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

• 70 • Alasdair Whittle
inter- or intra-group rivalry. One trend suggested for Orkney is from dispersed small monuments,
with modest accumulations of human remains, which served scattered communities, to the
grander monuments, more centrally placed, in which the idea of a larger community was
expressed by very considerable deposits of bone, some perhaps even robbed from earlier
structures (Sharples 1985).
By the Late Neolithic, few if any such constructions were being built, though many were still
actively regarded. In terms of mortuary rites, the emphasis began to pass from generalized
ancestries to remembered or invented genealogies, intimated by the occurrence of more individual
graves with grave goods. How should this be interpreted? It is often seen as witness to greater
social differentiation or glossed as ‘the rise of the individual’, but this should not be seen as a
simple process. Individual funerals occurred throughout the Neolithic, and veneration of ancestral
pasts continued into the Late Neolithic, in respect for existing monuments and in the enclosure
tradition. Genealogical reckoning within the frame of the ancestral order suggests as much a
more interdependent, as a more individualized or atomized society.
Enclosures: bounding the world
When the first enclosures came to be built, their impact, both physical and conceptual, must have
been considerable. The outer circuit of the causewayed enclosure on Windmill Hill, for example,
had a diameter of some 350 m (Figure 4.5). It belonged to the later Earlier Neolithic or the
Middle Neolithic. The evidence indicates that this enclosure was set in open woodland or scrub;
it constituted a ‘monumental intervention in nature’ (Hodder 1990, 260). Moreover, encircling a
place with ditches and embankments was a new idea, since earlier monuments here took the
form of barrows and related structures. Its source may have lain in earlier ditched enclosures of
the continental LBK, and the new practice may have stood for older concepts of community and
ancestral order.
As with other monuments, there are variations and unities in the use of causewayed enclosures
(Edmonds 1993), which seem to be a mainly southern phenomenon. They consist of circuits of
interrupted ditch, with internal banks, generally low and informal; some ditches are backed by
palisades, as at Orsett, Essex, or Haddenham, Cambridgeshire. Windmill Hill had three circuits,
Figure 4.5 Excavation of bone deposits in the middle ditch of the causewayed
enclosure at Windmill Hill (Alasdair Whittle).
possibly contemporaneous,
possibly successive. Others range
from one to four, and there are
regional variations in spacing of
circuits and enclosed areas. Some
sites have seemingly incomplete
circuits and others ones that link
natural features such as streams and
the sides of promontories. On the
chalklands, many are set on hilltops
or scarps, but there are numerous
examples in southern and Midland
river valleys, and near the fen-edge
of East Anglia. Stone-walled
enclosures in the south-west, such
as Carn Brea, Cornwall, may be an
equivalent form.
These sites do not seem on the
whole to have been settlements,