Over the last two decades Joanna Brück has emerged as perhaps one of a handful of leading thinkers writing about Bronze Age Britain and Ireland. Whether picking apart the assumptions of gendered hierarchies in funerary practice or teasing out the ways in which concepts of the self are interwoven with forms of technology, her writing has always offered a nuanced and sophisticated engagement with the evidence from this period. More broadly, her theoretical work reflecting on, for example, the assumptions built into phenomenology, or the ways in which archaeologists have unthinkingly imposed dualisms between ritual and daily life, are widely cited and have changed the thinking of the discipline well beyond the Bronze Age, indeed well beyond European prehistory. Fundamentally, the vision of the Bronze Age Brück has developed over the last twenty years has been a relational one. That is, rather than presuming that people are bounded individuals, or subjects, who impose their will onto equally bounded objects, Brück has sought to tease out the relations through which Bronze Age societies emerge. Thus, funerary practices shift from being about the display of status acquired by individuals, to revealing the relational connections that forge notions of identity and personhood. Practices like metalworking are not just technological processes but disclose relational networks of meaning that forge senses of self which blur the boundaries between people and things. It is this vision of a relational Bronze Age that this well-written and well-illustrated book offers, and it represents a brilliant culmination of the author's singular work over the last two decades.
The book begins with a chapter setting out the main themes of the volume, and in particular highlighting the principle emphasis on relations identified above. The chapter attempts to walk a line differentiating itself both from traditional views of the connections between people and things, where the latter are merely the possessions of the former, and more recent posthumanist positions that have advocated for a complete rejection of dualisms like subject and object. There are some inaccuracies, to my mind, in the description of different theoretical positions. One personal bugbear is that few, if any, posthumanists argue that objects have agency as Brück claims (p. 7). Those that continue to use the term argue that agency is a product of relations and is not possessed by objects or people. Indeed, this is an example of a number of theoretical tensions throughout the volume.
The second chapter deals with the funerary treatment of the body in the Bronze Age in a broad chronological overview, beginning with Beaker burials and moving through the subsequent sequence. Brück strongly emphasises that whilst particular rites may dominate in certain periods, there are always other stories to tell, with multiple burials existing alongside single interments and in parallel to cremations at different times. Throughout, Brück stresses the relational character of personhood, but gives voice to changes through the period, including an increased ambivalence towards the dead in the Late Bronze Age.
Chapter 3 turns to objects, and specifically towards object biographies. Here, Brück traces the similarities between the treatment of objects and bodies and identifies the crucial role of metal. Metal is critical here not for the way it creates status and wealth, but for how its production, use, and destruction allows people to understand their world in new, and always relational, ways. The chapter includes the discussion of many sites and objects, and a detailed reading of the relational aspects of the famous burial of the Amesbury Archer.
The fourth chapter deals with houses and settlement, focussing on daily life in Bronze Age Britain and Ireland. In parallel to the discussion of objects in the previous chapter, the critical intersection of the relationship between people and houses is flagged as central to the emergence of Bronze Age personhood. In addition, any claims for the emergence of hierarchy are rigorously undermined. Although the chapter covers the rather sparse settlement evidence of the early part of the period, its main focus is, understandably, on Middle and Late Bronze Age sites, following the widespread emergence of roundhouse architecture.
The fifth and final substantial chapter broadens the focus out from the household to the landscape, analysing the importance of special places as well as dealing with the emergence of field systems. Brück convincingly unpicks the traditional opposition of the organised and imposed co-axial field systems and their more piecemeal aggregate cousins. The chapter also sets out the evidence for human and animal interaction, and argues, in part through the analysis of animal burials, that the boundaries between human and animal were not clear cut in the Bronze Age.
The book concludes in traditional fashion, with Chapter 6 summarising the major themes of the volume, it is especially useful in bringing together how the Bronze Age shifts from its early to later phases, and how the author relates this to changes in landscape, material culture, and especially trade and exchange between groups in the Late Bronze Age.
The strengths of this book are many. This is one of the first synthetic books about the Bronze Age of Britain and Ireland to be written for some time, certainly with such a clear theoretical agenda. It will prove an essential teaching tool, and as someone who teaches a third-year module on Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain and Ireland this will be going straight to the top of my reading list. The book is good not only because it offers us such a clear vision of a relational Bronze Age, but also because each of the chapters contains numerous clear examples drawn both from famous sites, and also from many excavated by commercial units in recent years. The volume gives a clear sense of the changes that happen in the Bronze Age and will provide much food for thought for students and scholars alike.
Of course, no book is without its weaknesses. There are perhaps three things one might indicate here. The first is simply that, if you have read Brück's papers (and if you haven't, then really what have you been doing with yourself?), there will be nothing conceptually surprising here. It is to Brück's credit that her version of the Bronze Age has been so well explicated previously that I mostly found myself nodding in agreement and with some familiarity with much, if not all, of the argument, even as new examples were brought to the fore.
Second, as a Neolithic specialist, I was also struck by how change and continuity with the previous period were explored, or not. Gender in the Bronze Age is remarkably different from the Neolithic, yet little is made of this in the volume or from where this might have emerged. Brück emphasises how critical metalwork was in the emergence of new understandings of body, personhood, and exchange, but has less to say about the ways in which pottery and some stone technologies continue. Indeed, when she says that metalwork ‘required materials and objects to be brought together and amalgamated’ (p. 225), I was struck that the same could be said of pottery which of course goes back to the Neolithic, and would be a much more familiar technology at least early on in the Bronze Age. There may be more to say here about change and continuity between periods.
Beyond this Neolithic navel-gazing by your reviewer, however, there is a third and more substantial issue. Whilst new sites have emerged and been incorporated into Brück's work, so have new theories, which have not been to the same extent. Brück's approach and its emphasis on relations now occupies an awkward middle ground. She is keen to emphasise early on that she does not want to take a non-anthropocentric position. Fair enough—although I firmly disagree with her reading of what a non-anthropocentric position implies. This rejection, however, leaves her take on relations in a rather ambivalent position. Fundamentally, I am not clear whether Brück sees the world—today, tomorrow, or in the Bronze Age—as relational, or whether this relational claim is one that is specific to the Bronze Age itself. So, for example, in her conclusion she declares that ‘the Bronze Age person can therefore be viewed as a composite—an assemblage of substances and elements flowing in and out of the wider social landscape’ (p. 224). This is entirely reasonable—but this statement is one that many thinkers of a posthumanist bent, whom Brück explicitly separates herself from, would be happy to make to describe how human bodies work today. Indeed, how different is this from how a theoretically informed Neolithic specialist might describe bodies in that period? On the other hand, she says Bronze Age people did not clearly differentiate between humans and animals, but she clearly does, as the burial of animals is discussed in Chapter 5, the burials of humans in Chapter 2.
The point is that if we take the world to be fundamentally relational, as many archaeologists, philosophers, and others urge us to do, then the claim the Bronze Age is relational loses its historical specificity—a point I take from Darryl Wilkinson's (Reference Wilkinson2013) critique of relational personhood. The reality is that for many archaeologists, Brück's argument that we need to see periods of the past as relational and non-dualist has firmly been accepted. It is thanks in large part to her that I, and many others, now adopt a relational perspective as our starting point. The challenge, then, is to develop this to provide an understanding of how relations can be put together in historically specific ways. Brück does this brilliantly at various points in the book, for example in Chapter 3 where she stresses how it was the material properties of bronze that created new concepts of substance in the Bronze Age—a statement any new materialist would surely endorse. How can we go beyond this? The next steps for a relational archaeology are to develop more historically situated and detailed accounts of how relations shift and change. To do this, we need to be more radical, in my view, and to start with a position that the world, present and past is relational. In such a world we will not need to discuss how Bronze Age people, for example, blur differences between nature and culture (p. 169) because there is no such difference to begin with.
This critique should not be belaboured, however, not least because, whilst I might have already signed up to a relational approach, there are plenty of people, not least those studying the Bronze Age, who have not. This book is an essential read for anyone who remains unconvinced that a relational approach can open up much more challenging and nuanced understandings of the past. It will be a critical resource for scholars of this period, and others, thinking through these ideas, as well as students encountering them for the first time. Elsewhere, the Bronze Age is once more replete with stories of standing armies, aDNA-driven tales of population replacement and genocide, and narratives that would not have been out of place a hundred years ago. Brück offers a powerful and convincing alternative. Her work provides a timely reminder of the kinds of stories we can tell when we take a nuanced theoretical position and apply it to the detail of the evidence: a reminder of how a commitment to recognising that the Bronze Age has its own reality, its own forms of difference, and its own ontologies can allow us to use it to say something different, something new. If you want a book that emphasises the complex relations out of which the past emerges, that asks us to take the daily lives of ordinary people seriously, and which recognises that the simple oppositions we draw between people, things, animals, and places were more complex in the past than we sometimes assume, then I cannot recommend this highly enough.
