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South-west Britain--Cornwall, Devon and west Somerset--has featured little in discussions of British rock art. However, although it lacks the complex motifs found in northern Britain or the rich ornamentation of the Irish passage graves, it has a growing number of sites with simple cup-marks and stands at a pivotal location in the wider distribution of this form of rock art within north-west Europe. This paper considers the cup-mark tradition in south-west Britain and its wider European context, drawing attention to comparable traditions in western France, Wales, and south-west Ireland where simple cup-marks occur in analogous contexts. We propose a chronology for cup-marks in the south-west, from suggested Neolithic origins associated with rock outcrops and chambered tombs through to their use in Bronze Age barrows and subsequently roundhouses in the second millennium BC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the character and role of exchange in Bronze Age Britain. It critiques anachronistic models of competitive individualism, arguing instead that the circulation of both artefacts and the remains of the dead constructed the self in terms of enduring interpersonal ties. It is suggested that the conceptual divide between people and things that typifies post-Enlightenment rationalism has resulted in an understanding of Bronze Age exchange that implicitly characterizes objects as commodities. This article re-evaluates the relationship between people and things in Bronze Age Britain. It explores the role of objects as active social agents; the exchange of artefacts and of human remains facilitated the production of the self and the reproduction of society through cyclical processes of fragmentation, dispersal and reincorporation. As such, Bronze Age concepts of personhood were relational, not individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]