Landscapes of Neolithic Ireland is the first volume to be devoted solely to the Irish Neolithic, using an innovative landscape and anthropological perspective to provide significant new insights on the period. Gabriel Cooney argues that the archaeological evidence demonstrates a much more complex picture than the current orthodoxy on Neolithic Europe, with its assumption of mobile lifestyles, suggests. He integrates the study of landscape, settlement, agriculture, material culture and burial practice to offer a rounded, realistic picture of the complexities and the realities of Neolithic lives and societies in Ireland.
The Chalcolithic wedge tombs of Ireland represent a dramatic re-emergence of megalithism over a millennium after most Neolithic megaliths were built and many centuries after most had gone out of use. This resurgence of building monuments associated with the dead may well have been associated with a period of social instability caused by the expansion of exchange networks and associated with the introduction of metallurgy. Regional, group, and individual identities all seem to have undergone change at this time, probably in a dynamic demographic context. Variations in the distribution and scale of wedge tombs in Co. Clare, on the west coast of Ireland, provide an interesting study that may reveal a pattern of clan affiliations, status competition, and enduring links to an important and ancient locale.
The Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscape contributes to the development of theory in archaeology and anthropology, provides new and varied case studies of landscape and environment from five continents, and raises important policy issues concerning development and the management of heritage.
These essays examine for the first time the relationship between landscape and prehistoric monuments across Europe, placing the issue in a regional and intellectual context.
This is the first project to study hillforts in relation to warfare and conflict in Bronze Age Ireland. This project combines remote sensing and GIS-based landscape analysis with conventional archaeological survey to investigate ten prehistoric hillforts across southern Ireland.
Atlantic Europe is the zone par excellence of megalithic monuments, which encompass a wide range of earthen and stone constructions from inpressive stone circles to modest chambered tombs. A single basic concept lies behind this volume - that the intrinsic qualities encountered within the diverse landscapes pf Atlantic Europe both informed the settings chosen for the monuments and played a role in determining their form and visual appearance. Monuments and Landscape in Atlantic Europe goes significantly beyond the limits of existing debate by inviting archaeologists from different countries with the Atlantic zone (including Britain, France, Ireland, Spain and Sweden) to examine the relationship between landscape features and prehistoric monuments in their specialist regions. By placing the issue within a broader regional and intellectual context, the authors illustrate the diversity of current archaeological ideas and approaches converging around this central theme.
These papers highlight recent archaeological work in Northern England, in the commercial, academic and community archaeology sectors, which have fundamentally changed our perspective on the Neolithic of the area. Much of this was new work (and much is still not published) has been overlooked in the national discourse. The papers cover a wide geographical area, from Lancashire north into the Scottish Lowlands, recognising the irrelevance of the England/Scotland Border. They also take abroad chronological sweep, from the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition to the introduction of Beakers into the area. The key themes are: the nature of transition; the need for a much-improved chronological framework; regional variation linked to landscape character; links within northern England and with distant places; the implications of new dating for our understanding ‘the axe trade; the changing nature of settlement and agriculture; the character early Neolithic enclosures; the need to integrate rock art into wider discourse.
One of the principal characteristics of the European Neolithic is the development of monumentality in association with innovations in material culture and changes in subsistence from hunting and gathering to farming and pastoralism. The papers in this volume discuss the latest insights into why monumental architecture became an integral part of early farming societies in Europe and beyond. One of the topics is how we define monuments and how our arguments and recent research on temporality impacts on our interpretation of the Neolithic period. Different interpretations of Göbekli Tepe are examples of this discussion as well as our understanding of special landmarks such as flint mines. The latest evidence on the economic and paleoenvironmental context, carbon 14 dates as well as analytical methods are employed in illuminating the emergence of monumentalism in Neolithic Europe. Studies are taking place on a macro and micro scale in areas as diverse as Great Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Germany, the Dutch wetlands, Portugal and Malta involving a range of monuments from long barrows and megalithic tombs to roundels and enclosures. Transformation from a natural to a built environment by monumentalizing part of the landscape is discussed as well as changes in megalithic architecture in relation to shifts in the social structure. An ethnographic study of megaliths in Nagaland discuss monument building as an act of social construction. Other studies look into the role of monuments as expressions of cosmology and active loci of ceremonial performances. Also, a couple of papers analyse the social processes in the transformation of society in the aftermath of the initial boom in monument construction and the related changes in subsistence and social structure in northern Europe. The aim of the publication is to explore different theories about the relationship between monumentality and the Neolithic way of life through these studies encompassing a wide range of types of monuments over vast areas of Europe and beyond.
This landscape study of the rock-art of Rombalds Moor, West Yorkshire, considers views of and from the sites. In an attempt to understand the rock-art landscapes of prehistory the study considered the environment of the moor and its archaeology along with the ethnography from the whole circumpolar region.
This detailed study of the Mesolithic and Neolithic in Britain and Ireland examines evidence related to changes in social behaviour. Martin King discusses economic and subsistence data, burial practices, mobility, social order, construction, land clearance and the deposition of artefacts, interpreting this material evidence in social terms.
