Temporary Palaces: The Great House in European Prehistory rehistory

by byR Richard Bradley Oxbow Oxbo Books May 2021 2 £16.99 pp254 pb isbn 9781789256611 97

This and the book below are early examples of a new, time-limited genre: reflections made during the pause of covid lockdown. As it happens, both authors are senior professors at the same university, having joined Reading 50 and 47 years ago respectively. If these two books turn out to be representative, we might be seeing a literary covid bonus. Bradley’s focus is an idea, a “topic which has fascinated me for more than a decade”: what is the meaning of what he calls Great Houses, enormous, shortlived buildings? He begins, deliciously, with the remains of a massive building excavated in the 1960s on Doon Hill, Dunbar, and identified as early medieval. As decades passed, it became clear that it was in fact millennia older and Neolithic. Why such similarities in such apparently wildly different contexts? Bradley extends the question across Europe. He finds repeated themes. The buildings are mostly timber and rectangular, though sometimes round, and push at contemporary limits of engineering and resources. However the key drivers are not architectural, but social and political. Frequent commonalities include craft production, feasting, and destruction by fire, and Great Houses appear at times of culture contact or migration. A stimulating review