Description

Summary: antler fragments, from Bishops Cannings G76, Wiltshire.

Research results

Antler found during excavations of Beckhampton Road longbarrow by Paul Ashbee in 1964. During her reinvestigation of the osseous assemblage of the barrow, Banfield noted the presence of five antlers placed in two neat piles on the pre-mound surface. The groups included a mix of shed antlers and those removed by butchery, and she argues the two would have had very different connotations. She argues that these deposits were clearly deliberate, and demonstrate the importance of the community's relationships with these animals.

In her PhD with the university of Leicester, Bandfield (2018) re-examined the osseous assemblages Beckhampton Road, West Kennet and Cold Kitchen Hill long barrows, as well as material held by other institutions from a number of Neolithic long barrows in the Avebury and Salisbury plain areas. She takes a post-humanist approach to these materials, seeking to re-analyse and re-emphasise faunal assemblages which garnered little attention from the original excavators and in initial post-excavation analyses and publication. In doing so, she illustrates both the potential importance of human-animal relations to the communities who contructed these monuments, but also the significant meaning these remains may have conveyed.