Defining a Regional Neolithic

Evidence from Britain and Ireland

Kenneth Brophy, G. Barclay, G. Barclay

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781782972921
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte

This book is the ninth published collection of papers from a Neolithic Studies Group day conference, and it continues the Group's aim of presenting research on the Neolithic of all parts of the British Isles. The topic - regional diversity - is an important theme in Neolithic studies today, and embraces traditions of monumentality, settlement patterns and material culture. The contributors to this volume address issues of regionality through a series of case-studies that focus not on the traditional 'cores' of Wessex and Orkney, but rather on other areas - the 'Irish Sea Zone', Ireland, Scotland, Yorkshire and the Midlands. The volume commences with an introduction (Gordon Barclay) that expands on the initial impetus and research questions behind the 2001 conference this volume is based on. This is followed by a more abstract contribution analysing that most familiar of tools for the display of 'regional' archaeological data, the distribution map (Kenneth Brophy). Two papers follow that address the role material culture plays in both defining and characterising regional trends, one addressing the distinctive regionality of querns in the Neolithic (Fiona Roe), the other a wide-ranging analysis of high status material culture and monumentality in Yorkshire (Roy Loveday). A series of regional studies follows, with three papers focusing explicitly on a range of evidence from the 'Irish Sea zone (Vicki Cummings, Tom Clare and Aaron Watson and Richard Bradley). A large and detailed body of evidence from the East Midlands is also considered (Patrick Clay) and the volume is completed by two papers considering very different regional scales in Ireland. At a more localised level, a series of islands off the east coast of Ireland are discussed in a local and wider context (Gabriel Cooney) and a still wider scale approach is taken to landscape and routeways across Ireland as a whole (Carleton Jones). These papers do not simply set up 'rival' distinctive regions, but rather suggest that local, regional and national traditions cross-cut and combine in different ways in different places. The interaction between regions is as significant as intra-regional distinctiveness. This volume addresses how we might begin to develop a more nuanced vision of the Neolithic of the British Isles.

Chapter 1

Introduction:

a regional agenda?

Gordon Barclay

In suggesting the agenda for the day meeting Kenneth Brophy and I posed four questions to the speakers:

1. In what way is, and in what areas are, inter-regional contrast or variation manifested?

2. Can boundaries be recognized and if they can, are they short-lived or persistent?

3. Are some areas (e.g. Orkney or the Boyne Valley) of particular, trans-regional significance, or are such perceptions a product of modern concerns?

4. Can material culture be seen as a reflection of actual regional variation in the Neolithic, and if so, what role does it play in creating and sustaining identities?

The reader must decide how successfully we, and the contributors, were.

It was as recently as 1985 that Ian Kinnes pointed out that ‘There is no reason, other than that of modern political expediency, why the “Scottish Neolithic” should exist as an entity’ (1985, 16). He might as well have written the ‘British Neolithic’. Childe, (1935, 1) wrote that ‘…Scotland is not an arbitrary political division but possesses…a personality of her own’. This is not an accurate assessment, and the considerable variation in the landscape, accessibility and carrying capacity of the regions of Scotland, mean that the origin and development of human settlement will inevitably have been varied. More recently Gabriel Cooney (2000) had still to make the same argument for Ireland – that there was no homogeneous Irish Neolithic. In parts of England outside the ‘archetypal English landscape’ of the south and south-west (Barclay 2001, 2004), Frodsham, Harding and others have shown that this problem affects other parts of England in the same way as in the surrounding countries (Harding et al. 1996).

Kinnes’ 1985 statement seems now a statement of the blindingly obvious – two decades ago it did not. Until the 1970s or 1980s the assumption, conscious or unconscious, was that there was a relatively unified British Neolithic; as Harding (1997) has commented, an approach that recognizes regionality but consigns it to a minor role in narratives, has had a dominant place in the literature. The ‘unified Neolithic’ model had four main origins:

1. archaeology had been working with limited amounts of reliable data from survey and excavation;

2. a large proportion of that data was from a limited number of areas that had seen concentrations of activity by archaeologists or in the antiquarian period. The development of explanatory models inevitably relied heavily on these data sets;

3. some of the ‘core’ areas of study were lacking certain sorts of data (particularly for settlement). In combination with the overall thinness of data, the creation of coherent narratives necessitated the drawing together of data that now seems to have more complicated relationships, and a better understood local context;

4. the data for the ‘core’ areas was given a primacy over data from other areas – it was the norm against which other material was seen to vary; that assignment of primacy, and the concentration of archaeological effort in those areas in the first place, may reflect deeper-seated concerns within the archetypal English landscape (cf. Barclay 2004).

The archaeological result of the ‘unified’ model was a generalized prehistory that overemphasized similarity, underplayed diversity and assigned a primacy to data and explanation in ‘core’ areas. This is a characteristic shared with written British history, but that discipline has for longer been conscious of the historical and cultural effects on the writing of history within Britain. ‘Four Nations’ history – supposedly history of the constituent parts of the United Kingdom – is largely a history of England, erected as a sort of ‘norm’, with inconsistent inclusion of references to material or events in other parts of the country. Pittock (1999, 98) characterizes it as history ‘…which seeks conformity and minimizes differences and nuances’. These descriptions are unfortunately true of many recent accounts of British prehistory (e.g. Longworth and Cherry 1986; Dyer 1990; Parker-Pearson 1993; Schama 2000).

The historiography of the Neolithic is a study in itself – and there can be no ‘final’ account. I have written one, relevant to my own area of study (Barclay 2001) and others need to be written for other parts of Britain and Ireland.

A consistent element in the argument for regional perspectives for the Neolithic of Ireland and Scotland is the suggestion that models erected in one area on relatively well-studied data-sets have been used uncritically to explain data in other areas. As we learn more about the Neolithic the use of broad-brush explanations becomes less sustainable. We cannot ignore the very clear evidence for inter-regional contact, such as the wide distribution of stone axes, types of pottery and burial and ceremonial practice (as represented by pottery and monument types); however, it has been strongly argued that material must be placed in its regional context before broader parallels are sought or a ‘national’ picture drawn.

As more data – better survey, aerial photography and particularly the results of excavation – have become available for non-core areas, the homogenizing models have been found wanting to explain increasingly varied data. The issue rose to the top of the agenda from the early 1990s with, on the one side, the promotion of the mobile Neolithic hypothesis beyond its natural home in southern England, and on the other, criticism by workers in northern England, Ireland and Scotland.

Of the four questions asked at the start of this introduction, the individual’s answer to the third, ‘Are some areas (e.g. Orkney or the Boyne Valley) of particular, trans-regional significance, or are such perceptions a product of modern concerns?’, perhaps reveals one’s view of the extent to which the origins and development of the Neolithic of these islands is regionally determined, or whether one is still committed to a sort of ‘core/periphery’ model. That there are still lines drawn between two camps was brought home to me when one of the anonymous referees for my ‘historiography’ (Barclay 2001) paper noted that a criticism of it ‘would be the default assumption throughout that all areas are equal, just different; that because Orkney is not Wessex, it cannot be a phenomenon of the same kind…Yorkshire may indeed be another “bright spot” between Stonehenge and Brodgar, but that does not diminish the luminosity of the other two’. This – perceptions of importance – was one of the themes Kenneth Brophy and I wanted to explore in the day meeting; to what extent are areas like Wessex, the Boyne Valley, and Orkney ‘centres’ in prehistory, or merely ‘central’ to the thinking of a majority of prehistorians? The survival of impressive monuments and the resultant prolonged attention has resulted in the latter, but not demonstrated the former. Were these ‘luminous’ centres of particular importance in the past, or is their modern status a reflection of the concerns of prehistorians during the last century or so? We have seen Wessex and Orkney suggested as places of pilgrimage – but are the pilgrims only modern prehistorians? Let us consider for a moment some complexes of monuments that have come to light more recently. How would our perceptions of relative importance be affected if the complexes at Dunragit (Thomas 2001, 138–40, 2004) or Hindwell (Gibson 1996) were not of perishable timber, but had survived in stone to the 19th century or beyond?

This is the nub – do we start with an assumption that certain areas are ‘primary’ or do we have to test and demonstrate such assumptions? In approaching this issue we have to overcome decades of archaeological discourse, as well as the deeper cultural influences on the writing of history that I have set out elsewhere (Barclay 2001). However, we must be careful not to replace ‘national’ prehistories with micro-regional approaches that underplay the very real shared traditions, and complex relationships between regions, between Britain and Ireland, and between the British Isles and mainland Europe.

In 1996, in the publication of the Neolithic Studies Group meeting on houses, Thomas (1996, 6) suggested that we ‘should think of the European Neolithic less as a unified and homogenous entity and more as a series of historical developments which are only loosely connected with each other’. This seems a useful place to start in considering the Neolithic of these islands. Clearly there are strong relationships and shared traditions, but we can see that differences are greater than used to be thought. We must explore the characteristics that suggest shared origins and traditions – for example long mounds, timber mortuary structures within them, plain round-bottomed pottery, the widespread distribution of henges – as well as those that suggest quite different approaches – the apparent absence of interrupted-ditch enclosures north of central Scotland, the vigorous early Neolithic round barrow traditions of Perthshire and Yorkshire, and regionally-constrained distributions of types of artefacts and monuments.

We are in the early stages of the exploration, but we believe the meeting, the proceedings of which form the basis of this volume, was a useful contribution to this important area of study.

Bibliography

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