Salt and ceramic exchange in Western Britain during the first Millennium B.C.

This thesis demonstrates the distribution of several prehistoriccommodities by the characterization of the artifacts, the identificationof their production locations, and the final deposition of thoseartifacts after transportation and use. The structures of thesedistributions are the results of the production and exchange systemsmaintained by the economic and social organization in existence duringthe first millennium B.C. in western Britain. By assessing thesedistributions, using quantitative analyses and statistical tests, it ispossible to infer patterns of activity which reflect that organization.The artifacts selected include pottery vessels made under at least twodifferent forms of production organization - a small-scale system formore limited or localized consumption of product, and a large-scalesystem for wider or regional consumption; and salt-drying containers fromtwo different inland brine springs sources with one at Droitwich inWorcestershire and another in Cheshire. The production and distributionsystems of both the pottery and the salt container types were examineddiachronically through this period of a thousand years to discover whetherthere have been any changes in the organization of these activities.The techniques used to identify, measure, and compare thesedistributions include ceramic petrology to define the artifacts and locatetheir sources of production, quantification by weight, percentage, andrelative index to measure the material distributed in proportional andcomparable form, and regression analysis with correlation coefficients toassess the significance of the results. Social and physical constraintswhich may affect the distributions are discussed, modeled, and interpretedfor many of the variations in these patterns. These factors can includethe economic value given the commodities based on manufacturing time andeffort (labour investment), consumer distance from source, transportationefficiency, and alternative commodity sources, as well as the socialvalues placed on commodities for,identification of group association oralliances. The latter aspects are particularly noticeable in thepatterning of material residues resulting from the activities of groupsorganized by kin relationships, the system believed to have been prevalentduring the period under study, It is by examining the structure of theseparticular exchange patterns that detailed information about the organization of this society can be deduced.