With 150 illustrations.
The world's wetlands are unique environments: from inland bogs and lakes to coastal marshes they are rich not just in wildlife, but human life and history as well. For thousands of years the wetlands, through their extraordinary preservative qualities, have kept intact ancient remains that would have perished on dry land, such as the bodies of unwary travelers trapped in the bog, or prehistoric trackways and whole villages. But now these landscapes are under serious threat from drainage and peat-cutting. This timely book is the first to describe for the general reader the extraordinary archaeological wealth of the wetlands worldwide - and just how much we stand to lose if this heritage is destroyed.
Author(s): Bryony Coles, John Coles
Series: Ancient Peoples and Places
Publisher: Thames and Hudson
Year: 1989
Language: English
Pages: 216
City: New York
Preface 7
1. The decades of discovery 9
Early warnings 10
Two fruitful decades: 1855-1875 17
2. Extending the search 32
Irish crannogs 32
Robert Munro and the Scottish crannogs 34
Ehenside Tarn 37
Glastonbury 39
Terps: mounds of the north European coasts 40
The Court of the Pile-dwellers 44
Reinterpreting the lake-dwellings 51
New projects in northern Europe 54
3. Living by the sea 59
America 60
Late Mesolithic coastal sites of northern Europe 65
Britain 72
North European coastal Neolithic 76
Later prehistory 79
4. Pioneers of the inland waters 86
Freshwater foragers 91
Foraging farmers 96
Timber and time, or peripatetic peasants 103
Settling down? 106
Neolithic material culture 108
5. The lake-dwellers 117
Circum-Alpine chronology 117
The settlements 119
How long was a village occupied? 125
Subsistence 127
Bronze Age material culture 129
Riverside and floodplain 133
The Fens and Flag Fen 136
Biskupin 138
Glastonbury and Meare 140
New work on crannogs 144
Elsewhere in the world: a postscript on potential 147
6. Reaching the far side 151
Travel and transport over the bogs 154
The Sweet Track 156
Corlea: an Irish roadway 159
The Tibirke roads 161
Bourtanger Moor 162
Lower Saxony 165
Travel and transport upon the water 169
7. Bogs and bodies 173
Into the pool 173
Gifts to the bogs 177
Tollund man 180
Preservation 184
Clothing 185
Death in the bog 189
Ritual deposits 191
War booty 192
Wooden figures 194
Chronological table 198
Brief guide to sites and museums 199
Select bibliography 205
Sources of illustrations 211
Index 212
