Is it possible to experience the Neolithic period (c.4000—c.2400 bce) in Britain today? Of course not, or not in any literal sense. And yet, there are devices that we can create, and places that we can visit, that can to some extent stand in for that experience. These enable us, however fleetingly, to bridge the gulf of time that separates us from the distant world of thousands of years ago. One new way of traversing this chasm became available to us in 2013, when English Heritage opened a new visitor centre at Stonehenge. Inside the airy modern structure the latest audio-visual technology introduces visitors to the site and its surrounding prehistoric landscape. Remarkably, before the year was out, that centre had hosted a visit by the then President of the United States of America. Barack Obama made an unscheduled stop at the World Heritage Site en route from a NATO summit in Wales on 5 September 2014. Apparently, visiting Stonehenge, widely regarded as the most extraordinary of all prehistoric sites in Europe, was on the personal ‘bucket list’ of that recent incumbent of the White House. Among the things that the US President would have seen at the Stonehenge centre were reconstructed Late Neolithic houses from the area, and the visitor can now enter and walk around in these buildings, made using authentic materials (Fig. 0.1).
These newly constructed timber and daub buildings had been created on the basis of evidence recovered from Durrington Walls, a colossal Late Neolithic complex 2 miles (3.2 km) from Stonehenge, where settings of concentric rings of massive posts were contained within an embanked enclosure half a kilometre across. Surprisingly, if the visitor centre had been built when it had originally been planned a decade earlier, it would not have been possible to recreate these 4,500-year-old houses, with their square ground plans and central hearths. This is because the excavations that would reveal these striking vestiges of the Stonehenge people were then only just beginning. This is an indication of the pace of discovery in the study of Neolithic Britain, and the immediacy of this process is one of the things that we would like to convey in this book.
If you are a local Wiltshire school student, it is now possible to take part in a field studies sleepover in one of these houses, of the kind that had been occupied for short periods by the participants in the seasonal gatherings that took place at Durrington many centuries ago. Of course, this does not enable the students to experience life as it was lived on what is now Salisbury Plain in the Late Neolithic, any more than those who attended the Stonehenge Free Festivals in the 1970s and 1980s shared the same feelings as their prehistoric forerunners. But the sensation of standing close to, or even amongst, the settings of sarsens and bluestones at Stonehenge itself is, as President Obama put it, ‘really cool... there’s something elemental about it’.
This experience of being amongst the remains of a Neolithic monument is not exclusive to Stonehenge. It can be encountered in many parts of Britain, and perhaps most profoundly in the remoter uplands of the north and west, where groups of uprights, or even single stones represent the traces of structures built as much as 6,000 years ago. In human terms, this period would extend back as long as 240 generations. Modern DNA studies in Cheddar have indicated that some of the contemporary inhabitants may be descended from people who lived in the Mendips as far back as the end of the Ice Age, and the same may be true of other parts of Britain. However, it is equally likely that people from various parts of continental Europe migrated into Britain, in smaller or larger numbers, at various junctures throughout prehistory. So in a variety of ways it is possible to feel a sense of connectedness through time to past people and ancient places, particularly where structures and monuments have only been superficially altered by natural processes of decay and changes in land use across those immense spans (which nonetheless, of course, in planetary or cosmological terms are but a blink).
These modern-day activities (standing within reconstructed buildings, seeing media visualizations, or visiting ancient monuments) clearly do not expose someone to the visceral experience of a living Neolithic world, not least because the sites concerned do not for the most part, or for long, wholly enclose you. A candlelit stooping walk along the carefully restored slab-lined entrance passage and into the central chamber-space of the Neolithic tomb of Maes Howe on the Orkney Mainland comes close to providing such an immersive experience, given the sheer amount of rock from nearby Neolithic quarries that surrounds you (see Fig. 0.2 for the similar Cuween Hill).
Yet you soon realize that the chamber was re-roofed only 100 years or so ago as an act of restoration after a Viking tomb-raiding expedition had broken through the original corbelled roof a thousand years ago. And of course, you would also have to ignore the modern Historic Scotland safety paraphernalia. In contrast, however, descent some ten metres down the shaft (albeit its top is enclosed by a modern concrete cover) of one of the ‘flint mines’ in the chalk rock at Grimes Graves in Norfolk (excavated, or more properly ‘re-excavated’, nearly fifty years ago) and onto its floor is a truly inspirational experience (see Figure 4.1). This is especially the case if one does not suffer from claustrophobia and can explore one of the side-galleries that were dug to follow the seams of flint banded horizontally in the chalk. Here in these galleries even the soot from the Neolithic miners’ lamps has left its unmistakable traces on the exposed chalk walls, and the strike-marks of the miners’ red deer antler-pick tines are evident alongside the seams of flint in the chalk where lumps were prised out.
Otherwise, besides the more engaging among national and local museum displays, the most direct contact that can be made with the world of Neolithic Britain is through the act of archaeological excavation. The raw encounter with a residue that formed 4,400 years ago and more, the feel in your hand of an object that had last been touched by the people who made, or used, or deposited it (or all three) all those centuries distant, are highly personal experiences. This is the lure that draws so many people, whether students or volunteers, to give up their free time to endure hardships, occasional boredom, and frustration, to contribute to the archaeological endeavour. In some places, as at the Ness of Brodgar excavations, again on the mainland of Orkney, this encounter can be a three-dimensional one, working (and walking) in among the stone-slabbed walls of structures that were used 5,000 years ago, with incised wall-decorations and even occasional ‘paintwork’ in view.
Alternatively, as at the Stonehenge visitor centre, one can observe a visualization created by archaeologists of a landscape or an event featuring both the objects and the scientific evidence that can illuminate that distant Neolithic world. This imagery could take a number of different forms, but is perhaps most often encountered through a digital fly-through model very familiar to a generation brought up on computer games. And inevitably, visualizations of this kind involve either anachronisms or a level of simplification that strips out much of the texture that would have made the experience of being alive, and living within a social nexus comprising family and acquaintances, meaningful in the Neolithic period.
And finally, there is the written word. A particularly vivid way of rendering the warp and weft of the world of Neolithic Britain, as recorded through the encounters that archaeologists have made with these remains from Britain’s earliest farming past, has been evident in the writings of Aubrey Burl. In his book Rites of the Gods, for example, Burl describes Neolithic life and practices as he understood them over thirty years ago, based upon the (then) already thirty years or so of his working life spent ‘among the stones’. He distilled there his thoughts and impressions concerning Neolithic religion, magic, and the kinds of practices that led to the manufacture of objects that will always remain enigmatic, but that have often been entirely ignored by archaeologists––to the impoverishment of wider understandings.
So, for example, concerning one kind of artefact repeatedly encountered, but difficult to comprehend the purpose of, Burl ventured:
The stone discs found at Cairnholy, small enough to fit comfortably in the palm of one’s hand, are puzzling. Their edges have been roughly flaked but their surfaces have been beautifully smoothed. Yet there is no carving or anything upon them... By themselves the Cairnholy discs might be ignored, but others have been discovered... Made of slate, sandstone, sarsen, quartz, anything from one to five inches in size, [and] found with burials, with cremations, in chambered tombs, stone circles and in the ditches of enclosures such as Windmill Hill and Avebury, even as far north as the circle-henge of Stenness in the Orkneys, their mystery remains... The discs may have been lids [for pots used to store ancestral bones] but it is arguable that they were ancestor-stones, or talismen [sic], or representations of the sun or moon.
(1981: 77–8; compare with Fig. 0.3)
Other archaeologists have envisaged the routine practices, and their implications, which characterized the making of Neolithic objects and the fulfilment of seasonal rounds in Britain. Among these works is the book Ancestral Geographies of the Neolithic, published in 1999. Written by Mark Edmonds in part as an experiment in re-envisioning Neolithic lives in Britain, this book is discussed further in our review of the development of Neolithic studies in Chapter 1.
Neolithic Britain: The Transformation of Social Worlds invites the reader to experience Neolithic Britain in an entirely different way, however. Our aim is not to evoke the presence of Neolithic people in Britain by visualization (though we hope that the often vivid illustrations do convey something of the complexities of Neolithic life and the impact of their created places today), nor to attempt to see that world through their eyes, nor even to stimulate any depth of thought about the unseen worlds that Aubrey Burl explored in Rites of the Gods. Rather, the purpose of this book is to provide the reader with a concise panorama of the history of Neolithic Britain, principally through two narrative approaches. Before setting out how following these approaches has influenced the way that the book is organized by chapter, it may be helpful to explain two things: first, what we mean by ‘narrative’, and, secondly, how we envisage this book being perceived by its potential readership.
The simplest definition of narrative that we employ here is ‘a written account of connected events, comprising a story’. This is what is most often meant by a historical narrative: a dynamic account of the sequential passage of selected events. This is selective because it is always a matter of choice as to which events to give prominence to, especially in terms of causation. However, in line with what has been termed the ‘multivocality’ of the past, and of the different sources of evidence that we routinely draw upon as archaeologists, we also refer to narratives as arising from the piecing together of stories from the study of a variety of different Neolithic materials and interpretive perspectives. So there is, for instance, a narrative, a story, or a historical account that arises from an awareness of the phenomenon of ‘big houses’ built (apparently) during a brief period in the early fourth millennium bce. Equally there is another distinct story that, later on in that millennium, concerns the building and use of ‘causewayed camps’ (ditched enclosures that are discussed at length in Chapters 3 and 4). We pursue these stories in our accounts of what we understand to be the principal cultural developments in different parts of Britain across those considerable time spans, woven around particular cultural practices or patterns of material remains. This kind of narrative writing is considerably assisted nowadays by the conduct in recent years of studies specifically devoted to the development of fine chronologies for multiple sites belonging to the Neolithic in Britain.
Secondly, as far as our prospective readership is concerned, the book should not be envisaged as a textbook, although it can be read in part as such. Nor do we consider it a contribution to new research, although some of the ideas contained within it are new. Rather, we hope that it will serve to mark a ‘pause for reflection’ in the process of interpreting and assimilating new research and new data. This is not only to assimilate such new information in broader narrative terms, however, but also to explore the breadth of narrative that can be created by integrating both old and new data in new ways. In particular, our aim on the one hand is to explore the social dimensions of the cultural practices manifest in the artefacts and residues encountered by archaeologists investigating Neolithic material and places; and on the other hand to situate those practices within a dynamic, historical framework where the understanding that Neolithic people may have had of their own past becomes itself a focus for discussion.
For the non-specialist reader we want to illuminate the Neolithic by providing a window into just how fascinating the world of Neolithic Britain can be: not only as a consequence of its unfamiliarity, but also precisely because of the intellectual challenges the complexity (and incompleteness) of its traces presents us with. These traces were created within a world entirely contrasting with the one we occupy today, heavily influenced as ours is by the intellectual frameworks, and habits, bequeathed to us by the European Enlightment. As such, we cannot achieve a workable understanding of the Neolithic world by rendering it in narrative terms as a world ‘just like our own’. We anticipate that while the specific arguments rehearsed in the book may be unfamiliar to (many of) our intended readership, they will nonetheless recognize the generality of debates within the social and historical sciences that have played out across numerous subject areas and periods in other disciplines.
The first of the two narrative approaches that we have adopted in this book is, therefore, one that provides a sequential, unfolding story comprising a series of particular accounts of diverse cultural and historical phenomena. It is organized within three chapters, spanning the nearly two millennia concerned. While there are parallel stories within the overall narrative that concern specific kinds of material or practice, the account concerns, both in outline and in detail, developments through time: from the last centuries of the fifth millennium bce in the first of these chapters, from the long centuries of the fourth millennium in the second, and from the early centuries of the third millennium in the third chronological chapter.
The second narrative approach is one that is deliberately placed, in two intervening chapters, between and after these more obviously sequential accounts. This approach is more thematically focused, and in the first of the two chapters it involves explaining our understanding of some key social and cultural practices (or groups of related practices) such as ‘dwelling’ and ‘dealing with the dead’, citing examples drawn from across the whole span of the Neolithic in Britain. In the second thematic chapter we examine particular kinds of evidence, and specific circumstances, to explore a dawning appreciation among archaeologists studying the Neolithic period in Britain, that Neolithic history comprises more than simply its unfolding. We are gradually becoming aware, rather, that not only did those temporally far-distant communities have their own inheritance of places, practices, and resources, but that at least some people among them also had their own consciousness of that inheritance. We suggest that they may have viewed this in their own terms as a legacy from the past, and as a history that they could commemorate by developing their own practices of citation.
These contrasting approaches are employed in this way across a series of five chapters that make up the main body of the book. They follow an opening chapter, however, that describes and explains the different interpretive and research perspectives that have provided the framework for the study of the Neolithic period in Britain over the past sixty years and more. The first of the three historical narrative accounts, Chapter 2, explores contemporary understanding of the crucial transitional period either side of 4000 bce. The unfolding of this period has become more closely defined chronologically in recent years, and this has led to a restatement of the idea of an invasion of farmers: a process that saw what some archaeologists have termed a ‘tsunami’ of farming practices and a fully Neolithic lifestyle sweep across Britain from the Thames Estuary northwards and westwards within a century or so. In our view, however, there is little doubt that there were trans-Channel contacts before the advent of the ‘British’ Neolithic, as much as that there were piecemeal movements of people relocating permanently from the Continent into Britain during the crucial transitional period. The lived situation cannot therefore be reduced exclusively to the past importation of a ‘package’ of Neolithic practices by a discrete group of vigorous migrants. Several of the characteristic features of Neolithic life in Britain that emerged by 3800 bce had clear antecedents among the existing late Mesolithic communities. And many places of resort favoured in the centuries before 4000 bce were precisely the places where many subsequent ‘Neolithic’ focal activities took place.
A second historical narrative account, Chapter 3, then takes up the story to describe the considerable further transformations that occurred across the succeeding centuries down to around 3000 bce. Prominent among these were the construction of ‘big houses’, quite possibly as places of assembly; the growth of exchange networks across considerable distances; the construction of mounds marking ancestral presences and places where remains of the dead might be interred; the digging and filling of pits as markers of place and practices (and not only as rubbish disposal facilities); the creation of reserved spaces defined by the digging of strings of ditch-segments and associated banks; and later, the digging of long and (mostly) narrow parallel-ditched enclosures. There was also a great diversity within practices of broadly similar character across Britain, although some areas such as Cornwall, Wales and the Marches, lowland Scotland, the Hebrides, and the Orkney Islands began developing distinctive features of material culture and practice from early on.
The first of the two more overtly thematic accounts (Chapter 4) then explores aspects of Neolithic life and culture across the whole span of the Neolithic in Britain with specific reference to both the immediate and the cumulative significance of particular kinds of practice. The chapter opens with an exploration of the fascinating detail that has been observed concerning the mining of flint in Sussex and Norfolk, and its implications for actions and cultural exchanges sometimes hundreds of miles away. Prominent among the ostensibly more prosaic aspects of Neolithic life are the practice of collective feasting and the question of what constitutes ‘dwelling’ in a context where recognizably domestic residences, or houses, are less common than the evidence for middens, pits, and various ephemeral structures. The practices of herding and hunting are then looked at, as a prelude to a discussion of conflict and the evidence for warfare and injury. The working and raising of timber, the forms and uses of pottery, the circulation of stone axes, and the practices of weaving and basketry as indicated obliquely in ceramics are also described. A closing section assesses the relation between death and identity as currently inferred from the study of burials and the deposition of human remains.
The third historical narrative account, Chapter 5, focuses upon the third millennium bce and the development of Britain-wide networks of sociality and cultural exchange and contact in the Later Neolithic. The extraordinary complexity of activity on the Orkney Mainland is examined, and the apparent implications of Later Neolithic chronology for the transmission of a ‘Grooved Ware complex’ southwards across Britain culminating in the creation of dense complexes of monuments in many places, and especially in the Stonehenge/Avebury area. The relation of this profusion of monumental forms and evidence for gathering, feasting, and mortuary activities to the arrival of a pan-European suite of practices bound up with a particular form of pottery, conventionally referred to as Beakers, along with the first use of metals in society, is then reviewed at some length.
The second more thematic essay (Chapter 6) focuses upon the importance of descent among the human communities of Neolithic Britain. Avowedly interpretive, and in some respects overtly speculative, this account nonetheless provides what are, it is hoped, some new insights into a suite of practices that implicate the existence of forms of historical consciousness on the part of Neolithic people themselves. The book is concluded by a brief essay that explores whether there was a way of ‘being Neolithic’ that (despite the historical artificiality of the continuing use of a label first coined more than 150 years ago based on a particular classification of stone tool use) still lends coherence to the study of the fourth and third millennia bce in Britain.
Moving beyond this, the Conclusion also evaluates the usefulness of the study and ‘experiencing’ of Neolithic Britain more widely. It contests the view that the primary subject of the Neolithic is the advent of farming and the inexorable process that it set in train regarding a reliance upon food production. Such a perspective is rooted in a materialistic conception of history, and one that imparts motives to people in the past that accord with modern conceptions of the inevitability of social evolution determined by advances in technology. In contrast, we restate our argument that the Neolithic concerned a move to a different conception of sociality made possible through, but not determined by, the arrival and adoption of domesticates in these islands.
By these islands, of course, we mean the whole of the north-west European archipelago. However, in this book we will restrict ourselves primarily to England, Scotland, and Wales. There are several reasons for this. First, Irish archaeology has had a tradition of research quite as rich and complicated as that of Britain, and we do not have space to do it justice here. More importantly, the Irish Neolithic may have run parallel with, and been linked to, that of the British mainland, but it cannot be reduced to it. At times developments in the two regions were comparable, but at others they diverged appreciably. Equally, the degree of contact and influence between Britain and Ireland fluctuated throughout prehistory. Necessarily, we will make reference to sites and happenings in Ireland where they have direct bearing on our narrative of Neolithic Britain, but to cover the island properly would require another book, and there are others better placed than ourselves to write such a volume.
