A Geography of Offerings: Deposits of Valuables in the Landscapes of Ancient Europe (Oxbow Insights in Archaeology)

More than quarter of a century ago Richard Bradley published The Passage of Arms. It was conceived as An Archaeological Analysis of Prehistoric Hoards and Votive Deposits, but, as the author concedes, these terms were too narrowly focused for the complex subject of deliberate deposition and the period covered too short. A Geography of Offerings has been written to provoke a reaction from archaeologists and has two main aims. The first is to move this kind of archaeology away from the minute study of ancient objects to a more ambitious analysis of ancient places and landscapes. The second is to recognize that problems of interpretation are not restricted to the pre-Roman period. Mesolithic finds have a place in this discussion, and so do those of the 1st millennium AD. Archaeologists studying individual periods confront with similar problems and the same debates are repeated within separate groups of scholars – but they arrive at different conclusions. Here, the author presents a review that brings these discussions together and extends across the entire sequence. Rather than offer a comprehensive survey, this is an extended essay about the strengths and weaknesses of current thinking regarding specialized deposits, which encompass both sacrificial deposits characterized by large quantities of animal and human bones and other collections which are dominated by finds of stone or metal artifacts. It considers current approaches and theory, the histories of individual artifacts and the landscape and physical context of the of places where they were deposited, the character of materials, the importance of animism and the character of ancient cosmologies.

Table of Contents

Chapter One Beginning again

Chapter Two A chapter of accidents
The Broadward hoard
The Mästermyr hoard
Reassessments
Bridges and troubled waters
Iron Age deposits at La Tène
Roman artefacts from the Rhine near Mainz
Reassessments
Literary sources
Ritual and non-ritual, religious and secular deposits
The ubiquity of water
Hidden in plain sight

Chapter Three Faultlines in contemporary research
Chronological faultlines
Controversy and uncertainty
The sources of confusion
Unfinished business
The next stage

Chapter Four Proportional representation
The variety of deposits
Excavations at two spring deposits
Excavations at other wetland deposits
Excavations at dryland deposits
A question of scale
A question of time
Summary

Chapter five The hoard as a still life
Pronkstillevens
Accumulations
Display
Summary and conclusions

Chapter Six The nature of things
Technologies and myths
Stone and metal
Metals

Chapter Seven A kind of regeneration
The final act
Whole and undamaged artefacts
Incomplete or damaged artefacts
Friendly fire
Fragmentation
Weights
Numbers
the last act

Chapter 8 Vanishing point
Sinking treasures
Giving and taking
Artefacts with attitude
Profiting from loss
Exquisite corpses

Chapter Nine A guide to strange places
Naming places
Going under
Going forward
Northern lights
Southern comforts
A note of caution

Chapter 10 Thresholds and transitions
Introduction
Bridges, fords and causeways
Other kinds of boundaries
River names and their associations
The character of water
The character of mountains
The earth compels
A final reflection