Ray Keith - Neolithic Britain

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp , United Kingdom

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Keith Ray and Julian Thomas 2018

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First Edition published in 2018

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018935372

ISBN 9780198823896

ebook ISBN 9780192559432

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, cr 0 4 yy

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This book is dedicated to the memory of
Andrew Sherratt (19462006)

Former Assistant Keeper of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum, and Professor of Archaeology at the Universities of Oxford and Sheffield

An original thinker, scholar, and prehistorian

This wonderful book is published in 2018, at a time when Britain is convulsed over questions of identity, trying to forge a sustainable future whilst faced with alarming anxieties and insecurities. And here are these two eloquent men, Ray and Thomas, mining our deep history and finding evidence of migrations and climate change, trade routes and new technologies, new patterns of food and farming, clear practices of government and belief. Neolithic Britain suddenly seems thrillingly familiar.

Time is the great theme of the book. We begin to understand not only how we might see our modern world in the context of a society that evolved between six and four thousand years ago, but also, and spectacularly, how those ancestors might have understood and celebrated their own sense of the past. The authors convey brilliantly the ways in which memory and commemoration are captured in the life of household objects, rituals, and architecture.

Theres a joy in finding history told here not by the victors but by the scientists and the storytellers. For this lay reader, one of the pleasures of the book is howat a fingertip levelthese archaeologists work, and the sophistication with which modern technology helps them clarify what they find. This pleasure is redoubled by the dialogue that ensues about interpretation. In the dynamic exchange of ideas Ray and Thomas keep the past with us, part of our contemporary reality.

Theres a delightful irony in the way this is the written history that itself was a technology unavailable to the people whose story they tell. The books illustrations and photographs serve as vivid representation of the objects and artefacts and traces of lives that unearth their truths. At best, it gives the reader not the results of Ray and Thomass archaeology, but the experience of being part of their excavations and discoveries.

Theres a nagging sense, though, whether you have dipped into this book over months or wolfed it at one sitting, that it isnt the last word on the subject. Rather, it feels like the starting point for a conversation about who we are. Its a conversation with two exceptional guides who inform our understanding of humanity through their curiosity about the nature of evidence and their reading of stone, and land, and water. Its the story of civilization.

Peter Florence
Director,
Hay Festival

This book has arisen from conversations between the co-authors about both archaeology and Neolithic studies over the course of three decades, starting in 1987 when we both found ourselves on the staff of the then St Davids University College (University of Wales), Lampeter. These talks have been sustained at intervals, but each of us has also benefited from discussions with many other people who, like us, have become absorbed in the study of the Neolithic of Britain and Europe. We first developed the idea of writing this book as a joint project in 2009, embarking in earnest upon the enterprise in 2014. We would like to acknowledge here with thanks those individual scholars, field archaeologists, and scientific specialists who have had relevant conversations with one or other of us, and who have in many cases provided key insights and have shared information. The list is long, and includes: Mike Allen, Hugo Anderson-Whymark, Martyn Barber, Alistair Barclay, Gordon Barclay, John Barrett, Lara Bishop, Richard Bradley, Bill and Jenny Britnell, Marcus Brittain, Kenny Brophy, Nick Card, Andrew Chamberlain, Chantal Conneller, Gabriel Cooney, Vicki Cummings, Timothy Darvill, Ruth van Dyke, Mark Edmonds, Andrew Fleming, Tony Fleming, Chris Fowler, Irene Garcia Rovira, Julie Gardiner, Duncan Garrow, Paul Garwood, Alex Gibson, Seren Griffiths, Oliver Harris, Frances Healy, Gill Hey, Ian Hodder, Tim Hoverd, Robin Jackson, Mats Larsson, Matt Leivers, Gavin Lucas, Lesley McFadyen, Jackie McKinley, Koji Mizoguchi, Jenny Moore, Jacqui Mulville, Nick Overton, Stuart Palmer, Mike Parker Pearson, Rick Peterson, Josh Pollard, Ffion Reynolds, Colin Richards, John Robb, Chris Scarre, Niall Sharples, the late Ian Shepherd, Alison Sheridan, Adam Stanford, Anne Teather, Christopher Tilley, Kate Welham, Alasdair Whittle, and Ann Woodward.

We are grateful to all those who have provided, or who have helped to source, illustrations for the book. Appropriate credits are given in the captions and/or the illustrations list. However, we would especially like to thank Richard Scott Jones for pre-publication images, and Aaron Watson and Tim Hoverd for archaeological drawings and reconstructions. The artist Anna Dillon, wood-engraver Hilary Paynter, and photographer Adam Stanford have been outstandingly generous in permitting us to use examples of their work to enliven the book visually. We thank the editorial and production team at Oxford University Press, and especially Charlotte Loveridge, for their painstaking efforts and their support in seeing the book through to print.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank Peter Florence for accomplishing two things for us. First, for his test-driving of the manuscript prior to publication; and secondly for his agreement to write a Foreword with which to launch the book from the perspective of someone who, though not a professional historian or archaeologist, nonetheless has a keen sense of both history and historicity in our own times, and their value to a society that still sometimes struggles with a non-pecuniary sense of the importance of history or literary culture.

We want, of course, to take this opportunity to express our gratitude for the forbearance of Catherine, Morag, Rowan, Anna, Lucie, Sophie, Anna, Robin, and Dylan, in our respective families, during the long haul of production of yet another archaeology book.