Ancestral Geographies of the Neolithic: Landscapes, Monuments and Memory

186 Pages·1999·7.89 MB·English

by  Mark Edmonds

Ancestral Geographies of the Neolithic

Ancestral Geographies of the Neolithic is a vivid portrait of life in the small, dispersed
communities of Neolithic Britain. Focussing in on the landscape and monuments
of the fourth millennium BC, Mark Edmonds provides a dramatic, colourful
interpretation of how these prehistoric peoples understood the world in which
they lived.
Central to this study is the idea that communities of the time may have thought
about the land, and about themselves, in ways very different to those we take for
granted today. Theirs was a world shaped by kinship, ancestry and various forms of
affiliation. It was a world in which the dead were a powerful presence, and where
distant times and places held a particular fascination. Many of these themes were
brought into sharpest focus during periodic gatherings at the monumental enclosures
and tombs that appear in our record for the first time, where communities engaged
in ancestral rites, exchange and other forms of ceremonial. It was through both
routine and ritual experience that dispersed and fragmented communities
acknowledged their ties to the land, to the past and to each other.
Ancestral Geographies of the Neolithic will provide invaluable insights into later
prehistory to students of archaeology and landscape history, and all those interested
in how prehistoric landscapes were inhabited.
Mark Edmonds is a senior lecturer in landscape archaeology at the University of
Sheffield. He is the author of Stone Tools and Society.

Ancestral Geographies of
the Neolithic

Landscape, monuments and memory

Mark Edmonds

London and New York
First published 1999
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

© 1999 Mark Edmonds
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Edmonds, M.R. (Mark R.)
Ancestral geographies of the Neolithic: landscape, monuments and
memory/Mark Edmonds
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Neolithic period—Great Britain. 2. Earthworks (Archaeology)—
Great Britain. 3. Human ecology—Great Britain. 4. Landscape
assessment—Great Britain. 5. Great Britain—Antiquities.
I. Title
GN776.22.G7E33 1999
936.1–dc21 98–36461
CIP

ISBN 0-415-07677-3 (HB)
ISBN 0-415-20432-1 (PB)
ISBN 0-203-02019-7 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-08563-9 (Glassbook Format)
Contents
List of illustrations vi
Preface ix
1 Settings and scenes 1
2 Origins 11
3 Ancestral geographies 15
4 Keeping to the path 32
5 Working stone 36
6 A gift from the ancestors 51
7 The living and the dead 56
8 Attending to the dead 75
9 A time and a place for enclosure 80
10 Drawing the line 106
11 Arenas of value 110
12 The pattern of things 130
13 Changes in the land 134
14 Post excavation 152
Postscript 155
Bibliography 163
Index 169
Illustrations

1 Hambledon Hill, Dorset 2
2 Coppiced woodland 14
3 Earlier Neolithic hammerstone, blades, scrapers, fabricators
and single piece sickles 17
4 Flaked and ground axes of flint and stone 19
5 Earlier Neolithic pottery 20
6 Coppiced woodland 22
7 The Sweet Track, Somerset Levels 25
8 Stone 35
9 Plans of earlier Neolithic mines in southern Britain 41
10 Shafts and galleries from three mines in Sussex. A: Blackpatch;
B: Harrow Hill; C: Cissbury 43
11 Earlier Neolithic mine at Harrow Hill (Sussex) under
excavation 45
12 Surface exposure of axe-making debris on an old working
floor 46
13 A stone axe quarry in the central Lakeland fells 47
14 Hands holding stone 48
15 Bones and skull 55
16 The structural sequence at Wayland’s Smithy, Oxfordshire 57
17 Facade at Wayland’s Smithy 58
18 Mortuary and facade structures at a. Nutbane; b. Haddenham.
c. Mortuary deposits at Fussell’s Lodge 60
19 Earlier Neolithic mortuary sites. a. Facade and burial chambers
at West Kennet. b. Wayland’s Smithy. c. Willerby wold.
d. Fussell’s Lodge. e. Streethouse 62
20 a. South Street, Wiltshire. b. Beckhampton Road, Wiltshire 64
21 Tombs in the Derbyshire Peak District
a. Long barrow with superimposed round barrow at Perryfoot.
b. Long barrow with superimposed round barrow at
Longstone Moor. c. Five Wells chambered barrow. d. Green
Low chambered barrow. e. Minninglow. f. Chambered
bank barrow at Long Low 66
Illustrations vii
22 Outline plan of the great barrow and surrounding enclosure at
Duggleby Howe, Yorkshire 69
23 Plan of the double-ditched barrow at Barrow Hills, constructed
on the margins of a causewayed enclosure near Abingdon 71
24 Whitegrounds, Yorkshire 72
25 Articulated body of a man in the entrance to the north
chamber of Hazelton long cairn, Gloucestershire 74
26 a. Rybury. b. Haddenham 79
27 Knap Hill, Wiltshire 81
28 Knap Hill from the ground 82
29 Whitesheet Hill, Wiltshire 84
30 Windmill Hill, Wiltshire 86
31 Aerial photograph of Long Meg and her Daughters (Cumbria) 87
32 The stone-banked enclosure at Gardom’s Edge, Derbyshire 88
33 Causewayed ditch at Hambledon Hill 90
34 Land-use potentials around four enclosures 91
35 The relationship between the enclosure and earlier longhouses at
Langweiller 8 94
36 Longhouses and enclosure at Darion, Belgium 96
37 The two phases of enclosure at Sarup, Denmark 97
38 a. The Trundle, Sussex. b. Whitehawk, Sussex 100
39 Crickley Hill, Gloucestershire: Phase 1b 102
40 a. Briar Hill, Northamptonshire. b. Robin Hood’s Ball,
Wiltshire 103
41 a. Great Wilbraham. b. Knap Hill 109
42 Enclosure, cursus and predominantly later cropmarks at Etton,
Cambridgeshire 111
43 Primary ditch deposits at Etton 112
44 Haddenham, Cambridgeshire 114
45 Skull in ditch at Hambledon Hill 116
46 a. Etton. b. Upton. c. Uffington. d. Melbourn. e. Roughton 118
47 Skull in ditch at Maiden Castle, Dorset 119
48 a. Coombe Hill. b. Orsett. c. Great Wilbraham 120
49 a. Association of human remains with ditchworks at Offham.
b. Burial from Offham. c. Burial from Staines 122
50 a. Southwick. b. Barholm. c. Northborough 123
51 Animal bone in the ditch of Windmill Hill 124
52 A small axe from the Lake District deposited in a pit at Etton,
near Peterborough 125
53 Cornish ground stone axe and pot deposited at
Hambledon Hill, Dorset 126
54 a. Windmill Hill. b. Melbourn. c. Briar Hill. d. Hambledon Hill 133
55 Body in ditch at Hambledon Hill, Dorset 135
56 Hambledon Hill, Dorset 136
57 The Stepleton enclosure at Hambledon Hill 139
viii Illustrations
58 Maiden Castle, Dorset, showing the position of the long
mound in relation to the enclosure 140
59 Crickley Hill, Gloucestershire: Phase 1d 142
60 Distribution of arrowheads around one of the entrances at
Crickley Hill, Gloucestershire 143
61 Plan of the Dorset cursus 146
62 Detail of the monument complex at Dorchester-on-Thames,
Oxfordshire 147
63 Abingdon, Oxfordshire 148
64 The Trundle, Sussex 151
Preface

This book has taken quite a while to complete. It began with an article on earlier
Neolithic causewayed enclosures that I wrote in the late 1980s. In it I tried to
compress everything that I felt I had to say about these enigmatic monuments,
reviewing evidence and the arguments of others. The result was turgid and
impenetrable; I can’t look at it now.
A few years after the article was submitted, I began to think about
developing some of its themes in a more extended discussion. At that stage,
I planned to write a rather conventional study, an overtly analytical work
which reviewed the character and chronology of enclosures in southern
Britain. Libraries were excavated for references and the book began to take
some sort of shape; chapters on the history of interpretation, on traditions
of construction and on the landscape setting of enclosures in different regions.
Much of the text seemed rather lifeless, but I had produced about forty to
fifty thousand words, and was reluctant to scrap the files and start again.
Fortunately, fate intervened. We were burgled twice in three days and I lost
the lot. Along with all the usual appliances and CDs, the burglar made off
with a briefcase containing all the back-up files and a novel by Peter Ackroyd.
If they have tried to read any of the text, they have probably been punished
enough.
Given the chance to start again, I decided to approach the book in a
different way. I began to realise that the difficulties I had been having were
as much a problem of writing as they were a problem with the evidence.
The arguments were detached. On the one hand, there was abstract discussion
of the relationship between material tradition and social life, of the
importance of ritual and of the ways in which institutions might be sustained
through people’s practice. On the other, there was the evidence itself, the
products of survey, excavation and argument accumulated over more than a
century. The two sides seemed unconnected; theoretical insights and material
details kept missing each other.
There were, of course, good reasons for this. The evidence is grey on
many issues and this often encourages abstraction. However, the problem
was more basic than that. The book, like many others, missed both the
humanity and the materiality of the times and places that I was interested