Landscapes of Neolithic Ireland

Gabriel Cooney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135108557
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: Social Sciences

Landscapes of Neolithic Ireland is the first volume to be devoted solely to the Irish Neolithic, using an innovative landscape and anthropological perspective to provide significant new insights on the period.
Gabriel Cooney argues that the archaeological evidence demonstrates a much more complex picture than the current orthodoxy on Neolithic Europe, with its assumption of mobile lifestyles, suggests. He integrates the study of landscape, settlement, agriculture, material culture and burial practice to offer a rounded, realistic picture of the complexities and the realities of Neolithic lives and societies in Ireland.

1
Looking at the Irish Neolithic — A Landscape Perspective

Shining the light

As an archaeologist the period I have always been particularly interested in is what is known as the Neolithic. For the archaeologist the word ‘Neolithic’ conjures up a range of varied associations. In calendrical time terms it refers to the period in Ireland between 4000 and 2500 BC, but extending over 2,000 years earlier in parts of Europe. It is when we see the beginnings of agriculture, but also the continuity of foraging. This was when the first major human intervention into the then densely wooded Irish landscape was made. The archaeological record indicates a complex set of religious beliefs, including the construction of a range of ceremonial monuments. These monuments occur alongside evidence of the dominance of routine lives. It would seem that people had a great concern with the dead and the ancestors, matched with and perhaps reflecting the lived reality that most people could not expect to live past their early 30s. These are just a few of the images that the word ‘Neolithic’ conveys to archaeologists working with the evidence from this period. Indeed the definition of what the term means is still a matter of considerable debate.

However, this debate is largely confined to the academic literature. To the wider public the term ‘Neolithic’ is more nebulous and ill-defined. When the word is used at all in Ireland it would be very strongly linked with specific monuments or aspects of the period, such as megalithic art. Writing this at the approach of the winter solstice when there is the modern celebration of the annual lighting up of the passage and chamber of Newgrange by the rising sun shining through a roof box, is to be reminded of the continuing importance of monuments like Newgrange. It has become an icon for a modern age, a shining light for people living 5,000 years after it was constructed. Hence, it is not surprising modern public perception of the Irish Neolithic is dominated by the wealth of the visible, monumental evidence and by the beguiling appeal of megalithic art. When we look at the wider context in which Newgrange, or other well-known monuments such as Poulnabrone on the Burren in Co. Clare, are interpreted today, there would seem to be little understanding or analysis of their role for the people who built them. It is almost as if the monuments have been detached from their past, de-contextualised and de-socialised, to serve the present day (see Gibbons 1996).

This sense of detachment is part of a wider problem. While it would be accepted that understanding the past is seen as important in Ireland, there has been a tendency to compress and marginalise the 7,000 years of Irish prehistory (e.g. Smyth 1993: 404) and to see Irish prehistory as a fragmentary, unreadable, remote past. Archaeological themes have become popular as metaphors for understanding or revealing the past, as in Seamus Heaney’s poetry (1998). But in contrast to the perception of archaeology as a methodology for getting at the evidence from the past or for poetic inspiration, it is in the writing and interpretation of history that the cultural complexity of the past is generally seen as being recognisable or coherent. This is an over-simplistic view that archaeologists strongly need to contest. The archaeological record for Irish prehistory, for example, offers the basis for a detailed interpretation (e.g. Cooney and Grogan 1994). The evidence from the Neolithic period in particular is very varied and offers us an insight into how people created a complex social world. Furthermore we can compare and contrast this with Neolithic worlds elsewhere in western Europe, with particular reference to the neighbouring island of Britain to the east.

To come back to Newgrange, it seems reasonable to argue that if we are to have any real insight into its meanings we need to know about the people who were responsible for its construction. We also have to look at the social context in which it was created. In a historical sense the monument has to be placed in the context of the long human history of the ridge on which Newgrange was built, with activity going on long before and after the actual monument itself. In turn we have to place this activity in the wider context of developments elsewhere in Ireland. This book provides an interpretative approach to the Neolithic period in Ireland and argues that it should be regarded as important in a wider context, both within the broader setting of the Neolithic period in western Europe and as a significant, 1,500-year-long segment of the story of human settlement in Ireland.

Writing the Neolithic

Part of the reason why a de-contextualised, simplistic view of the Neolithic in Ireland is so common has to do with the way in which it has been studied and interpreted by archaeologists. Our approaches to the Neolithic have been dominated by studies that focus on particular aspects of the archaeological data, such as individual sites or megalithic tombs, pottery or settlement. This is to some extent due to our archaeological use of classification as an analytic and ordering device to comprehend the evidence and also is a recognition that the past only survives in a fragmentary state. But this approach tends to emphasise the distinctions between these different categories of data rather than focusing on the reality that they all formed part of the material culture of Neolithic people. We have failed to adequately distinguish between the way we as archaeologists classify the data and how people in the past actively used material culture to create their lives and worlds. Again, we need to write more about the inadequacies of the record as reflecting conditions of preservation rather than in any sense suggesting a simplicity in prehistoric lifestyles (e.g. McGhee 1996: 8). But there has been a continuing persistence of these ideas in archaeological writing about the Neolithic in Ireland which has helped to perpetuate the public perception of this period as one inhabited only by different types of megalithic tombs, the archaeologists who study them and the deposits that ended up in them (see Ó Cróinín 1995).

What we should be emphasising is that the archaeological record is the material expression of the behaviour and ideas of the people who created it. In this sense it offers us a unique data set, providing the basis for an interpretation of the meaning of people’s lives and giving insights into the details of those lives. Over the last thirty years in Ireland there has been an explosion in the amount of archaeological data that we can classify as being relevant to the Neolithic period (see Waddell 1998). However, despite this wealth of archaeological data, interpretations of the period in Ireland are still greatly influenced by models and approaches that were current in the 1960s. The changes and advances in archaeological theory (e.g. Hodder and Preucel 1996) that have taken place over the last thirty years have had a relatively limited impact (Cooney 1995). We have moved on methodologically but not theoretically. Elsewhere in Europe a lot of theoretical work has focused on the Neolithic. In Denmark, for example, survey and excavation data have been allied to new methodological and interpretative approaches (see papers in Hvass and Storgaard 1993). The archaeology of the British Neolithic has been rewritten during this time (e.g. Smith, I. 1974; Bradley 1984; Darvill 1987; Thomas, J. 1991; Barrett 1994). These new perspectives have a major influence on the way in which the European Neolithic is being interpreted (Hodder 1990; Whittle 1996; Edmonds and Richards 1998). There are now very different ways of looking at the interpretation of people and society from the material culture that survives in the archaeological record. It has been recognised that we need to understand the underlying links between the past that we record and the writing of that past in the present (e.g. Shanks and Tilley 1987a; 1987b). The social, economic and historical context in which archaeologists operate inevitably influences their view of the past (e.g. Hodder 1991; Cooney 1995; 1996a). Following on this it has also been realised that theory and data cannot be separated, data is theory-laden (see discussion in Clarke 1973; Wason 1994: 7–11). Reflecting on the influence of social context, there has also been a recognition that in the past, as in the present, factors such as age, gender and social status influence how people see the world. (It might be useful to clarify the distinction between sex and gender; as Brown (1998: 11) puts it, gender is a cultural categorisation that uses biological sex differences to structure thought and behaviour but it is not determined by them.) From all of these interpretative strands has come the realisation that there cannot be just one narrative about the past – we have to see it from different perspectives.

When archaeologists or anthropologists take on the guise of professional strangers, studying other societies from the outside, and in the case of archaeologists very often from a great distance of time and a very different set of perceptions and with a very partial record, they adopt categorisation and classification as the basis for understanding human life. Because of this analytic framework the focus can tend to stay on separate sets of data, or to concentrate on particular sets of evidence, such as monuments or tools or occupation sites, with some attempt at integration built at a later stage on this fragmented structure. But we have to recognise that the human world is culturally constructed and intermeshed. Culture is inventive, shifting and changing over time as people work actively with the cultural inheritance they receive to create their lives, and in doing so change that cultural inheritance (Johnson, M. 1989; Carrithers 1992; Brumann 1999). People, through their actions and traditions, create distinctive cultural worlds and have their own senses of those worlds (Geertz 1983). It is from this perspective that we should be grappling with the problematics of the archaeological record. Material culture is actively used by people in creating their social world and in the past as today objects frequently appear to have had a symbolic value. An insight into understanding the material traces left in the archaeological record may be gained by thinking about them as being linked together through metaphor and metonymy (Hodder 1995; Whittle 1995; Tilley 1996). Using metaphors, people transfer meaning from one thing to another; for example mortuary houses were built to represent houses. Metonymy is a process in which we think of things or objects as standing for a wider set of values or ideas, as when an object of prestige status, such as a crown or a mace, can symbolise a leader or the concept of leadership. By thinking along these lines we may be able to see some of the webs of significance in which people were anchored (Geertz 1973: 5).

As archaeologists we also have to be concerned with time. The events of human lives, both the mundane or everyday and the important or unusual, encompass both past experience and portents for the future. Time and looking back is bound up in carrying forward the processes of life and culture (Ingold 1993: 157, see also Clark 1992: 55–6). While as archaeologists we normally see time in terms of chronologies, as something to be used to study the past, we should perhaps examine in more detail the lived experience of time. A well-known approach to the concept of time operating at different levels is that of Braudel (e.g. 1985) who identified three levels of time or history. First there is the longue durée, long-term patterns of continuity and change that are linked to environment and place. Second there is the history of conjuncture, which focuses on shorter economic and demographic trends and cycles. Third there is the history of events, dealing with the lives of individuals and short-term events (see Bintcliff 1991; Knapp 1992). In discussing these ideas of time and history Gosden (1994) used them as a launching pad to distinguish three different but connected kinds of time from a human, lived perspective. First there is the time of our lives, the time of personal existence bounded by life and death. Second there is public time, to do with marking important events or occasions and redolent with symbols, metaphors and metonymies which...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and plates
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Looking at the Irish Neolithic — a landscape perspective
• 2 Irish Neolithic landscapes
• 3 Home is where the hearth is
• 4 The dead are everywhere
• 5 Monumental landscapes
• 6 Living in a material world
• 7 Local places, big issues
• Bibliography
• Index