| Summary: | This thesis investigates the interrelationship between the later prehistoric inhabitants of Cheshire and the County Palatine of Lancashire (<i>Lancastria)</i>, and their physical and cultural landscape as it changed through time. It focuses on some of the material properties of that environment, and the way the prehistoric inhabitants responded to the constraints and opportunities that it presented. The emphasis will be on the contextual analysis of the archaeological record, integrating different types of artefact, and different classes of data, because this has the potential to offer new insights into the production and reproduction of small-scale society. The result is a reading of activity in terms of the construction and re-construction of identity at the scales of the individual, group and society. A tension is identified between membership of a wider northern European ‘Bronze Age’, and feelings of local affiliation, expressed at the scale of the region through the particular form of material culture placed in burials, and the particular metalwork types selected for deposition. It was through those practices that the identity of places in the landscape was continually reproduced. It was in the selection and performance of those acts that the participants defined themselves, through practices, as a community with its own identity. This is how the small-scale groups of later prehistoric Lancastria reproduced themselves as a community.
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