Ms Olivia Britter

Research interests

• How Household Archaeology can be used to undestand ways of living in later prehistory.
• The use of material objects and architecture as a means of demonstrating social and cultural identity.
• How social and cultural shifts impact people’s lives and how this is visable in the archaeological record.
• The Bronze to Iron Age transition period in Britian. 
• Categorisation of archaeological time.

Current research

My research explores social change in Bronze and Iron Age Britain through the material culture and architecture of household contexts. The tendency to separate these periods in scholarship has led to a fragmented approach in the understanding of both, despite the continuation and evolution of technologies as well as social and cultural constructs.

I will instead approach the Middle Bronze Age through to the end of the Middle Iron Age as one ‘long first millennium BC’, in order to highlight the nuances of the changes throughout these periods. Through this reframing, I aim to understand how this dynamic part of British prehistory impacted and changed the lives of the people who lived through it. The household has often been a scale missed in the study of Bronze and Iron Age Britain, with research instead being focussed on the interpretation of archaeological data to aid understandings of concepts such as gender, status, hierarchy, and inter-community relations. Previous research has also been used to highlight the importance of understanding large-scale cultural shifts and the significance of seemingly ‘high-status’ individuals to wider cultural values and practices.

Through this research it is hoped that I will explore how people experienced the evolving world around them and if/how households reacted to the changing nature of the society they were a part of. Therefore, the households I intend to look at may be used to consider how broad an impact this proposed period of dynamic social change had on the everyday lives of the people that experiencing it. This research will therefore aim to provide a new perspective on how social and cultural change progressed throughout the long first millennium BC as continuous yet ever-evolving constructs.