Monumentalising Life in the Neolithic: Narratives of Continuity and Change

One of the principal characteristics of the European Neolithic is the development of monumentality in association with innovations in material culture and changes in subsistence from hunting and gathering to farming and pastoralism. The papers in this volume discuss the latest insights into why monumental architecture became an integral part of early farming societies in Europe and beyond. One of the topics is how we define monuments and how our arguments and recent research on temporality impacts on our interpretation of the Neolithic period. Different interpretations of Göbekli Tepe are examples of this discussion as well as our understanding of special landmarks such as flint mines.

The latest evidence on the economic and paleoenvironmental context, carbon 14 dates as well as analytical methods are employed in illuminating the emergence of monumentalism in Neolithic Europe. Studies are taking place on a macro and micro scale in areas as diverse as Great Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Germany, the Dutch wetlands, Portugal and Malta involving a range of monuments from long barrows and megalithic tombs to roundels and enclosures. Transformation from a natural to a built environment by monumentalizing part of the landscape is discussed as well as changes in megalithic architecture in relation to shifts in the social structure. An ethnographic study of megaliths in Nagaland discuss monument building as an act of social construction. Other studies look into the role of monuments as expressions of cosmology and active loci of ceremonial performances. Also, a couple of papers analyse the social processes in the transformation of society in the aftermath of the initial boom in monument construction and the related changes in subsistence and social structure in northern Europe.

The aim of the publication is to explore different theories about the relationship between monumentality and the Neolithic way of life through these studies encompassing a wide range of types of monuments over vast areas of Europe and beyond.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Sep 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781789254952

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Thoughts on monumentalism

1

Neolithic monumentality for the 21st century

Anne Teather

Abstract

Prehistoric monuments are some of the most evocative structures standing today. It is unsurprising that they have received enduring attention from archaeologists and a central place in interpretations of the past. Yet, we often uncritically accept the views that monuments occupied a pivotal position in past societies, and that their endurance over millennia was a deliberate manifestation of their past social purpose. In this paper, I critically review our hierarchical approach to site types in the Neolithic as a triumvirate of monuments, settlements and localities where economic resources were exploited. I argue that these in turn have been used to define symbolic, social and economic functions respectively and this approach particularly diminishes the role and morphology of economic sites in the past. From an examination of the morphology of ditches and shafts and a review of temporal approaches to construction, it is proposed that the differences between such sites is less marked, particularly in the late Neolithic. The paper concludes that we need to take a more balanced approach to investigating site types, as it is only with a more even focus of scrutiny that we will be able to offer broader understandings of past communities.

Introduction

Widely thought of as one of the defining characteristics of the European Neolithic, the emergence of monument building is associated with the innovations in material culture and shift in subsistence practices from hunting and gathering, to farming and pastoralism that feature strongly in accounts of this period. However, recent studies and analyses of the Neolithic have increasingly separated the study of monuments from investigations of sites that are not monuments. For example, in discussing the Neolithic landscape of Southern Scandinavia, Hinz (2018, 211–2) elaborates this idea, ‘the site types that dominate the archaeological record include permanent settlements with their fields, monumental burial sites, such as earthen long barrows, megalithic graves, and causewayed enclosures, accompanied by sites with specific (economic) character, for example, flint acquisition/processing sites’. Hinz’s view reflects a conventional categorisation of Neolithic sites into a functional (and implicitly hierarchical) triumvirate of monuments, settlements and localities where economic resources were exploited. These three categories effectively represent symbolic, social and economic functions respectively.

While it is now rarely suggested that Neolithic monuments solely had an economic function (as stock enclosures, for example) or a single ritual or symbolic function, many have been interpreted as having had a societal function that may also have served, at least in part, an economic purpose. These include providing social areas for gathering and trade purposes (as has been proposed for causewayed enclosures); or monuments such as chambered tombs also having had a functional mortuary role in housing the human dead. Similarly, economic and functional interpretations are juxtaposed and as such bolster each other to create a stronger argument. For example, a causewayed enclosure may have been for people to meet to trade goods, and the size of an enclosure is a functional indication of how many people accumulated there. We build interpretations through aggregating evidence and with reference to other evidence, and like a decoupage, paste an overlapping picture of past human lives.

Yet, sites that are deemed to have less ‘cultural importance’, for example natural landscape features such as caves, and sites of raw material exploitation like mines or quarries, have commonly been viewed as being less interpretively important in the present, and by analogy of less social importance in the past. With a focus on the British Neolithic, this paper seeks to critically examine what we define as monuments. Through discussing the language and concepts of monumentality and how our arguments and recent research on temporality impacts on our interpretations of this period, I will argue that our current approach is biased in favour of the monuments of the past. We need to take a more balanced approach to investigating site types as it is only with a more even focus of scrutiny that we will be able to offer broader understandings of past communities.

What is a prehistoric monument?

At the very end of the 20th century, Thomas (1999, 34) reviewed how prehistoric monuments had been interpreted by archaeologists as direct reflections of the societies that built them. While Renfrew (1973, 556) saw these monuments as ‘the natural counterparts of other features of society’, Bradley’s (1985) focus was on their temporal properties, including the permanence of their architecture and their longevity in the landscape. Thomas (1999, 35–37) argued that monuments framed social relationships through transforming and controlling human spatial experience, and that would probably also have been reflected in non-monumental architectural spaces. Therefore, while these interpretive positions differed, there was a consensus that monuments reflect one or another aspect of the social environment of the time of their construction. More recent work has focused on the enduring importance of monuments evidenced through their later modification and reuse (e.g. Gillings et al. 2019) and also their relationship to other non-monumental archaeological evidence (e.g. such as settlement, French et al. 2012). These are informative perspectives, although the separation between interpretations of monuments on the one hand and the morphology and characterisation of monuments on the other is a division that is rarely considered. What attributes or combination of features makes something a monument, rather than a settlement or a place of economic exploitation?

For prehistorians, the term ‘monument’ usually refers to a visually salient and impressive megalithic, timber or earthen structure that exhibits purposeful and often standardised architectural design. Additionally, a monument should be of demonstrable effort to construct and have required the mobilisation and organisation of a substantial number of people in order to create it. A further, though not essential attribute, is that a monument should have a discernible social purpose – for example, to serve as a gathering place, or to facilitate mortuary activity or social cohesion activities such as feasting and/or displays of power. There are often structural similarities in monumental architecture across geographical distances that allow archaeologists to establish typologies of monuments, and there may be additional similarities in surface decoration, such as rock art and/or applied pigment. Finally, the longevity of monuments in the landscape may be evidenced through continued or repeated use, suggesting that some monuments retained an enduring importance after their initial use. In summary, a monument is a type of prehistoric archaeological site whose construction typically followed a normative design, required considerable effort to create and was likely to have had enduring social meaning for both its creators and for succeeding generations of people.

In the English language, the word ‘monument’ originates from Latin monere, that means to remind. Similarly, Latin origins have resulted in Swedish (minnesmärke), Norwegian (minnesmerke) and Danish (mindesmarke) terms that confirm that the word for monument is strongly related to memorialisation; in German, the common term denkmal is a composite word of denken (to think) and Mal (either meaning an occasion, or alternatively a sign or mark). Hence the original meanings of the English and European terms for ‘monument’ are inextricably bound up with the notion of committing a past event to memory (or in some instances of commemorating an individual’s life). The temporality of a monument is therefore interpretively fixed at its moment of construction as a memorial, rather than evolving and transforming through social time. To elucidate this point: a war memorial containing a Christian cross, common in Britain today, contains the same symbolism as that found in a church. Yet, however monumental churches and cathedrals may be, they were not constructed to be memorials, but rather to serve as places for the living to meet and worship. That churches are continuously used, rebuilt and increasingly repurposed is due partly to their central locations in urban or rural environments, and their history of being habitual places where people gathered. A few churches become memorialised as historically and culturally important in their own right; but again, this may be largely because of their association with manifestations of political and social power. For example, Westminster Abbey in London is the traditional place that English monarchs are crowned and their mortal remains buried. Returning to prehistoric ‘monuments’, the present-day motivations for classifying monuments are primarily for typological and curatorial convenience, rather than to increase understandings. An unfortunate consequence is that our terminology for these past structures is far too focused on a specific approach to temporality; one that I will explore and challenge in this paper.

Monuments and temporality

Recent research aimed at creating a more refined chronology for monument construction has had a sweeping and perhaps unintended impact on our interpretations of Neolithic society. I have previously expressed concerns regarding the role of a new historicism in archaeology and its application in methodologies in the examination of archaeological deposits (Teather 2018). Yet in terms of built structures, the temporality of monuments themselves and their social role has come under increased scrutiny. This tension between interpretations of a prehistoric monument perceived as a planned structure, set against evidence that monuments were subject to different forms of construction and modification over time, was the subject of vigorous academic debate during the 1990s by many scholars (e.g. Bradley 1984; 2002; Tilley 1994; Thomas 1996; 1999). The current turn to historical particularism could be argued to reflect that of the late 1980s and a subject attended to in some detail by Barrett (1991). Almost 30 years ago, Barrett (1991, 13) reflected that Avebury ‘was not conceived as an entity, a plan in the mind of some autocratic chief’. He argued (1991, 132) that even large building projects such as those at Avebury or Durrington Walls might only have represented people spending minimal time away from mundane activities. Yet the recent intensive radiocarbon dating exercises that have taken place on many British Neolithic sites (principally enclosures and burial mounds) challenges this view. This work has shown that most monuments were built and used, at least in their primary intended role, within a short timeframe of perhaps only two or three generations or up to 75 years (Bayliss et al. 2007; Whittle et al. 2007; 2011). Therefore, the dominant narrative has changed from interpretations of multi-phase or emerging monumentality driven by the consequences of social change. Instead, the favoured interpretations now focus on monuments having a framed chronological temporality that encompasses both causewayed enclosures and chambered tombs within the Neolithic as a whole, and with a social temporality measured in a few generations or a single life-span. Like smaller cogs in a bigger wheel, people are imagined working their lives and perhaps those lives of their children, at building and using one monument.

The question of the temporality of monuments is therefore critical for any interpretation of a past society. A swift design and execution of the building of a monument suggests a greater control over effort and a larger population; whereas a piecemeal approach where elements can be manipulated or altered during construction can allow for a more dispersed, mobile population and a more fluid cultural and social structure. Temporality impacts on demography, effort and expenditure; returning us seamlessly towards processual arguments that concern labour; person-hours, economic surplus and the subsistence requirements of a workforce (see below). How long it took to build a monument is perhaps the most fundamental key in constructing past societies. While these arguments have a profound impact on how we may view monuments, they form a discrete branch of theoretical concern that is rarely applied to analyses of settlements or areas of raw resource exploitation. A review of settlement theory is out of the scope of this short paper and I will focus instead on the temporality of economic exploitation.

The cultural and economic impact of quarrying and flint mining

Localities of natural resource exploitation such as flint mines now largely sit outside normative interpretations of archaeological activity, though they were thoroughly investigated as part of the New Archaeology research programme. During the 1970s excavations at the late Neolithic flint mines at Grime’s Graves in Norfolk, England, ideas of craft specialisation and mining as a Neolithic industry were proposed. Mercer’s (1981, 20, 112–113) calculations on the human effort required for extraction of the 1971 shaft of 12.1 m depth (15–16 men over 2–3 months), the area of cultivation of cereal required to sustain the workforce (one hectare) and the estimate of axes from a single shaft (between 1.12 and 2 tons of axes from 8 tons of flint) are impressive. Yet the picture they draw of Neolithic mining is almost entirely devoid of human behaviour apart from people as industrial work units. This was partially acknowledged by Mercer, who commented when discussing the presence of Grooved Ware in a lamenting tone, ‘little has emerged of a cultural unit (in a Childean sense)’ (Mercer 1981, 113). This dissatisfaction in not finding evidence of other ‘household’ activities led to his conclusion that ‘the overwhelming impression gained from the site is one implying the work of a highly institutionalised and ‘professional’ mining community’ (Mercer 1981, 112).

The British Museum excavations at Grime’s Graves from 1972–1976 were published as five fascicules of which the fifth contains the most social interpretation (Longworth and Varndell 1996, 79–89). In many respects this is similar in tone to Mercer’s work, concentrating on factual data concerning the amount of flint extracted and calculations of the labour required. The lack of settlement evidence at mining sites in general had led to the understanding that the subsistence activities required to sustain daily life did not take place in the immediate vicinity of mine sites. Regional tribal groups initially proposed by Drewett (1978) were evoked, supporting ideas of these tribes being socially categorised as ‘miners’, in opposition to other categories of person (‘farmer’ etc) and through this, indicating an industrial approach and a segmented or caste-structured, fairly sedentary, society.

The classification of flint mines as centres of industrial production led to the focus of academic study on the one artefact consistently interpreted as being produced from raw material obtained from mining contexts – flint axes. Through the above view of regional groups, interpreting flint mine sites and axes as purely functional began to merge together. As each mine shaft was clearly capable of yielding tonnes of flint, the assumed purpose of a flint mine was to extract flint to be worked into axes. It has long been noted that the quality of flint from mines may be slightly better than surface deposits but not so much as to impact on manufacturing technique. Gardiner (1990, 119) suggested that the size of nodule required to make a flint axe and the quality of it would be critical for axe manufacture: only large good-quality flints would be effective for the production of a sizeable tool. The evidence from ‘working floors’ at mine sites suggested that although the flint was worked into a basic axe shape, or roughout, close to the mine sites there is little evidence of knapped debris from finishing the axes, or for polissoirs, which would indicate that grinding and polishing the finished axe must have taken place elsewhere. Hence, mining was viewed as simply an extractive process for the purpose of obtaining raw material for axe production, the later finishing taking place at a distance (Mercer 1981, 113).

A recent research project funded by The Leverhulme Trust (NEOMINE) has sought to chronologically situate flint mining and quarrying in the Neolithic of northern Europe (Schauer et al. 2019; Edinborough et al. 2020). Through a programme of new radiocarbon dating, it approached the products of these acquisition sites (axes) and investigated their potential role in the establishment of new farming communities primarily through enabling land clearance. This has shown that flint mining appears to be closely related to the emergence of the Neolithic in many areas. For Britain, the start of flint mining slightly predates the earliest Neolithic dated enclosures, although it should be appreciated that there are a number of other less well dated monument classes that may show contemporaneity with early mining activity in some areas (e.g. earthen long barrows). Early Neolithic flint mining in Britain is geographically focused within the chalk bedrock of Sussex and Hampshire, with some mining in Scottish gravel deposits at the Den of Boddam and Skelmuir Hill, at Ballygally Hill, Northern Ireland and some later Neolithic mining in chalk bedrock in Sussex at Church Hill, and Grimes’ Graves, East Anglia (Fig. 1.1). In morphological terms, flint mining in glacial secondary deposits (such as Scotland and Grand Pressigny, France) is entirely different to that of primary deposit extraction, being more likely to exhibit quarrying or open cast mining due to the instability of the surrounding deposits (Saville 2005).

The early Neolithic flint extraction activity on chalk primarily takes the form of shaft and gallery mining; a similar process as that seen at the major contemporary European mine sites of Spiennes, Belgium, Hov, Denmark and Krzemionki, Poland. However, is it possible to examine mines from a perspective of monumentality? How far do they fit within our interpretive schemes, and would their inclusion as monuments be interpretively useful?

Temporality, effort and completeness

Richards et al. (2013) have discussed completeness as one of the quandaries of monument construction with regard to two monuments – the Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar, Orkney. As they state, ‘it is difficult to reconcile the immense amount of labour expended in creating the rock-cut ditches, with the incomplete circle at the former and haphazard or hasty erection of individual monoliths at the latter’ (Richards et al. 2013, 119). They have partly addressed the temporal problem regarding the construction and use of stone circles by incorporating discussion of quarrying and social factors within the research and analyses of several sites, an approach used by some of the same scholars for Rapa Nui (Hamilton et al. 2008). Therefore, the site of acquisition of the stone (a quarry), the journey that the stone traverses and the nature of architectural phases of ‘wrapping’ (i.e. embedding the stones into an enclosing space), all form part of the temporal study of the building of the monument. This is helpful in that the temporality of monument construction is potentially elongated beyond simple, rapid erection; but it could be argued to neglect the temporal dimension of the quarrying itself. For example, the movement of raw materials such as stone from quarries at different locations on Orkney to build the Ring of Brodgar, may have been a deliberate act with the intention of incorporating different parts of Orkney into one monument (Richards et al. 2013). Yet, the stones may have taken decades to quarry and move, during which time the quarry may have been monumental in itself. Perhaps these examples serve to deconstruct the idea of a monument as a planned and finished entity, as much as it dissolves the location of the monument from one central place to several dispersed places. This is also echoed in the work to locate the origins of Stonehenge bluestones from Welsh quarries, that may have already been incorporated into two earlier monuments prior to their inclusion in Stonehenge (Parker Pearson et al. 2019). Therefore, the physical monument becomes displaced geographically and chronologically. In order to make progress, we need to articulate these places and processes differently.

Flint mine morphology

Flint mine shafts are large and impressive. Ranging from 2 m to almost 13 m depth in Britain (Teather 2016), they show that there was a sustained effort to remove soil and chalk overburden and dig through upper flint seams to reach a level where there was a consistent source of high-quality flint. In addition to shafts at mining sites, there are a number of likely Neolithic shafts that are rather poorly dated, such as the singular Monkton Up Wimborne shaft in Dorset (Green 2000), and groups such as those at Cannon Hill, Berkshire (Bradley et al. 1976), at Blackhorse Road, Hertfordshire (Moss-Eccardt 1988) and the 21 shafts between 1 and 2 m wide and 2 to 8 m deep at Eaton Heath, Norwich (Wainwright 1974) (Fig. 1.1). The Monkton Up Wimborne and Blackhorse Road shafts are in chalk and may have been intended as flint extraction shafts, although those at Cannon Hill and Eaton Heath are not located on the correct geology for dense flint extraction but had early Neolithic flint tools and pottery in their deposits (Thomas 2013, 239–240). Even noting these examples, digging to this depth was an unusual activity in the earlier Neolithic when other monuments, such as causewayed enclosures, exhibit ditches that only survive to c. 2–2.5 m depth of excavation (although these may of course have been deeper when initially constructed). Similarly, ditches that accompany long barrows that date to the mid-4th millennium BC rarely have ditches that extend beyond a 2.5 m depth, yet, in the late Neolithic, digging to a greater depth is manifested differently.

Fig. 1.1 Map of Britain (without Northern Isles) with mining sites mentioned in the text.

The later Neolithic witnesses shaft digging and the excavation of ditches at a different scale. The huge henge monument at Avebury, Wiltshire that dates to c. 2500 BC (Pollard and Cleal 2004), is almost 350 m in diameter and has a recorded ditch depth of c. 10 m depth, although the crest of the bank would have risen 16.8 m above the base of the ditch (Ashbee 2004). This 10 m depth is similar to many of the depths recorded at the contemporary flint mining site of Grime’s Graves (Teather 2016) and at Maumbury Rings, Dorset, where the late Neolithic henge site contained up to 45 shafts in a circle, that on excavation proved to be up to 11 m deep (Bradley 1975) (Fig. 1.2). In comparative architectural terms, Maumbury Rings combines both shaft extraction and the addition of a ditch and external bank, whereas at Avebury there is the henge without shafts; and at Grime’s Graves there are shafts without a henge. Recent dating has revealed that later flint mining also took place at the early Neolithic site of Church Hill (Teather 2019), suggesting that late Neolithic and early Bronze Age flint mining was more widespread than previously thought. Therefore, while deep and complex extraction (over 4 m) was primarily for the purposes of mining flint in the early–mid Neolithic, it became integrated into wider monumental activity during the later Neolithic. The idea of deep extraction then, and the physical enaction of digging, culminated in an integrated approach to producing architectural modification and monumentality that is absent in the earlier Neolithic. It seems that extraction at depth may have signified something particular and contained for early Neolithic communities, but was more widely enacted during the late Neolithic primarily for monumental purposes.

Fig. 1.2 Schematic of the depth of various prehistoric features.

The question of this paper was – are flint mines monumental even though they do not follow a schematic and cohesive architectural plan similar to an enclosure, henge or stone circle? Henge ditches are monumental, whether they are 2 m or 10 m deep, because henges were built to a standardised circular design. Shafts with monuments are monumental because of their integration into structures that have other monumental features. Yet, flint mines do follow a form of plan, but that is determined at least in part by geological imperatives rather than human preferences. In following flint seams and beds of particular geological strata, they are only found in particular geographical locations and perhaps it would be more useful to consider geology as not just a passive resource but as an active social agent that contributes to the formation of sites (cf. Peterson 2019). Quarries and mines therefore are not monuments, but rather the density of extraction or other features can make them monumental.

Conclusion

This paper has discussed our approaches to monuments and locations of raw material extraction in order to elucidate how we construct different schemes of analysis for different categories of sites of past activity. This has implications for how we look at past human societies. No archaeologist would argue that all structures that we class as monuments today were built and designed for the purposes of memorialisation (either in the present or in the past); however, our language is perhaps restricting our ability to examine the traces of past building and activity beyond monuments. This paper commenced with a quote from Hinz (2018, 211–212) that summarised a conventional categorisation of Neolithic sites into a functional (and implicitly hierarchical) triumvirate of monuments, settlements and areas of resource exploitation. I have argued that monuments are framed as a temporally cohesive social event of thought and construction through approaches to their architectural similarities. As Barrett (1991, 18) pertinently argued, architecture ‘is a material technology enabling the regionalisation of a place to emerge through practice, creating different categories and moments of being’.

We have developed more intricate ways of addressing monumentality perhaps at the expense of better analyses of sites of resource exploitation. The sites that sit outside the classification category of monuments, such as settlements or quarries and mines, and arguably other areas of resource exploitation, occupy a marginal interpretative zone in this chronological and memorial approach. Quarries and mines appear to represent a lack of coherent planned architecture that culminated in a particular form; instead they represent decades of action or episodic returns to active growth, or decline and modification, and their structure may be determined as much by geological opportunities and constraints as by human design. They are therefore not monuments in both our defined physical and temporal terms, but they can be monumental. The lack of evidence for much Neolithic settlement on mainland Britain in areas of dense monumentality, has hindered any comparison between the structure and temporality of settlements with that of monuments. While I have previously argued that the complex architecture of shaft and galley flint mine sites should be seen as monuments (Teather 2011; 2016) this may not be wholly appropriate. While the deposits in mines and in contemporary surface monuments are remarkably similar (Teather 2016), they are morphologically distinct. Not every bank and ditch is a monument, and neither is every pit or shaft, however, extraction sites can become monumental, as perhaps can settlement sites.

Therefore, rather than dissolve our triumvirates of site types, we should seek to redress the hierarchy and expand our descriptive language. As I write we are in the midst of a global pandemic, where our areas of resource exploitation (supermarkets) have become more socially important almost overnight, as have our areas for housing the recently deceased (mortuaries). Our monuments and churches are closed, but our everyday existence relies on foods farmed and mostly preserved months, if not years, ago. Hospitals are being created in a monumental style within exhibition arenas all over the UK.

In compressing these temporal moments of monuments and the acquisition of things that make human life possible, we deny the social complexity of the Neolithic. It seems most likely that Neolithic monuments were momentary societal expressions of solidarity with an ideology. While the input of individuals is critical to construction, it is societies that build monuments as expressions of social relationships and different power structures, that may be both cohesive and contradictory. Yet whatever humans do, whether extraction, building or habitation, can be performed at modest or monumental scales. We should examine these evidential categories along a spectrum and not a hierarchy.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank two anonymous referees and two patient friends for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Any errors or omissions are solely mine.

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Origin of monumentalism

2

Monumentality in Neolithic southwest Asia: making memory in time and space

Trevor Watkins

Abstract

An impressive feature of the settlements of the earliest Neolithic of southwest Asia – a feature that has its origins in the preceding Epipalaeolithic period – is the investment of great amounts of labour and symbolic power in the creation, maintenance, reconstruction, and ritual ‘burial’ of communal buildings of monumental scale. At a different scale, the building, maintenance, rebuilding and replacement of houses within settlements indicates that they were the physical embodiment of the household as an institution. The communities that inhabited the settlements and the households for whom the houses were the centres of their lives were the descendants of the mobile forager bands of the Upper Palaeolithic, and they continued to live by the hunter-gatherer ethos of sharing. Later, as the practice of agricultural economies led to ideas of property and to inequalities of wealth and hierarchies of power, things would be different. The evolutionary problem that they had to solve was twofold: how to live together permanently as large, autonomous communities in daily cooperation with many people whom they scarcely knew; and, as settled (no longer mobile) communities, how to sustain the extensive networks of social exchange on which their societies depended. The hypothesis proposed here is that, in the early Neolithic trans-egalitarian interim, households, communities and networked super-communities relied on their ability to create ‘imagined communities’, building and sharing ideologies of social memory by means of new institutions and their symbolic, physical instantiations.

Introduction – preliminaries

Before we consider the monumental architecture and sculpture of the early Pre-Pottery Neolithic period in southwest Asia, it will be helpful to identify two misconceptions that may get in the way of our understanding of the phenomenon. The first mistaken idea is the common equation between the beginnings of farming and the Neolithic; and the second is the tagging of the settlements of the period with the label of villages.

The common idea of what is central to the Neolithic is both partial and misleading. Childe’s idea of a ‘Neolithic revolution’ is more than 80 years old; it has been widely dispersed and has become embedded, but its meaning has also been stripped down to ‘when farming replaced hunting and gathering’, and ‘the domestication of plants and animals’. Robert Braidwood led his teams into the field in the Kurdish region of northeast Iraq in 1948, seeking to test Childe’s theory (Childe 1936). Braidwood made important discoveries and initiated a new multi-disciplinary mode of research on the recognition of plant and animal domestication and the origins of farming. The focus became the quest for the origins of agriculture: hence the reduction of the ‘Neolithic revolution’ to its equation with the time when farmers replaced hunter-gatherers.

We need to understand the Neolithic of southwest Asia as a three-stage process. The early Pre-Pottery Neolithic (9600–8500 BC) continued social, economic and cultural trends that can be seen developing through the Epipalaeolithic period (23,000–9600 BC). Within this first phase of the Neolithic, there is evidence for the management of animal populations, the management of woodland species (Asouti and Kabukcu 2014), and for pre-domestication agriculture (that is, the non-intensive cultivation of some cereals over a period of centuries, or more than a millennium (Willcox 2013)). But these earliest Pre-Pottery Neolithic societies, living in permanent settlements, were essentially intensive forager communities that managed the territory around their settlements, harvesting storable plant food resources, some of which were obtained through a degree of cultivation. Botanists and zoologists have recognised the indicators of the domestication of cereals, and of sheep, goat, cattle and pig in different combinations from different regions around the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent and central Anatolia around or soon after 8500 BC; but domestication did not bring an end to hunting and foraging. The second stage, especially from 7500 BC, saw the steadily increasing dependence on domesticated crops and herded animals, and rapidly increasing settled community size. The dramatic monumental architecture that has been discovered over recent decades belongs almost entirely within the earlier phase of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic.

The second part of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, during which mixed farming gradually became established, saw continuing rituals, particularly in those regions concerned with intramural burial, skull retrieval and curation, but only rarely the creation of large-scale monumental buildings. The scale of settlements grew greatly during this second phase, reaching a climax in the ‘mega-sites’ of the southern Levant and Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia, whose population has been estimated between 5,000–8,000. The third stage of the Neolithic began with the final Pre-Pottery Neolithic, which saw the abandonment of many of the large, late Pre-Pottery Neolithic settlements. It seems to have begun before the rapid climate change event of the last centuries of the 7th millennium BC, but the processes of population dispersal and the formation of new or revised subsistence economic strategies were doubtless hastened and amplified by the reduced levels of rainfall, and widespread aridification of landscapes (Weninger et al. 2009; Marciniak 2019).

There is another legacy of the early years of research on the Neolithic of southwest Asia that needs to be brought into the foreground. Our words for villages, towns and cities are a poor fit for the early Neolithic societies. Braidwood made an important contribution to the vocabulary of Neolithic research; he introduced the term ‘village-farming’ to encapsulate both the social and the economic aspects of the new way of life that emerged in the Neolithic of the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent (Braidwood 1956; Braidwood and Howe 1960). While Braidwood was engaged in fieldwork on the opposite wing of the hilly flanks zone, Kenyon was ‘digging up Jericho’ (Kenyon 1957a). In her early report on Pre-Pottery Neolithic Jericho, a large settlement surrounded by a substantial wall and rock-cut ditch, she alluded to Childe’s urban revolution theory; the scale of the settlement (which was overlain by a Bronze Age city), its public works, and the complex cultural practices of intramural burial, skull retrieval and curation, assured her that it was not a village but a town which may have had a population of several thousand inhabitants (Kenyon 1956, 184). And she linked towns with the formation processes of emerging urban civilisation in Mesopotamia (and in the Levant, as at Jericho itself). Braidwood (1957) and Kenyon (1957b) jousted with the terms that characterised both the Neolithic and urban revolution theories of Childe. Then, in the early 1960s James Mellaart, who also knew well the works of Gordon Childe, undertook his excavations at the huge and unique Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia. He took delight in stirring things up: Çatalhöyük was bigger (and better) than anything that either Kenyon or Braidwood had found, and it was nowhere near the ‘hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent’, which Braidwood had defined as the zone of Neolithic social and economic innovation. With obvious relish Mellaart proposed that Çatalhöyük showed the classic characteristics of an urban society as defined by Childe, so that it could be claimed as a (the first) city (Mellaart 1967). Ian Hodder (2006), who has spent 25 years devoted to the Çatalhöyük Research Project, opted for the median of those three categories in the subtitle of his book about the site, but significantly put the word ‘town’ in quotation marks. Village, town, or city: we have three categories of settlement in English, and the early Neolithic settlements do not fit into any of them.

Forms of monumentality and memorialising

The earliest Neolithic communities continued to live by the ethos of sharing that they inherited from their deep Pleistocene past; farming and a household mode of production emerged many centuries later. Operating the sharing ethos at the new scale of large, permanent communities and building the essential and resilient social capital required the demonstrable corporate creation and maintenance of forms of monumentality and ways of memorialising (Watkins 2012). Monumentality and memorialising have been found widely in the settlements of the early (Pre-Pottery) Neolithic of southwest Asia (dating approximately between 9600 and 6500 BC). These practices can be seen to originate and develop in the Epipalaeolithic of the Levant, but space requires that we focus here on the Neolithic.

There is a range of memorialising that starts with the ritualised burial of individuals within settlements, sometimes within houses, sometimes within house-like buildings dedicated to housing the dead. This was not, of course, a new phenomenon in the Neolithic: there were multiple ritualised Homo sapiens burials in at least two of the Middle Palaeolithic occupations in the Mount Carmel caves in the north of Israel, dating at least 120,000 years ago. Burials associated with open settlements, the earliest examples of skull retrieval and curation, and the use of previously occupied rock shelters or caves as cemeteries of sometimes dozens of individuals can be traced as a slow crescendo through the Levantine Epipalaeolithic (23,000–10,000 BC), out of which the early Pre-Pottery Neolithic grew. The intramural burial customs of the early Neolithic have been surveyed (Croucher 2012), and the intensive ritual and ceremonies, feasting and multiple sub-floor burials accommodated by the houses of Çatalhöyük (7200–6500 BC) have been investigated and documented extensively (e.g. Hodder 2006; Bogaard et al. 2009; Russell et al. 2009; Hodder and Pels 2010; Boz and Hager 2013; Anspach 2018). In the mid-range of memorialising is the concern for the house as a ‘living’ and respected entity that requires continual renewal, as at late 8th-millennium BC Boncuklu, near Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia (Baird et al. 2016), or at early Pre-Pottery Neolithic Qermez Dere in North Iraq (Watkins 1990). The semi-subterranean structures at Qermez Dere were furnished with pairs of strange pillars made of clay around a stone core. Since these were the only structures found in the settlement, it was assumed that they were used as houses, but houses full of meanings that we could not decipher. Similar sub-circular, sub-rectangular, semi-subterranean building, furnished with pairs of standing stones have now been found at a series of early Pre-Pottery Neolithic settlements in the upper Tigris valley in southeastern Anatolia (see, for example, Hasankeyf Höyük; Miyake et al. 2012; or Gusir Höyük; Karul 2011). The paired monoliths of these Tigris valley sites form a link between Qermez Dere in north Iraq and the Euphrates drainage sites to which we now turn.

In the last 20 to 30 years we have learned of the existence of communal projects to create and maintain buildings of a monumental scale and purpose, both at the heart of early Pre-Pottery Neolithic settlements in the Euphrates valley in north Syria, in southern Cyprus, and southern Jordan, and at a special mountain-ridge site, Göbekli Tepe, in southeast Turkey. With few exceptions, these examples of communal or special, non-domestic buildings all belong in the early part of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, between about 9600 and 8500 BC, that is before the domestication of plants and animals, and well before farming became the established mode of subsistence. The massive structures at Göbekli Tepe seem to have continued in use for a short time beyond that date, but only smaller and rather different buildings were created after the middle of the 9th millennium BC. The settlement of Nevalı Çori in the upper Euphrates basin in southeast Turkey had a repeatedly rebuilt, semi-subterranean building that, like the enclosures of Göbekli Tepe, was populated by large T-shaped monoliths (Hauptmann 2011). And the long-lived settlement of Çayönü, further upstream and near Diyarbakir, possessed a series of special purpose buildings in a large central plaza (Schirmer 1990; Erim-Özdoğan 2011), one of which possessed a pair of tall stone monoliths set in a terrazzo floor. However, for the most part, the dramatic architectural monuments (and their associated sculpted and carved imagery) belong in the earliest part of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, which in many ways is an extension of the social, economic and cultural developments of the preceding Epipalaeolithic period.

Fig. 2.1 Jerf el Ahmar, Syria. The second in a series of large, circular, subterranean communal buildings. There were traces of stored cereals and legumes in some of the cells, but the function of the open area of low platforms is unclear. The spread-eagled skeleton of the young female can be seen whose decapitated body was thrown onto the floor before the structure was burnt and buried. (By kind permission of Dr Danielle Stordeur.)

The best known of the monumental communal buildings is a series that replaced one another in the heart of Jerf el Ahmar, a small settlement built and repeatedly rebuilt over several centuries on a low natural mound beside the Euphrates in north Syria (Stordeur et al. 2000; Stordeur 2015). Despite the fact that these were salvage excavations undertaken while a dam was under construction, the excavators of Jerf el Ahmar were able to combine acquiring in-depth knowledge of the centuries-long history of the settlement with broad exposures that enabled them to map the structure of the settlement’s shifting layout. The houses of the settlement were small, represented by their sub-circular stone foundation courses clustered around communal cooking-hearths. The earliest communal building was poorly preserved and could not be fully investigated before the waters in the dam on the Euphrates rose to engulf it. But its form was very like that of the much better known second communal building (Fig. 2.1). This was in an area at the centre of the settlement (Fig. 2.2), surrounded by rectangular, multi-cellular buildings. It took the form of a massive, cylindrical, subterranean structure (diameter approximately 7 m, depth below ground level at least 2 m). The sides were formed of a retaining wall built of stone blocks set in mud mortar. Access must have been from the flat roof, which was supported on a number of timber posts and beams. Like its predecessor, around half of its perimeter the structure was equipped with a series of door-less cells formed by mud-brick walls. In the