It is just over sixty years since Stuart Piggott published his major work, Neolithic Cultures of the British Isles. This was the first comprehensive account of what was then known and assumed about the ‘New Stone Age’ in these islands, and it surveyed discoveries and summarized debates that had occurred over the previous century. This process of gradual accumulation of data and ideas has continued apace since Piggott was writing, not least owing to the precision with which we can now date much of the activity that characterizes the Neolithic. When Piggott was writing his book in the early 1950s an American, Willard Libby, was experimenting with the technique of radiocarbon dating as a by-product of the development of nuclear technology. This dating method uses the rate of decay of radioactive isotopes to measure the time that has elapsed since a sample of organic matter last exchanged carbon with its environment—in short, the time since an organism died. Application of the method has cumulatively transformed our understanding of prehistoric chronology. To illustrate the impact upon the study of Neolithic Britain, we have only to appreciate that in Neolithic Cultures Piggott imagined a British Neolithic period that lasted for around five hundred years, beginning in about 2000 bce. This estimated span was based on a series of assumptions about the rate of cultural change, and the affinities between artefacts in Britain, continental Europe, and further afield. However, over the past half-century this inherited chronology has been swept away as radiometric dating has gradually been refined, and huge numbers of dated samples have accumulated. These now suggest that the Neolithic period began in Britain shortly before 4000 bce, and ‘ended’ with the advent of a variety of objects made of metal instead of stone, from around 2400 bce.
The implications of this transformed appreciation of the duration of the Neolithic are profound, for while Piggott and his contemporaries were dealing with periods of historical time that were comparable with those with which we are familiar from recorded history (the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the emergence and spread of Islam, the development of capitalism), we now have evidence for human activity in the Neolithic of Britain that is dispersed across an expanse of time as much as three times longer than these major historical episodes. Over the past decade, moreover, the way in which we can calibrate the Neolithic has further been transformed by the widespread application of Bayesian statistical analysis to radiocarbon dating. Where a number of these ‘radiometric’ determinations exist for a particular site, and especially if they can be related to a sequence of archaeologically detectable events that took place in a known order, it is now possible to create a statistical model that reduces the error term on particular dates, and calculates the probability that specific events took place within what were often quite short periods of time (see Writing ‘timescapes’, below). The advent of this approach to achieving greater chronological precision has had an especially profound impact on the European Neolithic as we now have a prehistory that is reckoned in terms of decades and human generations rather than centuries or millennia. As a consequence archaeologists often find themselves confronted with brief bursts of activity set against the background of considerable periods of time during which not much appears to have happened, owing to the absence, or rarity, of archaeologically visible events from these times.1
Of course, the evidence for the British Neolithic is exclusively material in character, comprising pottery and stone tools, architectural structures, and the remains of the bodies of people and animals, unsupported by the kinds of clue provided by written records. The very muteness of this material has meant that archaeologists have been able to write a series of strikingly different narratives from closely similar material. As such it is inevitable, arguably even more so than in the work of documentary-focused historians, that these narratives have owed a great deal to the intellectual perspectives of their time, and the preoccupations of the writers themselves. New ideas about how societies develop and change have enabled us to recognize the significance of new forms of evidence, while placing existing evidence in a new light.
As a result, the history of writing about Neolithic Britain has involved repeated changes not only in the way that the significance of particular events has been interpreted, but also in understandings of what actually happened. Moreover, the phenomenon of ‘the Neolithic’ itself has repeatedly been re-evaluated, and still remains a topic for debate. For while the term serves to identify a particular period of the past, there is a general understanding that the period concerned was characterized by a distinctive process or phenomenon. So, unlike the Bronze Age or the Iron Age, which have traditionally been distinguished primarily by the appearance of specific kinds of metalworking technology, the Neolithic is often discussed as an entity definable in terms of the arrival or adoption of a package of traits, or simply as a development that overtook and engulfed particular groups of people. When Sir John Lubbock coined the term in 1865, he intended principally to separate a New Stone Age in which tools had been ground and polished from an earlier period in which they had been only chipped and flaked. Yet already in his Pre-Historic Times, in which he had first defined the period, Lubbock moved beyond this simple technological definition and suggested that the keeping of cattle might be an important characteristic of the Neolithic in some areas. In subsequent accounts, while some authors have defined the Neolithic primarily as being characterized by a particular economic system, others have emphasized its historical identity as a stage of social or cultural development. Still others have regarded the Neolithic as if it represented a form of social organization, or could be identified with a mode of thought developed, for example, around the idea of ‘domestication’.
Although, therefore, there is general agreement that the Neolithic was the period during which domesticated plants and animals were first introduced to Britain from continental Europe, and in which people first used pottery vessels and polished flint and stone axes, built massive funerary monuments, and dug ditched enclosures, the significance of these developments has been understood in radically different ways by different authors at different times. It is the nature and impact of such differences that we want to explore and explain in this chapter.
When archaeologists discuss the development of their own discipline, they often define a series of discrete periods or phases of investigation, very like the periods into which they divide the prehistoric past. This provides a useful heuristic, or shorthand, for describing the history of archaeological thought, but it is equally important to recognize that ideas and interpretations that were proposed many years ago, under intellectual regimes that we might now consider moribund, continue to have their reverberations in the present. Christopher Tilley has shown, for example, how use of the term ‘megalith’ has long outlived its utility, yet still today frames (or at the least influences) interpretive discussions about the purpose of Neolithic monuments in which large stones were deployed (see Fig. 1.1). In this way, writing about the British Neolithic has always involved making choices from the options that are available to us in the present, including drawing on the past history of research, knowingly or unknowingly. For this reason, certain themes or tropes recur throughout the literature. For instance, there is a continuing tension between approaches that address artefacts and monuments typologically (seeking to classify and categorize, and to identify each tomb or stone tool as an example of a particular abstract ‘type’), and those that attempt instead to place the object into its specific context, by concentrating on its place on an archaeological site, or in the broader landscape and its topography. These procedures lead to very different ways of representing the past, the former concentrating on the definition of particular kinds of entity at different scales of resolution (‘cultures’, ‘traditions’, or ‘techno-complexes’), while the second focuses instead on social practices and lived experiences. Equally, some accounts of the Neolithic have sought to explain the changing relationships between people, technology, and the environment, while others have tried instead to interpret the meaning or significance of aspects of Neolithic culture. This important point underlines many of the arguments made later in this chapter.
Revolutions and emigrants
Piggott’s Neolithic Cultures took some of its cues from the archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe, who had established much of the framework for European prehistory during the 1920s. Childe had brought together the Scandinavian tradition of detailed observation and classification of artefacts and the central European focus on identifying ‘peoples’ in prehistory. To this, he had added on the one hand a concern with transformative horizons of social and economic change (which he termed ‘revolutions’ in line with his Marxist interpretation of history) and on the other hand with how different cultural traditions accommodate themselves to particular regions and landscapes. Childe’s ‘revolutions’ included the introduction of bronze metallurgy and the emergence of urban life, both of which he considered to be important preconditions for the eventual rise of modern capitalism. However, most fundamental of all was the ‘Neolithic revolution’, in which people ceased to be reliant upon food collection, and began food production. For Childe, this process had begun in the oases of the Near East, where the environmental conditions of the last glaciation had forced people, animals, and edible plants into a close proximity that gradually developed into a kind of symbiosis. Once human beings had domesticated cattle, sheep, pigs, wheat, barley, and lentils, they were able to relocate them out of their natural habitats and into new landscapes through the physical movement of populations.
While Childe took the view that cultural innovations (such as bronze metallurgy, the wheel, or horse riding) tended to have a single geographical origin and to ‘diffuse’ from one society to another, he also believed that the spread of the whole integrated set of elements that made up the Neolithic way of life was more likely to have been dispersed by folk movement. As he understood people generally to be culturally conservative and unwilling to change their material equipment without good reason, he believed the occurrence of similar kinds of artefact in different regions could be taken as an indication that the same community had passed through each separate area in the course of its migrations. This led him to the conclusion that a family of ‘western Neolithic’ cultures distributed across Atlantic Europe were linked like the branches of a tree, ascending from a single root. These people had been the bearers of a way of life based on domesticated species, and agriculture had been for them a cultural predisposition. Farming was a source of their identity as much as their sustenance, and the implication that farmers are a fundamentally different kind of person from hunters is one that has contributed an enduring undercurrent to subsequent discussions of the Neolithic: one that saw the adoption of farming as one of the great ‘revolutions’ that transformed society and moved it upwards along an evolutionary scale of increasing complexity.
Clearly, Childe’s narrative of economic revolution sparking population movement and pan-European transformation is one that would have resonated widely in the immediate aftermath of the Russian (political) revolution and the First World War. History might easily have been understood by many of his contemporaries as a process in which radical transformations of economic life unleashed turbulence and dislocation on people who had little power to resist. However, a slightly different and more conservative inflection was placed on these ideas in Britain and Scandinavia during these same interwar years. In Britain, the notion that ‘this island race’ had been progressively enriched by the successive influxes of Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans had become a cornerstone of a colonial world view that sought to spread the virtues of (British) civilization around the globe. This was extended back in time to explain each new assemblage of artefacts throughout prehistory in terms of successive waves of Continental migrants: Beaker people, Urn folk, Halstatt invaders, and so on. At the same time, a ‘scenic nationalism’ was increasingly interested in the way that these different groups of people had created the foundations of the distinctive landscapes of Britain (and other countries), ultimately giving them the character that nurtured a unique national identity.
The popularity of this ‘landscape and folk identity’ perspective was most clearly reflected in the growing interest in proxy indicators of environmental change, especially through the study of microscopic pollen grains trapped and preserved in sediments and deposits such as those of peat bogs, and providing evidence of changes in the vegetation over long sequences of time. While this approach had initially focused on natural processes of landscape change, such as the recolonization of Britain by trees and shrubs after the last Ice Age, there was a gradual increase in attention paid to indications of human interference with the landscape. In particular, the evidence for episodes of deforestation during the Neolithic could be recruited to support a vitalist, post-Enlightenment narrative of venturous and adaptable humanity triumphing over brute, passive nature. Where Mesolithic hunter- gatherers had merely existed within the natural world, Neolithic people were able to subject nature to their will. So Neolithic migrants were not only the carriers of a farming lifestyle, they also brought with them a new spirit of striving and overcoming. In Britain and Denmark, studies of prehistoric pollen profiles from the 1930s to the 1960s developed increasingly sophisticated analyses of landnam (ground-breaking) clearances of the forests using stone axes to chop down trees, sometimes prefigured by a ‘leaf fodder regime’ in which stalled animals were fed gathered foliage.
It was a combination of Childe’s archaeology of revolutions and this new landscape ecology that Piggott employed so systematically in Neolithic Cultures. His narrative envisaged groups of Continental migrants, the ‘Windmill Hill folk’, arriving by sea and adjusting their cultural repertoire and way of life to insular conditions, and in the process emerging as a distinctive strand within the cultural web of the European Neolithic. Yet the indigenous hunting people of Britain also found a place in Piggott’s narrative: disrupted and archaeologically invisible for some centuries after the arrival of the Windmill Hill people, they eventually created, along with the newcomers, a series of ‘secondary Neolithic cultures’ of a distinctive insular kind. These unique cultures were made recognizable through the development of chisel-shaped arrowheads suited to wildfowling, a heavy stone tool assemblage used for grubbing flint nodules out of clay deposits, pottery decorated with cord and bird-bone impressions (echoing the ‘Forest Neolithic’ of the Baltic), and new mortuary practices and monumental forms. All these were added to the pre-existing Western Neolithic repertoire. But because these ‘cultures’ overlapped in some of their components, and even made use of the same kinds of monument, Piggott imagined a Later Neolithic in which a series of different kinds of community interacted, pursuing slightly different ways of life. Eventually, these groups were joined by small colonies of incomers from the Continent who brought with them small, fine, glossy Beaker vessels, copper daggers, and gold trinkets. The emergent characteristic Early Bronze Age of Britain was therefore seen by Piggott to be the outcome of the interaction and fusion of these different groups with varied cultural inheritances. Given the narrative coherence of his account, it is not hard to grasp why its arguments were such a strong influence upon the understanding of the dynamics of Neolithic ‘history’ in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century.
Ecology and social evolution
By the middle of the 1960s, the picture of Neolithic colonists whose pioneering spirit led them to tame and subdue the wildscape had begun to be implicitly challenged by a more overtly evolutionary approach to landscape change. This was more likely to focus on what was seen to be the direct evidence for the workings of a subsistence economy: animal bones, the charred remains of plant seeds, and the location of settlements in relation to favourable soils and other resources. Rather than identifying agriculture as the cultural preference of particular groups of people, this interpretive approach asserted that the way in which people acquired their food was simply a form of behaviour, no different in kind from the various ways in which other animals feed themselves. According to this perspective, people will generally adopt the most rational and efficient way of gaining sustenance within the ecological niche and climatic conditions that they find themselves in. The subsistence economy is, in this view of the world, primarily a tool with which to achieve successful adaptation to changing environmental circumstances. It followed from this that the adoption of agriculture in western Asia and its spread in Europe was not a ‘revolution’ in Childe’s sense, but merely an intensification of the ecological relationships between people, animals, and plants. These relationships might wax and wane with time, and ‘domestication’ might have occurred many times in the distant past, in many different locations, in line with the environmental pressures that had acted upon human communities.
Directly or indirectly, these ideas have had a profound impact on the way that the British Neolithic was (and for some archaeologists continues to be) envisaged. The implications have been several, but two can be highlighted here to explain what could follow on from this way of thinking about, especially, how farming might have been adopted and developed. First, if farming was a way that people behaved, and which people could adopt or discard, rather than being an expression of cultural preferences, there was no reason to suppose that it might not have been adopted by indigenous hunter-gatherers who had been in contact with Continental neighbours from whom they could acquire cultigens and livestock. The many groups of migrants envisaged as having arrived from France and Belgium might therefore have been no more than a figment of archaeologists’ imaginations.
Secondly, if Neolithic people had not been relentlessly imposing themselves on the natural world, but had been to some degree at the mercy of their environment, then their way of life might have proved fragile and subject to failure. A number of accounts published in the 1970s and 1980s argued that the apparent cultural disjuncture between the Earlier and Later Neolithic could be attributed to an episode of economic collapse, following which forest clearances regenerated and population declined. A Neolithic agricultural regime had overextended itself and had been overwhelmed by the effects of soil exhaustion and possibly also insect infestation. Only when society had recovered from this setback did a new (Later Neolithic) cultural formation emerge in Britain, characterized by henge monuments, elaborately decorated pottery, more diverse stone tools, and complex funerary rites.
This tendency to see the relationship between people and their environment as unstable and periodically subject to dramatic, negative change has been identified by Bruce Trigger as a feature of a growing anxiety amongst the Western nations from the 1970s onwards. Where the immediate post-war era had been characterized by optimism concerning technological progress, there was now increasing concern that humanity was faced with forces beyond its control, in the form of environmental degradation, population growth, and overexploitation of natural resources. These issues emerged at much the same time as the application of a completely different form of evolutionary thinking, ultimately derived from anthropological scholarship in the United States. This reintroduced the long-established idea, ultimately attributable to the European Enlightenment, that societies develop through time by passing through a series of characteristic stages of increasing complexity and sophistication, within which communities become progressively more internally differentiated and ranked. While the environment was, according to this model, still afforded an important role, it was nonetheless understood as existing in a dynamic relationship with population and technology rather than determining development. More complex and hierarchical societies were understood as managing and controlling these relationships more effectively than less formally structured ones by developing highly organized systems of leadership, redistribution, and economic specialization. A distinctive aspect of this approach was that it presented archaeological evidence as a correlate, or index, of the process of social evolution.
An influential paper on the archaeology of Neolithic ‘Wessex’ (the area of the modern-day counties of Wiltshire and Dorset, and parts of Hampshire and Somerset) published by Colin Renfrew in 1973 exemplified this approach. Renfrew argued that the increasing scale and centrality of monuments––from earthen long barrows in the Early Neolithic to henge enclosures, Silbury Hill, and the stone phases of Stonehenge in the Late Neolithic––reflected the growing size of populations whose labour was made available for massive projects owing to the development and workings of a new and more stratified social form (Fig. 1.2).
This latter was the chiefdom, distinguished by centralized heritable authority, the administered redistribution of resources, greater population and productivity, and the use of special forms of dress and monumental works to identify and to promote the interests of an elite. Later, Renfrew undertook fieldwork in the Orkneys, with the intention, at least in part, to demonstrate that a similar sequence of social hierarchization and centralization could be traced there.
Another important development associated with this social evolutionary school of thought lay in questioning the assumption that particular sets of artefacts automatically reflected the identities of distinct groups of people—Childe’s ‘cultures’. It had been pointed out, for instance, that a specific combination of stone tools might not be a manifestation of cultural preference or ethnic identity, but of what was required to conduct a particular set of tasks (such as hunting or butchering animals) within a specific ecological context. On this basis, Piggott’s argument that a number of different cultural groups might have coexisted in Late Neolithic Britain came to be seen in a different way. Styles of pottery including Beakers and Grooved Ware and their associated artefact sets began to be described as ‘special purpose assemblages’. These were not necessarily used by entire communities or even for a wide range of activities, and it was noted that they were often concentrated in specific kinds of site. Therefore, although ‘coarse’ or ‘domestic’ Beaker pottery was known, the preponderance of fine Beaker vessels and associated exotic items in graves led to the suggestion that they represented a status package of Continental origin, monopolized by the higher orders of society. Similarly, the discovery of large quantities of Grooved Ware at the massive henge enclosures of Durrington Walls in Wiltshire and Mount Pleasant in Dorset during excavations in the 1960s and 1970s led to claims that this form of pottery had been used to mark the presence, or rise, of a pig-herding subculture, or an astronomer-priesthood, or a social elite. This in turn gave rise to a ‘prestige-goods’ theory to explain elite control of increasingly centralized societies. That is to say, certain kinds of scarce or finely crafted artefacts were now understood as having been monopolized by socially pre-eminent groups, who were able to control their circulation, and in the process gather clients and followers.
Symbol and meaning
These arguments in some ways anticipated the developments of the 1980s and 1990s, which saw the presentation of a perspective in which artefacts came to be identified as material symbols that demanded interpretation, while social conflict and competition replaced environmental forces as the perceived causes of change. One important development of this phase of study and interpretation was that both objects and monuments were recognized as having had an active role to play in Neolithic societies, rather than simply having reflected the identities of groups of people in the past, or as having acted simply as emblems of power, rank, or authority. Richard Bradley described the stone axes that circulated from quarries in the west of Britain during the Early Neolithic, and also a range of exotic items including polished discoidal knives, jet belt fittings, finely polished adzes, stone maceheads, and carved stone balls that were in use from 3500 bce onwards, as ‘weapons of exclusion’. By this he meant that the exchange of these items amongst privileged people and their deposition in graves and other contexts both identified and amplified social differences. Similarly, John Barrett argued that the labour involved in constructing henge monuments and stone circles was not an index of the existing degree of social hierarchy and centralization so much as a means by which elites brought themselves into existence. In this view, these elites had actually created their own authority by inciting or coercing large numbers of people to work together to create massive architectural forms, in the process establishing privileged spaces that could be occupied only by the dominant few.
A further consequence of the characterization of material things as symbols that conveyed or constructed meanings was a greater attentiveness to the composition of archaeological deposits. It had long been recognized that groupings, sometimes spectacular, of certain materials occasionally occurred at Neolithic sites. Entire cattle skulls had been found in the flanking quarry ditches of earthen long mounds, while decorated chalk plaques and other unusual items had been recovered from isolated Late Neolithic pits. The excavation of the causewayed enclosure at Hambledon Hill in Dorset during the 1970s and 1980s revealed human skulls placed at the butt ends of individual ditch segments, while the similar enclosure at Etton in Cambridgeshire, dug at much the same time, contained rich and complex waterlogged deposits. These included a pottery vessel inverted over a mat of birch bark, a hafted stone axe, and bundles of cattle ribs. The unspoken assumption in prehistoric studies had always been that the bulk of the available evidence has accumulated in ‘traps’ such as pits and ditches in a random and haphazard fashion, normally as a by-product of the pursuit of everyday activities. Yet here instead, at sites such as Hambledon Hill and Etton and many others like them, there was growing evidence of an archaeological record that had formed to a significant extent through deliberate and purposeful acts. One reaction to this realization was the exploration of the concept of structured deposition, and a dawning recognition that although some deposits announced themselves as being out of the ordinary through their richness or sheer oddness (potsherds pressed against the sides of pits, or flint artefacts deliberately smashed immediately prior to burial, for example), some groupings of quite mundane objects appeared to be patterned or structured both in their selection and their careful placement in particular contexts—from the chambers of long mounds to the ditches of enclosures, but most commonly in pits dug into the ground and then immediately backfilled. In some cases there appeared to be particular objects and materials that were either routinely mutually associated with one another, or that were in contrast deliberately segregated from each other. Yet it has long been recognized that patterning in archaeological residues can be generated by entirely random processes. One way to accommodate this apparent contradiction is to suggest that there is a continuum between on the one hand highly formalized deposits of symbolically charged things, often within or near special places or ‘monuments’ of some kind, and on the other hand fortuitous accumulations of cultural materials that had been brought together owing to natural processes or routinized activities. Somewhere between the two are numerous Neolithic pits containing hearth-scrapings and potsherds, flint chips and animal bones, which may represent cleaning-up operations following short-lived episodes of habitation. These can nevertheless include occasional fine and clearly selected artefacts that have been deliberately incorporated into the placed material, and which enhance the impression that the assemblage as a whole represents the record, the marker, or the intentional trace of a human presence.
This phase in the study and writing of Neolithic Britain was also characterized by a heightened awareness of the inferential, fundamentally interpretive nature of archaeological investigation itself. Archaeological evidence is always fragmentary, and relates to a past time that is, to some degree, irretrievably lost. It follows, according to a then-emergent perspective, that simply presenting the available evidence in unalloyed form will inevitably result in something that is entirely inadequate in terms of the subtleties of past social practices and interactions. The traces of these past actions need therefore to be connected together by a narrative that renders them comprehensible and that is credible to its audience. Archaeology in such perspective is therefore a craft whose products are acknowledged as being constructed in the present, out of the scattered remains that past people have left behind them. Such a position is distinct from out-and-out relativism, in that it insists on the limitation on what can be said about the past imposed by the material evidence itself.
Writing the Neolithic as metaphor
One of the leading proponents of a semantic interpretation of archaeological phenomena, in which past objects and residues were legible as if they were texts, was Ian Hodder, who offered a distinctive perspective on the Old World Neolithic. For him, domestication was as much a symbolic or metaphorical relationship between humans and other species as a biological or ecological one, and it was grounded in the longer-term process of the domestication of society, through the development of the concept of home. Hodder’s view was that in order for people to begin to cultivate plants and herd animals, they would first have had to appropriate the world conceptually, by distinguishing between the domestic domain of hearth and household and the external sphere of the wild. These he identified with the complementary principles of the domus and the agrios: the former encompassing the dwelling space, the domestic community, cultivation, nurturing and femininity, and the latter connoting the waste, the forest, masculinity, hunting, and violence. This opposition enabled living things to be drawn into and maintained within the domestic sphere (or shunned and repudiated), just as the agricultural labour force was constituted through ties of co-residence and consanguinity. Importantly, Hodder’s perspective drew on the insights that he had previously developed into the meaningful constitution of material culture. He emphasized that rather than simply being a way of thinking about things, the domus/agrios distinction actually gave form to tangible reality, through the way that people habitually interacted with material entities that were imbued with significance. Yet this capacity to structure quotidian life was grounded on the way that the separation between home and the wild, life and death harnessed and mobilized people’s fears and emotions to produce drama and the desire for change, towards sedentism and greater control over resources.
Hodder’s book The Domestication of Europe described a long-term process in which the idea of domestication was gradually dispersed across Eurasia from the ‘fertile crescent’ of Iraq, southern Turkey, and the Levant, manifested in villages of substantial houses, fields of crops, herds of animals, and elaborate artefacts. However, towards the end of the fifth millennium bce the domus ceased to be merely a framework for the organization of small farming communities and their immediate ecologies, and began to be applied to much larger social groups. Rather than the taming and subjugation of natural resources, it was now the direction and control of substantial groups of people and their labour that was at stake. From this time onwards, conspicuous domestic architecture faded from the record, and was replaced by massive monuments containing the remains of the dead. Nonetheless, these tombs and barrows often demonstrated similar organizing principles to the houses that preceded them, such as a linear and graded ordering of space. But ultimately, the scope of the domestic order to encompass larger and larger populations and more and more elaborate monuments reached its limit. The Later Neolithic saw a vengeful return of the agrios, in the form of warlike artefact styles and single grave burials, which together reinstated a concern with masculinity, violence, hunting, death, and the wild world beyond the house.
Hodder’s account has been criticized for imposing onto the ancient past what amounts to a dichotomy between culture and nature, which is arguably an artefact of the modern Western sensibility. However, his intervention was critically important in two respects. First, it powerfully made the case that the Neolithic represented more than a cultural package or a particular subsistence strategy. For Hodder, the Neolithic was at once a way of thinking and a framework for social action. The Neolithic way of life was distinguished by a means of understanding the world as much as by access to a specific set of productive resources. Secondly, as much as any previous writer, Hodder drew attention to the different kinds of Neolithic that had developed in different parts of Europe. While The Domestication of Europe does not dwell on Britain to any great extent, it is clear from what he writes that the Neolithic of chambered tombs, long barrows, and causewayed enclosures was distinct in character from that of long-lived villages and cemeteries found in central and south-east Europe. Although we might disagree with his view that the essence of the Neolithic lay in conceptual structures rather than social relationships, it is abundantly clear that the pattern that he identified is one that demands explanation.
Writing the Neolithic creatively
The argument that narratives about the past are actively pieced together in the present resulted in a certain amount of reflection on the kind of writing that archaeologists have themselves routinely undertaken: too often the reportage is dry, timid, and unimaginative. The alternative might be a more creative kind of writing, which has the courage to experiment with narrative style and a combination of different media in order to elicit unexpected conclusions from the evidence. One of the most sophisticated examples of this approach was Mark Edmonds’s Ancestral Geographies of the Neolithic. Published at the end of the 1990s, this book had first been conceived as a study of the causewayed enclosures of the Earlier Neolithic in southern Britain. However, the approach eventually taken was instead to place these monuments into the context of a series of specific and frequently attested activities that would have been played out across the Neolithic landscape. In particular, Edmonds chose to focus upon the management of woodland, the herding of animals, the acquisition and working of flint, and the relationship between the living and the dead, each of which is represented or implied by materials and objects found at the sites in question. The enclosures themselves were only directly addressed in the latter part of the book, by which time the themes of movement, exchange, consumption, and mortuary practice that were evoked at and through the monuments concerned were already well established. Moreover, Edmonds complemented his more prosaic discussion of the materials with evocative photographs of trees, of flint nodules, and of human remains, as well as a series of short imaginative vignettes, depicting moments of Neolithic life and the interactions of ‘real’ people. These had the virtue that, while prehistorians often find themselves discussing the past in abstractions, here Edmonds forced himself to imagine what everyday experience would have looked like on the ground. Equally, he was as much concerned with the grain and texture of Neolithic life as with historical events and processes.
Edmonds’s visual images of tree bark, serrated stone, and pitted, grainy bones, and his word pictures of purposive Neolithic activity were perhaps a reaction against a discipline that had become increasingly removed from any kind of visceral or elemental engagement with material things, except through the practice of excavation itself. But at the same time, his imagined Neolithic episodes resonated with a growing concern with the difference of that once-living past. An increased familiarity with ethnography and the diversity of human ways of life on the part of archaeologists had given rise to a desire to resist the imposition of modern values and prejudices on the past. Ways needed to be found to allow the Neolithic to surprise us through its unfamiliarity.
These same issues were central to another key 1990s text focusing on the Neolithic of Britain, Christopher Tilley’s A Phenomenology of Landscape. Tilley’s point of departure was the observation that our written and visual representations of, and contemporary physical encounters with, prehistoric monuments tend to be both unnecessarily and unhelpfully remote from the lives of the people who built and used these structures. For example, tombs and enclosures are reduced to ‘dots on maps’, or are visited as ‘heritage experiences’, entering from the car park and exiting through the gift shop.
Tilley began his excursion by citing a range of ethnographic studies to suggest that in many non-Western societies the landscape is understood as animate in the sense of being imbued with the presences of ancestors and spirits. He then made reference to the work of a number of humanistic geographers, who had emphasized the experiential character of space and place. For these writers, human beings come to know their world through the body, haptically and sensorily (by touch, smell, and hearing) as well as visually, as they move across the land. In the attempt to develop a more immediate understanding of an otherwise distant Neolithic world, Tilley described his own field-based experiences of the chambered long cairns of the Welsh Black Mountains, the dolmens of Pembrokeshire, and the major linear earthwork structure, the ‘Dorset Cursus’, the latter in particular in reference to a lengthy walk across the landscape following its course over several miles. In a manner that can be compared with the practices of the German tradition of hermeneutics, Tilley then based his reading of the monuments he encountered on what he felt he had in common with their builders: a human body with its array of senses, and the landscape itself. For although vegetation has changed, fences have been built, and roads laid down, the ‘bones of the land’, the topography, is, he argued, broadly the same as it was in the Neolithic.
It is undeniable that Tilley’s fieldwork resulted in a series of fresh insights into the location and configuration of prehistoric monuments that perhaps could not have been arrived at by any other means. Nonetheless, his work has been criticized for its assumption that the experiences of a late twentieth-century, white, middle-class man can somehow automatically have a significant amount to tell us about the perceptions of prehistoric people of diverse ages, genders, statuses, and degrees of ability. Equally, although Tilley explicitly denies this, there has been a suspicion that his approach demands an unacceptable degree of romantic empathy, attempting vicariously to think the thoughts and experience the feelings of past people. One plausible response to these criticisms is that an ‘experiential archaeology’ such as his was seen to be should be understood as no more than a contemporary analogue for the activities of people in the past, which may ultimately provide insights into presently existing landscapes and structures, but which affords no direct entry into the lived world of the past. It is, therefore, only the first step in the inferential process.
The writings of both Tilley and Edmonds have been viewed, sometimes very negatively, as representative of a ‘hyper-interpretive’ trend within archaeology, and it is arguable that as Western society has lurched into a pragmatic neoliberal era and a subsequent economic crisis, archaeology has to some extent edged away from sophisticated theorization, and any in-depth contemplation of its own ethical and political significance. This has coincided with an explosion of new scientific techniques that are of undoubted value to the discipline, and many of which are of particular significance to the study of the Neolithic. These include the investigation of ancient DNA, the use of stable isotopes in human bones to assess the predominant diets that people consumed during life (whether mammal or plant foods, maritime or terrestrial), the study of lead and strontium isotopes in human and animal teeth to determine how far people and their herds had moved from place to place during their lifetimes, and the analysis of the chemistry of residues from pottery vessels to identify the foods that they had contained, which has revealed amongst other things the extent of dairying in the Neolithic.
One response to this has been a retreat into a kind of naive empiricism: the view that techniques can now tell us all we need to know about the past, and that theory is therefore redundant. Such a view is ultimately unsustainable because archaeology cannot avoid being also a human and social science, at root an inherently inferential, interpretive discipline. Nonetheless, the appearance of new forms of evidence has sometimes occasioned a return to the explanatory frameworks that have been noted already, especially those that are social evolutionary in emphasis. So the tone of some recent interpretations of DNA and isotope data echoes the ‘ethnic prehistories’ of the 1920s and 1930s, with their folk movements and genetically homogeneous communities of ‘hunters’ and ‘farmers’. While such interpretations are in themselves lacking in explanatory power in reference to how people live their lives and make their collective history, in defaulting to these models we ultimately run the risk of lending support to atavistic agendas in the modern world, which romanticize ‘golden ages’ of racial purity in the past.
Writing ‘timescapes’: new chronologies for the Neolithic
Besides the new narrative insights from creative interpretive writing and from the various novel laboratory-based, scientific studies, the greatest impact in recent years on our understanding of the Neolithic in Britain has, as we pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, come about as a result of the systematic application of Bayesian statistics to suites of more numerous and more accurate radiocarbon dates from more rigorously examined site contexts. The purpose of this new engagement in mature statistical study has been twofold: first, to introduce greater chronological resolution than has been possible in the past when isolated dates with their broad spans of probability were all that was available; and, secondly, to interrogate closely the relation between sequences of deposits and the kinds of datable material sealed within them. For instance, the clear preference now is that radiocarbon dates are obtained not only from precisely delineated site contexts where the circumstances of their deposition are certain, but also that they are from short-lived materials such as twigs, sapwood, seeds, or articulated bone that is unlikely to have been ‘curated’ (that is, saved from being entirely discarded and forgotten, but instead stored or buried in known locations for later retrieval and redeployment). This interrogative approach arose from a recognition of a past lack of rigour in selecting material for dating, and specifically the frequency with which already old organic material had been incorporated within later deposits, therefore erroneously making these latter deposits, and the structures and monuments they were part of, appear to have been created earlier in time than they had in fact been.
Towards the end of their monumental 2011 region-by-region Bayesian-based analysis of Early Neolithic site chronologies predominantly in southern and eastern Britain (Gathering Time), Alasdair Whittle and colleagues produced two chapters that synthesized the implications. In the first of these chapters, entitled ‘Neolithic narratives’, the south/eastern Early Neolithic (broadly mid fourth-millennium) enclosures were set (in 165 pages) in the context of their timescapes. These latter were explained in terms of the metaphor of an unevenly woven cloth with a pattern of threads marked by temporal gaps and intervals as well as continuities. This involved studying chronologies not only for sites in Britain and Ireland as a whole, but also for the use-lives of different materials such as the various kinds of pottery and stone axes. We shall return to issues concerning the longevity and periodicity of use of the enclosures, and the patterns of deposition they encompass, in Chapters 3 and 4; and how thinking specifically about the ‘historical materiality’ of axes and pottery can affect the writing of Neolithic history, also in Chapter 4. What interests us here is what Whittle and his associates thought such intensive comparative chronological study could make possible, in terms of what they termed ‘narrative history’.
In brief, what was perceived was an uneven pattern of adoption of pottery-making, cereal cultivation, livestock farming, flint-mining, ‘hall’ construction and the first building of long barrows in the first two to three centuries from 4000 bce, with the earliest activity focused upon Kent and the Thames Estuary. During the thirty-eighth century bce, the pace of change was seen to have quickened, with a ‘startling array’ of innovations including both enclosure-building and long-distance trade arising perhaps ‘within the span of an individual life-time’, while a developed package of Neolithic practices spread beyond south-eastern England. Later, a peak in the creation of enclosures (for which most dates in southern Britain were obtained and studied) was traced in the final quarter of the thirty-seventh century bce at the same time as a reduction in the number of long barrows being built. Then, in the early part of the following century, the pace of enclosure-circuit construction ‘slackened’, before a ‘last main bout of fresh enclosure building’ occurred in the middle of the thirty-sixth century bce. There was then a decline in the creation of new enclosures ‘in the generations around 3500 bce’, while at the same time the networks of contact that had facilitated the movement of axes and some pottery also wound down as new traditions of building, such as the creation of (southern British) cursus monuments, picked up. The conventions of ‘rise’ and ‘decline’ are tropes familiar from earlier eras of culture-historical writing, and therefore such historical writing exhibits continuities with British intellectual traditions first articulated in the 1920s. However, in the narratives of Whittle and his collaborators, these are given a new twist, with their fine-grained accounts of micro-variation and spatial variability in the various phenomena concerned.
The second of the two chapters of synthesis in Gathering Time, the latter of the two-volume work, examined ‘the social dynamics of change’ in reference in particular to the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition, consumption patterns, monument sequences, artefacts and their symbolism, and the close-Continental origins of practices of flint-mining, house-building, and enclosure-creation. Issues of sequence, contemporaneity, individual lifespans, and ‘social time’ were here seen as central to the process of writing history from site and artefact chronologies. The authors saw a social dynamic for the adoption of farming practices and a Neolithic world view in south-eastern Britain as potentially having arisen from economic pressures experienced by peoples on the near-Continent, together with a growing appreciation of the benefits of farming on the part of indigenous groups. Drawing upon the writings of American archaeologist (and specialist in the prehistory of migration on the Eurasian steppes) David Anthony, they saw the principal mechanism for such adoption as initial long-distance contact followed by migration led by pioneer individuals. These ideas will be discussed in Chapter 2 in some detail, not least because Anthony sees the process as both kin-dependent and a two-way process. This potentially places the whole concept of cultural adoptions and influences on the cusp of the earliest Neolithic in Britain in an entirely fresh light.
A key aspect of the particular kind of chronologically refined narrative of the Early Neolithic presented by Whittle and his associates was the recognition that there was great diversity among traditions of monument-building and the sequences of activity at different localities, while certain time-related changes affected wider areas within Britain. These phenomena demand satisfactory, necessarily complex, explanation. The final Gathering Time chapter identifies as especially critical, periods of apparently rapid change that marked transformations in the nature and pace of interaction between groups. The dramatic expansion of exchange networks from the mid thirty-seventh century bce, along with the widespread appearance of Decorated Bowl pottery in the thirty-eighth century, was seen as a case in point, since it appears to correlate closely with the first appearance of causewayed enclosures.
The distinctive contribution of what we might term this timescapes approach to writing the Neolithic, therefore, has been not only to highlight the contrasting (and sometimes very narrow) timescales for activity that existed at different locations, nor only to help with the mapping of time-related changes spatially across Britain, but also to make evident the varied narratives that cut across one another. In other words, it is no longer tenable to suggest that there is fundamentally only one possible narrative of historical change within and across Britain through the 1,600–1,800 years of the duration of the Neolithic. Rather, each strand of evidence, each region, and also each similarly structured site across regions contributes its own narrative strand to Neolithic history across the decades and centuries concerned. Moreover, a single lived lifetime could intersect, and become bound up with, several such narratives.
Writing the Neolithic in a geographically balanced way
It is a truism to say that we write history from the evidence, but that various predispositions and biases affect the way that evidence is gathered as well as weighed.2 In studies of Neolithic Britain the areas that were studied first and most intensively have tended to give us a view of the Neolithic period that is skewed geographically. We know far more about central southern England in the Neolithic than almost any other part of Britain, and certain sites in East Anglia, the Thames Valley, Anglesey, and some (albeit limited) areas of Yorkshire have, for example, also featured disproportionately in surveys of Neolithic phenomena. Similarly, what was known about the Neolithic archaeology of the Orkney Islands surpassed many times our understanding of most of mainland Scotland until very recently. That this situation needs to be redressed was first confronted explicitly in a polemical essay by Gordon Barclay published in 2001. This charted the nature and consequences of such particular biases, especially as regards the development of a ‘research culture’ that determined what was important, and where: in other words, how such imbalances were perpetuated.
That this imbalance is not just a feature of Neolithic studies in Scotland (and especially the mainland) is evident from the fact that other areas have only recently seen a level of activity even remotely matching the decades of research and study invested in areas such as Wessex. An example of an area hitherto relatively neglected, the understanding of the Neolithic archaeology of which has been transformed in recent years, is Kent, which is ironically the area of Britain geographically closest to mainland Europe. This transformation can be attributed to economic development and the requirement for this to fund archaeological works in advance of destruction of sites. Even within Wiltshire, the bias resulting from a focus upon the principal chalk uplands has become evident as close to home as in the Vale of Pewsey, which is a low-lying area of country that actually separates the two parts of the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site. It has only been in the past five years that substantial new field research has begun in the area around Marden, despite the latter location having long been known to feature a massive Neolithic henge.
The impact of such imbalance on the entire historical narrative of the British Neolithic has arguably been fundamental. For example, although an intensification of archaeological activity in areas close to the eastern seaboard of Scotland from East Lothian near Edinburgh northwards up to Aberdeen has to a large degree addressed the deficit with north-eastern and eastern England (as chapters of a recent book edited by Kenneth Brophy and others demonstrate), the east–west imbalance remains. As Gordon Noble pointed out more than ten years ago, the Hebridean areas of Scotland have long been viewed as geographically marginal and their archaeology exceptional within, or somehow unrepresentative of, the British Neolithic as a whole. Among other reasons for this, the impact of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Highland clearances was to give subsequent generations (and especially from the early twentieth century) the impression not only that these areas had historically featured low population densities, but also that their lands had always been relatively unproductive.
Noble suggested that environmentally these areas were instead advantageous for farming in the Neolithic, with light, well-drained soils and long summer daylight (and therefore growing) hours. Moreover, once a maritime perspective is reintroduced, these areas can be seen as having been highly accessible by sea, in contrast to inland areas where both travel and transportation were arduous and time-consuming. The consequence of this was that travel and interactions were probably both more frequent and had greater impacts than for more easterly or central areas of Scotland. So although distinctions between east and west were a result of two separate sets of north–south routes that existed in prehistory, there is no inherently greater importance of east over west in terms of their relative contribution to the history of Britain in the centuries concerned. The differences are nonetheless profound, with one side of northern Britain interacting down the western seaboard southwards as far as Cornwall, and beyond ultimately to Iberia; and the other predisposed to interactions down to East Anglia, the Netherlands, and north-central Europe.
We need therefore to be mindful of the biases that are inherited and perpetuated, rather than simply inherent, in trying to write the history of Neolithic Britain; and also to be aware that we are still a long way from any ‘complete’ understanding of the Neolithic of any area of Britain. To illustrate, we can point to the various recent studies of the ‘Stonehenge landscape’, several of which are mentioned in this book. In this most-studied of areas, our understanding has been transformed in the last two decades by projects that have fundamentally dislodged received interpretations by locating and investigating new sites, in part as a result of asking fresh questions (for instance concerning early use of the River Avon) that had not previously been considered. The authors of this book, collaborating also on a major long-term field research investigation of a single site close to the Black Mountains in Herefordshire, are also acutely aware of areas where almost no research investigation had taken place until recent years. So, the Walton Basin in Radnorshire in eastern Wales has been shown to possess an extraordinary density of Neolithic sites, for example; while the Neolithic archaeological resource of Herefordshire has not only been shown to be both rich and extensive, but also to feature kinds of phenomena not so far witnessed in any other part of Britain. Had such areas been studied first, and more fully, some of the sites and regions perhaps thought of now as ‘typical’ might rather have been seen as less representative of other areas of Britain than they are currently perceived to be.
The grand narrative versus emergent causation
Throughout the Old World, the Neolithic is associated with a series of momentous changes: the inception of agriculture, the foundation of sedentary settlements, the construction of massive monuments, and the adoption of a series of new material technologies. This has meant that the period has always been central to long-term, large-scale accounts of human development. The Neolithic is often seen as a crucial stage in the journey from hunting band to advanced urban society. But at the same time, because the period is distinguished by elaborate material culture with potential symbolic significance, complex funerary customs, ceremonial architecture, and conspicuously non-utilitarian practices, it also became a focus for fine-grained analyses of social life at the micro level, as we have seen. This contrast between scales of analysis was the subject of an important discussion by Andrew Sherratt in the 1990s, who advocated a return to the ‘grand narrative’. Sherratt held that reluctance on the part of archaeologists to address the ‘big picture’ of social and economic change through time denoted a loss of confidence. However, he also recognized the limitations of existing large-scale narratives, notably that they tend to rely on eighteenth-century archetypes of ‘hunters’, ‘pastoralists’, and ‘farmers’, which imply that social and cultural developments are determined by changes in subsistence practices.
The social categories that Sherratt refers to originated in the so-called ‘conjectural histories’ of the Enlightenment. While seventeenth-century writers had imagined a distant past in which human society had come into being through the establishment of a kind of contract to abide by a set of agreed rules of conduct, authors such as Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Adam Smith imagined instead a series of necessary stages that humanity must have passed through in order to arrive at its present condition. Importantly, these were narrative explanations of the human condition that dispensed with a reliance on the influence of God on worldly affairs. Yet they were entirely ‘conjectural’ in the sense that they made no use of material evidence: they stated what must have happened in order for the modern world to have come into being. Only with the work of the Danish antiquary Christian Thomsen in creating the Three Age scheme of Stone, Bronze, and Iron at the start of the nineteenth century did archaeological materials begin to be placed in the Enlightenment scheme. These imagined histories were stadial. That is, they were composed of a series of stages of development. Thus Adam Smith proposed successive phases of hunting, herding, farming, and commerce. While these were based on different forms of subsistence, Adam Ferguson suggested instead a progression of social types: savagery, barbarism, and civilization.
Enlightenment historical narratives were generally grounded in the notion that human progress is achieved over time through the application of reason and free will in order to transform the material circumstances in which people find themselves. However, while the Scottish authors took a predominantly optimistic view of this process, the French and Germans often argued that there was a price to be paid for progress. Becoming civilized might result in a loss of spontaneity and freedom, and growing inequality and conformity. In reaction against the progressive visions of the Enlightenment (and the revolutionary views that they inspired), the Anglican cleric Thomas Malthus presented a much more pessimistic world-historical narrative, in which successive technological innovations enabled human populations to grow to new levels. But the effect of this was only to press harder on resources, increasing human misery and challenging ingenuity to develop further solutions. During the nineteenth century stadial histories became rather more inflexible, generally assuming that progress from simple to complex social forms was a universal pattern. As Europeans became more familiar with the inhabitants of the regions that they explored and colonized, different peoples were identified as representatives of distinct stages of social evolution. Anthropologists such as Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan developed increasingly complex evolutionary schemes populated by existing human communities, and these were then retrospectively applied to the European past. Thus the Neolithic might be identified with the transition from hunting to farming, or from savagery to barbarism.
A common characteristic of grand narratives is that they often identify a single factor as the prime mover in human development. For the Enlightenment philosophes this might be the emergence of modern commerce, the growth of learning, the extension of human freedom, the increasing sophistication of science and technology, or the elaboration of religious beliefs. Inevitably, whichever of these is given the causal role, the others are relegated to the place of consequences and outcomes. In the case of archaeological grand narratives, Andrew Sherratt pointed to the ‘premise of calorific priority’, the understanding that the acquisition of food is always the first consideration for human beings, and that all other aspects of life are secondary and subsidiary to subsistence. By contrast, Sherratt advocated an approach to long-term processes that saw no inevitable priority for any particular factor. Rather, large-scale structures emerged from a concatenation of circumstances in unpredictable ways. For him, the complex global systems within which we now find ourselves enmeshed were the outcome of the progressive synchronization of phenomena that might originally have been independent and unrelated.
An elegant example of an archaeological grand narrative is David Miles’s The Story of the Axe: How the Neolithic Revolution Transformed Britain. Although Miles is principally concerned with the Neolithic as a decisive episode in history, his account spans the entire period from the origins of humans up to the present. The Neolithic is therefore placed into a long-term sequence of developments, beginning with progressive increases in hominin brain sizes, which enabled social interaction and cooperation to grow in scale. Alongside this process, humans learned to make more complex stone tools, to use language, to cook food on fires, and eventually to make containers and projectiles and to process and store foodstuffs. Throughout his account, humans are nudged or bludgeoned into economic intensification or migration between regions by episodes of climatic change: amelioration provides opportunities, declining conditions demand adaptation. For Miles, the Neolithic is synonymous with ‘farming’, and its emergence and spread were the almost inevitable consequence of big-brained humans being confronted with population growth and environmental fluctuations. Farming was a causal process, rather than one element of the Neolithic alongside others. It arrived in Britain as a ‘cultural and economic tsunami’. Yet once it was installed in the islands, he has rather less to say about the practicalities of agriculture than about the axes, tombs, enclosures, and henges that were supposedly the products of the new subsistence system. Late in his book, Miles acknowledges the arguments of Stevens and Fuller, who infer that the scale of cereal cultivation declined precipitously after an initial ‘honeymoon’ period, only to recover in the middle of the Bronze Age. But the implications of this possibility for a model of social and cultural development driven by economic intensification are not really worked through.
Like the conjectural historians, Miles sees the transition from one economic stage to another as both categorical and encompassing diverse aspects of human life. Mesolithic hunters and Neolithic farmers had different and incompatible world views. Where foragers dwelt in the midst of nature and treated their prey with respect, agriculturalists sought to dominate and control land, animals, and plants, and to forcibly turn raw materials into artefacts. Living things were transformed from fellow inhabitants of the earth to commodities and possessions. For Miles, farmers universally have a utilitarian view of plants, animals, and land, which he demonstrates with examples drawn from his home in rural France. Agriculturalists therefore have archetypal characteristics, and having crossed a crucial threshold six thousand years ago, Neolithic people became broadly comparable with Miles’s modern-day neighbours. However, where fellow writers of grand narratives, including Jared Diamond, have presented the beginning of food production and the relinquishment of hunter-gatherer lifestyles as a terrible mistake that resulted in declining health and social inequality, Miles is more optimistic. He points out that most of the benefits and comforts of modern civilization (from telecommunications to healthcare) would have been impossible without the Neolithic revolution. Miles acknowledges that global agriculture is out of control: industrialized farming relying on excessive use of fertilizers, too much production of meat, destruction of soils and habitats and the poisoning of the seas, and too much focus on unhealthy processed foods. Yet he comes to the somewhat whiggish3 conclusion that all is not lost, and that human ingenuity may yet enable destructive practices to be reformed.
It is instructive to compare Miles’s global narrative with John Robb’s article ‘Material Culture, Landscapes of Action, and Emergent Causation: A New Model for the Origins of the European Neolithic’. Where Miles presents a highly readable text for a wide audience, Robb’s is an academic journal essay, but this is not the limit of the contrast. While Miles identifies the essence of the Neolithic with agriculture, and therefore sees the other innovations of the period as being the products of economic change, Robb begins by stressing that physical things are more than just inert matter that human beings act upon. Rather, objects can influence, channel, and impact upon our lives, and his principal claim is that the Neolithic involved a new set of relationships between people and things. Human beings have the freedom to act in pursuit of their goals and desires, but they always do so in a world that that has been formed by the activities of past generations. So what any of us can achieve at any particular moment depends upon whether we find ourselves in a paddy field, in a modern city centre, or in a nuclear wasteland. This is what he calls the ‘landscape of action’, and in the Neolithic it became progressively more structured. For Robb, the paradox of the Neolithic is that it spread directionally from east to west across the Old World, and that communities rarely reverted to a Mesolithic way of life, but that the local processes involved were multiple and distinctive. In some areas, major movements of population took place, while in others the contribution of indigenous people was greater. Not all the elements of the Neolithic assemblage occurred in all areas, and the duration of change varied considerably. Robb argues that causal mechanisms such as population growth and climatic change that operate at a pan-continental level are inadequate, since quite different sequences of events can be identified in different parts of Europe. Yet the outcomes of these multifarious developments became gradually more alike as time went on. Thus in many areas the Neolithic ‘package’ of innovations did not appear all at once, but was gradually assembled from elements whose adoption was spread over a period of time. This might arguably have been the case in Britain, for one of the findings of the Gathering Time analysis was that pottery and timber buildings could be identified at an earlier date than monument building or domesticated animals.
Robb’s answer to his conundrum is that the reasons why people adopted Neolithic things and practices were various: sometimes social, sometimes economic, and sometimes ecological. But one thing that they always had in common was a change to a more ‘thing-heavy’ world, filled with axes, pottery vessels, houses, garden plots, coppices, herds of domesticated animals, tombs, enclosures, and trackways (see Fig. 1.3 for the stone axe quarry at Great Langdale in Cumbria).
Collectively, these things encouraged people to act in particular ways, often without having to think about it. Although people had been diversely motivated to place themselves in this position, their lives became increasingly similar. For Robb, the Neolithic was ‘sticky’ or ‘funnel-shaped’, easier to get into than to extract oneself from, because the accumulating landscape of action was one that encouraged more and more reliance on material things. There was no prime mover, no universal explanation for why Europe became Neolithic, merely a tendency toward convergence, a ratchet that worked more smoothly in one direction than the other. Causation was therefore emergent, growing out of a nexus of factors and events, but nonetheless pressing in a single direction.
Writing ‘the transformation of social worlds’
In this book, we provide a perspective arising from our own ‘living-through’ the movements and moments within archaeology, of historicism (witness Piggott’s prehistoric ‘cultures’), processualism (exemplified by Renfrew’s social evolutionary polities), structuralism and ‘post-processualism’ (especially Hodder’s symbolic and semiotic archaeology), and post-structuralism (for example, Tilley’s reflexive ‘phenomenology’). These ‘-isms’ are abstractions that to some extent represent intellectual fashions and, in archaeology, they have been worked through in often idiosyncratic ways. Despite this, theory is a necessary precondition, not an optional extra, to archaeological interpretation, and we have formulated our theoretical position in response to the emergence of real-world concerns with gender, cultural relativity, and philosophical thinking that have their roots in the early twentieth century. Concerns with human being and time, with the allusiveness of cultural expression (verbal, literary, material), with materiality and substance, with social reproduction and the negotiation of competing interests, with the person versus collectivities of people, and so on, are central, rather than peripheral, to a successfully holistic approach to history and archaeology. It is not possible to adopt a neutral, ‘pragmatic’, or ‘objectivist’ approach to the past.4 Equally, our approach is not exclusively explanatory in the narrow sense. That is, we do not only wish to identify the processes of cause and effect that link the artefacts, resources, structures, and practices of the Neolithic, bringing about change. We equally seek to evaluate their significance or meaning, and identify their place in the fabric of prehistoric life. We generally accept the view that historical change emerges from a cauldron of contingent and interlocking circumstances, rather than assuming the straightforward, law-like character of billiard balls colliding with one another.
Our perspective is avowedly interpretive and anthropological, therefore, and it builds upon a series of basic propositions concerning society, material culture, and history. We have expressed this perspective here as being concerned with ‘writing the transformations’ of the ‘social worlds’ of the Neolithic in Britain, with particular reference to the multiplicity of Neolithic societies and their history. Our point of departure in such a project is an understanding that connectedness through descent and alliance has, necessarily, long been fundamental to the ways in which human societies are organized according to bonds of kinship (both real and fictive—because, among other things, this is how ‘strangers’ become assimilated within social groups), and to how individuals understand and negotiate their place within society. The ‘social’, then, is time-bound, and the ‘weaving’ of narrative that Whittle and his collaborators see as being made possible by refining chronology is also a necessary interpretive corollary of a concern with social practice and social change.
We intend that this book should provide a particular lens, therefore, through which we seek to view the distant cultural worlds of one period of British prehistory. Its theoretical bearings will nonetheless become more apparent in practical narrative and commentary in the pages that follow. We have attempted to isolate the principal social, economic, and cultural developments through a period of profound change in the landscape, physical and cultural, of Britain, lasting from the end of the fifth to the middle of the third millennium bce. This account is deliberately more interpretive than descriptive, not least because there are already several excellent texts that provide an introduction to the monuments and artefacts of the period, and more will no doubt appear in the years to come. We focus in particular upon the key themes of social practice, kinship, and descent, and in doing so we hope to privilege neither the analytical framework of modern science nor the immediacy of experience. Given that our perspective is an anthropological one, we view the acquisition of sustenance, the conduct of relationships with animals, of ceremonial life, and of craft activities (for example) as aspects of an integrated way of life, rather than separate spheres to be investigated by different kinds of archaeologists. We have in a way dipped into the stream of stories that together made up the lived millennium and a half of the human past of Britain that we term ‘Neolithic’. We have selected, and our ‘samples’ are necessarily partial. We hope, nonetheless, that the journey will prove interesting.
