Round barrows in Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age Yorkshire : architecture, burial, and landscape

Abstract

This thesis examines the role of round barrows during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age (c. 2500 – 1500 BC) in Yorkshire. This is done by exploring patterns in site distribution, use of construction material, changes in artefact deposition, burial practices and architectural traditions to examine changing prehistoric engagements with the dead, the remains of past monuments, and the land itself through three key questions. These are: how were round barrows in Yorkshire developed over time, how did they affect the changing relationships between the living and the dead, and what do they tell us about prehistoric engagement with the physical world? Across the centuries of their use, round barrows relate differently to the sense of space and place, conceptions of past and memory, and signify shifting relationships between the living and the dead. These trends are traced across whole of Yorkshire and in specific case study areas: the Upper Wold Valley, the Ure-Swale interfluve, and the Howardian Hills. Throughout Yorkshire, there is a co-existence of Beakers and Food Vessels in burials. Practices such as cremation burial were more common in certain regions than others in the latter half of the Early Bronze Age. In the Wolds and the Vale of Mowbray, inhumation remained a significant practice throughout the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age. Cremation burial became more influential across Yorkshire and round barrows with burials of cremated remains were built in the Howardian Hills without pre-existing monuments. In the Ure-Swale interfluve, round barrows were built both within Neolithic monument complexes and outside of them c. 2150-1750 BC. After that development of burial mounds moves away from older monuments. Diversity in round barrows is difficult to appreciate from only the Wolds or the North Yorkshire Moors. The region might follow many of the patterns established elsewhere in Britain but it is comprised of varied and a greater level of refinement could define other parts of the county better by using the wider-scale framework to examine monuments in the surrounding regions.