Understanding the Neolithic

Julian Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134621422
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book employs contemporary theoretical perspectives to investigate the Neolithic period in southern britain. It is a fully reworked edition of the author's Rethinking the Neolithic (1991).

Chapter One
An archaeology of difference

INTRODUCTION

It seems particularly ironic that prehistoric archaeology systematically erases those qualities of the past which attract us to it in the first place. When we come across a megalithic tomb, its presence is one which can be at once intriguing and disturbing. It is an object which is foreign to our own culture, yet it exists in the same space as we do. Although it may have been incorporated into folklore, or depicted on a road map, or included in a heritage trail, its material existence is one which can seem at odds with its surroundings. Such a monument is an indication that the world that we inhabit was once quite different. As such, it offers us the opportunity to encounter the ‘otherness’ of the past. It is doubtless this experience of something mysterious and alien which first inspires many of us to take up archaeology as a study. Being engaged by the past, we want to know more about it. Yet it is precisely through attempting to find out more about the past that we erode its unfamiliarity. We introduce techniques of classification and rationalisation which homogenise and tame the past.

The difference of the past is inexhaustible. But despite this, I wish to argue that our present image of the Neolithic period in Britain is one which is unnecessarily tied to a series of contemporary assumptions. It may be ultimately impossible to mentally escape our own cultural context, and to grasp a dead and alien culture in its own terms. Nevertheless, it is a reasonable goal to account for the reasons why our present understanding has been put together in the way that it has, and in the process to present a more satisfactory interpretation. It is for this reason that many of the chapters of this book will dwell at some length on the history of investigation into particular aspects of the British Neolithic. My suggestion is that successive generations of archaeologists have not simply progressed gradually toward a more perfect understanding of prehistory. On the contrary, in the course of their labours they have constructed a series of prejudices, stereotypes and assumptions which need to be exposed and evaluated before we are able to move forward. Of course, this is not to say that critique will ever be able to purge our accounts of the past of ‘bias’, to such an extent that we can claim neutrality. Apart from being a practical impossibility, a neutral understanding of the Neolithic would probably be quite dull. This book doubtless has its own prejudices, and consequently it is presented as a critical writing of the British Neolithic rather than a definitive account.

While the social sciences have long stressed the way in which our personal experience forms the frame through which we apprehend reality (Bourdieu 1977, 2), the problems faced by archaeologists in overcoming their preconceptions are singular. Inevitably, we judge the object of our investigation in relation to ourselves and the way that we live. But as archaeologists who inhabit the same space as the past society which we study, we are also tempted to see that society as part of an unbroken developmental continuum which leads upward to ourselves. All of prehistory and history do no more than document the process of emergence of our present order. The consequence of this for the Neolithic has been that in addition to the imposition of a modernist economism which seeks to find a ‘rational’ explanation for all aspects of prehistoric society, the period has been seen as a simplified and more barbaric form of the epochs which succeed it. This can take the relatively crude form of interpreting the ‘Beaker folk’ as a community of foederati brought into Britain to quell the rebellious natives (Ashbee 1978). But equally, Neolithic pits have been interpreted as storage devices, despite their manifest unsuitability for the purpose, by analogy with Iron Age pits (Field et al. 1964). Causewayed enclosures have been seen as the equivalent of hillforts (Renfrew 1973a; Barker and Webley 1978), and Neolithic pottery was originally categorised according to an ABC sequence which mimicked schemes devised for the Iron Age (Hawkes 1931; Piggott 1931; Warren et al. 1936). Arguably, all of these interpretations are grounded in a meta-narrative of continuous, seamless and progressive development toward the present; The notion that the Neolithic might in certain respects be qualitatively and categorically different from what followed it, and that major horizons of cultural discontinuity might exist in prehistory at a more fundamental level than that of migration, invasion and diffusion is one which has been difficult to entertain under these conditions. This volume is addressed to the problem that, while any prehistory we write is a modern production, written within a contingent set of historical and cultural circumstances, the past achieves its greatest political potency when it retains its sense of difference and ‘otherness’. Consequently, it is not concerned with theory to the exclusion of practice, or vice versa. It has been suggested that textual production in archaeology is dominated by descriptive, ‘common-sense’ works, and that works of theory are few and far between (Shanks and Tilley 1987a, 14–15). However, while we might agree with this argument in principle, another point needs to be added. Texts concerning abstract theory have been a constant, if minor, element of the archaeological canon over the past thirty years (e.g. Clarke 1968; Watson et al. 1971; Gardin 1980; Hodder 1986; etc.). However, what have been rather less common have been works that take a body of integrated theory as the basis for a sustained evaluation of a particular period or problem. Within the ‘processualist’ tradition there have been useful attempts to use theory as a means to throw new light on to certain problems (e.g. Renfrew 1972; Randsborg 1980; Hodges 1982). Nevertheless, in some of these instances the method which has been followed is to recruit ‘bits’ of theory from various sources to explain particular phenomena, rather than to start from an integrated theoretical position.

WRITING PREHISTORY

Recently, archaeologists have become increasingly aware of the textual dimension of their enterprise. Part of this awareness has involved the adoption of a textual model for the archaeological record (Patrik 1985), but in this chapter I will concern myself more with the status of archaeological discourse as writing, and some of the implications which follow from this. History, Frederic Jameson tells us, is only available to us textually (1981, 35). This point is forcefully supported by Shanks and Tilley (1987a, 19; 1987b), when they suggest that archaeological evidence is only made comprehensible when it is placed in the context of a narrative—that is, when we tell a story. This admission clearly contradicts the positivist dictum that we should allow the facts to ‘speak for themselves’, and the notion that we could conceivably accumulate a complete set of evidence which would reduce the past to a transparent and selfevident state. Despite what archaeologists may claim to the contrary, our problem may not be one of a paucity of evidence, but one of defining which elements of the evidence are significant. In this connection, Michael Roth (1988, 10) considered the positivist historian’s dream of a ‘perfect chronicle’ containing every event in history written down as it happened. Such a chronicle would still provide an inadequate vision of the past, since the significance of events is only ever understood in context, and often only in hindsight. The relevance of an historical event is judged in terms of its contribution to the development of an historical plot, a sequence of significant and related happenings. Whenever we write about prehistory we undertake a conscious or unconscious sifting and sorting of the available evidence, creating new meanings in the process. What we define as significant evidence, what we choose to look on as facts, varies depending on the preoccupations and preconceptions under which we write the past.

My investigation of the British Neolithic begins with the recognition that the archaeological past is inherently written, and is written in a present which is itself ‘in history’. What makes this different from writing a novel is that what I write adheres to something which already exists, a raw material which is transformed in the act of writing: the ‘trace’ of the past in the present. But writing about the past involves taming it; placing the evidence in a comprehensible narrative requires us to rationalise it from a perspective which is located in the present. There are a number of different ways in which archaeologists can and do write the past, and here I should like to suggest a means of coming to terms with this problem, before addressing the difficult question of how we can evaluate rival accounts of the past. The central motif of the first part of this discussion is drawn from Paul Ricoeur’s essay The Reality of the Historical Past (1984). Here, Ricoeur distinguishes between three tropes of historical writing: History-as-Same, History-as-Other and History-as-Analogue. Each of these ‘great signs’ is distinguished by a particular relationship between the past and the present. Or rather, each form of writing attributes a different status to the written past. It is arguable that the great bulk of archaeological writing is conducted under the sign of the Same. In order to make sense of the evidence available to them, archaeologists often employ some form of universalism, whether it is called analogy, uniformitarianism or middle-range theory. In this way, the palaeoeconomic school sought to explain the evidence which was available to them concerning prehistoric settlement and subsistence by recourse to presumed universal laws of behaviour based upon animal ethology (Higgs and Jarman 1975). Other forms of Past-as-Same which prevail in archaeological discourse involve attempts to isolate anthropologically defined forms of social organisation in the past. Thus, for instance, we can identify Renfrew’s search for ‘chiefdoms’ in European prehistory (1973a), or the forms of structural Marxist archaeology which seek evidence for particular kinship systems or modes of production in the past (Thomas 1987).

Ricoeur cites the work of Collingwood as his central example of History-as-Same, and it is significant that Ian Hodder drew upon Collingwood’s writings in developing one of the most sophisticated archaeologies written under the sign of the Same (Hodder 1986, 90). According to Ricoeur, Collingwood’s aim in historical ‘re-enactment’ is not the re-living of events, but the rethinking of the thoughts of the actors concerned. To get inside the event in this way suggests that knowing what happened is already to know why it happened: understanding consists in fusing with the mental life of another. Hodder takes this line of reasoning to imply that certain universal structuring principles allow unique events to be appreciated by all people at all times.

However, even with such an advanced form of Past-as-Same there are inevitably certain problems. These stem, I think, from the medium through which the archaeologist must attempt to enter past worlds: that is, material culture. Taking the argument that we can look on material culture as being in some ways analogous to language, something which conveys or produces meanings, it is questionable whether any communicative medium can give a total and immediate access to the thoughts of another person. To suggest this would be to accept Edmund Husserl’s model of the meaning-giving subject expressing primordial, internally generated meanings through communicative acts (Norris 1982, 46). This effectively implies that a pure and perfect experience is first created within a person, and then as a secondary matter expressed through the imperfect, distorted artifice of discourse, whether it be verbal or material. This would require that meaning can exist in the first instance in a form which is external to language or any other form of signification. In this way of thinking, language and material culture are relegated to the status of vessels for conveying pure ideas and impressions from place to place and mind to mind. But as Michel Foucault objects, ‘there is nothing absolutely primary because, when all is said and done, underneath it all everything is already interpretation’ (1967, 189).

There is something to be said for rejecting the image of deep meaning underlying more superficial communication. As in the case of Husserls attempt to identify certain archetypal human experiences, the use of ‘depth metaphors’ can often be associated with the attempt to isolate some phenomenon which is timeless, ahistorical, ‘hard-wired’ or transcendental (Derrida 1978a). The modern West often appears to be fixated with hidden meanings and deep Freudian horrors. Yet this is a metaphysical way of thinking, in which whatever we experience is always secondary to a more fundamental order of things which can only be inferred. From an archaeological point of view, this is a counsel of despair, since it implies that the material things which we study are no more than a tattered reflection of cognitive worlds which are forever lost to us (Thomas 1996a; 1998a). Rather than search for ‘deep meanings’ locked away in the structure of artefacts, it is possible to argue that thought and communication are one and the same thing. Ideas cannot precede signification, since we require objects and concepts in order to structure our thought. Thinking is not an abstracted reasoning which takes place in a realm of pure consciousness: it is a practical aspect of our being in the world (Heidegger 1962). All of this makes the suggestion that material culture is language-like (Hodder 1982a; Tilley 1989) all the more significant. Material culture is a form of signification, and as such it exists not to express essences (as some forms of historical idealism might suggest) but to produce meaning (Olsen 1990). People use things to think with; things are integral to thought, and to the production of meaningful worlds.

The study of material culture is a means of engaging with those past worlds, even if this is always achieved from the context of our own world (Johnson and Olsen 1992). This need not involve any attempt to empathise with past people, or to enter into their thoughts. Meaning is not locked away in the individual mind: it is produced in public, in interaction, in the relationships between people and things. It is struggled or negotiated over, or the result of an uneasy accommodation between differently positioned people, with different understandings of the world. People live in a world of pre-understanding and interpretation, which they continually actively test and reinterpret (Thrift 1991), but which always involves imperfect and partial understandings. Their material culture is fashioned as a part of this imperfectly grasped world (as is our own). Consequently, when we interpret past material culture, we are not approaching the ‘empirical reality’ of the past ‘as it really was’ (as if such a thing were possible). We are creating an interpretation of an interpretation (or many interpretations), a cultural production fashioned from other cultural productions. This recalls Derrida’s seemingly playful digression on Nietzsche’s umbrella (Derrida 1978b; Norris 1982, 71; Lawson 1985, 116). Apparently, one of Nietzsche’s manuscripts contains a marginal note, which says: ‘I have forgotten my umbrella.’ Derrida finds almost endless possible meanings for this one sentence, speculating as to whether it should be taken at face value, or whether it represents some coded comment on or key to the rest of the manuscript. Indeed, he finds it possible to argue that it is no more or less significant than any other sentence in the manuscript. This is because its meaning is ultimately unknowable; what we take it to mean depends upon our own reading. This is also the case with archaeological evidence. The paradox is that while the evidence may determine that some things cannot be written about it, there are potentially limitless things which can be written about it.

If there are problems with perspectives which link past and present, the immediate alternative is a past written under Ricoeur’s sign of the Other. It is here that some more of the disturbing consequences of post-structuralist thought for archaeology start to emerge. In their different ways, Derrida and Foucault have done away with the ‘points of presence’, the Archimedean places of reference outside history which might act as the thread to guide us through the labyrinth (Lentricchia 1980, 166). Now, there is only the labyrinth. ‘Nothing in man,’ says Foucault, ‘not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve as a basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men’ (1984a, 87). What, then, if there is no stable entity which we can call human nature? What if, as Nietzsche suggested, even the most seemingly stable elements of our existence, like ethics and values, can be seen as historical and transient? What if there are no structural universals which extend into the past? What if there were no chiefdoms in the Neolithic? How can we ever reach into the distant past if we have only concepts developed in the present with which to apprehend it?

It is with the attempt to get beyond ‘the consoling play of recognitions’ (Foucault 1984a, 88) that the idea of History-as-Other begins. Such a history is based not on searching for similarities between past and present, but in the recovery of temporal distance. By revealing the difference of the past, such a history seeks to delegitimise the present. In this way, the difference of the past becomes one of its most political characteristics. The prototype of such a history was Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (1969), which served as a model for Foucault’s work on penal systems and sexuality. In each case the aim was to historicise the apparent universals of the human condition by contrasting past and present. All of the common-sense values dissolve before genealogical analysis—words do not keep their meanings, desires do not keep their objectives, ideas do not keep their logic.

Genealogy, a contrastive history, can be argued to provide a paradigm for effective archaeological research. It is possible to use a similar methodology to investigate particular areas of human practice through a search for points in time in which they were subject to structural changes. Our efforts can be directed at those supposedly static and ahistorical spheres like the appropriation of landscapes, the preparation and consumption of food, the disposal of household waste, the organisation of domestic space and the use of the human body in mortuary practice. Each of these has been conventionally looked on by archaeologists in universal terms: hence food remains are looked on as evidence for calorific input, while mortuary practices are seen as the raw material for mathematical indices of the degree to which a society is ranked.

This kind of an archaeology would be opposed to the forcing of the past into modernist categories and classifications. At each stage, it would attempt to recover the strangeness of the past, its alien quality. However, it must be admitted that in the final analysis such a process will always be incomplete and unfinished. One can deconstruct the forms of one’s analysis of the past indefinitely. Clearly, no set of concepts or ideas developed in the present will ever grasp the whole essence of the past (see Dews 1987, 177). So just as Derrida can demonstrate the absence of any fixity of meaning by moving constantly from one signifier to the next, we might search endlessly for a written past which finally breaks its ties with the present. At some point we must come to terms with this, and simply write a story. It is at this stage that we move to Ricoeur’s final great sign, that of the Analogue. Here, the narrative which we write is recognised as something which is not the real past, but which ‘stands for’ the past. A history written as Analogue is an account written in the present, which weaves together the traces of the past in a web of rationalisation. If we accept the point that to write at all is to tame and homogenise the past, such a writing effects some kind of reconciliation between Same and Other.

If we begin from the position that what we are striving to do is to free the past from ethnocentric and presentist deformations, our writing can begin with a radical separation of past and present through the use of genealogy and deconstruction, yet it must end with some level of domestication. Writing the past is an endless task, but one in which each act of putting pen to paper is recognised as a failure to fully articulate difference.

GENEALOGIES OF THE NEOLITHIC

These considerations stand behind the approach which will be followed in this book. The intention is to use each chapter to trace the development of a different aspect of Neolithic society in Britain: subsistence economics, monument-building, depositional practice, the making and use of ceramics, and mortuary practice. While these accounts of the period may intersect in places, their relative autonomy from each other is presented as a virtue. Each chapter will involve some degree of historiography, attempting to explain the emergence of current ideas, and this historical dimension serves as the basis for a critique, which can inform a fresh look at the evidence. These chapters (2–6) could be said to have been written as genealogies, emphasising the cultural difference between the Neolithic and the present. In the later part of the book, a series of regional studies and a conclusion attempt a reintegration of the separate strands which have been followed. Geographically, the study is principally focused on the central southern part of England (the counties of Avon, Berkshire, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Somerset and Wiltshire). However, it is recognised that some aspects of the evidence cannot readily be addressed within such a limited frame. To some extent, each class of evidence is investigated within its own appropriate scale of analysis.

Chapter Two
Beyond the economic system

Agriculture is not merely a necessary pendant to civilisation; it is its life force, the fundamental qualification of its appearance, and if the men of Avebury, whose high and laborious civilization is manifest in their works, were not agriculturalists, we are faced with a contradiction in terms.

(H.J.Massingham, Downland Man, p. 207)

THE IMAGE OF A ‘NEOLITHIC ECONOMY’

The still dominant understanding of the Neolithic in Britain rests upon its identification as a primarily economic phenomenon. Because the essence of the Neolithic is believed to lie in agricultural practice, a relatively homogeneous economic base is presumed to underlie the evident cultural variability of the period. In this chapter I will contest this assumption, and will suggest that a quite different set of economic practices prevailed in the Neolithic of southern Britain. Some aspects of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Understanding the Neolithic Understanding
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Chapter One: An Archaeology of Difference
• Chapter Two: Beyond the Economic System
• Chapter Three: Reading Monuments
• Chapter Four: Pits, Pots and Dirt: A Genealogy of Depositional Practices
• Chapter Five: Portable Artefacts: The Case of Pottery
• Chapter Six: Mortuary Practice
• Chapter Seven: Regional Sequences: The Stonehenge Area
• Chapter Eight: Regional Sequences: The Upper Thames Valley
• Chapter Nine: Regional Sequences: The Avebury District
• Chapter Ten: Conclusion
• Bibliography