Wessex culture
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The Wessex culture is a name once given to the predominant prehistoric culture of southern Britain during the early Bronze Age, although it has now largely gone out of usage. It should not be confused with the later Saxon kingdom of Wessex.
Active during the first half of the 2nd millennium BC, knowledge of the Wessex people comes from their burial practices as no settlement evidence has yet been positively identified. They buried their dead under barrows using inhumation at first but later using cremation and often with rich grave goods. It has been argued that they were an immigrant race, replacing and wiping out the earlier Beaker people.
They appear to have had wide ranging trade links with continental Europe, importing amber from the Baltic, jewellery from modern day Germany, gold from Brittany as well as daggers and beads from Mycenaean Greece and vice versa. The wealth from such trade probably permitted the Wessex people to construct the second and third (megalithic) phases of Stonehenge and also indicates a powerful form of social organisation. Although this stage is responsible for the image people think of when they hear the word Stonehenge, this stage of construction has little to do with the astronomical calculations that can be answered using Stonehenge.
When the term 'Wessex Culture' was first coined, investigations into British prehistory were in their infancy and the unusually rich and well documented burials in the Wessex area loomed large in literature on the Bronze Age. During the twentieth century many more bronze age burials were uncovered and opinions about the nature of the early-mid Bronze Age shifted considerably. Since the late 20th century it has become customary to use the label 'Wessex Culture' only when referring specifically to the hundred or so particularly richly furnished graves in and around Wiltshire.
[edit] References
Piggott, S 1938. The Early Bronze Age in Wessex, Proc. Prehist. Soc. 4, 52-106.
Piggott, S 1973. The Wessex culture of the Early Bronze Age, Victoria County History Wiltshire I (ii), 352-75.
Coles, J M and J Taylor 1971. The Wessex Culture, a minimal view, Antiquity 45, 6-14.
