Neolithic Landscapes: Neolithic Studies Group Seminar Papers, vol 2.

Thomas, Julian

PETER TOPPING (ed.). (Oxbow monograph 86.) x+187 pages, 38 figures, 7 tables. 1997. Oxford: Oxbow; 1-900-188-41-4 paperback [pounds]20.

It is a sign of the intellectual health of a specialist study group that its deliberations can generate collections of papers of general interest. That this is the third volume to emerge from the meetings of the Neolithic Studies Group is a good thing in itself. This time around it is the topical issue of landscape which is addressed, although with the added complication of attempting to focus on the domestic as opposed to ceremonial aspects of Neolithic life. Whether the two can actually be disentangled to this extent is an arguable point, but the editor's expressed desire to move beyond the narrow functionalism which has characterized much of the study of Neolithic settlement and subsistence is an admirable one. The volume proceeds from a series of thematic chapters to a number of regional studies, ending with comparative accounts of continental evidence. Tim Darvill sets the scene with a discussion of the various ways in which landscape has been approached by archaeologists, concluding that a landscape is a context within which human action is generated, rather than an object to be studied from without. As much as a set of topographic features, a landscape involves conceptual schemes through which people apprehend their immediate world. In a case-study of the later Neolithic of the Stonehenge area, Darvill suggests that the imposition of a cosmological scheme onto the land was responsible for the recognizable patterning of the archaeological evidence. What might perhaps be added to Darvill's account is a consideration of how such a scheme might have been lived through and enacted in everyday practice.

The two following papers serve to demonstrate the malleability of the available evidence for Neolithic landscape-use. Both have something to add to current debate, but they are able to accommodate diametrically opposed viewpoints to similar material. Pointing to recent scepticism over the model of sedentary mixed farming in the temperate Neolithic, Alasdair Whittle argues against a simple division between sedentism and mobility. Noting that discussions of relative mobility have been more sophisticated in hunter-gatherer studies than in later prehistory, he draws out some of the possibilities for different regimes of embedded, tethered, logistical and circulating mobility. Significantly, he presents ethnographic evidence that neither livestock, nor cultivation, nor the building of substantial dwelling structures need necessitate full-time sedentism. In contrast, Gabriel Cooney mounts a rear-guard action on behalf of the sedentary farming Neolithic. I find the argument no more convincing the second time around, and it is underlain here by a whiff of nationalism, presenting 'the Irish evidence' as a distinct entity defined by modern political boundaries. As Martyn Berber points out in a later paper, the limited evidence for Neolithic economic practices in Britain and Ireland has meant that what has been found in one location is often taken as characteristic of all, resulting in a homogenized and hybrid picture. So, while Cooney is able to point to a series of large timber buildings with rich assemblages of carbonized grain, it is an open question whether one sees these as characteristic farmsteads (of which there must at one time have been many more), or whether they are a specialized type of site, connected with storage, redistribution or conspicuous consumption. Pointing to the specific character of the Irish Neolithic, Cooney emphasizes the enduring significance of place. Yet an attachment to place need not be an exclusive prerogative of sedentary communities. The pathways followed by mobile groups lead between significant places, of which Ayers Rock is merely the most obvious example. However, Cooney's strong suit is an emphasis on regional variability. As he says, we should not expect the same subsistence practices and patterns of residence to have prevailed throughout Neolithic Britain and Ireland. Having said this, it may have been precisely the belief that the Neolithic was underlain by a uniform economic system which retarded any concern with geographical variation.

The potential complexity of economic activities is underlined by Jenny Moore's paper on the use of cyclical burning to maintain open woodland, while Mark Patton attempts to integrate monuments and traces of domestic occupation in his study of the Channel Islands. Patton recognizes that a landscape approach provides a framework for bringing together different aspects of the evidence, although like Darvill's chapter his account of Neolithic Jersey as divided between a sacred upland and a secular coastal lowland is a little formal and structuralist in tenor. Miles Russell demonstrates that the wealth of existing evidence for Neolithic Sussex will sustain new interpretations, while Barber faces the opposite problem of the paucity of sites and finds in Kent. As he argues, if our understanding of the period has been constructed in other areas with a richer record, a series of expectations are likely to be imposed upon less-studied regions. Dave Field, Nigel Brown and Gill Hey provide chapters based upon recent field projects on flint mines, southern Essex and the Upper Thames respectively. All present rich new material, and Hey's account of Yarnton in particular shows how an investigation framed at the landscape level can produce stunning results.

Finally, Keri Brown and John Chapman discuss settlement in the landscapes of the Tavoliere and the Great Hungarian Basin. Brown's information on hundreds of enclosed Neolithic settlements is remarkable, but her story of stress caused by soil exhaustion and decreasing rainfall being solved by mass migration is a little one-dimensional. Chapman's is a weighty and densely argued contribution, which suggests that, rather than being just another kind of artefact or cultural marker, tell mounds are the outcome of a long-term process of becoming. This process was underwritten by a decision on the part of a community to stay in one place, a nucleation of households in substantial houses, social mechanisms to avoid fissioning, and a changed attitude to burnt daub, which became physical evidence of ancestral dwellings. One questionable element in the argument is the notion of 'vertical competition', whereby larger tells might have been awarded greater esteem or sanctity. Given that tell-formation would have taken many generations, it is difficult to imagine authoritative people striving to increase the height of their tell.

JULIAN THOMAS Department of Archaeology University of Southampton