Object biographies

In September 1886, John and Richard Mortimer excavated a large barrow at Garton Slack, East Yorkshire (Mortimer 1905, 229). At the centre of the barrow lay the inhumation burial of a young adult male. A flint knife, a clay button, and two lumps of yellow ochre had been arranged behind his head; at his left hand were two quartz pebbles and fragments of two boar’s tusks, while the scapula of a pig had been laid on top of his ribs. One detail of this burial seems particularly alien to contemporary eyes, however. When the body had begun to decompose, his mandible was removed and placed carefully on his chest, and a miniature Food Vessel inserted into his mouth. Here, a pot replaced an element of the human self and the physical boundary between person and object was elided: the open mouths of both pot and body worked as channels through which relationships flowed in processes of communication and commensality. This chapter will explore the relationship between people and objects in the Bronze Age. The Bronze Age saw the introduction of new technologies, notably metalworking, which had a significant impact on concepts of personhood and identity. A greater diversity of materials was employed than in previous centuries, including visually striking substances such as amber and faience, while more ‘mundane’ materials such as bone were used to make a new and wider variety of objects, particularly during the later part of the period. Such objects were incorporated into new contexts too, notably settlements and burials, and our interpretation of these finds—especially those from burials and hoards—has had a significant impact on our understanding of the period. We will start by examining objects from Early Bronze Age contexts, focusing in particular on burials, before moving on to consider what technologies such as metalworking and cloth production can tell us about the construction of concepts of the self in the Middle and Late Bronze Age. During the early part of the period, artefacts such as copper-alloy daggers, bone pins, pottery vessels, and stone tools were buried with the dead.