The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe

by Chris Fowler

  THE TRANSFORMATION OF NEOLITHIC SOCIETIES

  In many areas, funerary structures were the first major monuments to be built. Menhirs and alignments of standing stones might represent an exception to this pattern, although it is equally possible that stones might be set up in memory of particular ancestors, or even be understood as the physical embodiments of the dead (Tilley 2004, 57). By contrast, Andersen (this volume) notes a recurring pattern in which ditched or palisaded enclosures were constructed in relatively short ‘waves’, often some hundreds of years after the first Neolithic activity in a given region (see also Whittle 1988, 5). Andersen suggests that enclosure building may represent the hallmark of the emergence of a fully Neolithic way of life, bringing a protracted transitional phase to a close. In Britain, causewayed enclosures began to be constructed toward the end of the thirty-eighth century BC, and their spread from the south-east of the country echoed that of Neolithic entities and practices three hundred years earlier (Whittle et al. 2011, 683). It is tempting to see the development of enclosed sites as an indication that some kind of ‘critical mass’ had been achieved, perhaps in terms of a level of population that now required a higher level of organization (as implied by Renfrew 1973, 548). However, the development of the British enclosures also coincided with that of a series of regional exchange networks, circulating stone axes from quarries in the west, exotic forms of pottery, and other lithic materials (Smith 1971, 102).

  We have argued that Neolithic societies were characteristically exclusive holders of collective wealth, and an inevitable consequence of this was that they were often intensely competitive and murderously violent (Schulting and Fibiger 2012). If mortuary monuments of one kind or another were connected with in-group relations, and the way in which solidarity in the present was constructed in relation to the collective past, it may be that part of the role of enclosures lay in regulating the relationship between communities and the wider world. Enclosures created the conditions under which different groups, and perhaps strangers from further afield, could come together temporarily in order to engage in convivial relations, and to exchange goods, personnel, and information. Significantly, in both Britain and Scandinavia the emergence of a new generation of enclosures in the middle and late Neolithic coincided with the creation of new networks of inter-regional interaction. The palisaded enclosures of Zealand, Bornholm, and Scania were created in the period between 2800 and 2600 BC. At this time, new networks and assemblages were coming into being, with the Single Grave complex and the Battle Axe complex emerging alongside the long-established TRB (Larsson 2012, 119). Similarly, the more massively constructed palisaded enclosures of Scotland, Ireland, and England were connected with the southward extension of the Grooved Ware complex in the earlier third millennium BC (Noble and Brophy 2011; Thomas 2010; Brophy, this volume). At the risk of oversimplification, it may be that episodes of enclosure building were often connected with transformations of Neolithic societies in which inter-community competition was moderated by the development of inter-regional exchange networks and more encompassing identities. These latter may, in some cases, have involved new ceremonial or religious practices (see Loveday, this volume).

  A further question that is raised by the use of the label of ‘Neolithic society’ is that of how far such a distinctive form of organization survived into the Bronze Age, and indeed whether it makes sense to talk of ‘Bronze Age societies’. Bartelheim and Pierce (this volume) argue that to begin with, the small quantities of copper and gold deposited principally in graves might not have had much impact on societies in which power was still primarily based on agricultural production. In this sense, there is a degree of continuity between Neolithic and Bronze Age societies. But on the other hand, the restricted locations of metal ores and the new exchange networks that developed as a result, the scarcity of metalworking skills, and the potential of metal to be monopolized socially introduced new dynamics into European communities (Heyd and Walker, this volume; Kristiansen, this volume). Further, whilst agriculture retained its importance, its character changed in significant ways through the Bronze Age, whether through the emergence of permanent settlements and field systems, or forms of intensification such as irrigation or the Mediterranean polyculture (Barrett 1994, 147; Stevens and Fuller 2012; Gilman 1981). But it is arguable that the most important distinction between Neolithic and Bronze Age societies lay in the way that the latter were more fully immersed in durable large-scale social structures (Kristiansen and Larsson 2005, 108). Neolithic people were capable of prodigious feats of construction, the iconic example of which would be Stonehenge. These involved the mobilization of colossal quantities of labour and resources, drawn from great distances (Viner at al. 2010). But the authority necessary to achieve these feats may always have been temporary and unstable, given the particulate and inwardly focused character of Neolithic communities.

  CONCLUSION

  In this chapter I have argued that although the spread of domesticated plants and animals across the continent was arguably the most significant development during the European Neolithic, it was underpinned by a distinctive social transformation. Whilst not all Neolithic communities relied completely on herding or cultivation, it is difficult to see how Mesolithic groups could have assimilated livestock or cereals without first undergoing fundamental organizational changes. These involved the severing of extensive webs of social connections in order to create circumscribed communities who shared access to a body of collective wealth, and the ‘socialization’ of a wider range of non-human entities, including animals, artefacts, and architecture. Henceforth, when long-distance contacts were established they took the form of exchanges (of persons, animals or artefacts) between separate and bounded communities. Human projects were now more likely to be channelled and sustained by these non-humans, and societies were made more durable in the process. However, the implication of this kind of organization was that Neolithic societies had a tendency to being highly competitive and independent. This militated against their incorporation into stable, large-scale authority structures. Over time, the forces that brought about the transformation of Neolithic societies appear to have been the development of inter-regional networks of exchange and interaction, a growing emphasis on genealogy and descent, and the intensification of subsistence economics.

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