The Bronze Age Metalwork of South Western Britain

Bronze Age metalwork has always caught the interest of archaeologists, largely due to the very large volume and variety of objects that is still being recovered on an almost daily basis. Regional catalogues have been repeatedly undertaken in an attempt to manage the sheer wealth of data and analyse the implications. In 1983, one Susan Pearce published such a study of south western Britain (BAR 120, 1983), contributing a catalogue of 896 find spots. This discussion embraced the wider understanding of metalworking in the region, how this fitted with traditions across the rest of the country and the European continent, and how the metalwork was integrated into prehistoric society. This volume is intended to bring the 1983 corpus of south western Bronze Age metalwork finds up to date by documenting finds made in the four counties between January 1980 and July 2014. The intention here is not to undertake a full re-examination of the south western metalwork and its context - such a discussion is beyond the confines of this publication - but instead to suggest some of the broad parameters within which such a discussion might take place, and to point to several key themes that have become prominent in Bronze Age studies since 1983 and to some that remain relatively underexplored. A digital copy of the 1983 corpus is available to download as part of this publication to allow access to the complete collection of find spots in south western Britain.