- Because the people of the Bronze Age did not leave any kind of written evidence behind them, there is no way of knowing how they saw themselves or their place in the world. Everything is a matter of informed inference and conjecture, based on the physical evidence they left behind them. Researchers have been able to use this evidence to explore how people lived in the Bronze Age, what might have been important to them, and how their lives played out against the backdrop of their physical and material surroundings.
- Life in the Bronze Age was reliant on agriculture. The seasonal changes of the agricultural cycle would have shaped the routines by which people lived their lives. The way in which this was expressed in physical form, whether through monuments or through material culture, changed markedly throughout the Bronze Age. During the Early Bronze Age, the movement of celestial bodies such as the sun and the moon appears to have been on some importance, suggesting a concern with cosmology. The focus appears to shift in the Middle and Late Bronze Age, perhaps towards land and water and the agricultural cycle, with death and rebirth being expressed through concepts like fragmentation and recycling and re-use.
- Bronze Age people occupied a lived-in landscape, which in places had already been modified and ritualised by the actions of successive generations who had constructed often-substantial monuments made of earth, timber and stone. During the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age these large-scale communally-built monuments may still have played important roles as backdrops to important life events. Some of the henges and cursus monuments which had been created in the Neolithic were incorporated into later practices and sometimes modified through the addition of stone settings such as circles and standing stones. These created a permanent presence in the landscape, perhaps changing the emphasis from the act of building, to the definition of a particular space.
- One form of monument, the stone circle – perhaps best represented by the Machire Moor complex on Arran – shows that Early Bronze Age people had an interest in the sky, with the movement of the sun and moon being of particular relevance. Rather than viewing these monuments as complex mechanisms for the calculation of astronomical problems, we can perhaps see them instead as calendars which provided a practical means of structuring how and when local communities structured their actions in both ritual and routine spheres. It is possible, too, that late examples of timber monuments, such as those identified at Dunragit (Thomas 2015) and also, potentially, Hunterston, played a similar role, though in both cases it may be that the very Neolithic preoccupation with acts of creation, destruction and remembrance still influenced how local communities interacted with the landscape.
- In some areas, the agricultural landscape appears to have been organised into fields from an early date. These now survive only in limited areas where the impact of modern agriculture has been slight. A detailed investigation of the area around Machrie Moor – including the sites of Machrie North, Tormore and Kilpatrick – allowed some insights into the complexities of such landscapes, which might include field banks, cairns and also burnt mounds. The relationship between the landscapes of the living and the nearby landscapes of the dead remains uncertain, though it is possible that on some occasions the remains of the dead – or sometimes even token portions of their remains – were integrated within these ‘agricultural’ landscapes. This may have marked a growing trend throughout the Bronze Age from a cult of the dead and the ancestors towards a preoccupation with the agricultural cycle, and a focus more on ideas of death, rebirth and fertility.
- Moving into the Middle Bronze Age and on into the Late Bronze Age, houses seem to become more monumental in scale and permanent in nature. This may indicate a more sedentary lifestyle, but could also potentially demonstrate a reintegration of ritual practice into the home and the field. The deposition of Bronze Age metalwork – either in the form of hoards or as single finds – may provide another insight into how Bronze Age people negotiated their relations with each other and with the natural world. There is increasing evidence for an association between the deposition of metalwork with natural features such as springs or with liminal places. These could include boundaries or even the ritualised landscapes first established in the Neolithic. Work to explore these connections is as yet in its early stages, but some research has been undertaken. Cowie (Cowie 2004) considered the Maidens hoard and the metalwork finds concentrated along the Maich Water (including the Gavel Moss hoard) as examples of Bronze Age metalwork finds deposited in special places. Another example is Turner’s work highlighting the association between an Early Bronze Age ritualised landscape at Largs and the deposition of two Middle Bronze Age flanged axes (Turner forthcoming).
- The people of the Bronze Age raised livestock, ploughed fields and grew arable crops. They were responsible for the production of material culture using a variety of technologies: metalwork, ceramic and lithic. How these different roles helped mould their identity remains obscure, as evidence for the production of all manufactured items remains elusive. We can perhaps infer how they viewed themselves by how they arrayed their dead within the grave: again, this varies markedly over time.
- In the period between 2500 BC and 2200BC, when the first copper working was evidenced but before the alloying of tin and copper to form bronze, the first instances occurred of individual burials, often accompanied by a specific pottery type (the ‘Beaker’). Archery equipment might also be included with male burials. These burials mark the first instances where gender differentiation between males and females is evidenced, with similar differentiation between older and younger males also apparent (Shepherd 2021). Unfortunately, evidence for these ‘Beaker burials’ is very sparse in South West Scotland, with the only possible examples to date recorded through antiquarian activity (e.g. Courthill, Dalry). Other means of differentiating biological sex and hence identifying gender differences may be possible through detailed examination of associations between specific artefact types and accompanying human remains. However, with much material derived from antiquarian investigations where recovery was poor, this task may prove difficult, if not impossible, in many cases.
- Knives and daggers are occasionally included in burials dating to the Early Bronze Age, where they are associated with various types of pottery vessel. Examples include the antiquarian find from Blackwaterfoot, an excavated example from Carlochan (Masters and Yates 1977), and a recently-excavated dagger grave from Lockerbie Academy (Sheridan and Northover 2011). Detailed analysis of the latter revealed that the dagger may have been manufactured using Welsh metal. Wider similarities between this weapon and others (including the example from Blackwaterfoot), and its association with an archer’s wristguard could indicate that this particular individual – or those closest to him – chose to align themselves with a broader group for whom particular items of material culture were considered important. These items were manufactured from exotic goods sourced outwith the region and they portrayed an image associated with archery, perhaps linked with warfare and leadership, perhaps with hunting, or perhaps with all these things.
- Material culture associations linked with hunting or even, perhaps, some form of warrior culture proliferate throughout the Bronze Age. Archery and daggers are characteristic of the Chalcolithic and the Early Bronze Age. Looped spearheads and rapiers replace these items in the Middle Bronze Age, though by this time, they are excluded from burials. They occur instead in hoards such as that from Drumcoltran. The Late Bronze Age is characterised by leaf-shaped swords and pegged spearheads. The deposition of complete leaf-shaped swords is rare in South West Scotland, but there are, nonetheless, examples of items which are drawn from a wider repertoire of ‘warrior’ equipment. Broken swords and a fragmentary cauldron – potentially linked with feasting – were included in the Dalduff hoard. The five or six sheet bronze shields included in the Lugtonridge hoard are another spectacular example of military equipment being discarded as a probable ritual offering in a wet place. Bronze Age communities from the Early Bronze Age onwards do not seem to have defined their dead as warriors, and it is hard to establish just how important this more martial aspect of Bronze Age life was throughout the region, even during the Late Bronze Age. If the metalwork types occurring in the region do reflect strategies of selection and deposition, then single axeheads continue to dominate in acts of selective deposition throughout the Bronze Age.
- There is limited evidence for the use of personal ornament, with a twisted neck-ring or torc and amber beads recovered from the Middle Bronze Age Glentrool hoard (Callandar 1921). Gold ornaments were also associated with the Blackwaterfoot burial. Beads made from various forms of lignite, such as jet and shale, are also recovered from Bronze Age contexts, with particularly spectacular jet necklaces recovered from Chalcolithic burials, perhaps as a counterpoint to the gold crescentic lunulae that have been occasionally recovered from marshes and peat bogs. Unfortunately, there is insufficient contextual evidence for those finds recovered from across the region to draw conclusions regarding how they might have been used to define gender, age or status.
- In one aspect of Bronze Age daily life, however, recent excavations and improvements in the analysis of osteoarchaeological remains have granted us spectacular new insights. Because cremation was the dominant funerary rite, we cannot use the same techniques which have given the spectacular insights into population movement revealed during the Beaker People project (Parker Pearson, Sheridan, Jay, Chamberlain, Richards and Evans 2019). But we can still obtain important insights into the health and demographics of the region’s Bronze Age population. There is some evidence, particularly amongst children, of pathologies caused by malnutrition as well as evidence for other health issues. The human remains recovered during the excavation of a flat cist cemetery site at Craig Tara proved particularly informative. These dated from the late 3rd to the 2nd millennium BC, and revealed evidence for periodontal disease and also for iron-deficiency anaemia, potentially caused by poor diet or parasitic infestation. Ongoing work at a cremation cemetery at South Boreland is likely to further enhance our understanding of such issues. From such sites we can infer that daily life in the Bronze Age was not always easy or comfortable. Perhaps this is why, at the site of Blairbuy, we see evidence for – according to the excavator (Bailie 2013) – members of the local community constructing custom-built cists in advance. What is interesting in that particular case is that they were either not granted the opportunity to use these cists, or they chose not to.