Controlling Colours : Function and meaning of Colour in the British Iron Age

Colour defines our material world, operates as a communication tool and creates meaning. This book revisits well known and well documented sites or artefacts and explores their colours and colour connotations by looking at various contexts such as processes, landscape, iconography, body decoration or the colour connotations of death.

Colour defines our material world, operates as a communication tool and creates meaning. But despite the wealth of colour present in British Iron Age archaeology, interpretative studies have concentrated mostly on the shape of material objects and their decoration, with at best fleeting references to colour. This book revisits well known and well documented sites or artefacts and explores their colours and colour connotations – whether hue or luminosity, whether natural or man-made, whether innate or deliberately applied - by looking at various contexts such as processes, landscape, iconography, body decoration or the colour connotations of death. The importance of changes in colour caused by passing of time, processing, handling or exposure, as well as the deliberate concealment or defacing of colour is looked at . Finally and most importantly, using methodologies ranging from examination of written sources, comparisons from the fields of anthropology and ethnology to experimental archaeology the author attempts to shed light on the symbolic meaning behind such colours or colour contexts and contribute to our understanding of Iron Age cosmologies.