The story begins with Boxgrove Man, the earliest human yet recovered in Britain, and ends with the first named resident of Sussex, one Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus, Great King of the Britons and friend of the emperor Claudius. Dr. Russell examines the wealth of archaeological remains and discoveries from the 500,000 years that separate these two prehistoric people: remains that include the earliest forms of neolithic monument, such as Whitehawk Causewayed Enclosure and the flint mines of Cissbury, and the impressive Iron Age hillforts of Hollingbury in Brighton and Mount Caburn near Lewes.
This is the first review of the archaeology of this important landscape – from Palaeolithic to medieval times by contributors all routed in the archaeology of Sussex.
This book examines the nature of social relationships in later prehistoric Britain, taking, as a case study, the archaeology of the Wessex region of southern England in the first millennium BC. --
First published in 1999. This groundbreaking volume addresses issues central to the study of prehistoric settlement including group memory, the transmission of ideology and the impact of mobility and seasonality on the construction of social identity. Building on these themes, the contributors point to new ways of understanding the relationship between settlement and landscape by replacing Capitalist models of spatial relations with more intimate histories of place.
Drawing upon his own extensive knowledge of European archaeology, Graeme Barker has impressively integrated the full range of archaeological data to produce in this book a masterly account of prehistoric farming in Europe on a unique scale. He makes use of modern archaeological techniques to reconstruct the lives of prehistoric farmers in remarkable detail. Not only do we now have a vivid picture of the prehistoric farmyard, but we know what animals were kept, how they were fed and why they were bred. Evidence for crops grown and techniques of cultivation and husbandry helps recreate the prehistoric landscape. Even the social organisation that determined the use of resources, and provided the crucial stimulus for agricultural change, can be relived. Graeme Barker develops his argument through analogies with the agricultural history of classical and medieval Europe and concludes that today's industrial farmers can learn much from the successes and failures of early European farming.
The social processes involved in acquiring flint and stone in the Neolithic began to be considered over thirty years ago, promoting a more dynamic view of past extraction processes. Whether by quarrying, mining or surface retrieval, the geographic source locations of raw materials and their resultant archaeological sites have been approached from different methodological and theoretical perspectives. In recent years this has included the exploration of previously undiscovered sites, refined radiocarbon dating, comparative ethnographic analysis and novel analytical approaches to stone tool manufacture and provenancing. The aim of this volume in the Neolithic Studies Group Papers is to explore these new findings on extraction sites and their products. How did the acquisition of raw materials fit into other aspects of Neolithic life and social networks? How did these activities merge in creating material items that underpinned cosmology, status and identity? What are the geographic similarities, constraints and variables between the various raw materials, and how does the practise of stone extraction in the UK relate to wider extractive traditions in northwestern Europe? Eight papers address these questions and act as a useful overview of the current state of research on the topic.