Mike Parker Pearson

The age of Stonehenge

Stonehenge is the icon of British prehistory, and continues to inspire ingenious investigations and interpretations. A current campaign of research, being waged by probably the strongest archaeological team ever assembled, is focused not just on the monument, but on its landscape, its hinterland and the monuments within it. The campaign is still in progress, but the story so far is well worth reporting. Revisiting records of 100 years ago the authors demonstrate that the ambiguous dating of the trilithons, the grand centrepiece of Stonehenge, was based on samples taken from the wrong context, and can now be settled at 2600-2400 cal BC. This means that the trilithons are contemporary with Durrington Walls, near neighbour and Britains largest henge monument. These two monuments, different but complementary, now predate the earliest Beaker burials in Britain – including the famous Amesbury Archer and Boscombe Bowmen, but may already have been receiving Beaker pottery. All this contributes to a new vision of massive monumental development in a period of high European intellectual mobility….

Evidence for mummification in Bronze Age Britain

Ancient Egyptians are thought to have been the only people in the Old World who were practising mummification in the Bronze Age (c. 2200-700 BC). But now a remarkable series of finds from a remote Scottish island indicates that Ancient Britons were performing similar, if less elaborate, practices of bodily preservation. Evidence of mummification is usually limited to a narrow range of arid or frozen environments which are conducive to soft tissue preservation. Mike Parker Pearson and his team show that a combination of microstructural, contextual and AMS 14 C analysis of bone allows the identification of mummification in more temperate and wetter climates where soft tissues and fabrics do not normally survive. Skeletons from Cladh Hallan on South Uist, Western Isles, Scotland were buried several hundred years after death, and the skeletons provide evidence of post mortem manipulation of body parts. Perhaps these practices were widespread in mainland Britain during the Bronze Age.

Materializing Stonehenge - The Stonehenge Riverside Project and new discoveries

This article reviews recent interpretations of Stonehenge in terms of contrasting uses of stone and timber in the mid-3rd millennium BC. It explores the relationship of this enigmatic monument with circles of wood at nearby Durrington Walls and Woodhenge, establishing how these various monuments might have been integrated into a single scheme in which these remarkable structures were linked by artificial avenues and the natural feature of the River Avon. It also investigates the ways in which substances other than wood and stone – turf, earth, chalk and wood ash – may also have had significance for ideas and practices of transformation involving the living and the dead. The results of excavations and fieldwork in 2004 and 2005 are also summarized.

Detecting milk proteins in ancient pots.

Deciding whether to farm cattle for milk or beef was just as complex in the past as it is today. Compared with meat production, dairying is a high-input, high-output, high-risk operation indicative of an intensive, sophisticated economy, but this practice is notoriously difficult to demonstrate in the archaeological record. Here we provide evidence for the presence of milk proteins preserved in prehistoric vessels, which to our knowledge have not been detected before. This finding resolves the controversy that has surrounded dairying on the Scottish Atlantic coast during the Iron Age and indicates that farming by the early inhabitants of this harsh, marginal environment was surprisingly well developed.

Who was buried at Stonehenge

Stonehenge continues to surprise us. In this new study of the twentieth-century excavations, together with the precise radiocarbon dating that is now possible, the authors propose that the site started life in the early third millennium cal BC as a cremation cemetery within a circle of upright bluestones. Britains most famous monument may therefore have been founded as the burial place of a leading family, possibly from Wales.

Food, Sex and Death: Cosmologies in the British Iron Age with Particular Reference to East Yorkshire

The British Iron Age had an enduring set of traditions involving the east– west axis of the suns path, the sunwise progression of movement and the classification of animals. Although these traditions were manifested regionally in slightly different ways and were modified, contested and restructured during the Iron Age, they provide us with a key to unlock aspects of the symbolism and practices of daily life. The significance of westerly orientations and of pigs in embodying and expressing associations of high status and other social differences were principal features of a strongly hierarchical society whose social differences were otherwise largely muted in terms of material culture distinctions. The cemeteries of East Yorkshire provide a detailed insight into the ordering of these social differences which were, even then, only rarely expressed through grave goods and mortuary elaboration. The burials of the Yorkshire elite are suggestive of a conception of sacred leadership or kingship, which included the symbolic spearing of certain individuals. Animal offerings were used in the structuring of social differences, with pig portions and sheep bones marking thedead of elite and commoner groups respectively.

Archaeology: Detecting milk proteins in ancient pots

Deciding whether to farm cattle for milk or beef was just as complex in the past as it is today. Compared with meat production, dairying is a high-input, high-output, high-risk operation indicative of an intensive, sophisticated economy, but this practice is notoriously difficult to demonstrate in the archaeological record. Here we provide evidence for the presence of milk proteins preserved in prehistoric vessels, which to our knowledge have not been detected before. This finding resolves the controversy that has surrounded dairying on the Scottish Atlantic coast during the Iron Age and indicates that farming by the early inhabitants of this harsh, marginal environment was surprisingly well developed.

Brochs and Iron Age society: a reappraisal

The brochs, great stone towers of Iron Age Scotland, are famously puzzling. Who inhabited these strongholds (if habitations they were)? New fieldwork at the broch of Dun Vulan, on South Uist in the Western Isles, prompts reappraisal of the geographical and social context of the brochs, by developing untapped sources of social evidence.

Isotopic analysis of faunal material from South Uist, Western Isles, Scotland

Abstract This paper reports on the results from stable isotope analysis of faunal bone collagen from a number of Iron Age and later sites on the island of South Uist, in the Western Isles, Scotland. This preliminary investigation into the isotopic signatures of the fauna is part of a larger project to model the interaction between humans, animals, and the broader environment in the Western Isles. The results demonstrate that the island fauna data fall within the range of expected results for the UK, with the terrestrial herbivorous diets of cattle and sheep confirmed. The isotopic composition for pigs suggests that some of these animals had an omnivorous diet, whilst a single red deer value might be suggestive of the consumption of marine foods, such as by grazing on seaweed. However, further analysis is needed in order to verify this anomalous isotopic ratio.

Close encounters of the worst kind: Malagasy resistance and colonial disasters in Southern Madagascar

The arrival of Europeans on the southern coasts of Madagascar in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries had profound if unusual consequences for indigenous societies. Certain of these, the Tandroy, Karembola and Mahafaly peoples, actively shunned contact and trade with the outsiders, although they imported large numbers of trade guns. The historical evidence indicates, however, that these slave-based societies did not provide substantial numbers of slaves to the Europeans. Descriptions of their isolation and endemic warfare can be matched by archaeological evidence for major discontinuities in the settlement patterns of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, when settlements in the river valleys were abandoned for defensive locations in the waterless southern plain. Whilst warfare may have been a feature of the expanding polities in the sixteenth century and later, it was undoubtedly exacerbated by the arrival of French troops and guns in the seventeenth century. The two European trading/colonial interventions in the south, at St Augustine and at Fort Dauphin, were unsuccessful not only because of their involvement in this warfare but also because colonists did not fully understand the central position of women within trading networks and political alliances.