Journal of Neolithic Archaeology
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Megalithic tombs and storied landscapes in Neolithic Ireland
Get PDFThis paper is concerned with the storied landscapes underlying the megalithic tradition of the Irish Neolithic. The importance of place is now well established as a significant factor in the distribution of megalithic tombs at a local level as well as the original source of material from which they were built. At one level those places could be seen as a backdrop to the megalithic tomb; at another they could be seen as the reason for its construction or an intrinsic element of the construction ritual. Here we are concerned with the Neolithic mythologies that might have given meaning to ancient landscapes. Although the specific mythical personalities and events through which the meaning of places were reinforced and transmitted from generation to generation in deep prehistory are now lost to us, we can nevertheless hope to identify the landscapes in which such mythical dramas were brought to life in the stories. The paper draws on analogies from Irish mythology and folklore, and examines a small number of Neolithic case studies in some detail
Transcendent phenomena in the Late Copper Age Boleráz/ Baden settlement uncovered at Balatonőszöd- Temetői dűlő: human and animal “depositions”
Get PDFAnimal and human remains were unearthed in 75 features at Balatonőszöd-Temetői dűlő, among them intramural burials and sacrificial pits. It became clear during the analysis that there was a spatial and chronological overlapping between the seemingly separate Boleráz and Baden settlement centres between 3300 and 3100 BC, which was true for the fi nd materials as well. Features with ceremonial paraphernalia, such as vessels came from the surroundings of the pits with animal and human skeletons and they together formed ritual areas of a ceremonial sequence composed of a series of rites
Burials and builders of Stonehenge: social identities in Late Neolithic and Chalcolithic Britain
Get PDFThe identity of the people who built Stonehenge has long been a mystery. Fifty years ago, archaeologists speculated that it was built by Mediterranean or Egyptian architects directing local barbarians. The results of current research indicate that the influences behind its architecture can all be traced to pre-existing British traditions of monument building in Wales and Wessex.Preliminary results of osteological research are demonstrating that, of the estimated 150 people buried at Stonehenge, the 64 that have been excavated were drawn from a restricted section of society. Whereas two of them were adult women and two or three were children, the remainder may have been adult males.The few grave goods found with these cremation burials suggest that these may have been individuals with political and religious authority. They were buried at Stonehenge in the period 3000–2300 cal BC and may have formed one or more dynasties of rulers.Stonehenge’s first stage of construction (3000–2920 cal BC) was at a time of growing unity in material culture across Britain, in terms of ceramic style, henge monuments and house forms. Its construction may have been designed to unify different regions of Britain, specifically the sarsen stone region of Wessex with the bluestone region of Wales.Stonehenge’s second stage of construction (2620–2480 cal BC),when the monument largely took the form that it has today, was associated with a large village at nearby Durrington Walls which was later monumentalized as a henge. Inspiration for Stonehenge’s stone architecture – shaped stones, lintels and mortice-and-tenon jointing – can be found in the indigenous timber architecture of Britain. Specifically, its form derives from the timber circles of Wessex and elsewhere in Britain, while the horseshoe arrangement of the trilithons derives from the D-shaped plans of timber public buildings excavated in Wales as well as at Durrington Walls and Stonehenge. In conclusion, Stonehenge can be understood as a monumental representation in stone of building styles normally built in timber – a meeting house for the ancestors
Innate and/or expressed identities: Their conceptualization through monumentality, funerary practices and grave goods? Some examples from the megalithic tradition of western France.
Get PDFThe notion of identity has sometimes been implicitly likened to methodology of classification, which applies to prehistorian’s work in order to better position the subject of his research in time and space. Concerning megalithism in Western France, a model of unilinear development has now prevailed for about fifteen years, drawing a parallel between the classification of architectures and what appeared to be new suggestions concerning the periodisation of material culture. This model struggles in accounting for the entire diversity of the observed facts. Therefore, one has to accept the idea of multiplicity of identities or of multifaceted identities, sometimes coexisting within the same place. A technological approach assumes that all material implementation realized by men – beyond functional constraints and specificities – bears a part of innate identity resulting from the manner in which the operational sequences, whether simple or complex, are set up. At the same time, all these implementations materialise a conceptual standard to which expressed identity values are often attributed. Amongst the numerous conceptual standards whose entire diversity we only just start to perceive in the megalithism of Western France, a very elongated trapeze-shaped plan lined by two lateral quarries is valorised. According to a general proposal hardly new in itself, this standard is not without recalling the plan of the Danubian house
Measuring distinction in the megalithic architecture of the Carnac region: from sign to material
Get PDFBarely two centuries after the appearance of the first archaeologically- visible elements that served to define the earliest Neolithic in the west of France around 4900 BC – that is, domestic buildings, pottery, a distinctive flint technology, and other aspects of material culture that reproduced the norms that had been established in the Paris Basin and on the middle Loire river – along the southern shores of Brittany there was a sudden and unexpected ‘accumulation of concepts’ among the hunter-gatherer-fisher communities who lived there. The emergence of an extremely inegalitarian political structure was expressed in terms of massive standing stones and colossal funerary mounds, architectural constructs that were unique in Europe at this time and which constituted the earliest permanent architecture in the region. These monuments were funerary and symbolic in nature, being associated with the most extraordinary accumulation of objects made from rare and exotic materials. Moreover, the representations of the world that appeared as engraved images on the standing stones constitute visible signs of a divided society.By tacking between two extremes, from symbol to material within the protean phenomenon that we call megalithism, this contribution sets out to capture a sense of the distinction that was being expressed by this élite – a distinction that did not just define inequality in that society, but also differentiated it from contemporary groups elsewhere and from its successors in southern Brittany
Periodisierung der Trichterbecher-Gesellschaften. Ein Arbeitsentwurf
Get PDFOld and new data from the Funnel Beaker societies have been collated to create a new chronological chart of regional developments. The comparison between Scandinavian and North Central European periodisations offers the possibility to identify different developments in a synchronized time frame
MegaForm – Ein Formalisierungssystem für die Analyse monumentaler Baustrukturen des Neolithikums im nördlichen Mitteleuropa
Get PDFMegaForm is a recording system for Neolithic megaliths in northern Central Europe and southern Scandinavia. It was created in the context of the Priority Program 1400 “Early Monumentality and Social Differentiation”. It aims at formalising the recording of architectural traits of megaliths, non-megalithic monuments and simple graves, focussing on single characteristics, not on complex types. Specific national traditions have resulted in different terminologies. MegaForm unites these into one overall recording system, a new standard for the recording and description of megaliths. In this article, the recording system is proposed and commented, and it is possible to download a suitable database system
RADON 2009.03 – Die Datenbank mitteleuropäischer 14C-Daten im neuen Gewand
Get PDFTen years have passed since the first version of RADON, a database for radiocarbondates of the central-european neolithic period has been developed. After a short retrospective the new version of RADON with GUI and added features is presented, focusing on a new aspect of the free accessible database: the introduction into the possibilities using VBA with MS Access
Der soziale Raum zur Zeit der Trichterbecherkultur – Aspekte der Landschaftsraumnutzung am Beispiel der Verbreitung von Siedlungen und Megalithanlagen in Nordwestseeland, Dänemark
Get PDFThe paper presents preliminary results from my ongoing research project with the title “Social Space during the Funnel Beaker culture. A landscape archaeological analysis of North- western Zealand, Denmark”. The aim of my study is to analyse the material dated to the Funnel Beaker culture from North-western Zealand typologically, chronologically and topographically, and to discuss it in the light of theoretical approaches to the structuring of space and the meaning of human-made and perceived surroundings. These surroundings, here called “social space”, contain “natural” as well as material and non-material “cultural” elements, which result from human interaction. The study concentrates on two aspects, which both focus on the notion of mobility: Firstly with the level of the “subject” (How do human beings move in a physical and a mental sense?), and secondly with the level of the “object” (How complex are objects’ movements?). These two aspects shall be discussed in connection with the finds from the Funnel Beaker culture from the study area, to investigate the shifting contexts that are enclosed in their material setting. In the course of the project the archaeological data is registered in a database, which can be connected to the GIS program Map.Info. The landscape of North-western Zealand, about 30 x 25 km big, varies with different kinds of coasts, inland-water, bogs, flat planes and mountain ridges (Table 1). It is rich in Funnel Beaker material, among others due to many archaeological campaigns in the area. Compared to other regions particularly many settlements, megalithic monuments and bog finds occur together (Figure 1 and Table 2). As a starting point for this preliminary analysis, the material has been divided in three phases, Early Neolithic I (EN I, ca. 3900–3500 BC), Early Neolithic II to Middel Neolithic II (EN II – MN II, ca. 3500–3000 BC) and Middel Neolithic III – Middle Neolithic V (MN III – V, ca. 3000–2800 BC), a division that also is used in related studies. Settlements and megalithic monuments (for the numbers of settlements see Figure 2 and 3, for number of megalithic types see Figure 4) and their spatial distribution have been discussed and compared for each chronological period. The spatial distribution of the settlements in EN I (the only non-megalithic long barrow is not mapped here) is related closely to big inland-water areas and to the coast. Spatially it stands in a Mesolithic tradition (Table 3). During EN II – MN II the number of settlements increases prominently, situated in the inland as well as at the coast, and the megalithic monuments occur in high numbers, spread over nearly the whole area (Table 4). In MN III – V the intensity of settlement decreases with locations in the same areas as in the foregoing period. An overview over the time periods represented on the individual settlements shows that most of the settlements only have been used during one period (Figure 5), though with a tendency for some more continuities between EN II – MN II and MN III – V. The overall development indicates that there must have been a profound change between EN I and EN II – MN II, with the erection of megalithic monuments and the “colonisation” of the inland, but that there also have been elements of continuity, which are, during the whole Funnel Beaker Culture, represented through the sites at the coast. The question is, how to interpret their continuous use: Do we see a splitting of society in two groups with a “traditional” group still using the places at the cost, or do the people that move into the inland, have a divided form of labour and still use the places occasionally/ seasonly as hunting and fishing stations? In any case, EN II – MN II seems, compared to the previous and the following period, like a period characterised through high mobility, in the sense of intra-cultural communication (between one group or between many groups within Funnel Beaker society) along with more advanced and complicated physical transport of heavy material
SDS – Systematische und digitale Erfassung von Steinartefakten (Arbeitsstand SDS 8.05)
Get PDFThe following contribution offers a recording system for stone artefacts. This compilation of existing systems from the Upper Paleolithic to the Neolithic should serve as a starting point for systematic and quantitative analysis with a uniform coding and standardized listing system of the conventional attributes recorded at lithic inventories. Therewith a valuable basis for comparative analysis and digital exchange of the data should be guaranteed