A Bronze Age cremation cemetery near Hodnet
Archaeological recording along the new Hodnet Bypass
During the summer and autumn of 2002, the Archaeology Service carried out a watching brief on the topsoil-strip phase of the construction of the new A53 Hodnet Bypass.
Among the historical features recorded during the watching brief were the drains and ditches of 19th century water-meadows alongside the River Tern at Wollerton and Losford, and a 19th-century stable, once part of a small-holding, at Webster Lane on Hodnet Heath.
The Archaeology Service also carried out the rescue excavation of an early Bronze Age cremation cemetery, discovered by chance at the Espley end of the new road. At least 17 individual cremation pits were identified, containing charcoal and fragments of burnt human bone. Samples of the charcoal from three of the pits were sent for radiocarbon dating, and these have dated the cemetery to the early Bronze Age, between c.1600 BC and 1400 BC.
Hodnet in the Bronze Age
The period we know as "the Bronze Age" began with the introduction of metal tools and weapons in about 2500 BC, and lasted until about 700 BC, when iron-working was first developed.
The people living in Shropshire in the Bronze Age will mostly have been farmers, probably living in small communities, probably based on family groups. However, we know very little about where their actual settlements were. Most of our knowledge of these people comes from their burial sites, and from the chance finds of the stone and bronze tools and weapons that they used.
During the Bronze Age the dead were often buried beneath the circular mounds of earth or stone that we call barrows. Sometimes they were cremated and buried in cemeteries, such as the one discovered at Hodnet during the Bypass works.
Sometimes the dead were buried with their tools, weapons or ornaments - clay pots, bronze axes or daggers, flint arrowheads and knives. Often, as at Hodnet, the dead were buried without any of these.
The Bronze age people's tools and weapons are also sometimes found without any sign of burials. These hoards as they are called may have been buried as part of a ritual, or perhaps as a bronzesmith's stockpile of scrap, intended for later re-use but never recovered.
