Building for the Dead: Events, Processes and Changing Worldviews from the Thirty-eighth to the Thirty-fourth Centuries cal. BC in Southern Britain (original) (raw)
Related papers
Chapter 3: The Monument Builders: The Neolithic and Bronze Ages (4500 BC-1000 BC)
The Archaeology of Northamptonshire (ed Martin Tingle), 2004
In the thirty-five years since the excavation of the Earls Barton round barrow, archaeology has transformed our understanding of Neolithic and Bronze Age Northamptonshire. From a sparsely visited backwater, it has become a landscape alive with people who not only survived but prospered sufficiently to be able to devote much of their energy towards building and maintaining enclosures as meeting places and in marking the burial places of their dead with large earthwork monuments. Through this time we see long periods of stability broken by episodes of sudden change in their way of life, and in the monuments they constructed and the tools that they used. From the semi-nomadic communities of the early Neolithic moving across a landscape without visible boundaries, they became communities marking out territories and respecting the power and wealth of certain successful individuals, who no doubt acted as tribal chieftains. The stage was therefore set for the next period of major change, the appearance of established farming communities using a new metal, iron
Around the beginning of the 3rd millennium cal BC a cremation cemetery was established at Forteviot, central Scotland. This place went on to become one of the largest monument complexes identified in Mainland Scotland, with the construction of a palisaded enclosure, timber structures, and a series of henge monuments and other enclosures. The cemetery was established between 3080 and 2900 cal BC, probably in the 30th century cal BC, which is contemporary with the cremation cemetery at Stonehenge. Nine discrete deposits of cremated bone, representing the remains of at least 18 people, were identified. In most instances they were placed within cut features and, in one case, a series of cremation deposits was associated with a broken standing stone. This paper includes the first detailed assessment of the cremated remains at Forteviot and the features associated with the cemetery, and explores how the establishment of this cemetery may have been both a catalyst and inspiration for the elaborate monument building and prolonged acts of remembrance that occurred at this location over a period of almost 1000 years. The paper also outlines the parallels for Forteviot across Britain and, for the first time, draws together the dating evidence (including Bayesian modelling) for this major category of evidence for considering the nature of late 4th/ early 3rd millennium cal BC society. The results and discussion have wide implications and resonances for contemplating the establishment and evolution of monument complexes in prehistoric Britain and beyond.
Bridlington Boulevard Revisited: New Insights into Pit and Post-hole Cremations in Neolithic Britain
Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2024
The majority of excavated human remains from Neolithic Britain emanate from monumental sites. However, it is increasingly recognized that multiple funerary practices are often attested within these monuments, and that diverse treatment of the dead is evident contemporaneously at non-monumental sites. In this paper, we highlight such variation in non-monumental funerary practices in Neolithic Britain (c. 4000–2500 BC) through the biographical study of an assemblage from a large post-hole at Bridlington Boulevard, Yorkshire. Through osteological and taphonomic analysis of the human bones and technological and microwear analysis of the accompanying axehead, we infer complex funerary processes, with the expediently manufactured axehead potentially featuring in the funerary rites and subsequent post-raising before being deposited in the feature. Bridlington Boulevard represents one element of a varied funerary complex—cremations in pits and post-holes—at a time when most individuals were not deposited in monuments, or indeed were not deposited at all. Compiling these non-monumental cremations across Britain causes us to look beyond categorizing these assemblages as funerary contexts, and instead suggests important cosmological associations and forces were brought together in pit and post-and-human cremation deposits.
This chapter reflects on one of the key discoveries of the authors’ research excavations conducted at Forteviot in lower Strathearn, central Scotland, between 2007 and 2010. Investigations here have revealed an extensive complex of late Neolithic monumentality and burial including a giant late Neolithic palisaded enclosure and a range of associated henges, timber structures and burials dating to the period 3000-2000 cal. BC. The catalysis for the creation of this extensive monument complex on a landscape scale may have been the establishment of a cremation cemetery at Forteviot where a minimum of 18 individuals were placed in the ground accompanied by bone pins and a handful of other grave goods in the early centuries of the 3rd millennium cal. BC. In the centuries following the establishment of the cremation cemetery at Forteviot, the aforementioned timber and earthwork enclosures were constructed, some encircling the cemetery; episodes of monument creation and burial continued into the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age. At Forteviot we can perhaps identify these activities as ways in which subsequent generations attempted to control access to an important ancestral shrine and burial ground.
Change and Diversity in Neolithic Mortuary Practices on the Isle of Man
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society
While the Early Neolithic chambered tombs of the Isle of Man are well known and the Late Neolithic has been clearly defined with reference to a distinctive suite of artefacts, little is known about the Middle Neolithic. This article reports on 17 new Neolithic radiocarbon dates from cremated human remains from the Isle of Man. These identify five burials in cists as Middle Neolithic and indicate new sequences of activity at cemeteries starting in the Middle Neolithic. Each of these sites is examined in detail. The dates also spur a reconsideration of the development of Ronaldsway pottery and the integration of Grooved Ware pottery and motifs into early 3rd millennium practice on the island. The paper ends with a consideration of the changing effects of mortuary practices throughout the Neolithic on the Isle of Man and a discussion of connections with Middle and Late Neolithic activity in Ireland and Britain.
Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, 2008
The abodes of the dead or the ancestors are not always those places where mortal remains are laid to rest. This chapter investigates how we might identify prehistoric monuments, ostensibly not funerary in character, as being places of the ancestors. It examines the case of Stonehenge within the context and landscapes of Neolithic Wessex to explore the symbolic significance of the wooden and stone materials out of which the great monuments of the Neolithic in England were constructed. This concern with "materiality" is extended to the ceramics of that period, showing that similar structuring principles were in use not only in the contexts of use for certain ceramic styles but also in the tempering agents added to their clays. This is an attempt at a contextual archaeology in which the duality of structure and agency is central to understanding the prehistoric past.
Documenta Praehistorica, 2011
This article presents the first synthesis of the evidence for a diverse range of mortuary practices across the British Isles, and an interpretation of what they suggest about understandings of the body, relatedness, personhood and ancestry in Early Neolithic Britain and Ireland. By exploring the ways that mortuary practices were interwoven with the development of the places where they were carried out, we can build up a more detailed – and more varied – picture of the principles underlying Early Neolithic mortuary practices. Some practices suggest an interest in the ancestral remains of the dead, while others suggest different phenomena, yet a general picture of how human bodies were appreciated emerges.