Maritime lives in Iron Age Britain

Abstract

Iron Age coastal communities in England have been poorly understood since the beginning of our discipline. This is mainly as result of the lack of evidence for everyday maritime activities and also the focus of research on explaining an agro-pastoral way of living. Evidence of fishing, boats, harbour structures and ports are very rare archaeologically, and thinking about people living by the sea in this period has been widely overlooked as most of the interest has been the nature of the connections and trade-networks (mainly by Cunliffe 2008). In contrast, evidence for non maritime activities, such as farming and cattle rearing is so rich that looking to the coast only happens in special situations.

Using the Isles of Scilly as a case study, this research challenges the established views that societies on the coasts of south-west of England were mainly cattle herders and farmers. Through palaeolandscape reconstruction, site analysis and material culture study, this research argues that settlement on the coastline is as important as that found inland. It shows that Iron Age maritime aspects of culture were deeply embedded within cultural traditions and that the maritime way of living had little to do with extraordinary or unusual situations.

This research shows that preconceived ideas of what a maritime site should look like, as is the case of harbour structures and important ports, divert the attention from the subtleties of recognising maritime culture’s signature. It is through the study of archaeological context and environmental evidence that these are likely to become more obvious. Therefore, throughout this document the analysis of maritime landscape, settlement pattern and material culture generates new perspectives on how to approach the study of maritime societies in archaeology.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Fraser Sturt: orcid.org/0000-0002-3010-990X

ORCID for Richard whitewright: orcid.org/0000-0002-3548-0978

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