More than quarter of a century ago Richard Bradley published The Passage
of Arms. It was conceived as An Archaeological Analysis of Prehistoric
Hoards and Votive Deposits, but, as the author concedes, these terms
were too narrowly focused for the complex subject of deliberate
deposition and the period covered too short. A Geography of Offerings
has been written to provoke a reaction from archaeologists and has two
main aims. The first is to move this kind of archaeology away from the
minute study of ancient objects to a more ambitious analysis of ancient
places and landscapes. The second is to recognize that problems of
interpretation are not restricted to the pre-Roman period. Mesolithic
finds have a place in this discussion, and so do those of the 1st
millennium AD. Archaeologists studying individual periods confront with
similar problems and the same debates are repeated within separate
groups of scholars - but they arrive at different conclusions. Here, the
author presents a review that brings these discussions together and
extends across the entire sequence. Rather than offer a comprehensive
survey, this is an extended essay about the strengths and weaknesses of
current thinking regarding specialized deposits, which encompass both
sacrificial deposits characterized by large quantities of animal and
human bones and other collections which are dominated by finds of stone
or metal artifacts. It considers current approaches and theory, the
histories of individual artifacts and the landscape and physical context
of the of places where they were deposited, the character of materials,
the importance of animism and the character of ancient cosmologies.
