A history of stone and metal at Upton Lovell G2a
The Upton Lovell G2a burial is a famous ‘Wessex culture’ grave. Sometimes understood as the burial of a ‘shaman’, sometimes a metalworker, it has played a key role in our understanding of the Early Bronze Age in Britain. In this talk I focus our attention not on the bodies buried in this grave but the gravegoods. This lecture draws on work from the Leverhulme funded Beyond the Three Age System project based at the University of Leicester which brings together new materialist theory and scientific techniques to reveal changing material histories. Through this project we have been able to carry out microwear analysis and scanning electron microscopy (completed by Christina Tsoraki, Chris Standish and Richard Pearce) on the stone and metal gravegoods. The results from these new analyses allow us to map a history of interactions between people and materials captured in the objects. These reveal interweaving connections between gold, stone and copper, allow us to create a chaîne opératoire for gold working in the period, and suggest that our modern ways of categorising materials may miss much of the complexity of how they worked in the past.

Delta via Zoom:
https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/61078545089