This is the first project to study hillforts in relation to warfare and conflict in Bronze Age Ireland. This project combines remote sensing and GIS-based landscape analysis with conventional archaeological survey to investigate ten prehistoric hillforts across southern Ireland.

The Atlas of Hillforts of Britain and Ireland project (2012-2016) compiled a massive database on hillforts by a team drawn from the Universities of Oxford, Edinburgh and Cork. This volume outlines the history of the project, offers preliminary assessments of the online digital Atlas and presents initial research studies using Atlas data.

The Bronze Age, so named because of the technological advances in metalworking and countless innovations in the manufacture and design of tools and weapons, is among the most fascinating periods in human history. Archaeology has taught us much about the way of life, habits and homes of Bronze Age people, but as yet little has been written about warfare. What was Bronze Age warfare like? How did people fight and against whom? What weapons were used? Did they fortify their settlements, and, if so, were these intended as defensive or offensive structures? in response to these and many other questions, Bronze Age Warfare offers and intriguing insight into warfare and society, life and death in Europe 4000 years ago. It describes the surviving evidence of conflict - fortifications, weapons and body protection, burials, human remains and pictorial evidence - and seeks to understand the role played by aggression in the prehistoric world.

Trade before Civilization explores the role that long-distance exchange played in the establishment and/or maintenance of social complexity, and its role in the transformation of societies from egalitarian to non-egalitarian. Bringing together research by an international and methodologically diverse team of scholars, it analyses the relationship between long-distance trade and the rise of inequality. The volume illustrates how elites used exotic prestige goods to enhance and maintain their elevated social positions in society. Global in scope, it offers case studies of early societies and sites in Europe, Asia, Oceania, North America, and Mesoamerica. Deploying a range of inter-disciplinary and cutting-edge theoretical approaches from a cross-cultural framework, the volume offers new insights and enhances our understanding of socio-political evolution. It will appeal to archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, conflict theorists, and ethnohistorians, as well as economists seeking to understand the nexus between imported luxury items and cultural evolution.

Bronze Age Worlds brings a new way of thinking about kinship to the task of explaining the formation of social life in Bronze Age Britain and Ireland. Britain and Ireland’s diverse landscapes and societies experienced varied and profound transformations during the twenty-fifth to eighth centuries BC. People’s lives were shaped by migrations, changing beliefs about death, making and thinking with metals, and living in houses and field systems. This book offers accounts of how these processes emerged from social life, from events, places and landscapes, informed by a novel theory of kinship. Kinship was a rich and inventive sphere of culture that incorporated biological relations but was not determined by them. Kinship formed personhood and collective belonging, and associated people with nonhuman beings, things and places. The differences in kinship and kinwork across Ireland and Britain brought textures to social life and the formation of Bronze Age worlds. Bronze Age Worlds offers new perspectives to archaeologists and anthropologists interested in the place of kinship in Bronze Age societies and cultural development.

Oxbow says: This study re-evaluates many of the misconceptions about the war-crazed Iron Age warrior hero, and questions anew the role of hillforts as truly, or primarily, defensive structures. Taking a regional approach to Middle Iron Age warfare, Finney examines hillforts and weaponry from lowland Britain.

Eight papers, ranging from the Chalcolithic in Northwest Africa and Iberia to the Iron Age in Central Europe, shed light on issues as diverse as the principles of chronology building, the role of alleged ‘defensive’ enclosures, pottery studies, use-wear analysis of Iron Age weaponry and the Hallstatt/La Tène transition in the eastern Alps.