by Chris Fowler
THE NEOLITHIC AS A FORM OF ORGANIZATION
If neither economic practice nor residential patterns were fixed over time and space, one alternative has been to argue that the core element of the Neolithic was a uniform cosmology or ideology (e.g. Hodder 1990). The Neolithic is thus a way of thinking. However, it is not clear why such a thing should escape transformation as material realities changed, and the notion that it might be based upon a conceptual division between culture and nature is arguably anachronistic, a product of modern western thought (Collingwood 1945, 9). In the light of these difficulties, the present author has tended to argue in the past that the Neolithic is best understood as no more than a repertoire of entities and practices that were adopted in different ways by different societies under contingent circumstances (e.g. Thomas 1999, 17). More recently, however, John Robb (2013, 658) has made the crucial observation that despite the particularity of the local processes involved, we also need to understand the Neolithic phenomenon at a global level. He notes that the shift from Mesolithic to Neolithic was a one-way process that spread across the European continent in a little more than two millennia. People for the most part did not revert to a Mesolithic way of life, and whilst as we have seen they sometimes did abandon or reduce their dependence on domesticated resources, this is not necessarily the same thing. Robb’s explanation for this is that the advent of the Neolithic involved a changing relationship between people and things, from which it was increasingly difficult for communities to extricate themselves. This argument carries resonances of Hodder’s (2012) account of the progressive process by which human beings have become increasingly ‘entangled’ with material objects, but has the additional virtue of identifying the Neolithic as a horizon of quantum change in person–thing relations.
There is much to recommend the view that any commonality that we can identify in the European Neolithic is likely to be found in the character of relationships and forms of organization, rather than the presence or absence of particular species or artefact types. However, there are two aspects of Robb’s argument that need to be qualified. The first of these is that his article can be read as suggesting that social changes identified were essentially the outcomes of economic and technological developments. In other words, it potentially embodies a level of determinism. The second is that Robb appears to use the terms ‘Neolithic’ and ‘farming’ synonymously, thus perpetuating a difficulty that has bedevilled the debate for decades. ‘Farming’ and ‘agriculture’ refer to the practice of rendering living things as property, and cultivating them, in the sense of intervening in and channelling their proliferation and reproduction (Ingold 1996). The Neolithic, by contrast, was a form of sociality that facilitated both ownership and cultivation, and whilst it often co-occurred with farming in the Old World, it was not the same thing. The relationship between the two is comparable with that between capitalism and industrial production: they are conceptually distinct if historically intertwined.
Whilst Robb emphasizes the relationships between people and things, the transformation of the relationships amongst human beings formed an equally important aspect of the Neolithic transition. We have noted already that hunter-gatherers often have a way of life that is based on sharing, mutual support, and extensive, relatively fluid webs of social relationships. One of the reasons why foragers sometimes find it difficult to adopt agriculture is that their neighbours and affines will simply demand that they share out their seed corn or breeding stock for immediate consumption, with the result that they have no crops or herds left by the next season (Peterson 1993, 864; Woodburn 1982, 447). A set of arrangements that is highly effective in securing the survival of hunter-gatherers therefore militates against a change to more intensive economic practices. If such a change is to take place, a social transformation is required in order to bring increasingly bounded social units into being, which can serve as the holders of collective property. However, such a revision of what Karl Marx would call the social relations of production would only enable the adoption of a new form of subsistence, rather than determining the form that this would take: horticulture, pastoralism, mixed farming, or even the intensified and monopolistic use of wild resources (see Ingold 1980, 94).
Despite this emphasis on social relationships, the argument that I want to make here is distinct from Marxist orthodoxy in two important respects. The first is that it rejects the ‘productionist metaphysics’ that represents the world as a massive store of inert raw materials that are at the disposal of humankind, whilst animals are simply biological automata (Heidegger 1977, 17). In this account, production involves the removal of matter out of nature, and its transformation by human labour, so that humans are the sole authors of whatever is made. An alternative to this vision is to see human beings as immersed in a world of active, vibrant and flowing materials and other animate creatures, whose configurations they alter through an engaged involvement (Bennett 2010, 4; Ingold 2012, 434). Secondly, I would like to blur the contrast that Marx relies upon between the forces and relations of production, to some extent. For it is arguable that what distinguishes the Neolithic is not only a fundamental change in the character of property relations, but also a much more imbricated relationship between humans and what Bruno Latour (2005) would call ‘non-humans’. By this I mean not only that people owned and made more material things, and maintained more continuous connections with artefacts, plants, and animals, but that relations between humans were increasingly channelled through, sustained by, and delegated to non-human entities. Admittedly, the lives of both humans and animals are always supported and stabilized by places and objects that they can return to and reuse: cliffs, waterholes, fording places, forest clearings, and conveniently shaped stones (Ingold 2012, 429–430). But what distinguished Neolithic societies was the way that non-humans became more integral to their fabric: not just that people had more dealings with other kinds of beings, but that they embedded them in social relationships. Where hunters episodically and discontinuously engage with animals that are human-like, but are members of societies of their own, herders live continuously alongside animals that are contained within their own social unit. This would have had the paradoxical effect of making societies more durable, whilst introducing elements whose behaviour humans might not always have been able to predict or control. Thus the activity of a pastoral community is different from that of a hunting band, in that the former is a hybrid entity whose movements always involve a tension between the objectives of the humans and the desires of the livestock. Similarly, if social relationships are sustained by the circulation of artefacts and the inhabitation of architectural spaces, then breakage and decay, maintenance and repair can come to represent volatile and capricious aspects of the maintenance of social order.
This is not to say that the relationships that Mesolithic people had had with things and animals had been in any sense asocial. Whilst hunter-gatherers often understand animals to be human-like beings, who have to be treated with respect, they are nonetheless not members of human communities, so that dealings with them tend to be discontinuous and transactional (Ingold 2000, 72). By contrast, the domestication of animals is a social process that renders them as a kind of kin, as well as sentient, animate property (Orton 2010, 189; Russell 2007, 28). Similarly, for hunter-gatherers the quantity of material things employed is often minimized by the combination of portability and sharing relations. Those things can certainly have an intense social and personal significance. For instance, it has been argued that Mesolithic tools composed of multiple microliths embodied the work of a number of different people, and this might have had the effect of restricting the claim that any one person would have on the meat of an animal slain with the arrow (Finlay 2003). But Mesolithic technology was as much concerned with mediating the relationship between people and the wider world as it was with articulating social relationships. Thus the distinctive stones that were collected for use as tools and amulets are likely to have expressed the relationships between pe
rsons and places, whilst long exchange chains that could generate alliances and indebtedness between people were much more characteristic of the Neolithic (Hardy and Wickham Jones 2003, 381).
We might say, then, that whilst Mesolithic societies were composed of extensive and relatively unbounded networks of relationships between persons, Neolithic societies were bounded but heterogeneous assemblages in which people, animals, and things were mixed up together. The density of made things in the Neolithic suggests a new way in which communities made themselves at home in the world, as well as extending their social presence beyond that of their corporeal bodies. But the most important aspect of this change involves the durability of social arrangements. In a world without state institutions, society is not a fixed entity so much as something that is constantly being brought into being. Where people or animals have few material resources beyond their own bodies, they find themselves continually having to define the parameters of their social world through a process of negotiation and testing (Strum and Latour 1987). For a hunting and gathering society, it is the resources of custom and tradition that are drawn on to supplement and strengthen the process of performatively creating and renewing social relationships, but this is none the less a costly and skilled operation.
Yet when animals and material things are incorporated into a society, a kind of ‘splinting’ occurs, where the temporalities of different kinds of entities become bundled together. This has the effect of extending the duration of social connections. Objects endure beyond single human lifetimes, and are passed between the generations, providing continuity (Joyce 2000, 190). The same is true of herds of animals, which have a dynamic and a duration of their own, to which groups of people attach themselves. Moreover, both objects and animals contribute to a stabilized context into which new generations of people are born, and within which they become socialized (see Mlekuz, this volume). Equally, both portable artefacts and architecture channel human movement and guide habitual practices, reducing the need for deliberation in everyday life, whilst the daily and seasonal movements of animals and the requirements of growing plants impose a more predictable rhythm on human existence. Overall, the change from Mesolithic to Neolithic would have been one in which a more elaborately crafted material world increasingly routinized social reproduction, reducing the risk of social rupture and the need for continual tactful negotiation.
In the British context, it is notable that much of the archaeological material of the earliest Neolithic embodies the themes of the initiation of identity, and the guiding of practice. The timber halls discussed above, for instance, were constructed during a short period immediately after the start of the Neolithic, and arguably represent a mechanism through which bounded communities were brought into being. This was ‘house building’ in both senses of the phrase: both the physical construction of a dwelling and the initiation of a co-resident social unit. The halls share with the timber mortuary structures or shrines beneath many earthen longbarrows an emphasis on inserting massive posts into the ground which stands as a powerful statement of the coming-into-being of a new kind of community (Thomas 2013, 297). During the same period, pits containing the deliberately placed residues of episodes of habitation, and middens containing materials built up over many decades, both commemorated human activity in the landscape, and laid down the conditions for future action. To a much greater extent than in the Mesolithic, artefacts and architecture provided the ‘scaffolding’ for everyday life. This is one of the reasons why, as Robin Skeates points out in his discussion of underground ceremonial activities in the central Mediterranean (this volume, ch. 47), ritual and quotidian activities were often tightly intertwined during the Neolithic.
This point is particularly clear in the case of the deep shaft flint mines that were dug on the South Downs of Sussex from the very start of the Neolithic. These were not strictly necessary for the acquisition of good quality flint for the manufacture of polished axes, and indeed thousands of perfectly good flake axes had been made during the Mesolithic on flint from surface exposures (Holgate 1995, 135). Yet the mines provided an architectural setting in which the various stages of productive labour were choreographed, so that the creation of value in material things was both contained and regulated (Edmonds 1995, 63). As Capote and Díaz del Río (this volume) argue, flint mines in Neolithic Europe were often remote from everyday activity, and their particular locations may have contributed to the value and meaning of the material that was extracted from them. Similarly, it is notable that the earliest structures preserved under long mounds such as Hazleton North and Eweford are often screens and façades (Lelong and Macgregor 2007, 21; Saville 1990, 20). These reveal a preoccupation with framing and staging social activity whilst creating spaces that were hidden or occluded, dividing access to performance and communication. In a different way, the Sweet Track across the wetlands of the Somerset Levels also represented an example of building practices that laid down the conditions for movement and action, so that subsequent acts become repetitive and routinized (Coles and Orme 1976, 35). It is thus arguable that one of the main roles of architecture in the primary Neolithic was to regulate social interaction, rendering the outcomes of both ritual performance and everyday conduct more predictable and less risky.
THE PLACE OF THE DEAD
Another relationship that took on an enhanced importance during the European Neolithic was that between the living and the dead. The elaborate treatment of human corpses is one of the characteristic features of the European Neolithic, and took a variety of different forms, ranging from burials under the floors of domestic dwellings to the construction of massive funerary monuments (e.g. Robb, this volume). At times, interactions with the dead could be intimate and physical: bones scraped of flesh, stacked, or placed together in new configurations (Fowler and Scarre, this volume). In the context of the argument developed here, it is easy to recognize the role that ancestral remains might play in emphasizing both the coherence of a community and its continuity with the past. Communities that claim kinship with a common ancestor possess a greater potential for lasting solidarity and affinity. Loveday (this volume) makes the very significant point that the long-established model of Neolithic funerary monuments as enduring lineage ossuaries may not have applied throughout the period, or in all areas. As he points out, in some cases the human remains inside tombs and barrows may represent no more than a dedicatory deposit establishing an ancestral presence at a particular site. One of the unexpected findings of a series of Bayesian analyses of the radiocarbon chronologies of long cairns and earthen longbarrows in southern Britain was that the extensive assemblages of human remains contained within them had generally accumulated in a relatively short period of time, often only a generation or two (Whittle et al. 2007, 131). The implication is that rather than the equivalent of a ‘cemetery’, in which the dead progressively accumulated over the centuries, mortuary monuments may often contain a group of founding ancestors, understood by the living generations as responsible for the establishment of their community. Like the timber halls already discussed, the building of such a structure could therefore represent a powerful statement of the coming into being of a distinct social group.
As Cummings, Midgeley, and Scarre (this volume) note, the earliest megalithic funerary monuments in western France were long mounds with closed chambers, apparently contemporary with the massive and sometimes decorated menhirs of the same region. Sequences in which closed deposits of small numbers of bodies appear early are known in other areas as well (Rocha 2005), again suggesting the theme of founding ancestors deposited in structures that announced the emergence of a new social order. Only later did passage graves develop in Brittany, Normandy, and Iberia, offering the possibility of protracted access to the mortuary deposit. As Cummings, Midgeley, and Scarre (this volume) point out, the open chamber accessed by means of a passage would have enabled skeletal elements to be retrieved for display and circulation, as well as making possible the successive introduction of ne
w burials. Passage graves also revealed a growing preoccupation with placing the dead in relation to landscape features and the positions of the heavenly bodies and particular times of year (Hoskin, this volume). Later still, allée couvertes and hypogées often contained very large numbers of bodies, the earliest of which were sometimes pushed aside to allow new interments (Masset 1972, 300). The changing character of megalithic burial hints that the relationship between the living and the dead was one that shifted over time. This much is suggested by the growing importance of single grave burial (sometimes under round mounds, sometimes with grave goods) in the middle and later Neolithic in some areas. As Fowler and Scarre (this volume) argue for Beaker burials, this may have been connected with the emergence of new categories of dead. In particular, we can identify the growing importance of distinct lines of descent, rather than a generalized connection with the founding ancestors of an entire community. Increasingly, it became important that wealth and authority should be handed down to particular members of society. In the British case, mortuary practices emerged that emphasized the exit of specific persons from society, rather than celebrating a founding generation of ancestors. Toward the end of the fourth millennium BC, single grave burials began to be deposited beneath round barrows, often equipped with grave goods. From around 3100 BC, these were superseded by cremation burials, which accumulated sequentially in ‘cemeteries’ that were often contained within circular monuments of one kind or another, probably the largest of which was at Stonehenge (Parker Pearson et al. 2009). At that site, an estimated total of no more than 240 cremated bodies was deposited over a period of a quarter of a millennium. This suggests a continuous process in which each successive interment was positioned spatially and temporally in relation to those that had come before.