Lesley McFadyen

Building for the Dead: Events, Processes and Changing Worldviews from the Thirty-eighth to the Thirty-fourth Centuries cal. BC in Southern Britain

Our final paper in this series reasserts the importance of sequence. Stressing that long barrows, long cairns and associated structures do not appear to have begun before the thirty-eighth century cal. bc in southern Britain, we give estimates for the relative order of construction and use of the five monuments analysed in this programme. The active histories of monuments appear often to be short, and the numbers in use at any one time may have been relatively low; we discuss time in terms of generations and individual lifespans. The dominant mortuary rite may have been the deposition of articulated remains (though there is much diversity); older or ancestral remains are rarely documented, though reference may have been made to ancestors in other ways, not least through architectural style and notions of the past. We relate these results not only to trajectories of monument development, but also to two models of development in the first centuries of the southern British Neolithic as a whole. In the first, monuments emerge as symptomatic of preeminent groups; in the second model, monuments are put in a more gradualist and episodic timescale and related to changing kinds of self-consciousness (involving senses of self, relations with animals and nature, perceptions of the body, awareness of mortality and attitudes to the past). Both more distant and more recent and familiar possible sources of inspiration for monumentalization are considered, and the diversity of situations in which mounds were constructed is stressed. More detailed Neolithic histories can now begin to be written.

Animals and Cotswold-Severn long-barrows: a re-examination.

In this paper new collaborative research is presented following a re-examination of the faunal remains and architectural evidence from a selected number of Cotswold-Severn long barrow sites. Five different loci of deposition are considered: ‘pre-barrow’ contexts; the chambers; the superstructure of the barrow and the ditches; the forecourt; and blocking material. These spatial locations were chosen following research that has demonstrated that these areas are likely to represent different temporal, as well as spatial, patterns of activity. While the faunal remains are diverse in character, common themes observed at the sites include: the deposition of complete or partial remains of foetal and young animals within chambers; the use of teeth and cranial elements within blocking material; and, within each temporal context, the absence of clear evidence for feasting and the importance of cattle, and the small but constant inclusion of wild mammals. This complexity of practice has the potential to mature our thinking regarding the nature of human–animal relationships within the early Neolithic of Britain and provide a secure foundation of evidence for subsequent interpretations.

Mobile Spaces of Mesolithic Britain

ABSTRACT This article examines how spaces were being made during the Mesolithic of Britain. Rather than focus upon material culture and landscape as separate analytical constructs, it demonstrates instead how they intersect and in so doing give rise to an understanding of space that is mobile and rendered through force. In investigating this the author asks whether objects not carried around by the occupants of Mesolithic Britain should be regarded as discarded (as has traditionally been the case), or should be seen as an ongoing and active component of how people make themselves at home. She goes on to suggest that people left things behind in the Mesolithic in order to create the possibility for future connections, making these objects anything but ‘homeless’.

House, Household, Home

This chapter discusses the contributions of the volume in terms of the problem of ‘house as object’. It argues for an archaeological architecture that undoes the ‘house as object’ in three important ways—there is an approach that extends architectural history into material culture studies, another that explores the dimensions of architectural space as a part of landscape, and a final one that understands the value of allowing time and use to add meaning to architecture.