The Neolithic of Mainland Scotland

ISBN-13: 9780748685721 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 352 str.

Brophy; Kenneth Brophy; Gavin MacGregor

Opis

What was life like in Scotland between 4000 and 2000 BC? Where were people living? How did they treat their dead? Why did they spend so much time building extravagant ritual monuments? What was special about the relationship people had with trees and why was so much time and effort spent digging holes and filling them back up again?
This collection examines what we can say about how people lived in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age of mainland Scotland where much of the evidence we have lies in the plough-zone, or survives as slumped banks and filled ditches, or simply appears as ruinous megaliths. It draws together leading experts and young researchers to present fresh research and outlines radical new interpretations of the pits, postholes, ditches, rubbish dumps, human remains and broken potsherds left behind by our Neolithic forebears.
Much of this evidence has come to light as a result of rescue or developer-led fieldwork in the past few decades, putting the emphasis very much on lowland, mainland Scotland as opposed to high-profile Orcadian Neolithic sites. Inspired by the work of Gordon Barclay, one of the leading scholars of Scotland's Neolithic over the last forty years, this new compilation offers a wide-ranging analysis of the evidence we have for the first farmers in Scotland.

Spis treści

Acknowledgements; Notes on Contributors; List of Tables and Figures; Foreword; Part 1. Scotland's Mainland Neolithic in Context; 1. Gordon Barclay: A career in the Scottish Neolithic, Ian Ralston; 2. Neolithic Past, Neolithic Present: the socio-politics of prehistory, Gavin MacGregor; 3. ‘Very real shared traditions’. Thinking about similarity and difference in the Scottish Neolithic, Vicki Cummings; 4. Who were these people? A sideways view and a non-answer of political proportions, Alex Gibson; 5. Pathways to ancestral worlds: mortuary practice in the Irish Neolithic, Gabriel Cooney; Part 2: Non-megalithic monuments; 6. Hiatus or hidden? The problem of the missing Scottish upland cursus monuments, Roy Loveday; 7. Making Memories, Making Monuments: Changing understandings of henge monuments in Central Scotland in prehistory and the present, Rebecca Younger; 8. Seeing the wood in the trees: the timber monuments of Neolithic Scotland, Kirsty Millican; Part 3: Pits, pots and practice; 9. Life's the pits! Ritual, refuse and remembrance in North East Scotland, Gordon Noble, Claire Christie and Emma Philip; 10. Huts, halls and holes: Neolithic settlement in mainland Scotland, Kenneth Brophy; 11. Rethinking the Balfarg pottery assemblage, Ann MacSween; 12. Pursuing the penumbral: the deposition of Beaker pottery at Neolithic monuments in Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age Scotland, Neil Wilkin; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.