Britain is internationally renowned for the high quality and exquisite crafting of its later prehistoric grave goods (c. 4000 BC to AD 43). Many of prehistoric Britain’s most impressive artefacts have come from graves. Interred with both inhumations and cremations, they provide some of the most durable and well-preserved insights into personal identity and the prehistoric life-course, yet they also speak of the care shown to the dead by the living, and of people’s relationships with ‘things’. Objects matter.
This book’s title is an intentional play on words. These are objects in burials; but they are also goods, material culture, that must be taken seriously. Within it, we outline the results of the first long-term, large-scale investigation into grave goods during this period, which enables a new level of understanding of mortuary practice and material culture throughout this major period of technological innovation and social transformation. Analysis is structured at a series of different scales, ranging from macro-scale patterning across Britain, to regional explorations of continuity and change, to site-specific histories of practice, to micro-scale analysis of specific graves and the individual objects (and people) within them. We bring these different scales of analysis together in the first ever book focusing specifically on objects and death in later prehistoric Britain.
Focusing on six key case study regions, the book innovatively synthesises antiquarian reports, research projects and developer funded excavations. At the same time, it also engages with, and develops, a number of recent theoretical trends within archaeology, including personhood, object biography and materiality, ensuring that it will be of relevance right across the discipline. Its subject matter will also resonate with those working in anthropology, sociology, museology and other areas where death, burial and the role of material culture in people’s lives are key contemporary issues.

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
  • 1.1. The rationale and scope of the Grave Goods project
  • 1.2. Grave matters: three preconceptions
  • 1.3. Research questions and methods: between large-scale datasets and ‘object biography’
  • 1.4. Results and outcomes
• 2. From ‘appurtenances of affectionate superstition’ to ‘vibrant assemblages’: an historiography of grave goods
  • 2.1. Introduction
  • 2.2. Early explorations: ‘lasting reliques’
  • 2.3. Antiquarian excavations: ‘All the treasures I could obtain’
  • 2.4. Typologies of things and people: social evolutionary approaches
  • 2.5. ‘Devoted to the dead’: the concept of material affection
  • 2.6. Pots as people? Grave goods and culture history
  • 2.7. Funerals and folklore
  • 2.8. Rank, status and power
  • 2.9. ‘Where only the heart is competent’: the impact of ethnography and mortuary sociology
  • 2.10. Relational, vibrant assemblages and kinwork
  • 2.11. Osteobiographies and object histories
  • 2.12. Discussion
• 3. Grave goods: the big picture
  • 3.1. The foundations of the project
  • 3.2. Grave goods in later prehistoric Britain: broad-scale patterning
  • 3.3. Discussion
• 4. What goes in a grave? Situating prehistoric grave goods in relation to the wider materials of life
  • 4.1. Introduction
  • 4.2. Previous approaches to material relationships between archaeological contexts
  • 4.3. Accessing the ‘living material repertoire’?
  • 4.4. Charting the ebb and flow of objects deposited in burials, hoards and settlements, 4000 BC–AD
  • 4.5. Relating burials, hoards and settlements: detailed case studies from Dorset and Kent
  • 4.6. Discussion
• 5. Small things, strong gestures: understated objects in prehistoric graves
  • 5.1. Introduction
  • 5.2. A context for understated grave goods
  • 5.3. Animal remain grave goods
  • 5.4. What is in a pebble? Another thing that only people who collect pebbles will understand
  • 5.5. Less is more: burials with just one thing
  • 5.6. Small sets and bundles
  • 5.7. Discussion
• 6. Performing pots: the most common grave good of all
  • 6.1. Introduction
  • 6.2. Pots in the Grave Goods database
  • 6.3. A potted summary: pots in graves from the Early Neolithic to the Late Iron Age
  • 6.4. New pots, old pots, fresh pots, used pots: vessels made for the moment and vessels with a biography
  • 6.5. Size matters
  • 6.6. The aesthetics of pots
  • 6.7. Positions, grouping and arrangement of pots in the grave
  • 6.8. Discussion
• 7. Material mobility: grave goods, place and geographical meaning
  • 7.1. Introduction
  • 7.2. ‘Exotic’ materials and mobility in prehistoric Europe
  • 7.3. Material mobility from the Neolithic to the Iron Age: a brief outline
  • 7.4. Grave goods and material mobility
  • 7.5. ‘Exotic’ materials
  • 7.6. Local materials
  • 7.7. Discussion
• 8. Time’s arrows: the complex temporalities of burial objects
  • 8.1. Introduction: time and burial
  • 8.2. ‘Multi-temporal’ mortuary material culture in the Neolithic
  • 8.3. Pyre goods, cremation and the temporalities of funerary process
  • 8.4. Living in the moment: cremation burials of the Late Iron Age
  • 8.5. Discussion
• 9. Discussion: grave choices in a material world
  • 9.1. Representing people and ideas
  • 9.2. Democratising grave goods and exploring conceptual boundaries
  • 9.3. Grave goods and the wider picture
• Appendix: objects recorded within the Grave Goods database
• Bibliography