Across Iron Age Europe the human head carried symbolic associations with power, fertility status, gender, and more. Evidence for the removal, curation, and display of heads ranges from classical literary references to iconography and skeletal remains. Traditionally, this material has been associated with a Europe-wide head-cult, and used to support the idea of a unified Celtic culture in prehistory. This book demonstrates instead how headhunting and head-veneration were practised across a range of diverse and fragmented Iron Age societies. Using case studies from France, Britain, and...

The past few years have seen an upsurge in the numbers of known Neolithic settlements in Ireland. Many of these sites have been excavated by archaeologists based in field units, but few are well-known to the wider archaeological community. The papers in this volume, which were presented at a conference held at Queen's University Belfast in 2001, provided a forum for a discussion of the new Neolithic material from Ireland in its wider geographical context. Although the bulk of the emerging Irish settlement evidence relates to substantial houses, many of these papers consider wider themes,...