping and tool use within a ‘rise
and decline’ theoretical framework. Dis-
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cussing how flint technology has changed
from the Mesolithic to the Bronze Age
due to environmental and economic
driving forces, the text simplifies more
than it clarifies. Here I would have appre-
ciated a firmer editorial line.
In a study of the circulation of Bronze
Age metalwork between Britain and
Ireland on the one hand and the Neth-
erlands and Belgium on the other, David
Fontijn shows that most of the imports in
the Low Countries previously regarded
as British-Irish actually represent British
rather than Irish objects. Another result
from Fontijn’s study is that these imports
took the route through France, mixed
up with objects produced in France,
before ending up in the Netherlands
and Belgium. This leads Fontijn to the
interesting interpretation that the British
material actually might have been per-
ceived as a mix of objects coming from
the south, rather than from the British
Isles overseas.
In a contribution on thoughts on tech-
nology, materiality, and ideology, Mary
Helms presents an interpretation of a
skilled craft and ritual master behind the
creation of the Dover boat. The master,
and the boat that took shape under this
master’s direction, were, Helms suggests,
‘charged with bridging and making con-
nections with realms and regions beyond
or outside of local society proper; which
305
is to say with cosmological realms and
cosmological regions … representative of
more “distant” space and time’ (p. 157).
The boat created with the technological
and ritual skills of this master embodied
the cosmos of the society creating it.
In an exploration of the ritual of travel
in prehistoric Europe, Robert Van de
Noort puts the Bronze Age sewn-plank
boats in context. By investigating the
links between travel and its metaphor-
ical significance, Van de Noort comes
up with a number of assertions about
the function of the Bronze Age sewn-
plank boats. Referring to the work of
Mary Helms (1988), travel is interpreted
as a metaphorical way of reaching into
other worlds. The study shows how the
perception of this ‘reach into the “other
world”’ (p. 172) changed over time. By
approximately 1500 cal BC, travelling to
the ancestors had become a voyage of the
dead in the other world.
The well-known find of the so-called
‘Amesbury Archer’ is discussed by Andrew
Fitzpatrick in the book’s final chapter. Fitz-
patrick interprets the man known today as
the Amesbury Archer as one of those who
may have introduced Copper Age metal-
lurgy into Britain.
The anthology raises interesting issues
on influences, exchange, and the existence
of a cultural unity between people living
on either side of the English Channel and
southern North Sea. This is in line with
several on-going discussions of social and
cultural Bronze Age territories that tran-
scend modern-day national boundaries.
In this sense the book contributes to an
ongoing deconstruction of a European
archaeology bound by modern borders.
Therefore I consider the book’s sub-title
Cultural Contact in Prehistoric Europe some-
what misleading. I have read the studies
presented as much more than that, as a
presentation of research on more multifac-
eted contacts than merely cultural ones, and
 306
taking place not just in prehistory but in
the present as well. Nevertheless, the book
presents some fascinating and well-argued
case studies; it is interesting to read about
current research concerning the Dover
Bronze Age boat. Given the rarity of such
discoveries, the complexity of its construc-
tion in the Bronze Age, and the quality of
its preservation, the Dover boat is a key
resource for prehistoric maritime archae-
ology. This significance is done justice more
than adequately by the studies presented in
this book.
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Fulvia Lo Schiavo, James D. Muhly, Robert Maddin and Alessandra Giumlia-Mair, eds,
Oxhide Ingots in the Central Mediterranean (Biblioteca di Antichità Cipriote 8, Rome:
A. G. Leventis Foundation and CNR – Istituto di Studi sulle Civiltà dell’Egeo e del
Vicino Oriente, 2009, 519 pp., illus., CD, pbk, ISBN 88-87345-15-5)
The oxhide ingots of the Mediterranean are
one of the most interesting and remarkable
pieces of evidence for Bronze Age trade.
Those in the Central Mediterranean include
the earliest to have entered the archaeolog-
ical record, though since the fundamental
article of Hans-Günter Buchholz in 1959
they have been primarily associated with
the East Mediterranean. The first was dis-
covered in Sardinia in 1857, long before the
much better-known discoveries in Cyprus
and the Aegean, and was an object of some
puzzlement, though Giovanni Spano, who
published these first pieces from Serra
Ilixi, soon recognised that they were ingots
and not stelae or ritual objects. The excite-
ment of the discovery of first the Cape
Gelidonya shipwreck in 1958–9, and then
the Uluburun wreck in 1982, was followed
by the realisation that in terms of site
numbers, those on Sardinia were actually
the most numerous, even though the Sar-
dinian pieces themselves are mostly frag-
mentary. Together with the pieces from
Sicily, Corsica and southern France, which
European Journal of Archaeology 14 (1–2) 2011
References
Clark, P. (ed.), 2004a. The Dover Bronze Age
Boat. Swindon: English Heritage.
Clark, P. (ed.), 2004b. The Dover Boat in
Context: Society and Water Transport in Pre-
historic Europe. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Helms, M., 1988. Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic
Odyssey of Power, Knowledge and Geograph-
ical Distance. Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press.
Anders Högberg
Sydsvensk Arkeologi AB, Malmö, Sweden
together amount to only five sites, the Sar-
dinian ingots represent a remarkable corpus
of material that bears directly on the whole
question of the Bronze Age metals trade in
(and beyond) the Mediterranean.
The present volume is a most valu-
able addition to the literature on oxhide
ingots – one might even say the most
valuable since the publication of the Cape
Gelidonya shipwreck in 1967. Fulvia Lo
Schiavo has of course published catalogues
of the Sardinian ingots previously, but here
we are given the most up-to-date informa-
tion on their form and their context (where
it exists), along with previously unknown
or hard-to-find information on the ingots
from Corsica, Lipari and Sète. The Lipari
pieces, part of the Lipari hoard, are espe-
cially interesting and important, given the
situation of the Aeolian islands in terms
of Mediterranean contacts, and the hoard
itself is given additional treatment by Rosa
Maria Albanese Procelli and Alessandra
Giumlia-Mair. The volume as a whole,
though, is testament to the generosity of the