What bronze can’t buy? The morality and ethics of metalwork  destruction and deposition in Bronze Age Britain

Wilkin, Neil

What bronze can’t buy? The morality and ethics of metalwork destruction and deposition in Bronze Age Britain

Download

Name

Chapter_21__1_.pdf

Description

visibility:open

Size

5.13 MB

Format

Adobe PDF

Checksum (CRC64NVME)

SEGw9kYa5QU=

Resource type

Book chapter

Creator (person)

Wilkin, Neil

ORCID

Date published

2025

Abstract

In the modern world, dominated as it increasingly is by the invasive and triumphant attitudes and reach of economic markets, it is easy to overlook the girding role of moral values. Some economists and political philosophers now claim that, for balance to be restored, ‘market societies’ must shift back towards being ‘market economies’, while conceding that social values and market forces are, ultimately, deeply intertwined. The growing appreciation of the overlapping spectra of economic, social and spiritual values mirrors recent developments in how prehistorians think about metalwork deposition in north-west Europe during the Bronze Age. Models involving simple binaries between utilitarian and spiritual explanations for destruction and deposition are long gone. Notably, David Fontijn forwarded the important concept of ‘keeping while destroying’ to help explain the rationale behind the sacrifice of material and economic valuables by recognising the creation of social and ‘moral’ meaning and value(s) that could be achieved in the process. This chapter uses the evidence for metalwork destruction and deposition during the British Bronze Age to define and develop the concepts of ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’ as important, archaeologically visible, motivations underpinning depositional behaviours. It makes a case for how morality can be related to the universal notion of ‘rites of passage’ and the idiom of ‘rebounding violence’ developed by the anthropologist Maurice Bloch. This concept offers prehistorians a way of connecting the role of rites of passage in the creation of power and authority and the acts of violence wrought upon so much Bronze Age metalwork during the mid to late second millennium BCE.