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REVIEW
Bruno Vindrola-Padrós
In this article I review Richard Bradley’s latest book introducing the geographies of
hoards and votive offerings in Northern and Western Europe that range from the
Mesolithic period to Mediaeval times. Beyond the descriptive account of the deposits
in the area, the book comprises a well-founded critique on academic traditions in
archaeology, and their tendency of creating regional and chronological faultlines.
These faultlines, it is argued, severely limit our interpretations of deliberate depo-
sition of objects which are, often subsumed under terms like ‘ritual’. In an attempt
to overcome these faultlines, Bradley provides an alternative to typological
studies of hoard deposits by focusing on object histories and their place within
the landscape. Through this approach, original interpretations are presented from
hoard deposits (mostly containing metalwork) that transcend pervasive ritual/non-
ritual dichotomous interpretations.
Richard Bradley articulates this provoca- xiii). A Geography of Offerings not only com-
tive and ambitious seminal piece through a bines much of his earlier work on intentional
longue durée approach to hoard deposition deposits with his later landscape approach to
and votive deposits, spanning from Mesolithic prehistoric settlements and monuments, but
to Mediaeval times in Western and Northern ventures further into historical periods (e.g.
Europe. This constitutes a proposal that Roman, Migration and Viking Age), incorpo-
the author himself describes as taking him rating varied sources from artefactual descrip-
beyond his ‘comfort zone’ (Bradley 2017: tions, pictorial representations, and Classical
and Early Mediaeval texts. Through this large
scale analysis, he sets up two central aims.
University College London, GB First, an epistemological agenda is estab-
bruno.padros.14@ucl.ac.uk lished oriented towards exposing and
Art. 23, page 2 of 3 Vindrola-Padrós: Review of A Geography of Offerings
How to cite this article: Vindrola-Padrós, B 2017 Review of A Geography of Offerings: Deposits of
Valuables in the Landscapes of Ancient Europe Papers from the Institute of Archaeology, 27(1):
Art. 23, pp. 1–3, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/pia-536
Copyright: © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use,
distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Papers from the Institute of Archaeology is a peer-reviewed open
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