Neolithic Flashcards
New Ideas in the Neolithic
- Domesticated animals
- Cereal cultivation
- Flint mining, quarrying and trading
- Long-houses
- Ceremonial or ritual monuments
Early Neolithic houses
Few known until recently
– Lack of visibility?
– Mobile, transient nature of early Neolithic population?
- ‘Pre-monumental’ phase
‘Hall-houses’: Communal houses for ‘pioneer farmers’?
• Meeting places: feasting or cult centres? • Farm houses? • Social cohesion in clearance and construction – Symbolic burning? – Cereals and dairying – Low numbers of artefacts – Smaller oval/rectilinear structures nearby – Other flimsier Neo structures
Ideologies behind the ‘houses’
Broad similarities in template • Structured deposition, e.g. arrowheads, axes, pottery sherds • Lifecycles of houses and people • Burning down – Closure – Arson/attack? – Accidental?
Causewayed enclosures
Monument found across NW Europe, including northern France, Western Germany, southern Britain
• Discontinuous ring of ditch(es) and bank with causeways
Enclosure layout
Use of slopes, water courses as well as ditches
• Enclosing central area with
• England: shorter ditch segments
‘Tor’ enclosures
• Discontinuous drystone walls without ditches e.g.
Carn Brea, Cornwall
• 3700 – 3300 BC
• 14 House platforms
• Occupation debris
• Houses burnt down
• 700+ leaf shaped arrowheads around entrance
Causewayed enclosures purpose
- Meeting places, defence, act of creation of monument?
- Similarities with Paris basin – continuing connections/migrations?
Neolithic Houses: Ritual or profane?
Ritual:
– Atypical butchery evidence: sporadic feasting?
– Structured depositions
– Little evidence for permanent settlements?
Domestic:
– Faunal evidence is comparable with other Neolithic domestic settlements
How mobile were Early Neolithic ‘farmers’?
- Wild animals were still exploited
- Dairying was intensively practiced
- Aquatic animals seem to be largely ignored
- Were causewayed enclosures meeting places?
Marine resources
- In the Mesolithic, coastal dwellers had a marine-based diet
- In the Neolithic, everyone seemed to have a terrestrial based diet
Cereal agriculture
-Cereal agriculture widespread, comparable with continent?
or
-Cereal agriculture sporadic; wild plants still major resource?
or
-Failed attempt, reemergence in Bronze Age?
Later development of the house
- Houses become less regular and more diverse
- Rectangular houses rare in later Neolithic
- By 3300 BC things began to change, move towards circular houses
Orkney Isles: Habreck
Early Neolithic (3300 – 3000 BC) • Timber houses – only short-lived • Followed by stone structures • Raw resources – trees? Neolithic quarry.
Skara Brae
(3100 – 2500 BC) • Stone-built • Circular • Central hearth • Stone furniture
Neolithic Britain and Ireland
Connectivity
– Comparisons with continent: causewayed enclosures, houses, pottery, introduction of domesticates to Ireland
– Around Britain and Ireland: spread of styles and ideas, e.g. Grooved Ware, house styles
• Regionality
– Regional pottery styles and uses of pots
– House styles and materials
Neolithic definition
The arrival of farming
A major social development
Move from reliance on hunting‐gathering‐fishing to food production
When and how does farming reaches Britain and Ireland?
Cultivated cereals Domesticated animals – cow, sheep, goat… Pottery Leaf‐shaped arrowheads; ground axeheads Monuments Flint mines Rectangular timber buildings
Long tradition of studying Neolithic monuments
- Very visible!
- Initial antiquarian interest
- Early 20th century, beginnings of modern archaeology
- A Mediterranean origin, especially Mycenae, Crete
- Megalithic monuments (mega, lithos = big stone) could only have been erected by skilled masons from advanced civilisations
- e.g. Newgrange, Edward Llwyd, 1699
- Stonehenge and Avebury landscape, William Stukely,, 18th century
Range of Neolithic monuments across Britain and Ireland
Some are mortuary monuments – associated with human remains = ‘tombs’
Others gathering spaces for ceremony, movement, performance
Ways of bringing people together (male/female? Hierarchy? Coercion?)
• Shape/form (typology)
• Landscape setting
• Mortuary practice
• Radiocarbon age
• Social structure in prehistory
Classification of megalithic monuments
By shape or form (typology)
e.g. long mounds/long cairns versus chambered tombs; simple»_space;» complex
By date
e.g. early»_space;» late Neolithic
Dating megalithic monuments
Very often, not easy to determine –
• Secondary re‐use in prehistory
• Excavated/dug out in 18th/19th centuries
• Stone – lack of organics to radiocarbon date construction phases
• Emptied of material, modern tourist attractions
Portal tombs
- Also called portal dolmens, quoits (Cornwall)
- Widely spread – north & west Wales, Ireland, Cornwall
- Over 230 examples in total
- Shared maritime cultural tradition – Irish Sea Zone
Features of portal tombs
• ‘Closed‐off boxes’; rectangular chamber
• Usually one chamber
• Sometimes surrounding low stone cairns
• Completely covered or capstone visible?
-Distinctive large capstone
-Capstone often sloping to back, heavier part to front
-Brownshill capstone c. 120 tonnes
-Portal stones, usually in line with sidestones
-Often a doorstone fully or partly blocking the entrance
Human remains from portal tombs
e. g Poulnabrone portal tomb, Clare, SW Ireland
- Monument constructed c. 3800 BC and in use for up to 600 years OR
- Older, skeletal material gathered up and placed in a later monument?
- Dates of human bone span 390‐660 years
- Starting – 3885‐3720 cal BC
- Ending – 3335‐3115 cal BC
Other functions of portal ‘tombs’?
- ‘Raising stones to sky’
- Performance rather than burial the key issue?
- Quarrying of capstone
- ‘Quick architecture’?
Long cairns/long barrows
Ireland – called ‘court tombs’ Scotland – called ‘Clyde tombs’ • Elongated shape (usually trapezoidal) • Court feature • Gallery/chambers of stone orthostats (originally roofed) • Surrounding stone cairn and kerb
Variation in long barrow features
• Open courts • Single Court • Dual courts • Central courts -Function of the court? -A place for ceremonies?
Long barrows
- Mostly eastern Britain
- South‐central England ‘heartland’
e. g. Severn‐Cotswold, Wessex, Thames Valley - Also Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Eastern Scotland
The ‘classic’ long barrow (Kinnes 1992)
- Elongated mound (rectangular, oval, trapezoidal) that is higher to east
- Monumental forecourt or façade, usually facing east
- Porches/avenues of posts approaching entrance
- Stone/wooden revetments supporting mound edges
- Ditches running along sides of mound
- Burial chamber/s approached through forecourt OR inserted into sides of mound
- Timber/stone blocking when monument closed
Five southern British long barrows
West Kennett, Wayland’s Smithy, Ascott‐under‐Wychwood, Fussell’s Lodge, Hazleton North
-Most dating between 3750‐3550 BC
-However, construction and use short‐lived
-Rare events in any one locality
-Variation in treatment of human remains:
-Unburnt, but articulated dis‐articulated
-Relatively small numbers‐ 15‐40 people
-Successive deposition over max 5 generations, usually fewer
=Little evidence for very old/ancestral remains
Long barrow histories: West Kennett
Excavated partially 19th c, John Thurnam
Long ditches, transeptal chamber
Forecourt blocked in Late Neo/Early Bronze Age
36 individuals in primary deposits
Sealing layer chalk rubble, sarsens, earth
Secondary human deposits
Conventional thought – open for centuries
Construction of monument 3670‐3635 cal BC
A surprisingly short span of use –
10‐30 years (68% probability)
1‐55 years (94% probability)
Not a long history of accumulation
of human remains
Causewayed enclosures
- A non‐megalithic ‘monument’
- Earthen bank and ditched enclosure; gaps or causeways
- Palisade fences, wooden ramparts/revetments
- Concentrated in southern Britain, but in smaller numbers across other parts England, Wales and Ireland
- Peak in construction 3700 BC onwards, i.e. after long barrow construction starts
- Labour required for enclosure construction – how/why were people involved?
- Some enclosures with ‘ritual’ or purposeful deposits e.g. Windmill Hill
- Animal & human bone, pottery across three circuits.
- Density; whole/parts. Symbolic order?
Cursus monuments
- Parallel‐sided linear earthen monuments
- Ditches and banks
- Often running for long distances
- Notoriously difficult to date!
- Lack of associated material
- Stratigraphy – relationship to other monuments, e.g. causewayed enclosures
- Mid‐4th millennium BC but continuing into Bronze Age
Passage tombs
Irish Sea area
Middle Neolithic – 2nd half of 4th mill. BC
Passage tomb features
A passage (!) That opens up into a chamber • Cruciform • Polygonal • Undifferentiated A covering mound or cairn ‐ sometimes layered (stone, earth, turves)
Passage tombs in the landscape
- Just off the summits of mountains, ridges
- Intervisibility
- Commanding attention?
- Connecting larger communities than earlier monuments?
- Dense clusters or complexes of passage tombs
Human remains in passage tombs
- Multiple burials
- New interest in cremation, although unburnt bone/inhumed bone still present
Grave goods from passage tombs
- Chalk & stone balls
- Stone & bone beads
- Pendants
- Bone & antler pins
- Carrowkeel pottery
- Stone basins
Passage tomb art
- Mostly abstract or non‐representational
- Concentration in Boyne Valley, Ireland, esp. Knowth and Newgrange
- Key points in tomb architecture – entrance, thresholds, lintels
Passage tombs and astronomical alignments
Passages of some tombs aligned on astronomical events, e.g. shortest and longest days of year Midwinter solstice – • Newgrange, Ireland • Maes Howe, Orkney Midsummer solstice – • Bryn Celli Ddu, Anglesey
Late Neolithic monumental landscapes
3000/2900 BC, passage tombs coming to end of their primary use
New types of monument appear:
• Henge (open‐air enclosure defined by earthen banks and ditches)
• Stone circles
• Timber circles
• Wooden palisades
Passage tomb dating
-Bone pins
c. 3600 BC onwards
-Quanterness- Deposition probably
starts
3450–3350 BC
-Big eastern tombs
3300‐3000 BC
-Cellular or Maes Howe‐type tombs
-Progression? Simple to more elaborate? West to East?
Henge monuments
Definition:
- Circular area surrounded by ditch and (normally) an outer bank
- Stone/wooden uprights standing within
- Before 3000 BC right up to c.2000 BC
- Part of ‘ceremonial’ landscapes – with lots other monuments
- Low lying, set within dished landscapes
- Framing landscape around?
- An ‘amphitheatre’?
To recap…
Earlier Neolithic monuments
-Portal tombs/dolmens – Irish Sea distribution
-Long mounds – court tombs/Clyde tombs (mostly stone) long barrows (earth, stone chambers/timber structures)
-Stalled cairns – Orkney‐Cromarty tombs
-Causewayed enclosures – ‘heartland’ in south‐central Britain
Middle Neolithic
-Passage tombs – across Irish Sea zone
– related to Maes Howe‐type (cellular) tombs on Orkney
-Cursus monuments
Late Neolithic
-Henges
-Stone circles (mostly in Scotland; stone circles further south are later in date)
-Timber circles and settings (large open‐air spaces or arenas)
-Cursus/linear monuments continuing
