The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe

by Chris Fowler

  Chronology and temporality are crucial to our understanding of the processes of construction and funerary deposition, and to the meanings that they may have held. The imprecision with which archaeologists can date the prehistoric past and model change at sites leads all too easily to monolithic interpretations (e.g. of ancestral veneration) and to the impression that changes in beliefs and practices were slow and gradual, but this is contested by cases where precise radiocarbon dates are becoming available. Thus for instance the chambered and unchambered long barrows of southern Britain are now known to fall within a period of a few generations between the thirty-eighth and thirty-sixth centuries BC, and short event-like horizons have been proposed for the construction of other categories of chambered tomb in northern and western Europe (Bayliss and Whittle 2007; Scarre 2010). Some of the earliest chambers in Britain began as simple structures, sometimes built on the site of earlier activity. In some cases that activity was in the form of a setting of two or three split-trunk posts (see Noble 2006, 78–94). These post settings, also found under unchambered barrows, may have been part of shrines marking places that already had a history of religious value before the dead were buried there. Burial may have changed the significance of the locale. Impressive façades were built at many sites; either contemporaneously with the post settings or chamber, choreographing access to these, or later framing forecourts for gatherings outside chambers or at the front of mounds. Some chambered tombs were closed off and ceremonially put out of use. In northern France this process (known as ‘condamnation’) involved the destruction through burning of timber chambers (as in parts of Britain), or the partial demolition and levelling of a megalithic chamber such as La Chaussée-Tirancourt (Masset 1997, 151–152). In some cases, the addition of the mound may have marked the transformation of a funerary space into a monumentalized memorial. Where mounds accompanied or followed chambers or unchambered burials quickly, they may have commemorated known human individuals or families, possibly acknowledging them as ancestors, but in some instances several centuries intervened before monument closure or elaboration, and any concept of the ancestral dead is more likely to have been generic.

  The dead may not always have been rapidly transformed into anonymous ancestors through funerary activity, but a cumulative effect of building structures to contain or cover the dead was to produce places associated with the ancestral dead. Ditch-digging and mound-building was not confined to mortuary sites, and during the same periods as earthen longbarrows were built, mounds transformed other historic places, such as post-defined cursus monuments in Scotland (Thomas 2006). Each of these monuments acknowledged the generative legacy of specific historically meaningful or perhaps now-mythical acts and events associated with the locales they monumentalized. Evidence for continuing veneration of these ‘ancestral’ sites is, however, equivocal, and it is possible that many sites were ignored or even shunned by subsequent generations following tomb closure or barrow construction. It is at present equally difficult to interpret the extent to which ‘ancestral’ human remains were curated away from mortuary sites based on the occasional burial of a bundle of bones or skull, or the few known examples of stray bones at locales other than mortuary sites, caves or enclosures. It is also worth noting that ethnographies suggest that the bones (among other bodily substances) of the living and recently dead may also be identified as ancestral matter by the community (Fowler 2010, 13, 18). Thus, the possibility of Neolithic concepts of ancestry will remain an important challenge to interpret at a range of scales, and cannot be simply rejected nor repeated without specific scrutiny.

  MORTUARY DEPOSITS AT ENCLOSURES

  The deposition of human remains in enclosure ditches is a practice that can be documented at Bandkeramik sites in the late sixth millennium BC, Menneville in the Aisne valley being one of the most westerly examples of a widespread central European phenomenon (Farruggia et al. 1996; Hofmann and Orschiedt, this volume). Similar practices recurred in later millennia. In the chalk and limestone terrain of western France south of the Loire, for example, human remains, both isolated skeletal elements and complete formal burials, are frequently encountered at the base of the rock-cut ditches from the late fourth and third millennium BC. At Champ Durand there were five formal burials: three double, two single (Joussaume 2012). At Echiré, there were five formal burials in the outer ditch (two with skulls removed) and scattered human remains in the inner ditch (Burnez 1996). These deposits are consistent with a ceremonial rather than defensive interpretation for these enclosures (Scarre 1998).

  Intact bodies were sometimes placed within the ditches of British earlier Neolithic causewayed enclosures (c. 3650–3350 BC). At The Trundle and Whitehawk, intact bodies were accompanied by incised chalk blocks (Curwen 1929, 1934). Intact burials have also been found at later enclosures in southern Britain. Two intact child burials had been inserted in niches cut within the ditch floor and covered by cairns of flint at Hambledon Hill (Mercer and Healy 2008). Four inhumations and a cremation deposit were placed in ditch segments at Flagstones c. 3300–3000 BC; the segments were backfilled and, a few years later, three were covered by large sarsen slabs (Healy 1997). At Monkton-up-Wimborne, Dorset, four people were interred together in a shaft at the centre of a pit-defined enclosure: a woman, her daughter, and two other children (Green 2000, 77–84). Some of the people buried intact at enclosures had died difficult deaths—in or just before childbirth for one of the Whitehawk burials, for instance, and following the (presumably contemporary) death of several members of a family at Monkton-up-Wimbourne.

  Skulls and isolated human skeletal elements were more common at causewayed enclosures, as at Hambledon Hill where cut marks and animal gnawing have been identified on some bones, whilst human skulls, lacking mandibles, were placed on the ditch floor (Mercer and Healy 2008). It is hard to say whether curation of heads was a form of ancestral veneration or whether these were trophies of violence (see Schulting and Wysocki 2005), and it is possible some heads or skulls moved between such categories (Fowler 2010, 8). Isolated bones, particularly skull fragments, have been found in some later Neolithic pits and henge ditches (Thomas 1996, 164–168), often late in the sequence of fills and sometimes associated with Grooved Ware sherds. For instance, human skull fragments have been found at the top of the ditch shafts of henges at Maumbury Rings and Wyke Down 1. Cremated remains have also been found at Stonehenge dating from c. 3000 BC (Parker Pearson et al. 2009).

  MORTUARY DEPOSITION AT OTHER PLACES

  Human remains were placed not only in contexts that we might readily classify as funerary or ceremonial in nature, but at other unmodified locales such as rivers, caves, and bogs. Thomas (1998) has argued that, as well as being buried, the remains of the dead were circulated through prescribed earlier Neolithic arenas such as causewayed enclosures and flint mines alongside other materials like flint and carved chalk objects within an ‘economy of substances’ (cf. Thomas 1996, 141–182). Thus, following death not all bodily essences were invested in tombs, and dispersal of remains into the landscape need not indicate a lower value for those persons or their remains.

  Only one clear example of a deliberate burial has been found in a British flint mine (Cissbury Shaft VI), although a skull was found in the fill of pit 1 at Grime’s Graves (Barber et al. 1999, 62–63), and another shaft yielded a pick made from a human femur. Caves were used more frequently. Sheridan et al. (2008, 10, 17) provide radiocarbon dates from human remains in five Devon caves which all fall between c. 3900 and 3300 BC, whilst Dowd (2008) identifies a series of Neolithic burials from Irish caves. Leach (2008) outlines a range of early Neolithic mortuary practices within Yorkshire caves, pointing out that those whose bodies were left intact in these special places were effectively excluded from normal funerary treatment, and that several of them had serious pathologies. Middle and later Neolithic pottery has been found in caves yielding the remains of what were probably intact bodies (Barnatt and Edmonds 2002). These British examples form part of a broa
d north-west European pattern of burials or isolated body parts from a wide range of contexts, many of which would not be considered primarily funerary in character (Pariat 2007).

  REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HUMAN BODY AND METAPHORS FOR THE BODY

  Figurative human representations were relatively rare. In the Paris basin a small but significant group of ceramic figurines is dated to the late fifth millennium BC, notably from the enclosures of Fort Harrouard and Noyen-sur-Seine (Mohen 1986; Mordant and Mordant 1986). The c. 15cm-tall clay bodies are naked and schematic, with accentuated sexual attributes (Scarre 2007, figs 2 and 3). The provision of socketed heads on some suggests they may originally have been clothed in some way. They were not deposited in a special or structured fashion and may have featured in the daily lives of household members; their meanings may have been contextual. Fragments of similar figurines have been found in the Auvergne and southern France.

  A different set of fifth millennium human representations is found in northern France. In the north-west (Brittany and adjacent areas), an early series of standing stones (most subsequently incorporated into passage graves) carries a range of engraved motifs that may include schematic representations of the human figure (Scarre 2009). A classic contentious example is the so-called ‘mother-goddess’ motif from passage graves such as Ile Longue: a rectangular face or body, attached arms or ears, central crest or vestigial head, and wavy hair. ‘Shouldered’ slabs are mainly found built into megalithic tombs but may originally have been free-standing menhirs. The largest and most remarkable is the massive shouldered slab re-used as a floor stone around which chamber II of the Petit Mont cairn was built (Lecornec 1994). The identification of the human form is here based on overall shape rather than engraved motifs. Conversely, the slab re-used as a capstone in the Déhus passage grave on Guernsey is not anthropomorphic in shape, but engraved with an unequivocal human figure (Kinnes and Hibbs 1989). The evocative face and faintly carved belt and bow are without stylistic parallel in Neolithic north-west Europe.

  Late in the fourth or early in the third millennium, human figures were carved in outline in the chalk-cut hypogea of the Marne, and pairs of breasts carved in relief on the late-series megalithic tombs of the Paris basin and Brittany (Scarre 2009). In contrast to the earlier carved slabs, these stones had not been re-used but are in situ, an intentional part of the funerary space. They are also more overtly gendered. Yet only those of the Marne hypogea are complete human representations; the remainder are disembodied body parts, representing perhaps female-related concepts of nurturing and feeding, the transmission of vital essences. The free-standing Le Câtel menhir on Guernsey has clearly marked breasts, and may belong to the same tradition (Shee Twohig 1981, 200; Fig. 53.3). A second stone of similar type, but reworked at a later period, comes from the adjacent parish of Saint Martin’s whilst fragments of two further three-dimensional statue-menhirs have been found in Brittany (Kinnes 1980). Statue-menhirs also appear in southern France and the Alpine zone (Scarre 2007), but are entirely absent from Britain and Ireland despite the shared currency of megalithic architecture across north-west Europe.

  FIG. 53.3. Le Câtel menhir, Guernsey. Granite statue-menhir of presumed late Neolithic date with shoulders, breasts and ‘necklace’ and a circlet around the crown of the head.

  (Photograph: Chris Scarre).

  Few unambiguous representations of the human form have been recovered in Britain and Ireland. The early Neolithic ambiguous bone ‘god dolly’ from the Haddenham enclosure may represent a human form (Pollard in Evans and Hodder 2006, 307–308), and there are two wooden figurines: one from the Somerset levels near features dating to between 3040 and 2450 BC, and one from Dagenham dating to the terminal Neolithic/Chalcolithic or start of the early Bronze Age (Scarre 2007). It is notable that these did not use the most enduring media: only on Orkney have stone or clay figurines been found, notably the two figures in stone and one in clay from in or around late Neolithic buildings at the Links of Noltland (Varndell 2012, fig. 53.4). Miniatures of bodies provide an opportunity to observe phenomena at a smaller scale, to create an easily manipulated microcosm and thereby reflect on the body in a particular way. North-west European communities might have manipulated scale in different ways to those of south-east Europe; in north-west Europe, where monuments constituted microcosms, scaling key principles down so that human beings could relate to them bodily in a single space at a single time, there may have been less need to miniaturize the body. Alternatively, these communities may have used more ephemeral media to depict bodies.

  FIG. 53.4. Three figurines from the Links of Noltland, Westray, Orkney. Scale length 2cm. The middle figurine is made of clay.

  © Crown Copyright reproduced courtesy of Historic Scotland. http://www.historicscotlandimages.gov.uk.

  In contrast to intact bodies, body parts were represented in a variety of media (Thomas 2005). In later Neolithic Britain, schematic faces were carved on the drum-like chalk objects from Folkton in Yorkshire, and further possible faces appear on the macehead from Knowth and on a sandstone plaque from Rothley Lodge Park in Leicestershire. In northern France and southern Britain, there seems to have been a focus on the organs used in the transmission of vital substances. Paired female breasts are carved on tomb walls in Brittany and the Paris basin. Stone or clay balls and phalli have been found at mines, causewayed enclosures, and henge monuments in southern Britain. Teather (2008, 266) reports 22 phalli from southern Britain of which 12 are chalk, eight flint, one bone, one clay, and one iron pyrite. If they refer to body parts, such balls may represent testes, breasts, or heads. Other ambiguous objects may also have referred to body parts: mushroom-headed bone pins recovered from Irish passage graves which often also contained stone, chalk or limestone balls, such as the Mound of the Hostages, may perhaps have been phallic referents.

  We might also compare human bodies with other material ‘bodies’ and consider whether Neolithic people saw the same principles manifested in these bodies and in human bodies. Human bodies can be understood as composed of the substances passed on by the generations that went before—containing vital essences transmitted down lines of descent—and/or as renewed by ongoing interaction with other spiritual beings (Fowler 2004a, 101–129; Jones 2008, 192–193). In many belief systems such generative forces are also invested in a range of worldly materials, places, objects, plants, and animals. Detailed contextual analyses have considered the media of the Neolithic world as metaphors for or equivalents to the human body or its constituent parts and substances: pottery vessels (Fowler 2001, 2004b, 2008; Thomas 2002); stone, quartz, flint, and pitchstone (Fowler and Cummings 2003; Jones 1999; Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina 1998); plants, trees, and wood (Cummings and Whittle 2004; Fowler 2003; Noble 2006; Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina 1998); axes (Thomas 1996); and animal bodies, especially cattle (e.g. Jones 1998; Ray and Thomas 2003). Tombs, cairns, and barrows can be seen as embodiments of a community: the social body at a large and enduring scale (Fowler 2004b, 2008; Fowler and Cummings 2003). Bodies, objects, places, and structures were sometimes subject to comparable cycles of generation, transformation, and destruction followed by the manipulation of their fragmented substances. Like more figurative representations, each medium could have provided a different way to reflect on human bodies. Moreover, human persons do not only interact with human ancestors and peers: vital and generative relations with other entities—persons, spirits, and other beings—may have been negotiated in many ways, some involving human remains. Communities might trace their ancestry in relation to human progenitors, animals, trees, or mountains with whom they shared a mythical origin. Thus, understanding Neolithic bodies requires a move beyond art that literally represents the body and beyond the bodies themselves to explore the wider media through which bodies were generated, experienced, and reflected upon.

  DISCUSSION

  The diversity in mortuary practices and bodily representations outlined in this chapter may relate to varied ways of conceptualizing
and categorizing bodies, persons, communities, ways of dying; to different religious beliefs and ritual practices; and to varied and changing relationships among the living and between the living and the dead. New chronologies for mortuary sites and new analyses of human remains will increasingly allow us to discern historical junctures when specific ways of treating bodies and relating to the dead came to the fore, and to start to build a picture of the daily routines that shaped Neolithic bodies (e.g. Wysocki and Whittle 2000).

  Some broad trends in treating the dead emerge from the diversity of specific regional and historical patterns. Whilst bodies were sometimes presented as an ornamented image following death, or engraved in stone, they were often represented ambiguously, in pieces, in process, in transformation. Throughout most of the Neolithic in north-west Europe, the intact, fleshed body was seldom represented. Instead (in twenty-first century terms), real bodies and their parts were presented directly in daily routines, ceremonial interactions, acts of excavation, construction, and deposition. In most cases burial of human remains was rare, and perhaps derived more from very specific ideas about particular people, events, or places than from normative funerary traditions extended to all. Where bodies were placed in single graves, relations were arguably traced through the artefacts in the grave, location near others in a cemetery—the growth of which involved tracing relations across generations—and/or choice of place for burial. But some single burials were left isolated and with little or no objects. The increased frequency of single burials in the Beaker period may indicate the emergence of a new understanding of what burial meant, bringing about new categories of the dead.