Chapter frontispiece: ‘Cows and Daisies’ (wood-engraving, Hilary Paynter)
Cattle were an extremely important resource in Neolithic Britain, and the wood-engraver’s image here captures the essence of black cattle happily at graze in rich meadows.
Engraving: 1964, © Hilary Paynter (website: http://www.hilarypaynter.com).
There is a modern tendency to see history as a progression of tableaux, or a montage of scenes, a cavalcade; or, as we noted in Chapter 1, an ascent through measurable social evolutionary stages from relative cultural simplicity towards a present of multilayered complexity. In the modern world, history is expressed in the form of narratives that have been standardized and systematically ordered, and published in a diversity of media, as well as being contested by alternative perspectives in print and online. This contrasts with the way that knowledge and tradition are conveyed in societies that lack written literature, which generally takes the form of oral transmission. However, they are also expressed and fixed (however fleetingly) and transformed through the use of material items and material culture, including the built environment. For such societies, history may take the form of a shared memory of significant events, but these are always experienced and mediated through the filters of social relationships of dominance and subordination, and of kinship. This latter is composed of the shifting elements of genealogy, lineage, and descent, although any or all of these may be fictional in character, and open to a degree of manipulation.
The challenge in writing the history of un-historicized peoples (that is, people whose history has not been written for them, or has indeed been written over their heads), and particularly those in remote time, is to try to approach the substance of their social reproduction in a tangible way. As we have already suggested, the writing of Neolithic history in Britain involves an identification and exploration of forms of practice attested from the artefacts and residues that were created by those temporally distant people. In this chapter, the aim is to distil some understanding of the dynamics of social interrelations from an appreciation of particularity and difference in cultural practices through time: sometimes in one location, and sometimes through a comparison of events and processes at more than one place. The aim is also to see how the passing of time was historicized by the Neolithic people whose remains we encounter.
Fig. 6.1 Silbury Hill, Wiltshire, with Windmill Hill in the distance
This photograph shows not only the remarkable conical mound built on the very end of a northwards-trending promontory intersected by the A4 Bath Road, but also the Neolithic time-depth that is traceable in this landscape. Beyond Late Neolithic Silbury Hill and to the right, on the hill on the horizon, for example, is the site of the causewayed enclosure at Windmill Hill (marked also from this angle by two prominent Bronze Age round barrows). These two sites differ not only in their material manifestation (one a series of concentric rings of ditches and low banks, the other a prominent and tall flat-topped mound), but also by the fact that they are separated in time by up to 800 years.
Photograph: June 2015, © Keith Ray.
We have identified a central paradox of the century or so either side of 4000 bce (which continued to be important until at least 3800), that we can recognize continuity in some Mesolithic traditions and practices at a time when major transformations were also taking place, affecting the same communities. This is seen principally in the reuse (and perhaps veneration) of ancestral places, sometimes selected for the building of specialized structures, as well as in the continued practice of hunting and the collection of wild foodstuffs. Red deer continue to make an appearance in the deposits formed by Neolithic communities: yes, occasionally as foodstuffs, but also as another among those kinds of animal whose bones, in some circumstances (but not as frequently as those of cattle), could be appropriate to bury along with those of people, and also in particular whose shed antlers appear to have been the preferred tool for prising out lumps of the earth, chalk, and rock in the digging of pits and ditches. Moreover, the resource of hazelnuts was harvested, as formerly in ‘hunting and collecting’ times: but in the Neolithic, as we have already noted, these nuts became, in their charred form, a substance that recurs time and again in contexts that suggest that their presence was a requirement for the formation of the residues concerned rather than an incidental result of otherwise prosaic practical activity.
The opportunities associated with living in an environment in which forests continued to exist, but that had in many places already by 4000 bce taken on a park-like open or scrubby aspect, have recently attracted some comment. Mike Allen and Julie Gardiner have noted, for example (based upon studies including analysis of tree pollen, surviving ancient land snail shells, and preserved ancient soils), that a pattern of human exploitation of a mosaic of vegetation and tree cover emerged in the later Mesolithic in some of the chalklands of southern Britain that continued to be frequented in the Neolithic. Within this mosaic were some locations where quite extensive grasslands opened up alongside tracts of woodland, such that the interface between them would have encouraged the growth of hazel and of the berry-bearing plants of the woodland margins. This in turn would have attracted herd animals, providing perfect browsing conditions, and there would have been an incentive therefore for people to congregate in these areas. Meanwhile, elsewhere, such as in the East Anglian fenland, continuities have been observed from the Late Mesolithic to the Early Neolithic in the use of tree-throw holes both as repositories for possibly midden-derived material and as locations (marked also by post- and stake-holes) for temporary periodic dwelling.
Early to mid fourth-millennium structures such as long barrows and causewayed enclosures were in some places created in new clearings from mature woodland. One way to regard this is to see this process as a deliberate placing of such structures in areas that were marginal to settlement, and as the ‘domestication’ of wilder or more remote areas. However, although in some regions causewayed enclosures were constructed peripherally in relation to concentrations of other kinds of monument (Hambledon Hill, on the edge of the chalk upland of Cranborne Chase, being a case in point), they were not always created in woodland clearings. Others were built within regenerated woodland, or in the scrubland margins of extensive areas of woodland, or, apparently, in areas such as the north Wiltshire downs and Salisbury Plain, places that featured long-established grazed grassland.
Careful dendrochronological study of selected oak and ash timbers (those which featured the best-preserved sapwood) from five of the six excavated trenches dug along the course of the Sweet Track in the Somerset Levels has revealed that the Track was built either late in 3807 bce or sometime during 3806 bce, and was in use for only around ten years (Fig. 6.2).
The ‘Track’ is in fact a raised walkway of narrow oak planks placed end to end, supported by a cross-work of rods and poles in other species of wood, and extending for nearly two kilometres northwards from the Polden Hills to Westhay island across the reed and sedge marsh. It is conceivable that the clearance of the trees attested around this time on the Poldens and along the length of Westhay island, as well as the coppicing of the hazel also used in the construction of the walkway, were Early Neolithic innovations locally. Yet there were disturbances of the local vegetation in the decades and centuries preceding this and there have been unequivocally Mesolithic flints found in those same places where the trees were cleared.
The building of the raised walkway evidently resulted from the wish or the need to cross the marshlands between areas of drier ground. It has been estimated experimentally that once the major timber components had been cut and stored, ten people could have carried the timber for its construction along its course, and have built it in place within a week. Whether or not this was the case, it was in part the narrowness of the track that enabled it to be built relatively quickly. Yet even so its 1.8-km-long course was estimated to have contained over 4,000 metres of planks, 2,000 metres of heavy rails, and 6,000 roundwood or split pegs and at the least this attests to a high degree of organization of people and coordination of efforts. Moreover, its short span of use nonetheless featured enough traffic in both directions (and passing with difficulty) that an appreciable number of items were dropped and lost. The patterns and character of loss (in soft marshy ground that soon converted to peat, thus preserving organic remains) provide rare glimpses of the ebb and flow of activity in different parts of the landscape. Mixed and relatively dense woodland characterized the southern end of the trackway, and it was in the southern one-third of its course that all the wooden bows and the leaf-shaped flint arrowheads found during the archaeological excavations of the 1970s were encountered (some arrowheads with fragments of the hazel-rod shafts still adhering to them).
Although it may be the case that the ubiquitous presence of dung-beetles indicates that cattle were driven along (or rather alongside) the walkway, it is also evident that it was a focus for deposition (accidental or otherwise) involving whole bowls, axes, flint arrowheads, and a number of wooden artefacts. It is, however, the presence of another, slightly earlier, timber trackway, the Pole Track, whose remains were disrupted and displaced, and then partly incorporated into the later walkway, that indicates the likelihood of a continuity of practice here from before such loss of the Early Neolithic items. The Pole Track followed a course immediately adjacent to, parallel with, and partially under the course of the Sweet Track, and its timbers have been dated to only some thirty years earlier, around 3838 bce. Its excavators suggested that this stratigraphically earlier work was in fact an access structure that enabled the Sweet Track to be built, and that the difference in dates of the wood indicates merely that the timber used for it had been stored in preparation for the ‘main’ construction event. This seems to us to be inherently unlikely, however. Rather, it indicates that the need or desire to reach an otherwise not easily accessible location from the higher ground to the south (when the marshland waters rose in winter, the trackway became impassable) was one that spanned generations of people. This suggests in turn that rather than being entirely an innovation, both trackways were replicating and reproducing an access-route of some historical time-depth. Time-depth is marked also in the growing and harvesting of the wood used in construction of the Sweet Track, since the hazel was clearly coppiced, and the hazel pole tree-ring evidence indicates that the trees concerned were in existence up to (or had been growing from boles as long ago as) twenty-five years before the trackway was built. Moreover, the oak had come from two different areas of woodland: at the northern end of the trackway, large mature oaks had been cut down to produce the planks, while at the southern end, the oaks were young.
As such, as well as solving the practical problem of crossing marshy ground from one dry place to another, the Sweet Track can be understood as referencing in a dramatic way a historicity of action in place, and perhaps the continuing importance of access not simply to grazing but also to the resources, both vegetative and game, that the seasonally inundated Levels environment had from time immemorial afforded. And yet surely it was a lot of effort to expend to build such an extensive track simply to access the western end of Westhay island from the Polden Hills to the south. Is it possible, rather, that it was a time-honoured place to access for superordinate reasons? The excavators argued for the prosaic in the interpretation of their finds, but we find it difficult to envisage what practical reason would have induced people to carry along such a narrow and difficult raised walkway a pot full of porridge with its wooden spurtle intact, or indeed to transport several other fine thin-walled vessels (some of which had been painted in different colours and were found intact), two unused axeheads from exotic sources, or, for that matter, a model (assumed toy) wooden axe or ‘tomahawk’ (see ‘The art of transformation in skeuomorphic practices’ in Chapter 4), and then curiously to have dropped all these items closely beside, and sometimes actually tucked underneath, the track. What we can envisage instead here is the need to access an otherwise remote location that may indeed have served immemorially as a hunting station (though the bows and arrows were all found at the landward end), or newly created summer grazing grounds, but that also had a special place in the hearts and minds of those people who were prepared to go to such lengths to reach that place through the swampy morasses. The trackway was made necessary by a climatic change that led to a phase of increasing inundation of what we now think of as the peat-filled Levels: but what the Pole and the Sweet tracks indicate is that there was an overriding reason that caused them, for a brief period of a few decades until access by this means was rendered impossible, to create a humanly constructed facility to continue to visit a place that had an inherited importance, probably from millennia before. In this way, the significance of an honoured (potentially even Mesolithic) past was encapsulated in a task that may have not taken a huge amount of time to execute, but that involved the deployment of considerable forethought, effort, and resource to achieve.
In 2003 we, the authors of this book, published an account of why we thought that cattle in particular were of pre-eminent social and cultural importance to at least some societies in southern Britain during the Earlier Neolithic period. The evidence that had led us to this conclusion included the way that the remains of cattle had been deposited in a variety of ‘structured’ ways, had been placed alongside the bones of humans, and in some cases had been treated as equivalents for humans. For example, it is now evident that the so-called ‘head and hooves’ associated with the burial deposit at the Fussell’s Lodge long barrow actually consisted of two separate deposits. The skull of an ox had been placed at the eastern end of the mortuary structure, while the foot bones from on top of the flint cairn that covered this structure were apparently later in date, and may have formed part of a hide draped over the cairn. Here, the deposition of cattle remains together with humans was evidently a recurrent practice. By contrast, at the Amesbury 42 long barrow near the Greater Stonehenge Cursus, the antiquary John Thurnam reported a deposit of cattle bones that appeared to substitute for any human burials. We went on to pose a variety of questions about the occurrence of cattle bones in particular contexts, and we noted how in some cases the cattle bones had seemingly been curated over extended periods of time, up to a century or more. We envisaged cattle as representing an important resource to Neolithic people, a form of wealth as well as sustenance that was mobile and managed, and that could be employed as gifts, as feasts, or to acquire followers. The destinies of animals and their herders were intertwined through the transmitted knowledge of breeding and rearing. But the bones of cattle were also a resource, as by analogy with recent historic cattle-herding peoples, the blood-stock and lineage of animals are a matter of the greatest possible interest. Moreover, the composition of a herd represents a physical reminder of relationships and transactions between people. Cattle herds are therefore a repository of collective history, and the bones of the animals from these herds a tangible trace of this history.
Where the bones of past individual cows had been retained for long periods, they might constitute a resource of memory, and especially a mnemonic of past cattle populations, in a way that paralleled the retention and apparent circulation of some of the bones of dead humans as representative of the ancestral remains of past human communities. In a sense, the storing and circulation of the bones of humans and cattle reinforced each other: the herds with their own patterns of (bred) descent reflected the ancestral human individuals and communities (with their own associated patterns of familial descent) that had kept and bred them. This close relationship between people and animals might simply have been reflected in the careful burial of cattle bones, but it was made more conspicuous by their placement alongside human corpses. Further, it was the curation of cattle bones over long periods that demonstrates that this activity was related to descent.
The precise radiocarbon dating of cattle bone is infrequent, so the presence of individual curated cow bones in the Neolithic has rarely been recognized. It is for this reason (the rarity of dating of individual cattle bones) that it is specifically at Stonehenge that the deliberate placing of two ‘ancestral’ cattle jaws dated to the fourth millennium in the primary ditch at the first Stonehenge monument (that had nonetheless demonstrably been dug at the end of the fourth millennium) has been demonstrated. The importance of understanding the dating and phasing of a key context at such an important site meant that the cattle bones found in that context were dated: not primarily through interest in the cattle, but simply that their bones provided suitable material for obtaining chronological information. But having dated those bones, and having demonstrated that they were far older than the context in which they had been placed (which also yielded ‘younger’ dates on other material), the curatorial genie was let out of the bottle, so to speak. So there was deliberate retention and re-deposition of ancient cattle bones, even if the ‘curation’ concerned was among other debris within middens. In this connection it is perhaps significant that the ox skull from Fussell’s Lodge is noted as having been ‘very soiled’, and had therefore perhaps been exhumed or brought from elsewhere before deposition.
Such demonstrable curatorial practice, and perhaps also the scratched markings on cattle bones from the ditches of the Fen-edge enclosure at Etton near Peterborough, or the three carefully laid out ox skulls beneath the Beckhampton Road long barrow near Avebury, recorded more than the keeping and breeding of those animals, however. It may also have evoked the series of transactions (alliances, marriages, funerals, gifts, and barter) and events (feasts, raids, and shifts of residence) that had given rise to the particular composition of stock represented by those cattle remains. The power of the metaphorical connection—‘cattle bones represent herds and record kinship relations over time’—resides in the degree to which both cattle and people were seen to share a traceable (in the sense of avowed and acknowledged) kinship and a shared, even corporate, history.
In the Stonehenge area, Sarah Viner and colleagues have carried out strontium isotope analysis study of the tooth enamel of thirteen Late Neolithic cattle teeth from jawbones recently excavated at Durrington Walls. This indicates at least the possibility that cattle herds were brought together on Salisbury Plain from some distance away, given that eleven of the teeth were from cattle raised beyond the chalklands of southern Britain, even from as far afield as Cumbria and the Scottish Highlands. Pigs were also brought to the site for consumption, but the available evidence suggests that 70 per cent of these came from within a distance of two days’ walk. That a bigger percentage of the cattle were brought from further away perhaps indicates the importance of an assembly of herds of different origin. This would have provided a context for the display of animals, and for the cementing of alliances and the sustaining of relationships between different groups, as well as for conducting the exchanges that facilitated the tracing of bloodstock through social relations extending over considerable spans of distance and time.
That Neolithic people experienced the passing of time is undoubted, at the very least through diurnal and seasonal rhythms and the passage of the life cycle through birth, childhood, coming of age, reproduction, and death. Much writing about the Neolithic, especially in Britain, has been devoted to pondering why certain features of chambered tombs, for example, are oriented and built in such a way that, at sunrise or sunset at key seasonal junctures such as midsummer and midwinter, shafts of light penetrate into the furthest recesses.
Fig. 6.3 Loughcrew Neolithic cairns and the view across the Vale of Meath
The cairn cemetery located on a hilltop west of Kells overlooking the Vale of Meath to the north-west of Dublin is one of the most impressive cemeteries of Neolithic circular kerbed and passage cairns anywhere in Ireland (or beyond). The stones of both the passages and the chambers of some of the larger cairns were favoured locations for the creation of rock-art featuring designs with affinities with earlier structures on the western Atlantic fringes of continental Europe and contemporary parallels in the Boyne valley passage tombs nearby and further afield on Anglesey in north Wales.
Photograph: © Adam Stanford (website: http://www.aerial-cam.co.uk/).
Ideas of rebirth and even spiritual resurrection may have been behind such considerable efforts to produce the desired effects. Much less attention has been paid, however, to a related question that is ostensibly equally unanswerable. That is, did Neolithic people in Britain possess or develop any theories about time? While there can be no certain answers to this question, we should perhaps not simply ignore the clues that may be present.
One such clue that has been noted often as a remarkable presence, but has rarely been commented upon further in terms of its potential significance, is the placement of a slab-like Jurassic limestone monolith containing much of a large fossil ammonite in a prominent position in the façade of the chambered tomb at Stoney Littleton just to the south of Bath in Somerset (Fig. 6.4).
Fig. 6.4 Stoney Littleton long barrow, Wellow, Somerset: forecourt
The 30-m-long Stoney Littleton long barrow is located on the south side of the Wellow Brook to the south of Bath and to the north-east of the Mendip Hills. It occupies an unusual position sited facing up the slope above the stream, with its façade and forecourt on the crest of the slope facing southwards. Beyond the centre of the deeply in-turned dry-stone walled façade a 13-m-long passage provides access to seven chambers, three on each side and one at the end. The fossil ammonite can be seen at lower left centre, just above ground level. It was excavated in the early years of the nineteenth century and restored in 1858 by Thomas Joliffe: by inscriptions built into the fabric of the tomb.
Photograph: © Adam Stanford (website: http://www.aerial-cam.co.uk/).
The long barrow is some thirty metres long and is unusual in that it occupies sloping ground above the Wellow Brook that flows north-eastwards to join the River Avon some five kilometres away. The passage is unusually elongated, and it is likely that the seven ‘transepted’ chambers each had numbers of skeletal parts deposited within them in the manner that the West Kennet barrow did (Figure 3.12). Two aspects of this stone placement and barrow-arrangement merit special mention. The first is that the forecourt of the tomb not only occupies the break of slope, such that it is the only part of the barrow that is prominent when approached from the east; and that the barrow is so oriented south-eastwards that the early morning sunlight at certain times of the year falls directly upon it. The second aspect is that the ‘half’ of the ammonite within the stone actually forms the southern jamb of the entrance. This arrangement can hardly be considered accidental, and the ammonite itself in this way would have ‘greeted’ the deceased as their remains were inserted into the barrow. It is, of course, impossible to know what this signified, but it seems at least possible that the spiral fossil was given such prominence as a metaphor both for the passage of time and for the eternal cycle of death and rebirth.1
It could, of course, be claimed that this was a one-off expression of such possible ideas, and that the featuring of spiral patterns in Later Neolithic passage tombs was merely a consequence of decorative play. However, Anne Teather has recently highlighted another example, this time involving the representation of what looks like a fossil ammonite rendered upon a chalk block. This object was discovered at The Trundle causewayed enclosure on the South Downs near Goodwood north of Chichester in 1931 by an excavation team led by Cecil Curwen. It was found at the base of the ditch of the innermost circuit, along with a chalk cup, another perforated chalk block, a number of other smaller blocks, and a mass of charcoal. The inner circuit is thought to be the first to have been dug, and the dates obtained are among the earliest for causewayed enclosures anywhere in Britain. The block itself, measuring thirty centimetres across, took the form of a C-shape with a broad semi-circular central void created by smoothly hollowing out the chalk. Around the upper lip of this void was a raised band, beyond which radiated a series of striations made with a sharp flint tool. These lines were carefully etched only five centimetres in length, and were arranged in batches of four or five striations each, set in such a way as to imitate the whorls of an ammonite.
The metaphors literally embedded within these ‘ammonite’ features may have been mirrored, if not in terms of exactly similar references, in other practices of placement. Here it may be instructive to return to the suggested metaphorical placement of the ‘grave goods’ of a hammer stone and knapped flint nodule or core possibly in the hands (or arm-crook in the case of the core) of the so-called ‘flint-knapper’ burial that had been laid in the north chamber of the completely excavated Hazleton long barrow in the Cotswolds, discussed in Chapter 4. This could indeed have referenced the adult male concerned as a particularly skilful knapper of flints in life, or it could have made a more general reference to the art and practice of flint-knapping. It might also have been that the decision to include the pieces was reflective of the point at which that person died: in ‘mid-knap’, so to speak (without trying to make light of the circumstance). However, another twist to the metaphors embedded within the act of knapping may also have been referenced here, in a particular way reflecting the passage of time and life. This is because the core concerned comprised not a completely, nor even nearly completely, knapped nodule. Rather, it was half-knapped: and this may have been expressive of the idea that the knapping of a flint nodule was like the living of a life. The adult male was not young, but neither was he senescent. Could it not be therefore that what was being connoted by this particular selection of a core and arrangement of the objects concerned was the passage of a life only half-lived and a decease that was premature?
In Chapter 4 we noted that the ceramic vessels of Neolithic Britain were not created randomly, but that their manufacture and surface embellishment appear to form a series of stylistic ‘traditions’. These styles find expression, for example, in different pre-firing pot-building techniques, ways of incorporating fluxing agents such as crushed rock fragments, the creation of a range of related shapes and forms, the incorporation of particular treatments such as burnishing of surfaces or the eversion (that is, out-turning) of rims, and the use of particular devices or patterns of decoration. Archaeologists have long observed that these traditions of manufacture tend to have a characteristic life cycle, of appearance, reproduction, elaboration, and decline. In the era before the introduction of chronometric dating, much effort was put into the relative ordering and temporal sequencing of styles, as a means of establishing a chronological framework for prehistoric times. While in the case of the British Neolithic the results of these procedures were less finely grained than in other periods and regions, different pot styles were also believed to provide clues to the identity of the different groups of people who made and used them, in terms of isolable ‘cultures’. The decline of this culture-historical way of differentiating communities of people from the formal characteristics of their artefacts transformed discussions of the ‘style’ of material things within archaeology. Increasingly, the sharing of decorative motifs or manufacturing techniques was identified as reflecting the extent to which different social groups had been engaged in interaction, while the stylistic idiosyncrasies of individual objects were attributed to ways in which people conveyed information about their personal identities.
While the habitual replication of pottery forms and decoration is no longer automatically seen as indicative of bounded cultural identities in the past, it does nonetheless provide us with clues concerning how the practices through which pots were made, distributed, used, and discarded were maintained over time. Of these, it is necessarily the discard or disposal of pottery that is most often represented in the form of residues encountered by archaeologists. For the most part, broken pots have been recognized as a diagnostic indicator of deposits that might be defined as ‘rubbish’, whether these are pits, dumps, or middens. As we saw in Chapter 4, these perceptions have been altered to some degree by the explicit consideration of structured or intentional deposition. It is now generally acknowledged that the kinds and quantities of objects placed in various contexts were sometimes subject to a degree of selection, and that in some cases choices were made regarding the way in which items should be deposited. So the arrangement of sherds from broken vessels in such a way as to appear to be lining the early fourth- millennium bce Coneybury pit near Stonehenge, for example, appears far from random. While entire vessels were only rarely deposited in pits or the segments of causewayed enclosure ditches, the fragments that were selected for deposition were frequently those that were most diagnostic of a particular style of pot (rims, carination, decorated portions). The relationship between the deposited sherd and the entire pot was clearly significant, and the former might be said to be representative of the latter. As we saw in the case of Kilverstone in Chapter 4, the distribution of conjoining potsherds between different pits within a single site has sometimes been charted systematically. Parts of pots were separated and recombined, and this process arguably had a deeper significance. For the histories of manufacture and use of individual pots, and the associations of specific types of pots, were introduced into these depositional contexts, perhaps becoming fused together there. Such practices were ‘knowledgeable’, without necessarily always entering the realm of explicit and conscious awareness, as already noted.
The way in which styles of decoration have been deployed on pots and reproduced over time has sometimes been identified as an example of ‘information redundancy’: important for the maintenance and reproduction of the style, but possessing little intrinsic significance. If you were to ask (as many an ethnographer has) a traditional potter why he or she decorates a pot in a particular way, the answer would probably consist of reasons such as ‘custom’ or the aesthetic pleasure of producing ‘a good pot’. However, the pots that were produced during the mature stages of the British Neolithic often suggest that style was being manipulated in quite deliberate ways. It appears that particular stylistic devices were recognized as specifically and self-consciously expressive of a known and celebrated tradition that carried into the present not only ‘memory’ but also connotation, from past practice. The emergence of novel forms of pottery may indicate the proliferation of new contexts for the use and display of ceramics, over and above the routine patterns of production, circulation, and discard. One example is the relatively rapid elaboration, including sometimes profuse surface decoration, of several kinds of pot among the repertoire of mid fourth-millennium bce plain bowl and bag-shaped forms, and their association with the deposition of other items, and human and animal bones, within a novel form of monument, the causewayed enclosure.
In the past, archaeologists have been attached to the idea that one style of pottery has ultimately been replaced by another that has become more ‘fashionable’. A more interesting variant of this argument is the suggestion that specific kinds of pot acquired a high status or prestige when they were newly introduced, but that this was gradually eroded, allowing them to be superseded by innovating styles over time. However, the re-placing of pots (or sherds thereof) from an ‘earlier’ tradition in the same contexts as later styles appears to have been a practice that occurred widely in the third millennium. This is most notably the case with the co-occurrence of Peterborough Ware and Grooved Ware. The highly structured and elaborated character of some such practices has been traced and investigated closely in modern studies at particular sites and locations, and this will be discussed at greater length below, in the discussion of deliberate curation.
The idea that the corporate expression of family, kinship, and descent can and should be marked by the metaphor of the ‘House’ is one that has a long lineage in European history, being made explicit in literary works in Greece from at least the fifth century bce. Arguably, its origins can be traced back to the first Neolithic longhouses of continental Europe, and in Britain to the founding halls that have already been discussed at length in this book. Both the formation of ‘house societies’ in the centuries immediately following 4000 bce, and the later deliberate mixing of the bones of various people drawn from different places together in the ditches of causewayed enclosures, may have represented acts of consolidation and incorporation into wider alliances and corporate identities. The former in particular deserves some further consideration. The house may only sporadically and unevenly have manifested itself as a communally occupied dwelling in Neolithic Britain, and just as often expressed itself in the form of a major funerary (or other) monument. Houses in this sense are social entities distinguished by an identity that endures through time, and a set of objects and activities that are passed down between the generations. ‘Houses’ in this sense have much in common with ‘families’, as corporate descent groups that trace their origin back to a founding ancestor, who may be entirely mythological.
In the case of causewayed enclosures, archaeologists have long pondered why it is that while there are instances where mid fourth-millennium enclosures have continuous ditches with only one or two entrances, by far the majority of such enclosures comprise one or more concentric circuits of discontinuous lengths of ditch, separated by undug gaps, or ‘causeways’. The digging and filling of these ditch segments exhibit both distinctiveness and similarities, and different degrees of structuredness of deposition. Some of the more intensively investigated among these sites reveal contrasts in the character of activity between the two sides of the ditch circuit, as at Etton, and there are other, more subtle ways in which the character of deposition appears to draw attention to distinctions between different parts of the enclosure. In some cases the density of pottery and flint may vary between the different rings of ditch segments, while particularly rich concentrations of finds may be clustered at the butt-ends of ditches, as with the group of skull fragments, an axe butt, and traces of burning identified at Haddenham in Cambridgeshire.
Different patterns and sequences of representation and deposition characterize the different causewayed enclosure sites so far investigated: no two sites are identical. Indeed, in the relatively rare instances where two such sites have coexisted in adjacent locations, the differences have sometimes been profound, with the main and Stepleton enclosures at Hambledon Hill offering a case in point. One more detailed example will have to suffice here. At Kingsborough Manor on the Isle of Sheppey, two causewayed enclosures were found to have been in use across almost exactly the same spans of time in the mid fourth millennium bce. They had been built on either side of the crest of a ridge and were sited barely fifty metres apart. While one enclosure overlooked the Thames Estuary northwards, the other faced the Swale southwards, and the Medway valley beyond. The latter was an area in which there were many contemporary arenas of activity including long barrows, other enclosure sites, and places where pits and other features were concentrated, while the former comprised wide marshy estuarine wilds. The busyness of the southern landscape appeared to be reflected in the multiple gatherings of people that had taken place at the south-facing enclosure, such gatherings being represented by the casual burial of debris from feasting events including quantities of broken pottery and exotic items. In contrast, the north-facing site possessed only small deposits of material that had been extremely carefully placed, so indicating that infrequent, intimate events had taken place there.
And yet all such sites involved the demarcation of (mostly circular or oval) areas contained within circuits of discontinuous ditches. Time and again the ditches have produced indications of having been rapidly backfilled, sometimes episodically, and sometimes with repeated recutting of the segments at subsequent points in time. The depositional emphasis that we have noted on the ends of lengths of ditch suggests that ‘opposing’ terminals could be envisaged as points of contrast with the ‘next’ segment, and this tends to support the idea that the physical segmentation of the ditches might reflect the social segmentation of different kin groups.
While this does not necessarily imply the deliberate mapping of lineage history at such sites, it does suggest some kin-based segregation of activity. The combination of the periodic drawing together of groups of people and their differentiation from one another in the same setting sits comfortably with the idea that among the purposes of such enclosures were exchange, and the working out of familial relations between groups potentially occupying very broad but not necessarily contiguous living-space territories. The inclusion of human remains in some of these segmented ditch lengths, and the elaboration of contemporary pottery with sometimes profuse surface scoring and decoration, may represent further expression of this kind of social and familial distinction. The frequency of such deposition of human remains at some sites, as at the main enclosure at Hambledon Hill, has even led to the suggestion that they were primarily places of exposure of corpses prior to bone collection and circulation. Of more interest, however, in the light of the above discussion, is the placing of both whole human skulls and whole inverted pots at intervals along the base of some excavated enclosure segments not only at Hambledon Hill, but also at Etton in the Cambridgeshire fenlands, in a manner that suggests that each could stand proxy for the other (pot::skull), perhaps as ‘vessels for (in the sense of representing or connoting) the ancestors’.
Nor were causewayed enclosures necessarily the only manifestation of the lived practice of collective representation of a fundamentally socially segmented world. Both stone circles and (perhaps slightly later on in British prehistory) stone rows can be read in terms of the assembly (albeit potentially in very different ways) of ancestral presences that stood proxy for the foundation and descent of different lineages within contemporary social formations. This is not necessarily, either, only a matter of ethnographic analogy. To Mike Parker Pearson’s Madagascan colleague, Ramilsonina, it was blindingly obvious that the stones of Stonehenge must have represented the ancestors of the builders of that monument in some way. This was a visceral reaction from someone whose particular Malagasy heritage, with its close involvement in raising stone memorials as part of elaborate funerary rituals, predisposed him to ‘reading’ British prehistoric monuments in this particular way. While this provoked interesting insights into past practice on the part of Parker Pearson, it should not necessarily be regarded as the only way to make the particular arrangement of stones at Stonehenge intelligible.
Colin Richards may have moved us some way towards a more closely situated understanding of the context of multiply sourced creation of such monuments by his observations concerning both quarries and stone circles in Orkney. He has suggested that the complex lithology of stone circles such as that at Brodgar is attributable to the fact that several communities each ‘contributed’ a stone from a quarry in their home territory and brought it and erected it in place where different clans or lineages had assembled for fairs and festivals, to conduct exchanges, give gifts, and arrange alliances (see Chapter 5). The nature of the circle is such that different stones can also ‘point’ in different directions, perhaps towards the source-areas of each of the individual stones. This might also explain why so often each stone in a circle appears to be so deliberately individual: the stones could represent, both in their own right and as a grouping assembled in one place, at one and the same time a coming together and a representation of the individual character of each of the contributing and (perhaps albeit temporarily) cooperating groups. Indeed, Richards sees this bringing of a stone gift from each group in competitive terms: a kind of Highland Games where each group brought along and put down their own marker and symbolic competitor. This may also place Stonehenge, interpretively, in a new light: the deliberate organisation of the stones brought from more than one location (bearing in mind the sandstones as well as rhyolite, dolerite, and sarsens there) into a uniform template could have been a metaphor for societal unification that stood in deliberate contradiction to the ‘polyglot’ circles elsewhere. And perhaps the ultimate symbolic expression of such a superordinate bond was the permanent physical linking together of the sarsens by lintel-stones.2 It may be this single factor that explains why Stonehenge is unique and still has a strongly resonant impact upon visitors even today.
In Chapter 4 we described a variety of social practices that gave form and texture to the lived worlds of the Neolithic. But some of the same materials that we discussed there also have aspects that are pertinent to the issues of time, history, and inheritance. It is for that reason that a brief return to discuss axes of flint and stone is instructive. While we have dealt with the transport and dissemination of axes, we will now turn to their deposition and destruction, the final phases of their individual life histories. In the past two decades, archaeologists have increasingly made use of the notion of ‘object biographies’ as a means of drawing together the production, distribution, and consumption of artefacts, which had hitherto often been subject to entirely separate analyses. These personal histories of things can be both distinctive and diverse, since items can have extremely varied degrees and forms of interaction with people (comprising different degrees of knowledge and skill, and different forms of use), and can also have experiential lives of their own, involving decay, corrosion, and wear, sometimes occasioning repair and maintenance on the part of their owners and users. In the case of Neolithic Britain, a number of authorities have recounted the possible ‘lives’ of axeheads, since often these have not only travelled considerable distances from their places of extraction, but also were clearly highly prized objects, whose ownership reflected or contributed to the roles, statuses, and identities of people. The different stages in this progress would generally have involved quarrying from the living rock and ‘roughing out’ to create the basic axe shape, followed by the grinding, honing, and polishing of their surfaces, their transportation and circulation sometimes over considerable distances, their reworking (and sometimes their deliberate fragmentation), and finally their deposition in a variety of different kinds of place.
The jadeitite axehead found beside the Sweet Track, and therefore dated to 3806 bce (at least as far as its deposit, accidentally or otherwise, in that location is concerned), is a case in point. On typological grounds in reference to morphologically similar jadeitite axes found in Brittany, this axe was manufactured in the period 4500–4200 bce and could have been brought to Britain at any time subsequently. The fineness of this axehead, which showed no sign of having ever been hafted or used, could have been the main reason why it had been kept intact (and just possibly it could have been curated by the ‘Mesolithic’ precursors of the trackway-builders), eventually to be given to the waters at this particular place and time.
The other of the two ‘unused’ axeheads found next to the Track was yet more interesting in terms of its location. This axehead was made, it would seem, from flint being mined during much the same period on the Sussex Downs. Its blade was partly polished, and it also had no indications of ever having been hafted or used: it was, in other words, in perfect condition. But most telling was a find made just four metres away, on the other side of the Track. This was of a rectangular twenty-centimetre length of oak stem, the centre of which had been hollowed out to create a deep rectangular recess. The impression is that this oak object therefore formed the main element of a lidded box. It just so happens that the pristine flint axe fits snugly into the recess in the wooden ‘tray’, raising the possibility that the latter was the lower part of a wooden box, and that when the box was opened deliberately, or dropped accidentally, the axe flew out from its secure place to be ‘swallowed’ by the nearby silts. In turn, it hints also that a normal means of transportation of fine axes was either boxed or wrapped (the jadeitite axehead could equally, by analogy with Netherlands examples where the wrapping has been inferred from wear traces, been transported carefully enveloped in fabric).
A common phenomenon of the Neolithic in Britain, then, is the casual loss, and quite probably also the deliberate placing, of complete (and frequently unused) stone axes in the landscape, in watery places, in long mounds, in the ditches of causewayed enclosures, and so on. While we cannot distinguish between the purpose of deposition for the vast majority of accidental discoveries of such whole axes, their distribution across the landscape is not necessarily random, and an association with water is frequent enough to consider the possibility that they were deliberately placed, in the same way that in later centuries bronze objects were similarly so placed. As valuable items, there may have been a ‘dedicatory’ aspect to such deposition (as also where they occur in primary contexts, for instance in causewayed enclosure ditches, as at Etton in Cambridgeshire). However, given that many such axes exhibit no indication of ever having been used, and that they occur as chance finds also in areas that may have been wooded, another explanation is possible. This is that, rather than always having been casual losses while their owners were out in the woods cutting trees or stems, or woodworking, they were deliberately placed in those same woodlands, as offerings. Given their ubiquity, might they even be regarded as having represented a ‘seeding’ of the land with a potent symbol of clearance and human intervention in the landscape?
For the past century or so, the study of stone axes has focused upon these complete or nearly complete examples. However, by far the most common excavated examples of such axes have been quite small fragments representing the deliberate flaking or fragmentation of whole axeheads, and these have often been carefully (rather than randomly) placed with other items, including other carefully selected fragmented items, such as pottery sherds, in such locations as pits and the ditches of causewayed enclosures. While this process of deliberate destruction has been widely remarked upon, reasoned explanations of why the practice took place are harder to find.
The consequences of this axe-shattering practice have been so remarkable at some sites as to receive special mention. Whole finely worked axeheads from the mountain quarries at Graig Lwyd had, for example, been brought to the nearby site at Parc Bryn Cegin, Llandygai, near Bangor in north Wales, where a number of fourth-millennium Early Neolithic rectangular buildings had stood. Flakes were cut out of the surface of these stone objects to exfoliate their surfaces and, together with a burnt butt-end fragment of another axe in the same material, had been carefully buried in pits and other places at the site, over the whole course of the Neolithic period. One of the pits containing Grooved Ware pottery as well as axe exfoliation flakes at the site had been placed carefully overlapping the site of one of the timber houses built several hundred years earlier, and a similar pit and contents were found in exactly the same relation to such a house at the adjacent site at Llandygai close to two Late Neolithic henges. This apparent commemoration of an early site is something we shall return to shortly, but for the moment it is the character and duration of the practice of, in various ways, slicing up and scattering the debris of Neolithic axes that is of interest here.
John Llewelyn Williams and Jane Kenney have suggested that ‘woefully vandalistic destruction’, ‘orgies of smashing in bucolic merriment’, and ‘the potlach [sic] phenomenon of the west coast of North America’ could equally well explain the break-up and deposition of the Graig Lwyd axes at Parc Bryn Cegin. They concluded that, given how many axes were treated in this way at the site, ‘there is no doubting the sanctity of the fragmented debitage to the Neolithic supplicants’ there.3 Meanwhile, at two Later Neolithic settlement sites at Rothley, on the River Soar in Leicestershire, axes were similarly destroyed, in similar ways. At Temple Grange, near a circular post-hole defined house, a large Charnwood-type stone axe had been found in a pit along with flaked fragments from its polished surface, while fragments of the same axe had also been found sixty metres away. In the larger of two pits at Rothley Lodge Farm nearby, another two Charnwood-type polished stone axeheads had been deliberately exfoliated in just the same way, and were buried along with ‘thousands’ of sherds from broken-up, highly decorated Grooved Ware pots, more than twenty-five flint scrapers and waste-flakes, and a miniature stone plaque incised with a face-like design. The smaller pit featured deliberate deposits of a single Grooved Ware vessel, an elongated, squared stone rubbing or polishing stone, a spherical clay ball, and many burnt bones. A flint axe also found in this pit had been deliberately burnt to the point where it had exploded and shattered into hundreds of pieces.
Is it possible to suggest, given the ubiquity of the suite of practices involved, a wider explanation for this deliberate fragmentation of objects redolent of long-distance connections between communities? We have already noted that, especially as the Neolithic progressed, it seems that the place of extraction of rock to be used for the manufacture of stone axes acquired, or accumulated, some special significance and that the remoteness and ‘topographical difficulty’ of such places seemed to imbue the process of acquisition (and therefore by association the axeheads themselves) with a certain mystique and importance. Moreover, the selection and treatment of individual pieces of flint or rock seems to have become integral to this process of the promotion of items from the prosaic to the profound. In some cases, for example, what might otherwise have been seen as flaws (such as fossils embedded within flint nodules) were highlighted rather than disguised in the roughing-out and polishing of individual axeheads. So why did some of these objects have their surfaces deliberately flaked off, while others were smashed up into pieces, or burnt and disintegrated? One explanation for a similar breaking and burning of axeheads at the Etton causewayed enclosure was ventured by Mark Edmonds in the monograph publication of the site. He wrote: ‘It may be that these artefacts were harnessed, broken and/or burnt within important rites of passage... [and] collected on the completion of certain rites and deposited with some deliberation. Placed in the earth and in association with other cultural materials, their presence may have helped to sustain the associations of the site and a sense of continuity for specific social groups.’ In this way, local Neolithic ‘history’ would have included a memory of such events and their significance.
Alternatively, the axeheads may have been regarded as having stored up ritual power or magic, or ancestral benefaction. In such circumstances it would not necessarily have been seen as destructive to break the items up, but rather it would have been regarded as a means of distributing their power more widely, enabling them to somehow release their embodied energy and to transmit whatever values they were seen to embody, across both space and time. We could compare this with the flint nodules that had been knapped entirely away in the ditches of certain monumental structures, as noted in Chapter 4. This is not entirely different from the way that the relics of holy people were distributed in medieval Europe, and could indeed have been the equivalent in stone of the rendering down and circulating of the remains of the dead in Neolithic Britain (see Chapter 4, and the next section here). The temporal character of these actions is of critical importance. While whole axes might be lost, or exchanged, or deliberately deposited in pits or watery places, the distribution of axe fragments could be envisaged as a wider ‘seeding’ of pieces of objects that had acquired associations with the past. This would focus all the associations and links to people, to events, and to journeying that they—literally—embodied into series of dedicatory acts undertaken at intervals (reflected at Parc Bryn Cegin and elsewhere in a series of pits) that created a history of such deposition at an ancestral location.
Had we been writing this book two decades ago, it is entirely possible that the kinds of materials and contexts that we have been addressing in this chapter would not have been connected to the kin relations and patterns of descent of past communities. These issues would more likely have been considered exclusively in relation to the remains of ‘the ancestors’ themselves. These, of course, have most frequently been encountered in the excavation of long barrows and chambered tombs, and also increasingly in the ditches of causewayed enclosures. In Chapters 3 and 4 we discussed at some length the treatment of the dead, ranging from excarnation, defleshing, and dismemberment to cremation and the burial of complete bodies accompanied by grave goods, in facilities ranging from tombs and barrows to pits and enclosures, while acknowledging that this diverse evidence may represent only a small sample of the total.
We have already noted the curated cattle mandibles placed in the ditch at Stonehenge. But archaeologists are increasingly identifying the retention of a variety of objects over what were often lengthy periods of time in Neolithic Britain. For instance, Anne Teather has recently drawn attention to a process that she described as ‘cultural reclamation’, in which already ancient bones and other items were appropriated in order to manufacture links with a mythic, and quite possibly fictional, past. It is possible that the presence of engraved stone plaques, like the one that we have just noted from Rothley Lodge Farm in Leicestershire, alerts us to particularly important deposits associated with Late Neolithic Grooved Ware. Another similar pit at King’s Stanley in the Vale of Gloucester potentially represents a very dramatic example of curation. Here, fragments of Grooved Ware were found at either end of the base of a pit filled with a single-event deposit dated to the late third millennium bce. Flint and animal bone, and many lumps of limestone, were found scattered throughout the pit: but at its centre at a slightly higher level, in effect enfolded within the Grooved Ware vessel pieces, were found burnt hazelnuts, a miniature limestone plaque incised all over with groups of parallel scored lines, and, especially significantly, most of the sherds from a whole Mortlake-style bowl that belonged to a tradition of pot-making that had ceased at least 400 years before its deposition here. Instrumental or functional explanations for such ordering of residues simply fail to capture the complexity of meaningful reference instanced here. While we cannot hope to access the significance of the thought and traditions of cultural practice that went into the digging and filling of this pit, we can identify the fact of structuring, the incorporation of old pots with new (and the mapping of the past that this doubtless involved), as well as the surely purposeful inclusion of a strikingly symbolic and perhaps deliberately miniaturized artefact (the scored stone, with its at least possible connotative reference to binding or packaging up).
One of the arguments for continuity in the occupation of the land of Britain throughout much of prehistory concerns the endurance of practices that can be demonstrated or inferred to have taken place repeatedly in the same location. We have already dwelt at length on instances of this phenomenon at either end of our period, at around 4000 bce and at the time of the introduction of Beaker pottery. Sometimes these continuities can range over enormous temporal spans, as with the lower Wye Valley caves at which practices of careful human burial are attested repeatedly, at intervals, across a span extending from the end of the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago through to the sixth century ce. This continuity can perhaps be explained through simple attachment to place, or by a suite of beliefs concerning entry to an ‘otherworld’ beyond life, through the portals of cave entrances (Fig. 6.5).
However, we suggest that during the Neolithic the themes of durability, stability, and continuity took on a new and greater significance. The creation of social entities that were not so liable to fragmentation as those of the preceding Mesolithic period, and who had exclusive access to shared resources, was a precondition for a way of life that involved a significant role for the herding of animals and/or the cultivation of crops. Thus we have argued throughout this book that an important innovation of the period was the emergence of ‘invested lineages’, by which we mean corporate social groups held together by the presumed sharing of blood and ancestry, and often by at least temporary co-residence. The ‘investment’ to which the term refers is the communal ownership of the means of production, as well as dwelling structures and ceremonial monuments, and presumably also less tangible goods such as names, titles, rituals, songs, and dances. In addition, it seems probable that these groups will have invested their collective efforts in the production of a common history, which served both to bind the community together and as a basis for the exclusion of others. For Neolithic societies, the creation of history was partly achieved through the collective labour involved in bringing buildings and monuments into being, and partly through the manufacture, circulation, giving, and use of portable artefacts such as fine pots and polished axes. It was also produced in the ebb and flow of meetings and partings, fission and fusion occasioned by the periodic assembly of people, animals, and things at places such as causewayed enclosures. Finally, history will have been created, renewed, and sometimes selectively transformed through practices that drew the past into the present, through commemoration, remembering, and forgetting.
This emphasis on commemoration is graphically attested at individual sites where the memory of the significance of an event can echo down the centuries within the Neolithic and beyond, into the Early Bronze Age period. One example that we have already raised is the construction of halls and houses, and in some cases the deliberate burning, burying, and other decommissioning events associated with their demise. Three frames of temporal duration were involved in the burning down of a house and its subsequent ruin and memorialization. The first was the immediate act of setting and tending the fire that destroyed the building. This was immediate in its temporal frame and presumably relatively brief, if dramatic, in its temporal duration. The vividness of the act, and to some degree its extravagance, was what would have imprinted the memory of the event upon the witnesses, and may well have given rise to oral traditions committing it to shared remembrance. At sites such as Dorstone Hill in Herefordshire and Warren Field, Crathes, on Deeside in north-east Scotland, it may well have been the case that the burnt building remained as a shell, with the stumps of its principal upright timbers visible for some years. This duration would have been equivalent to the length of time of individual lives, and memories attached to the ruin would have spanned several generations. In many cases the ruins were subsequently in some way ‘encapsulated’ within a larger structure that monumentalized the place, and fixed the memory of the events there into what might be described as a ‘legendary’ frame of temporal awareness. These patterns applied also to the stone houses of the Orkney Islands, which were often abandoned with some ceremony, as in the case of the cattle and sheep skulls placed on the floor, and rich deposits of cultural material in the filling of parts of the Grobust building at the Links of Noltland on Westray.4 Some Orkney houses were also monumentalized after their use, as we have seen.
Our investigations in recent years at Dorstone Hill have recorded events that serve to bring together a number of the strands of history, practice, and descent that we have introduced in this chapter. Three early hall-like buildings were each memorialized by burning and encapsulation within funerary long mounds, but the easternmost of these in turn also contained a primary linear mortuary structure, which was itself commemorated in a series of ways. After this chamber had been dismantled, its position had been marked by the digging of a U-shaped ditch surrounding it on three sides, the spoil from which was thrown up to create a small mound that sealed its traces, and which was only later bonded to the larger barrow covering the burnt debris of the building (Fig. 6.6).
Fig. 6.6 Dorstone Hill, Herefordshire: mortuary structure
Seen from the air, the trough-like mortuary structure at the western end of the easternmost of three long mounds on Dorstone Hill in Herefordshire is bracketed between two large post-holes, and enclosed with a U-shaped ditch. The up-cast from this ditch formed a small mound that was later incorporated into the larger barrow, which sealed the burnt remains of a timber building.
Photograph: © Adam Stanford (website: http://www.aerial-cam.co.uk/).
Some while into the natural silting process, this ditch was then strewn with an organic deposit that, along with what was possibly rotted midden material, contained a great quantity of highly fragmented, cremated human bone. This might conceivably have been removed from the chamber itself. The bone was then sealed beneath a mass of stone thrown into the ditch, which at some later point was cut through by a stone-lined cist, which may potentially have held a further burial. It was probably at least two centuries after the raising of the mound that a further commemoration of the chamber site took place, in a quite remarkable way. A small drum-shaped pit was inserted, shaft-like, in the later fourth millennium, into the top of the mound. Into the base of this pit was placed a polished flint axe with a fine blade (and which contained in its flint matrix a highly visible fossil), along with other flints, while a polished stone axe recovered from an adjacent modern drain is also likely to have originally been held within this pit. The flints comprised a large, thin, leaf-shaped, bifacially worked knife, together with some at least of the flake debris from its final dressing (Fig. 6.7).
Fig. 6.7 Dorstone bifacially worked flint knife
This fine flint artefact was one of a group of objects deposited in a small, cylindrical pit dug beside the mortuary structure beneath the eastern mound at Dorstone Hill. Some of the waste flakes from the manufacture of this item were also recovered from the pit, indicating that it had been made not long before it was buried.
Photograph: © Adam Stanford (website: http://www.aerial-cam.co.uk/).
Meanwhile, a series of very large pits had been cut through the main mound. Each was dug down as far as the intensely burnt daub and timber of the building, and no further, and each was lined with large slabs of stone, before fragments of cremated bone of humans and cattle were deposited.
These circumstances reveal a series of ways in which a single location had come to embody collective history and enduring links with the past. The timber mortuary structure and its enclosing ditch had been located in proximity to a wooden building that had been conspicuously destroyed by fire, and both were eventually covered by a unified mound that served to memorialize them in a massively material fashion. But the key features of both structures, and the histories they embodied, were apparently recalled in some detail, and sporadically commemorated in a series of acts of veneration. The small cylindrical pit had been carefully inserted close by the mortuary structure, and contained two axes that must have been brought to the site from some distance. But the presence of the knife and the flakes from its manufacture are perhaps more significant, for they demonstrate that the object was made then and there, with the sole intention of gifting it. Both the creation of the object and its placement therefore formed parts of a performance whose intention was to bring the dead back to mind. Similarly, the digging of the larger pits in the main mound reveals that a knowledge of the burnt hall had been sustained, and the materials that were placed into them were quite deliberately being positioned in juxtaposition to the brightly coloured building debris that their excavation revealed. Finally, like the drum-shaped pit, the cist had been dug with an appreciation of the position of the mortuary structure, with the aim of establishing a spatial relationship between a newly deceased person and a location of ancestral presence. In each case these intimate relationships between new deposits and the tangible vestiges of the past demonstrate how history was being produced and refined through a series of discontinuous acts that repeatedly asserted continuities with an original founding community. This pattern is by no means unique to Dorstone Hill, and throughout this book we have drawn attention to particular locations that developed through time to become the repositories of collective memory, as the bodies of the recently deceased and potent objects were placed in relation to structures and deposits that were now old but still recalled in some detail. Good examples would include the sequence of graves, burials, and episodes of mound construction at Duggleby Howe, and the many reconfigurations of Stonehenge.
The discerning reader may well be thinking that the present chapter has involved not only a reprise, but also to a large extent a repetition, of much that was introduced and discussed at some length in our chapter on ‘social being and cultural practices’. Rather, we would suggest, it has involved an abstraction of, and a concentration upon, the specifically historical dimensions of such practices. The reason why peoples are seen to be ‘without history’, whether in the past or the present, is that, for traditional peoples, tradition and history are elided. Historical consciousness for such people may not hold the precision that a chronological, recorded, calendrical realization of history demands of Western-influenced societies today. But it is far from the case that such societies lived ‘outside history’. While this may be immanent in the residues that archaeologists encounter and investigate, it is hard to articulate closely. What we have been highlighting here are the practices that have embodied both continuity and change through the two millennia concerned, and the recording of these practices today is just beginning to enable us to write ‘history’ in both a narrative and explicatory sense. However, it is the evidence for curation, and for what we have termed the strategic deployment of artefacts and residues, which enables us to appreciate that history was a living, as well as a lived, experience in the fourth and third millennia bce. As recorded in the descent of practices focused upon particular events and particular times, or extended through repetition and allusion over longer spans of time, history registered via descent and tradition itself was in a number ways a self-conscious practice and a renewable and revitalizing resource for the people of Neolithic Britain.
1. Note the Aveline’s Hole double-burial ammonites here: see the reference in the Bibiographical commentary.
2. It has been suggested by Alex Gibson and others that timber circles may have been linked together by lintels, but even if this was the case, it is the connection of stones in this way that is unarguably unique to Stonehenge.
3. The language used by these authors is instructive, and is important in terms of what we described in the Introduction concerning ‘encounters with the Neolithic’ achieved through excavation. This can not only be vivid but also somewhat ‘shocking’, as with this axe-smashing episode in north Wales. Similar experiences have been conveyed in reference to some of the more intensively studied sites discussed in this book. For example, Francis Pryor described his amazement at first encountering the debris of woodworking at Etton, and even more notably Roger Mercer was struck forcefully by his realization that warfare had produced dire consequences for individual people at the Stepleton enclosure on Hambledon Hill.
4. The Neolithic settlement of the Links of Noltland on the island of Westray is located in an area of sand dunes behind Grobust Bay, and was originally excavated by David Clarke of the National Museum of Scotland between 1978 and 1981. These investigations revealed a building containing dense occupation residues, including materials apparently connected with the closure of the site. More recent work, since 2007, has exposed further buildings, a Bronze Age settlement, and two Neolithic figurines.
