The Times of Their Lives

Hunting History in the Archaeology of Neolithic Europe

Alasdair Whittle

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781785706691
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia europea

The hunt is on for the most detailed histories of people in the remote past that we can achieve. We can now routinely, through Bayesian modelling of radiocarbon dates, construct much more precise chronologies than previously, down to the scales of lifetimes and generations, and even on occasion of decades. Better timing opens estimates of duration and the evaluation of the tempo of change. Rather than the conventional default perspective of generally slow change and much continuity, in blocks of time a couple of centuries long or more, we can now examine sequences that are often much more dynamic, quicker-changing, and from time to time more interrupted and punctuated than we had previously imagined. We can now write much more precise and ambitious narratives about the actions, decisions and choices of past people; the pre- can and should come out of prehistory. Despite the absence of written records, such narratives can be aligned much more closely with those of history and its concerns with the specific and the particular, and can serve to rid archaeology of its addictions to generalization and fuzzy chronology.Coming out of a recent major project funded by the European Research Council, and with the experience of Gathering Time (Oxbow Books 2011) also behind it, The Times of their Lives sets out this case. It considers the varying timescales of archaeology, history and anthropology, and the construction of precise chronologies. It examines the reach of precision in a series of case studies across Neolithic Europe to do with big themes of settlement, monumentality and materiality through the sixth to third millennia cal BC. It goes on to consider the implications of much more precise chronologies for narratives of social differentiation and change through the Neolithic sequence, and reflects on how to combine the varying timescales presented by turning points in the long term, by the slow time of daily life, subsistence practices and population growth, and by lifetime and generational developments. It ends by looking ahead to a future archaeology, exploiting the best of archaeological science, which can write precise and detailed narratives for the people of early history. Though focused on the European Neolithic, The Times of their Lives sets a challenge for archaeology as a whole.

Chapter 1

Hunting history

The importance of history

If history requires narrative, it matters who tells the stories, and how. Several significant discussions of this, from Eric Wolf’s Europe and the people without history (1982), Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the past: power and the production of history (1995) and Edward Said’s Orientalism (1995), to Jack Goody’s The theft of history (2006), agree that when people are denied their history, they can be rendered powerless. ‘History reveals itself only through the production of specific narratives’, as Trouillot puts it (1995, 25), and control of sources, archives, narrative and reflection is paramount (Trouillot 1995, 26). The theme has been continued in a recent collection of archaeological and anthropological papers on early Africa (Schmidt and Mrozowski 2014), whose title, The death of prehistory, also neatly evokes the aim of my book. In being habituated to write about the past, ‘prehistoric’ people of Europe and elsewhere in a very generalised, and frequently timeless, kind of way, I will argue that archaeologists have imposed a similar kind of denial of history, often unthinkingly. The aim of my book is to show how, using case studies from the European Neolithic period, we should try to write much more detailed narratives about people in the remote past of several thousand years ago. In so doing, we can attempt to take the pre- out of prehistory, and restore to centre-stage a sense of past people’s actions, choices and decisions.

My reaction to the dominant, generalising and rather distancing kind of writing in archaeology comes because for most regions and for most sequences around the world, prehistorians have until recently only been able to assign the past people whom they study to more or less imprecise times (Bayliss et al. 2016). Our less than perfect chronologies come from the way in which time is measured and controlled (or thought to be), normally through an uneven combination of site stratigraphies, ordering of the material through typology and in some regional traditions through seriation, and radiocarbon dating. The default, conventional approach to the use and interpretation of radiocarbon dates has essentially relied on just looking at them: the visual inspection of calibrated dates, or ‘eyeballing’. A radiocarbon sample from a few thousand years ago will calibrate to a date spanning 100–200 years (at two standard deviations); a group of such samples will not produce identical calibrated dates, even when they derive from the same event (the demise of a tree, the killing of a cow, or the death of a person) and eyeballing a graph of such dates has tended to include the extremes of the timespan indicated (Bayliss et al. 2016). Prehistorians and other archaeologists regularly exaggerate the duration of a given phenomenon as well as accepting the relative imprecision of its dating; without formal constraint, things will often appear to have started earlier, lasted longer, and ended later than was the case in reality (Bayliss et al. 2007). By way of contrast, dendrochronology can provide dates precise to a calendar year and even to a season within a given year, but in the European context, the waterlogged conditions in which wood is preserved are largely confined to the Neolithic and Bronze Age settlements on the fringes of the Alps – the Alpine foreland (Menotti 2004). These results are hugely important, as I will explore in several chapters in this book, but while they are very significant in helping to underpin and provide cross-checks for the more traditionally constructed chronologies in regions around them, they have not so far had much impact on the kinds of narratives in general which we choose to write about Neolithic Europe. (I should make it clear from the outset that my use of the label ‘Neolithic Europe’ includes what many scholars have called the Copper Age; I will discuss this later on.)

The best way out of this situation, it is now clear, lies in the rigorous application of Bayesian chronological frameworks for the interpretation of radiocarbon dates, in combination with the highest standards in sample selection and evaluation, critical examination of context and stratigraphy, and refinement of the ordering of associated material through typology and where possible seriation. The Bayesian approach, as I will set out briefly but in more detail in Chapter 3, combines the distributions of probability which a group of radiocarbon dates represents with existing knowledge, for example of site stratigraphy, contexts, association and sample taphonomy (things which, to their credit, archaeologists are often very good at), to produce revised date estimates; since the inevitable scatter of radiocarbon dates around a given phenomenon has been formally constrained, these revised date estimates are often much more precise than the initial probability distributions. If they do the right things – which they frequently fail to do – archaeologists in general and prehistorians in particular do not have to confine themselves any longer to the long term, and an imprecisely estimated long term at that, which has often been seen as the defining currency of the discipline. So this book has two goals. I want to explore the challenges of creating much more detailed sequences for the long span of the Neolithic in Europe, and I want to think about the consequences of finer-resolution narratives for our understanding of the lives of past people. Alongside the long term, or perhaps better, woven into it, we can think of a spectrum of histories at varying temporal scales, from the enduring grasp of traditions or the reach of social memory, covering one, two or more centuries, down to lifetimes and generations, measurable in decades. Whether we can get to even more precise chronologies, to eventful horizons and even events, is open to debate, a question which will surface several times in the chapters that follow.

Much is therefore open to change in the way we can write about the archaeological past, and how we can situate archaeological narrative. I believe that the consequences are potentially revolutionary, for practically every regional sequence across Neolithic Europe as a whole. Perhaps it helps to put this bold claim in context by reflecting on the development of my own involvement in the application of Bayesian chronological modelling.

Histories of the Dead, and Gathering Time

Looking back at my earlier work, I was always interested in the challenge of creating chronologies and getting things in the right order (Whittle 1985; 1988, chapter 2). When I excavated the causewayed enclosure of Windmill Hill, Wiltshire, in southern England, in 1988, however, the samples which I submitted for radiocarbon dating (Whittle 1993; Whittle et al. 1999) left much to be desired by modern standards, since the disarticulated bones in question could have been residual, and therefore older than the contexts in which they were deposited or otherwise ended up. By around 2000, I was working with Michael Wysocki on a project on the human bone from early Neolithic contexts in southern Britain, principally long barrows and long cairns. We had been struggling to win funding for radiocarbon dating, but were put in touch with Alex Bayliss, then of English Heritage (now Historic England), with whose support we were able to obtain a large set of dates – some 160 – for five long barrows. It was not the numbers of dates that changed everything, however, but rather their inclusion in rigorously constructed Bayesian models. The method had been promoted not long before, including by Caitlin Buck who had worked briefly in our Cardiff department (Buck et al. 1996), and one of the first major applications had already been made, to the chronology of Stonehenge (Bayliss et al. 1997). Here was a remarkable set of results (Bayliss and Whittle 2007). Rather than belonging to an ill-defined early Neolithic of several centuries’ duration, none of the long barrows predated the 38th century cal BC, and the main use of four of the five long barrows ended in the latter part of the 37th century cal BC. That was clearly not the whole span of such constructions, since the first phase of Wayland’s Smithy probably started just after 3600 cal BC, with its small mound probably constructed in the late 36th to early 35th century cal BC, and its second phase, with an architecture remarkably similar to that of 37th-century West Kennet, in the middle to later part of the 35th century cal BC. The first phase of depositions of human remains at Wayland’s Smithy was probably of very short duration, and three of the other four long barrows were, according to the models, in primary use for only one to three generations (taking 25 years as a generation, discussed in more detail in Chapter 2), with Ascott-under-Wychwood the longest-lasting, probably over three to five generations (Bayliss and Whittle 2007). Suddenly we were talking not just about centuries but parts of centuries and even decades. We were being offered a first glimpse from this obviously small sample of how things might have their own very specific times. At a period in British Neolithic studies at least when two of the main characteristics of ‘monuments’, including long barrows, were seen to be their drawn-out processes of construction and their subsequent ability to endure for long periods of time, we had been given a revealing insight into how things could have happened much more quickly than we had previously imagined possible.

Fig. 1.1: The sequence of construction at the Windmill Hill causewayed enclosure and West Kennet long barrow in the 37th century cal BC. After Whittle et al. (2011). Background image by kind permission of Josh Pollard.

The surprises continued. By 2003, Alex and I, joined by Frances Healy, who had been working on the publication of Hambledon Hill with its excavator Roger Mercer, were lucky enough to gain major funding for a much more ambitious programme of dating of the early Neolithic causewayed enclosures of southern Britain and Ireland.1 Mainly distributed across southern Britain, these sites had long attracted attention and excavations had often produced a wealth of material from their ditches, much of it suitable for dating. Some claims had been made for very early dating within the British Neolithic (at the time that meant around or soon after 4000 cal BC), but many researchers were probably again content to assign them to the broad span of several centuries which defined the British early Neolithic, though there were some perceptive suggestions of a more specific date within that span (Cleal 2004; Bradley 2007). By combining in our many models over 400 new results from carefully selected samples with over 400 existing radiocarbon dates from nearly 40 such enclosures, we were able to show that causewayed enclosures were probably first constructed in the last decades of the 38th century cal BC, just before 3700 cal BC, and probably appeared from east to west across southern Britain, to reach a peak in numbers in the latter part of the 37th century cal BC; after a lull, new constructions resumed in the early 36th century cal BC, to fall right away by the middle of that century (Whittle et al. 2011).

Fig. 1.2: Model for the spread of Neolithic things and practices at the start of the Neolithic in Britain and Ireland. After Whittle et al. (2011).

This much bigger set of results could be joined to those for long barrows and other kinds of monument. It now looked as though causewayed enclosures first appeared some time after long barrows, perhaps getting on for a century later, or, judging by the early dating of the Coldrum monument in Kent (Whittle et al. 2011, chapters 7 and 14; Wysocki et al. 2013) substantially later; the demise of four of our sample of five well dated long barrows coincided with the end of the first surge in enclosure construction, in the decades around 3625 cal BC; and the final ending of new enclosure constructions appeared to coincide with the emergence of the first, very different cursus monuments. Duration again came to the fore as an issue of key significance. Although the primary use of some enclosures lasted for some three centuries, as had long been suspected on the basis of ditch stratigraphies and the material they contained – Hambledon Hill, Dorset, had already been shown to be an example of this durability (Mercer and Healy 2008) – others proved to be in shorter use, for not much more than a century, and some to have been probably very short-lived indeed. Construction again appeared be a much swifter affair than previously imagined, and the examples of the three circuits of the Windmill Hill enclosure and the West Kennet long barrow were shown to be successive and inter-woven over several generations in the middle part of the 37th century cal BC (Fig. 1.1).

By modelling some 1400 existing dates for early Neolithic contexts across southern Britain, Ireland and Scotland south of the Great Glen (see also Griffiths 2014), we were also able to put long barrows and enclosures into a much wider and more secure (though still of course provisional) context. Debate on the nature of the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition had been (and continues to be) intense, but most protagonists, whether supporters of colonisation or indigenous transformation, had been using an informal estimate of around 4000 cal BC as the horizon of change. Our models suggested a very different picture, with the first Neolithic ‘things and practices’ (as we called it) probably appearing in the area of the Greater Thames estuary in southeast England in the 41st century cal BC, to spread again east to west, gradually at first and accelerating with time, to encompass most of Britain and Ireland by the 38th century cal BC (Fig. 1.2). Although the modelling did throw up one major problem, the potentially early dating of the enclosure of Magheraboy just outside Sligo in western Ireland, overall a coherent sequence emerged: of early, small-scale beginnings in the south-east, an accelerating spread to the north and west, and the successive introductions of places and constructions for collective burial and commemoration, and then larger-scale assembly. With better (though for barrows and the wider early Neolithic context, still far from perfect) timing, also came a sense of tempo, and the pace and nature of change.

Old questions could now be seen in a new light. Perhaps we could relate beginnings in the south-east to the offshoot of major changes in settlement on the immediately adjacent continent; perhaps initial small-scale colonisation was combined with subsequent transformation of indigenous communities in Britain; perhaps Ireland could be seen as inextricably enmeshed in this process; and perhaps the increasing tempo of change requires a competitive dynamic in social relations (Whittle et al. 2011, chapter 15; see Chapter 5 for further discussion). Why, although we know for sure that the building of very similar enclosures goes back before 4000 cal BC on the adjacent continent, did it take some three centuries of development before people chose to replicate the idea in southern Britain? Whatever the answers, we were now asking much more specific questions of a much more detailed sequence. From that process, I argue, we were creating narrative, full of potential links, motives, agency and plot (Ricoeur 1980; 1984). Whatever the many remaining uncertainties, I believe that we were beginning to write a much more specific kind of history than previously possible, if history is defined as the telling of true stories, the interpretation...