Julian Thomas

For many centuries, scholars and enthusiasts have been fascinated by Stonehenge, the world’s most famous stone circle. In 2003 a team of archaeologists commenced a long-term fieldwork project there for the first time in decades. The Stonehenge Riverside Project (2003-2009) aimed to investigate the purpose of this unique prehistoric monument by considering it within its wider archaeological context.

This is the first of four volumes which present the results of that campaign. It includes investigations of the monuments and landscape that pre-dated Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain as well as excavation at Stonehenge itself. The main discovery at Stonehenge was of cremated human remains from many individuals, allowing their demography, health and dating to be established. With a revised radiocarbon-dated chronology for Stonehenge’s five stages of construction, these burials can now be considered within the context of the monument’s development. The different types of stone from which Stonehenge is formed – bluestones from Wales and sarsen silcretes from more local sources – are investigated both at Stonehenge and in its surroundings. These surrounding monuments include single standing stones, the Cuckoo Stone and the Tor Stone, as well as the newly discovered circle of Bluestonehenge at West Amesbury beside the River Avon. The ceremonial Stonehenge Avenue, linking Stonehenge to Bluestonehenge, is also included, with a series of excavations along its length.

The working hypothesis behind the Stonehenge Riverside Project links Stonehenge with a complex of timber monuments upstream at the great henge of Durrington Walls and neighbouring Woodhenge. Whilst these other sites are covered in a later volume (Volume 3), this volume explores the role of the River Avon and its topographic and environmental evidence.

This book developed from discussions following the 2012 In Dialogue: Tradition and Interaction in the Mesolithic–Neolithic Transition conference held in Manchester, UK. This conference provided a forum to compare not only the processes through which material innovations were adopted and elaborated during the Early Neolithic, but also the ways in which these processes have been understood and represented within the respective archaeological research traditions. The book examines the developments that followed the introduction of farming into Britain and Southern Scandinavia (Denmark and Southern Sweden). Contributors to the volume discuss the idiosyncratic social and cultural patterns that emerged at this pivotal period. An overarching narrative is woven by scholars from both regions who seamlessly integrate material culture, dwelling practices, controversial theory and ritual activities into a detailed image of the changing world of the early Neolithic in North-West Europe. Through a theoretically informed approach, the relationshA between material culture, subsistence regimes, monumentality, ceremonial activity and social relations is explored. The process in which people became 'Neolithic' is complex and required changes not just in subsistence but in every facet of their lives; this is what this book wishes to investigate. By leaving the traditional colonization and adoption debate for a more nuanced approached, an intricate cultural tapestry can be woven. From their organisation of the landscape to their place in the world, things were fundamentally altered: this is where the authors of this book focus their attention. This is a regionally focused, theoretically and methodologically complementary set of papers by specialists who offer a comprehensive and authoritative overview of different aspects of this fundamental transition.

This volume is concerned with the investigation of three complexes of prehistoric ceremonial monuments in the immediate environs of Dumfries in the south-west of Scotland, conducted between 1994 and 1998. These were the Pict's Knowe henge, the Holywood cursus complex, and the post alignments/cursus at Holm. The field research was designed in such a way as to recognise that prehistoric monuments often have complex and individual sequences of construction and use, while also acknowledging that detailed studies of particular sites and local contexts will ultimately advance our understanding of monumentality in prehistoric Europe. The three sites of the Pict's Knowe, Holywood and Holm have proved especially helpful in addressing questions of how particular places maintained their importance over long periods of time. In each instance the location was characterised by features which possess a high degree of archaeological visibility. In the former case it was the upstanding earthwork of the bank and ditch that identified the site as a henge monument, while Holywood and Holm were discovered through aerial photography. Each of the sites investigated had complex sequences of development, in which the structural elements that were recognised prior to fieldwork were not necessarily the most important or the most long-lived. This book considers the details of the excavated features, environmental and artefactual evidence, as well as more general concerns. The first part of the volume concentrates on the Pict's Knowe, while the second looks at the more spatially and typologically related sites of Holywood and Holm.

Studies of early fourth-millennium BC Britain have typically focused on the Early Neolithic sites of Wessex and Orkney; what can the investigation of sites located in areas beyond these core regions add? The authors report on excavations (2011-2019) at Dorstone Hill in Herefordshire, which have revealed a remarkable complex of Early Neolithic monuments: three long barrows constructed on the footprints of three timber buildings that had been deliberately burned, plus a nearby causewayed enclosure. A Bayesian chronological model demonstrates the precocious character of many of the site's elements and strengthens the evidence for the role of tombs and houses/halls in the creation and commemoration of foundational social groups in Neolithic Britain.

Stonehenge is Britain's largest cemetery of the third millennium cal BC and yet we know very little about who was buried there and when. Excavations across almost half of its area have yielded 52 cremation burials, many cremated fragments and over 40 fragments of unburnt human ...

... Sebastian Andrews, Susan Bedford, Paul Binns, Katie Burne, Lizzie Carlton, Chris Casswell, Ralph Collard, Jess Davidson, Paul Flintoft, Jeffrey ... The students from Manchester were: Ann Hook, Alexander Beben, Zoë Rozar, Richard Elliot, Seamus Farren, Gemma O'Dwyer, Kate ...

Stonehenge is a national symbol, recognised through- out the world, and interpreted in different ways by a wide variety of constituencies, from Druids to New Age enthusiasts (Chippindale 1990) (Fig. 1). It has served as a focus for contemporary cultural and polit- ical struggles, ...

Investigations at Dorstone Hill in the parish of Dorstone in the Dore Valley, Herefordshire, have taken place annually since 2011, with the aim of investigating Neolithic settlement in the area just to the south of the chambered tomb of Arthur’s Stone. The project has been directed by Professor Julian Thomas of Manchester University and Dr. Keith Ray, formerly County Archaeologist with Herefordshire Council, in association with Professor Koji Mizoguchi, of Kyushu University, Japan, and Tim Hoverd of Herefordshire Council. The project has deployed local volunteers and students from (mostly) the Universities of Manchester, Kyushu and Cardiff. Irene Garcia-Rovira, Ellen McInnes and Lara Bishop of the University of Manchester have supervised the work in the field during all four seasons.
The hilltop at Dorstone Hil is a promontory extending south-westwards from the ridge separating the Dore and Wye valleys east of Hay-on-Wye. The field occupying the hilltop was cleared of scrub and levelled to be brought into cultivation during the Second World War, and had, by the 1960s, produced a significant assemblage of worked flints. The site was test-excavated by Roger Pye and members of the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club in the 1960s, and was provisionally classified as a Neolithic hilltop enclosure. The low earthen bank that extends east-west for 120m across the narrow neck of the promontory was surveyed by English Heritage in the late 1990s, and it was concluded that it was a defining feature of the putative enclosure.
In 2011, a trench was dug across the bank where it appeared to survive best, close to its eastern limit, and well to the east of a putative entrance gap. No ditch accompanying the bank was found, but a historically-recent quarry was intercepted. The bank itself was found to comprise large stone slabs on its north-facing side, and burnt clay on its crest. A pit containing sherds of Neolithic pottery was found on the southern side of the bank. In 2012, a trench opened to the west of the ‘entrance gap’ revealed that the bank was covered on both northern and southern sides with a capping of stones, and a stone-lined cist, with a broken leaf-shaped arrowhead, was uncovered on the northern side. Again, no ditch was evident, and a burnt deposit was found within two parallel lines of palisade slots.
In 2013, this trench was further investigated and the burnt deposit was seen to cover the remains of a timber aisled hall. It was deduced that this had burned down and that the burnt clay was super-structural daub. Structural timbers were recorded, decayed from charred posts and woodwork. Also in 2013, a further trench was excavated between the eastern and western mounds. A pit containing distinctive flint items of likely Late Neolithic date was found to have been dug into the top of the eastern mound, close to where a rectangular mortuary chamber of Early Neolithic character (large upright timber posts linked by a stone-lined trough) had previously been dug into the subsoil. An early Neolithic axe was found, albeit displaced by a modern drain, immediately west of this chamber. Further finds included the eastern end of the aisled building intercepted in the 2012-13 trench, and a series of Bronze Age deposits apparently located deliberately to reference the earlier features.
In 2014, a further trench was opened across what had been supposed was the western end of the western of two long mounds. This revealed a third long mound that had been created in similar sequence to the central mound, with a burnt deposit then capped by turf. It was, however, retained within a stone wall (lost to bulldozing along its southern side) that had formed the basis for a ‘Cotswold-Severn’-style cairn that included modest side-chambers. The eastern end of this trapezoidal cairn had been reinforced with stone buttressing before all three mounds were linked by further stonework. In 2015, planned excavations will complete the investigation of this western mound/cairn.

For many years archaeologists have struggled with the problem of addressing prehistoric worlds that may have been experienced and understood in ways that are remote from those of the modern west, and yet are only accessible to us through their material traces. The observations of social anthropologists have provided a perennial source of insights that help to challenge our contemporary prejudices and expectations, but the danger of imposing an ‘ethnographic present’ on the past is ever-present. Many prehistorians presently engage with various forms of philosophical thought as a way of looking at their evidence in fresh and counter-intuitive ways, but in this book Doug Bailey adopts a different and novel strategy. Bailey presents Breaking the Surface as a work of ‘art/archaeology’, a practice that emerges from the encounter between two disciplines, in which archaeological materials are removed from their normal context and deployed in artistic ways to create unfamiliar perspectives. However, in practice the book works in the opposite direction, drawing on the work of artists, psychologists and linguistic anthropologists in order to shed new light on a supremely archaeological phenomenon: holes in the ground.

ABSTRACT Archaeology, defined as the study of material culture, extends from the first preserved human artefacts up to the present day, and in recent years the ‘Archaeology of the Present’ has become a particular focus of research. On one hand are the conservationists seeking to preserve significant materials and structures of recent decades in the face of redevelopment and abandonment. On the other are those inspired by social theory who see in the contemporary world the opportunity to explore aspects of material culture in new and revealing ways, and perhaps above all the central question of the extent to which material culture — be it in the form of objects or buildings — actively defines the human experience. Victor Buchli's An Archaeology of Socialism takes as its subject a twentieth-century building — the Narkofim Communal House in Moscow — and seeks to understand it in terms of domestic life and changing policies of the Soviet state during the 70 or so years since its construction. Thus Buchli's study not only concerns the meaning of material culture in a modern context, but focuses specifically on the household — or more accurately on a series of households within a single Russian apartment block. A particular interest attaches to the way in which the building was planned to encourage communal living, during a pre-Stalinist phase when the State sought to intervene directly in domestic life through architectural design and the manipulation of material culture. Subsequent political changes brought a revision of modes of living within the Narkofim apartment block, as the residents adjusted and responded to changing political and social pressures and demands. The significance of Buchli's study goes far beyond the confines of Soviet-era Moscow or indeed the archaeology of the modern world. He questions the role and potential danger of social and archaeological theory of the totalizing kind: a natural response perhaps to the experience of the Narkofim Communal House as an exercise in Soviet social engineering. He poses fascinating questions about the relation between individual households and the state ideology, and he emphasizes the role of material culture studies in reaching an understanding of these processes. In the brief essay that opens this Review Feature, Victor Buchli outlines the principal aims and conclusions of An Archaeology of Socialism. The diversity of issues that the book generates is revealed in the series of reviews which follows, touching in particular upon the ways in which routines of daily life — archaeologically visible, perhaps, through the analysis of domestic space — relate to structures of authority in society as a whole.