Traditions of deposition in the neolithic of Wessex

• Main Author: Pollard, Carl Joshua
• Published: Cardiff University 1993
• Subjects: 936.2
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.603085

This thesis seeks to demonstrate intentional selection, and spatial and associational patterning in the past deposition of artefactual, faunal and human remains in the British Neolithic. Drawing on theory from material culture studies and anthropology, it is suggested that depositional practices were the result of, and played a part in the creation and maintenance of, systems of cultural classification and symbolic order. Furthermore, that deposition was often actively employed in ascribing sets of meanings and references to places, events and practices through a process of material culture signification and connotation. A major part of the thesis takes the form of a series of detailed case studies of depositional practices within excavated sites in the Avebury and Stonehenge regions of Wiltshire. A variety of contexts, including pits, funerary monuments and enclosures of both Earlier and Later Neolithic date, are examined; within which consciously motivated acts of deposition are seen as a recurrent feature. In a broader discussion, implications developing from the case studies and analysis of depositional activity at other sites elsewhere in southern Britain are related to issues of Neolithic perceptions of identity, locality, time, ancestry and the supernatural. Particular attention is paid to the way in which depositions contributed to the structuring and classification of space within monuments. In a final section, depositional practices are considered in relation to a wider debate surrounding Neolithic origins and processes of becoming and being Neolithic.