RICHARD BRADLEY. The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland. xviii+322 pages, 106 illustrations. 2007. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 978-0-521-61270-8 paperback £16.99 & $28.99; 978-0-521-84811-4 hardback £40 & $70.
RICHARD BRADLEY. The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland. xviii+322 pages, 106 illustrations. 2007. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 978-0-521-61270-8 paperback £16.99 & $28.99; 978-0-521-84811-4 hardback £40 & $70.
Review by Alasdair Whittle
School of History and Archaeology, Cardiff University, Wales, UK
I once saw a ten-minute version of War and Peace by two actors and one actress, their only prop a small cannon. The performance was hectic, one actor doubling as both Pierre and the whole Russian army, noisy (much use of the cannon), soon over, and great fun. It bore some resemblance to the original, but was obviously not the same as reading the great novel. Would a new prehistory of Britain and Ireland by Richard Bradley, ranging from the start of the Neolithic c. 4000 cal BC and ending after the Middle Iron Age c. 150 BC, and offering approximately, within the limits set by the publisher, two thousand words per century, offer a similar experience?
Four millennia of British and Irish prehistory are divided for working purposes into four not unfamiliar blocks: Early Neolithic, c. 4000-3300 cal BC; Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, c. 3300-1500 cal BC; Later Bronze Age (embracing the Middle and Late Bronze Age), c. 1500-800 cal BC; and the Early and Middle Iron Age (c. 800-150 BC). There are four main aims. First, Bradley sets out to provide even coverage of the whole of the two islands, avoiding excessive attention to the so far best known sites and regions, and importantly, incorporating results of recent contract or developer-funded archaeology, too many of which still lurk in the 'grey literature'. Secondly, he sets out to treat Britain and Ireland together, and to examine the relationships between them period by period, an approach, he claims, that has not found favour in recent times. Thirdly, the book is offered as 'an interpretation, not a manual' (p. 26), with the selected dominant themes being monuments, landscape and settlement. Finally, it is seen as 'a contribution to social archaeology', a bold attempt to get beyond description. How then does the performance of all this fare in just 322 pages?
The aim of even coverage is brilliantly met. Impressively well referenced and nicely illustrated (principally by Aaron Watson), the text is tautly written throughout: a model of concise prose. A plethora of sites - for earlier periods mainly monuments, for later times mostly settlements and landscapes - are discussed, and Bradley delivers what's on the tin, looking at all sorts of regions and not shirking from engaging with unglamorous sites like small ring ditches. The specific links to contract archaeology I found less clear over the whole book. This account comes after a major AHRC-funded project on the potential of the grey literature, a task carried out with the help of Tim Phillips and David Yates. In earlier chapters there are several specific references to the new contributions of contract archaeology, but perhaps the most telling one - that of early Neolithic houses in Ireland - is already well known through interim reports in the conventional literature; other examples are noted rather than documented more fully. There appears to be a greater contribution from contract archaeology to our understanding of later prehistoric land boundaries, droveways and settlements, though the text is often a little vague about this. It is to be fervently hoped that other, more detailed publications will fully record this fundamentally important attempt to make the most of vital sources of information.
The relationship between Britain and Ireland has in fact been constantly argued over in the specialist literature, period by period and topic by topic, but undoubtedly this is the first book-length treatment for a long time, and as such very welcome. There are also dangers in this approach. Compression can lead to simplification. While there is a bold attempt to differentiate Early Neolithic attitudes to the body in the two islands, chapter 2 ends by implying rather similar beginnings in both, which can be disputed. Because there is little explicit theorising in the book, we never discover quite what it means to track the relationships between these two offshore islands; there is little explicit discussion of the scale of prehistoric sociality in general, the networks extending from place to place, valley to valley, region to region, and so on beyond. And the account tails off in later prehistory, when the evidence for settlement in Ireland goes so cold.
Within his own selective terms, Bradley offers powerful interpretations. He hints strongly at colonisation as the prime mover in the start of the Neolithic, but with incomers outnumbered by locals; tracks the descent of monuments, fuelled by emulation among elites; follows the opening of the monumental sphere to wider audiences in the Late Neolithic and the restrictions of genealogies in the Early Bronze Age; and finally guides the reader through the complex, shifting histories of bronze supply and its eventual collapse, and of land-use and land-division in later prehistory. He is mostly inclined to buck the interpretive trend, as with colonisation at the beginning of the Neolithic, though for the Iron Age he sides with the newer view of hillforts as some kind of communal enterprise rather than defended elite residences, and for the Beaker period he envisages only a few people on the move. He is at his best when he takes more time: with Early Neolithic houses, the shift to big-scale, open monuments in the Late Neolithic, or open-field Iron Age agriculture.
As a contribution to social archaeology, the book offers only the rather vague language of groups, communities and elites. Agency is not a term discussed or used, and the scales of social interaction are left mostly unexplored. The daily taskscape is largely hidden from view, though we catch glimpses of it in the Iron Age; treatment of material culture is also intermittent. The chronological focus, within large blocks of time, is inclined to be fuzzy. The principal prime movers of change mooted are emulation and resistance. There is little consistent sense of values, worldviews or cosmologies, whether shared or disputed, though discussion of Neolithic houses and references to the past points usefully in this direction. These are some of the casualties of the limits within which the book was produced, since Bradley has written creatively and extensively about them elsewhere. Overall, this provocative book deserves to be widely read, and will stimulate much debate, but like Ten-Minute Tolstoy, it contains an uneasy struggle between form and content.
