This chapter examines the disparate scales of ritual deposition in Iron Age Europe, from the individual/household to the wider region. It explores commonalities underlying different practices, ...including the pervasive interest in human remains, the deployment of ritualized violence, the formalization of religious practice, and the roles of natural, domestic, and monumental spaces. The Iron Age is notable for the ritualization of domestic life, with certain objects, including human body parts, deposited in houses. Watery places provided another focus; bodies showing heavily ritualized treatments have been found in bogs from Scandinavia to Ireland. From the middle La Tène period, more formal cult centres appear, some as foci for deposition on an enormous scale. Elsewhere, as in Ireland, ritual activity focused on ‘ancestral’ landscapes. Motivations behind acts of deposition are difficult to ascertain, but the material residues suggest a widespread concern with sacrifice as a means of securing benefits for the community.
Although some limited consideration has been given to the possibility of links between the early medieval ceramic traditions of the Western Isles and the souterrain ware of north-east Ireland, these ...have tended to be framed in the context of supposed Dalriadic cultural influence flowing from Ireland to Scotland. A re-evaluation of the possible relationships between these pottery styles suggests that souterrain ware might instead be seen as part of a regional expansion of western Scottish pottery styles in the seventheighth centuries AD. This raises the question of what social processes might underlie the cross-regional patterning evident in what remains a vernacular, rather than a high-status, technology. Publication Abstract
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Although some limited consideration has been given to the possibility of links between the early medieval ceramic traditions of the Western Isles and the souterrain ware of north-east Ireland, these ...have tended to be framed in the context of supposed Dalriadic cultural influence flowing from Ireland to Scotland. A re-evaluation of the possible relationships between these pottery styles suggests that souterrain ware might instead be seen as part of a regional expansion of western Scottish pottery styles in the seventh-eighth centuries AD. This raises the question of what social processes might underlie the cross-regional patterning evident in what remains a vernacular, rather than a high-status, technology.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PNG, UL, UM, UPUK
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