P R E H I STO RY
Animating the Dead Bronze Age Burial Practices in Orkney Edited by Jane Downes
Brings together the results of the Orkney Barrows Project.
EBOOK AVAILABLE
Oxbow Books • 9781789255584 Hardback • b/w and colour illus. 280 x 216mm • 416 pages December 2020 • £40.00
About the editor: Jane Downes is Director of the Archaeological Institute of the University of the Highlands and Islands, Scotland. She has a PhD in the study of Bronze Age burial practices in Orkney from Sheffield University. Her research interests are in burial archaeology, particularly cremation, and in prehistoric and landscape archaeology.
This book brings together the results of the Orkney Barrows Project, initiated and directed by Jane Downes and funded by Historic Environment Scotland. The barrows sites detailed and discussed in the volume are Linga Fiold, a barrow cemetery in West Mainland which was comprehensively excavated and which provides extraordinary evidence of pyre sites and cremation practices; Gitterpitten, a barrow cemetery in Rendall, of which three barrows were excavated partially; and Varme Dale also in Rendall, of which two barrows were excavated. The Vestra Fiold, Sandwick barrow site which was surveyed and excavated to a limited extent is also reported upon. Eight Bronze Age cist burials excavated under ‘rescue’ conditions by a range of other individuals are also included within this volume. The evidence is used to compare and contrast the rites and practices of cremation and inhumation. Discussion of chronology and typology of the burials is placed in the context of the other burial evidence from Orkney, and the other aspects of the Bronze Age represented by settlement, burnt mounds, etc. As such the book forms an update to M. Hedges’ contribution ‘The Second Millennium and After’ in C. Renfrew Prehistory of Orkney (1985).
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