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

• 66 • Alasdair Whittle
other settlement. The scale of working seems disproportionate to the needs of everyday existence,
though recent excavation at the Group VI workfaces shows that extraction could be small-scale
and episodic (Edmonds 1995). This offers a graphic illustration of the non-mundane values that
guided many activities.
Shrines, tombs and graves: monuments to the ancestors and the dead
The past was a vital component of Neolithic world views. Neolithic people may have regarded it
in two ways: as evidence, on the one hand, of a timeless natural and social order and, on the
other, of the emergence of a new world involving remembered or imagined beginnings, reverence
for ancestors, and domestication.
The treatment of the human dead was bound up closely with such views. The record is strewn
with occurrences of human remains, often incomplete. These are recovered from occupations as
well as in various monument contexts, outlined below. Some formal graves, often for individuals
but occasionally for more, are known, as well as the distinctive, regional series of monuments in
the form of long or round barrows and cairns, both chambered and unchambered. These
constructions often contained the remains of the dead, frequently as collections of incomplete
skeletons, variously selected and arranged; but they had other points of reference and therefore
other meanings as well.
Formal single burials are relatively rare in the Early Neolithic. Under (and thus predating)
the outer bank of the Windmill Hill causewayed enclosure, an adult man was buried in flexed
position in an oval pit. He had no grave goods, and the grave pit may have been open for some
Figure 4.2 The primary burials in the Radley oval barrow, Oxfordshire (Richard Bradley).