Feasting networks and Resilience at the end of the British Bronze Age

Exploring how communities respond to economic and climatic crisis is key for enhancing understanding of resilience in the past and present. This project will explore responses to a deteriorating climate and trade collapse at the end of the Bronze Age in Britain. A major focus is the new social and economic networks that developed and how these made communities resilient in the face of turmoil. This will be achieved by employing a new suite of scientific methods to analyse the very rich, but understudied sites known as middens.

Around 800BC Europe suffered great upheaval as the climate deteriorated and economies collapsed, with bronze abruptly losing value. Like the 21st century economic crisis, this first millennium BC boom and bust caused great instability. In southern Britain, society did not shift focus to iron, but rather to agricultural intensification and grand-scale feasting; there was a 'Feasting Age' prior to the Iron Age. The remains of these feasts created some of the most startling archaeological sites ever unearthed. These 'middens' represent the very richest resource of material from British prehistory, some covering an area the size of several football pitches and producing hundreds of thousands of artefacts. These provide the key to understanding socio-economic change during this phase.

In spite of the rich archaeological resource and the importance of this transition in shaping society for centuries, we still know remarkably little. The most fundamental change was the breakdown in the bronze trade network, which had controlled the movement of people, ideas and artefacts for centuries. We know very little about the new social and economic networks that emerged and centred on these vast feasts, making society resilient at a time of instability and framing power relations and community interaction right up to the Roman conquest. They are key to understanding not only this transitional phase, but British later prehistory more broadly.

New research developments mean that the time is right to address these archaeological problems. Recent excavations have provided a wealth of material to address these issues. In addition, scientific advances mean that we can now establish patterns of human and animal movement with greater precision than was previously possible. Finally, there is a large body of material and a suite of scientific methods that can reconstruct the changing face of society in southern Britain and examine how it remained resilient in the face of economic and climatic deterioration.

The project will focus on six middens that date to the Bronze Age-Iron Age transition (c. 800BC-400BC) in two regions: Wiltshire and the Thames Valley. These areas were the epicentres of activity during this phase, hosting vast feasting events evidenced by rich material assemblages. These feasts were at the very centre of the dynamics of a changing society. They provide a focal point for community interaction, forging and consolidating new alliances. They are also the focus of new economic practices, representing hubs for the intensification and trade of agricultural produce. Therefore, using a suite of bioarchaeological techniques, the project will examine the new social and economic networks that developed and, using theoretical models, will examine how they made communities resilient in the face of adversity.

Multi-isotope analysis (strontium, sulphur, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen) will reveal where animals and humans came from and how agricultural production was maximised through different husbandry practices and landscape use. This will reconstruct the new inter-community networks and the organisation of the economy and agricultural production, thus revealing the strategies that made communities resilient. It will provide a key case study into responses to socio-economic collapse and will transform understanding of how change at the end of the Bronze Age shaped society in southern Britain for centuries.

The impact programme will enrich lives and transform perceptions and has three strands, varying in the number of beneficiaries and the potential scale of impact.

Military veterans: Ex-forces personnel will benefit from rehabilitation, skill development and employability through post-excavation analysis on material from East Chisenbury. The site is a visible mound on the MoD Salisbury Plain training area, well known to thousands of soldiers. Operation Nightingale (ON, run by CA Archaeologist of the Year 2019 R Osgood) and Breaking Ground Heritage (BGH, run by ex-Marine R Bennett) have run 5 seasons of excavation (2011-3, 2016-7) with veterans. The PI excavated/supervised bone processing in 2016-7. ON and BGH enable recovery pathways and skill development for ex-forces personnel through heritage work. They won the English Heritage award for best community action project (2016) and addressed the House of Lords All Party Group on heritage and wellbeing (2019). Veterans have progressed to archaeology degrees, to heritage employment or to use their new skills in other sectors. Veterans are strongly invested in the project and have expressed disappointment at not being involved in post-excavation, when more skills are developed and the site narrative is created. This will be addressed by engaging them in processing and scientific analysis of the material they excavated. The co-produced data will be key to the project outcomes. Successful co-production has been pioneered at Cardiff through the AHRC-funded CAER project (Times Higher Education 2017 award winner), on which the PI is the zooarchaeologist. It has been highly successful in benefiting communities and archaeological research, particularly with support from the AHRC Digital Transformations in Community Research Co-Production programme. This has invariably involved communities defined by location. This project will be pioneering in co-producing research from excavation to laboratory with a community of military veterans. BGH and Cardiff University BioArchaeology will sign a memorandum of understanding to train veterans for other ON projects (4-8 veterans per year), thus creating legacy benefits.

Military communities and the regional populace: Perceptions of prehistoric Wiltshire will be transformed among these groups through 9 engagement events across garrison town schools, community centres, young archaeologists' clubs and the Wiltshire Heritage Museum. The budget will not facilitate events in the Thames Valley, but funds will be sought to support this (e.g. Cardiff's Impact Fund). The programme will demonstrate the wide catchment Wiltshire has had for millennia, just as today (c. 20,000 military personnel and dependants). It will counter the misconception that Wiltshire is a county for 'local' people and inspire a sense of belonging for military families and pride in Wiltshire's diversity for the regional populace. It will also redress the great imbalance in how Wiltshire's prehistory is portrayed and perceived. Museums, popular books and the media have long provided a biased view, skewed towards eye-catching monuments and artefacts, from Neolithic henges to Early Bronze Age gold. Middens of the BA-IA transition are absent from the public consciousness, yet it was arguably when the region's importance was at its height. Most local people know nothing of these sites due to a lack of popular exposure.

Wider public: A tailored media strategy will engage wider audiences to maximise national impact and give this little-known phase the exposure it deserves. Middens and the vast feasts they hosted are overlooked in the narrative of Britain's past. This will be addressed through popular dissemination. Press releases will accompany the project's synthetic papers, articles will be submitted to popular magazines and a programme on prehistoric feasting will be pitched to Radio 4. This multi-pronged approach will help change public perceptions of prehistoric Britain.