Environmental Science: Archaeology

The Battle of Towton was fought near the the Yorkshire village of Towton on Palm Sunday 1461 in a driving storm of sleet and snow. It was the greatest conflagration of the Cousin’s War, with a conservative and reasoned estimate of the dead to be in the realm of 20,000, the largest one-day death-toll of any battle on British soil. Its outcome resulted in regime change and one royal dynasty toppling another. This paper considers the battle from an historical, geological and archaeological perspective, attempting to give a clear picture of the ebb and flow of conflict; battle–line deployment, tactics, and the synthesis of geography and military decision which lead to such a decisive victory by Yorkist forces under Edward Plantagenet. The factors that effected such a huge loss of life, particularly in the Lancastrian rout are evaluated: special attention being paid to the mass grave assemblage of 37 humans skeletons one mile north of the battle and what these combatants remains can tell us about the nature, mind-set and disposition of the forces and commanders arrayed on the field of battle that day.

The critical tactical necessity of its capture and the audaciousness of the military operation that silenced the German gun batteries atop its brow, have insured that the storming and holding of this sheer coastal promontory, dominating the approaches and landing zones of what would very shortly become the D-Day beaches of Omaha and Utah, has resonated ever since in the histories of WWII.

This paper appraises Hitler’s Atlantic Wall of static line defences exemplified by the Pointe and finds it to be fatally flawed. The contributing steps that lead to its downfall are considered;

• By 1943 onwards, the disruption of Axis supply and logistics in the Normandy sector was resulting in inferior quality construction techniques and structurally weakened defensive emplacements.

• The lack of defence in depth over the sector as a whole and its relative isolation from supporting military assets of sufficient substance and quality.

• Accurate advances in aerial bombardment and overwhelming Allied air superiority with the ability to reach out and destroy at will. This severely compromised the defensive capabilities of the complex in the months previously and, crucially, immediately prior to its assault.

• The development of elite military units, their co-ordination and operational support, combined with training in storming fixed defences and achieving mission objectives with independent initiative.

• Portentously the geological strata of the Normandy cliff-face itself which conspired against the defenders and offered its attackers a natural stairway to the cliff’s apex.

A final point of inquiry is pin-pointing the hidden location of the complex’s field guns themselves, the remaining intact 155mm GPF’s being relocated over a mile inland after the USAF’s air raid on April 25th, before being found and rendered inoperative by recon units of Col. Rudder’s men of the 2nd Rangers Battalion.

This paper charts the rise, dominance and fall in castle construction in Ireland.  It looks at the evolution of its architectural form and addresses the constructs function in the Irish historical record. Special attention is paid to the case for Gaelic Castle construction before the 1169 Norman Invasion, aswell as the evidence for contemporaneous Gaelic construction in the early centuries of Anglo-Norman colonisation prior to the onset of the Gaelic Tower Houses in the 1400’s. Also considered is the close connection, both in architectural form and in the historical personages involved, between Irish Castle evolution and English, Welsh and Outremer Crusader castle design.

This paper provides an over-view of Bronze-Age weapon evolvement over time, accessing the aesthetic and manufacturing features of the period’s weapon types, specifically Sword, Pole-Arms and Shield through the window of experimental archaeology in simulated weapon construction and combat re-enactments with controlled sparring. The aim of which being to better understand their martial applications, build limitation and creative potential inherent in the interplay of form and function.

Use-wear, pattern damage and design analysis of surviving Bronze-Age weapon artefacts suggested a framework for complementary Eastern as well as Western Martial Art techniques to employ with the weapon systems exploring their capacity and lethality.  This resulted in plausible theories of combat-use seen within the cultural prism and mind-set of Bronze Age Warrior societies.

The author hopes to open a window into late Victorian colonial warfare through the most classical of weapon systems, the sword, in its still prominent role in select theatres of war while at the same time deciphering the cultural and social tapestry, aesthetic and martial design choices in the British Infantry Officer’s Sword evolvement from the 1860’s to the outbreak of The Great War. A further wish is to provide testament to the military and political careers of William Gregory Wood-Martin, his sons James Isadore Wood-Martin and Francis Winchester Wood-Martin, both the latter using their lives in actions at Neuve Chapelle and Ypres in the years of 1915 and ’16 respectively during The First World War.

Considerable quantities of amber occur in Irish deposits of Later Bronze Age date, especially in hoards of the Dowris phase (Eogan 1983). This exotic material reached Ireland through exchange networks that may have stretched all the way to the coasts of Denmark, potentially via Scotland (Eogan 1999). This paper is concerned with the likely process of those exchanges and the level of mobility so inferred. It is argued that travel, at least over some of the stages along this network, may have involved long distance ‘directional movement’, as opposed to ‘down the line exchange’, and asks what social conditions might have facilitated such travel. In a search for analogy this paper looks to the texts of early and later medieval Ireland, “where much stress is placed on the duty of hospitality in the laws, wisdom-texts and sagas... [and] to refuse food and shelter where it is due is to be guilty of the offence of esaín literally ‘driving away’” (Kelly 1988, 140). A special class of ‘hospitaller’ the briugu existed in Ireland  from at least the early medieval period until the 16th century AD (Kelly 1988, 37). Early texts outline the obligations of this role as “having a never-dry cauldron, a dwelling on a public road and a welcome to every face” (Kelly 1988, 36). Could such as system of hospitality have facilitated long distance travel across Bronze Age Europe? What class, or rank, of person could have travelled along such networks and how would such journeys have been understood?

Eogan, G. (1983) The Hoards of the Irish Later Bronze Age, Dublin: University College Dublin.

Eogan, G. (1999) 'From Skåne to Scotstown: some notes on amber in Bronze Age Ireland' in Harding, A., ed. Experiment and Design: Archaeological Studies in Honour of John Coles, Oxford: Oxbow Books, 75-86.

Kelly, F. (1988) A Guide to Early Irish Law, Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.

""Considerable quantities of amber occur in Irish hoards of Later Bronze Age date, especially those of the Dowris Phase. This exotic material reached these shores through exchange networks that may have stretched all the way to the coasts of Denmark, potentially via Scotland (Eogan 1999). This paper is concerned with the likely process of those exchanges and seeks to understand how amber was ‘valued’ at different stages along those networks, particularly prior to and during its deposition in Ireland.

The term ‘value’ covers a number of inter-related concepts. These can be divided into: ‘values’ in the sociological sense, ‘value’ in the economic sense and value in the structural linguistic sense (Graeber 2001). This paper deals primarily with the first two meanings and argues these are largely inseparable, especially in the context of an ‘embedded economy’. It will employ insight from analogous ethnographies, particularly the famed ‘Kula ring’ of Melanesia (Malinowski 1922, Weiner 1992, chapter 5), to illustrate the differences between the economy in which we live and those which may have existed during the Irish Later Bronze Age. While no historical or ethnographic analogy is exact, and they do not supply parallels, they do offer a range of analogies superior to methodological approaches predicated on implicit ‘common sense’, particularly when considering concepts such as value. With this in mind this paper will assess two previous, very different approaches to the interpretation of Bronze Age hoards (Maher and Sheehan 2000, Bradley 1985, Bradley 1990) and then will extend an argument to consider the value of Irish Later Bronze Age finds of amber.

Bradley, R. (1985) Occasional Paper No. 13. Consumption, Change and the Archaeological Record: The archaeology of monuments and the archaeology of deliberate deposits, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, Department of Archaeology.

Bradley, R. (1990) The Passage of Arms: An archaeological analysis of prehistoric hoards and votive deposits, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Eogan, G. (1999) 'From Skåne to Scotstown: some notes on amber in Bronze Age Ireland' in Harding, A., ed. Experiment and Design: Archaeological Studies in Honour of John Coles, Oxford: Oxbow Books, 75-86.

Graeber, D. (2001) Toward an anthropological theory of value: The false coin of our own dreams, New York: Palgrave.

Maher, D. and Sheehan, J. (2000) 'Different ages, varying perspectives: the phenomenon of hoarding' in Desmond, A., Johnson, G., McCarthy, M., Sheehan, J. and Shee Twohig, E., eds., New Agendas in Irish Prehistory: Papers in commemoration of Liz Anderson, Bray: Wordwell, 177-188.

Malinowski, B. (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagos of Melanesian New Guinea, London: Routledge.

Weiner, A. B. (1992) Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While Giving, Berkley: University of California Press.
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"Coasts are an obvious and acknowledged liminal landscape, situated between the worlds of land and sea and serving as the point of departure and arrival for sea journeys. Promontories inhabit a special place within that liminal landscape, projecting from the land into the sea. This paper will look at how traditional interpretations of these sites as defensive locations often fall short, how their enclosure may have had a magico-religious or ritual purpose and what rites we might expect to have taken place in such spaces. While not always easily accessible from the sea, promontory enclosures are arguably located along ancient seaways, or near landing and departure points, and it is proposed that they therefore mark significant points in a ritually imbued cultural landscape. The belief in an antagonistic relationship between land and sea will be central to this interpretation. This is evidenced in taboo and the use of liminal agents by coastal communities to navigate between those worlds (Westerdahl 2005). With a focus on Irish promontory enclosures, this paper will explore these hypotheses by looking at several elements including: established sea routes, individual site morphologies, placenames and maritime taboos.
Westerdahl, C. (2005). Seal on Land, Elk at Sea: Notes on and Applications of the Ritual Landscape at the Seaboard. The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology. 34 (1) p.2-23"

The presence of beads in earlier Bronze Age burials is often interpreted as an indicator of wealth, or status, on the part of the deceased. In the cases where the materials were rare, or had demonstrably distant origins, the long distant networks implied would seem to support such suppositions. However, this may only represent part of the story; in some cases button and bead materials or forms may have had other symbolic meanings and their inclusion in burials may reveal a variety of relationships. This paper will look at the distribution of a number of bead and button materials and types in Ireland, particularly those in burials, and then focus in on several examples in an attempt to show how the narrative can be enriched with a more complex understanding of the relationships and beliefs that might be represented.

Investigations undertaken in advance of the Kildare bypass led to the discovery of a small unenclosed Early Bronze Age settlement in French Furze townland, Co Kildare. The inhabitants chose to build their dwelling on a south facing slope situated a short distance above a small stream and cook lower down the slope closer to the nearest water supply. The only artefacts found on the site were struck lithic tools and debitage (waste material), and 8 sherds of Bronze Age pottery. While the remnants of pottery may appear quite paltry, the information they reveal about the people who lived at this site and the contribution it can make to our wider knowledge of life during the Early Bronze Age are extremely important. Prior to careful monitoring of large infrastructure projects, very few settlement sites with which we could connect much more complete pots which have been found with burials. From these few sherds we can tell that the inhabitants used pottery of the bowl tradition that indicates widespread social connections with other groups. This paper will consider the potential of the pottery remnants from this site, allied with those from burial sites, to tell us about the lives of potters and pottery users and about the social relations between them almost 4000 years ago.

Considerable quantities of Nordic/Baltic amber occur in Irish later Bronze Age deposits. This exotic material reached Ireland through exchange networks that may have stretched all the way to the coasts of Denmark. This paper reviews some of that evidence and then looks to the texts of medieval Ireland in a search for analogies of how such travel might have been socially facilitated.