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The Birth of
Neolithic Britain
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An Interpretive Account
JULIAN THOMAS
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School of Arts, Languages and Cultures
University of Manchester
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Introduction: The Problem
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The beginning of the Neolithic is a topic of perennial interest in British archaeology. At some time towards the end of the fifth millennium bc, domesticated
animals, cultivated crops, pottery vessels, flint mines with deep shafts, certain
types of polished stone tools and particular kinds of field monuments can be
recognized for the first time on the British mainland. The implication must be that
a radically new set of social practices had become established by this time. These
material innovations had already been present in the northern and western
margins of continental Europe for some time, and it follows that this period saw
their transfer onto the offshore archipelago, rather than the independent generation of an entirely new way of life. Novel resources and cultural forms need not
all have arrived at precisely the same time, but it seems probable that most of them
were first introduced within a relatively short interval. Exactly how this took place
has been a matter of continuing debate for some decades. In recent years much of
the discussion has revolved around the relative importance of Neolithic colonists
and indigenous Mesolithic people, and the extent to which the adoption of
agriculture represented a fundamental base to which all other developments
were subsidiary, or merely one change amongst others. Each year, an already
huge literature is swelled by publications on aspects of the Mesolithic-Neolithic
transition ranging from cultivation and herding (Rowley-Conwy 2004a) to
ceramics (Cleal 2004; Sheridan 2010a), from diet (Richards and Hedges 1999) to
chronology (Whittle 2007a; Collard et al. 2010), and from seafaring (Garrow and
Sturt 2011) to climate change (Tipping 2010). This book represents at attempt to
draw this material together, and to provide a coherent narrative for the transformation that overtook the island, while at the same time offering a view of what
kind of phenomenon the Neolithic was by the time that it arrived in Britain.
Seeking to offer a synthetic account of British ‘Neolithization’ is a daunting
task, and not merely because the very rich debate on the subject is still supported
by a rather uneven evidence base (Whittle 1990a: 209). A more profound difficulty
is that on close inspection the discussion resolves itself into a series of different
arguments, which operate at different levels of spatial and temporal resolution. So
questions of the spread of farming at the continental scale (Bellwood 2005), or of
population-level genetic changes (M. B. Richards 2003) are not always easy to
marry with localized investigations of cultural sequences and settlement patterns
(for example, Whittle 1990b; Sturt 2010). The reason for this is that ‘Neolithic’ is a
deeply protean term, which can refer to a particular subsistence economy, a level
of technological development, a chronological interval, a specific set of cultural
entities, to racial or ethnic identities, or to a specific type of society. As a
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consequence, a series of different kinds of archaeology (as well as other disciplines) converge in their interest in the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition, but are
often conversing at crossed purposes. One upshot of this is that at a particular
point in prehistory, a series of different kinds of transformation are simultaneously understood to have been taking place: changes in economic practice, in
social organization, in material elaboration, in landscape use, and in population
structure. Each of these can be presented as fundamentally important stages in
human development. The Neolithic is variously described as the time when
human beings ceased to live in nature and instead gained control over nature;
the time when food gathering gave way to food production; the time when
wandering bands were replaced by stable village communities; and the time
when people began to inhabit a material world that they had crafted for themselves. Without wishing to erase the significance of the onset of the Neolithic, it
may be that these various narratives impose an inflated set of expectations on the
evidence, and make it more difficult for subtler accounts of the period to emerge.
Part of the objective of this volume is to tease apart the different aspects of the
Neolithic transition, while at the same time attempting to integrate very different
forms of evidence. To that end, the first three chapters of the book are concerned
with the continental sequence, and the character of change in a number of
different European regions. This is an essential preparation for an investigation
of the British material, both as a way of addressing the historical and cultural
circumstances under which Neolithic innovations arrived, and as a means of
identifying the kind of Neolithic that had developed by the later fourth millennium bc. Working at the continental level, it would be easy to portray the
Neolithic as a unified and homogeneous phenomenon. However, the objective
of these chapters is to reveal the distinctiveness of the developments that took
place in different parts of Europe. Indeed, if there is any commonality to Neolithic
societies across the continent, we will tend to find it in the social relationships that
constrained and facilitated everyday activity, rather than a uniform set of economic practices or residential patterns. The unique character of the Neolithic
transitions that took place in different regions can partly be attributed to local
social and ecological conditions, but it is equally important to recognize that
rather than having a fixed set of attributes the Neolithic was repeatedly transformed as it progressed through time and space. The Neolithic was a historical
phenomenon, in other words, and underwent a series of non-reversible, directional changes. It was as much a process as an entity, and the Neolithic of Britain
was quite different from that of the Balkans or Central Europe. Placing the British
Neolithic into its context involves both appreciating the diversity of regional
transitions and identifying a series of overarching developments that took place
at a pan-regional scale. Some readers will undoubtedly find the focus of the
European chapters on social and economic processes rather than patterns of
cultural similarity and difference unsatisfactory. However, it is the intention of
the work to be interpretive or explanatory, rather than merely descriptive.
As well as forming a common focus of interest for economic, evolutionary,
ecological, culture-historic, symbolic, and social forms of archaeology, the question of how and why the Neolithic began in Britain has been a sensitive barometer
of archaeological opinion over the past century or so. Different kinds of interpretations have been favoured by different generations of archaeologists, and it is
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Introduction
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unsurprising for instance that the culture-historians of the 1920s to the 1960s
principally focused on folk movement as a mechanism of change (e.g. Childe
1940: 34; Piggott 1954: 16), while their processual successors emphasized instead
the relationships between population, resources and technology (e.g. Renfrew
1973a: 138). In order to grasp why particular conceptions of Neolithization have
come to prevail in the present it is important to understand how the arguments
have developed over this period, and to that end a lengthy chapter will be given
over to historiography. Similarly, it will be argued that, whether we choose to
see Neolithic innovations as having been introduced by a migrating population or
adopted by indigenous people, it is essential the understand the Mesolithic
background against which these developments took place. However, no apology
is offered for taking the view that indigenous communities were actively involved
in transforming their own conditions of existence. It is hoped that this book will
gain coherence by being structured as an argument, which maintains that the
fundamental process at work at the start of the British Neolithic was the transformation of Mesolithic societies. However, it is absolutely not suggested that this
process was spontaneously, internally generated, and it is all but impossible to
imagine that such a change could have taken place if groups who had access to
domesticates and Neolithic material culture had not been present on the Atlantic
coasts of Europe. In this sense at least, the British Neolithic should be understood
as a co-creation of indigenous Mesolithic and continental Neolithic communities.
This co-creation emerged from a kind of dialogue conducted across the open seas,
and in Chapter Eight the significance of interaction between societies of different
kinds is assessed. The key argument that is made is that rather than seeing the seas
that surround Britain as a barrier to movement and contact, they should be
understood as a transformative space, which altered the identities of people,
artefacts, and animals. Travelling across the English Channel or the North Sea
in prehistoric times would not have been without peril, but it would have been
precisely this that gave prestige to seafarers and value to goods that had crossed
the ocean.
As much as any of the material discussed in Chapter Five, this volume is a
product of the time at which it was written, and an important aspect of this is that
it belongs to what may come to be referred to as the immediately ‘post-Gathering
Time era’ of Neolithic studies. That is, it was completed in the wake of Whittle,
Healy and Bayliss’ (2011) fundamentally important revision of the chronology of
the earlier Neolithic in Britain, which was based upon the Bayesian modelling
of radiocarbon dates. This new temporal framework is broadly adopted here,
even if not all those authors’ conclusions are accepted. The Gathering Time
chronology clearly demonstrates that we can now identify a ‘primary Neolithic’,
dating roughly to the period between the forty-first and the thirty-seventh centuries bc. This is essentially the period with which this book concerns itself. But
equally importantly, it is evident that this period of four centuries or so was not
internally homogeneous, characterized by a series of attributes which all changed
abruptly at the start of the mature Early Neolithic. On the contrary, at the start of
the period Neolithic artefacts and practices were only present in the extreme
south-east of Britain, and they moved northwards and westwards at an uneven
rate, while large timber buildings were not continuously being built in all regions
throughout the period.
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Timber halls and houses are one of the specific elements of the Neolithic
material assemblage that are addressed at some length in the latter part of the
volume. It is by linking house building with the anthropological notion of ‘house
societies’ that one of the most important aspects of the British Neolithic begins to
be revealed. Our discussion of hunting and gathering societies demonstrates that
their resistance to agriculture is often vested in social mechanisms that preclude
the accumulation of goods and the development of social inequality. The building
of the house brings into being a bounded community who have shared rights to a
body of property. Corporate social groups of this kind can resist the demands of
others for a share of their wealth or produce, and are inherently competitive. But
equally important is the role of material things in this kind of social formation.
The purpose of the house (or even, as we shall see, the memory of the house) is to
provide a constant, durable entity to which successive generations of a community
attach themselves. That is, architecture represents a source of continuity for social
groups.
In successive chapters, it is demonstrated that other aspects of the Neolithic way
of life also had the effect of ‘defining and strengthening the social bond’, as Strum
and Latour (1987: 795) have it. Where Mesolithic people had a limited range of
artefacts and rich but discontinuous interactions with animals, Neolithic people
used material things to mediate social relations to a greater extent (particularly in
exchange transactions), and incorporated animals into their societies. The conclusion of the book is that the Neolithic is best understood as a social (rather than
primarily ideological or economic) transformation, but that social relations and
economic practices cannot be disentangled from one another. It is certainly not
argued that some form of ideological change paved the way for a separate
economic change, as Rowley-Conwy (2004a: 97) has inferred. The Neolithic
involved a change in the social relationships between humans and non-humans,
where the latter includes artefacts, architecture, plants, and animals. Where
Mesolithic societies were primarily sustained by the continual ebb and flow of
relationships between persons and other persons, Neolithic sociality was ‘splinted’
and canalized by relationships between people, animals and things that had been
rendered more durable. Neolithic social relationships were no more complex than
those of the Mesolithic, but more kinds of entities were now integral to society.