The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe

by Chris Fowler

  Schlicht, E. 1968. Die Funde aus dem Megalithgrab 2 von Emmeln, Kreis Meppen: Studien zur Keramik der Trichterbecherkultur im Gebiet zwischen Weser und Zuidersee. Neumünster: K. Wachholtz.

  Sheridan, A. 2007. Green treasures from the magic mountains. British Archaeology 96, 22–27.

  Sherratt, A. 1996. Why Wessex? The Avon route and river transport in later British prehistory. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 15(2), 211–234.

  Sherratt, A. 2006. La traction animale et la transformation de l’Europe néolithique. In P. Pétrequin, R-M. Arbogast, A-M. Pétrequin, S. van Willigen, and M. Bailly (eds), Premiers Chariots, Premiers Araires. La Diffusion de la Traction Animale en Europe Pendant les IVe et IIIe Millénaires Avant notre ére, 329–360. Paris: CNRS Editions.

  Simpson, D.A., Murphy, E., and Gregory, R. 2006. Excavations at Northton, Isle of Harris. Oxford: Archaeopress.

  Strahm, C. 1994. Die Anfänge der Metallurgie in Mitteleuropa. Helvetia Archaeologica 25, 2–39.

  Strahm, C. 2005. L’introduction et la diffusion de la métallurgie en France. In P. Ambert and J. Vaquer (eds), La première métallurgie en France et dans les pays limitrophes, 27–36. Paris: Mémoire de la Société Préhistorique Française 37.

  Taylor, T. 1999. Envaluing metal: theorizing the Eneolithic ‘hiatus’. In S.M.M. Young, A.M. Pollard, P. Budd, and R. Ixer (eds), Metals in Antiquity, 22–32. Oxford: Archaeopress.

  Thornton, C.P. and Roberts, B.W. 2009. Introduction: the beginnings of metallurgy in the global perspective. Journal of World Prehistory 22(3), 181–184.

  Timberlake, S. 2005. In search of the first melting pot. British Archaeology 82, 32–33.

  Timberlake, S. 2009. Copper mining and production at the beginning of the British Bronze Age new evidence for Beaker/EBA prospecting and some ideas on scale, exchange, and early smelting technologies. In P. Clark (ed.), Bronze Age connections: cultural contact in prehistoric Europe, 94–121. Oxford: Oxbow.

  Vandkilde, H. 1996. From stone to bronze: the metalwork of the late Neolithic and earliest Bronze Age in Denmark. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.

  Wentink, K. 2006. Ceci n’est pas une Hache: Neolithic Depositions in the Northern Netherlands. Leiden: Sidestone Press.

  Whittaker, J.C. 1994. Flint knapping: making and understanding stone tools. Austin: University of Texas Press.

  CHAPTER 38

  DEPOSITION IN PITS*

  DUNCAN GARROW

  INTRODUCTION

  THIS chapter, somewhat unusually, focuses on a single type of archaeological feature—the pit. Neolithic pits in Britain are generally fairly small, usually measuring less than two metres in diameter and a metre in depth (Fig. 38.1). Normally, their fills contain charcoal-rich material, along with broken pottery, flint debris and tools, burnt flint, burnt stone, charred hazelnut shells, charred seeds, and bone. Often, these materials simply appear to have been dumped into the pits. However, occasionally, more elaborate depositional practices—such as selecting apparently special objects, or carefully arranging certain items at the base of a pit—are identified.

  FIG. 38.1. A cluster of early Neolithic pits at Kilverstone, Norfolk (1m scale).

  (Photograph: D. Garrow).

  Pits are, of course, found on Neolithic sites right across Europe, mostly in association with other archaeological features—alongside longhouses or cut into the floors of mud-brick tells, for example (see e.g. Last, this volume; Raczky, this volume). Across Britain, however, numerous sites exist which consist only of pits, sometimes in very large numbers (Thomas 1999, ch. 4; Garrow 2006; Anderson-Whymark and Thomas 2012). Over the past twenty years, there has been a substantial increase in the number of known pit sites through developer-funded archaeology. This has ensured that pits are now incorporated into accounts of the British Neolithic, providing an important counterweight within a period which has predominantly been discussed through monuments.

  On many pit sites in Britain, no evidence survives of the houses, settlement enclosures, and other features with which it is presumed the pits were once associated. In many regions, what we know about Neolithic occupation—and in some cases, the Neolithic as a whole—we must deduce from pits. The absence of evidence for dwelling structures across large parts of Britain, especially the south and east, has forced Neolithic archaeologists to problematize the way in which ‘settlement’ worked at that time (e.g. Gibson 2003). Generally speaking, the absence of archaeologically visible houses, and the supposedly ephemeral evidence that pits are usually seen as representing, have been taken as suggesting that settlement itself was mobile, impermanent and relatively small-scale (e.g. Pollard 1999; Thomas 1999).

  In Britain, the creation of pits, and subsequent deposition of material culture within them, appears to have been a practice particularly associated with the Neolithic. Whilst some Mesolithic pits are known, most famously those in the Stonehenge car park (Allen and Gardiner 2002), they are relatively rare. Similarly, during the early Bronze Age, the number of pits drops substantially. Whilst pits were dug continually right through to the modern period, from the middle Bronze Age (c. 1500 BC) onwards they tend to represent one of a range of features, rather than the entirety of one site. Their role, it seems, had changed by then.

  NEOLITHIC PITS IN BRITAIN: SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL VARIABILITY

  It is important to point out that ‘deposition in pits’ is far from a uniform phenomenon during the British Neolithic. Whilst pits are known right across Britain at this time, they do not occur in anything like uniform numbers geographically (Garrow 2012a). Intriguingly, they appear to be relatively sparse in the areas where post-built structures are more common, such as Scotland and north-west Wales. The greatest density of pit sites is in eastern England, where there are very few convincing structures; the region has also produced the majority of the largest sites (several with more than 50 pits). In eastern England, these very large clusters mostly date to the early Neolithic, and are associated with Mildenhall pottery (Garrow 2006, ch. 3). By contrast, in the middle Thames valley, only twenty early Neolithic pits have been found, with pit digging really only taking off during the middle Neolithic, in association with Peterborough Ware (Lamdin-Whymark 2008, 123). In Wessex, the picture is different again: the early Neolithic is characterized not by very large sites, but rather by massive deposits of material within single pits, as at Coneybury and Rowden in Wiltshire (Richards 1990; Woodward 1991). Late Neolithic pits associated with Grooved Ware pottery are the most numerous in this region (Thomas 1999, 69), as they are on the comparable chalk geology of East Yorkshire (Manby 1999).

  As well as this spatial variation, deposition in pits is characterized by considerable variability over time and between contexts, even within regions. In eastern England for instance, during the early Neolithic there is no clear patterning in what was deposited or how it was placed within a pit. However, over time, there is evidence that the act of deposition became more stylized: during the late Neolithic, certain objects were apparently selected preferentially and, at times, very clearly arranged within the pit. Intriguingly, this is diametrically opposite to what happens in monumental contexts, where deposition became less stylized over the course of the Neolithic (Garrow 2007a). Similarly, in the Thames valley, different types of deposition predominate in different contexts at different times (Lamdin-Whymark 2008).

  Overall, it seems that whilst the idea of digging pits and putting material within them was important to people across many areas of Britain during the Neolithic, the ways in which this practice was actually played out varied considerably over space and time, and between different contexts.

  HOW HAVE PITS BEEN INTERPRETED?

  As archaeologists, we dig a variety of different feature types: ditches, post-holes, hearths, graves, floors, walls, wells, pits. Most of these words have implicit associations or preconceived meanings: a ditch demarcated a specific space, perhaps around a field or settlement; a post-hole housed a wooden timber upright and probably formed part of a building; a hearth was a place of war
mth, fire, and cooking; a grave contained a burial and perhaps artefacts; and so on. The word ‘pit’, on the other hand, is reserved for features which do not have an immediately obvious meaning or role. It remains ambiguous, and so has to be qualified for us to understand its nature: a ‘cremation’ pit, a ‘rubbish’ pit, a ‘cess’ pit or ‘quarry’ pit. Pits can be dug for a ‘bewildering number of purposes’ (Greene 2002, 120). During the Neolithic, the purpose of pits certainly proves difficult to pin down. They are not easily categorized. Over the years, this ambiguity has resulted in a rich diversity of interpretations.

  During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pits featured only occasionally in narratives of the British Neolithic. Generally, where they were discussed, the notion that they must have been primitive ‘pit dwellings’ predominated (e.g. Pitt Rivers 1898; Wyman Abbott 1910), an idea which sat comfortably with social evolutionary views of the Neolithic at that time. In the 1930s and 1940s, interpretations broadened somewhat. The pits found at Clacton in Essex, for example, were viewed as being either ‘surface occupation or camp sites’, ‘cooking holes’ or ‘hearth sites’, as well as possible ‘pit dwellings’ (Warren et al. 1936). Two pits found in a garden 300 yards from the famous timber monument at Woodhenge in Wiltshire also initiated new interpretations. The fact that these contained unused axes, arrowheads, and bone pins, alongside large slabs of Grooved Ware, suggested to Stone and Young (1948, 302) that ‘their use must be susceptible of interpretations other than mere refuse pits’. They went on to suggest, somewhat creatively, that ‘possibly we have the remains of sacred feasts held in the [Woodhenge] enclosure and considered in consequence too hallowed for normal disposal and demanding special ritual burial’ (Stone and Young 1948, 305).

  Throughout the 1960s, assumptions linking the Neolithic with a ‘package’ of full-scale mixed farming, pottery production, new stone tool technologies, and permanent settlement underlay most interpretations. Excavations at Hurst Fen, Suffolk (Clark et al. 1960), for example, aimed to recover the long-awaited ‘Neolithic settlement’. Although 200 earlier Neolithic pits were excavated, none of the expected structures were there. Their total absence was not seen as particularly problematic, being explained away as a consequence either of house construction techniques, or of the fact that people lived in temporary tents (Clark et al. 1960, 205).

  The publication of Hurst Fen nevertheless significantly changed the way pits were approached. For the first time, a major site containing pits alone had been found. Confronted by such an impressive number of them, the excavators were forced to think about exactly what those pits might have been for. Through comparison with similar, basket-lined pits in Egypt, and no doubt also influenced by understandings of the Iron Age, they concluded that the features at Hurst Fen were ‘best interpreted as storage pits’ (Clark et al. 1960, 211). The material within them was of secondary importance, seen as rubbish simply filling convenient hollows. With occasional exceptions, the storage pit interpretation dominated until the early 1990s.

  Thomas’s book Rethinking the Neolithic (1991) represents perhaps the key turning point in understanding Neolithic pits. Thomas devoted a whole chapter to describing a ‘genealogy of depositional practices’, suggesting that the intentional deposition of material culture in the ground represented a fundamental part of what it was to ‘be’ Neolithic. He also made a very convincing case that, unlike Iron Age ones, Neolithic pits were not suitable for grain storage (Thomas 1991, 63). As a consequence, he argued that pits were dug ‘specifically for the burial of particular materials, and backfilled immediately afterwards’ (Thomas 1991, 75). In later works, he introduced two further key concepts: that the digging of pits and deposition of material culture somewhere changed people’s relationship to that place (e.g. Thomas 1996, 166); and that the act of deposition had a ‘performative’ element (e.g. Thomas 1999, 69).

  Since the late 1990s, many prominent Neolithic archaeologists in Britain have made sure to include pits within their accounts of the period (e.g. Edmonds 1999; Whittle 1999; Bradley 2007). Moreover, the arguments set out in relation to Neolithic pits in Britain have now influenced interpretations of other periods and regions. For example, Hill carried out a detailed and highly influential study of pit deposits in the Iron Age (Hill 1995), whilst Chapman (2000) investigated the concept of ‘structured deposition’ in pits (and elsewhere) in south-east Europe.

  At the end of this brief history of pit interpretations, it is worth summarizing my view on why pits were dug and filled with material during the British Neolithic. It is, of course, difficult to reach an understanding of why people felt the need to excavate a pit and then fill it with domestic ‘rubbish’, particularly as those motivations may have varied over time and space. It was not, however, purely a desire to keep sites ‘tidy’, as large amounts of material were also generally left undeposited on the surface at pit sites. The fact that the appearance of pits (in the early Neolithic) coincides with the widespread occurrence of much larger excavated constructions, such as long barrows and causewayed enclosures, is notable. Indeed it can be argued that pits are one element of the much broader practice of ‘altering the earth’ (Bradley 1993) which characterized the Neolithic in Britain and beyond. Thomas’s point (1991, 75)—that the act of depositing material culture in the ground was simply an important part of ‘being Neolithic’—is certainly pertinent here. In the same way that material was deposited in monumental contexts, such as causewayed enclosures, during the early centuries of the Neolithic, so too was it deposited in what appear to have been more ‘domestic’ sites comprising only pits. It is also worth reiterating another of Thomas’s points—that the act of deposition may well have changed people’s perception of ‘place’ (1996, 166). In a world of newly cleared primary forest and relatively impermanent settlement (in some regions at least), people may have felt a desire to tie themselves, materially, to particular places. The act of placing the detritus of occupation in the ground at each visit may have maintained a sense of connection with that place when moving on, perhaps as often as every few months. By the same token, having buried some possessions within the ground, along with the memories and events those items were probably associated with, people may well have felt more drawn to that place next time they chose where to settle.

  Whatever the motivations and effects of the practice, in many regions this subtle relationship between material culture, pits, and places appears to have been important to people for the two millennia or so of the Neolithic. It is, therefore, one which we must take very seriously when trying to understand human lives and practices at that time.

  THE IDEA OF ‘STRUCTURED DEPOSITION’

  Perhaps the most influential work on Neolithic deposition, ‘Ritual activity and structured deposition in later Neolithic Wessex’, was published in 1984 (Richards and Thomas 1984; see Garrow 2012b for a critical history of the concept of structured deposition), in the early days of post-processual archaeology. It was explicitly concerned with facilitating ‘a systematic approach to ritual, which … allows the examination of both symbolism and structure as embodied in material culture and its deposition’ (Richards and Thomas 1984, 190). The authors analysed depositional patterning within the late Neolithic henge at Durrington Walls, Wiltshire. Those deposits were said to be ‘structured’ in a recognizable way because they had been produced as part of the ‘highly formalized, repetitive behaviour’ associated with ritual (Richards and Thomas 1984, 191). Material culture, particularly Grooved Ware pottery, it was argued, had been deposited in a way which conveyed complex ideas through ‘specific sequences and rules applied to the contexts and associations of different objects’ (Richards and Thomas 1984, 192).

  With hindsight, and after over two decades of interpretive development, the paper might be criticized for artificially separating ‘ritual’ from other aspects of life (Brück 1999; Bradley 2005) and for assuming a very direct relationship between material patterning and intentionally constructed symbolic meanings. However
, this work—and particularly the term ‘structured deposition’—has had a lasting effect for very good reasons. Perhaps most important of all, the focus on ‘rubbish’ during the Neolithic made it of fundamental relevance to our interpretations.

  The notion of ‘structured deposition’ has caught on particularly well in relation to pits, largely because, in contrast to causewayed enclosures, henges, etc. they usually have no clear ‘function’ other than deposition. As a result, the ‘ritual’ interpretation has been particularly easily applied. From our own perspective at least, the practice of digging small holes just to fill them with rubbish is undeniably strange. The idea of ‘structured deposition’ gave that practice a label. Richards and Thomas intended to provide a method to identify ‘ritual’ practices materially; the next step was to proceed to an interpretation. However, the success of the term has arguably led to that interpretive process being cut short. Its identification has become the interpretation in itself. It is now possible to excavate a Neolithic pit, identify ‘structured deposition’ (i.e. a strange Neolithic practice which we cannot understand) within it, and leave it at that. Whilst this provides an easy route out of a difficult situation, it is also unsatisfactory. To build a more complete understanding of deposition in pits, we need to move beyond the issue of ‘structured deposition’, to look at other aspects of the material within those features.

  BEYOND ‘STRUCTURED DEPOSITION’?

  The remainder of this chapter explores some of the ways which allow us to move beyond simply identifying pits containing structured deposits. Acts of intentionally ‘structured deposition’ (sensu Richards and Thomas 1984) by no means occur in all pits. The influence and subsequent application of the concept has therefore resulted in a rather biased view. Primarily, I will look beyond the act of deposition itself at processes occurring one step further back in time: what can the material deposited actually tell us about what happened, and how it happened, on pit sites? First, I will investigate what happened to the material within pits prior to deposition, and what this can tell us about the character of settlements and how ‘rubbish’ was perceived. I will then consider what the deposited material tells us about the character of occupation on pit sites, looking at how ‘much’ occupation these supposedly ephemeral sites actually saw. I will also show that pits as containers of significant ‘background’ information offer extremely important information in addition to that recovered from monumental contexts. Finally, I consider what the material dynamics of a site (e.g. where different parts of the same pot ended up) reveal about the character of occupation there. Many of my examples come from eastern England, which has produced the highest numbers of pits overall, and which I have studied previously in most detail.