Neolithic Britain最新文献

{"title":"Narratives for the third millennium","authors":"Keith W. Ray, Julian Thomas","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198823896.003.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198823896.003.0013","url":null,"abstract":"By the later part of the third millennium BCE, Britain had become connected to mainland Europe by the so-called ‘Beaker network’. This appears to have involved the circulation of people, materials, and cultural innovations over trans-continental distances. Most tellingly, it included direct evidence for cross-Channel contact and the movement of individual people into Britain who had lived much or most of their lives in continental Europe. However, the evidence for such contact during the previous few centuries is very much sparser. If, as it seems reasonable to infer, developed passage tombs were ultimately an Atlantic European phenomenon that was adopted in idiosyncratic ways in Ireland, Scotland, and finally Scandinavia during the course of the fourth millennium, routine interactions with the Continent are less easy to identify thereafter. In marked contrast with this, the period after 3000 BCE saw the emergence of a range of new interregional connections within Britain and Ireland. These have been less consistently recognized, as they conflict with the traditional narrative in which populations in central and south-west Asia engaged in periodic wholesale migration northward and westward. Such a narrative of external stimulus to change is less secure in this period because we now realize that the social and cultural changes that overtook Britain in the earlier third millennium originated predominantly in the northern and western parts of these islands. Some of the most significant innovations of the third millennium throughout Britain were ultimately generated in the Orkney archipelago and its immediate sphere of contact. While aspects of the unique developments that took place in the Orkneys can be attributed to connections with Ireland and the Western Isles, these contributed to the emergence of a distinctive social formation that was at once highly competitive and spectacularly creative. By the start of the third millennium, Orkney had become a crucible of social and cultural change, but developments in the islands arguably began to diverge from those on the mainland soon after the Neolithic began, perhaps during the thirty-seventh century BCE.","PeriodicalId":213696,"journal":{"name":"Neolithic Britain","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125837870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Narratives for the fourth millennium","authors":"K. Ray, Julian Thomas","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198823896.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198823896.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"The story of the Neolithic period in Britain as we so far understand it has been compiled from myriad individual archaeological encounters with the traces of human activity from the centuries concerned in different places within the landscape. These traces include the remains of partly earth-fast timber structures which often consist of recognizable features representing where the timbers had been pulled out of the ground, or had rotted in situ, or had been burned; areas of burning of ground-surfaces where hearth-fires had been laid; spreads of decayed materials that were formerly rubbish dumps or ‘middens’; large holes (usually referred to as ‘pits’) dug and backfilled with various deposits including whole or broken artefacts thrown or placed within them; and ditches that had been infilled or had silted up, and sometimes re-dug and redefined. The different episodes of construction and deposition that led to the formation of these traces are differentiated by those investigating them through the identification of thousands of isolable ‘events’. Some of these events were almost momentary (the digging of a pit, the removal of a post), while others (such as the gradual silting of a ditch) took place over an extended period. Archaeologists describe the isolable actions, events, and deposits resulting from such occupation of the land as ‘contexts’. Some materials retrieved from some of these contexts have been carefully selected by the archaeologists during their investigations to be datable using a variety of scientific dating techniques, and they provide individual site chronologies linked closely to the stratigraphic sequences involved. Repeated observed associations of different kinds of artefact with reliably dated contexts and site sequences allow comparative chronologies to be painstakingly constructed, and it is from this process that the possibility of a chronologically sound historical narrative for the Neolithic is gradually being built up. In these chapters entitled ‘narratives’, however, we are not only talking about the sketching out of a historical sequence, extremely important though it is. We are speaking also, if to a limited extent, about the teasing out of multiplicities of story from the material evidence.","PeriodicalId":213696,"journal":{"name":"Neolithic Britain","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130811914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: Neolithic Britain—encounters and reflections","authors":"K. Ray, Julian Thomas","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198823896.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198823896.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Is it possible to experience the Neolithic period (c.4000—c.2400 BCE) in Britain today? Of course not, or not in any literal sense. And yet, there are devices that we can create, and places that we can visit, that can to some extent stand in for that experience. These enable us, however fleetingly, to bridge the gulf of time that separates us from the distant world of thousands of years ago. One new way of traversing this chasm became available to us in 2013, when English Heritage opened a new visitor centre at Stonehenge. Inside the airy modern structure the latest audio-visual technology introduces visitors to the site and its surrounding prehistoric landscape. Remarkably, before the year was out, that centre had hosted a visit by the then President of the United States of America. Barack Obama made an unscheduled stop at the World Heritage Site en route from a NATO summit in Wales on 5 September 2014. Apparently, visiting Stonehenge, widely regarded as the most extraordinary of all prehistoric sites in Europe, was on the personal ‘bucket list’ of that recent incumbent of the White House. Among the things that the US President would have seen at the Stonehenge centre were reconstructed Late Neolithic houses from the area, and the visitor can now enter and walk around in these buildings, made using authentic materials. These newly constructed timber and daub buildings had been created on the basis of evidence recovered from Durrington Walls, a colossal Late Neolithic complex 2 miles from Stonehenge, where settings of concentric rings of massive posts were contained within an embanked enclosure half a kilometre across. Surprisingly, if the visitor centre had been built when it had originally been planned a decade earlier, it would not have been possible to recreate these 4,500-year-old houses, with their square ground plans and central hearths. This is because the excavations that would reveal these striking vestiges of the Stonehenge people were then only just beginning. This is an indication of the pace of discovery in the study of Neolithic Britain, and the immediacy of this process is one of the things that we would like to convey in this book.","PeriodicalId":213696,"journal":{"name":"Neolithic Britain","volume":"180 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134098970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Writing Neolithic Britain: an interpretive journey","authors":"Keith W. Ray, Julian Thomas","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198823896.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198823896.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"It is just over sixty years since Stuart Piggott published his major work, Neolithic Cultures of the British Isles. This was the first comprehensive account of what was then known and assumed about the ‘New Stone Age’ in these islands, and it surveyed discoveries and summarized debates that had occurred over the previous century. This process of gradual accumulation of data and ideas has continued apace since Piggott was writing, not least owing to the precision with which we can now date much of the activity that characterizes the Neolithic. When Piggott was writing his book in the early 1950s an American, Willard Libby, was experimenting with the technique of radiocarbon dating as a by-product of the development of nuclear technology. This dating method uses the rate of decay of radioactive isotopes to measure the time that has elapsed since a sample of organic matter last exchanged carbon with its environment—in short, the time since an organism died. Application of the method has cumulatively transformed our understanding of prehistoric chronology. To illustrate the impact upon the study of Neolithic Britain, we have only to appreciate that in Neolithic Cultures Piggott imagined a British Neolithic period that lasted for around five hundred years, beginning in about 2000BCE. This estimated span was based on a series of assumptions about the rate of cultural change, and the affinities between artefacts in Britain, continental Europe, and further afield. However, over the past half-century this inherited chronology has been swept away as radiometric dating has gradually been refined, and huge numbers of dated samples have accumulated. These now suggest that the Neolithic period began in Britain shortly before 4000 BCE, and ‘ended’ with the advent of a variety of objects made of metal instead of stone, from around 2400 BCE. The implications of this transformed appreciation of the duration of the Neolithic are profound, for while Piggott and his contemporaries were dealing with periods of historical time that were comparable with those with which we are familiar from recorded history (the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the emergence and spread of Islam, the development of capitalism), we now have evidence for human activity in the Neolithic of Britain that is dispersed across an expanse of time as much as three times longer than these major historical episodes.","PeriodicalId":213696,"journal":{"name":"Neolithic Britain","volume":"2005 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116051515","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"4000 BCE: a cultural threshold","authors":"K. Ray, Julian Thomas","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198823896.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198823896.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"The archaeological evidence that has accumulated over the past five decades demonstrates that two very different situations existed successively in Britain in the centuries on either side of 4000 BCE. While this is in some ways an arbitrary date, it is nonetheless a convenient one, since there are very few indications that ‘Neolithic’ artefacts and structures existed in Britain for long before the turn of the fourth millennium. Up until 4000 BCE (or perhaps a century or two earlier), the mainland and islands were populated by people who were heavily dependent upon hunting and gathering; afterwards the population lived a way of life that to a greater or lesser extent relied on herding and cultivating. Further, whereas the technology of the hunting societies had been skilfully made but was highly portable, more durable artefacts and architecture now proliferated, creating a much denser world of crafted things. However, the available evidence can be cast in a number of different ways, with the material before and after the critical date being capable of sustaining either maximal or minimal interpretations. As a consequence, the ways in which the character and degree of change across the threshold can be understood are also multiple and varied. As we saw in Chapter 1, the archaeologists of the 1920s to 1960s emphasized the contrast between the Mesolithic and the Neolithic. Before the ‘transition’ between the two, Britain was home to a sparse population of hunter-foragers who followed game (including deer, wild pig, and wild cattle) and collected plants, nuts, and berries, and, for those near the sea, exploited marine resources. They had few, often simple artefacts, although it was acknowledged that significant skill was invested in some of them. They lived in informal campsites composed of rudimentary shelters while pursuing a transient way of life. Afterwards, in contrast, there were settled agriculturalists living in stable communities, in well-built houses, enjoying a mixed farming subsistence base. They were capable of building barrows and tombs for their dead, which may have demonstrated their incorporation into a widespread megalithic cult. The dichotomy between these two ways of life demanded that some fundamental change must have separated them, of whatever kind.","PeriodicalId":213696,"journal":{"name":"Neolithic Britain","volume":"91 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116101029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Kinship, history, and descent","authors":"Keith W. Ray, Julian Thomas","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198823896.003.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198823896.003.0014","url":null,"abstract":"For traditional societies, by which we mean those peoples whose worlds are permeated by kin relations and obligations, and among whom past societies such as those of Neolithic Britain are mostly to be counted, the most precious inheritance is knowledge. Inherited knowledge is of many kinds, the most overt of which is instrumental knowledge—how to make a rope from fibre, where to look for and how to utilize medicinal plants, and so on. Alongside this, however, is a plurality of less obvious but equally fundamental knowledges that include kinds of behavioural knowledge (in the sense of customs and prohibitions, for example), forms of discursive awareness (how to negotiate the social world; what to recall and recount as story and history), and understandings of esoteric beliefs and their concomitant ‘necessary’ actions. Collective cultural and customary knowledge, then, is a resource that makes possible the sustaining and renewal of human social relationships through time. There is a modern tendency to see history as a progression of tableaux, or a montage of scenes, a cavalcade; or, as we noted in Chapter 1, an ascent through measurable social evolutionary stages from relative cultural simplicity towards a present of multilayered complexity. In the modern world, history is expressed in the form of narratives that have been standardized and systematically ordered, and published in a diversity of media, as well as being contested by alternative perspectives in print and online. This contrasts with the way that knowledge and tradition are conveyed in societies that lack written literature, which generally takes the form of oral transmission. However, they are also expressed and fixed (however fleetingly) and transformed through the use of material items and material culture, including the built environment. For such societies, history may take the form of a shared memory of significant events, but these are always experienced and mediated through the filters of social relationships of dominance and subordination, and of kinship. This latter is composed of the shifting elements of genealogy, lineage, and descent, although any or all of these may be fictional in character, and open to a degree of manipulation.","PeriodicalId":213696,"journal":{"name":"Neolithic Britain","volume":"113 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124339684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Social being and cultural practices","authors":"Keith W. Ray, Julian Thomas","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198823896.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198823896.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Human societies are held together by relationships, conventions, traditions, institutions, and tacit understandings. These things are intangible, and while humans themselves are reproduced as corporeal beings, their societies are sustained by practical activities that continually recreate knowledge, customs, and interpersonal bonds. Just as a language would ultimately disappear if it ceased to be used as a means of communication, so the rules and routines of social life are maintained only if they are practised. The corollary of this is that societies are not fixed and bounded entities as much as arrangements that are continually coming into existence, works (if you like) that are never completed. But material things are also in flux, constantly ripening, maturing, being made, being used consecutively in different ways through their ‘lifespans’, eroding and decaying: so that the social and substantial worlds are as one in being in an unending state of becoming. Nonetheless, objects often have the capacity to endure longer than habits, rules, or affiliations. They continue to exist independently of human beings and their actions. As a result, old artefacts and places occupied in the past can serve to give structure to current practices and transactions, providing cues and prompts, or reminding us of past events and appropriate modes of conduct. Hunter-gatherers have generally lived a way of life that involves making continual reference to natural features and landmarks. Certain distinctive cliffs, hills, islands, trees, and lakes have represented places to return to, or at which to arrange meetings or encounter game. As such they will have been places of periodic resort, and were incorporated into collective history and mythology. Meanwhile, other places acquired a meaning simply because specific people camped there, or met there, or died there. During the Mesolithic in Britain, some locations seem to have been persistently returned to over very long periods of time. One example is the site at North Park Farm, Bletchingley in Surrey, which appears to have been visited sporadically over hundreds of years, although the structural evidence for this at the site was sparse, being limited to a group of fireplaces.","PeriodicalId":213696,"journal":{"name":"Neolithic Britain","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125427905","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Conclusion: A lived Neolithic","authors":"K. Ray, Julian Thomas","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198823896.003.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198823896.003.0015","url":null,"abstract":"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 (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.","PeriodicalId":213696,"journal":{"name":"Neolithic Britain","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134116499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}