Chapter TwoThe Neolothic Sensory Revolution
Chapter TwoRecent research has stressed the fundamental role of monuments and material culture as objectifications of new modes of thought and the changing character of social relations during the Neolithic. The Mesolithic/ Neolithic ‘transition’ in Europe has been argued to have been primarily neither technological nor economic in character but a matter of changing ideologies or modes of thought mediated through material forms (for example, Hodder 1990; Thomas 1991, 1996; Tilley 1996a). Thus if we are to talk about causality, the Neolithic was a matter of mind, a triumph of the will, a new set of ideas, over matter and circumstances, a new way of organising social labour and expressing relationships to others through monument construction, the symbolism of pottery and polished stone axes, of herding domesticates and tilling the soil. In northwest Europe the debate has focused on whether a Neolithic way of life was adopted as a kind of package by final Mesolithic hunter-fisher-gatherers, inspired from the outside through the expansion of farming populations across Europe, or whether the adoption of Neolithic elements was a highly localised selective, differential, and indigenous development, which is my own view (Tilley 1996a). Looked at on a broad scale, multiple transitions were taking place at different times and in different places, so much so that the very conceptual veracity of the terms Mesolithic and Neolithic may inevitably be questioned. What we term the Mesolithic and the Neolithic had hundreds, if not thousands of different manifestations. Are there any common themes?
If Neolithic communities did feel and think differently about the world than did those in the Mesolithic, what caused the change? In this paper, I argue that a fundamental part of a new Neolithic ‘mode of thought’ was directly stimulated by fresh forms of sensory experience of place and landscape. If there was a Neolithic ‘revolution’, it entailed a sensory revolution in which through altering the earth people transformed their own experiential conditions of existence in a fundamental way. A new sensory experience of place and landscape and new modes of dwelling led directly to new ways of thinking and new sets of cosmological ideas explaining the place of people in the world.
A fundamental feature of the Neolithic everywhere is woodland clearance, whether it was to construct monuments, clear the land for settlements and fields, provide grazing for animals, quarry flint or stone, or obtain other raw materials. The character and extent of the forests that clothed much of lowland Europe at the time of the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition has been the subject of much debate. Rackham (1986) argues that the forest was virtually continuous, dark and dense, whereas others such as Moore (2003) suggest that this view is an exaggeration and that there was much local variation in the character of woodland stands, from those that were more dense and clothed to those that were more light and open with glades and clear patches in association with the varying character of soils, rocky areas, streams, marshes, and so on. Like most ‘Neolithic’ traits, woodland clearance was nothing new but was a tradition going back to the late Mesolithic, when areas might be burnt off and opened out to manipulate the forest flora and fauna and stimulate browse for ungulates (Mellars 1976; Moore 1996, 2003; Simmons 1975). The primary difference appears to be the extent of this woodland clearance—far greater and more extensive during the Neolithic—and its far more permanent character, with many of these woodland clearances being variously maintained by grazing domesticates and the presence of permanent settlements, and marked by monuments. Irrespective of whether the forested world of the Mesolithic was uniformly dense and dark, or more open and light, woodland clearance on a fairly massive scale in some areas during the early Neolithic irrevocably altered the environment, and with this event new conditions for sensory perception were created.
Let us try to imagine, for a moment, the great climax deciduous forests in which the final Mesolithic hunter-gatherer communities of northwest Europe lived: a network of tracks, of small clearings, fire-burnt areas, streams and river valleys, lakes and marshy areas, deep layers of leaf mould in places, different hues of green, fallen trees and tree holes, strong contrasts between shadows and bright shafts of sunlight penetrating the denser areas of the forest canopy, huge sometimes monumental trees of individual character that might be named and significant in themselves. Even if this was a landscape in which open areas existed, it was still one in which people were primarily forest dwellers: people who lived with trees and understood them—the manner in which they grew and the resources that they could provide. The collective use and management of trees was probably central to sustenance, cosmologies, and the ordering of social life. Activities such as fire clearance thus carried a heavy symbolic load during the Mesolithic and was not just simply a matter of ‘economic’ manipulation (Brown 2000; Edmonds 1999; Moore 2003). For the late Mesolithic forest people, social relations were structured in relation to the complex woodland mosaic itself, connecting social groups, game, the individual trees, grassland, and clearances. The forest constituted an entire field of meaning wrapped around old trees, fallen trees and tree holes, clearings, regenerating areas, trees connected in memory with specific events, trees providing shelter, firewood, a safe place to sleep, and a sense of home. Trees were intimately connected with the passage of the seasons, the reckoning of time and human lifecycles: an extension of the lives of those who lived among them. Some forest areas would be drier and lighter and more open, others wetter and close to impenetrable. A great cosmic web would probably link persons and animals, trees and water, fish and birds (for ethnographic examples see Garner 2004; Jones and Cloke 2002; Rival 1998). These people were of and in the forest in just the same sense as fish are immersed in the sea.
For the most part, living in such a forest world meant that vision was subdued and limited to tens of metres or so, varying somewhat with the seasons (Figure 2.1). Even being able to see as far as 50 m would for the most part have been a long distance. The only long vistas that might be obtained would have been either from forest edge areas or from the tops of high hills across the forest canopy to the tops of other high hills. Or, alternatively, looking out from the coast across the sea or from the shore across inland lake and marsh areas or paddling along straight stretches of river and stream channels. It is precisely in such locations that we tend to find later Mesolithic settlements throughout lowland northwest Europe: on the tops of high hills, on coastal cliffs, and by lakes and rivers.
FIGURE 2.1 ‘Mesolithic’ pathway through the forest.
However, for the most part, vision, while one was moving through the forest, was drastically curtailed. To the Mesolithic hunter-fisher-gatherer, sound and smell and touch would have been as important, if not more important, than vision, in obtaining food and orientating oneself and symbolically relating to the forest world. To hunt and gather food in such a world required the fusion of all the senses, a co-mingling of the audible, the tangible, the visual, the olfactory. The experience of the world was thus in a primary sense synaesthethic: One’s very survival might depend as much on sound, or smell as sight. Being able to hear a waterfall in the distance, or bird song, or to smell the presence of an animal would have been fundamental. In many ways, this world could be characterised as an intimate one in that most of that which could be experienced always had to be, quite literally, close to hand. The forest world was a place of sensuous embodied intimacy.
If we consider the human senses in terms of their perceptive possibilities, vision provides the greatest spatial reach: One can see much farther than one can hear or smell. To be able to touch requires things to be in reach of the body. What might be heard or smelt might often not be visible. To the Mesolithic hunter, an animal that could be heard or smelt would not be hidden. This contrasts with our modernist sensibilities, in which a hidden thing is almost always associated with that which we cannot see. In the forest world, sight could rarely be a distanciated gaze. The sense of vision would have been associated with things that were close to the body and that in many cases needed to be closer than things that could be heard, such as the sound of water, of bird song, of people chopping wood.
The perceptive possibilities for experiencing the forest would have had important consequences for cognition, for the way people dwelled and thought about their world and their place in it. The forest would have been a smells-cape, a soundscape, a visionscape, and the tactile qualities of the vegetation would have been fundamental. Landscapes formed from sounds and smells and touch would always have had a sense of dynamism and movement: transitory and always changing but linked to memory and meaning. Only a more distanciated spatial gaze from a hilltop across the trees might momentarily have frozen such a world below and made it appear static.
In a forested landscape, the forms and shapes of hills, ridges, spurs, escarpment edges, valleys, and coombes can hardly be perceived (Figures 2.2 and 2.3). In southern England, for example, the presence of steep escarpment edges in the chalk downlands, so visually powerful today in the landscape, would be lost (Figure 2.4). In the upland areas of southwest England, such as Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor, only the tips of the granite tors would be exposed among the trees, invisible from below. Trees camouflage and reduce the sense of scale and visual character of the landscape. From a boat one might see the shape of a lake; in the forest there would be no such equivalent experience of the contours of the land—the shapes of the hills could not be seen.
Neolithic forest clearance on a large scale, in some areas, such as on the chalk downlands of southern England (Allen 1995, 1997), permitted vision to become, for the first time, the dominant sense in terms of spatial orientation. The Neolithic ushered in a culture in which the visual became more and more important in relation to the perception of the environment and, in particular, the contours and forms of the land. This is not to suggest that Neolithic sensory experience was not equally synaesthetic at the hearth and in the home but
FIGURE 2.2 Deforested area of the East Hill ridge, East Devon, revealing the contours of the land.
FIGURE 2.3 Forested area of the East Hill ridge, East Devon. Note how the form of the ridge is completely obscured.
FIGURE 2.4 View across the northern edge of the chalk downlands of Cranborne Chase, southwest Wiltshire. Note the contrast between the form of the spur without trees in the foreground and the tree-clothed escarpment edge in the background concealing its form.
that visual experience became dominant over all the other senses for the first time in relation to what we can call landscape or the wider environment. Let us consider this further.
Clearing the land of trees allowed its profiles and contours to be revealed and in the process permitted a new visual perception of landscape that was simply not possible before. Thus forest clearance, whatever the intention, had the unintended effect of creating a new perceptual experience of the world. It permitted for the first time the spatial fixity of the distanciated gaze over greater and greater areas.
A characteristic feature of the early Neolithic in southern England is the construction of monumental enclosures on hilltops: causewayed enclosures such as Windmill Hill (Smith 1965; Whittle, Pollard, and Grigson 1999), Robin Hood’s Ball (Thomas 1964), Hambledon Hill (Mercer 1980), Hembury (Liddell 1936; Todd 1984; also see Edmonds 1993 and Oswald, Dyer, and Barber 2001 for general reviews), and Maiden Castle and stone enclosures such as Carn Brea and Helman Tor (Mercer 1981, 1986a) in the far southwest. The causewayed enclosures required the hilltops to be cleared of trees and extensive digging into the earth to form the banks and ditches. The stone hilltop enclosures of the southwest needed both tree clearance and the construction of encircling stone walls. In both cases, the processes involved were dual: removing the mantle of surface vegetation and altering the surface of the earth through moving and accumulating materials. From the cleared high hilltops with enclosures, it was often possible to see other such enclosures. It was not just the enclosure banks or walls that became visible in the surrounding landscape but the form, contours, and topographic character of the hills on which they were constructed.
FIGURE 2.5 Hembury Hill, East Devon, seen from the south. Trees now obscure the upper slopes of the end of a dramatic spur on which the early Neolithic causewayed enclosure is situated.
Building these enclosures thus revealed not just the monument itself but the form of the hills and landscape in which they were constructed. The experience of the hill, cleared of trees, was as fundamental as the experience of the monument itself. Each complemented the other in a dialectical relationship. Indeed, it can be suggested that hill and monument were in a relationship of mimesis. The experience of the monument was simultaneously the experience of the hill, and vice versa. For example, Hembury (Figure 2.5) was revealed as a dramatic spur of the Blackdown Hills in Devon, Hambledon Hill was revealed as a clover-shaped hill island separated from chalk downlands of Cranborne Chase to the east, Maiden Castle, in South Dorset, as another hill island, and so on.
A visual widening and opening out of the world thus went in tandem with monument construction during the early Neolithic. We know that many early Neolithic long barrows were constructed on grassland that had already been cleared of trees before these monuments were constructed (for example, Allen 1995: 56; Thomas 1991; Whittle 1993). Many, situated high up on ridge tops, were meant to be seen from considerable distances away. That they should be intervisible was an important factor in their location and cannot purely be a matter of coincidence (Griffith 2001; Tilley 1994). During the Mesolithic, the same hilltops were undoubtedly significant. Rather predictably, flint scatters are frequently found in these locations, but monuments were not constructed and forest clearance still remained limited or insignificant.
During the Mesolithic, the landscape and its elements—huge trees, rocks, waterfalls, caves, lakes, valleys—were in effect the monument. By contrast, during the Neolithic, the monument became part and parcel of the visible landscape, which happened and could have happened only in a culture in which visual perception had become extended and widened. For example, early Neolithic long barrows and cursus monuments are often deliberately built in places so as to appear to be skylined from other barrows on Salisbury Plain and elsewhere (Tilley, fieldwork in progress). This way of building would make no sense if such monuments were constructed in small and limited woodland clearances. During the earlier Neolithic, the landscape itself, now at least partially cleared of trees, was no longer enough. It had to be permanently altered and marked by the presence of monuments. This was accomplished in three main ways:
The last appears to be the case for many of the small—and significantly not very monumental or large—long barrows in southern England that frequently occur in landscapes that are not dramatically defined by striking hills, ridges, rock outcrops, and so on (see Field 2006: 99ff. for a general discussion). These monuments created a new set of cultural reference points in the landscape, adding to what was already there. Monuments became the new vivid symbols of cosmic order, and the landscape became structured and perceived in relation to them: cultural representations of order.
Whether the monument bears a mimetic or a marking relationship to landscape, its construction always involves the creation of a new sense of place that later may provide a reference point for the construction of others. So, in some cases, the primary relationship of the monument is to pre-existing landscape features. In others, the primary relationship is to other pre-existing monuments. Overall, in the Neolithic there appears to be no grand scheme or set of invariant principles at work. The significance of individual monuments was localised, improvised, and site specific.
The act of constructing monuments was, however, clearly an attempt to integrate and incorporate the world and to transcend the fragility of corporeal existence into an enduring form that became as much an embedded part of the landscape as the hills and rocks and valleys themselves. In the Mesolithic, the relationship of people to landscape was generalised, and knowledge was acquired through movement and drawing together knowledges of what one experienced as one moved around: rocks, trees, hills, and so forth. In the Neolithic, this knowledge of landscape became much more site specific and embodied in monuments that gathered these experiences together (see below). During the Mesolithic, social identities were embodied in landscapes as a whole rather than in terms of particular constructed monuments within those landscapes: generalised rather than specific.
Forest clearance and monument construction resulted in both a difference experience of the world and a different kind of knowledge of that world. This different kind of knowledge and experience went hand in hand with an increasing social and material interconnectivity: exchanges of ideas, stone and flint axes (themselves iconic of forest clearance), pots, and other raw materials from numerous sources on a diversity and material scale in the Neolithic that represents a quantum leap compared with the Mesolithic. A world that was visually opening out became a world that was increasingly interconnected.
It is worth pointing out that from the Hembury Hill causewayed enclosure in southeast Devon, it would have been possible to see another such enclosure on the Raddon hills to the west. From the Raddon Hill causewayed enclosure, the enclosures on both Hembury Hill and High Peak and another hilltop settlement and probable enclosure at Haldon Belvedere were visible (see Figures 6.1 and 6.2). Looking farther afield from Hembury, one can see to Dartmoor and Exmoor. From Exmoor, one can see South Wales, the Mendip Hills, and Dartmoor. From Dartmoor, one can see Bodmin Moor, with its probable Neolithic hilltop enclosures, Rough Tor and Stowe’s Pound. From these hills, you can see to Carn Brea, from there to West Penwith and Land’s End. Vision is the only of the senses capable of directly connecting distant places, and my suggestion is that, as the experiential importance of the visual increased in relation to the perception and the understanding of the landscape, so did flows of people, ideas, and raw materials in the Neolithic world (Figure 2.6).
In the final Mesolithic, populations lived in and were part of a forest world that was not substantially altered. The Neolithic ushered in a new era in which the world became substantially modified and controlled through forest clearance and monument construction, discussed above. Monument construction, quarrying activities, flint mining, pottery making and a host of other projects all involved digging into the earth. This also involved, probably unintentionally, a process of discovery. The large-scale construction of monuments during the Neolithic provided new ways to answer a basic set of questions: What’s underneath our feet? How do we find out about that which lies beneath the mantle of soil and vegetation that covers the earth? How can we understand distinctive changes in the patterns of plant life that we see around us as we move around? Why do oak and lime and ash grow here? Why do pine and birch and gorse grow there? What happens to the rain when it falls from the sky? Why do bogs and springs occur, and where does the water flow to? Why are the hills and the ridges situated where they are in the landscape? Why the flat landscapes, why the valleys? What might the different rocks and stones in the landscape that we encounter mean? In the Mesolithic world, the only places that rocks (what we call geological features) would be revealed would be (1) along coastal cliffs; (2) inland on exposed points (cliffs along river valleys); and (3) high up in areas without trees, soil, and vegetation, such as the tors of southwest England or mountains or hilltops elsewhere. Across vast swathes of lowland England, or Europe, there would be no rock exposures whatsoever. By digging, quarrying, mining, and revealing a hidden landscape through forest clearance, Neolithic populations importantly discovered the rocks beneath their feet and the morphologies of the land across which they moved. Tree clearance also had the effect of intensifying surface water run-off, exposing rocks, particularly on hilltops. Herding cattle similarly disturbed the ground, creating exposed hollow ways across such areas as the chalk downlands. Tilling the soil brought to the surface stones hidden in it. All these processes and activities created new sensory experiences of place that were not just visual but also tactile and embodied through all the other senses. As an example, I consider flint.
FIGURE 2.6 Places mentioned in the text.
The presence of fertility symbols in the Neolithic has long been recognised in the form of flint phalluses and rounded chalk and flint balls that have been recovered and recorded in excavations. But these represent only one small part of a whole repertoire of naturally occurring flint forms that occur on the chalk downlands. In ploughed fields, on areas of disturbed ground, and in other exposures there is an extraordinary variety of naturally occurring forms of flint. These vary locally and between different areas of the chalk downlands. Some of them bear an uncanny resemblance to human bones in their shape, colour, and texture. The outer cortex is the off-white colour of old bone, and flints of this colour may almost perfectly resemble bone in their form and size. They include flints that resemble human long bones with the ball joint attached, thin curved pieces resembling ribs, flat and curved bits looking like skull or scapula fragments. Others resemble vertebrae or broken pieces of long bones (Figures 2.7 and 2.8). Some flints in size and dimensions look extraordinarily like fleshy fingers. There also occurs a wide variety of other sculptural forms that in their shape and profile are suggestive of birds and animals.
FIGURE 2.7 Flint ‘femur’ end found in a rabbit hole in a long barrow on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire.
FIGURE 2.8 Collection of broken and disarticulated flint ‘bones’ from a ploughed field at Lyscombe Bottom, central South Dorset.
Today such flints are invariably found in ploughed fields, or they are thrown up from rabbit and badger holes dug into Neolithic and Bronze Age barrows. Flints of these forms are rare in or absent from the only naturally occurring flint exposures that occur on the river beds. Such material is, however, also found in the top-most layers of tree holes revealed when trees have blown over.
The Neolithic involved an opening up of the land and its first cultivation. Such flints would have been revealed in the normal course of digging ditches, constructing monuments, and tilling the fields. The strong resemblance of these flints to the bones and some of the fleshy parts of the human body would not have gone unnoticed. Such stones that looked like bones would have had to have been incorporated into a social and cosmological understanding of the earth, its contents, its fecundity, and the landscape. Constructing new monuments in the early Neolithic would have constantly revealed old bones, thrown up after having been concealed in the ground. Tilling the ground would also have constantly revealed such stone ‘bones’.
We know that early Neolithic mortuary practices involved the disarticulation and rearrangement of bones within monuments (Shanks and Tilley 1982; Thomas 1988; Thomas and Whittle 1986). This treatment of bones had its counterpart in the fragmentary and scattered ‘bones’ that people found while constructing these very monuments and that were also dispersed across cultivated areas. If the bones that were manipulated within the monuments represented the human ancestors of local social groups, then the stone bones may well have represented the fragmentary remains of pre-ancestral beings who lived before people occupied the earth.
Thus the activity of transforming the earth had its unintended outcome in revealing the bones of beings who had come before. In field survey work on barrows within the landscape around Stonehenge, the frequency with which these ‘bones’ are thrown up from animal burrows and scrapes is quite striking. Some of these ‘bones’ might very well have been deliberately incorporated or deposited within barrows, which would therefore contain both human ancestral bones and stone bones from pre-ancestral beings. However, we do not know this from excavations, because such stones, apart from the obvious phalluses, have rarely been recorded or mentioned by archaeologists. Being ‘natural’ rather than fashioned artefacts, they have ended up discarded on excavation spoil heaps.
It is worth noting that these quite extraordinary ‘bones’ and sculptural forms are unique to the chalk and occur nowhere else in southern Britain. Where the chalk occurs, the stone bones are found. This fact surely made the chalk downlands landscape and the monuments erected within it of great significance. The concentration of early Neolithic causewayed enclosures and long barrows on the chalk downlands of southern England has long been noted by archaeologists, and it is from this area that we have the earliest radiocarbon dates (Whittle 2007), Perhaps it is no coincidence that the earliest monuments were erected in areas containing old ‘bones’.
Neolithic flint mining is an activity that began in the Neolithic and that has been almost universally regarded as a search for fine material for making tools. Such an activity may in part have also been motivated by a desire to explore what lay beneath the surface of the ground, and it, too, would have revealed extraordinary flint material of the same character as discussed here.
Two general processes seem to be fundamental in the Neolithic in a way not apparent in the Mesolithic: (1) integrating or gathering processes; (2) incorporating processes. Both brought together people, ideas, raw materials, places, and landscapes and provided the foundations for cosmological systems. Monuments such as causewayed enclosures, long barrows, and chambered tombs provided focal points for integrative and incorporative processes. At these places, raw materials and discrete sensory experiences of other places in surrounding or more distant landscape were brought together through the collection, exchange, and deposition of artefacts: stone axes from faraway places; pottery such as Hembury Ware, incorporating distinctive stone as temper from the Lizard; flints from various local and more distant sources with different qualities of colour, patina, texture, and so on. In other words, monuments gathered together places and landscape. Often in the case of stone-built monuments, an extraordinary range of stones was used from distant and local places in the landscape. The megalithic tombs of the Boyne valley, eastern Ireland, are an excellent example of such use, incorporating a wide variety of local rocks—sandstones, schists, limestones in their kerb stones, and rocks from far more distant sources: quartz from the Wicklow mountains and mudstones from the Carlingford mountains to the north (Cooney 2000; Mitchell 1992; Tilley 2008). We might surmise that the wood used to construct the mortuary chambers of earthen long barrows of southern England or Neolithic timber circles might well have come from forest trees with more than local origins. Monuments integrated and, through their very construction, incorporated the world surrounding them. They themselves created new types of sensory experience through these processes.
Acts of monument construction and raw material extraction and processes changed the Neolithic sensory world. There was also a fundamental change in the relationship between people and animals. In the Mesolithic, although it was interdependent, the relationship between people and animals to a certain extent always involved distance. With the exception of the domestic dog, people did not live with animals. During the Neolithic, people did live with their stock and, in particular, with cattle. Living with animals, identifying with animals and their welfare, created a very different, more intimate and enduring, and personalised set of relationships that one does not imagine could have existed between Mesolithic populations and red deer. The cattle keeper would have identified his or her life with the animals that she or he kept. Individual animals would have become objectifications of human beings in a way that was not possible in relation to game animals that looked after themselves.
I have already argued that the relationship between people and landscape changed from being generalised (or ‘smooth’) to much more differentiated (or ‘broken’) and site specific between the Mesolithic and the Neolithic. This change is directly paralleled by a change in the relationship between people and animals—generalised and more distant in the Mesolithic, individual and personalized in the Neolithic. During the Neolithic, social identities became attached to particular monuments and particular domestic animals. The burial of the bones of domestic cattle in monuments together with people effectively entangles their identities.
My argument in this chapter has been that cosmologies explaining the origins and the place of people in the world are ultimately derived from the embodied sensory exploration of that world. Cosmologies make sense and bring order to the minutiae of similarities and differences observed and encountered through dwelling in and moving through landscapes. Thus cosmological thought is metaphorical in nature, a primary and originary mode of human reasoning, whose basis is connecting often disparate experiences through chains of resemblances (Tilley 1999a; also see Chapter 10 this volume). The Neolithic ushered in a sensory revolution that became integrated into cosmologies that were in turn objectified in monuments and material culture. The Neolithic is all about the attempt to incorporate the ‘wild’ into a cultural frame. However, this is not a significant break from the Mesolithic, in that we can always identify a number of Neolithic trends already present—limited forest clearance, limited exchange, a close relationship with some animals, such as the dog.
The Mesolithic/Neolithic transition is best expressed as a negotiation of long-term cultural trends that became crystallised in what we term the Neolithic, when they became clearly articulated and durably expressed. Perhaps the key to understanding the Neolithic is the recognition that it was the first attempt to totalise disparate sensory experiences, some new, some old, into a coherent cosmological model of the world, objectified in monuments and artefacts, rather than accepting its inherent diversity and fragmentation. Neolithic thought was grounded in new sensory experiences of landscapes and monuments, rocks and stones, animals and plants. The world became much more human-centred and personalised: situated, controlled, constructed, transformed, integrated, incorporated, connected in relation to place, time, and landscape. Through fundamentally altering the earth, clearing trees, and constructing monuments, people revealed the bones of the land in a double sense. First, its contours and forms previously masked and hidden by surface vegetation were revealed. Clearing a hill or a spur simultaneously revealed its form in the landscape. Second, digging into the earth threw up new materials for experience, such as flint bones. These processes of revelation created new sensory experiences that led to a revolution in thought. By altering the land, people created new conditions for experiencing it and new materials that provided food for thought. Activities such as forest clearance and flint mining and keeping domesticates were far from being just economic transformations, because they had profound social and ideological consequences. People created new sensory experiences of the earth and through this process altered themselves, a theme further explored in Parts II–IV.