Andy M Jones (Cornwall County Council, UK)

Following the case studies provided by social anthropologists such as Bourdieu, Turton and Waterson, archaeologists have, over the last couple of decades increasingly moved away from solely interpreting Middle Bronze Age settlements as centres of food production and agriculture towards the development of models, which highlight the socialising role of the settlement. Many of these interpretations have focussed upon the ritualised nature of much of the surviving evidence: for example, structured deposition, the cosmological principles that are likely to have underlain the spatial organisation of roundhouse orientation and settlement layout. Indeed, it has been argued by some archaeologists that most of what survives in the archaeological record is the product of ritualised activity.

The recognition of ritualized activity within the settlement has undoubtedly provided a useful way of interpreting archaeological deposits but there is a danger that once widely accepted, ‘meta’ or generic paradigms for explaining deposits will lead to a loss of subtlety in interpretation and that variation and diversity between settlements will be overlooked.

This paper will address the evidence for ritualised behaviour emerging from large-scale excavations of a Middle Bronze Age settlement and its surrounding landscape at Scarcewater in Cornwall, where the character of overtly ritual and more subtle ritualized activity will be discussed.