Funerary and Related Cups of the British Bronze Age

Contents

Introduction ;
Chapter 1: A Potted History of Cups ;
Chapter 2: Cup Forms, Fabrics, Surface Treatments and Motifs ;
Chapter 3: Observations on the Technology and Use of Bronze Age Ceramic Cups ;
Chapter 4: The Archaeological Contexts of Cups ;
Chapter 5: Cups and Human Remains ;
Chapter 6: Associations and Chronology ;
Chapter 7: Cups: An Overview ;
Corpus ;
Bibliography ;
Appendix 1: Cup-Associated Burials ;
Appendix 2: The Association of Cups with Other Ceramics ;
Appendix 3: Cups and Associated Artefacts

About the Author

Claire Copper, an experienced field archaeologist and established member of the supervisory team at the Ness of Brodgar excavations in Orkney, completed her MPhil on the Bronze Age funerary cups of southern England in 2017 at the University of Bradford. Her current doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh is funded by the Margaret Stewart Bequest and builds upon her MScRes study of the Beaker pottery of northern Britain and the Netherlands.

Alex Gibson has worked in the field of Neolithic and Bronze Age archaeology for the last 40 years with the Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust, English Heritage and the University of Bradford. He has published extensively on Neolithic/BA pottery, ritual monuments and sepulchral practices and has written over 150 specialist reports on Neolithic and BA ceramics.

Deborah Hallam, following a career in industry, entered the University of Bradford as a mature student to study for a BA in Archaeology. She went on to complete an MPhil by research and is currently researching for a PhD on the Neolithic of the Yorkshire Dales.

Reviews

‘This book provides a new and welcome synthesis of a particularly enigmatic group of Bronze Age ceramics, which have been variously named, but which the authors choose to classify, justifiably, as cups. Drawing on a large dataset of over 770 cups collated by the authors from England, Scotland, and Wales, it provides a concise and logically ordered discussion of these objects, covering earlier research, physical form, construction, contexts, associations (particularly with human remains), and chronology, before concluding with the catalogue of material.’ – Edward Caswell (2023): Current Archaeology 395