Gary Robinson

The Life and Times of a Chambered Tomb: The Results of Survey and Excavation at Blasthill Chambered Tomb, Kintyre, Western Scotland

Clyde cairns are a distinctive form of early Neolithic burial monument found in western Scotland. However, there have been no detailed investigations of these sites for many decades. Knowledge of early Neolithic monumentality in this region remains limited and reliant on parallels with better-known sequences in southern Britain and in Ireland. New research questions have recently arisen which explore the date of the construction of megalithic sites as well as the use and reuse of monuments over time. With these research questions in mind, this article presents the results of excavations at Blasthill chambered tomb in southern Kintyre, focusing on the use of this monument over a two thousand-year period. Excavations have suggested that this monument saw several key phases of construction and elaboration as well as more minor adjustments and depositions from the early Neolithic through into the Bronze Age. Both the architecture and material culture deposited within the monument suggest fluctuating relations with surrounding communities, most notably others in western Scotland and eastern Ireland.

From Machair to Mountains: Archaeological Survey and Excavation in South Uist. Edited by Michael Parker Pearson

timely volume, fleshing out a relatively sparse regional literature. Paula Gardiner’s paper takes a somewhat north Somerset-centric approach to Mesolithic hunter-gatherer landscapes and highlights the paucity of quality data across the whole peninsular. Alison Sheridan contextualizes development in the Neolithic of the south-western part of Britain against wider northern French contexts. A more reflective and discursive paper by Tony Blackman examines the Bodmin Moor phenomenon of pseudo-quoits and propped stones, the sorts of seemingly naturalistic structures clearly visible on sites such as Rough Tor. Ceramic evidence is examined for the late Neolithic by Jodie Lewis and David Mullin, and for the Early Bronze Age by Andy Jones who highlights its regional flavour. Paul Bonnington introduces us to multiple cremation burials in the earlier Bronze Age, and Andrew Fleming revisits the Bronze Age field systems or ‘reaves’ of Dartmoor. The latter is a well-written and lively paper which engages in recent theoretical and anthropological work and provides much food for thought. Jacqueline Nowakowski’s extensive paper on the biographies of Bronze Age round houses on Cornwall is similarly grounded in recent theoretical debate. Griffith and Wilkes’ con tribu tion on recent work on Devon hillforts is a timely synthesis of a very important topic, high lighting the great value of aerial photography in rethinking the nature and distribution of these sites, which tend to be problematic due to relatively sparse dating evidence and excavation strategies. Moving into the historic period, Anna Tyacke, Justine Bailey and Sarnia Butcher highlight the importance of the Portable Antiquities Scheme in forcing us to re-evaluate orthodox thinking on the distribution of diagnostic artefact types, here namely Romano-British brooches. Allied to archaeo-metallurgical analysis, it is clear that some of these very distinctive forms of material culture may have been manufactured in the far west of Cornwall. This conclusion forces us to rethink elements of the relationship between Cornwall and the rest of southern Britain in this period. Carl Thorpe’s paper on the early medieval native pottery of Cornwall, such as Gwithian-style wares or grass-marked pottery, brings much of Charles Thomas’ early work up-to-date, and sets the agenda for future work. Peter Herring’s chapter on ethnic identity and landscape from the Cornish perspec tive is ultimately not as convincing as it could be as it fails to engage in great depth with recent theoretical approaches to identity. Two brief personal memoirs and a full bibliography of Quinnell’s writing complete the book. This collection is, on the whole, an interesting, accessible and informative set of papers, as well as a useful update on many aspects of archaeological research in Cornwall, and to a lesser extent, Devon. Inevitably there is some unevenness, and lack of balance (perhaps too much earlier prehis toric emphasis when there is scope in particular for highlighting recent work in the Romano-British and early medieval periods) and whilst the emphasis on a distinctive regionality is important, some wider overall context, as demonstrated in Fleming’s paper, would be welcome. There is a need to move beyond the dry data-led synthesis, and in a sense this collection may fall short in that regard. There is scope here to push conceptual boundaries more imaginatively. There are also editorial glitches; bibliographic conventions are not always consistent or strictly adhered to; some typo graphical errors have crept in (e.g. p. 90) and to actually misspell the dedicatee’s name in the photo graphic caption on the frontispiece is surely a cardinal error which should be avoided at all costs in any Festschrift. Niall Finneran