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Stone Age long barrows housed living as well as dead

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Stone Age long barrows housed living as well as dead
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... ?full=true
08 June 2012 by Julian Thomas

Did Neolithic people really use earthen long barrows as cemeteries, or did the structures have a living purpose?

THE Neolithic era, when humans began to grow crops and domesticate animals, is generally thought to have its origins some 8000 years ago in the Middle East and spread across Europe to the British Isles. Exactly when it "arrived" in Britain, however, has been the subject of a lively but unresolved debate. This revolves around the question of whether innovations such as domesticating plants and animals, and making pots, polished stone tools and monuments were introduced from the continent by a migrating population - or adopted by indigenous hunter-gatherers.

Recently, these debates have been further enlivened by the emergence of a more precise chronology for the period, based on research by Alasdair Whittle and Frances Healy at Cardiff University, UK, and Alex Bayliss at English Heritage. This provides better radiometric dating and applies Bayesian statistical modelling to radiocarbon dates.

At last, there is a decent timetable stretching from the first glimmerings of a Neolithic presence after 4100 BC to the construction of large enclosed sites used for gatherings in 3700 BC and beyond. The emerging picture is of a process of "Neolithisation" beginning in the south-east corner of England, and spreading north and west over three centuries or more.

This fine-grained chronology has also produced some challenges to our views of the Neolithic - one of the most important of which concerns houses. Neolithic archaeology has been bedevilled by a failure to find settlement sites, prompting the suggestion that relatively mobile social groups may have relied on ephemeral dwelling structures. A possible answer was initially thought to lie in the recent discovery of large rectilinear timber buildings in both the UK and Ireland. Over 80 of these "houses" are now known in Ireland, many of them revealed by excavations ahead of millennium infrastructure projects. On the UK mainland, only a dozen or so structures are known, but they tend to be much larger.

Staggeringly, the Bayesian analysis of the available dates for the Irish buildings suggests they were all built in a few years, perhaps in as little as 55 to 85 years. In the UK, the large halls seem to have been constructed a generation or two after the appearance of Neolithic artefacts. The buildings in Scotland are considerably later than those in southern England.

While southern halls like White Horse Stone in Aylesford, Kent, are built from light timbers and owe their inspiration to continental structures, the Scottish halls used massive posts, had elaborate internal architecture involving screens, and do not seem to have equivalent structures in Europe. Interestingly, both the hall at Warren Field in Aberdeenshire and that at Claish, Stirling, contained pairs of huge non-functional posts set along the axis of the building, which appear to have been dug out and removed before the structures were deliberately burned down.

The building of houses and halls seems not to have characterised the whole of the early Neolithic, but was a phase communities went through. The buildings were not replaced, and were often used for a only a short while before being burned by their occupants, a common practice across Europe. As the process moved north, the houses became more elaborate and monumental, and less obviously suitable as conventional dwellings - although they may have been occupied for some or all of the time.

How do we explain this? One helpful idea comes from French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Studying Native American societies, Lévi-Strauss found groups for whom the expected rules of kinship and descent appeared not to apply. For these communities, the "house" referred to both a physical building and to a social entity - a group of people who collectively owned a body of property and claimed membership of a household attached to a dwelling structure.

While individual members come and go, the house provides an enduring physical core that facilitates transmission of wealth and positions of authority down the generations. A "house society" is a community of shared interest, whose bounded character enables it to monopolise goods and titles. Lévi-Strauss imagined this society as a stage between tribal groups and ranked societies. But since his examples range from longhouse societies in south-east Asia to medieval Europe's great "houses", such as those of Burgundy and Artois, others see the house as an institution existing in different kinds of societies.

Yet what these societies do share is that "housiness" appears to emerge at times of deep socio-economic transformation. For all these groups, the construction of the physical house is of great symbolic importance, for it represents the material manifestation of the group's foundation. Two widespread features reflect this: an emphasis on the insertion of posts into the ground as a moment of initiation, and the incorporation of the remains of the founding ancestors of the household into the building, whether buried beneath the floor or displayed as relics.

There are obvious reasons why indigenous groups making the transition towards the Neolithic might have developed into house societies. Domesticated animals, particularly cattle, were an attractive substitute for wild ungulates, because they could be controlled and accumulated as wealth. For most hunter-gatherers, sharing food and aid represents a means of coping with risk and scarcity. The formation of exclusive house societies allowed such groups to throw off these imperatives and begin to accumulate property, which both ensured their survival and let them garner prestige through feasting and gift-giving.

Yet the practice of house-building was short-lived. As timber halls went out of use, a variety of funerary monuments sprang up. And here the new chronology of the Neolithic yields another surprise. Britain's chambered tombs and earthen long barrows have been seen as formal disposal areas, cemeteries used by communities over centuries. But there has been disagreement over whether the remains came from communities with equal access to the facility or were the bones of a small elite. The new dating suggests the funerary use of many of the long mounds and cairns of southern England may have been limited to one or two generations, or even a decade, and that they didn't bury their dead there over generations. Only the founding ancestors were required to give a monument legitimacy.

For years, archaeologists have pointed to the similarity between these long mounds and the timber houses, with their trapezoidal form, entrances at one end and flanking ditches. Yet this discussion has been framed in terms of the construction of "houses of the dead", apart from the living. I propose a radical alternative: these structures were houses, in Lévi-Strauss's sense, representing the durable, physical focuses for house societies, and containing the remains of the founding generation of ancestors as testimony to the group's history.

One recurring feature of the earthen long barrows of southern England bears witness to this function: like the Scottish halls, the timber chambers that contained the remains of the dead were framed by a pair of massive wooden uprights, set on the axis of the mound. These were often composed of a single split oak trunk, with the flat sides set on the inside. This symbolically expressed both the moment of initiation of the community and its boundedness - within a single entity.

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This essay is based on a paper given by Julian Thomas at a conference in April entitled "Death shall have no dominion: the archaeology of mortality and immortality" at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge, UK. Thomas is professor of archaeology in the School of Arts, Histories and Culture at the University of Manchester, UK


From issue 2867 of New Scientist magazine, page 32-33.
 
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