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

The Neolithic period
• 75 •
importantly, the use of timber longhouses and novel artefacts. The long, slow interaction between
the LBK and the south Scandinavian/north European plain Mesolithic led to a convergence of
lifestyles. The LBK also impacted on, and was influenced by, indigenous communities in northwest
France and elsewhere. From these traditions much was adopted in Britain: ideas, memories, forms
of monumental architecture, new styles and kinds of artefact, and new subsistence staples.
The relationship appears not to have involved direct descent from any single area. The general
character of Earlier Neolithic Britain has much in common with its contemporaries in western
Europe: mobility and dispersal, broad-based subsistence practices, barrows, interrupted ditch
enclosures, axes and round-based pottery styles. The repertoires vary from region to region. It
seems that there were actively maintained and widely shared value and belief systems that helped
to bring the Neolithic into existence and then to consolidate it. Particular horizons of contact,
visible for example in the spread of passage grave monuments, may intimate this. In the Late
Neolithic, while there was interaction with Ireland, much of the insular record is not matched on
the Continent, including henges and Grooved Ware. The trajectories of change there were by
now varied and complex (Whittle 1996), but the innovations of the Corded Ware horizon, from
c.2800/2700 BC onwards, occurred east of the Rhine, and northern France at least shared with
Britain an archaic attachment to older monument forms. When contact with the Continent did
come in the Beaker horizon (Chapter 5), this was a renewal rather than a total innovation.
Key texts
Barrett, J., 1994. Fragments from antiquity: an archaeology of social life in Britain, 2900–1200 BC. Oxford: Blackwell.
Bradley, R., 1993. Altering the earth: the origins of monuments in Britain and continental Europe. Edinburgh: Society
of Antiquaries of Scotland Monograph Series, 8.
Hodder, I., 1990. The domestication of Europe. Oxford: Blackwell.
Thomas, J., 1991. Rethinking the Neolithic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tilley, C., 1994. A phenomenology of landscape: places, paths and monuments. Oxford: Berg.
Whittle, A., 1996. Europe in the Neolithic: the creation of new worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bibliography
Ashbee, P., Smith, I.F. and Evans, J.G., 1979. ‘Excavation of three long barrows near Avebury, Wiltshire’,
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 45, 207–300.
Barclay, G.J., 1997. ‘The Neolithic’, in Edwards, K.J. and Ralston, I.B.M. (eds) Scotland: environment and
archaeology, 8000 BC-AD 1000. Chichester: John Wiley, 127–149.
Barrett, J., Bradley, R. and Green, M., 1991. Landscape, monuments and society: the prehistory of Cranborne Chase.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bradley, R., 1992. ‘The excavation of an oval barrow beside the Abingdon causewayed enclosure, Oxfordshire’,
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 58, 127–142.
Cleal, R.M.J., Walker, K.E. and Montague, R. 1995. Stonehenge in its landscape: twentieth-century excavations.
London: English Heritage.
Coles, J. and Coles, B., 1986. Sweet Track to Glastonbury. London: Thames and Hudson.
Darvill, T. and Thomas, J. (eds) 1996. Neolithic houses in northwest Europe and beyond. Oxford: Oxbow Monograph
57.
Edmonds, M., 1993. ‘Interpreting causewayed enclosures in the past and present’, in Tilley, C. (ed.) Interpretative
archaeology. Oxford: Berg, 99–142.
Edmonds, M., 1995. Stone tools and society. London: Batsford.
Entwhistle, R. and Grant, A., 1989. ‘The evidence for cereal cultivation and animal husbandry in the southern
British Neolithic and Early Bronze Age’, in Milles, A., Williams, D. and Gardner, N. (eds) The beginnings
of agriculture. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports S496, 203–215.
Hodder, I., 1982. Symbols in action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kinnes, I., 1979. Round barrows and ring ditches in the British Neolithic. London: British Museum Occasional
Paper.