lanarkshire-1978/03_037

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INTRODUCTION : THE BRONZE AGE

3. THE BRONZE AGE (c. 2500-600 BC)

Towards the middle of the third millennium BC Neolithic traditions of burial in Britain were
profoundly affected by the arrival of immigrants from the Rhine basin and perhaps the
Atlantic coasts of Europe. The earliest of these new settlers introduced two important inno-
vations - individual burial, frequently by inhumation in a grave or cist, and a style of pottery
known as Beaker ware; they also brought copper technology, which, by about 2000 BC, was
replaced by bronze-working. ¹ For the period between about 2500 and 1500 BC the use of such
terms as Neolithic and Bronze Age has little archaeological relevance, as Beaker pottery and
burial-traditions and the continuing use of henge monuments span a period of change that
cannot conveniently be labelled. Neolithic traditions of collective burial were gradually
replaced by individual inhumation or cremation in a grave or cist, in some instances covered
by a round cairn or barrow. As in the Neolithic period, our knowledge of the Bronze Age in
Lanarkshire is derived from funerary and ritual sites, or from stray finds; no habitation
sites have yet been positively identified, although some hill-top sites and unenclosed platform
settlements may have originated towards the end of the second millennium BC, in the later
phases of the Bronze Age.

CAIRNS AND BARROWS

About eighteen hundred cairns and barrows have been recorded; they are widely distributed
(Fig. 2), but relatively scarce in the northernmost part of the county. Many cairns, however,
were destroyed before adequate records were kept ² and considerable numbers were removed
during the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Destruction
seems to have been especially severe in the Middle and Lower Wards; in the parish of Lesma-
hagow, for example, only four cairns now remain out of a redorded total of almost forty.
Roughly seventeen hundred of the cairns form the group of small cairns discussed on
pp. 8-10; the rest, however, range from about 4 m in diameter up to the largest and most
conspicuous cairn in the county crowning the summit of Tinto (No. 107, Pl. 6c), which is
45 m in diameter. Even if this cairn is partly of natural origin, ³ and has had stones added to it
by visitors, it remains one of the largest cairns in Scotland and is comparable with the enor-
mous, but now ruined, cairn at Cairn Muir, Caputh, Perthshire. ⁴ The cairns usually appear as
low mounds, although Nos. 67 and 114 are substantial structures similar to the large cairns on
the North Muir, Peebleshire. ⁵ The addition of a long mound of unusual construction to a
round cairn at Easton (No. 46, 7). gives it the superficial appearance of a long cairn but, unlike
Neolithic cairns with broadly similar mounds at Bryn yr Hen Bobl, Anglesey, ⁶ and on Great
Ayton Moor, Yorkshire, ⁷ there is no reason to believe that the Easton cairn is earlier than the
Bronze Age.

1 See Burgess, C B. 'The Bronze Age' in Renfrew, C (ed.),
British Prehistory (1974), 165-232.
2 Cf. TGAS, new series, iii (1895-7), 498-9; Stat. Acct., ii
(1792), 221-2; ibid. (reissue), vii (1973), 29-30.
3 Geographical Journal, cxx (1954), 219.
4 Coutts, H, Ancient Monuments of Tayside (1970), 9, no. 6.
5 Inventory of Peebleshire, i, Nos. 47-8.
6 Archaeologia, lxxxv, (1935), 253-92.
7 Hayes, R H, The Chambered Cairn and Adjacent Monuments
on Great Ayton Moor, North-East Yorkshire, Scarborough
and District Archaeological Society Research Report, 7
(1967), 22-3, 32-3.

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