Digital Archive for Grave Goods: Objects and Death in Later Prehistoric Britain 2016-2021
Anwen Cooper, Duncan Garrow, Catriona Gibson, Melanie Giles, Neil Wilkin, 2020. (updated 2024) https://doi.org/10.5284/1052206. How to cite using this DOI
- Introduction
- Overview
- Project Database:
- Schools Resources
- British Museum Trail
- Metadata
- Usage Statistics
Data copyright © Duncan Garrow unless otherwise stated
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Primary contact
University of Reading
Whiteknights
PO Box 218
Reading
RG6 6AA
England
Resource identifiers
- ADS Collection: 3438
- DOI:https://doi.org/10.5284/1052206
- How to cite using this DOI
Introduction
Image © The Trustees of the British Museum.
This collection comprises the digital archive for the Grave Goods: Objects and Death in Later Prehistoric Britain project. Data was created between 2016 and 2021.
The Grave Goods project focused on material culture in graves and other formal mortuary contexts in Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age Britain, c. 4000 BC to AD 43. Britain is internationally renowned for the high quality and exquisite crafting of its later prehistoric grave goods. Objects from burials have long been central to how archaeologists have interpreted society at that time. Interred with both inhumations and cremations, they provide some of the most durable and well-preserved insights into personal identity and the prehistoric life-course, yet they also speak of the care shown to the dead by the living, and of people’s relationships with ‘things’. Objects matter. This project sought to transform current understandings of mortuary practice and material culture in later prehistoric Britain.
The Grave Goods project conducted its analysis at a series of different scales, ranging from macro-scale patterning across Britain, to regional explorations of continuity and change, to site-specific histories of practice, to micro-scale analysis of specific graves and the individual objects (and people) within them. Our main dataset consisted of a database of all material culture found in formal mortuary contexts during the Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age within six key case study regions across England, Scotland and Wales: Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly; Dorset; Kent; East Yorkshire; Gwynedd and Anglesey; Orkney and the Outer Hebrides.
The project was a research collaboration between Duncan Garrow (University of Reading), Melanie Giles (University of Manchester) and Neil Wilkin (British Museum), and project researchers Anwen Cooper (Manchester) and Catriona Gibson (Reading). We also worked closely with Historic Environment Record officers in England, Scotland and Wales.
Project Bibliography
- Cooper, A., D. Garrow, C. Gibson, M. Giles & N. Wilkin (2017). Summary of project - Grave goods: objects and death in later prehistoric Britain. PAST: The Newsletter of the Prehistoric Society, 12-14.
- Cooper, A., D. Garrow, C. Gibson & M. Giles (2019). Covering the dead in later prehistoric Britain: elusive objects and powerful technologies of funerary performance. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 85, 223-250. doi:10.1017/ppr.2019.8.
- Cooper, A., D. Garrow & C. Gibson (2020). Spectrums of depositional practice in later prehistoric Britain and beyond. Grave goods, hoards and deposits 'in between'. Archaeological Dialogues 27, 135-157. doi:10.1017/S1380203820000197.
- Cooper, A., D. Garrow, C. Gibson, M. Giles & N. Wilkin (2021). Grave goods: objects and death in later prehistoric Britain. Oxford: Oxbow.
