4 Ceremonial Practice and Mortuary Ritual Old customs O I love the sound correlation between the importance of an However simple they may be event to those taking part in it, and its What ere wi time has sanction found surviving signature. Durable objects remain Is welcome & clear to me visible, and so naturally figure prominently in the archaeological interpretation of a John Clare, The Shepherd’s Calendar: December monument, but this can lend them a dispro­ portionate weight of importance. A festival 4.1 The forms and uses of at which a hundred people prayed, danced, monuments sang and offered sacrifices for a week may have left no trace other than enhanced phos­ The modest scale and changing character of phate levels; a funeral attended by six for the the monuments at Raunds are a reminder of space of half a day may have left a grave and the intimacies of people’s lives as they built a set of grave goods. and used this landscape. There was no preconceived intention or master plan 4.1.1 The early 4th millennium behind its long-term development, no grandiose vision obediently reproduced by There is every indication that people had generation after generation of peoples. ceased to live at the West Cotton confluence Instead, the history of the river valley is char­ by the time the first monuments were built, acterised by more fleeting occasions of and that the rest of the excavated area was concretization, or short-term episodes not occupied at all until after they had gone during which the beliefs and practices of out of use. An early cut-off point for the society were realised through specific debris of living is reinforced by the scarcity projects of construction and use. The monu­ of Mildenhall Ware among the Neolithic ments themselves, as built exemplars of a Bowl pottery, which is almost all plain, ‘world view’, resonated with the conven­ sometimes with Grimston Ware characteris­ tions, mythologies and religious opinions of tics (Tomalin SS3.8.4). The cessation of those involved in creating these places, while everyday occupation may suggest that the those who subsequently encountered them area had acquired new meanings and signifi­ were actively engaged and orientated by their cance at the onset of the Neolithic. The physicality. Yet this was an open-ended and builders and users of the monuments would discursive process as monuments were peri­ have come to them in the course of herding odically abandoned, modified or superseded. their stock and for specific events, but these The result was not so much an enduring visits resulted in no more than a handful of framework by which the living world was perceptible acts of construction, modifica­ understood as a spatial resource manipulated tion and deposition, some of them minus­ according to the changing priorities, inter­ cule, over as much as 500 years. The ests and aspirations of local people. frequency, scales, rhythms and characters of The physical form of the monuments any invisible episodes can only be guessed at. provides an insight into the changing social The monuments constructed in the first agendas of those occupying the river valley. few centuries of the 4th millennium may A focus on their spatial properties, particu­ have provided a common focus, or sequence larly the ways in which their various archi­ of public symbols, around which the local tectural components may have orientated community could unite (3.2.4). This would experience, provides the most obvious certainly explain the closeness of the north means by which to study the ontology, or part of the Turf Mound and the Long mode of being, implicit in these works. But Mound, which were both aligned on the this is a problematic exercise. It is necessary same space, an area that may have owed its to acknowledge that there may be little significance to already historical events in 199 A NEOLITHIC AND BRONZE AGE LANDSCAPE IN NORTHAMPTONSHIRE the long-used settlement at West Cotton. Hodder 2006). It is likely, in other words, Along with the Avenue and Long Barrow, that the destructive and transforming power these early monuments mark the course of of fire, sometimes invoked in attempts to the Nene, and each lay at or near a conflu­ interpret the burning of artefacts (eg ence of the river with a tributary (Fig 1.4). Larsson 2000, 609–10) or the practice of The marking of what must have been a cremation (eg Brück 2001, 155), may have natural routeway strongly suggests that been at least as expressive when applied to contemporary practices involved movement monuments themselves. That it was intrin­ along the terrace, between and beyond the sic to the life cycle of many of these 4th­ monuments. The freshly built mounds at millennium sites, as well as some of the West Cotton could have focused the atten­ contemporary ‘timber halls’ (G Barclay et al tion of those arriving at the confluence and 2002; J Thomas 1996b, 9), is the more then moving further along this pathway, understandable when we consider how even if their slight size – the north end of the recorded cosmologies attribute to it the Turf Mound is likely to have stood to only power to both purify and renew the world about 1m, and the highest part of the Long (Eliade 1989, 87–8, 123). Mound to about 1.25m – made them rela­ Similar concerns – if rather different tively inconspicuous except at close quar­ practices – are reflected in the already burnt ters. The parallel fences on the top of the earth and wood placed in the gully of the Turf Mound would have accentuated the Raunds Long Mound. It may have formed alignment and formed a semi-enclosed part of a pattern represented more fully at space. People inside this space might have the Etton causewayed enclosure, where it been able, depending on the height of the was possible to identify both the fire sites fences, to see or be seen only along a north­ and the features in which material from east/south-west corridor, one end of which them was placed. Areas of reddened gravel focused on the space at the north-east end subsoil with high magnetic susceptibility of the Long Mound. testify to intense burning on the ground. There is little to indicate the intensity One especially, in the east of the enclosure, and character of activity at each site, was so large (almost 1,000m2) as to suggest although episodes of burning are revealed that the fires were burnt there intermittently at three of the four early monuments. The throughout the Early Neolithic use of the Turf Mound fences may not have stood for site, generating the magnetically enhanced long, as each of two successive pairs was soil, charcoal and highly burnt animal bone burnt in situ, as was at least some of the deposited in pits and ditches in the same burnt material in the hollows of the area of the interior (Challands 1998; Pryor Avenue. The same might be true of nine 1998a, 355). Burnt material was also regu­ stakes in the gully on top of the Long larly placed in the segments of the Hadden­ Mound. The role of fire in contemporary ham causewayed enclosure (Hodder and ceremony is little discussed, although there Evans forthcoming). The burial of this is widespread evidence for it. The burning material and the widespread deposition of of mortuary structures, such as those at already burnt material in Neolithic pits (J Street House, Cleveland (Vyner 1984, Thomas 1999, 64), suggest that the 159–61), or Kilham, Yorkshire (Manby symbolic properties of fire were also inher­ 1976a, 119–23), before they were sealed ent in its leftovers, the remains being used to beneath mounds would have provided make particular statements, or to transform moments of spectacle and drama at the end meanings and roles. The importance now of particular stages in the use of the sites. attached to fire may be connected to the So, too, would the firing of probably later contemporary adoption of lifeways in which monuments, such as the façade at land clearance had become more frequent Grendon, Northamptonshire (Gibson and and more extensive, even a process central McCormick 1985, 37–8), and a palisaded to ordered social life. enclosure subsequently covered by an oval The monuments would have been highly barrow at Maxey, Cambridgeshire (Pryor et visible when freshly built or modified, but al 1985, 62–5, 234). The oak chamber of these spells would have been brief. The the Haddenham long barrow, and the Avenue, exiguous from the first, would human remains inside it, seem to have rapidly have become a series of slight, silted burnt less spectacularly – slowly and at a hollows. The unrevetted Turf Mound and relatively low temperature, clamped down the east and east-centre of the Long Mound by the already-present mound (Evans and would have merged inconspicuously into 200 CEREMONIAL PRACTICE AND MORTUARY RITUAL their settings once grass and herbs had with each monument itself an act of remem­ grown on them and regrown around them. brance. Through the journey, a narrative By the time the hurdle revetment of the west could be told, which established and main­ and centre of the Long Mound had decayed tained social linkages and relations, espe­ and the mound sides had weathered into a cially if it was part of a ceremonial cycle for smooth, vegetated slope, it would have been the circulation of human bone (4.2.1). The even more part of the surrounding pasture. spatial story may have also created and Even the application of a layer of gravelly sustained intimacy with the surrounding loam and the subsequent cutting of a gully landscape, best illustrated by the façade that around the mound would have left it a preceded the Long Barrow.