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BRONZE AGE WORLDS

Bronze Age Worlds brings a new way of thinking about kinship to the task of
explaining the formation of social life in Bronze Age Britain and Ireland.
Britain and Ireland’s diverse landscapes and societies experienced varied
and profound transformations during the twenty-fifth to eighth centuries BC.
People’s lives were shaped by migrations, changing beliefs about death, making
and thinking with metals, and living in houses and field systems. This book of-
fers accounts of how these processes emerged from social life, from events, places
and landscapes, informed by a novel theory of kinship. Kinship was a rich and
inventive sphere of culture that incorporated biological relations but was not
determined by them. Kinship formed personhood and collective belonging, and
associated people with nonhuman beings, things and places. The differences in
kinship and kinwork across Ireland and Britain brought textures to social life and
the formation of Bronze Age worlds.
Bronze Age Worlds offers new perspectives to archaeologists and anthropol-
ogists interested in the place of kinship in Bronze Age societies and cultural
development.

Robert Johnston is a Senior Lecturer in Landscape Archaeology at the Univer-

sity of Sheffield. He has published articles and edited books on aspects of land-
scape archaeology and the later prehistory of Britain and northwest Europe. He
currently researches landscape transformations in western Britain.
BRONZE AGE WORLDS
A Social Prehistory of
Britain and Ireland

Robert Johnston
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Robert Johnston
The right of Robert Johnston to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-1-138-03787-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-03788-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-17763-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by codeMantra
For Anna and Florrie
CONTENTS

List of illustrations ix
Acknowledgements xiv

1 Introduction 1

PART I
Gifts 25

2 A patina of journeys: 2500–1700 BC 27

3 Dispersed lives: 2000–700 BC 75

PART II
Dwellings 131

4 Home ground: 2500–1200 BC 133

5 Living and gathering: 1400–700 BC 180

PART III
Landmarks 239

6 Enchanting places: 2500–1500 BC 241

viii Contents

7 Akin to land: 2200–700 BC 285

8 Conclusion: a social prehistory 347

Index 361
ILLUSTRATIONS

1.2 A small selection of the over 200 objects assembled at Dowris 4

1.3 Three crotals from Dowris 6
1.4 The bronze handled vessel found in boggy ground at
Corrymuckloch, Perthshire 8
2.1 Coll’s northern shore 28
2.2 An all-over-cord beaker that was excavated from a timber-
lined grave, along with fragments of two other beakers, at
Upper Largie, Argyll 30
2.3 The graves of the ‘Archer’ and ‘Companion’ at Amesbury, Wiltshire 33
2.4 The copper halberd with a surviving portion of its wooden
haft, which was excavated from a ring ditch near Trecastell, Powys 40
2.5 A slate die for making gold ‘sun discs’, recovered from
Hacketstown, County Waterford 43
2.6 Plans of the excavated cist cemeteries at Keenoge, County
Meath, and West Water, Peeblesshire 46
2.7 The vertical placements of burials at Chilbolton, Hampshire
and Gayhurst, Buckinghamshire 50
2.8 A plan of the burials within a barrow at Barnack, Cambridgeshire 51
2.9 The Banc Tynddol gold disc recovered from a probable grave
close to the Copa Hill copper mine, Ceredigion 54
2.10 A plan of the pit at Lockington, Leicestershire, containing a
copper dagger, gold armlets and fragments of beaker vessels 56
2.11 The wooden figure from Dagenham, Essex 57
2.12 The Middleton Moor spacer plate necklace excavated by Thomas
Bateman from a barrow near Arbor Low henge, Derbyshire 61
2.13 The setting and excavation of the cist at Start Oykel, Easter Ross 64
x Illustrations

3.1 The cist emerges from the peat on Whitehorse Hill, Dartmoor 75
3.2 The braided cattle-hair bracelet with tin studs from
Whitehorse Hill, after conservation 76
3.3 A ceramic vessel from an inhumation burial in a barrow near
Folkton, North Yorkshire 78
3.4 A bronze ring-headed dress pin from Collingbourne Ducis, Wiltshire 80
3.5 The segmented, quoit and star-shaped faience beads from
Findhorn, Moray 80
3.6 A plan of the burials within a cairn at Armadale Bay, Isle of Skye 82
3.7 Three phases of burials and elaboration of the cairn at
Poulawack, County Clare 84
3.8 Examples of barrow groups on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire 85
3.9 A plan of the cremation cemetery at Skilmafilly, Aberdeenshire 86
3.10 A section through one of the excavated barrows at Linga
Fiold, Mainland, Orkney 88
3.11 The lidded vase food vessel from Ballinchalla, County Mayo 90
3.12 A plan of the cremation cemetery at Templenoe,
County Tipperary 94
3.13 The largest cluster of cremation burials amongst the
funerary structures excavated at Eye Kettleby,
Leicestershire 96
3.14 The bronze shield recovered during peat-cutting near Moel
Hebog, Gwynedd 101
3.15 The gold ornaments, palstaves, chisel and ceramic vessel from
Burton, Wrexham 103
3.16 The funerary deposits within the ring ditch and enclosure at
Rathgall, County Wicklow 107
3.17 The broken objects from Glascoed, Gwent 114
3.18 Gold penannular bracelets and the decorated neck-ring from
Downpatrick, County Down 116
3.19 A view of the mortuary deposit at Cliffs End, Kent 118
4.1 Aileen Fox’s photographs of a stone being ‘trigged’ into
position during her excavations at Kestor, 1952 134
4.2 ‘House beautiful’ 135
4.3 The roundhouses at Stackpole Warren, Dyfed 137
4.4 A domestic structure associated with beaker ceramics
excavated at Graigueshoneen, County Waterford 138
4.5 ‘A miscellany of pits’ containing beaker and collared urn
pottery excavated at Godwin Ridge, Cambridgeshire 143
4.6 Burnt stone mounds and troughs distributed along a stream-
edge at Glan-r ŷd Bridge, Pembrokeshire 147
4.7 Aerial photograph of the ‘platform settlement’ at Lintshie
Gutter, Lanarkshire 152
 Illustrations xi

4.9 The low stone wall constructed around the infilled

roundhouse at Scarcewater, Cornwall 157
4.10 Plans of paired roundhouses within the settlements at Allt na
Fearna, Sutherland, and Yarnton Site 1, Oxfordshire 161
4.11 The concentric enclosures and roundhouses at Meyllteyrn
Uchaf, Gwynedd 162
4.12 Examples of enclosed roundhouse settlements on Dartmoor, Devon 167
4.13 Excavation plan of Redwick ‘Building 2’, Severn Estuary 169
5.1 Dún Aonghasa, on the south coast of Árainn 180
5.2 Plan of the Bronze Age domestic structures at Meadowend
Farm, Clackmannanshire 183
5.3 Plan of the tenth to ninth-century structures at Cassington,
Oxfordshire 185
5.4 A conjoined pair of Bronze Age houses at Links of Noltland,
Westray, Orkney 187
5.5 Two spatially separate examples of how pottery production
was organised within the settlement at Tinney’s Lane, Dorset 191
5.6 Pottery within a pit at Tinney’s Lane, Dorset, including
wasters, cup, and spindle whorl 192
5.7 A plan of the buildings at Jarlshof, Shetland, showing the
distribution of mould and crucible fragments 193
5.8 Excavation photograph during Alexander Curle’s excavations
at Jarlshof in 1932 194
5.9 Plans of eleventh to ninth-century BC enclosures from eastern
and midland Ireland 199

5.11 An aerial view of Clashanimud hilltop enclosure, County Cork 208

5.12 Features excavated within the inner bank at Clashanimud
hilltop enclosure, County Cork 209
5.13 Map showing the locations of Haughey’s Fort, King’s Stables
and the Tamlaght hoard 214
5.14 The bronze vessel from Arthog, Gwynedd 217
5.15 Two sections of the flesh-hook from Dunaverney, County Antrim 218

5.17 Two post-Deverel-Rimbury vessels: a polished carinated

bowl from Must Farm, Cambridgeshire, a coarseware jar from
Striplands Farm, Cambridgeshire 227
6.1 Silbury Hill, Wiltshire 245

6.4 A reconstruction of the timber circle (Holme I) at Holme-

next-the-Sea, Norfolk 251
xii Illustrations

6.6 Concentric circles of small standing stones at Beaghmore,

County Tyrone 255

6.10The recumbent stone circle at Loanhead of Daviot, Aberdeenshire 267

6.11Wigber Low, Derbyshire 269
6.12The two barrows excavated at Church Lawton, Cheshire 272
7.1 Bryn Cader Faner, Gwynedd: one of the monuments on Colin
Gresham’s ‘Ardudwy trackway’ 286
7.2 Uragh stone circle, Beara Peninsula, County Kerry 289
7.3 Excavation plan of Moel Goedog I ring cairn, Gwynedd 291

7.5 Excavation plan of the ring cairn at Brenig, Denbigh Moors 297
7.6 The cairnfield at Barnscar, Cumbria 300
7.7 The distribution of cairnfields amongst the fells south of
Eskdale, Cumbria 303
7.8 Plans of the roundhouse platforms, small cairns and fields at
Green Knowe, Peeblesshire, and Standrop Rigg, Northumberland 309
7.9 Aerial photograph of the cellular fields and roundhouses at
Leskernick, Bodmin Moor 311

7.11 Schematic map depicting the main areas of linear field systems
on Dartmoor 317
7.12 The transformation of the droveway and ditches at Elliot Site,
Fengate, Peterborough 320
7.13 Aerial photograph of the rectilinear fields on Horridge
Common, Dartmoor 325
7.14 A late Bronze Age linear boundary above Garron on the
Antrim Plateau 330

8.2 George Petrie’s painting of Dún Aonghasa, Árainn 355

 Illustrations xiii

Additional illustration and text credits

The image AP_2007_0095 Maeni Hirion is Crown copyright and is reproduced
with the permission of Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Mon-
uments of Wales (RCAHMW), under delegated authority from The Keeper of
Public Records.
Extract from Leigh, Margaret. 2018. Spade Among the Rushes. Birlinn Origin,
Edinburgh. Copyright © the Estate of Margaret Leigh. Reproduced with per-
mission of The Licensor through PLSclear.
Eighty-seven (87) words from Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom by Tim
Robinson (Penguin Books 2011) Copyright © Tim Robinson, 2011.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I benefited from the help and forbearance of many friends and colleagues dur-
ing the writing of this book. The Department of Archaeology, University of
Sheffield, provided me with time (two semesters of research leave), financial as-
sistance (towards the production of illustrations) and a collegiate environment
in which to work. I began writing the book in late 2016, when I had the good
fortune to spend a short period as a visiting researcher at the Department of
Archaeology, University College Dublin (UCD). Particular thanks to Graeme
Warren for welcoming me to UCD, and for guiding me to some of the anthro-
pological research that has influenced my thinking about kinship. It was while
in Dublin that I approached Routledge with a book proposal. I am grateful to
Matthew Gibbons at Routledge for the early encouragement and advice, and to
Katie Wakelin for her editorial support.
Anna Badcock, Neil Carlin, Anwen Cooper, Oliver Davis, Chris Dwan,
Duncan Garrow, Melanie Giles, Paul Halstead, Barry Heafield, Glynis Jones,
Emily La Trobe Bateman, Ben Roberts and John Roberts were all kind enough
to read and comment on drafts of chapters. Their suggestions were immensely
helpful, and I hope I have reflected at least some of their wise feedback in the
published text.
Rowan May (ArcHeritage) completed all the line drawings with her usual
thoroughness and to a tight deadline. Bill Bevan shared a selection of his splen-
did photographs of monuments in Britain and Ireland (billbevanphotography.
co.uk). John Wedgwood Clark and Julie Cruikshank permitted me to use quo-
tations from their publications. Individuals, archaeological companies, archives
and museums have kindly helped with images and permissions to reproduce
illustrations: Adam Gwilt and Kay Kays (National Museum of Wales); Andy
Jones (Cornwall Archaeological Unit); Ann Woodward; Billy O’Brien (Univer-
sity College Cork); Chris Chapman; Chris Evans, Andy Hall and Mark Knight
 Acknowledgements xv

(Cambridge Archaeological Unit); Clare McNamara (National Museum of

Ireland); Colchester Museums; Eva Bryant (Historic England Archive); Fraser
Hunter, Matt Knight and Maggie Wilson (National Museum of Scotland); Gary
Duckers (Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust); Gavin MacGregor (Northlight
Heritage); Hazel Moore (EASE Archaeology); Jamie Quartermaine (Oxford
Archaeology North); John Allan; Julie Curle; Kenny Brophy (University of
Glasgow); Lisa Brown (Wiltshire Museum); Lyn Wilson (Historic Environment
Scotland); Maria Medlycott (Essex County Council); Mark Gardiner (Univer-
sity of Lincoln); Martha Jasko-Lawrence (Museums Sheffield); Matt Brudenell
(Oxford Archaeology East); Nigel Blackamore (y Gaer Museum, Art Gallery,
Library—Brecon); Olivia Lelong; Penny Icke and Toby Driver (Royal Commis-
sion on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales); Pippa Bradley (Wessex
Archaeology); Sharon Webb and Aaron Watson (Kilmartin Museum); Stephen
Carter; Stephen Weir (National Museums NI); Thomas Cadbury (Royal Albert
Memorial Museum, Exeter); Wendy Mitchell (Tourism Ireland).
This book is dedicated to Anna and Florrie, my closest kin, and the ones who
have given the most so that I could complete the writing.
1
INTRODUCTION
Dowris

Two men dig—it is the 1820s, in an unremarkable potato field in the middle
of Ireland, close to the meeting of four townland boundaries on Lough Coura,
County Offaly (Figure 1.1). Their spades turn up some broken and greened
pieces of metal amongst the peaty earth. These first pieces give unexpected mo-
tivation to the men’s labours, and rapidly a few objects become ‘at least a horse-
load of gold-coloured bronze antiquities’ (Cooke 1847–1850, 424). The Dowris
hoard, as the collection is now known, is the largest assemblage of Bronze Age
metalwork from Ireland. The hoard comprises over 200 objects: swords and scab-
bard chapes, spearheads and a spear butt or butts, socketed axes and a hammer,
gouges, knives and razors, cauldrons and buckets, horns and crotals, along with
pieces of bronze and metalworking rubbing stones (Eogan 1983, 117–142). It was
deposited in the tenth or ninth century BC (Becker 2012).
Published accounts of the Dowris discovery appeared a few decades after the
event, with consequential divergences in reported facts and over its significance.
Rev. Dr Thomas Robinson, an eminent academic astronomer, presented his ac-
count based on information from the Earl of Rosse, who held portions of the
collection. Robinson placed the hoard in a cut-out bog where a Phoenician
‘travelling merchant’ had become stuck and forced to abandon his heavy load of
commodities (Robinson 1847–1850, 242). Thomas Cooke, Crown Solicitor for
County Offaly, claimed a first-hand account from one of the discoverers and,
locating the discovery on dry ground, reasoned that the objects were the remains
of a founder’s workshop:

In fine, the great quantity of things found, their variety, their being in an
unfinished as well as in a finished state, the amorphous mass of spare metal,
and the rub-stones, all tend to the conclusion that Dowris was the site of a
manufactory of bronze utensils.
(Cooke 1847–1850, 439)
2 Dowris

FIGURE 1.1 An extract from the 1840 First Edition Ordnance Survey 6 inch map for
County Offaly. The location of the Dowris find is marked with a star (in-
formation from Coles 1971). © Ordnance Survey Ireland/Government
of Ireland; Copyright Permit No. MP 0001620.
 Introduction 3

Robinson and Cook’s respective interpretations, the merchant’s misfortune and

the founder’s safe-keeping, made common-sense of a wonderous assemblage.

A closed assemblage
Around the same time as the Dowris discovery, the curator of the Museum of
Northern Antiquities in Copenhagen, Christian Thomsen, was classifying the
museum’s collection of artefacts into chronologically sequential groups defined
by the technologies of working stone, bronze and iron (Rowley-Conwy 2007).
The three-age system that Thomsen adopted was not a new idea. Lucretius, writ-
ing in the early first century BC, used the three ages to describe the development
of human culture, and the scheme was reasserted by French and Danish schol-
ars in the eighteenth century (Trigger 1989). The difference between these and
Christian Thomsen’s classification lay in the methodical way in which Thomsen
approached the problems he faced: stone, bronze and iron were not utilised at the
exclusion of one another, and there were many other materials, such as pottery,
gold and wood, that occurred either intermittently or throughout prehistory.
Thomsen began teasing these tangles apart by studying groups of objects that
were found together in ‘closed assemblages’ such as graves or hoards. By compar-
ing closed assemblages with one another, he was able to identify patterns in the
variability of particular styles of artefacts within each period, and make a strong
case for the integrity of the three-age model, which until then had been largely
hypothetical.
The Dowris hoard provided a valuable closed assemblage with which pre-
historians could apply Thomsen’s approach and construct classifications and
chronologies for the Bronze Age in Ireland and beyond (Figure 1.2). The term
‘closed’ was a misnomer, since the analysis required scholars to draw relations be-
tween the objects within the hoard and finds from elsewhere in Europe. Building
on a century of scholarship, George Eogan (1964) defined the Dowris Phase
through its metalwork styles and technologies, mainland European associations
and ways of life. He observed plentiful links between the bronze and gold objects
found in Ireland and examples from Britain, and northern and central Europe.
The Dowris bucket, on stylistic grounds, originated from southeastern Europe.
While some of the gold neck ornaments and sunflower pins found in other
Dowris-type assemblages, Eogan interpreted as Irish manifestations of southern
Scandinavian and German types.
However neatly woven Eogan’s account of the Irish later Bronze Age, he had
to accept that some threads lay looser around the edges of the pattern. Why was
the metal placed in the ground? Eogan could not easily distinguish between util-
itarian and spiritual purposes for hoarding, although he recognised the potential
overlap between ‘crisis and cults’ (Eogan 1964, 311).
When Robinson and Cooke wrote their conflicting accounts of the Dowris
discovery they appeared to at least agree on the utilitarian character of the hoard.
4 Dowris

FIGURE 1.2 A small selection of the over 200 objects assembled at Dowris: including
crotals, horns, swords, spearheads, axes and razors. © The Trustees of
the British Museum. All rights reserved.

It was either a travelling merchant or the remains of a metalworking workshop.

Vere Gordon Childe restated these same attributions a century later when he
distinguished between hoards hidden during times of unrest by bands of ‘trav-
elling tinkers’ or the remains of the ‘village smithy’ (Childe 1930, 45). George
Eogan was less confident that hoards could be entirely explained as collections of
objects hidden during periods of crisis, noting instead the ritual or cult functions
that might be responsible. Nevertheless, he remained supportive of Dowris as
a workshop (Eogan 1964, 311). The interpretative tide was turning, and a few
years later John Coles presented the variety and unusual character of the objects
found at Dowris as an accumulation of votive offerings in a sacred bog: ‘the
most convenient explanation of the objects from Dowris is that they represent a
central offering place’ (Coles 1971, 164). This idea was repeated and amplified in
subsequent writing (Becker 2013, 238; Cooney and Grogan 1994, 166; Gerloff
2010, 69), and Dowris has settled as one of the ‘unmarked natural locations in the
landscape … returned to for the enactment of ritual depositions over generations’
(Leonard 2014, 69).

Dowris as kinwork
There are a variety of reasons to question the interpretation of Dowris as a grad-
ual accumulation of offerings to a supernatural being. The designation of the
findspot as a bog is problematic, since it is largely dependent on whose account
 Introduction 5

you choose to believe. Thomas Cooke was especially clear on the matter, having
been led to the location by a witness to the original discovery:

the fact must be recorded that the Dowris relics were not found in what
can be properly denominated bog, but in the centre of a potato garden
extending down the slope of a rising ground between the paddock and the
moorland. A cock of hay has been left during the last winter between the
place of the finding and the bog, so little of wet or quagmire exists there
even now.
(Cooke 1847–1850, 435)

Unlike a river, a pool or a wetland, the bog-edge location would have made an
unlikely spot for repeated offerings. Tellingly the objects were evidently recov-
ered in a relatively tight group, given the short timeframe for their uncovering
and removal from the field. While this does not preclude their deposition in a
bog, it is less likely they were offerings made across years, decades or longer. By
comparison, the finds from the Bog of Cullen, County Tipperary, which are also
interpreted as an accumulative offering, were discovered during two centuries of
turf cutting throughout the bog (Eogan 1983, 154).
I am also struck by curious symmetries in the Dowris assemblage that are
difficult to interpret if the items accumulated over a long time period. There are
36 axes and 36 spearheads extant in museum collections, and the original esti-
mate is that there were 44 spearheads and 43 axes. Of the 48 crotals (pendants),
there are 20 with 12 neck ribs and 20 with 14 neck ribs. The fragments from
five swords could be allied with the four large spearheads. Of the sheet-bronze
vessels, there is one complete bucket and one complete cauldron. The horns are
of two distinct types. The types have separate geographical distributions, divided
between northeast and southwest Ireland. The single exception to this distribu-
tion is Dowris, where both types of horn were found together (Coles 1963).
These symmetries in the composition of the assemblage and the clustering of
the objects in one location mean that Dowris was, at a time and place, a gath-
ering of things and a gathering of persons. The spearheads and axes were the
most numerous items in the hoard, and they were likely to have been everyday
personal items—objects that people kept on their person. In support of this,
the axes and spearheads have quite similar proportions of complete and slightly
damaged examples. There is a logic to interpreting the 40 or so personal objects
as the contributions from an equivalent number of persons with the hoard. It is
a moot point whether or not the persons contributing axes and spearheads were
individually present at the depositional event or if the hoard represented a process
of collecting or gathering exchanges over time prior to deposition (e.g. Joy 2016).
In a gift economy, things are parts of the persons that exchanged them (‘things
and people assume the social form of persons’ (Strathern 1988, 145)), so the axes
and spearheads at Dowris were co-present with the human persons with whom
they were associated.
6 Dowris

Animals were also amongst the relations gathered by the hoard, and they were
present through some unusual objects: bronze horns and crotals. The graceful,
curving horns, of which over 90 survive from Ireland, mimicked instruments
made with cattle horns, which have not survived. John Coles (1963) classified
the horns based on the slenderness of their form, the presence and style of deco-
ration, and the ways in which they were played. The horns were used sufficiently
frequently to become damaged, with two-thirds showing evidence for repairs.
They were deposited in groups, up to 26 horns in the case of the Dowris hoard,
and always in bogs. (Dowris may be the exception, if it was a bog-edge setting.)
Coles (1965) suggested the horns formed an element in a wider ‘bull cult’ shared
between communities as widespread as southern Scandinavia and Iberia. His key
to linking this cult to Ireland was the 48 bronze crotals or pendants recovered
from the Dowris hoard (Figure 1.3). The crotals are spherical or pear-shaped,
hollow, and containing a small piece of bronze or stone, which rattles inside—or
a ‘feeble tinkling’ according to Thomas Cooke (1847–1850, 431). They have a
ring to enable them to be suspended, but few other clues to their function. To fit
with the idea of a bull cult, John Coles argued the crotal might symbolise a bull’s
scrotum and so represent the animal’s virility. John Waddell, while sceptical of
the evidence for a ‘bull cult’, suggests the crotals might have been worn around
the neck of a prize bull (Waddell 2010, 246), although the staples holding the sus-
pension rings are not especially strong (Werner and Maryon in Eogan 1983, 136).

FIGURE 1.3 Three crotals from Dowris. The larger examples are c. 120 mm in length.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.
 Introduction 7

A reading of the early medieval Irish epic Táin Bó Cuailnge may influence these
suggestions for the importance of the bull (Kinsella 1970). The stories centre on a
raid by the armies of Connacht to steal the brown bull of Cuailnge. It is a miscon-
ception to imagine the animal as though it was the winner at a modern agricultural
show. The bulls at the centre of the tales are begotten from two pig-herders who
served their respective kings of Connact and Munster. The herders cast malign
spells on each other’s pigs in a quarrel that leads them to take the forms of first birds,
then undersea creatures, stags, warriors, phantoms, dragons, maggots and, finally,
the white and brown bulls. The principal human hero of the tales, Cúchulainn,
is both human and otherworldly, and takes on multiple animal forms in his war-
fuelled furies. In an analysis of the stories, Erik Larsen (2003, 182) suggests of one
section that the ‘ease by which the writers oscillate from man to cattle … indicates
an identity ambivalent in its essence’. I am not using Táin Bó Cuailnge as an anal-
ogy for the tenth to ninth centuries BC, nor would I claim the stories have origins
in the Bronze Age. The tales illustrate how the boundaries between humanity and
animality may be porous: animals may act as humans, humans may act as animals.
Animals may have characteristics of intentionality and personhood comparable
with humans. Animals may be kin with humans. This brings a further category of
actor, and kinfolk, to the assembly of the Dowris hoard: animals, possibly cattle,
made present through the horns and crotals.

Assembling a world
If Dowris was partly a gathering of human and animal persons, it was also a
gathering of the things and places that themselves made assemblies. The intact
bucket and cauldron, both crafted from sheet bronze, were by virtue of their
size best suited to preparing and sharing drink and food amongst a large gath-
ering or long feasting event. Sabine Gerloff (2010, 64) estimates the capacity of
Bronze Age cauldrons at 30–40 litres. The form and decorative elements on
the base of the bucket are similar to examples from southeast Europe, and in
hoards and burials elsewhere the buckets are associated with cups used in serving
liquid from the vessels (Figure 1.4). The cauldron, on the other hand, is of an
Irish type, round-based and with handles. The cauldrons are believed to have
been suspended over a fire and used for cooking meat, with the contemporary
flesh-hooks providing the means of serving food from the vessels (Needham and
Bowman 2005). Both the Dowris vessels were well-used before deposition, with
evidence of repairs to the bucket (Eogan 1983, 129–130) and the replacement of
the cauldron’s base (Gerloff 2010, 69). Their long lives may also be indicated by
the period between their making and their deposition. Gerloff (1986) proposes
that the bucket was made towards the end of the second millennium BC, and
that the Tulnacross-type cauldrons (of which Dowris is an example) began being
deposited early in the first millennium BC. This makes the bronze vessels around
a century older than the other objects in the assemblage (Becker 2012), which is
conceivable given their wear and repair.
8 Dowris

FIGURE 1.4 The bronze-handled vessel found in boggy ground at Corrymuck-

loch, Perthshire. The vessel is 153 mm in diameter. Image © National
Museums Scotland.

The consensus amongst scholars is the cauldrons, flesh-hooks, buckets and

cups were the accoutrements for prestigious feasting customs that operated
throughout Atlantic Europe (Coombs 1975; Needham and Bowman 2005),
and which may have derived inspiration if not identical meanings from prac-
tices in central Europe and the eastern Mediterranean (Gerloff 1986, 107).
These feasts are imagined as exclusive affairs, either where a select and high
status few practised elite dining rituals or a chief (usually figured as male—
Brück 2019) distributed largesse upon his kinsfolk. These interpretations take
account of the distant associations of the feasting practices and the styles of
the feasting equipment. Distance equated with high social status, which was
individualised in a chief.
 Introduction 9

Inspired by Mary Helms’s writing (Helms 1988), Kristian Kristiansen and

Thomas Larsson explain how chiefs acquired their elevated status within Bronze
Age society:

Magical powers and heroic fame were gained through participating in dis-
tant travels and expeditions, where chiefs could meet and compete about
their skills, mythical stories and heroic deeds, and return with new knowl-
edge, skills and fame, and with esoteric goods to symbolise their social and
ritual standing.
(Kristiansen and Larsson 2005, 39)

A vertical scale plays a pivotal role in these accounts. The chiefly class, or ‘elites’,
at the top of the social hierarchy operated on a different spatial level to those at the
bottom of the hierarchy. Elites travelled long distances and, sometimes through
proxies, acquired objects and materials from outside their regions. People of
lower status were defined through their labours, and the animals, grain and local
resources they contributed to the wealth of chiefdoms. Within this framework,
there were dependencies between high social status, inter-regional travel and
exchange, and rare materials or objects. Earle and Kristiansen (2010) present a
vivid contrast between the closed nature of the local and the open nature of the
distant. The local is conceived as something static and inward looking: ‘archae-
ologists should leave the safe harbours and homesteads of local processual and
contextual studies and enter the roads and seaways that were travelled numerous
times during the Bronze Age and beyond’ (Kristiansen and Larsson 2005, 369).
The cauldrons and buckets from Dowris are large vessels that could provide
for tens of participants in a feast. They also had long lives, outlasting any single
individual within a community. That does not preclude them being prestigious
and distantly connected objects. It does mean that in their lives they enabled
the formation of a great many relations as the sources of the drink and food
that bonded persons together at gatherings. These gatherings offered a variety
of means for making and sustaining relations. Rather than placing the agency
for these occasions with ‘chiefs’, I would suggest we interpret the vessels as the
creators of the relations that were made during collective feasting events. As par-
ticipants in these events, the vessels were in kinship with the human participants.
Like the human participants, the vessels’ relations stretched out geographically
and through time by virtue of their long biographies.
The Dowris hoard was created through exchanges between kin and with
a place. Persons were present in the hoard through their weapons, tools, and
perhaps also in the contributions of their craft. Animal kin participated through
the horns and crotals, which were more than representations of animals—they
brought essences of the cattle to the assemblage. The collective practices of kin-
ship were present in the feasting equipment, which included a complete bucket
and a complete cauldron, alongside further fragments of vessels. The assembly
was also defined by the place itself. Dowris is less than 10 kilometres east from
10 Dowris

the River Shannon, Ireland’s longest river, and the location that would later take
on political significance as the confluence of three of Ireland’s four provinces. Yet
the hoard was not placed in or by the river. The participants gathered at a bog-
edge location, topographically indistinct, in a landscape otherwise empty of late
Bronze Age activity. This marginality played an important role in facilitating
kinwork—the practices that made and sustained kinship. All the participants may
have recognised shared kinship before the assembly of the hoard. My preferred
interpretation is that the hoard was an assembling of existing and new kin rela-
tions. The hoard made kin with a place: an assembly of relations that was made
by and made a place in the Irish landscape.
This is not a critique of the idea of distance or an attempt to localise and close-
down the Bronze Age. The point I am making is that the local was shaped by
the distant, and the distant was constituted from the local. This seems to favour
a flatter and relational conception of scale. It is one in which the local and the
distant mutually constitute one another, rather than representing separate, hier-
archically organised and perhaps contrary realities. Doreen Massey (1993) argued
against the conceptualisation of places as easily determinable, bounded and spa-
tial. She conceived of places as intersections in the networks of relations between
people and things in space that transform and ‘flow’ with time.
Sallie Marston and colleagues (2005) draw inspiration from Doreen Massey
in their theoretical critique of scale. They argue that their academic field, human
geography, should dispense with scale altogether and adopt a ‘flat ontology’. At-
tempts to conceive of scales relationally in horizontal terms, or as hybrids of hori-
zontal and vertical, cannot escape from the fundamental hierarchies and intrinsic
inequalities of concepts such as global and local, macro and micro:

social practices are cordoned off in their respective localities (or even
homes), thereby eviscerating agency at one end of the hierarchy in fa-
vour of such terms as ‘global capitalism’, ‘international political economy’,
‘larger scale forces’ and ‘national social formations’, while reserving for the
lower rungs examples meant to illustrate the ‘unique manifestations’ of
these processes in terms of local outcomes and actions, such as ‘the daily
sphere of the local’, ‘the urban as the scale of experience’ and ‘the smaller
scale of the local’.
(Marston et al. 2005, 421)

Discarding a scale requires less rather than more vocabulary. Terms like place and
landscape, body and home, region and world can all apply in the same domains of
social life. Human experiences may be said to be ‘scale-insensitive’, what Marilyn
Strathern (2000, 53) refers to as the ‘extensibility of the environment’: ‘values re-
tain their relationships…and thus their significance, across different domains of
life regardless of the dimensions of an event’. Throughout this book I will work
from the position that places like Dowris are of a particular time and place, and
simultaneously of accumulated times and places. We can address social orders in
 Introduction 11

all forms through the study of places and localities. Worlds were the accumulated
webs of practices and orders that humans made and inhabited through social
life—‘a knot in motion’ (Haraway 2003, 6). Worlding, as Marisol de la Cadena
(2015, 291 n4) explains it: ‘is the practice of creating relations of life in a place
and the place itself ’.

A social prehistory
My interpretation of the Dowris metalwork emphasises the relations that brought
the assemblage into being. I use the terms ‘kinship’ and ‘kinwork’ to describe
the relations and the activities that made them. I did not place hard boundaries
between the humans, animals and things that composed the Dowris assemblage.
With the remainder of this chapter I will present an argument for the approach to
kinship that guides the book’s narrative. I begin with my use of the adjective ‘so-
cial’ in the book’s title. Why not simply ‘prehistory’ (cf. Webmoor and Witmore
2008)? Social directs attention to the associations that emerge as humans inhabit
their worlds. These associations make persons, create collectives, and bring lives
and meanings to things, places and events. My approach is influenced by Bruno
Latour’s (2005) ‘sociology of associations’. Latour argues that research should begin
with the proposition we do not know what the social is made from. Researching
social life involves a slow process of identifying the participants and following
the associations. This approach differs from methods that claim to know from
the beginning ‘roughly what the social world is made of ’ (Latour 2005, 160). If the
social is too closely constrained within models and categories, then we (researchers,
prehistorians) in turn constrain our capacities to recognise diversity and difference.
We struggle with recognising our mistranslations, gaps in knowledge and the in-
compatibilities of our theories. The categories used to describe social life occupy
and determine the beginning, the middle and the end of the inquiries.
In accounts of Bronze Age societies, social life is often composed with the-
ories about group and individual identities that exist independently of the ma-
terial evidence from the past. Prehistories begin with households, families,
lineages, clans, chiefdoms and polities already in mind. Individuals become pres-
ent through their roles as warriors and wives, farmers, miners, shamans, smiths,
chiefs and adventurers. Prehistorians use these identities, and the concepts they
represent, for different reasons. The personal and collective identities populate
a coherent framework for writing about society. They bring explanatory power
to material that is difficult to comprehend because of its immense distance from
our present-day experiences and worldviews. They connect our present with a
Bronze Age past using familiar language. Often enough we shortcut the task of
describing social life by using terms that are ready to hand: ‘elite’, both as noun
and adjective, is one such shortcut. The language and the concepts carry many
assumptions that constrain our narratives.
A model of society and pre-defined identifiers are not necessary for research-
ing past social life. Some archaeologists have worked steadily and effectively to
12 Dowris

introduce new ways of thinking that undermine the assumptions we bring as

modern humans encountering ancient material culture (as with Brück 2019;
Conneller 2012; Lucas 2012). These empirical and theoretical investigations
question the separations of rituals from everyday practices, people from environ-
ments and things, experience from meaning. They share a critique of the binary
categorisations of the world that seem intrinsic to modern worldviews. Amongst
the catalysts are relational ways of thinking that describe worlds as assemblages
(DeLanda 2006), actor-networks (Latour 2005), meshworks (Ingold 2011), en-
tanglements (Hodder 2012) and ontologies (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017). These
ideas appear in different guises, whether non-representational theory, assemblage
theory, new materialism or the ‘ontological turn’. Their influence on archaeology
is well documented (Hamilakis and Jones 2017; Harris and Cipolla 2017; Jervis
2019). Whatever the metaphors, styles and distinctions, the common framework
can be defined broadly as relational.
Thinking through relations (or associations) allows social life to remain com-
plicated, ephemeral and messy (Law 2004), while offering a means of tracing the
formation and significances of persons, ideas and institutions. It acknowledges
flow, and offers means (the connector, association or line) that temporarily holds
participants (whether human or not) in place and for their relative locations to
be mapped. It decentres humans, so that they remain part of although never en-
tirely in control of, or makers of, the worlds they inhabit. In Theodore Schatzki’s
(2002, 123) words:

Social life transpires through human activity and is caught up in orders of

people, artefacts, organisms, and things. As such, it is not just immersed
in a mesh of practices and orders, but also exists only as so entangled. The
mesh of practices and orders is the site where social life takes place.

A relational approach accounts for the infinite ways in which things, places and
persons may be constituted, while offering a method for describing and com-
paring. It brings multiple ways of configuring how humanity and nature are
constituted (Strathern 1988; Viveiros de Castro 2015).
Relational approaches have met with plentiful criticism. They do not offer
a theory of the world, rather they provide methods for building theories about
worlds. They appear better at describing than explaining. Their specificities can
lead to close engagements with practices and things, while wider observations
about regularities in how social life is organised are absent. But the descrip-
tions, however geographically or historically defined, can appear similar to one
another. An example is the ‘dividual’ person, conceived in Hindu Indian and
Melanesian ethnographies (Marriott 1976; Strathern 1988), deftly and imagina-
tively applied to the interpretation of early Bronze Age burials (Brück 2006) and
subsequently becoming the consensus about the formation of personhood in the
British Bronze Age. An approach (a relational study of personhood) evolves into
a theory (persons are divisible) and then an instance (Bronze Age persons were
 Introduction 13

dividual), without sufficient disruption and qualification from the observations

prehistorians make about material culture (Sørensen 2010).
Decentring humans within social life returns symmetry in the relations be-
tween people and things (Henare et al. 2005) recognises the influences and vi-
brancies of materials (Bennett 2010), and disperses agency (the capacity to act
intentionally) across collectives. This exercise plays to archaeology’s strengths
in attending to and understanding things and substances. Unlike anthropology,
where humans are subjects of enquiry and co-participants in research, people’s
voices and much of their presence are absent from prehistoric research. It might
well be asked whether a ‘return to things’ means much in an academic field that
cannot move for things. Prehistorians were criticised for giving things undue
priority in social processes long before object biographies and vibrant matter
were in vogue. John Barrett (2016) identifies what he terms ‘a new antiquari-
anism’ in archaeology’s ontological turn or its ‘return to things’. He challenges
the claim that description is sufficient. By emphasising the descriptions of assem-
blages, relational approaches have exorcised depth and humanness from narra-
tives of prehistory. There is similarity here with Paolo Heywood’s entreaty for
relational approaches to be purposeful. To mean anything distinctive, relational
studies have to be clear about what they wish to achieve (Heywood 2018, 233).
In this book I follow a relational approach to composing the synthesis.
Relations connected people with one another, with objects, and with sub-
stances, places, animals and beings from other worlds. I describe things, ar-
chitectures and places emerging and acting in relation with humans. While
seeking to retain a relational approach within the synthesis, I am mindful of
the criticisms I outlined earlier. How do I retain an attention on humanity in
a prehistory of associations? Are there ways to give priority to certain kinds
of associations, and therefore bring a theoretical discrimination to the process
of synthesis? How do I identify and represent the depth and persistence of
certain relations through time?

Kinship and the genealogical method

My response to the questions I pose above is to situate kinship at the core of this
book’s narratives. I regard kinship as a distinct form of relation, and kinwork as
a distinct practice of relating. The distinctions that elevate kinship from other
forms of relatedness are in degrees of intensity and mutuality. Following Marshall
Sahlins (2013), I define kinship as a ‘mutuality of being’, or what Stasch (2009,
129) calls an ‘intersubjective belonging’. Kinship describes the close relations and
practices of relating that constitute humans as persons and groups. These rela-
tions include those generated through procreation and established through the
many varied acts of naming, co-presence, gift exchange and sharing substances
that have been documented amongst societies worldwide.
This definition moves away from the genealogical method that dominated
kinship studies for much of the twentieth century. A biological theory of kinship,
14 Dowris

or the genealogical method, gave primacy to the relations of birth (nature) onto
which categories and systems (culture) were then applied: ‘the elements of the
physical pattern are essentially simple and universal, whilst the social patterns
imposed on it are highly diversified and complex’ (Gellner 1960, 193). For socie-
ties without state-structures, kinship provided the basis for the political economy
and the genealogical method mapped kinship and the organisation of authority.
This enabled societal organisation to be comprehended in its entirety through
levels and degrees of connection and separation, which in diagrammatic form
had ‘the sterile austerity of an electrical circuit board’ (Ingold 2007, 111) or ‘a to-
tality present in simultaneity’ (Bourdieu 1977, 38). Prehistorians benefited from
the societal models that emerged from anthropology’s obsession with kinship.
It may not have been possible to ‘dig up a kinship system’ as Gosden (1999, 4)
characterised Lewis Binford’s (1962, 218) position on the matter. However, it was
possible to apply principles derived from anthropology to the interpretation of
archaeological material (Ellison 1981; Rowlands 1980).
The biological theory of kinship was transformed through accumulated eth-
nographic studies and anthropological critiques during the later decades of the
twentieth century. A key shift came in new conceptualisations of nature and
culture, which challenged the binary relationship that underpinned the gene-
alogical method. In her ethnography written while researching the Hagen in
Papua New Guinea, Marilyn Strathern (1980) argues that the strict dualistic pat-
tern of male:wild female:tamed is not a universal structural principle to which all
humans adhered. The concepts of nature and culture, so fundamental to modern
European thought, are contingent on who as well as where they are applied.
David Schneider (1984) directed a similar critique at the idea of kinship and an-
thropology’s reliance on kinship. Schneider argued that the priority given to bi-
ological relations represented a Western assumption about the primacy of sexual
reproduction. He observed that the genealogical method will always find kinship
structures at the core of small-scale political economies because it starts with the
categories of relation already pre-formed: ‘The genealogical method cannot but
confirm that genealogical relations constitute the basis of the notions of related-
ness in all societies’ (Holy 1996, 146).
The anthropology of kinship gradually emerged from this critique in different
forms and with a more diverse theoretical literature. A form of the traditional, ge-
nealogical method persisted or ‘metamorphized’ (Godelier 2011). Domains that
had earlier taken prominence in kinship studies found new expressions in studies
of personhood and domestic life (Busby 1997; Joyce and Gillespie 2000). The
impacts of new reproductive technologies on sexual relationships, families and
communities formed a further focus for attention (Bamford 2007). Archaeologists
have contributed to the reconceptualising of kinship through their contribu-
tions on personhood and houses (Casella and Fowler 2006; González-Ruibal
and Ruiz-Gálvez 2016), and in shaping discussions around the deep history of
kinship structures (Ensor 2011; Trautmann et al. 2011).
 Introduction 15

Biomolecular and genetic analyses can now define the biological relatedness
of ancient human remains with remarkable precision. The power of these meth-
ods and richness of the data offers potential for reconstructing biological relat-
edness across populations and between individuals. Palaeogenetics borrows its
terms for relatedness from anthropology: patrilineal, matrilineal, lineage, clan
and so on (Sánchez-Quinto et al. 2019; Zeng et al. 2018). Its network diagrams
representing genetic diversity and connectedness parallel those produced from
ethnographic studies. Palaeogenetic research is ‘big science’: in the amount of
funding, in the size of datasets and in the ambition and appeal of the explana-
tions it presents about the past. The disciplinary conventions, ambition and status
of science require publication of short-form papers in a handful of prestigious
journals. These formats leave no space for longer, contextual expositions on ei-
ther the archaeological evidence or theories of relatedness, mobility and culture
(Booth 2019, 593). The risk is that reductive historical narratives are heard most
clearly within academic and public contexts. And that kinship returns to being
a synonym for biological relatedness, and all the theoretical ‘heavy-lifting’ of
recent decades is over-shadowed by a more widely heard genealogical method.

Kinship in five premises

Several reasons emerge for foregrounding kinship in my synthesis of Bronze Age
Ireland and Britain. Kinship prioritises certain kinds of associations, and brings a
theoretical discrimination and explanatory power to a relational synthesis. Kin-
ship places the emphasis on humanity and humanness in a prehistory of associa-
tions. The transformation, or reinvention, of kinship theory during the last two
decades has broadened the realms and practices of kinship. It now informs and is
informed by broadly relational approaches that share considerable ground with
archaeological theorising. This forms part of a wider rebalancing in what might
be called an asymmetry in the relations between archaeological and anthropo-
logical theory (Yarrow 2010).
A different asymmetry is emerging in kinship research, this time between the
life and social sciences. Biomolecular and genetic analyses now define the biolog-
ical relatedness of ancient human remains with extraordinary precision. Bioar-
chaeology and palaeogenetics are applying methods that ‘excavate’ kinship. The
risk is that we take this literally, and the biological relations identified through
palaeogenetic analysis become kinship facts, around which we then fashion an
interpretative culture. The response must be to keep the dialogue open between
the fields within the natural and social sciences, and focus on the means, theoret-
ical and empirical, for integrating accounts of social life ( Johnson 2019; Johnson
and Paul 2016; Nash 2018). Explanations will be reductive where this integration
fails to account for advancements of social theory and biological science.
I embed kinship and kinwork throughout this book’s narratives. Kinship is
the lens through which I view the task of writing a social prehistory of Bronze
16 Dowris

Age Britain and Ireland. Kinship describes the close relations and practices of re-
lating that constitute humans as persons and groups. The distinctions that define
kinship from other forms of relating are in degrees of intensity, mutuality and
belonging. I will close this theoretical discussion by describing the scope of my
relational theory of kinship in five premises.
Kinship creates personhood and collective belonging. Kinship is both a constituent
of persons and networks of persons. Kinsfolk are ‘persons who belong to one
another, who are parts of one another, who are co-present in each other, whose
lives are joined and interdependent’ (Sahlins 2013, 21). In this respect, kinship
is much the same as a partible theory of personhood: persons are the ‘plural
and composite site of the relationships that produced them’ (Strathern 1988, 13).
Persons embody their kin relations, and those relations comprise the myriad
ways in which persons participate in others’ lives. Kinship is a transpersonal way
of belonging. Kinship is ‘intrinsic to the person, but also capable of overcoming
the boundedness of particular bodies and persons’ (Carsten 2004, 107). In Alan
Rumsey’s (2000) study of the pronoun ‘I’ in Polynesia and Melanesia, he ob-
served that a speaker can use ‘I’ in reference to a variety of social configurations,
including themselves, their kin group or an ancestor. Kinship provides a means
of going beyond the constitution of persons, and considers the formulation of
groups, places, ancestries and so forth. It represents the different ways that people
belong: to one another, to places and to histories.
Kinship associates people with nonhuman beings, things and landscapes. Kin may be
animals; supernatural entities; and persons, things and places. Peoples may de-
scribe their descent from gods and seek kinship with ancestral beings. In Maori
sagas, humans share descent with a variety of other beings: from flies and whales
to trees and canoes ( Johansen 1954). Kinship is created through gift exchange,
with gifts taking on the roles of persons or parts of persons existing within gifts
(Gregory 2015). Exchange extends the distances across which kinship may be
maintained, with things participating in the formation and maintenance of
kinship alongside and as parts of persons.

Perhaps the most serious of the many weaknesses of [kinship] diagrams …

is that they only include people: occasionally a god or an ancestor-turned-
animal may be admitted as a quasi-human circle or triangle, but only on
the condition that we recognise them as quasi-kin. There is no symbol for a
spring, river, mountain, mist or whale. In divorcing the humanity from the
materiality of kinship, these charts reinforce an understanding of kinship
as ultimately transcendent when what we should be seeking is a deeper un-
derstanding of the ways in which the humanity and materiality of kinship
are implicated in each other’s emergence.
(Sissons 2013, 373)

The multiple ways in which animals were incorporated alongside humans in

Bronze Age funerary assemblages illustrate how these relations could be assembled
 Introduction 17

(Brück 2019). Land and places played their parts: ‘the land is very much alive and
enters directly into the constitution (generation) of persons’ (Leach 2003, 30).
During the Bronze Age, kinmaking with living places can be recognised by the
deposition of metalwork as votive offerings and the persistence of landmarking
with monuments and boundaries.
Kinship is historically constituted, territorialised and codified. Kinship has structural
attributes by virtue of its persistence through time, culture, materiality and be-
ings: whether in language, habits, rituals, houses, things and bodies. DeLanda
(2006) uses the terms territorialisation and codification to describe the ways that
assemblages stabilise, consolidate and constrain social life. These processes are
properties of the assemblages and not external structures that impose an order
from without. Territorialisation and codification offer expressions of the ‘depth’
or historical conditions that Barrett (2016) argues are lacking from relational ap-
proaches in archaeology. ‘Descent’ has been used to describe the way that some
forms of kinship can accumulate through time, endure across generations and
stretch into mythic time. Descent may distinguish kinship that is reproduced in
political and public practices, rather than in the co-presences of daily life. The
linear arrangements of barrows built during the nineteenth and eighteenth cen-
turies BC provide an example of how the material conditions for lines of descent
were created and mobilised in the legitimation of authority.
Kinship is made through the sharing of substances and presences. A biological theory
of kinship essentialises sexual reproduction and the affinal relations (through in-
stitutions like marriage) that enable reproduction. Other relations are recognised
within a biological theory as either fictive or lying outside the proper domain
of kinship. A relational theory of kinship accommodates kinmaking through
the sharing of substances, including though not exclusively through procreation:
human blood, milk, bone, food and soil can all contribute. Kin may share the
same bones (Bloch 1992, 75), consume one another’s flesh (Fausto 2007) or be
made in the meals cooked from a shared hearth (Carsten 1997). Francesca Merlan
and Alan Rumsey (1991, 43) describe how the Ku Waru (New Guinea) derive
their kinship from the soil, which contains kopong, the matter that gives life to
all beings: ‘a kind of nutritive substance, whether extracted directly from the gar-
dens, channelled through man’s reproductive organs, woman’s breast, or stored
and consumed in the flesh of a pig’. A sharing of substances may be equated with
co-presences of bodies and in spaces. Kinship emerges from a mutuality of exist-
ence and the affectivity that emanates from proximities—‘to live with kin is life
itself ’ (Gow 1991, 119). Janet Carsten (2004, 35) writes that the ‘qualitative den-
sity of experiences’ is what makes houses important for kinmaking. The times
spent in one another’s presence, sharing knowledge, labour, food and nurture,
contribute to the affective qualities of kinship.
Kinship is creative, performative and political. Kinship can be unstable and need
work to sustain it. Mark Nuttall (2000) describes how Greenlanders choose many
of their kin according to circumstance. Naming plays a key part in this process,
with a shift from using personal to kin names providing the means of framing
18 Dowris

particular associations as kin-based. Obligations and rights constrain the fluid-

ity of these relations; they are flexible, not formless. Stefano Boni (2010) drew
similar conclusions from his study of funeral ledgers in the Akan area of West
Africa. Funeral offerings are a means of making and severing kinship, although
it is not a process of unconstrained invention. Norms and sanctions control cre-
ativity. Kinship may be core to destructive and contestable relations (Sahlins
2013, 53–57). Marriage exchanges within exogamous societies create inequali-
ties between the affinal groups, for which bride-wealth and dowry may operate
as recompense. Descent and inheritance create opportunities for theft as well as
gift (Lambek 2011). The arenas for creating powerful kin during the Bronze Age
varied through time, and from the personal to the collective: in lavish funerary
offerings, intimate and rare gifts to gods, the labours gathered at monuments and
hilltop enclosures and the violence of raids and inter-personal conflict.
The five premises map a relational approach to kinship: collective belonging,
plurality of relations, historical, commensal and creative. They constitute kinship
but they do not determine how it is manifest in particular settings. If kin relations
connect different domains of life and life’s many participants, human and otherwise,
then, Marshall Sahlins (2013) contends, kinship is cultural not biological relatedness.
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro phrases this same idea in a different way when describ-
ing the formation of kinship in Amazonia: ‘kinship is what you have when you “do
without” a biological theory of relationality’ (Viveiros de Castro 2009, 241). This
broader conceptualisation of kinship is worth defending as new methods sharpen the
potential of biological relations. If we break from a genealogical model, then different
dimensions become possible within kinship. Kinwork maps out some of the varia-
tions in how persons, groups, things and places are constituted.

Gifts, Dwellings, Landmarks

This book brings kinship to the task of explaining the formation of social life in
Bronze Age Britain and Ireland. The book divides into three parts, each com-
prised of two chapters: Gifts, Dwellings and Landmarks. These are convenient
compartments within which to organise the narrative. Gifts, Dwellings and
Landmarks are distinguishable and closely connected aspects of past social life.
The parts are ordered chronologically so that they present independent historical
narratives. I have not used established schemes for organising the Bronze Age,
whether the quadripartite system (Chalcolithic, Early, Middle and Late Bronze
Age) or periodisations based on artefacts. In their place, I have followed cen-
tennial, and occasionally decadal where available, timescales, which are more
sensitive to the different resolutions of archaeological chronologies and histor-
ical processes. A calendrical framework can better accommodate the different
rhythms, resolutions and asynchronies of change. As a consequence of these
asynchronies and the different precisions within archaeological timescales, the
paired chapters within each part are divided at different times during the Bronze
Age and with differing degrees of overlap.
 Introduction 19

Part I, Gifts, examines human mortuary rites and the deposition of metalwork
and other valued objects in the landscape. These were the practices through
which persons and things were exchanged within and between worlds. Prehisto-
rians have recognised similarities and differences in the ways things and people
were treated at the ends of their lives. The differences depended on the exclu-
sion of certain types of objects from one domain (axes were absent from human
burials) compared with another (axes were frequently left in unmarked places
throughout the landscape). Similarities are recognisable in the ways that things
were treated as persons (carefully arranged for burial within a barrow or cairn)
and humans were transformed and used like other materials (when cremated
bone was used as votive offerings within settlements). Gifts, with the dead and
in the landscape, were important and creative kinwork. They were exchanges
amongst persons and with supernatural beings, and they offer glimpses of how
kinship was constituted through time. The chapters’ chronological sequence is
divided at around the time that cremation returned as a widespread practice
throughout Britain and Ireland, which occurred during the twentieth to eight-
eenth centuries BC.
In Part II, Dwellings, I consider the archaeological remains of domestic life. I
discuss the changing architecture of house and of settlements, the ways that daily
life left traces in places even when people did not live in durable buildings and
the rituals that took place within domestic settings. Settlements were the places
where people shared meals and shared their lives. The accumulations of food
waste, pottery and burnt stone within settlements are evidence for the intensities,
durations and richness of inhabitation. Settlements were places where some of
the deepest bonds of kinship were formed. They hosted large gatherings and se-
lective feasts, and provided the stages for performing life-cycle rites. The distinc-
tions were blurred between these practices and the depositional events I discuss
in Part I. The chapters in Dwellings overlap by two centuries and are divided
at around the time that settlements took on more powerful and intense roles in
social life, during the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC. The overlap between
the chapters is around two centuries, and it could have been more. Settlements
were long-lived, and it is difficult to establish archaeological chronologies from
the accumulated residues of everyday life.
The chapters in Part III, Landmarks, are concerned with the different ways
that people’s relations with land and sky shaped the places of Bronze Age Brit-
ain and Ireland. Landmarking includes a breadth of building and ritual prac-
tices, encompassing barrows, cairns and circles, rock art, cairnfields and field
systems. These were places where people’s labours and performances made kin
between themselves and other selves who inhabited a living land and vibrant sky.
Changes in landmarking mattered because they were part of how persons and
kindred were constituted. The practices defined in Gifts and in Dwellings are
blended throughout Landmarks: in the mortuary deposits within monuments,
and in the shared labours involved in creating hilltop enclosures. The chapters in
Landmarks overlap across seven centuries during 2200–1500 BC. The narrative
20 Dowris

dismantles the categorical barriers that prehistorians have placed between mon-
umental and agricultural landscapes. The animate land remained an important
aspect of kinship throughout the Bronze Age, even if the associations and the
practices of kinmaking changed.
I conclude the book by reviewing the long-term processes that transformed
social life during the twenty-fifth to eighth centuries BC. Kinship was not a
stable category within social life. Kin were made from blends of processes that
we define as biological and cultural. The early centuries of the Bronze Age were
characterised by a fluidity of kin relations that absorbed unfamiliar populations
and cultures into social life. Localisation describes the process through which
people increasingly belonged to landscapes and places. This occurred alongside
and shaped the growing distinctions between regions in Ireland and Britain. A
gradual empowerment of domestic life occurred as houses replaced monuments
as landmarks. The performative and public aspects of kinmaking were founded
on relations with the supernatural, in personal and communal rituals, and in
acts of raiding, collective labour and feasting. The differences in kinwork across
Ireland and Britain brought textures to social life and the formation of Bronze
Age worlds.

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PART I
Gifts
2
A PATINA OF JOURNEYS
2500–1700 BC

Early autumn 1976 brought a storm to the island of Coll, on Scotland’s west
coast (Figure 2.1). The winds whipped through the sands below Cnoc Mór, near
Sorisdale, shifting the dunes and exposing human bones and an adjacent arc of
stones (Richie and Crawford 1977/1978). The stones formed a low wall that was
probably the edge of a domestic structure. There were floor deposits within the
arc of stones; a midden containing coarse pottery and limpet shells had accumu-
lated outside. The bones lay within a grave dug through the midden and marked
with an upright stone.
The grave contained a slightly built, young woman and parts of a small ce-
ramic vessel: an all-over-cord beaker, which was decorated and shaped in a sim-
ilar style to vessels from the Middle Rhine region, western Germany (Needham
2005, 179). A calibrated radiocarbon measurement on a sample of the woman’s
bone placed her death during the twenty-fourth or twenty-third century BC
( Jay et al. 2019, 54). This date is amongst the earliest for burials accompanied
by beakers in Britain. Strontium isotopic analysis on one of the woman’s teeth
showed that she spent her early childhood outside the region of gneiss bedrock
and calcareous sands where she was buried (Montgomery et al. 2019, 395). She
may have grown up in eastern Ireland, eastern England or mainland northern
and western Europe. Her genetic ancestry predominantly lay to the east, origi-
nating from populations in the Eurasian steppe (Olalde et al. 2018).
The circumstances of the woman’s burial at Sorisdale and her biography and
ancestry mean it is likely she travelled from the western European lowlands to
Britain. She participated in cultural and population changes that began in the
late decades of the twenty-fifth century BC and eventually affected all of Britain
and Ireland. And she is one of very few ‘first-generation migrants’ that have been
recognised amongst the individuals buried during the twenty-fourth century BC
in Britain.
28 Gifts

FIGURE 2.1 Coll’s northern shore: the beaker-accompanied burial was uncovered
amongst dunes close to the beach on the lower right side of the photo-
graph. © Crown copyright: HES.

As compelling as the woman’s biography and journey might be, there is more
to say about her kinship and her place in Coll’s landscape. The excavators did not
find the woman’s bones in anatomical order: the bones of her right arm lay be-
low her pelvis; her femora were correctly aligned yet rotated by 180 degrees; the
majority of her hand and feet bones had not survived or were missing from the
grave (Richie and Crawford 1977/1978, 76). The beaker was incomplete too. It
lacked its base, and roughly half the body was missing. The grave may have been
revisited, the bones moved and reordered and sherds removed from the beaker.
Alternatively, the woman’s bones and a large fragment of pot were carried from
another location and re-interred within a midden, by a house. The redeposited
bones were laid, without too much precision, in the shape of a body. The pit’s
unusual key-hole shape might have reflected the need to create a space like a
body in which the bones could be arranged.
The reordering and reburial of the woman’s bones at Sorisdale represented
a performance that differed from the mortuary rites undertaken immediately
after her death. Following her death, her body and identities were transformed
during rites of passage and incorporation. At Sorisdale, the woman’s bones were
uncovered, collected and moved. They became an offering within a midden, and
a means of connecting living and dead kin with a contemporary settlement. A
connection between the midden and the burial can be made because the pottery
sherds found within the midden were also beaker, although of coarser fabric than
the burial beaker and undecorated. Like the mortuary deposit, the midden was
also assembled from fragments of former lives. These fragments were created
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ascertained to be the case by observation; the observations being
made by Captain Hewett, then employed in a survey of that sea.

Cotidal Lines supply, as I conceive, a good and simple method of

representing the progress and connection of littoral tides. But to draw
cotidal lines across oceans, is a very precarious mode of
representing the facts, except we had much more knowledge on the
subject than we at present possess. In the Phil. Trans. for 1848, I
have resumed the subject of the Tides of the Pacific; and I have
there expressed my opinion, that while the littoral tides are produced
by progressive waves, the oceanic tides are more of the nature of
stationary undulations.

But many points of this kind might be decided, and our knowledge
on this subject might be brought to a condition of completeness, if a
ship or ships were sent expressly to follow the phenomena of the
Tides from point to point, as the observations themselves might
suggest a course. Till this is done, our knowledge cannot be
completed. Detached and casual observations, made aliud agendo,
can never carry us much beyond the point where we at present are.

Double Stars.

Sir John Herschel’s work, referred to in the History (2d Ed.) as

then about to appear, was published in 1847. 57 In this work, besides
a vast amount of valuable observations and reasonings on other
subjects 564 (as Nebulæ, the Magnitude of Stars, and the like), the
orbits of several double stars are computed by the aid of the new
observations. But Sir John Herschel’s conviction on the point in
question, the operation of the Newtonian law of gravitation in the
region of the stars, is expressed perhaps more clearly in another
work which he published in 1849. 58 He there speaks of Double
Stars, and especially of gamma Virginis, the one which has been
most assiduously watched, and has offered phenomena of the
greatest interest. 59 He then finds that the two components of this
star revolve round each other in a period of 182 years; and says that
the elements of the calculated orbit represent the whole series of
recorded observations, comprising an angular movement of nearly
nine-tenths of a complete circuit, both in angle and distance, with a
degree of exactness fully equal to that of observation itself. “No
doubt can therefore,” he adds, “remain as to the prevalence in this
remote system of the Newtonian Law of Gravitation.”
57 Results of Astronomical Observations made during the years
1834, 5, 6, 7, 8, at the Cape of Good Hope, being the completion
of a Telescopic Survey of the whole Surface of the visible
Heavens commenced in 1825.

58 Outlines of Astronomy.

59 Out. 844.

Yet M. Yvon de Villarceau has endeavored to show 60 that this

conclusion, however probable, is not yet proved. He holds, even for
the Double Stars, which have been most observed, the observations
are only equivalent to seven or eight really distinct data, and that
seven data are not sufficient to determine that an ellipse is described
according to the Newtonian law. Without going into the details of this
reasoning, I may remark, that the more rapid relative angular motion
of the components of a Double Star when they are more near each
other, proves, as is allowed on all hands, that they revolve under the
influence of a mutual attractive force, obeying the Keplerian Law of
Areas. But that, whether this force follows the law of the inverse
square or some other law, can hardly have been rigorously proved
as yet, we may easily conceive, when we recollect the manner in
which that law was proved for the Solar System. It was by means of
an error of eight minutes, observed by Tycho, that Kepler was
enabled, as he justly boasted, to reform the scheme of the Solar
System,—to show, that is, that the planetary orbits are ellipses with
the sun in the focus. Now, the observations of Double Stars cannot
pretend to such accuracy as this; and therefore the Keplerian
theorem cannot, as yet, have been fully demonstrated from those
observations. But when we know 565 that Double Stars are held
together by a central force, to prove that this force follows a different
law from the only law which has hitherto been found to obtain in the
universe, and which obtains between all the known masses of the
universe, would require very clear and distinct evidence, of which
astronomers have as yet seen no trace.
60 Connaissance des Temps, for 1852; published in 1849.
 CHAPTER VI.

Sect. 1. Instruments.—2. Clocks.

I Narepage 473, I have described the manner in which astronomers

able to observe the transit of a star, and other astronomical
phenomena, to the exactness of a tenth of a second of time. The
mode of observation there described implies that the observer at the
moment of observation compares the impressions of the eye and of
the ear. Now it is found that the habit which the observer must form
of doing this operates differently in different observers, so that one
observer notes the same fact as happening a fraction of a second
earlier or later than another observer does; and this in every case.
Thus, using the term equation, as we use it in Astronomy, to express
a correction by which we get regularity from irregularity, there is a
personal equation belonging to this mode of observation, showing
that it is liable to error. Can this error be got rid of?

It is at any rate much diminished by a method of observation

recently introduced into observatories, and first practised in America.
The essential feature of this mode of observation consists in
combining the impression of sight with that of touch, instead of with
that of hearing. The observer at the moment of observation presses
with his finger so as to make a mark on a machine which by its
motion measures time with great accuracy and on a large scale; and
thus small intervals of time are made visible.

A universal, though not a necessary, part of this machinery, as

hitherto adopted, is, that a galvanic circuit has been employed in
conveying the impression from the finger to the part where time is
measured and marked. The facility with which galvanic wires can 566
thus lead the impression by any path to any distance, and increase
its force in any degree, has led to this combination, and almost
identification, of observation by touch with its record by galvanism.

The method having been first used by Mr. Bond at Cambridge, in

North America, has been adopted elsewhere, and especially at
Greenwich, where it is used for all the instruments; and consequently
a collection of galvanic batteries is thus as necessary a part of the
apparatus of the establishment as its graduated circles and arcs.

END OF VOL. I.
 HISTORY
OF THE

I N D U C T I V E S C I E N C E S.

VOLUME II.
 B O O K VIII.

THE SECONDARY MECHANICAL SCIENCES.

HISTORY OF ACOUSTICS.
. . . . . . Go, demand
Of mighty Nature, if ’twas ever meant
That we should pry far off and be unraised,
That we should pore, and dwindle as we pore,
Viewing all objects unremittingly
In disconnexion dead and spiritless;
And still dividing, and dividing still,
Break down all grandeur, still unsatisfied
With the perverse attempt, while littleness
May yet become more little; waging thus
An impious warfare ’gainst the very life
Of our own souls. Worsdworth, Excursion.

. . . . . . Ἐσσυμένη δὲ
Ἠερίην ἀψῖδα διεῤῥοίζησε πεδίλῳ
Εἰς δόμον ἉΡΜΟΝIΗΣ παμμητόρος, ὁππόθι νύμφη
Ἴκελον οἶκον ἐναίε τύπῳ τετράζυγι κόσμου
Αὐτοπαγῆ Nonnus. Dionysiac. xli. 275.

Along the skiey arch the goddess trode,

And sought Harmonia’s august abode;
The universal plan, the mystic Four,
Defines the figure of the palace-floor.
Solid and square the ancient fabric stands,
Raised by the labors of unnumbered hands.
B O O K VIII.
 INTRODUCTION.

The Secondary Mechanical Sciences.

I N the sciences of Mechanics and Physical Astronomy, Motion and

Force are the direct and primary objects of our attention. But there
is another class of sciences in which we endeavor to reduce
phenomena, not evidently mechanical, to a known dependence upon
mechanical properties and laws. In the cases to which I refer, the
facts do not present themselves to the senses as modifications of
position and motion, but as secondary qualities, which are found to
be in some way derived from those primary attributes. Also, in these
cases the phenomena are reduced to their mechanical laws and
causes in a secondary manner; namely, by treating them as the
operation of a medium interposed between the object and the organ
of sense. These, then, we may call Secondary Mechanical Sciences.
The sciences of this kind which require our notice are those which
treat of the sensible qualities, Sound, Light, and Heat; that is.
Acoustics, Optics, and Thermotics.

It will be recollected that our object is not by any means to give a

full statement of all the additions which have been successively
made to our knowledge on the subjects under review, or a complete
list of the persons by whom such additions have been made; but to
present a view of the progress of each of those branches of
knowledge as a theoretical science;—to point out the Epochs of the
discovery of those general principles which reduce many facts to one
theory; and to note all that is most characteristic and instructive in
the circumstances and persons which bear upon such Epochs. A
history of any science, written with such objects, will not need to be
long; but it will fail in its purpose altogether, if it do not distinctly
exhibit some well-marked and prominent features. 24

We begin our account of the Secondary Mechanical Sciences with

Acoustics, because the progress towards right theoretical views,
was, in fact, made much earlier in the science of Sound, than in
those of Light and of Heat; and also, because a clear comprehension
of the theory to which we are led in this case, is the best preparation
for the difficulties (by no means inconsiderable) of the reasonings of
theorists on the other subjects.
 CHAPTER I.

Prelude to the Solution of Problems in Acoustics.

I N some measure the true theory of sound was guessed by very

early speculators on the subject; though undoubtedly conceived in
a very vague and wavering manner. That sound is caused by some
motion of the sounding body, and conveyed by some motion of the
air to the ear, is an opinion which we trace to the earliest times of
physical philosophy. We may take Aristotle as the best expounder of
this stage of opinion. In his Treatise On Sound and Hearing, he says,
“Sound takes place when bodies strike the air, not by the air having a
form impressed upon it (σχηματίζομενον), as some think, but by its
being moved in a corresponding manner; (probably he means in a
manner corresponding to the impulse;) the air being contracted, and
expanded, and overtaken, and again struck by the impulses of the
breath and of the strings. For when the breath falls upon and strikes
the air which is next it, the air is carried forwards with an impetus,
and that which is contiguous to the first is carried onwards; so that
the same voice spreads every way as far as the motion of the air
takes place.”

As is the case with all such specimens of ancient physics, different

persons would find in such a statement very different measures of
truth and distinctness. The admirers of antiquity might easily, by
pressing the language closely, and using the light of modern
discovery, detect in this passage an exact account of the production
and propagation of sound: while others might maintain that in
Aristotle’s own mind, there were only vague notions, and verbal
generalizations. This 25 latter opinion is very emphatically expressed
by Bacon. 1 “The collision or thrusting of air, which they will have to
be the cause of sound, neither denotes the form nor the latent
process of sound; but is a term of ignorance and of superficial
contemplation.” Nor can it be justly denied, that an exact and distinct
apprehension of the kind of motion of the air by which sound is
diffused, was beyond the reach of the ancient philosophers, and
made its way into the world long afterwards. It was by no means
easy to reconcile the nature of such motion with obvious
phenomena. For the process is not evident as motion; since, as
Bacon also observes, 2 it does not visibly agitate the flame of a
candle, or a feather, or any light floating substance, by which the
slightest motions of the air are betrayed. Still, the persuasion that
sound is some motion of the air, continued to keep hold of men’s
minds, and acquired additional distinctness. The illustration
employed by Vitruvius, in the following passage, is even now one of
the best we can offer. 3 “Voice is breath, flowing, and made sensible
to the hearing by striking the air. It moves in infinite circumferences
of circles, as when, by throwing a stone into still water, you produce
innumerable circles of waves, increasing from the centre and
spreading outwards, till the boundary of the space, or some obstacle,
prevents their outlines from going further. In the same manner the
voice makes its motion in circles. But in water the circle moves
breadthways upon a level plain; the voice proceeds in breadth, and
also successively ascends in height.”
1 Hist. Son. et Aud. vol. ix. p. 68.

2 Ibid.

3 De Arch. v. 3.
 Both the comparison, and the notice of the difference of the two
cases, prove the architect to have had very clear notions on the
subject; which he further shows by comparing the resonance of the
walls of a building to the disturbance of the outline of the waves of
water when they meet with a boundary, and are thrown back.
“Therefore, as in the outlines of waves in water, so in the voice, if no
obstacle interrupt the foremost, it does not disturb the second and
the following ones, so that all come to the ears of persons, whether
high up or low down, without resonance. But when they strike
against obstacles, the foremost, being thrown back, disturb the lines
of those which follow.” Similar analogies were employed by the
ancients in order to explain the occurrence of Echoes. Aristotle
says, 4 “An Echo takes place, when the air, being as one body in
consequence of the vessel which bounds it, and being prevented
from being thrust forwards, is reflected 26 back like a ball.” Nothing
material was added to such views till modern times.
4 De Animâ, ii. 8.

Thus the first conjectures of those who philosophized concerning

sound, led them to an opinion concerning its causes and laws, which
only required to be distinctly understood, and traced to mechanical
principles, in order to form a genuine science of Acoustics. It was, no
doubt, a work which required a long time and sagacious reasoners,
to supply what was thus wanting; but still, in consequence of this
peculiar circumstance in the early condition of the prevalent doctrine
concerning sound, the history of Acoustics assumes a peculiar form.
Instead of containing, like the history of Astronomy or of Optics, a
series of generalizations, each including and rising above preceding
generalizations; in this case, the highest generalization is in view
from the first; and the object of the philosopher is to determine its
precise meaning and circumstances in each example. Instead of
having a series of inductive Truths, successively dawning on men’s
minds, we have a series of Explanations, in which certain
experimental facts and laws are reconciled, as to their mechanical
principles and their measures, with the general doctrine already in
our possession. Instead of having to travel gradually towards a great
discovery, like Universal Gravitation, or Luminiferous Undulations,
we take our stand upon acknowledged truths, the production and
propagation of sound by the motion of bodies and of air; and we
connect these with other truths, the laws of motion and the known
properties of bodies, as, for instance, their elasticity. Instead of
Epochs of Discovery, we have Solutions of Problems; and to these
we must now proceed.

We must, however, in the first place, notice that these Problems

include other subjects than the mere production and propagation of
sound generally. For such questions as these obviously occur:—
what are the laws and cause of the differences of sounds;—of acute
and grave, loud and low, continued and instantaneous;—and, again,
of the differences of articulate sounds, and of the quality of different
voices and different instruments? The first of these questions, in
particular, the real nature of the difference of acute and grave
sounds, could not help attracting attention; since the difference of
notes in this respect was the foundation of one of the most
remarkable mathematical sciences of antiquity. Accordingly, we find
attempts to explain this difference in the ancient writers on music. In
Ptolemy’s Harmonics, the third Chapter of the first Book is entitled,
“How the 27 acuteness and graveness of notes is produced;” and in
this, after noting generally the difference of sounds, and the causes
of difference (which he states to be the force of the striking body, the
physical constitution of the body struck, and other causes), he
comes to the conclusion, that “the things which produce acuteness in
sounds, are a greater density and a smaller size; the things which
produce graveness, are a greater rarity and a bulkier form.” He
afterwards explains this so as to include a considerable portion of
truth. Thus he says, “That in strings, and in pipes, other things
remaining the same, those which are stopped at the smaller distance
from the bridge give the most acute note; and in pipes, those notes
which come through holes nearest to the mouth-hole are most
acute.” He even attempts a further generalization, and says that the
greater acuteness arises, in fact, from the body being more tense;
and that thus “hardness may counteract the effect of greater density,
as we see that brass produces a more acute sound than lead.” But
this author’s notions of tension, since they were applied so generally
as to include both the tension of a string, and the tension of a piece
of solid brass, must necessarily have been very vague. And he
seems to have been destitute of any knowledge of the precise nature
of the motion or impulse by which sound is produced; and, of course,
still more ignorant of the mechanical principles by which these
motions are explained. The notion of vibrations of the parts of
sounding bodies, does not appear to have been dwelt upon as an
essential circumstance; though in some cases, as in sounding
strings, the fact is very obvious. And the notion of vibrations of the air
does not at all appear in ancient writers, except so far as it may be
conceived to be implied in the comparison of aërial and watery
waves, which we have quoted from Vitruvius. It is however, very
unlikely that, even in the case of water, the motions of the particles
were distinctly conceived, for such conception is far from obvious.

The attempts to apprehend distinctly, and to explain mechanically,

the phenomena of sound, gave rise to a series of Problems, of which
we most now give a brief history. The questions which more
peculiarly constitute the Science of Acoustics, are the questions
concerning those motions or affections of the air by which it is the
medium of hearing. But the motions of sounding bodies have both so
much connexion with those of the medium, and so much
resemblance to them, that we shall include in our survey researches
on that subject also. 28
 CHAPTER II.

Problem of the Vibrations of Strings.

T HAT the continuation of sound depends on a continued minute

and rapid motion, a shaking or trembling, of the parts of the
sounding body, was soon seen. Thus Bacon says, 5 “The duration of
the sound of a bell or a string when struck, which appears to be
prolonged and gradually extinguished, does not proceed from the
first percussion; but the trepidation of the body struck perpetually
generates a new sound. For if that trepidation be prevented, and the
bell or string be stopped, the sound soon dies: as in spinets, as soon
as the spine is let fall so as to touch the string, the sound ceases.” In
the case of a stretched string, it is not difficult to perceive that the
motion is a motion back and forwards across the straight line which
the string occupies when at rest. The further examination of the
quantitative circumstances of this oscillatory motion was an obvious
problem; and especially after oscillations, though of another kind
(those of a pendulous body), had attracted attention, as they had
done in the school of Galileo. Mersenne, one of the promulgators of
Galileo’s philosophy in France, is the first author in whom I find an
examination of the details of this case (Harmonicorum Liber, Paris,
1636). He asserts, 6 that the differences and concords of acute and
grave sounds depend on the rapidity of vibrations, and their ratio;
and he proves this doctrine by a series of experimental comparisons.
Thus he finds 7 that the note of a string is as its length, by taking a
string first twice, and then four times as long as the original string,
other things remaining the same. This, indeed, was known to the
ancients, and was the basis of that numerical indication of the notes