Narratives for the fourth millennium

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.