The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

Chapter Four
The Neolithic period,
c.4000–2500/2200 BC
Changing the world
Alasdair Whittle
SETTING THE SCENE
In the earlier fourth millennium BC, in woodland near the River Avon, people dug a large pit and
deposited in it food remains and artefacts: the bones from several cattle and roe deer, and at least
one pig and two red deer; a few beaver and trout bones; some carbonized cereal grains, probably
emmer wheat; flint tools and waste; and many broken sherds from about 40 pots (Richards
1990). This pit is at Coneybury, near Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. It evokes many
recurrent features of the earlier part of the Neolithic period: activity in areas probably not much
frequented in the Mesolithic; a woodland setting; absence of residential structures and therefore
probably a mobile lifestyle; occasional gatherings of people involving feasting and the use and
deposition of novel forms of artefact; and the continuing use of animals and other wild resources
alongside domesticated stock and cultivated cereals.
Broadly contemporary with the Coneybury pit, other new features of the earlier Neolithic
landscape in this and other regions appeared: shrines or tombs in elongated mounds, echoing the
form of the great timber longhouses of the first Neolithic generations on the Continent and
containing collections of assorted human bone; and ditched enclosures that defined special places
for gathering and ritual, to commemorate the dead, to feast, and to celebrate the domesticity and
sociality of the Neolithic world. By about 2500 BC, there were further changes in this area.
Several more circular and linear enclosures had been built, the largest, the henge of Durrington
Walls (Wiltshire), with a massive circular bank set outside its ditch, containing circular settings of
timber uprights around and among which people continued the tradition of depositing food
remains and artefacts (Wainwright 1989). By this time, according to radiocarbon determinations,
the earthwork enclosure of Stonehenge had also been elaborated with stone settings at its centre
in a permanent version of the contemporary timber settings of Durrington Walls and other sites
(Cleal et al. 1995). This displays many features that recur during the later part of the Neolithic:
signs of more people in the landscape, but still the absence of well-defined settlements; a
considerable tradition of gatherings and monument building, referring to the past and elaborating
the significance of chosen places; and a scale of monument building that raises the question of
how such enterprise may have been organized and achieved.
It has become commonplace to entitle chapters on this period ‘First farmers’ or ‘Settling
down’, as though a new subsistence economy based on domesticated animals and cereals, and a