Reframing the Neolithic Item Type Thesis Authors Spicer, Nigel Christopher Rights <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/3.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by- nc-nd/3.0/88x31.png" /></a><br />The University of Bradford theses are licenced under a <a rel="license" href="http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Licence</a>. Download date 30/09/2021 08:59:09 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10454/13481 University of Bradford eThesis This thesis is hosted in Bradford Scholars – The University of Bradford Open Access repository. Visit the repository for full metadata or to contact the repository team © University of Bradford. This work is licenced for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence. Reframing the Neolithic Nigel Christopher SPICER Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD Department of Archaeological Sciences School of Life Sciences University of Bradford 2013 Nigel Christopher SPICER – Reframing the Neolithic Abstract Keywords: post-processualism, Neolithic, metanarrative, individual, postmodernism, reflexivity, epistemology, Enlightenment, modernity, holistic. In advancing a critical examination of post-processualism, the thesis has – as its central aim – the repositioning of the Neolithic within contemporary archaeological theory. Whilst acknowledging the insights it brings to an understanding of the period, it is argued that the knowledge it produces is necessarily constrained by the emphasis it accords to the cultural. Thus, in terms of the transition, the symbolic reading of agriculture to construct a metanarrative of Mesolithic continuity is challenged through a consideration of the evidential base and the indications it gives for a corresponding movement at the level of the economy; whilst the limiting effects generated by an interpretative reading of its monuments for an understanding of the social are considered. Underpinning these constraints is the conceptual privileging of the individual consequent upon the post-processual reaction to the totalising frameworks of modernist knowledge and the metanarratives of progress they construct – as exemplified in the economic reading of Childe. In examining the form of this reaction, the wider post-processual transposition of postmodernism within contemporary archaeological theory is also considered. In utilising Giddens’ concept of reflexivity, it is argued that rather than the ‘cultural turn’ itself, it is the inflection of the epistemological frameworks of the Enlightenment with a teleological reading of the past as progress that represents the postmodern within contemporary archaeological theory and it is through this understanding of postmodernism as expressing the capacity that modernity has to be self-aware that the conditions are established for the recovery of the Neolithic as a holistic object. i Contents Chapter 1 – Archaeology, Modernity and the Neolithic 1.1 Modernity and the Enlightenment framing of archaeology 1 1.2 Agriculture, progress and the Neolithic as an economic revolution 4 1.3 Postmodernism and the Neolithic as a symbolic revolution 12 Chapter 2 – The Emergence of the Neolithic 2.1 Beyond the totalising frameworks of modernist knowledge 17 2.2 Monuments and the changing form of the Neolithic 19 2.3 The Mesolithic of north-west Europe 26 2.4 The Mesolithic of Britain and Ireland 34 Chapter 3 – Towards an integrated reading of the Neolithic 3.1 Mesolithic continuity and the Neolithic 43 3.2 Underdetermination, economic movement and the evidential base 46 3.3 Towards an integrated reading of the Neolithic 72 Chapter 4 - Ancestry and the changing dynamics of the Neolithic 4.1 Ancestry, monumentality and the emergence of agriculture 84 4.2 Linearity and the changing form of ancestry 96 4.3 Circularity and the displacement of ancestry 106 Chapter 5 – Contemporary archaeological theory and the Neolithic 5.1 Post-processualism and the theoretical privileging of the individual 120 5.2 The individual, the social and the Neolithic 144 ii Chapter 6 – Reframing the Neolithic 6.1 Post-processualism and the postmodern inflection of 156 contemporary archaeological theory 6.2 The Neolithic and the hegemonic positioning of Wessex in 163 contemporary archaeological thought Bibliography 171 iii Chapter 1. Archaeology, Modernity and the Neolithic. 1.1 Modernity and the Enlightenment framing of archaeology. In breaking with the theological frameworks of pre-modern understanding, the Enlightenment stands at ‘the threshold of modern thinking’ (Hamilton 1992: 57) concerning the nature of society and the realm of the social. The conditions informing the emergence of this new mode of understanding had already been given in the astronomic and scientific advances of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the way these not only challenged the traditional cosmologies of scripturally-derived frameworks of belief but also demonstrated the superiority of science as a higher form of knowledge through its ability to ‘create secure truths based on observation and experiment’ (Hamilton 1992: 27). It was this ability of science to generate objective statements free from the effects of prejudice and superstition that informed the Enlightenment identification of science as the key to expanding all forms of knowledge for just as the application of a reasoned and empirically based knowledge had opened up an understanding of the natural world through the discovery of its underlying laws of regulation so, too, could the social. In constituting the social as a distinct and separate reality open to rational forms of investigation, the Enlightenment consequently ‘gave definition to the … idea of modernity’ (Hall 1992a: 2) and, in so doing, established the matrix for the subsequent emergence of the social sciences as modern forms of thought concerned with the secular understanding of the social. As a discipline concerned with the scientific investigation of the past, archaeology was both formed and framed within the epistemological context of this matrix. Indeed, as Thomas notes, ‘archaeology took shape within the conceptual framework of … modernity’ (Thomas 2004: 149) and ‘one of the most significant ways in which archaeology finds itself embedded in modernity lies in its adherence to a conception of knowledge that privileges method’ (Thomas 2004: 55). It is this privileging of method as a form of knowledge production specific to modernity that explains the movement out of antiquarianism for rather than confining itself to the description of those material remains existing within the present, archaeology was instead concerned with 1 the way such remains could be used to systematically investigate the past and in so doing reveal its underlying principles of order. To achieve this, archaeological investigative practice centred itself upon the rational procedures of modernist analytical methodologies designed to penetrate and fragment the reality of the past through the isolation of its constituent elements, whose characteristics, once determined, could then be recombined to produce knowledge of its overall complexity (Thomas 2004: 59). The form assumed by these methodologies had itself been derived from the field of natural history (Thomas 2004: 66). Here the emergence of classificatory structures appropriate to the categorisation of species and genera in terms of their defining characteristics had not only rendered the complexity of life malleable to the rational procedures of analytical science but, through the sequential positioning of its diverse forms resulting from the presence or absence of particular attributes, reproduced its underlying principles in thought. It was this capacity of science to reconstruct the hidden order of nature in knowledge that informed the application of these practices to the investigation of material culture for just as the ordering of species and genera had revealed the ‘tree of life’, so the grouping of artefacts around the presence or absence of particular traits was seen as a mechanism for accessing the hidden reality of the past (Thomas 2004: 66). As a result archaeological investigative practice structured itself around the typological classification of material culture and the way this permitted the identification of chronological sequences congruent with the real order of the past. Accompanying this methodological structuring of archaeology as a modernist discipline was an emergent conception of material culture as expressing the essential character of a people as the ‘construction of artefact typologies, and their elaboration into chronological schemes and regional sequences, was now understood as a means of identifying cultural entities; and of observing their behaviour in time and space’ (Thomas 2004: 66). Informing this understanding was the pluralized conception of culture advanced by Herder as referring to the distinctive ways of life common to different social groups such that culture was itself both specific and variable through the way it necessarily articulated the 2 shared traditions, values and meanings of subjective association (Bocock 1992: 232). It was this normative reading of culture that was transposed into archaeology through the notion of an ‘archaeological culture’ and is encapsulated in the definition accorded to it by Childe as a complex of associated traits characterised by ‘certain types of remains – pots, implements, ornaments, burial rites, house forms – constantly