Experiencing the Neolithic in the present
Why is the Neolithic period in Britain of continuing importance today? For one thing, as we observed in the Introduction to this book, places like Stonehenge, Avebury, and the components of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site such as Skara Brae, the Stones of Stenness, and the Ness of Brodgar provide an enduring fascination for a wide public, and therefore attract visitors from around the world (Fig. 7.1) (even if they don’t arrive presidentially, as Obama did).
Confronted with these spectacular but enigmatic remains, it is inevitable that visitors will find themselves looking, and often struggling, for explanations that meet their expectations of the real world. Most obviously, they want to know who made these things, and why. Beyond this, many visitors also want to identify where these people came from, what mattered to them most in their lives, and, perhaps most important of all, how they are connected to those of us inhabiting ‘their’ space, however much it has changed, today. But an equally important issue is that the way we view the Neolithic can have important ramifications for our understanding of the contemporary world, and how it came into being. For example, the adoption of farming appears to have been an escalating process from which British societies have been unable to extricate themselves, and that has led to environmental degradation and other modern ills. But it has also been a process that has shaped our perception of the landscape, and of what is ‘natural’ in our environment. And while the majority of us live a metropolitan way of life in contemporary Britain, our everyday language nonetheless remains full of reference to the land and its working.
The popular answers to the ‘whys’ of the Neolithic of Britain have been legion, ranging from the pre-industrial folk stories making intelligible the chambered mounds as giant’s graves or fairy caves, to antiquarian invocations of Merlin or the Druids, and more recent suggestions of priestly astronomers. Equally, as we saw in Chapter 1, each generation of academic archaeologists has brought new conceptual resources to bear on Neolithic Britain, and has come up with novel interpretations. It is, we contend, no coincidence that each new school of archaeological thought invariably finds itself addressing this particular set of evidence (for Neolithic Britain), for the same reason that the ‘person in the street’ is drawn to ponder the significance of a standing stone or a stone circle when they come upon them by chance in the landscape. The British Neolithic presents us with the rich material traces of a remote and in many respects a ‘lost’ world, with no shred of a written record to explain them. Even the decorative media of the period are predominantly abstract, and resist straightforward readings. Yet it is abundantly clear that these tangible things signal a set of long-lost experiences and understandings that were formed in conditions very unlike our own.
The preceding Mesolithic period would undoubtedly seem just as alien and puzzling to a modern sensibility, and quite possibly more so. But that lost age of bands of hunters and gatherers does not impose itself upon us visually, demanding our attention in the way that Silbury Hill or the Calanais stones do (Fig. 7.2, Stones of Stenness).
It is not too far-fetched to say that the landscapes that we now inhabit actually began to acquire aspects of their present texture during the Neolithic. Later periods, from at least the arrival of the Romans onwards, already have a ‘history’, in the sense that writers of the time (whether Julius Caesar or the Venerable Bede) have sketched out a narrative for us, which we can choose to build upon or contest, but not ignore entirely. The Neolithic presents us with no such received outline, and yet we have been at pains in this book to stress that this does not mean that it is a period without history. We have tried to draw the reader’s attention to a paradox: on the one hand, Neolithic history was different from our own, wholly enveloped as it was in relationships of kinship and descent, in practices and traditions, in inherited knowledge and stories, in herds of animals, in stone axes and pottery vessels, in middens and cultivation plots, in the bones of people and cattle, and in monuments of stone and earth that were, and remain, unique to it, and that would no doubt sometimes seem bizarre to our twenty-first-century sensibilities. But at one and the same time, in seeking to grapple with this kind of history and shape it into a written narrative, we unavoidably transform it into the kind of history with which we are familiar. One of the ways in which we have tried to resist this latter process has been to focus throughout on the notion of experience.
Our writing of the Neolithic is informed by our own experiences of artefacts and archaeological sites in the present. These encounters are not identical with those of past people, because our expectations and assumptions are inevitably those of modern Westerners and we bring a different cultural inheritance to bear on the material. Nonetheless, if we approach these remains with an awareness of the customs and practices, and the inherited resources of knowledge and wisdom of recent pre-industrial peoples, although the monuments and artefacts are shards and fragments of an existence different from our own, our understandings of them have the potential to challenge and dislodge at least some of these preconceptions.
Nor is the stock of traces of that Neolithic past a given: a further paradox is that while no new remains of the Neolithic can be created, any more than can be for any time in the past including the twentieth century, fresh discoveries are made virtually every day. One of the reasons why the Neolithic is able to surprise us, year on year, therefore, is because new and unfamiliar material is constantly coming to light through excavation. The Neolithic is anything but a closed book, and the evidence available for study has mushroomed over the past few decades. This is significant for two reasons. First, in the absence of a written history, and provided we do not overly predetermine the framework of interpretation for what we find, material things are not simply illustrative of our understanding of the past, but substantially frame, and continually also disrupt, that understanding. Any archaeological narrative is woven out of the residues left behind by human communities, but this is exclusively so only in the ‘prehistoric’ era. Secondly, we have drawn attention to the quite particular importance of new kinds of, and more numerous, objects to people living in the centuries we denote ‘Neolithic’. These items, we would assert, were far more than the symptoms or products of human existence or particular ways of gaining a living. When we talk about archaeological ‘evidence’, we generally mean that potsherds or flint tools point towards some faintly glimpsed and subtly intangible past reality that we can never directly encounter. The crucial point here is that in the Neolithic these kinds of object and material forms were integral to that reality. As a way of life, the Neolithic was sustained by things just as much as by language, and articulated through things perhaps even to a greater extent than through language. Artefacts and architecture provided the framework within which social life was conducted, the settings in which interaction took place, and the media through which tasks were performed, but they did not exist as a static constant. Not only were they continually being modified throughout their periods of use, they also stood or were used within landscapes that were marked by continual movement. Archaeologists are increasingly aware of the scale and frequency of contacts and linkages between regions, demonstrated by the widespread dispersal of artefacts, images, and species, from stone axes to patterns of lozenges and nested arcs to the Orkney vole.1 So as well as recognizing that landscapes and places were in continual flux, there has been much debate over the possibility of pilgrimages and processions to, and between, focal places. We would add that the networks involved would have had two critical roles. First, they would have served as a means of extending kin relations over space, thereby reinvigorating lines of descent. And second, these were no doubt the primary ‘vehicle’ for the transmission and acceptance of new customs, ideas, and practices.
People and things
It has been conventional to define the Neolithic as the period during which agriculture began. So, routinely, archaeologists and others have accepted without question the dictum that the Neolithic was caused by farming. As such, living in villages, using pottery vessels, making a wider range of stone tools, treating the dead in elaborate ways, and constructing imposing field monuments were all held to be consequences of domesticating plants and animals. We have argued, on the contrary, that it is important to reverse this logic if we are to gain an understanding of the profoundly social character of ‘becoming Neolithic’. Hunting and gathering people have (and have had) robust and successful ways of existing, which have often survived with little perceptible change for millennia. These ways of living have often depended upon minimal social differentiation, the limitation of personal possessions to what can be carried, the maintenance of extensive networks of kin, the existence of trusted allies across considerable distances, and the sharing of whatever one has, particularly food. These arrangements are highly effective in securing the survival of mobile, small-scale societies. However, when people start to invest their labour in resources that will be consumed at a later time, and that need continual care and management, this way of life meets its limitations. This changed suite of practices includes, of course, the domestication of plants and animals, but also the species-specific ‘cultivation’ (that is, the active and defended management) of wild plants such as hazel, acorns, and berry-bearing plants. It also involves the use of technology such as fish weirs, animal traps, and fishing boats, and the storage and mass processing of sometimes large quantities of foodstuffs. These developments can only occur when groups can assert collective ownership over resources, excluding others from sharing them.
The emergence of more deliberately bounded communities, more able to exercise collective ownership, was therefore one important aspect of the Neolithic as a social entity. Another was the way that social relationships were rendered more durable by marking investment in those relationships through multiplying the material things that bonded people together. In recent years this has been described by some archaeologists and anthropologists as an ‘enmeshment’ or an ‘entanglement’ from which it became ever harder for communities and individuals to break free. In this way, a Neolithic society was not just composed of people: it was made up of human beings together with non-human entities, including both artefacts and animals. Paradoxically, this made Neolithic societies better insulated from natural shocks but more vulnerable to the consequences of the kinds of community tensions that an increase of continual living together creates.
As we have been at pains to demonstrate, Neolithic communities possessed a sense of collective identity and continuity through time that rested not only on kinship with, and descent from, other persons, but also a collective investment in herds of animals, the circulation and inheritance of fine artefacts, the shared use of ceremonial spaces, the veneration of the bones of ancestors and their stock, and the acknowledgement of shared traditions and modes of conduct. In other words, the ‘Neolithic history’ that we have been discussing throughout this book was actually the precondition for a way of life involving the herding of animals and the cultivation of cereals. This kind of history, vested as it was in material things and the bodies of humans and animals, was continually renewed through performance, habit, and experience. To reiterate the point: the ‘evidence’ that we as archaeologists experience in the present was both the outcome of, and integral to, the very particular way that social life was experienced and sustained during the Neolithic.
Neolithic Britain and the wider world
The Neolithic has long been identified as a major horizon of change in the Old World, in which the shift from food collection to food production paved the way for a sedentary way of life, greater accumulations of population, craft specialization, and ultimately urbanism and the state, leading in turn to capitalism, industrialization, and modern democracy. Displacing the foundations of this narrative slightly, as we have attempted to do, has interesting consequences. Some of the presumed marginal aspects of Neolithic life are revealed as having had a greater causal role to play than has often been supposed. We have argued that the Neolithic represented a new formation of relationships between people, animals, and things, linked together historically. Adopting this formulation, there are considerable rewards to be gained from an ‘immersion’ in a Neolithic world. For the henges, stone circles, and chambered tombs that we can experience today are revealed as media through which social relationships were constructed and maintained, rather than ostentatious ‘optional extras’ that demonstrated the success of past societies in generating a surplus from an essentially unchanging set of economic activities.
As a collection of often large offshore islands, Britain has, since the loss of the land bridge to continental Europe, always been distinctive. And yet there is also a shared inheritance stemming from the two principal geographical directions of Continental linkage. One concerns what is still sometimes termed the ‘Atlantic Arc’. Two decades ago, Andrew Sherratt drew attention to the particularity of the far north-west fringes of Europe (Britain, Ireland, and Armorica—that is, Brittany and Normandy), where monument building achieved extremes of scale and complexity not seen anywhere else on the Continent (Fig. 7.3).
While the earlier third millennium bce saw the emergence of what are termed by archaeologists the Corded Ware and Globular Amphora complexes in central Europe, distinguished by the burial of flexed bodies with accompanying ceramic vessels in grave-pits, this development was delayed until the Beaker period in the north and west. Here, megalithic constructions developed toward ‘complexes’ such as those of the Carnac alignments of the Gulf of Morbihan in southern Brittany, the Calanais circles of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, and the passage-tomb cemeteries of the Boyne valley north of Dublin in Ireland. These complexes not only feature elaborate major monuments that required quite unprecedented quantities of labour for their construction, but also encompass entire landscapes. Rather than dismiss these assemblies as mere window dressing, we would prefer to identify them as characteristic of a distinct kind of Neolithic world, in which community, identity, and authority were constructed in specific ways. In other words, they distinguish a particular historical experience that was quite remote from our own.
The transformation of social worlds
We have discussed change as a constant, and sometimes an accelerated, factor in the history of Neolithic Britain, but we have perhaps directed less immediate attention to the concept of ‘transformation’. This is in part owing to our reluctance to cast the advent of the Neolithic as the only significant transformation that occurred in the 1600–1800 years or so in question. It is likely that there were, in terms of rates of change and their social causes and consequences, several historical junctures that could be described as transformational in the centuries concerned. However, we must be careful to distinguish between the incremental changes that can generally be identified whenever we chart a society’s development over time, and more fundamental shifts in the way that life is structured and ordered. Change is constant and continuous, even where it can barely be perceived. Transformation, however, is contingent (that is, it emerges out of locally specific circumstances, which may depend of the workings of chance, or the unintended consequences and unrecognized conditions of people’s actions), is episodic (not necessarily happening all at once, but often featuring a ‘chain reaction’ or a tipping point at which the alteration of circumstances becomes perceptible), and is often profound in terms of both its immediate and long-term consequences. When we speak of the transformation of social worlds, then, we mean that at certain points during the British Neolithic the fundamental terms under which social life was conducted shifted in categorical ways.
The beginning of the Neolithic would certainly qualify as such a transformation, but we would argue that the wholesale reorganization of community life associated with the Grooved Ware complex could be regarded as a development of comparable significance. At this point, existing media of social life (houses, the consumption of food, pottery vessels, depositional practice) were embellished and increased in scope in order to enable a step-change in the scale and reach of social relationships. Such a development qualifies as transformational in that it permeated a series of aspects of life, whose individual alteration was arguably mutually amplifying. The mobilization of labour to create new ceremonial centres, the emergence of new means of feeding huge gatherings of people, and the proliferation of architectural forms based on the cellular house together facilitated the production of new forms of collective identity. This is turn was the precondition for the construction of Stonehenge and Avebury, which might, quite reasonably, be identified as the apogee of the cultural possibilities that had been established during the British Neolithic.
Rewriting—and always learning more about— the Neolithic of Britain
We shall conclude this book by returning to the issue with which we began, especially in Chapter 1, which is the problem of writing about the Neolithic in Britain with an understanding fully in mind that not only did it have a history, but that we need to be aware that one of our primary aims in writing that history is to re-establish more closely both the pace and the ‘texture’ of its unfolding. At various places in the book we have drawn attention to the more precise chronological resolution that has recently had a revolutionary effect on Neolithic archaeology. This has self-evidently been of great benefit, but it brings with it the danger of privileging dating and sequence, sorting the evidence according to its place in a presumed linear narrative. In the process, our accounts of the past can appear commonplace and somewhat anonymous. There is nothing wrong with chronologically based narrative, but it is not enough on its own. We have therefore attempted to navigate a different course, tacking between writing about the passage of time, writing about social practice, and interrogating the subtleties of the archaeological record. Additionally, in trying to highlight some of the intricacies of practice that we can witness in what has been deposited and what has survived for us to record, we have drawn out those things that we regard as most telling about what we can glimpse of the concerns of people in their lived experience in the centuries concerned (Fig. 7.4).
The intention has been to produce a different kind of history from one that views the Neolithic remains that have been encountered and investigated as self-explanatory. While we have concentrated on material things, we have not done so in a traditionally empirical way, neither expecting facts to speak for themselves, nor having a grand narrative already in mind, for which we seek correlates in the record that we encounter. Instead, we have tried to enable other kinds of narrative to emerge, in the process of making comparisons and contrasts, rather than seeking exemplars of predefined processes.
Along the way, some new reflections on longer-term and wider-scale changes in material practice and society have, we hope, emerged. One such set of changes was, we think, worked through at the scale of the creation of monumentally sized constructions. In reference to the narrative of ‘enclosure and meeting places’ in the mid to late fourth millennium bce in Britain, for example, the evident succession from causewayed enclosures to cursus monuments has long been remarked upon. However, our conceptualization of the cursus as a deliberately different kind of enclosure which was built to connect up both physically and conceptually not only a landscape, but previous gathering-places within it, is, we would suggest, an innovative one. Moreover, it is a perspective that acknowledges the probable awareness on the part of the Neolithic people engaged in the activity of creating such structures of a profoundly historical connection between places and their unfolding histories of action and meaning. Similarly, we could draw attention to the close spatial relationship between massive conical earthen mounds and both henges and palisaded enclosures that was hinted at in Chapter 5. It could be argued that all of these forms of monumentality were concerned with the deliberate creation of reserved spaces, removed from the everyday and the commonplace. While there may have been a certain theatricality to both forms of monument (and henges have for many years been seen to be places where rites or ritual performances took place), it is arguably the fact of removal from the mundane, and the purposeful creation of a locale that was both liminal and transcendent, and that represented the culmination of a history of ‘reservation’, that were the ultimate reasons for the creation of these elaborate edifices.
And so in our respect for the ‘lived Neolithic’ of the people who inhabited Britain five millennia ago and more, we need to take on board the further realization that was expressed especially in Chapter 6, that not only did people at that time live that history, they also seemingly developed their own historical consciousness of change and continuity down the ages. In other words, they had clear notions of the previous existence of their own communities and the social relations that had brought them into being and had sustained them. But how can we possibly ‘know’ that this was so? We would argue that this is the implication of the last example that we drew on in that chapter, from our own investigations at Dorstone Hill. One of the patterns that we have dwelt on in this book has been that of the recurrence of activity over long periods at certain locations, often transgressing the conventional ‘periods’ into which prehistory is divided. We have implied that one of the principal reasons for this is because such places embody a history, which was understood by Neolithic people to have been both a resource and, potentially, a burden. These sites may have been identified as being imbued with ancestral power, which might prove either beneficial or polluting. But we suggest that they may also have been associated with past events or personages, whether these were human or metaphysical, and real or mythic. In any case, they will have been woven into the historical understandings that people will have developed of their communities and their landscapes, and as such they will have required careful management. This management took a number of different forms, whether of adding new layers of events and materials to carry the story forward, or of containment and sealing to mitigate the influence of the place.
At Dorstone, we suggest that the reason why the hilltop retained its significance, and attracted archaeologically visible interventions over a period of many centuries, is because the initial series of events, the construction and conspicuous destruction of a series of timber halls, was one that carried a potent message of inception. While the radiocarbon evidence for the site must presently be seen as provisional, the suggestion that these events began in the thirty-ninth or thirty-eighth century bce gives a hint that this was one of the earliest Neolithic ‘places’ in what is now the modern border country between England and Wales. As we argued in Chapter 2, the large timber halls of the earliest Neolithic can be identified with the creation of new kinds of community, and the three long mounds on Dorstone Hill amounted to durable memorials to the coalescence of these Neolithic social groups, quite possibly under the direction of new and powerful leaders. The subsequent construction of a causewayed enclosure on the same hilltop, and the digging of pits and a cist into the long mounds, where stone objects and human and animal remains were deposited, demonstrates an imperative to keep connecting back to that moment of beginning. Yet it is the precise and intimate detail of what occurred—the flint knife knapped and placed close beside the location of the original mortuary structure, and the stone-lined pits dug precisely to the level of the burnt house deposit—that demonstrates that this was not a generalized engagement with a place of nebulous potency. Instead, there was a historical understanding of the significance of the hill and the structures that had accumulated there, and of their importance to the enduring identities of specific groups of people. And, with that reflection, we end our account.
