Neolithic British Isles
Encyclopedia
Stone Age
The Stone Age is a broad prehistoric period, lasting about 2.5 million years , during which humans and their predecessor species in the genus Homo, as well as the earlier partly contemporary genera Australopithecus and Paranthropus, widely used exclusively stone as their hard material in the...
in the British Isles, it was a part of the greater Neolithic
Neolithic
The Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or New Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BC in some parts of the Middle East, and later in other parts of the world. It is traditionally considered as the last part of the Stone Age...
, or "New Stone Age", across Europe.
During the preceding Mesolithic
Mesolithic
The Mesolithic is an archaeological concept used to refer to certain groups of archaeological cultures defined as falling between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic....
period, the inhabitants of the British Isles had been nomadic hunter-gatherers, but around 4000 BCE new ideas arrived in the islands from continental Europe. These ideas were soon adopted by the natives, leading to a radical transformation of society and landscape that has come to be called the Neolithic Revolution
Neolithic Revolution
The Neolithic Revolution was the first agricultural revolution. It was the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and settlement. Archaeological data indicates that various forms of plants and animal domestication evolved independently in 6 separate locations worldwide circa...
. The Neolithic period in the British Isles was characterised by the adoption of agriculture
Agriculture
Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms for food, fiber, and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture was the key implement in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the...
and sedentary living, leading to the gradual decline of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. To make room for the new farmland, these early agricultural communities undertook mass deforestation
Deforestation
Deforestation is the removal of a forest or stand of trees where the land is thereafter converted to a nonforest use. Examples of deforestation include conversion of forestland to farms, ranches, or urban use....
across the islands, dramatically and permanently transforming the landscape. At the same time, new types of stone tools began to be produced, particularly those which were polished, and more highly skilled to produce than earlier hunter-gatherer types.
The Neolithic also saw ideological changes, with new ideas about religion, ritual and social hierarchy appearing to have been adopted. This is born out by the construction of a wide variety of monuments in the landscape, many of which were megalithic
Megalith
A megalith is a large stone that has been used to construct a structure or monument, either alone or together with other stones. Megalithic describes structures made of such large stones, utilizing an interlocking system without the use of mortar or cement.The word 'megalith' comes from the Ancient...
in nature. The earliest of these are the chambered tombs of the Early Neolithic, built to house some of these community's dead, although in the Late Neolithic this form of architecture was replaced by the construction of stone circles, a trend that would continue into the following Bronze Age
Bronze Age
The Bronze Age is a period characterized by the use of copper and its alloy bronze as the chief hard materials in the manufacture of some implements and weapons. Chronologically, it stands between the Stone Age and Iron Age...
.
Neolithic Irish and British people were not literate, leaving behind no written record that modern historians can study, and as such everything that is known about this time period comes from archaeological
Archaeology
Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...
investigations. This investigation began amongst the antiquarians of the 18th century, although only intensified in the 19th when John Lubbock
John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury
John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury PC , FRS , known as Sir John Lubbock, 4th Baronet from 1865 until 1900, was a polymath and Liberal Member of Parliament....
coined the term "Neolithic". In the 20th and 21st centuries, further excavation and synthesis went ahead, dominated by figures like V. Gordon Childe, Stuart Piggott
Stuart Piggott
Stuart Ernest Piggott CBE was a British archaeologist best known for his work on prehistoric Wessex.Born in Petersfield, Hampshire, Piggott was educated at Churcher's College and on leaving school in 1927 took up a post as assistant at Reading Museum where he developed an expertise in Neolithic...
, Julian Thomas
Julian Thomas
Julian Stewart Thomas is a British archaeologist, publishing widely on the Neolithic and Bronze Age prehistory of Britain and north-west Europe...
and Richard Bradley
Richard Bradley (archaeologist)
Richard Bradley is a British archaeologist specialising in the study of European prehistory, and in particular Prehistoric Britain. He is currently working as a professor of archaeology at the University of Reading. He is also the author of a number of books on the subject of archaeology and...
.
Historical overview
Late Mesolithic
The period that preceded the Neolithic in the British Isles is known by archaeologists as the MesolithicMesolithic
The Mesolithic is an archaeological concept used to refer to certain groups of archaeological cultures defined as falling between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic....
. During this period, Britain was still attached by the landmass of Doggerland
Doggerland
Doggerland is a name given by archaeologists and geologists to a former landmass in the southern North Sea that connected the island of Great Britain to mainland Europe during and after the last Ice Age, surviving until about 6,500 or 6,200 BCE, though gradually being swallowed by rising sea levels...
to the rest of continental Europe.
Archaeologist and prehistorian Caroline Malone
Caroline Malone
Caroline Malone is a British academic and archaeologist currently Director of Education and Reader in Prehistoric Archaeology at Queen's University, Belfast School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/gap/, and formerly Senior Tutor of Hughes Hall, Cambridge, UK...
noted that during the Late Mesolithic, the British Isles were something of a "technological backwater" in European terms, still living as a hunter-gatherer society whilst most of southern Europe had already taken up agriculture and sedentary living.
The Spread of the Neolithic
The first societies in the world to abandon hunter-gathering and replace it with agriculture were found in the Near East and China around 8000-6000 BCE, although similar developments later occurred independently in Mesoamerica, south east Asia, Africa and India. It was in the Near East that the "most important developments in early farming" occurred in the Levant and the mountains surrounding what is now Syria, Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Iran and Iraq, areas which already had rich ecological variation that was being exploited by hunter-gatherers in the Late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods.Early signs of these hunter-gatherers beginning to harvest, manipulate and grow various food plants have been identified in the Mesolithic Natufian culture
Natufian culture
The Natufian culture was a Mesolithic culture that existed from 12,500 to 9,500 BC in the Levant, a region in the Eastern Mediterranean. It was unusual in that it was sedentary, or semi-sedentary, before the introduction of agriculture...
of the Levant, showing signs that would later lead to the actual domestication and farming of crops. Archaeologists believe that the Levantine peoples subsequently developed agriculture between 8000 and 7000 BCE in response to a rise in their population levels which could not be fed by the finite food resources that hunting and gathering could provide. The idea of agriculture subsequently spread from the Levant into Europe, being adopted by hunter-gathering societies in what is now Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, and across the Mediterranean, eventually reaching north-western Europe and the British Isles.
The Neolithic in the British Isles
The archaeological community still debate whether the Neolithic Revolution was brought to the British Isles through by adoption by natives or by migrating groups of continental Europeans who decided to settle there.Late Neolithic: 3000-2500 BCE
- Meldon Bridge PeriodMeldon Bridge PeriodThe Meldon Bridge Period is the name given by archaeologists to the earliest period of metalworking and the first period of the late Neolithic in Britain. It spans the period 3000 BC to 2750 BC and is named after the typesite of Meldon Bridge in Peeblesshire. Copper was used for the first time in...
Early Bronze Age
The period that followed the Neolithic is known by archaeologists as the Bronze AgeBronze Age
The Bronze Age is a period characterized by the use of copper and its alloy bronze as the chief hard materials in the manufacture of some implements and weapons. Chronologically, it stands between the Stone Age and Iron Age...
, and it is characterised by the adoption of bronze
Bronze
Bronze is a metal alloy consisting primarily of copper, usually with tin as the main additive. It is hard and brittle, and it was particularly significant in antiquity, so much so that the Bronze Age was named after the metal...
as a material for making certain tools.
Agriculture
The Neolithic is largely categorised by the introduction of farming into Britain from continental Europe, from where it had come originally from the Middle EastMiddle East
The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...
. Prior to this, during the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods, the island's inhabitants had been hunter-gatherers, and the transition from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural one did not occur all at once. There is also some evidence of different agricultural and hunter-gatherer groups within the British Isles meeting and trading with one another in the early part of the Neolithic, with some hunter-gatherer sites showing evidence of more complex, Neolithic technologies. Although it is known that the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural society was gradual, it is still not fully understood, and as archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson
Mike Parker Pearson
Michael "Mike" Parker Pearson is a professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Sheffield in England. His books include The Archaeology of Death and Burial, Bronze Age Britain, Architecture and Order and In Search of the Red Slave...
noted:
- There is no doubt that domesticated animals and plants had to be carried by boat from the continent of Europe to the British Isles. There are a number of options. Groups of pioneers could have set off from the continent in one-off small-scale invasions. Or people might have arrived after a long-term and eclectic mixture of contacts down the continental coast from Denmark to France. Or gatherer-hunters might have traveled by boat to the continent and brought back the animals and plants as the result of slowly developing exchange contacts. There is no answer to this puzzle, which is all the more intriguing since the earliest evidence for farming in the British Isles comes from Ireland and probably the Isle of Man, and not from southern Britain.
The reason for switching from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural lifestyle has been widely debated by archaeologists and anthropologists. Ethnographic studies of farming societies who use basic stone tools and crops have shown that it is a much more labour intensive way of life than that of hunter-gatherers. It would have involved deforesting an area, digging and tilling the soil, storing seeds, and then guarding the growing crops from other animal species before eventually harvesting them. In the cases of grains, the crop produced then has to be processed to make it edible, including grinding, milling and cooking; all of this involves far more preparation and work than either hunting or gathering.
Deforestation
Deforestation
Deforestation is the removal of a forest or stand of trees where the land is thereafter converted to a nonforest use. Examples of deforestation include conversion of forestland to farms, ranches, or urban use....
areas of woodland in the British Isles in order to use the cleared land for farming. Notable examples of forest clearance occurred around 5000 BCE in Broome Heath in East Anglia
East Anglia
East Anglia is a traditional name for a region of eastern England, named after an ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom, the Kingdom of the East Angles. The Angles took their name from their homeland Angeln, in northern Germany. East Anglia initially consisted of Norfolk and Suffolk, but upon the marriage of...
, on the North Yorkshire Moors and also on Dartmoor
Dartmoor
Dartmoor is an area of moorland in south Devon, England. Protected by National Park status, it covers .The granite upland dates from the Carboniferous period of geological history. The moorland is capped with many exposed granite hilltops known as tors, providing habitats for Dartmoor wildlife. The...
. Such clearances were performed not only with the use of stone axes, but also through ring barking and burning, with the latter two likely having been more effective. Nonetheless, in many areas the forests had regrown within a few centuries, including at Ballysculion, Ballynagilly, Beaghmore
Beaghmore
Beaghmore is a complex of early Bronze Age megalithic features, stone circles and cairns, 8.5 miles north west of Cookstown, County Tyrone in Northern Ireland, on the south-east edge of the Sperrin Mountains...
and the Somerset Levels
Somerset Levels
The Somerset Levels, or the Somerset Levels and Moors as they are less commonly but more correctly known, is a sparsely populated coastal plain and wetland area of central Somerset, South West England, between the Quantock and Mendip Hills...
.
Between 4300 and 3250 BCE, there was a widespread decline in the number of elm trees across Britain, with millions of them disappearing from the archaeological record, and archaeologists have in some cases attributed this to the arrival of Neolithic farmers. For instance, it has been suggested that farmers collected all the elm leaves to use as animal fodder during the winter, that they the trees died after being debarked by domesticated cattle
Cattle
Cattle are the most common type of large domesticated ungulates. They are a prominent modern member of the subfamily Bovinae, are the most widespread species of the genus Bos, and are most commonly classified collectively as Bos primigenius...
. Nonetheless, as Pearson highlighted, this decline in elm might be due to the elm bark beetle
Bark beetle
A bark beetle is one of approximately 220 genera with 6,000 species of beetles in the subfamily Scolytinae. Traditionally, this was considered a distinct family Scolytidae, but now it is understood that bark beetles are in fact very specialized members of the "true weevil" family...
, a parasitic insect that carries with it Dutch elm disease
Dutch elm disease
Dutch elm disease is a disease caused by a member of the sac fungi category, affecting elm trees which is spread by the elm bark beetle. Although believed to be originally native to Asia, the disease has been accidentally introduced into America and Europe, where it has devastated native...
, and evidence for which has been found at West Heath Spa in Hampshire
Hampshire
Hampshire is a county on the southern coast of England in the United Kingdom. The county town of Hampshire is Winchester, a historic cathedral city that was once the capital of England. Hampshire is notable for housing the original birthplaces of the Royal Navy, British Army, and Royal Air Force...
. It is possible that the spread of these beetles was coincidental, although the hypothesis has also been suggested that farmers intentionally spread the beetles so that they destroyed the elm forests, providing more deforested land for farming.
Meanwhile, during the period from around 3500 to 3300 BCE, many of these deforested areas began to see reforestation and mass tree regrowth, largely because human activity had retreated from these areas.
Settlement
Around the period between 3500 to 3300 BCE, agricultural communities had begun centring themselves upon the most productive areas, where the soils were more fertile, namely around the BoyneBoyne
Several terms incorporating the word "Boyne" include:* Boann, the Irish goddess after whom the river is named* Boyne River * Boyne Falls, Michigan,* Boyne Resorts, a ski resort company in Michigan...
, Orkney, eastern Scotland, Anglesey
Anglesey
Anglesey , also known by its Welsh name Ynys Môn , is an island and, as Isle of Anglesey, a county off the north west coast of Wales...
, the upper Thames, Wessex
Wessex
The Kingdom of Wessex or Kingdom of the West Saxons was an Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the West Saxons, in South West England, from the 6th century, until the emergence of a united English state in the 10th century, under the Wessex dynasty. It was to be an earldom after Canute the Great's conquest...
, Essex
Essex
Essex is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the East region of England, and one of the home counties. It is located to the northeast of Greater London. It borders with Cambridgeshire and Suffolk to the north, Hertfordshire to the west, Kent to the South and London to the south west...
, Yorkshire
Yorkshire
Yorkshire is a historic county of northern England and the largest in the United Kingdom. Because of its great size in comparison to other English counties, functions have been increasingly undertaken over time by its subdivisions, which have also been subject to periodic reform...
and the river valleys of the Wash
Wash
Wash may refer to:* Arroyo , also called a wash, a dry creek bed or gulch that temporarily fills with water after a heavy rain* WASH, a water, sanitation and hygiene advocacy campaign initiated by the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council...
. These areas saw an intensification of agricultural production, and larger settlement.
The Neolithic houses of the British Isles were typically rectangular, being made out of wood, and as such none survive to this day. Nonetheless, foundations of such building have been found in the archaeological record, although they are rare, and have usually only been uncovered when they were in the vicinity of the more substantial Neolithic stone monuments.
Chambered Tombs
Iberia
The name Iberia refers to three historical regions of the old world:* Iberian Peninsula, in Southwest Europe, location of modern-day Portugal and Spain** Prehistoric Iberia...
to Scandinavia
Scandinavia
Scandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...
, and they were therefore likely brought to the British Isles along with, or roughly concurrent to, the introduction of farming. A widely held theory amongst archaeologists is that these megalithic tombs were intentionally made to resemble the long timber houses which had been constructed by Neolithic farming peoples in the Danube
Danube
The Danube is a river in the Central Europe and the Europe's second longest river after the Volga. It is classified as an international waterway....
basin from circa 4800 BCE.
As the historian Ronald Hutton
Ronald Hutton
Ronald Hutton is an English historian who specializes in the study of Early Modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion and contemporary Paganism. A reader in the subject at the University of Bristol, Hutton has published fourteen books and has appeared on British television and radio...
related, "There is no doubt that these great tombs, far more impressive than would be required of mere repositories for bones, were the centres of ritual activity in the early Neolithic: they were shrines as well as mausoleums. For some reason, the success of farming and the veneration of ancestral and more recent bones had become bound up together in the minds of the people."
Although there is disputed radiocarbon dates
Radiocarbon dating
Radiocarbon dating is a radiometric dating method that uses the naturally occurring radioisotope carbon-14 to estimate the age of carbon-bearing materials up to about 58,000 to 62,000 years. Raw, i.e. uncalibrated, radiocarbon ages are usually reported in radiocarbon years "Before Present" ,...
indicating that the chambered tomb at Carrowmore
Carrowmore
Carrowmore, County Sligo is one of the four major passage tomb cemeteries in Ireland. It is located at the centre of a prehistoric ritual landscape on the Cúil Irra Peninsula in County Sligo in Ireland....
in Ireland dates to circa 5000 BCE, the majority of such monuments in the British Isles appear to have been built between 4000 and 3200 BCE, a time period that archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson
Mike Parker Pearson
Michael "Mike" Parker Pearson is a professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Sheffield in England. His books include The Archaeology of Death and Burial, Bronze Age Britain, Architecture and Order and In Search of the Red Slave...
notes means that tomb building was "a relatively short-lived fashion in archaeological terms." Amongst the most notable of these chambered tombs are those clustered around the Brú na Bóinne
Brú na Bóinne
is a World Heritage Site in County Meath, Ireland and is the largest and one of the most important prehistoric megalithic sites in Europe.-The site:...
complex in County Meath
County Meath
County Meath is a county in Ireland. It is part of the Mid-East Region and is also located in the province of Leinster. It is named after the ancient Kingdom of Mide . Meath County Council is the local authority for the county...
, western Ireland: these include Newgrange
Newgrange
Newgrange is a prehistoric monument located in County Meath, on the eastern side of Ireland, about one kilometre north of the River Boyne. It was built around 3200 BC , during the Neolithic period...
, Knowth
Knowth
Knowth is a Neolithic passage grave and an ancient monument of Brú na Bóinne in the valley of the River Boyne in Ireland.Knowth is the largest of all passage graves situated within the Brú na Bóinne complex. The site consists of one large mound and 17 smaller satellite tombs...
and Dowth
Dowth
Dowth is a Neolithic passage tomb which stands in the Boyne Valley, County Meath, Ireland. It is found at .Dating from about 2,5002000 BCE, is the second oldest behind Newgrange of the three principal tombs of the Brú na Bóinne World Heritage Site a complex of passage-tombs...
, the former of which was built between 3100 and 2900 BCE.
Stone circles
Megalith
A megalith is a large stone that has been used to construct a structure or monument, either alone or together with other stones. Megalithic describes structures made of such large stones, utilizing an interlocking system without the use of mortar or cement.The word 'megalith' comes from the Ancient...
ic stone circles.
Stone technology
Axes
Axes may refer to:* Axes, woodworking hand tools* The plural of axis* Axes , a 2005 rock album by the British band Electrelane* X and Y axes, or X, Y, and Z axes, perpendicular lines used in the Cartesian coordinate system...
, made out of either flint
Flint
Flint is a hard, sedimentary cryptocrystalline form of the mineral quartz, categorized as a variety of chert. It occurs chiefly as nodules and masses in sedimentary rocks, such as chalks and limestones. Inside the nodule, flint is usually dark grey, black, green, white, or brown in colour, and...
or hard igneous rock
Igneous rock
Igneous rock is one of the three main rock types, the others being sedimentary and metamorphic rock. Igneous rock is formed through the cooling and solidification of magma or lava...
hafted onto wooden handles. While some of these were evidently used for chopping wood and other practical purposes, there are some axe heads from the period that appear never to have been used, some too fragile to have been used in any case. These latter axes likely had a decorative or ceremonial function.
Settlement
Neolithic Britons were capable of building a variety of different wooden constructions. For instance, in the then-marshland of the Somerset LevelsSomerset Levels
The Somerset Levels, or the Somerset Levels and Moors as they are less commonly but more correctly known, is a sparsely populated coastal plain and wetland area of central Somerset, South West England, between the Quantock and Mendip Hills...
in south-western Britain, a wooden trackway was built in the winter of 3807 BCE, that connected the Polden Hills
Polden Hills
The Polden Hills in Somerset, England are a long, low ridge, extending for , and separated from the Mendip Hills, to which they are nearly parallel, by a marshy tract, known as the Somerset Levels...
with Westhay Mears, a length which ran for over a kilometre.
Diet
Being agriculturalists, the Neolithic peoples of the British Isles grew cerealCereal
Cereals are grasses cultivated for the edible components of their grain , composed of the endosperm, germ, and bran...
grains such as wheat
Wheat
Wheat is a cereal grain, originally from the Levant region of the Near East, but now cultivated worldwide. In 2007 world production of wheat was 607 million tons, making it the third most-produced cereal after maize and rice...
and barley
Barley
Barley is a major cereal grain, a member of the grass family. It serves as a major animal fodder, as a base malt for beer and certain distilled beverages, and as a component of various health foods...
, and these therefore played a part in their diet. Nonetheless, this was supplemented at times with wild, un-domesticated plant foods such as hazelnuts.
There is also evidence that grapes had been consumed in Neolithic Wessex, based upon charred pips found at the site of Hambledon Hill; these may have been imported from continental Europe, or they might have been grown on British soil, as the climate was warmer than that of the early 21st century.
Hierarchy
The fact that in the Late British Neolithic various monuments were constructed that would have taken a large workforce a long time to produce has led many archaeologists to speculate that there must have been some sort of hierarchy organising such production.Religion
As archaeologist John C. Barrett noted, "There never was a single body of beliefs which characterise 'neolithic religion'... The variety of practices attested by [the various Neolithic] monuments cannot be explained as the expression of a single, underlying cultural idea."17th and 18th centuries
It was in the 17th century CE that scholarly investigation into the surviving Neolithic monuments first began in the British Isles, although at the time these antiquarian scholars had no understanding of prehistory, instead relying on Biblical literalismBiblical literalism
Biblical literalism is the interpretation or translation of the explicit and primary sense of words in the Bible. A literal Biblical interpretation is associated with the fundamentalist and evangelical hermeneutical approach to Scripture, and is used almost exclusively by conservative Christians...
which implied that the Earth itself was only around 5000 years old.
The first to do so was the antiquary and writer John Aubrey
John Aubrey
John Aubrey FRS, was an English antiquary, natural philosopher and writer. He is perhaps best known as the author of the collection of short biographical pieces usually referred to as Brief Lives...
(1626-1697), who had been born into a wealthy gentry family before going on to study at Trinity College, Oxford
Trinity College, Oxford
The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity in the University of Oxford, of the foundation of Sir Thomas Pope , or Trinity College for short, is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. It stands on Broad Street, next door to Balliol College and Blackwells bookshop,...
, till his education was disrupted by the outbreak of the English Civil War
English Civil War
The English Civil War was a series of armed conflicts and political machinations between Parliamentarians and Royalists...
between royalist and parliamentarian forces. He recorded his accounts of these megalithic monuments in a book entitled the Monumenta Britannica, but it remained unpublished.
Nonetheless, Aubrey's work was picked up by another antiquarian in the following century, William Stukeley
William Stukeley
William Stukeley FRS, FRCP, FSA was an English antiquarian who pioneered the archaeological investigation of the prehistoric monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury, work for which he has been remembered as "probably... the most important of the early forerunners of the discipline of archaeology"...
(1687-1765) who had studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
Corpus Christi College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. It is notable as the only college founded by Cambridge townspeople: it was established in 1352 by the Guilds of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary...
before becoming a professional doctor.
19th century
John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury
John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury PC , FRS , known as Sir John Lubbock, 4th Baronet from 1865 until 1900, was a polymath and Liberal Member of Parliament....
in his 1865 book Pre-historic times, as illustrated by ancient remains, and the manners and customs of modern savages. He used it to refer to the final stage of the Stone Age, defining this period purely on the technology of the time, when humans had begun using polished stone tools but not yet started making metal tools. Lubbock's terminology was adopted by other archaeologists, but as they gained a greater understanding of later prehistory, it came to cover a wider set of characteristics. By the 20th century, when figures like V. Gordon Childe were working on the British Neolithic, the term "Neolithic" had been broadened to "include sedentary village life, cereal agriculture, stock rearing, and ceramics, all assumed characteristic of immigrant agriculturalists."
20th and 21st centuries
In the 1960s, a number of British and American archaeologists began taking a new approach to their discipline by emphasising their belief that through the rigorous use of the scientific methodScientific method
Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of...
, they could obtain objective knowledge about the human past. In doing so they forged the theoretical school of processual archaeology
Processual archaeology
Processual archaeology is a form of archaeological theory that had its genesis in 1958 with Willey and Phillips' work Method and Theory in American Archeology, in which the pair stated that "American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing" , a rephrasing of Frederic William Maitland's...
. These processual archaeologists took a particular interest in the ecological impact on human society, and in doing so the definition of "Neolithic" was "narrowed again to refer just to the agricultural mode of subsistence."
In the late 1980s, processualism began to come under increasing criticism by a new wave of archaeologists who believed in the innate subjectivity of the discipline. These figures forged the new theoretical school of post-processual archaeology
Post-processual archaeology
Post-processual archaeology, which is sometimes alternately referred to as the interpretative archaeologies by its adherents, is a movement in archaeological theory that emphasizes the subjectivity of archaeological interpretations...
, and a number of post-processualists turned their attention to the Neolithic British Isles. They interpreted the Neolithic as an ideological phenomenon that was adopted by British, Irish and Manx society and led to them creating new forms of material-culture, such as the megalithic funerary and ceremonial monuments.
Academic and popular books
|year= 2008 |publisher= Constable |location= London |isbn=|nopp=|ref=Adk08}}|year= 1994|publisher= Blackwell |location= Oxford, U.K. and Cambridge, U.S. |isbn=978031189541 |nopp=|ref=Bar94}}
|year=2007 |publisher= Cambridge University Press |location= New York |isbn=978-0-521-61270-8 |nopp=|ref=Bra07}}
|authorlink=Ronald Hutton |year= 1991 |publisher= Blackwell |location= Oxford, U.K. and Cambridge, U.S. |isbn=9780631172888 |nopp=|ref=Hut91}}
|authorlink=John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury |year= 1865 |publisher= Williams and Norgate |location= London |nopp=|ref=Lub65}}
|authorlink=Caroline Malone |year= 2001 |publisher= Tempus |location= Stroud, Gloucestershire |isbn=0-7524-1442-9 |nopp=|ref=Mal01}}
|authorlink=Mike Parker Pearson |year= 2005 |publisher= B.T. Batsford and English Heritage |location= London|isbn=0-7134-8849-2|nopp=|ref=Pea05}}
|year= 2010 |publisher= The History Press |location= Stroud, Gloucestershire |isbn=970-752449210 |nopp=|ref=Wil10}}
Academic papers and articles
|year=1996 |title=Monuments as Landscape: creating the centre of the world in late Neolithic Orkney |jstor=125070 |journal=World Archaeology |volume=28 |pages=190–208 |ref=Ric96}}|year=2004 |title=How the West Was Lost: A Reconsideration of Agricultural Origins in Britain, Ireland and Southern Scandinavia |jstor= |journal=Current Anthropology |volume=45 |pages=S83–S113 |ref=Row04}}
|year=2003 |title=Thoughts on the 'Repacked' Neolithic Revolution |jstor= |journal=Antiquity |volume=77 |pages=67–74 |ref=}}
|year=2001 |title=Composing Avebury |jstor=827904 |journal=World Archaeology |volume=33 (2) |pages=296–314 |ref=Wat01}}