047-120 section 2.qxd 6/21/05 4:18 PM Page 61 River Avon acts as conduit for the transformation from life to death, with the Stonehenge Avenue providing a route for ancestral initiates to move from the River Avon to the circle of the ancestors (Stonehenge). Oppositions between life and death are expressed in the deposition of ceramics, the range of material culture represented, and the metaphorical use of timber structures in the domain of the living but stone in the domain of the ancestors. The physical subdivision of the landscape during the third millennium BC is fairly well represented by several finds. Evidence of a fenceline in the form of a line of postholes was sealed below Shrewton G23 (Green and Rollo-Smith 1984, 281–5). A group of five postholes on a NNW–SSE alignment were found below the Woodhenge Circle 1 (Durrington 67) and may be interpreted as a possible fence (Cunnington 1929, plate 39; RCHM 1979, 23). A similar line of six postholes was found on the northern edge of the northern bank at Durrington Walls within the stripped road corridor, although their exact date, their relationship to the henge bank, and continuation to the northwest and southeast is a matter requiring further research (Wainwright and Longworth 1971, 15–16). All of these glimpses of what appear to be fragments of rather larger features suggest that by about 2000 BC parts at least of the Stonehenge Landscape were being formally divided up through the creation of physical boundaries. Some of these land divisions may be connected with an expansion of arable cultivation represented in the fill sequences of a number of ditches. At the Amesbury 42 long barrow changes in the mollusca populations and soil matrix suggest the onset of cultivation in levels associated with the presence of Beaker pottery (Entwistle in Richards 1990, 108). Below the neighbouring Amesbury G70 and G71 barrows there is evidence for pre-barrow cultivation in the form of rip-ard marks cutting into the chalk bedrock surface (Christie 1967, 347). The importance of these old ground surfaces preserved below round barrows of the second millennium BC can hardly be overestimated. Collectively, the Bronze Age round barrows in the Stonehenge Landscape preserve underneath their mounds the largest sample of late Neolithic ground surface within such a small region anywhere in England. Stray finds broadly datable to the third millennium BC have been found widely across the Stonehenge Landscape. These include 15 flint and stone axes, of which at least two of the stone examples are of Cornish origin and three of the flint examples are listed on the GIS database as ‘roughouts’. Rather surprising in view of the presence of early metalwork in graves is the apparent absence of early styles of copper or bronze axe as stray finds from the surrounding landscape. EARLY BRONZE AGE (2000–1500 BC) Early in the second millennium BC the styles of pottery, flintwork, and metalwork change fairly markedly in southern England, as too the form and use of funerary monuments and settlement sites. The circulation of Beaker pottery is over by about 1800 BC (Kinnes et al. 1991; Case 1995), its place in funerary contexts initially being overtaken by collared urns, food vessels, and cordoned urns, with various Wessex biconical urns and early forms of Deverel-Rimbury style urns following a few centuries later. Metalwork characteristically belongs to Burgess’ industrial Stages V–VII within his Overton and Bedd Branwen periods (1980, 80–131), Needham’s Period 3 and 4 (1996, 130–3). Map I shows the distribution of recorded sites and finds of the early second millennium BC. The early second millennium BC is synonymous with currency of the widely accepted Wessex Culture proposed originally by Stuart Piggott (1938; and cf. Piggott 1973d) to embrace the material culture of a series of richly furnished graves found widely across the chalklands of southern England and extending northwards into the upper Thames basin and the Cotswolds. Of the 100 Wessex Culture graves listed by Piggott (1938, 102–6), 35 lie within the Stonehenge Landscape, emphasizing something of the significance of the area. Originally seen as the result of an incursion by a dominant aristocracy from Brittany, the sequence, relationships, and distribution of the rich Wessex graves have been elaborated and reviewed by ApSimon (1954), Coles and Taylor (1971), Gerloff (1975), and Burgess (1980, 98–111) amongst others. Since the 1970s, increasing emphasis has been placed on the essentially indigenous character of the main body of archaeological material for the period with the proposal that the rather exceptional well-furnished burials ‘were the graves of the rich and powerful in each chiefdom’ (Burgess 1980, 99). Humphrey Case has argued for a high degree of continuity between Beaker-using communities and those responsible for the Wessex graves on the basis of finds from Wilsford 7 (Case 2003). Here, part of a Group B Beaker vessel appears to have been found alongside a primary series collared urn, the two vessels sharing some decorative motifs, especially criss-cross patterns and zonal lozenge and zonal herringbone motifs. Also accompanying the extended inhumation in the primary grave was an unspecified number of other objects including an accessory vessel (grape cup) and a group of beads and pendants made of gold sheet, amber, jet or shale, fossil encrinite, and perhaps other stone. The single most richly furnished and best-known Wessex Culture burial is that from Bush Barrow on Normanton Down to the southwest of Stonehenge (Illustration 39). This barrow was investigated by William Cunnington and Richard Colt Hoare in September 1808 to reveal the burial of an adult male set north–south on the floor of the barrow (Colt Hoare 1812, 202–4). Grave goods with this burial include: a bronze axe, two very large bronze daggers (one with gold nails in the haft), two quadrangular gold plates, one gold scabbard-mounting or belt-hook, the head and bone inlay of a sceptre, and other fragments of bronze and wood (Piggott 1938, 105; Ashbee 1960, 76–8; Annable and Simpson 1964, 45–6; Burgess 1980,101). The human remains appear to have been reburied at the site, and it is still far from certain that the burial examined was in fact the primary burial. The grave goods are widely regarded as representative of the early phase of the Wessex Culture (Wessex I), but absolute dates for any graves within the tradition are extremely sparse and it has long been held as a priority to improve this situation. Within the Stonehenge Landscape the only dated Wessex Culture grave is the cremation burial accompanied by a jet button and jet and amber beads from Amesbury G39 on the western slope of King Barrow Ridge. On typological grounds this would be assigned to the later 61
047-120 section 2.qxd 6/21/05 4:18 PM Page 62 Illustration 39 Bush Barrow. (top) The barrow in August 1993. (bottom left) Reconstruction of the main recorded burial. (bottom right) Grave goods from the main burial. [Photograph: Timothy Darvill; bottom left after Ashbee 1960, figure 24; bottom right after Annable and Simpson 1964, items 168–78.] 62
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