A Feast of Beltain? ReXections on the Rich Danebury Harvests

Twenty-five years after embarking on what was to become one of the major Iron Age excavations of the twentieth century, Barry Cunliffe was also reflecting on the endless cycle from Beltain, through Lughnasadh, to Samhain and Imbolc, and back to Beltain (Cunliffe 1995). While the journey to which Cuchulainn aspired was across the bosom of his bride to be, Cunliffe’s journey took him to a deeper understanding of the culmination of European Prehistory. The campaign he so impressively led at Danebury hillfort formed a critical leg of that journey; it remains a keystone to everyone’s understanding of Iron Age society. He was not alone among his research group in reflecting upon that annual cycle of seasons and feasts, which is preserved in various subsequent Celtic and Gaelic accounts; the principal archaeobotanist and archaeozoologist on the Danebury Environs Project incorporated them into their resumé of seasonal economic activities (Campbell and Hamilton 2000). Cunliffe had previously inferred, on the basis of an analysis he conducted with Poole (1995) of different patterns of erosion and infilling in the thousands of pits within the hillfort of Danebury, that Beltain and Samhain were the times of their ritual opening and infilling. These same pits provided the present author with one of the richest archaeobotanical data-sets I have had the opportunity to examine, and formed a cornerstone of my arguments about Iron Age agricultural production (Jones 1981, 1984a and b, 1985, 1991, 1995, 1996). The discussion and critique those analyses have generated are at least as valuable as the original publications themselves, and the most recent of them draws the debate in an interesting direction. In a meticulous and critical study, Van der Veen and Jones (2006) question a number of aspects of my original argument, and shift the emphasis from my own, which was upon relations of production, to a new emphasis upon relations of consumption. Whereas I had connected the plant remains within the pits to the toil of farmers, they speculated upon the celebrations of the feast.