Richard Bradley. The Past in Prehistoric Societies.

Lane, Paul

xiv + 171 pages, 54 figures, 10 tables. 2002. London and New York: Routledge; 0-415-27627-6 hardback, 0-415-27628-4 paperback.

In this brief, but elegantly written and highly readable book, Richard Bradley returns to a set of themes that have fascinated him for many years. Specifically, his concerns focus around different conceptions of time held by ancient societies, the re-use of ancient monuments and artefacts at different times in the past and the relationships that link these two sets of issues. Bradley's key points are that the physical evidence for the re-use of monuments, structures and objects that archaeologists routinely observe and record; can provide insights into the conceptions of time held by ancient societies and the social significance that `the Past' had for these communities. In turn, such ideas about the past in the past, Bradley argues, will have had significant and variable consequences on the content and form of the archaeological traces that were left for future generations. Taken to its logical conclusion, this argument implies that the way ancient societies understood the past and related to ancient physical remains had a direct bearing on the composition of their specific archaeological manifestation, and thus also on how they are understood by contemporary archaeologists. These are not completely new ideas, but they are raised and discussed here in a way which raises profound questions as to how archaeologists might study and understand the plurality of times past.

Bradley's introduction maps out the main theoretical orientation of his study, drawing in particular on work by Gell on social categorisations of time and Connerton on how societies remember. As Gell argued, ways of thinking about time fall into two broad categories one being the experiential and culturally specific ways all societies have of understanding the relationships between past, present, and future; the other being the more representational and universalising method of locating events as being either `before' or `after' a specific moment, as occurs with calendrical dating. Following Gell, Bradley emphasises that the two schemes coexist side by side, rather than as alternatives, the latter providing an objective chronological sequence of events while the former offers an interpretative framework and commentary on how past, present and future are articulated. Whereas scientific dating methods, historical documents and oral sources provide the bases for objective, linear chronologies, relational understandings of time are far harder to access when dealing with archaeological materials. Here, Bradley draws inspiration from Connerton's suggestion that social memory is sustained through a combination of inscriptive techniques, such as writing and monument building, and bodily practices or `incorporation'. The latter, like riding a bike or knowing how to coil-build pottery are taught and learned through practice, and remembered intuitively through the medium of the body. What is significant, however, is that both can leave durable and tangible products, and assessment of their variable importance in different contexts can provide evidence for the relative significance given in the past to preserving, abandoning and/or inventing traditions.

In Chapters 2-4, Bradley develops these ideas through a series of examples based on the analysis of Neolithic to pre-Roman Iron Age contexts from northern and western Europe. In Chapter 2, Bradley examines the relationship between monuments and origin myths, taking as his examples the contrast between Linearbandkeramic (LBK) and Cardial Ware Neolithic traditions. In the former, social memory of its SE European origins seems to have been maintained through the deliberate NW-SE orientation of longhouses, the long-distance exchange of Spondylus shell and, ultimately, the `invention' of the long barrow burial mound. In the latter tradition, especially in its manifestation in NW France, the development of passage graves created a different relationship between the dead and the living since, unlike the long barrow, these structures allowed the dead to be visited. Another common feature of the passage-grave zone is the evidence for re-use and deliberate destruction of decorated menhirs and stone plaques. In contrast to the LBK idealised memorialisation of the past through physical structures, Bradley sees these latter practices as an example of `remembering by forgetting', comparable to the mortuary ritual known as malangan practised by inhabitants of New Ireland.

In Chapter 3, Bradley's attention turns towards concerns of prehistoric populations with their more immediate, rather than distant, past, as illustrated by such things as the rebuilding of houses, and the positioning of cairns and field boundaries. Again, contrasts and similarities can be observed in the archaeological record from NW Europe. At the Middle and Later Bronze Age site of Elp, in the Netherlands, for instance, the complex structural sequence of house building and burial suggests that throughout the long years of occupation the past history had a strong bearing on the way in which each phase was laid out. The manner in which this occurred suggests the active memory of earlier settlement layouts and grave orientations, rather than simply a passive response to physical impediments or opportunities. In Chapter 4, the focus is on physical evidence for conceptions of the future, rather than on the influences of the past. Drawing on recent work in Scotland, for instance, Bradley illustrates how the initial Neolithic timber circles at Machrie Moor, the megalithic cairn of Balnuaran of Clava, and stone circle at Tomnaverie all seem to have been built with a sequence of future transformations in mind. This `projecting of future pasts', Bradley argues, probably formed part of a set of predetermined rituals at these sites, that were planned to occur over several years, possibly in accordance with a lunar cycle. At other monuments, such as the alignments at Carnac, the initial construction may have begun with a similar view in mind, but eventually as memories were eroded the system broke down and new ways of re-using the earlier phases were developed.

Bradley's penultimate chapter takes the discussion a step further by examining evidence for the re-use of Bronze Age and earlier sites during the Iron Age, Roman and Medieval periods. As with his earlier examples, Bradley makes a convincing case that these ancient societies had some understanding of the physical remains they could see in their landscape, and that they deployed various strategies for placing such sites within a historical framework of their own making. Typically, this process can entail at least three kinds of response, interpretation, confrontation and legitimisation, each of which may have quite different material consequences. Ultimately, the broader significance of Bradley's case material is the demonstration that societies in the past, as in the present, habitually engage with the physical traces of earlier times and accommodate these within their constructions of history. Whether we term such practices `archaeology' (as I have suggested elsewhere), is perhaps less important than acknowledging that an understanding of these is attainable through the application of standard methods of archaeological analysis. To achieve such an understanding, however, as Bradley makes clear in his concluding chapter, requires a different kind of archaeological vision of time that looks horizontally and not just vertically.

PAUL LANE
British Institute in Eastern Africa