It is wonderful to have a thematic book on the Bronze Age in Britain and Ireland, and refreshing that it explores the relational generation of personhood. Joanna Brück's monograph is explicitly not a synthesis of cultural complexes or a discussion of chronological and typological developments, yet the rich evidence from the Bronze Age is covered in great detail in a format that is firstly thematic and secondly chronological. This book is a crystallisation of—and an extension beyond—Brück's inspiring work on the Bronze Age in Britain and Ireland over the last 25 years, and those familiar with her articles will not be surprised by the approach adopted in this superb volume.
Brück begins by blending a post-humanist emphasis on the importance of things and materials with an explicit emphasis on personhood. Challenging dualisms (particularly subject/object, self/other, culture/nature, sacred/profane), her book explores how making things and places in the Bronze Age also made people, society and worlds. Brück identifies recursive relations between activities in different domains, such as the interplay between metalworking and cremation, and highlights parallels in the life histories and transformations enacted on bodies, things and buildings. Regeneration following death is a recurrent theme in later periods, uniting in agriculture, bronze objects, settlements, middens, fields and the treatment of human remains. Human remains are a symbolic resource, often circulating among the world of the living, wrapped, contained, revisited and sometimes revealed. This Bronze Age is alive with gift exchanges between people and landscapes; it is an intimately experienced world, “an animate cosmos” (p. 223) of inalienable relations.
Brück does not apply a classificatory scheme for differing ontologies (qua Descola Reference Descola2013), and mentions of, for instance, totems or humans assuming animal characteristics are not associated with any specific anthropological definitions. Personhood and ontology are explored extensively—and brilliantly—through the material by detailed demonstration rather than construction of a grand interpretive scheme, and the book does not debate definitions of ontology nor comment much on comparative approaches to relational personhood and ontology. Rather, it explores the specific character of Bronze Age exchange, gender relations, personhood, rites of passage and cosmology largely through a lens of anthropological studies of non-industrialised non-Western societies. At times the characterisation of Western and non-Western concepts sounds too clear-cut: for example, the contrast drawn between individualising and relational personhood, or the argument that houses are “active elements in the constitution of the self” in non-industrial contexts rather than “passive settings for human action” in industrial societies (p. 161). But these are rare snags in the finely woven fabric of a nuanced approach to personhood and materiality: throughout the book, Brück makes it clear exactly which relations were fundamental to living in Bronze Age houses, or to being a person constituted through Bronze Age relationships, and there are incisive assessments of theoretical issues such as the problem with distinguishing commodity and gift economies. Brück's emphasis on relational personhood is highly effective in exposing the problem with inferring that social hierarchies and self-aggrandising elites and competitive individualism were the norm in Bronze Age communities. The book successfully presents a view of the period where relationships were more intimate, inalienable and diverse than previously inferred. There are excellent discussions of how abandoned Middle Bronze Age and Late Bronze Age houses received offerings similar to Early Bronze Age grave goods, of the interwoven lives of humans and animals, of everyday objects in graves, of shale bracelets broken during rites of passage, of the value of middens, among many other topics. As excellent as the book is, a more analytical discussion of variation in these relations over time and across space could have reached even greater heights, particularly in the concluding chapter. While an increasing tension between fragmentation and subdivision on the one hand and integration and boundedness on the other is discussed here, the conclusion focuses less on variation and change during the period than on general anthropological themes and ‘the end of the Bronze Age’. It explores contextual power relations and fluid personhood, cycles of exchanges, flows of substances recycled across generations, and regeneration following death, and makes a case for the importance of thinking about the Bronze Age as a distinctive period. But I would have liked to know more about what was different about the personhood of those wearing “regional costumes or objects […] that marked aspects of age or gender identity” at “large intercommunity gatherings” in the Late Bronze Age compared with those living in earlier centuries (pp. 162 & 212). What to make of distinctive practices such as Middle Bronze Age burials in field boundary ditches? If Early Bronze Age barrows integrated the wider landscape “while Middle and Late Bronze Age fields subdivided it” (p. 236), and if Early Bronze Age uses of place were ‘fluid’ while Middle Bronze Age houses were ‘single-generational’ and often had external hearths and Late Bronze Age settlements were ‘longer-lived’ aggregations of houses with central hearths, what differences in personhood, gender, ontology and power relations can be discerned?
If the book's strongly thematic large-scale approach sacrifices some detail in chronology, the same is true for regionality. Regional differences in settlement, field systems and barrow placements, for example, are discussed in relevant chapters, but the extent, scale and significance of regional variation is left in the background. For instance, the discussion of Early Bronze Age burial practices identifies a strong gendered distinction in bodily orientation in graves in north-east Scotland and eastern Yorkshire, but does not compare this with other regions (the pattern is only evident in around half of the contemporaneous burials in Northumberland, for instance). Brück acknowledges the price that is paid in chronological and regional detail by operating at this scale, and makes up for this by engaging thoroughly with example sites throughout. This approach has the advantage of highlighting the most evocative evidence, and Brück's interpretations of the cultural significance and effects of different practices are sure to be applied and re-evaluated in further site-specific, local and regional interpretations because they are so compelling. Even if the reader cannot always tell from the book how typical showcased burials are of local or regional traditions, the value of this approach lies in drawing together the diverse ways that mortuary features were revisited and remains were manipulated at the large scale. This draws attention to oversights in claiming that this period saw a rise in simply ‘individual burial’, and illustrates how we can better appreciate the relationships involved in interacting with the remains of the dead.
The book is beautifully written, highly detailed, thought-provoking and extremely up to date. It presents a fascinating account of the vibrant cultural worlds of the British and Irish Bronze Age, marshalling a wealth of case studies in presenting balanced, convincing arguments throughout. This is a richly textured book that I expect will stand the test of time; it is important reading for those interested in Bronze Age North-west Europe and for anyone seeking an excellent example of how to draw inferences about personhood and ontology from archaeological evidence.
