Neolithic Britain: The Transformation of Social Worlds

Cover
NEOLITHIC BRITAIN: The Transformation of Social Worlds
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of figures
Introduction: Neolithic Britain—encounters and reflections
One: Writing Neolithic Britain: an interpretive journey
	Revolutions and emigrants
	Ecology and social evolution
	Symbol and meaning
	Writing the Neolithic as metaphor
	Writing the Neolithic creatively
	Writing ‘timescapes’: new chronologies for the Neolithic
	Writing the Neolithic in a geographically balanced way
	The grand narrative versus emergent causation
	Writing ‘the transformation of social worlds’
Two: 4000 bce: a cultural threshold
	Differing views of a threshold
	Continuities across the threshold
	Innovative communities and their practices
	Halls, migration, and complexity: a White Horse Stone tale
	New preoccupations, new histories . . . new people?
	Genes and migrants
	Into fourth-millennium ‘history’
Three: Narratives for the fourth millennium
	The fourth millennium bce in Britain: a broad-brush perspective
	In the beginning, there was fine pottery . . .
	A narrative of Neolithization, and the creation of houses or halls
	A narrative of human burial, and the first creation of bone repositories
	Regionalization and exchange networks
	A narrative of changing subsistence practices
	Building long mounds and chambers, variously
	Creating enclosures and delimiting space within a circle or curve
	Delimiting space in a linear way
	Cultural diversities and elaborations
	The descent and diversification of traditions
Four: Social being and cultural practices
	Working and extracting flint
	From feasting to deposition
	Dwelling
	Herding and hunting
	Harm
	Communicating with pots?
	Timberworld
	Trails of the axes: from procurement to exchange
	The art of transformation in skeuomorphic practices
	Dealings with the dead: histories of the body
Five: Narratives for the third millennium
	Orkney house societies
	The Grooved Ware phenomenon
	The symbolic encapsulation of the house
	Henging, mounding, and the dead
	Stonehenge
	Dye in the blood: the appearance of Beakers in Late Neolithic Britain
Six: Kinship, history, and descent
	Beginning with trees: encapsulating a hunting and gathering past
	The Sweet Track: histories in and between place
	‘In the kinship of cows’ revisited
	Times and lives: some clues concerning Neolithic concepts of time
	Identity and descent implicated in the placing of pottery
	The creation, incorporation, and embodiment of the ‘House’
	The communication and ‘seeding’ of history in stone
	Curation of remains from the past in the Neolithic
	Patterns of commemoration: burning and marking
	Making and recording history through practice
Conclusion: A lived Neolithic
	Experiencing the Neolithic in the present
	People and things
	Neolithic Britain and the wider world
	The transformation of social worlds
	Rewriting—and always learning more about—the Neolithic of Britain
Glossary of technical words
Bibliographical commentary
	Introduction: Neolithic Britain—encounters and reflections
		General books on the British Neolithic
		Specific sites mentioned in the Introduction (and also elsewhere in the book)
	1. WRITING Neolithic Britain: an interpretive JOURNEY
	2. 4000 bce: a cultural threshold
	3. Narratives for the fourth millennium
	4. Social being and cultural practices
	5. Narratives for the third millennium
	6. Kinship, history, and descent
	Conclusion: A lived Neolithic
An outline of chronologies
	How chronologies are built: background and brief summary
	Building chronologies for individual sites
	Cross-dating between sites and building regional chronologies
	Making history: developmental stories
	The times of their lives
	Timelines: charting contemporaneity and change
Index