It has been suggested that the creation of the ditch at Durrington Walls was, given the lack of flint axe fragments and impressions in chalk blocks, at least partly undertaken with copper axes, increasing the potential linkage between such enclosures and metals in the 25th century cal BC (Parker Pearson (2011, 59), although this remains a contentious interpretation.
The carvings of 110 bronze axes and four bronze daggers on stones 3, 4 and 5 on the east side of the sarsen circle at Stonehenge also indicate a connection between such monuments and metals, with the Stonehenge examples stylistically dated to the latter part of the Early Bronze Age c.1750–1500 cal BC (Parker Pearson et al. 2015, 123), and this may represent a long-lived association. In Ireland there is also a direct association between older ceremonial monuments and metalworking; on the land surface next to the Neolithic passage tomb at Newgrange, which has been broadly dated to around 2000 cal BC, there are Beaker period metalworking stone tools and a bronze flat axe (O'Kelly and Shell 1979).
If the metal tools themselves were literally creating at least some enclosures or being used to create features within the enclosures (e.g. stone hole settings), is it possible that metal artefacts were created or recast (reborn?) within the enclosures? The novelty and theatre of such a transforming event associated with the making, using or remaking of a symbolically important metal object might have become a significant part of the enclosure function.
Such monumental complexes have been argued to embody the transformation of individuals between the realms of the living and the dead (Parker Pearson et al. 2015), but maybe the process of transformation associated with such enclosures was not confined solely to people, but also applied to metals (and possibly other materials)?
The performance of working metals, deeply invested within a ritualised routine to ensure the successful transformation of material from one form to another, could well have been undertaken in areas viewed as containing special powers or good omens, such as henges and other enclosure monuments. Younger (2017) draws attention to the transformative effects of fire and its association with henge sites, and it is possible that these transformative effects extend to the later working of metals within henges. Whilst the linkages described above are suggestive, there is currently no direct evidence for the making or remaking of metal artefacts within henges, although such ideas could be tested through the application of targeted geochemistry.
More here:
http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue52/4/6.html
Source:
The social organisation of metalworking in southern England during the Beaker period and Bronze Age: absence of evidence or evidence of absence?
Chris Carey, Andy M. Jones, Michael J Allen and Gill Juleff
https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.52.4
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