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

• 74 • Alasdair Whittle
and elsewhere, fixing the ancestral order for all time, making the past timeless, putting the present
beyond dispute, and uniting people with nature. In north Wiltshire, the even more monumental
construction of Silbury Hill mound was erected, perhaps as a symbol of the earth itself, and as an
expression of ideas to do with origins, regeneration and ancestral cycles. Such ideas may have
driven this society as much as social or political imperatives, though it may be hard to separate the
two dimensions.
Silbury Hill also joined a long-established complex of monuments. There were older barrows
and causewayed enclosures in the locality, and simple stone circles and at least one stone row.
That row connected Avebury to a smaller setting of timber and stone, the so-called Sanctuary,
and between the Sanctuary and Silbury Hill there were two large palisade enclosures, sub-circular
and oval. Both stone circles and palisade enclosures belong to the tradition of bounding space,
and both seem, like henges, to enhance and formalize that tradition in the Late Neolithic.
CONTINUITY, CHANGE AND FUTURE RESEARCH
A sense of working with nature and of belonging to a timeless world may have continued from
the Mesolithic way of life, as well as traits already mentioned, but there were new ways of doing
some things, and not simply tending newly introduced cultivated plants and domesticated animals.
Above all, novel ways of thinking about the world, in terms of beginnings, marked time, and the
new relations with nature demanded by domestication, mark this period. To what extent were
there subsequent changes? The possibility of contesting ritual knowledge and practice has been
noted, but on the whole the Earlier Neolithic seems characterized more by various forms of
integration and co-operation than by difference or competition. There may have been tensions
between social ideals and conceptual schemes: of a timeless past contrasting with marked time,
or working with nature clashing with a world in which people had increased control over animals
and plants. Some of the practices writ large in the archaeological record may be related to the
playing out of such ambiguities. For example, the near-obsession with cattle bone in causewayed
enclosure ditches may reflect attempts to come to terms with the changed status of animals. The
fact that animal bone was stored, selected, sorted and redeposited—like the human remains in
shrines and tombs—could intimate a concern to treat animals and humans similarly.
What further changes occurred? Late Neolithic society has often been proposed as more
differentiated than earlier phases; the language has been of chiefdoms, ‘ritual authority structures’
and the like (e.g. Renfrew 1973; Barrett 1994). The evidence for either economic intensification
or major population growth is weak, however, and social reconstruction rests to a large degree on
interpretation of monuments and mortuary rites. The beliefs and ideals that created the Neolithic
in the first place were probably maintained well into the second millennium BC. Genealogical
reckoning was a development of existing ideas about the ancestral past, and its practice may
gradually have encouraged an individualism that allowed an ethic of ownership and accumulation.
However, landscape changes from the Later Bronze Age onwards have a strongly corporate or
communal character, and even then the tradition of shared values must have remained powerful.
THE EUROPEAN SETTING
Neolithic Britain did not exist in a vacuum. While there was probably direct continuity of
population, and the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in Britain was not quite like that in any
continental region, the character of the Earlier Neolithic owed much to continental precedents.
The LBK culture brought cereals and domesticated animals to central-west Europe, and, just as