Feasting Networks and Resilience
at the end of the British Bronze Age

FeastNet Project

FeastNet is an AHRC funded project which explores past community responses to a deteriorating climate and trade collapse between Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age (LBA-EIA 900-600 BC) in Britain. A major focus is the new social and economic networks that developed and how these made communities resilient in the face of turmoil. This will be achieved by employing a suite of scientific methods to analyse the very rich but understudied sites known as middens. Multi-isotope analysis (strontium, sulphur, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen) will reveal where animals came from and how agricultural production was maximised through different husbandry practices and landscape use. This will reconstruct the new inter-community networks and the organisation of the economy and agricultural production, thus revealing the strategies that made communities resilient. It will provide a key case study into responses to socio-economic collapse and will advance understanding of how change at the end of the Late Bronze Age and the beginning of the Early Iron Age shaped society in southern Britain for centuries. 

Oxfordshire Museum Service