Relating to Raptors: The ‘upper part of a hawk’s head and beak’ in a Chalcolithic/Early Bronze Age ‘Beaker’ Grave, Driffield, East Yorkshire

Wallis, Robert J. (2023). Relating to Raptors: The ‘upper part of a hawk’s head and beak’ in a Chalcolithic/Early Bronze Age ‘Beaker’ Grave, Driffield, East Yorkshire. In: Wallis, Robert J. ed. The Art and Archaeology of Human Engagements with Birds of Prey: From Prehistory to the Present. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, pp. 119–135.

URL: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/art-and-archaeology-...

Abstract

The unusual find of a raptor’s head in a ‘beaker’ burial dating to the Chalcolithic/Early Bronze Age, near Driffield in the Yorkshire Wolds of north-east England, is explored in terms of new materialism, multi-species and relational thinking. Beaker burials have traditionally been interpreted in terms of rank, elite status and the emergence of the individual warrior-chief. Examining the relationships between the finds in the grave assemblage in terms of ‘proximity’ and ‘bundling’, I argue that the material qualities of the objects and substances, and the processes involved in their making, use and retirement, present a highly charged proximal bundle of relational associations. These resonate less vibrantly with the status of the individual interred, but rather with persistent themes of transformation, martiality and celestial phenomena. The distinctive funerary idiom materialised in grave C38 at Driffield arguably pertains to ontologies of predation and solar cosmology which enabled the construction and negotiation of new identities at a time when concepts of individuality and community, human and other-than-human, were being reconfigured.

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