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Wessex without Mycenae

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2013

Colin Renfrew
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Extract

The absolute chronology for the Early Bronze Age of Central and Northern Europe, including that for the Wessex culture of southern Britain, is not yet reliably established. This point was emphasized by V. Gordon Childe in his Retrospect, and the following words were indeed the very last which he wrote. Speaking of ‘the urgency of establishing a reliable chronology’, he stated: ‘a great deal of the argument depends on a precise date for the beginning of Unétice, that is at best very slightly the most probable out of perfectly possible guesses ranging over five centuries’.

At that time the basis for the absolute chronology of the Early Bronze Age was, as it largely remains today, a framework of synchronous links built up across Europe to the Mycenaean world of the Aegean Late Bronze Age. The assumption was made—and Childe stressed that it was an assumption—that European development and chronology were to be viewed in terms of ‘the irradation of European barbarism by Oriental civilisation’. Possible links for the European Early Bronze Age with Mycenae and indeed the Near East were eagerly sought in an attempt to build up a coherent chronology founded on this assumption.

Type
Research Article
Information
Annual of the British School at Athens , Volume 63 , November 1968 , pp. 277 - 285
Copyright
Copyright © The Council, British School at Athens 1968

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References

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2 Childe, V. G., Prehistoric Migrations in Europe (1950) 6 Google Scholar; id., ‘The Orient and Europe’, American Journal of Archaeology xliii (1939) 10.

3 Piggott, Stuart, ‘The Early Bronze Age in Wessex’, PPS iv (1938) 52 Google Scholar; and a detailed and more recent account of Mycenaean, contact in ‘Mycenae and barbarian Europe’, Sbornik Narodniho Muzea v Praza xx (1966) 117.Google Scholar A more precise definition of the ‘Wessex Culture’ is now needed, with more clearly defined chronological subdivisions. The forthcoming study by Miss Sabine Gerloff will be very welcome.

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27 Athens National Museum 8623, exhibited in April 1968 with material from Grave Χ.

28 Mr. Grinsell points out that the Badbury carvings do, on the other hand, have some stratigraphic context.

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31 For helpful and constructive criticism I am very grate ful to Mr. Andrew Fleming, Mr. L. V. Grinsell, Mr, Geoffrey Lewis, and Professor Stuart Piggott. The diagram. Fig. 1, was very kindly drawn by Mr. H. A. Shelley.