Revealing a prehistoric past: Evidence for the deliberate construction of a historic narrative in the British Neolithic

Abstract

Over the past decade, event-based narratives have become a norm in discussions of the British Neolithic. Statistical analyses of radiocarbon dates, combined with a detailed approach to individual contexts, have produced chronological resolutions that have enabled a greater understanding of the construction and use of some monuments. While these have been informative, they sometimes manifest exclusionary nomenclature, with terms such as ‘outliers' and ‘residuality' applied to data that does not agree with other data. In addition, theoretical approaches have seen a similar turn to examine individual contexts and artefacts with which to describe Neolithic life. This paper argues that the current dominance of event-based narratives, extrapolated from small-scale action, is inadvertently ignoring evidence of wider cultural understandings. In particular, evidence of the deliberate inclusion of already old bone in Neolithic deposits has been identified. It is argued that this bone represents a particular past focus on already old material that may have had social currency in British Neolithic symbolic practices.