Assembling Past Worlds: Materials, Bodies and Architecture in Neolithic Britain 2020056433, 2020056434, 9780367414894, 9780367414917, 9780367814786

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of figures and tables
Acknowledgements
Part I Assembling a posthumanist archaeology
1 Assembling past worlds: an introduction
2 Seven challenges for a posthumanist archaeology
3 Fragments from philosophy
Part II Assembling Neolithic Britain
4 What were Neolithic materials capable of becoming?
5 What could a dead Neolithic body do?
6 What worlds did Neolithic architecture create?
Part III Assembling past worlds
7 Time, history and memory: towards an ontography of the Neolithic
8 Conclusion
Glossary
References
Index

Citation preview

ASSEMBLING PAST WORLDS

Assembling Past Worlds draws on new materialism and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to explore the potential for a posthumanist archaeology. Through specific empirical study, this book provides a detailed analysis of Neolithic Britain, a critical moment in the emergence of new ways of living, as well as new relationships between materials, people and new forms of architecture. It achieves two things. First, it identifies the major challenges that archaeology faces in the light of current theoretical shifts. New ideas place new demands on how we write and think about the past, sometimes in ways that can seem contradictory. This volume identifies seven major challenges that have emerged and sets out why they matter, why archaeology needs to engage with them and how they can be dealt with through an innovative theoretical approach. Second, it explores how this approach meets these challenges through an in-depth study of Neolithic Britain. It provides an insightful diagnosis of the issues posed by current archaeological thought and is the first volume to apply the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to the extended analysis of a single period. Assembling Past Worlds shows how new approaches are transforming our understandings of past worlds and, in so doing, how we can meet the challenges facing archaeology today. It will be of interest to both students and researchers in archaeological theory and the Neolithic of Europe. Oliver J.T. Harris is Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Leicester. He is co-author of Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium (Routledge) and Archaeological Theory in Dialogue (Routledge). He researches new materialist, posthumanist and Deleuzian approaches to the past, applying them particularly, but not exclusively, to the Neolithic. He is co-director of the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project, which excavates sites across multiple periods on the west coast of Scotland.

ASSEMBLING PAST WORLDS Materials, Bodies and Architecture in Neolithic Britain

Oliver J.T. Harris

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Oliver J.T. Harris The right of Oliver J.T. Harris to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Harris, Oliver J. T., author. Title: Assembling past worlds : materials, bodies and architecture in neolithic Britain / Oliver J.T. Harris. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020056433 (print) | LCCN 2020056434 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367414894 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367414917 (paperback) | ISBN 9780367814786 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Neolithic period—Great Britain. | Archaeology—Philosophy. Classification: LCC GN776.22.G7 H37 2021 (print) |LCC GN776.22.G7 (ebook) | DDC 936.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056433 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056434 ISBN: 978-0-367-41489-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-41491-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-81478-6 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To Ellie, forever

CONTENTS

List of figures and tables ix Acknowledgementsxi PART I

Assembling a posthumanist archaeology

1

1 Assembling past worlds: an introduction

3

2 Seven challenges for a posthumanist archaeology

19

3 Fragments from philosophy

42

PART II

Assembling Neolithic Britain

69

4 What were Neolithic materials capable of becoming?

71

5 What could a dead Neolithic body do?

111

6 What worlds did Neolithic architecture create?

155

viii  Contents

PART III

Assembling past worlds

197

7 Time, history and memory: towards an ontography of the Neolithic

199

8 Conclusion

222

Glossary236 References242 Index270

FIGURES AND TABLES

Note: Representations of human remains appear as photographs in Figures 5.3 and 5.12, and as drawings in Figures 5.1, 5.2, 5.7, 5.8 and 5.10.

Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13

A traditional comparison of difference between two cars An Early Neolithic leaf-shaped arrowhead from Lincolnshire Arthur’s Stone, Portal Dolmen, Gower Peninsula, Wales Ontological elevation A cat in the process of transforming a chair from virtual human seat to actual cat bed Monument valley: a landscape differentiated by the action of long-gone oceans Grooved Ware pottery from Martlesham Map of sites discussed in the chapter Lanyon Quoit, a Neolithic portal dolmen Avebury Flows of stone in the Avebury Landscape Holm cursus monument Plan of Warren Field timber hall The Ring of Brodgar Stonehenge P37 (top) and P2 (lower) from Hambledon Hill One of the flint scrapers from Grooved Ware pit 0004 from Martlesham Polished stone axe from Cambridgeshire Desire paths in (a) Leicester and (b) Wiltshire

12 14 15 25 53 57 72 74 77 78 80 83 85 87 88 92 95 102 105

x  Figures and tables

4.14 The Garboldisham macehead 5.1 (A) Plan of Fussell’s Lodge, after Wysocki et al. 2007, 66, figure 1. (B) Plan of the funerary deposits at Fussell’s Lodge, after Wysocki et al. 2007, 68, figure 2 5.2 Neolithic Burial at Liffs Low 5.3 Excavation of a cremation deposit that has been placed in a small cut feature within Forteviot henge 1, Perth and Kinross 5.4 Map of sites discussed in the chapter 5.5 Examples of sites featuring fragmentation in the Middle and Late Neolithic 5.6 Healed depression fracture to left frontal cattle skull deposit B4 (DZSWS.1965.13.83a), Beckhampton Road long barrow 5.7 Examples of inhumation burials from the Early, Middle and Late Neolithic 5.8 The double burial at the Radley oval barrow 5.9 The mound at Duggleby Howe 5.10 The child burials at Hambledon Hill (A) Segment 17; (B) Segment 18 5.11 Examples of Early, Middle and Late Neolithic cremation sites 5.12 The cremation under Cladh Aindreis in Swordle Bay, Ardnamurchan, Scotland 5.13 Plan of the Dorchester monuments 6.1 Cladh Aindreis chambered tomb 6.2 Map of sites discussed in the chapter 6.3 Plans of causewayed enclosures 6.4 The sequence of deposits in ditch segment 7 at Etton 6.5 A plan of features at Hambledon Hill 6.6 Plan of White Horse Stone timber hall 6.7 Knap of Howar, Orkney 6.8 Plan of the settlement at Barnhouse 6.9 Plan of the major features of Mount Pleasant 6.10 The Stones of Stenness 6.11 Silbury Hill 6.12 Section through Silbury Hill showing phases of construction 7.1 The Rudston monolith 7.2 Bergson’s cone of memory 7.3 Avebury in plan

106

112 114 115 118 121 125 129 130 134 139 141 142 147 156 159 163 166 168 173 174 176 180 182 186 188 204 211 218

Tables 3.1 The seven challenges for a posthumanist archaeology 3.2 Challenges, principles and concepts 5.1 The inhumation burials at Duggleby Howe that are certain or highly likely to be Neolithic

43 66 132

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

No book is ever really single-authored; ‘each of us are several’, as Deleuze and Guattari say, which captures how we emerge in relation with the others, human and non-human, that shape our lives, our bodies, our thinking and our writing. Since I first began studying archaeology in 1999, I have been unbelievably fortunate to be educated and encouraged by an astonishing cast of characters. At Sheffield, I was taught about the Neolithic by John Barrett, Mark Edmonds and Mike Parker Pearson. At Cardiff, I learned about the same period from Doug Bailey, Vicki Cummings, Lesley McFadyen, Niall Sharples and Alasdair Whittle. In my first postdoc at Cambridge I worked with Dušan Boriç and John Robb; in my second at Newcastle with Jan Harding and Chris Fowler. At Leicester, I have worked with Rachel Crellin, Mark Gillings and get regular coffees with Roy Loveday. And those are just my European Neolithic gurus. In each place I have been I cannot express my gratitude to the teachers, colleagues and students who have expanded my mind, challenged me and made me love our discipline. In my job today I learn more every semester from my undergraduates in modules like Archaeological Theory, and Power and Difference in the Past. My MA and PhD students, past and present, have taught me so much, and many thanks in particular to Emily Banfield, Matteo Cantisani, Jonny Graham, Nathan Gubbins, Doug Mitcham, Yvonne O’Dell, David Osborne, Sofia Picken, Andy Rogers and Richard Stonehouse for shaping my thinking on theory, the Neolithic or both. Both at and beyond Leicester I continue to find inspiration in the brilliant work of my friends and colleagues, including, in addition to those named above and below, Nate Acebo, Ben Alberti, Susan Alt, Huw Barton, Penny Bickle, Lawrence Billington, Brian Boyd, Marcus Brittain, Kenny Brophy, Bob Carter, Andy Cochrane, John Creese, Zoe Crossland, Karina Croucher, Simon Dyson, Manuel Fernández Götz, Sev Fowles, Andy Gardner, Duncan Garrow, Mel Giles, Chris Gosden, Sue Greaney, Yannis Hamilakis, Colin Haselgrove, Marianne Hem Eriksen, Dan Hicks, Ben Jervis, Cara Jones, Andy Jones, Art Joyce, Kevin Kay, José Carvajal

xii  Acknowledgements

López, Gavin Lucas, Naoíse Mac Sweeney, Yvonne Marshall, Andy Merrills, Lindsay Montgomery, Nick Overton, Tim Pauketat, Katharina Rebay-Salisbury, Colin Richards, Peter Rowley-Conwy, Alice Samson, Tim Flohr Sørensen, Sarah Tarlow, Jeremy Taylor, Ruth Van Dyke, Chris Watts, Brendon Wilkins and Darryl Wilkinson. They could have gone in the last list, but the ATP gang deserve their own thanks: Hannah Cobb, Héléna Gray, Paul Murtagh, Phil Richardson, everyone on the Real Wild West WhatsApp group and anyone who has ever spent a Gin Wednesday on a kitchen dance floor with me, somewhere on the west coast of Scotland. The cover of this volume is Rene Magritte’s Invisible World, which I saw whilst visiting The Menil Collection in Houston. It is reproduced here, courtesy of The Menil Collection, Houston, and the Design and Artists Copyright Society. Many thanks to Jeff Fleisher for the invitation to come and teach his students at Rice, and hang out with his family, as well as for being another I have learned from. Also, special thanks to him for the number 34 shirt he sent me – now that is a singular truth in which I am willing to believe. Many other people kindly supplied images or helped with permissions, including Emily Banfield, Kenny Brophy, Lisa Brown, Rachel Crellin, Marta Díaz-Guardamino, Mark Gillings, Sue Greaney, Jim Leary, Roy Loveday, Donna McClendon, Colin Richards and Julian Thomas. Sarah Scoppie produced the index, Donald Sutherland did me a massive favour by producing the maps, and Mark Hoyle did sterling work redrawing, or creating, many of the images in the book. Enormous thanks to all three. I am very grateful for the support and confidence shown in me by Matt Gibbon and the team at Routledge. Parts of the argument were developed at seminars in Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, Leicester, Rome and too many TAG conferences to count, thanks to everyone in the different audiences for their feedback and (mostly) supportive questions. The most frightening part of writing anything is the first time you show it to somebody else. Thanks to the critical friends who kindly read parts of the manuscript: Craig Cipolla, Mark Gillings, Lesley McFadyen and Julian Thomas. One person read the whole thing, and indeed reads everything I write. I am unbelievably lucky to work with someone as clever and kind as Rachel Crellin, who I used to teach but now schools me every day. The writing of this book was supported by a Philip Leverhulme Prize (PLP-2016-109) and stems from ideas and conversations variously funded by the Leverhulme Trust on no less than four occasions. My debt to them is, to put it mildly, considerable. Beyond work I am ever in the debt of my family: Carr, Harris, Rowley-Conwy and Wilcox, human and non-human. In Leicester if one thing keeps me sane it is the rigours demanded by team LOF. I don’t think Tony Dandy would ever have guessed he’d have an acknowledgement in a book that combines Neolithic archaeology with French philosophy, but life comes at you fast sometimes. Finally, the book is dedicated, of course, to Ellie. How could it not be, when she has lit up my life for the last 15 years and spent the (in)famous first summer of lockdown kicking cancer’s arse with considerably more aplomb than I showed finishing this book.

PART I

Assembling a posthumanist archaeology

1 ASSEMBLING PAST WORLDS An introduction

Introduction Between 6,100 and 4,400 years ago, in what we now call the Neolithic, the world was different. Profoundly different. On the islands known today as Britain life was lived in a variety of ways, all very distinct from the present. These differences in some ways are obvious: the landscape was different, it was far more wooded; the economy was different, with no money or private property. People’s lives were different, not just for those of us who currently reside in cities but for contemporary farmers as well. There are other kinds of differences too, in some ways more profound. In this book we will explore how materials could make history and form relationships in the Neolithic, and with that construct new kinds of places. We will see how dead bodies gained new capacities to affect the world. We will discuss how the extraordinary monuments of the period created a new form of power that was not wielded or possessed by people, and thus quite different from power today. We will visit small sites where people placed sherds of pottery in shallow pits and others where they stood huge stones erect. We will think about how trees can move across landscapes and how people could be in more than one place at the same time. In doing so, we will need to consider the broader ways in which archaeology works, the kinds of issues it faces as a discipline and how by developing new ways of thinking we can meet those challenges. This will allow us to assemble the very different worlds of the past and examine how difference itself can be productive. This is a book about the Neolithic Britain, and this is a book about archaeological theory. Those two things are inseparable for me, despite what the constraints of structuring an argument or a glance at a contents page might suggest. I have been thinking about both of these topics off and (mainly) on for the last 20 years, learning from my teachers and my students about both of them and always coming back to each. Data, any good theorist will tell you, are always theory-laden (e.g.

4  Assembling a posthumanist archaeology

Johnson 2010, 105). That is, we cannot encounter archaeological remains from some sort of objective, apolitical and atheoretical standpoint. We are always already caught up in the process of interpreting what we find, from before the first scrape of a trowel (Hodder 1999). Nor, however, are our theories ever truly separate from our data (Pétursdóttir & Olsen 2018). Why do the theories that I find convincing work for me? Because they help me understand new things about the material I am interested in; they help me open up the productive differences between past and present and between alternative parts of, or versions of, the past. The theories we draw on, the ones that speak to us, the ones that make us think differently, are always and already shaped by our data and by who we are, our location and position in the world. The argument here emerges from a particular gathering of history, materials and ideas. Neolithic Britain, and the archaeological record of this period, informs the theory employed in this volume, as much as the philosophers I read shape my interpretations of that part of the past. In this initial chapter I introduce readers to some of the critical debates in archaeological theory to which this volume responds and to the main issues in thinking about the Neolithic with which we will engage. The chapter concludes by outlining the structure of the rest of the book.

Archaeological theory A posthumanist archaeology: an initial provocation This is a book about Neolithic Britain and a book about archaeological theory. Focusing on the latter, the volume looks at the obstacles that contemporary archaeological thought is beginning to identify. It analyses some of the issues raised by ideas that have become prevalent in the last decade or two that prevent us from simply carrying out ‘business as usual’. In Chapter 2, we will develop a detailed account of the seven most critical challenges that have arisen, but to give you a sense of what this entails, let us start with a single provocation. One of the central claims this book will make, developing recent arguments both inside (e.g. Crellin 2020; Crellin & Harris 2020; Crellin & Harris forthcoming; Crellin et al. 2021) and outside archaeology (e.g. Braidotti 2013; Ferrando 2019), is that a posthumanist approach to the past is required. Posthumanism is a term of increasing importance, but one that can be taken to mean many different things. It is, as the philosopher Francesca Ferrando (2019) puts it, an umbrella term. Rather than attempt to review all the different ways posthumanism can be understood, or misunderstood, here – a task for a book in itself – I will specifically stress what posthumanism means to me, and why I think it is a critical development for archaeology. Why, in other words, this book aims to help build a posthumanist archaeology. The posthumanist approaches employed in this volume draw their inspiration explicitly from feminist posthumanist thinkers like Ferrando and Rosi Braidotti (2013). This feminism reveals a critical commitment to a rethinking of what it means to be human in order to open up

Assembling past worlds  5

that category of ‘human’ in a much more radical way than has previously been attempted. For a subject that has long sought to justify itself as part of the humanities, and that in the United States is considered one of the four subfields of anthropology – the study of humans – the call for posthumanism might seem odd. Why would we not want to centre archaeology around human beings (Johnson 2010, 226)? After all, aren’t they the most interesting thing to study? Aren’t they responsible for the artefacts, sites and monuments that form the very substance of archaeology? Shouldn’t our ability to refine our chronologies and produce new scientific data move us ever closer to an engagement with our distant predecessors? Doesn’t a moral and political commitment to the importance of human beings mean they should be central to what we do? You may have answered yes to all of these, and in many ways I would too. Nonetheless, I would still suggest archaeology needs to develop a posthumanist approach to the past. Why? First and foremost, I must stress that developing a posthumanist approach to the past does not mean ignoring human beings. What it requires is for us to study human beings without privileging them above and beyond all other entities in the world. As we will see in the next chapter, this means our approach needs to become post-anthropocentric (Braidotti 2013; Crellin 2020; Ferrando 2019), but it does not in any way remove humans from our accounts. Second, whilst seemingly all inclusive, the human at the heart of humanism, to date the dominant framework in Euro-American archaeology, is actually rather restrictive. Since its first emergence, the language of humanism has been used as much to exclude as to include, to demand that certain beings be incorporated within the banner and others be excluded (Foucault 2002; Thomas 2004). These debates are live today. Whilst readers might all now (hopefully) agree that human beings have the same status regardless of gender, race, sexuality and so on, it was not long ago that only some people were included within this label. ‘All men are created equal’, states the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence of the United States, but such a statement did not apparently apply to white women or to the slaves of all genders that its authors owned. It seems that the human of humanism always returns to something that worryingly, for me at least, looks fairly familiar. It is a model rooted in the image of, and agency available to, the white, middle-class, heterosexual, male of the 20th and 21st centuries (Braidotti 2013). Everything else is somehow less than, or not quite, human. The ongoing legacies of colonialism, racism and misogyny suggest that humanism has not been entirely successful at treating all people the same (Braidotti 2019). Thus, despite its popularity, it is not clear at all that humanism offers an ethical or moral position that truly embraces the equality it apparently espouses. Its logic is written into our assumptions, however. When we debate about whether or not to accord human rights to chimpanzees, or whether Neanderthals were capable of ‘modern’ thought, we ask questions that compare them to a notional and essential concept of the human, one modelled on a very particular prototype. Thus, whilst a humanist approach might appear to offer a broad tent into which all

6  Assembling a posthumanist archaeology

of our ancestors are welcome, in fact it offers a device through which we include some and exclude others.1 So the first issue with humanism is that it tends to define quite closely who gets to be counted within that seemingly simple label of ‘anthropos’ – or human. The second damaging effect, and one especially worrying for archaeologists, is that through humanism the people our discipline studies are de-historicised. Part of what it means to be human, from this perspective, is held to be static through time. Humans do not share just an evolutionary history, or a set of potentials, but rather a fixed essence: an essential, universal and unchanging humanness. Thus, to be human, part of past peoples’ existence has to be separated from the historical relationships through which they came to exist and through which they understand the world. This means that even when we extend our concept of humanity to every member of our species that has ever lived, we are still denying their difference, their reality and their worlds, in order to extend universal claims from ours. In order to say they are, underneath it all, just like us, we have to argue that something about them is shared via the category of ‘human’ that exists outside of their world, that something transcends us and them to link both together. This isn’t only bad politics, it’s bad history. The third issue with humanism is that in celebrating a particular view of human beings, our narratives deny an active role in historical contexts to non-humans of all sorts, from animals, to plants, to pots, to weather systems, to mountains, to viruses and so on. This does not mean that the role of these differing elements in history will be the same as the ones people play, but they have to be accounted for nonetheless. Some archaeologists have taken this to mean we can write about objects without writing about people (e.g. Pétursdóttir & Olsen 2018); that will not be the aim of this book. Nor is this in any way a claim we need to return to the environmental determinism of an older generation. But I will suggest that writing histories that view human agency as something utterly different to anything else, and as something that operates ahistorically, prevents us from grasping the full complexity of the past. Thus, the response to humanist thought is not to ignore the human but rather to reimagine what it is to be human as one part of a complex and historically emergent world. We will return to these issues in the next chapter. Concerns with humanism are coming to the foreground in archaeology (Alberti et al. 2013; Crellin 2020; Crellin et al. 2021; Fowler 2013; Fredengren 2013; Lucas 2012; Olsen et al. 2012). To understand why, and what this means for the archaeology more widely, we need to briefly turn to the broader context. A brief outline of the history of archaeological thought can help us here, showing why these challenges are now becoming prominent (see also Harris & Cipolla 2017).

The briefest history of archaeological thought Most standard histories of archaeological thought, as many readers will know, break up the discipline into three great paradigms:2 first culture history, in which archaeologists sought to divide the past up into different bounded groups, identifiable

Assembling past worlds  7

through sets of material culture (e.g. Piggott 1954). What mattered here were the ideas in people’s heads, ideas which defined them as a particular kind of person and which they expressed through material culture. From the 1960s onwards, processual archaeology emerged and argued that archaeologists should adopt the approach of natural scientists (Binford 1968). Rather than describing the past, the point was to explain it through hypotheses testing. Rather than ideas, material conditions were what predominantly mattered, and how they forced people to adapt. In the 1980s the theoretical pendulum swung again (e.g. Hodder 1986). Feminism persuasively insisted that archaeology attend to women in the past (and indeed to their present disenfranchisement in the discipline) (e.g. Gero  & Conkey 1991). This, alongside ideas derived from various brands of Marxism, structuralism and post-structuralism, demanded that archaeologists turn to meaning again. Material culture was ‘meaningfully constituted’ (Hodder 1982, 13), and, although in a much more critical manner than the culture historians of the mid-20th century, the ideas people held of the world became central once more. Now this narrative is very problematic (cf. Crellin 2020; Harris 2018a; Harris & Cipolla 2017; Lucas 2017; Thomas 2015a). For example, it denies the complexity in all three approaches3 and fails to recognise how they do not really form three sequential paradigms4 (Harris & Cipolla 2017; Lucas 2017). More than this though, the three approaches, despite their vociferous denials, have much in common with one another and take certain basic things for granted (Harris & Cipolla 2017, chapter 2). The key question for each of them is ‘how do humans relate to the world?’ This central divide, humans and world, creates a way of understanding the past rooted in a primary dualism that has humans on one side and everything else on the other. That the power shifted from one side to the other in different approaches (from humans in culture history, to the world in processual archaeology and back to humans in postprocessual archaeology) hardly matters. The fact remains that this central rupture is paramount, and it is ontological, in the sense that it is about the fundamental structure of how the world works and what the world is. It is this divide that sustains the humanist nature of all archaeology – including approaches one might normally see as environmentally determinist. Even in these latter cases it is humans that respond to the unforgiving demands of climate, not (for example) complex networks of humans, things, plants and animals. They are thus equally human-centred or anthropocentric. Starting from a central division that opposes humans to the rest of the world, all sorts of other dualisms take hold, from culture versus nature to mind versus body and more. These oppositions have a long history within specific traditions of thought, and they often get pinned on the work of the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes. His Cartesian dualisms have thus structured the great debates of archaeological theory for almost a century. The centrality of the divide between people and world is one that the philosopher Quentin Meillassoux (2008) calls correlationism, and many of the challenges we will discuss in Chapter  2 have arisen as archaeologists attempt to undercut this divide and think about the world differently. As we will see in the next chapter,

8  Assembling a posthumanist archaeology

responding to this anthropocentrism, and the dualisms it generates, is a key obstacle for posthumanist archaeology.

Beyond the paradigms In the 2000s it became commonplace for archaeologists to declare that the great paradigm shifts were over; theory had no other place to go. Whilst new ideas would continue to emerge that would refine how we engaged with a variety of topics, the great seismic shifts in the discipline had come to an end. Yet declarations of peace in the theory wars, or even the death of archaeological theory (e.g. Bintliff 2011), proved to be somewhat premature. From the middle of the 2000s new questions emerged. These focused on what the past actually was and whether our central organising principles were really the ones on which we ought to rely. These approaches sought to challenge the correlationism, and the related anthropocentricism identified previously, and to think of new ways to understand the past outside of Cartesian dualisms. Two moves were critical here. The first was a growing emphasis on relations – on the way things connect to one another and indeed emerge in parallel to the relationships which constitute them (Crellin et  al. 2021, chapter  2). So rather than humans simply existing and then encountering the world, instead people and things brought each other into being through their relations with one another (cf. Harris & Cipolla 2017). In Britain approaches that drew on phenomenology (e.g. Thomas 1996) and personhood (Brück 2006; Fowler 2004) paved the way for this. The second critical issue was a reanalysis of the history of archaeological thought, its relationships with dualisms and its obsession with a particular vision of humanity. Important publications here included books by Andrew Jones (2001) and Julian Thomas (2004). Both drew on the central critiques of modernity: in Jones’ case the work of sociologists of science like Bruno Latour (1993); for Thomas the anti-humanism of Martin Heidegger (1962) and Michel Foucault (2002). From these seeds have grown a raft of different approaches that have tried to extract themselves from the dualisms of modernity. From symmetrical archaeology (e.g. Witmore 2007), with its emphasis on networks and the mixtures of people and things, via approaches rooted in the withdrawn entities of object-oriented ontologies (e.g. Olsen 2010), to the multiple worlds of the ontological turn (e.g. Alberti & Marshall 2009), archaeologists have begun asking new questions, identifying and setting out the challenges these new analyses and approaches raise for archaeology in the 21st century. In their own way, each of these approaches can be seen as posthumanist.

Towards a Deleuzian new materialism I do not intend to evaluate all of the different approaches that have emerged in archaeology which we can place under the label of ‘posthumanism’. Elsewhere Craig Cipolla and I have offered an introduction to each of them (Harris & Cipolla

Assembling past worlds  9

2017), and in the next chapter we will meet the particular challenges each creates. Instead, I want to be frank from the outset about the inspirations behind my approach and to flag a number of critical elements. The approach I take to building a posthumanist archaeology is one that is inspired by new materialism, and specifically by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. New materialism is an approach that is open to the active role of everything in the world, including animals, plants, materials and material things, as well as human beings. It rejects the opposition between organic and inorganic life that is normally employed and instead understands all things in the world as vibrant, in Jane Bennett’s (2010) term, and becoming – that is, in the process of ongoing change (Crellin 2020). New materialism covers a broad set of approaches that have found favour in a range of different disciplines, including geography, education, anthropology and latterly archaeology. Philosophically, it traces its roots back to elements of the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (e.g. 1962, 1969), especially his discussion of the flesh and embodiment, as well as to Deleuze and Guattari (2004) – more of the latter two later. Two things make new materialism especially important. First, it draws extensively and explicitly on scientific ideas. Its leading proponents include Karen Barad (e.g. 2007) – a physicist – and Donna Haraway (1991, 2008), whose PhD is in biology. This means it rejects any division between the humanities and the sciences. Second, it has a committed political approach that draws on the feminist thinking of its most important authors, including not only Braidotti, Barad, Bennett and Haraway but also Elizabeth Grosz (1994), Claire Colebrook (2014) and Anna Tsing (2015).

Assemblage and difference: introducing Deleuze New materialism, however, is a broad school of thought that, beyond its welcoming of non-humans of all kinds and its emphasis on process and becoming, is by no means in full agreement on anything. Indeed, it is sometimes called the new materialisms (plural) to emphasise this diversity (e.g. Coole & Frost 2010). The approach I will take to new materialism in this book emerges from a fundamental engagement with the philosophy of Deleuze, both alone and in his writing with the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari.5 This work has explicitly inspired the feminist posthumanism of authors such as Braidotti (2011), Grosz (2011) and Colebrook (2010), and so is particularly suitable for developing the arguments required. Deleuze’s philosophy is complex, and the primary aim of this volume is not to provide an introduction to it but rather to put the concepts he generates to use in writing about the past. Deleuze’s philosophy is relational; it emphasises becoming over being and incorporates the complexity and vibrancy of material things and the role of ideas, beliefs and thoughts. His writing is becoming of critical interest to archaeologists discussing materials (e.g. Conneller 2011; Jones 2012), change (Crellin 2020), the archaeological record (Lucas 2012), ancient cities (Alt & Pauketat 2020), the senses (Hamilakis 2013) and many other topics. The aim of Chapter 3 will be to set out the critical elements of Deleuze’s thought that will be of importance to my argument, but three central elements are worth introducing here.

10  Assembling a posthumanist archaeology

The first is the idea of assemblages. Developed by Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 2013) in their two volumes on capitalism and schizophrenia, assemblages offer us the benefit of an alternative starting point to humanism and are proving popular in archaeology (e.g. Crellin 2017; Fowler 2017; Jones & Hamilakis 2017; Harris 2017a; Jervis 2018; Lucas 2012). Where most approaches to the world begin with bounded objects which then form relations with one another, an assemblage begins with the gatherings themselves, with collectives. These work at multiple scales: so a water molecule is an assemblage of hydrogen and oxygen; a human being is an assemblage of DNA, bones, flesh, hair, oxygen, food, bacteria, muscle and more; a galaxy is an assemblage of stars, planets, moons, asteroids and, once again, many other things besides. Assemblages come together and persist for a period of time, and then break apart; they are always in the process of becoming. They also have specific histories that lead to their emergence out of their different components – so they are always located in history. Assemblages are thus historical and historicised multiplicities, in that they are made of multiple elements brought together in specific historically situated ways. Deleuze and Guattari (2004) develop a complex set of tools for describing assemblages, and we will return to them in Chapter 3. The key point here is that the various elements of Neolithic Britain we will be engaging with in this book, from pots to graves to monuments to communities, will all be treated, without exception, as assemblages. This emphasis on assemblage leads us to the second key idea that I want to introduce from the outset: the emphasis Deleuze asks us to place on the word ‘and’ (to distinguish it as a theoretical concept from the standard conjunction, I will refer to from now on as AND when using it in a Deleuzian sense) (Deleuze & Parnet 2002, 57). Now immediately this seems odd. Why emphasise this everyday word? First of all, this continues to emphasise relations; after all AND joins one thing to another. Second, it allows us to move away from focusing on what something is, in a singular or uniform sense, towards emphasising its complexity and its multiplicity. Is a diamond ring an amalgam of a carbon crystal structure that formed a billion years ago and a piece of shaped ductile metal with the atomic number 79? Is it a piece of jewellery that emphasises the love and commitment one person has for another? Is it a family heirloom that embodies biographies and histories of relations? Or, is it a product of generations of patriarchy that embodies capitalist, Oedipal and heteronormative sensibilities? Or, is it the outcome of exploitative colonial histories that take the natural resources of nations with things like diamonds and gold and turn them into baubles for rich people in other countries? Deleuze would ask you to reject these choices. Rather than asking what it is, as per those questions, instead ask what something does. As soon as you do that, you can move from having to choose between our different interpretations towards emphasising how they can all be real – replacing the question of what something is – as if that could ever be ­singular – with the conjunction of AND linking each of them together. Are presentday statues symbols of oppression, memories of the past, aesthetic objects of ­appreciation, navigation markers or the relational outcome of different materials? Yes to all – AND much more besides. This opens us up to a much more nuanced

Assembling past worlds  11

and complex position on how the world works. Statues as multiplicities allow us to think how differing qualities become foregrounded in different sets of relationships at particular moments. An emphasis on AND allows us to decide which qualities we want to foreground without having to claim a singular truth. Nor, however, does it slip into simple relativism. The conjunction AND allows a host of relations to connect but does not mean that anything goes: a diamond ring does not become the gift from an alien from Mars; a statue of a slave trader cannot escape the connections to the horrors of its past. The final of our three elements to flag up here in the introduction, before developing them further in Chapter 3, is the Deleuzian emphasis on difference (Deleuze 2004). This is not an emphasis on difference in the usual sense – as in how different one thing is from something else. How is your new car different to your old car? Well my old car was red, small, designed in Japan and called Bertie. My new car is different as it is black, slightly bigger, designed in France and called Jean Baptiste (Figure 1.1). This is not the kind of difference I mean here. Instead, Deleuze helps us to develop an emphasis on difference as a productive force in the world. Think of how differences in air pressure, temperature or moisture produce weather systems, for example. Warm moist air rising over cold air causes water vapour to condense, leading in turn to rain. It is the difference in temperature which relates to a difference in energy, which leads to a change in the overall conditions. Difference here is productive. A second way of thinking of this can be taken from a more archaeological example. Imagine you have an unexcavated feature in front of you. This feature might turn out to be all sorts of things  – one large pit, several intercutting pits, a series of postholes where posts have been replaced over time. Or it might be an animal burrow. By beginning to excavate it with your trowel you start to explore what kind of feature it is. It is not the case that you impose your vision on the feature; instead, you work with the resistance of the soil, the sounds it makes, its textures, to ‘follow the cut’ as Matt Edgeworth (2012, 78) beautifully describes it. In so doing, you act to differentiate6 the feature into one kind of thing instead of another; your trowelling makes a difference. Difference again is a productive force. As a third example, think about how different the Neolithic is from the present day. We could think about that in the same way we discussed the differences between my old car and my new car here – they buried their dead in this way, and we do it that way and so on. But we can also use that difference productively as a force, to create the possibility for thinking differently about the world. By bringing the Neolithic into contact with our ideas in the present, like the feature and the trowel, or air at different temperatures, we can create the capacity for change; we can alter how we think about the world. This is what it means to think about difference productively, or what Deleuze would call difference in itself (Deleuze 2004, chapter 1). This concept of difference has been particularly useful to feminist thinkers employing Deleuze’s work, alongside other thinkers of difference like Luce Irigaray (e.g. 1985). These three areas of Deleuzian thought are important to flag here because they form the book’s conceptual basis. We will return to them and to other ideas

12  Assembling a posthumanist archaeology

FIGURE 1.1 

A traditional comparison of difference between two cars

Source: Photo by author.

within Deleuze’s work when we develop the theoretical position in more detail in ­Chapter 3. This position will be set out to respond to the challenges we set out in Chapter 2. Before we get to that, however, we need to introduce the critical source of difference we will be dealing with: Neolithic Britain.

Assembling past worlds  13

Neolithic Britain This is a book about archaeological theory, but it is also a book about Neolithic Britain. The Neolithic is the first period of farming in Britain, it begins around the start of the fourth millennium cal bc, although at different times in different places (Whittle et al. 2011). It ends around 2400 cal bc with the arrival of copper tools and Beaker pottery. The material culture is made up of flint tools of different kinds (e.g. Figure 1.2), axes made of flint and stone from various specific sources, a variety of pottery, antler and bone tools, and, of course, objects made of wood and other perishable materials, many of which are lost to us today. This was a period with an economy based primarily on herding animals, namely cows, sheep, goats and pigs, and growing crops, including emmer wheat and barley. Reliance on crops varied, both regionally and probably, through time (Stevens & Fuller 2012; Worley et  al. 2019; cf. Bishop 2015), and feasting formed a critical element of social solidarity (Gron et al. 2018; Rowley-Conwy & Owen 2011). Wild resources were also drawn on occasionally and may well be underrepresented in the materials we recover. Life was lived in a world where the climate varied, with warmer and cooler periods, but without any clear-cut relationship between these changes and the kinds of lives people lived (Woodbridge et al. 2014). Some people were more mobile, while others lived in largely sedentary villages or in single timber halls (Barclay & Harris 2017). There may have been increased residential mobility in the years after 3300 cal bc, though no doubt with extensive regional variability (e.g. Worley et al. 2019). The Neolithic, of course, is most famous for its monuments (Figure 1.3). In the Early Neolithic (4100–3350 cal bc) we find chambered tombs, long barrows, portal dolmens and causewayed enclosures. These were not all built at the same time, nor all over the country, with few burial monuments being constructed before 3800 cal bc and causewayed enclosures dominating the landscape of southern Britain between about 3700 and 3300 cal bc (Whittle et al. 2011, 703). Cursus monuments emerged in the later centuries of this period and continued into the Middle Neolithic (3350–2900 cal bc), which also saw a greater use of single burials, sometimes under round barrows. From 2900–2400 cal bc a new world emerged, the Late Neolithic, with new kinds of funerary practice (cremation) becoming dominant and new kinds of monument (henges). Material culture changed through these periods as well, with different kinds of pottery emerging and fading through time. These time divisions are general, and obscure regional and temporal difference as well as many continuities; nonetheless, they form useful temporal markers. Britain too is an arbitrary entity – there was no country called ‘Britain’ or anything like that at this time, but it forms a useful boundary with which to delimit our case-studies. These will come from across Britain, including southern and northern England as well as Wales, highland and lowland Scotland and the Orkney Islands. This of course is only the barest outline of the period, which we will encounter in much greater depth and with much greater specificity in Chapters 4, 5 and 6 (see also Cummings 2017; Ray & Thomas 2018). Much of what we can say

14  Assembling a posthumanist archaeology

FIGURE 1.2 

An Early Neolithic leaf-shaped arrowhead from Lincolnshire

Source: Find ID 183887 Reproduced under Wikimedia commons: The Portable Antiquities Scheme/ The Trustees of the British Museum.

about the Neolithic is in a period of significant change. We are learning more and more about the movement of people into the country, through the study of ancient DNA (aDNA), and across the country, through isotope analysis (e.g. Brace et  al. 2019; Neil et  al. 2016). The former informs us about the transition to farming in particular, which will not be discussed in this book, and the latter about the rhythms and movement of everyday life. Carbon and Nitrogen isotopes also tell us more about diet (Richards & Schulting 2006). At the same time, Bayesian analysis of radiocarbon dates has helped to develop new and more complex narratives both for specific monuments and sites, and for the period as a whole (Whittle et al. 2011; Whittle 2018). Bayesian modelling narrows chronologies by building prior knowledge about stratigraphic sequence into mathematical analyses (Bayliss 2009). This can result in much tighter chronologies for

Assembling past worlds  15

FIGURE 1.3 

Arthur’s Stone, Portal Dolmen, Gower Peninsula, Wales

Source: Photo by author.

a specific site, a region or a whole period. Furthermore, new excavations by both commercial units and research teams continually add to our understanding both in well-studied landscapes like those surrounding Stonehenge or on Mainland Orkney, or in more far-flung places like the Ardnamurchan peninsula in Western Scotland. Clearly, the wealth of data that already exists and is emerging creates the potential for exciting new ways of writing about the Neolithic. Yet it is interesting that there has been only limited engagement between the new kinds of theory I outlined previously and these scientific developments. There are clear exceptions to this, including the objects discussed by Andrew Jones (2012) in his excellent book Prehistoric Materialities and in his study of decorated Neolithic artefacts with Marta Díaz-Guardamino (2019a). Similar theoretical concerns are also present in a somewhat implicit way in the excellent analysis of Orcadian houses and northern stone circles by Colin Richards and others (e.g. Richards 2013a; Richards & Jones 2016; see Chapter 6). Other studies of specific sites or materials, influenced by these approaches, have appeared in articles by Emily Banfield (2016), Rachel Crellin (2017), Vicki Cummings (2012), Mark Gillings and Joshua Pollard (2016)

16  Assembling a posthumanist archaeology

and Lesley McFadyen (2016). I too have offered some initial applications of these theories to the Neolithic (e.g. Harris 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2017a, 2018a). There is clearly more that could be done here, and in particular we have yet to see a widespread analysis applying relational approaches, new materialism or Deleuzian concepts to multiple scales of analysis. There has been something of a change here. In the 1990s and shortly after, just as I was becoming enamoured of the Neolithic, this period was the critical testing ground for the latest archaeological theories. Whether it was insightful new forms of ethnographic analogy (Parker Pearson & Ramilisonina 1998), the application of different forms of phenomenology (Gosden 1994; Tilley 1994; Thomas 1996), detailed historically contextual notions of practice and agency (Barrett 1994; Edmonds 1999) or the emergence of discussions of personhood (Fowler 2001), the Neolithic offered a sweeping landscape through which new ideas could be played out. Yet this seems to no longer be the case. In the place of these new ideas it has become perhaps more popular to presume that Science (the capital letter is not incidental), in whatever form, will provide the answers we need. Indeed, it has even been explicitly argued that Bayesian analysis in particular renders the use of relational approaches inappropriate (Draşovean et  al. 2017, 637), a perspective with which I  profoundly disagree. As we will see in the next chapter, the challenges posed by current thought are unlikely to be resolved by Science alone (contra Kristiansen 2014), however important the contributions made by new techniques become. Science alone cannot build a posthuman archaeology. In no way, however, should this be read as a rejection of the information that isotope analysis, new excavations, aDNA or Bayesian analysis makes available (cf. Crellin & Harris 2020). On the contrary, as Andrew Jones (2001, 2012) has shown us, attending to the material we excavate in a new materialist manner requires us to attend to these scientific elements (Harris 2014b). The current narratives emerging from the application of new scientific techniques have a remarkably familiar flavour to them, full of talk of invasions, population replacement, competition, hierarchy, ancestors and chiefdoms. Surely should new information from scientific approaches be allowing us to tell new stories? I argue that they can, but only when situated within theoretical approaches that ask new kinds of questions and respond to new issues. The approach I develop in this book aims to respond to the challenges archaeology faces. This book makes the claim that by attending to both the latest developments in archaeological thought and the evidence emerging from our excavations and analyses, new stories are there to be told about the Neolithic, which will feature alternative actors, acting in different and sometimes unexpected ways.

Conclusion: the structure of the book This chapter has acted as an introduction to the volume and begun the process of outlining some of the theoretical themes and issues surrounding Neolithic Britain

Assembling past worlds  17

that will be our focus. The volume aims to develop a posthumanist archaeology, rooted in new materialism and the philosophy of Deleuze, to respond to the challenges posed by archaeological theory in the present and to show how we can draw on these responses to construct new accounts of Neolithic Britain. These accounts will not be revolutionary; the target is not to invert our chronology or redefine the purpose of every monument or burial. Instead, the aim is to complicate how we talk and write about this period, to introduce new actors that play new roles, to map the changes in new ways and to identify how new concepts emerge from this. This means that our goal will not be to offer a more detailed account of the Neolithic than is otherwise available, whether regionally or chronologically. Other challenges await us here. This approach will require us to draw on data as much as cutting-edge theory and, in so doing, reveal that the two are always implicit in each other and neither truly works alone. I believe the approach this book takes to be important because it allows us to attend to difference in the past, and with that to make greater space for, and understanding of, difference in the present. The book as a whole is divided into three parts. The first, Assembling a Posthumanist Archaeology, includes this chapter and the next two. Chapter 2 sets out the seven major challenges that need to be met if we are to develop a posthumanist archaeology. Initial hints of how we might respond to these will also begin to emerge. Chapter 3 develops this argument to set out the major theoretical approach of the volume. This chapter will focus on developing a Deleuzian approach to the past that gives us the tools necessary to develop a posthumanist archaeology. The theoretical terms are also summarised in a glossary at the end of the book which acts as a quick guide when reading the case-study chapters which follow. The second part of the book, Assembling Neolithic Britain, consists of three chapters focused on Neolithic Britain at different scales of analysis, each posing a particular question. Chapter  4 asks: what were Neolithic materials capable of becoming? By examining the relationships that involved materials, and material things, the chapter will set out a version of the Neolithic that embraces the vibrancy of matter. Chapter 5 asks: what could a dead Neolithic body do? Here we explore how the treatment of bodies in death, both human and non-human, allows us to rethink what bodies could do, and how we can understand them in their specific historical circumstances. In turn Chapter 6 asks: what kinds of world did Neolithic architecture create? By approaching architecture as ‘machines for world making’ this chapter explores how different kinds of community and new forms of power emerged through the dynamic acts of building of the period. As will become clear, the boundaries between these chapters will be blurred, and themes will cross from one to the other. It is not that each operates only at a single scale of analysis but rather that certain scales become the focus or, in John Protevi’s (2009, xvi) terms, reach a point of particularly intensity, in each chapter. Each of the chapters will conclude by revealing a series of concepts that have emerged from the analysis, each of which has ontological implications. The third and final part of the book, Assembling Past Worlds, focuses on bringing these scales of analysis together. Chapter  7 maps out the historical development

18  Assembling a posthumanist archaeology

of the concepts identified in the previous three chapters and places them within an understanding of time that argues that recent attempts to reduce archaeology to either history or memory alone are misguided. This chapter will provide an ontological map, an ontography, of the Neolithic, for the first time. Finally, Chapter 8 will return to the challenges set out in Chapter 2, evaluate whether they have been met and set out the volume’s conclusions. That is for the end of the book; it is to the critical problems which archaeological thought is posing, to which our posthumanist archaeology must respond, that we turn to now.

Notes 1 We might also ask how the privileging of the human over all other entities has contributed to generating some of the great problems of our times (Carter & Harris 2020). What would happen if one took a post-anthropocentric approach to climate change (Latour 2018)? What would happen if one did not presume that people around the world shared an underlying essence, one that yearned for freedom and democracy? How might we address political, social and environmental problems differently? Our failure to deal with these issues, and indeed to truly tackle prejudice against certain human beings in our society, rests upon our insistence there must be a universal, eternal, vision of the human, one that continues to conveniently reflect the values of Western Civilisation™. These latter issues are beyond the scope of this book but allow us to recognise that the claims to moral superiority by the supporters of humanism are questionable at best (contra Malm 2019). 2 Although see Lucas (2017) for an interrogation of the history of this term both within and without archaeology. 3 Thus it denies the complexity of the work done by individual archaeologists like Grahame Clark (e.g. 1952), whose work in the 1950s laid the groundwork for environmental elements of processual archaeology, or the manner in which Gordon Childe (e.g. 1936) was as much a Marxist as a culture historian. Similarly, Colin Renfrew’s processual archaeology (e.g. 1973) is not the same as David Clarke’s (e.g. 1968) or Lewis Binford’s. Indeed, Binford’s early work (e.g. Binford 1962) is remarkably different from his own later writings (e.g. Binford 1983). See also Bruce Trigger’s (1970) comparison of culture history and New archaeology. 4 Culture history remains prevalent all over the world, and indeed we all use typology – one of its major achievements – to name and categorise sites and material culture. Processual archaeology created numerous new ways of employing scientific methodologies, from radiocarbon dating to animal bone analysis, that continue to be essential. 5 The account of Deleuze and Guattari’s friendship and work together in the joint biography Intersecting Lives (Dosse 2011) is an essential read. Many thanks to Yannis Hamilakis for suggesting it to me. 6 Technically, in Deleuzian terms this is an example of differenciation, rather than differentiation, but more on that in Chapter 3 (Deleuze 2004, 258).

2 SEVEN CHALLENGES FOR A POSTHUMANIST ARCHAEOLOGY

Introduction Archaeological theory is at an interesting point of inflection. As discussed in the last chapter, the seeming détente between processual and postprocessual archaeologies has been added to by new voices suggesting that these broad theoretical schools have more in common with one another than you might suspect (Harris & Cipolla 2017). In place of a narrative of competing paradigms, each one focused on how we understand the past; new claims have been made that we need to rethink how the past works, what the past is and how archaeology can engage with it (e.g. Alberti et al. 2013; Lucas 2012; Olsen et al. 2012). This has been variously described as an ontological turn, a material turn, a relational turn and so on. Its more strident supporters see this as a greater shift in the way we think about archaeology than any previous ‘revolution’. Older approaches focused on how you could access the past; these accounts were epistemological, in other words. Instead, new approaches focus on ontological questions – what the past actually is. My own view is that these new approaches are incredibly important; indeed, they are the principal stimulus for this book, but their revolutionary claims have been somewhat overdone. It seems unlikely to me that terms like typology, stratigraphy, radiocarbon dating and personhood are about to fade from the archaeological lexicon. Nonetheless, these new ideas pose a number of challenges to archaeology; they ask many of us to face up to some deeply held assumptions about what it is to be a person, what ‘life’ actually is, the security of our perspective and so on. To develop a posthumanist archaeology, these challenges will need to be met. In addition to Deleuzian new materialism, the version of posthumanism from which this book takes its inspiration, a number of different schools of thought are emerging. These include symmetrical archaeology, which one can divide into two separate ‘waves’: one drawing on Bruno Latour (e.g. 1999) and celebrating relations

20  Assembling a posthumanist archaeology

(e.g. Webmoor 2007; Webmoor & Witmore 2008; Witmore 2007), one rejecting relations and drawing on the object-oriented ontology (OOO) of Graham Harman (2011; e.g. Olsen 2010; Pétursdóttir & Olsen 2018; Witmore 2014). There are those scholars who see new possibilities in non-Western thought, whether drawing on Indigenous scholars like Vine Deloria Jr (Deloria Jr 1973) directly (e.g. Fowles 2013) or mediated via the writings of anthropologists (e.g. Alberti 2013). There are others who use the complex philosophy of the pragmatist thinker Charles Sanders Peirce to rethink the world of signs and materials (e.g. Cipolla 2013; Crossland 2018). Ian Hodder (2012, 2018) has developed his important concept of entanglement, combining elements of different relational and non-relational approaches to explore the long-term interaction of people and things. These approaches matter not only for the critical challenges they pose to archaeology, which I will set out later, but also because of the manner in which they refocus the discipline’s politics. As noted in the last chapter, the posthumanist approach this volume takes is explicitly influenced by feminism. The reason for opening up the category of the human for analysis is not just to write more accurate narratives about the past or to understand the complexity of past worlds more fully – though this book seeks to do both. It is also because by opening up the category of the human in the past we also fundamentally destabilise it in the present and future as well. The intersectional aspects of this feminism complement attempts to rethink archaeology’s relationship with Indigenous people and non-Western thought. In parts of the world this involves working with Indigenous peoples, and with Indigenous peoples leading their own archaeology (Crellin et al. 2021, chapter 4; Cipolla et al. 2019). It can also involve archaeologists working explicitly with the concepts developed by Indigenous thinkers (e.g. Fowles 2013), mentioned earlier, in the lands where those ideas emerged. Engagements with Indigenous thought are often discussed in terms of ‘decolonisation’. However, as Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2012, 21) remind us, decolonisation is not a metaphor – it ‘specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life’. That does not mean, however, that colonial and imperialist concepts are not an issue for European archaeology. The tropes of colonialism are as firmly embedded here as they are elsewhere. The discipline needs to unpick the ideas that have emerged through the colonial discourses of archaeology and that are employed worldwide. The aim should be to undercut and take apart treasured assumptions – of the special status of humanity, of the exclusively organic nature of life and so on – in order to make space for different ways of thinking. One way forward would be to import Indigenous concepts into European contexts, but this is not one, I suggest, without danger; it risks reducing specific, situated, ideas to generalised concepts, separated from the context of their emergence. Furthermore, employing Indigenous concepts in a European setting risks another act of colonialism (cf. Todd 2016), reaching out and taking yet more resources from one world to ­furnish another (Crellin et al. 2021, chapter 5). Perhaps the most secure way forward, for a European scholar working in Europe on European material, is to develop an approach that offers a critique of colonial tropes without risking the

Seven challenges  21

appropriation of other people’s context-specific concepts. So I suggest that posthumanism, with its emphasis on the open notion of the human and the ways in which new materialism and Deleuzian philosophy seek to challenge the dominant forms of Enlightenment thought, offers us a parallel toolkit1 (Tallbear 2015, 233–4, 2017), one with less risk of recolonising other people’s traditions of thought (cf. Cipolla 2019; Crellin et al. 2021). That said, it is only one approach amongst many which could be taken (cf. Sundberg 2014; Tuck 2010). I suggest that to develop a posthumanist archaeology we need to meet the challenges laid down by current theoretical debate. Here I  have identified seven of them. No doubt there are many others; this list is not intended to be exhaustive. What it represents are seven key areas to which archaeologists need to respond in order to develop a successful posthumanist approach, drawing both on the new ontological approaches and on some of their critics. These are the challenges that this book addresses.

Seven challenges for a posthumanist archaeology (1) To be post-anthropocentric The first of our challenges develops a critical area of posthumanism: the need for archaeology to be post-anthropocentric.2 In the last chapter we saw how anthropocentrism raises a series of political concerns in terms of the type of human – the implicitly gendered anthropos – located at the heart of humanism. Being anthropocentric also raises a series of other issues, however, that directly impede our study of the past. First, it places dualisms at the heart of how the world is conceptualised. By taking human beings to be a special class of existence, unique and separate from everything else, anthropocentric thought creates a single, dominant divide: people on one side, everything else on another. The question thus becomes how to bridge this divide? How do human beings access the world? How does the world affect human beings? As mentioned in Chapter 1, Quentin Meillassoux (2008) calls the concern with bridging this apparent separation ‘correlationism’. This central conceit can be traced back through Kantian philosophy at least as far as the radical scepticism of the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes (2008; Thomas 2004). Descartes wanted to know how we could be certain of the world ‘out there’ and argued that the only thing he could be sure of was that he was thinking ‘in here’, in his mind. Thus, his famous philosophical maxim: I think therefore I am. As we saw in the last chapter, once this central person/world dualism was in place, all sorts of other divides could be built on top of it: culture versus nature, mind versus body, genes versus environment, people versus animals, people versus things, men versus women. Numerous archaeological debates have been structured around these dualisms, and their critique has equally been a long-lasting aspect of archaeological theory since the 1980s. Yet they remain stubbornly intransigent, structuring our internal theoretical debates and how archaeological findings are presented to the

22  Assembling a posthumanist archaeology

world (Crellin & Harris 2020). As soon as we place human beings at the centre of our narratives, we find they expand to take up, as Harman (2016b, 31) would put it, 50% of the ontological space. To write narratives about the past that are not driven solely by these assumptions, a different starting point is needed.3 There are two further issues, as we saw briefly in the last chapter, that emerge from anthropocentric thought and the reliance on dualisms that it inevitably imposes. The first is that  – ironically – despite its emphasis on human beings, humanism actually limits our understanding of the people of the past themselves. The anthropocentric conceit brings with it several assumptions that close off the differences available to past people. To begin with, anthropocentric thought relies on the idea that there is something universal about human beings. This might be a Christian concept of the soul or a notion of a particular kind of mind endowed with rational thought, the capacity for speculation and language and so on. Whichever is selected, the anthropocentric approach takes this element of the human and places it outside of history; it makes it essential to the human. Alongside this, as scholars in archaeology looking at both personhood and phenomenology have argued, comes a particular notion of the human being as an atomised individual. Here the human being comes to be bounded by the skin, emerging as a pre-existing whole in the world. Whilst many, indeed most, approaches would happily recognise this underlying similarity is later covered by cultural difference – different languages, beliefs, the use of different things and so on  – they remain united by a more fundamental and essential identity. The emergence of ‘human beings’ united by this shared essence has created all sorts of problems for archaeology. It demands a singular before and after moment at some point in the distant past, where this essence comes into being. In Europe older approaches to human evolution often positioned this at the start of the Upper Palaeolithic, where ‘modern’ humans replaced their Neanderthal predecessors, in part due to the former’s alleged unique capacity for abstract thought (indicated by the art they left behind) (e.g. Mellars 2004). Evidence that Neanderthals were every bit as capable of this thus raises problems for this form of thinking (e.g. Hoffmann et  al. 2018), but this tends to be dealt with by incorporating Neanderthals under the broader human banner, rather than wondering whether it is the demand for a unique form of human ontological status that might be the bigger issue. This of course merely defers the issue and places the moment of emergence further back in time. Neanderthals, or Homo habilis, or Australopithecus afarensis, or whoever else, is always positioned as less-than the humans that came afterwards. Drawing on anthropological and philosophical studies, however, a range of archaeologists have challenged these ideas (e.g. Brück 2006; Chapman 2000; Fowler 2004, 2016; Gillespie 2001; Whittle 2003). The notion of the bounded individual with an indivisible essence is far from universal (Fowler 2004); instead, all manner of other kinds of personhood can be found around the world. Anthropologists like Marilyn Strathern (e.g. 1988) have shown how in Melanesia people consider themselves to be partible – that is, made of multiple elements that can be

Seven challenges  23

extracted and exchanged. In India, Cecilia Busby (1997) has looked at how people are permeable – that is, subject to the flow of substances into and out of their body, and a similar conception of the world can be found in medieval Europe (Fowler 2008; Robb & Harris 2013). In Amazonia, many groups conceptualise the world as highly animated, with animals and people sharing a similar soul, one that can be covered by a number of different bodies, allowing powerful humans and animals to change into one another (Viveiros de Castro 1998). Now this might, on one level, be taken as simply an example of interesting local belief – after all people in Melanesia aren’t really partible, are they? People in Amazonia can’t really turn into jaguars, can they? Yet this need not be the case. Differences between humans are undoubtedly real. Phenomenological and cognitive approaches have shown how human beings only come to understand their world through the material things and landscapes they encounter (Malafouris 2013). This is not just about what people believe. The motor functions of the hand change depending on the tools in use; the internal structures of the brain alter depending on the skills you pick up – skills that involve material objects. The history of European engagement with cattle is written into the genes of people from that continent through their ability to digest milk products. Here the real challenge of the argument reveals itself. Normally, at its very base, Western ‘common sense’ holds that whatever cultural differences might exist, human beings share a biology, a body, across space and time. Yet such a way of thinking – common to both evolutionary archaeologists and those that embrace the social construction of identity – rests on the nature/culture divide. What this means is that we require a way of engaging with the biological material of the body, without denying its importance, in a way that does not place even this aspect of ourselves outside of history (Robb & Harris 2013). The human body – from its most biological to its most social – is a product of specific historical processes. Some of these are large scale and long term; others are intimate, local and immediate4 (cf. Lock & Kaufert 2001). Does this mean that shaman in Amazonia can turn into jaguars? Not in the sense implied by essentialist ideas of species that have developed through Western Science. But if we consider a jaguar to be not just a biological organism but a set of what are termed, as in Chapter 3, ‘affects’ – ways of moving, behaving and perceiving the world – then yes perhaps they can; we will return to this issue later. What’s more, living in a world where that is possible has real effects on the people who dwell there. The question – the challenge – here for archaeology is to construct a past that no longer relies on a specific vision of a certain kind of humanity. Being post-anthropocentric is thus not about denying the importance of human beings but rather about restoring them to their rightful place as one element amongst others, and one that has its own historical specificity. This is central to developing the posthumanist approach this book calls for. The narratives archaeology tells will always involve human beings; this defines our discipline as different to geology or palaeontology (Lucas 2012, 260). The challenge for archaeology is to tell these narratives without being anthropocentric, not because we should be

24  Assembling a posthumanist archaeology

ignoring human beings, but rather because they cannot be granted their full historicised nature if one insists on an essential and universalising approach. So, the irony of humanism and anthropocentric thought is that whilst it proclaims attentiveness to human beings, it actually demands a universalising historical specificity that denies alternative forms of humanity their full reality, their full ontological weight. This is coupled, as already hinted at previously, with a denial of the role for the rest of the world – the countless non-humans that also took part in history. These range from the billions of bacteria within every human body – we are always and already so much more than just human (Morton 2017) – to the animals and plants that were consumed by people (and in the former case, on occasions consumed people in turn). It also includes the landscapes, the weather, the air, the rivers and the sea, which have their own histories that continue sometimes with great disregard for the plans of human beings. As Latour (1993, 1999) has taught us, our immediate history is not just that of Homo sapiens but also that of air pumps and transport systems, of bacteria and soil. When we look back to the Neolithic with this in mind, we can see how this period was one that involved humans, animals (of many kinds), plants (of many kinds), pots, axes, bows, arrows, antler, seas, rivers, fish, mountains, mines, monuments and more. This leads us to the second challenge: to be post-anthropocentric the historical role of the non-human must be embraced, from the agency of cattle to the vibrancy of matter, and with it a new concept of life itself.

(2) To embrace the vibrancy of matter One of the key challenges for archaeological thought trying to achieve a posthumanist approach is to truly embrace the active role of non-humans in the ­production of the past. On the one hand this is a critical response to anthropocentricism as noted previously. It immediately distributes and delegates the authorship of the past across a much wider range of entities. This means that history, agency and change emerge out of the developing relationships of a host of actors, rather than simply being the case that human beings are either the writers or the victims of historical process (Crellin 2020). The place to begin here is with the non-humans often lumped together as animals and plants. Critical work in anthropology (e.g. Kohn 2013), in geography (e.g. Lorimer 2006) and within zooarchaeology and archaeobotany has shown how plants and animals played an active and critical role in the production of the past. Marijke van der Veen (2014) has traced how plants exert influences over human beings, whilst Nick Overton and Yannis Hamilakis (2013) have set out how archaeologists can better understand animals in the past by avoiding anthropocentrism. More recently, Emily Banfield (2018) has offered a compelling account of what a post-anthropocentric approach to human/animal relations in Neolithic Britain might look like. This work draws upon thinking in critical animal studies, biology and philosophy by authors like Vinciane Despret (2016) and Donna Haraway (2008). Haraway (2008, 17), in particular, has developed the notion of

Seven challenges  25

‘becoming-with’, mapping how humans and their companion species shape each other’s lives. Her work has explored many examples, including the complex interactions of humans and dogs at agility trials, how they learn from each other, and how landscapes, sheep and herding dogs connect and are tied together in ‘webs of history’ (Haraway 2008, 100). In each case this goes further than singular relationships between animals and humans. Holding it to this would simply emphasise the central divide between humans and the world. Instead, as Haraway shows us, there is a need to think about how plants and animals interact, how different animals engage with one another, and how the landscapes and broader ecologies change as a result. This form of critical ecology opens up human beings as one element of complex sets of relationships and histories that brought, and bring, worlds into being (cf. Tsing 2015). There is a sliding scale in Enlightenment thought, down which it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine the subject in question playing an active role in the world (Figure 2.1) (cf. Tallbear 2019, 25). At the top are humans – no problem there of course. Next we find animals; here agency is easily accorded. The notion of becoming-with an animal seems easy to grasp. Anyone who interacts with even the most placid of domestic species can see the active roles they play in their own lives, and in ours. Their demands for feeding and attention come to structure our days and routines. Wild animals in the present disrupt human plans, from badgers that destroy archaeological sites to birds that force you to clean your car. It is not a great leap of imagination to accord them similar roles in the past. With plants it

FIGURE 2.1 

Ontological elevation

Source: After Crellin 2020, figure 7.1. Reproduced with permission of Rachel Crellin.

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becomes slightly harder to imagine their active role. Yet studies across a range of subjects have radically challenged this. Plants move, they influence humans and animals through their colours and tastes, they support soils and help retain water, and they create environments where certain animals flourish and others don’t. Those that are domesticated demand certain forms of care and not others. Reading the work of botanists, ecologists or geographers (e.g. Head et  al. 2012) shows that plants actively influence the world around them (Hall 2011; Head et  al. 2012; Ingold 2000). From trees (Rival 1998) to wheat (Head et  al. 2012), a range of plants are now being re-evaluated in connection to their active role in producing the world we live in. As Head et al. (2012, 29) point out, the world of plants is much older than the world of human beings, so the very evolution of our species was and is shaped by plants. In turn, the very capacity for plants to exist on land depends on the work done by fungi to convert rocks into soil and open up the potential for new evolutionary relationships and forms of life to come into being (Tsing 2015, 138). At the lowest point of this scale, however, separated from plants and animals by a seeming bottomless fissure, lies the world of the inorganic, of things and materials. Surely these things, by their very definition inanimate – non-moving – cannot play such an active role in the past. Many archaeologists continue to demand a clear separation between these two elements of the world (e.g. Barrett 2014): one final unbridgeable dualism. Yet this need not be the case. Whilst of course there are differences between organic and inorganic, we can question whether or not this means we need to deny action, agency, activity and even life to the latter. The work of thinkers like Latour (Latour 1987, 1993) has done much to examine how ‘inanimate’ non-humans contribute to the societies and lives of human beings. Latour (1999) famously argues that we need to consider the world in terms of networks of humans and non-humans, where agency and the capacity to affect the world emerge through relationships. Your ability to excavate an archaeological feature only emerges through the relationship between you, the tool you have selected and the feature itself (Edgeworth 2012; Yarrow 2003). Which tool you select will depend not only on your preferences but on how hard the ground is, how large the feature is, how much time you have to excavate it, the tradition you come from and so on. A whole network is at play here in producing the process of excavation, including non-humans in the form of soil and tools of various kinds. At a greater scale Latour (1987, 1993) has examined the role of non-humans in the production of scientific knowledge, and even in the emergence of modernity itself. Some archaeologists have begun to explore these ideas quite closely, under the banner of symmetrical archaeology in particular, looking at how archaeology emerges through the mixtures of humans and non-humans in the past and present (e.g. Olsen et al. 2012). Relationships are key here, and the world Latour describes emerges through these connections (cf. Fowler & Harris 2015). Approaches inspired by new materialism go further, however. New materialism is driven by the notion that rather than static and timeless, materials are in flux and in flow (Deleuze & Guattari 2004). Thus, it is not just ‘things’ – objects, tools,

Seven challenges  27

architecture and so on  – that contribute to history but the very materials from which they are constructed. They are, in the term used by the leading new materialist Jane Bennett (2010), ‘vibrant’. This idea captures the fundamental flows of energy that form the material world. At the large scale we can think of forces like gravity, the pull and push of the earth and moon, but also at a smaller scale the way all molecules vibrate and move. Add to this the flow of weather and the wind, the rush of rivers, the processes of adhesion and erosion and so on, and movement – life – comes back into the world, without the addition of any particular organic element. Once you start thinking about the inorganic in these terms, once you put the world in motion,5 very different kinds of understanding begin to emerge. Just as with animals previously, though, this is not simply about the relationship between people and materials. Instead, it is about mapping the relationships between multiple kinds of materials and the worlds in which they emerged. Looking back to the Neolithic we might ask: how do pots interact not just with humans but with cows whose milk they hold? How does antler link deer, people and the earth together as it is used as a digging tool? How does the vibrancy of landscape features, like the flow of rivers, or the height of mountains, tie in with changing patterns of forest cover, climatic shifts and the grazing practices of cattle? These questions, it should be clear, require us not just to think philosophically, and to employ the concepts developed in the next chapter, but to draw on archaeological science as well. It is archaeological science that allows us to attend to the vibrancy of things, to their contribution to the past, to the links and relationships they have with each other, with animals and the world around them (Jones 2001; Harris 2014b). The challenge here is for archaeologists to begin to recognise how materials themselves play their role in the world’s emergence. Materials are alive, but not in the same way as human beings. This is not about developing a ‘pan-psychism’ where everything can think or treating everything in an anthropomorphic manner. Rather, it is a challenge to embrace what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call ‘a life proper to matter’ (2004, 454), or what Tim Ingold (2012) calls ‘an ecology of materials’. This raises other challenges though. If we are to attend to these lives, then just like human beings, we need to focus on their historical specificity. Whilst oil, for example, has been used by humans in a variety of ways over more than a thousand years, it gained considerable new capacities in the 19th and 20th centuries, which have resulted in it playing a critical role in global geopolitics. Oil today is not the same as oil at 1000 AD. Archaeologists need to attend to this. How does a particular material work in a specific time and place? To understand that we have to consider in more detail the world of relations, process and history, and this leads us to our third challenge.

(3) To focus on relations, process and history Our discussions of both the need to be post-anthropocentric and the need to give non-humans their due makes clear that archaeology needs to develop a relational

28  Assembling a posthumanist archaeology

approach to the past (Crellin et  al. 2021, chapter  2). By relational I  mean an approach that does not presume that the primary elements of the universe are individualised elements operating at various scales (from atoms, to molecules, to people, to planets) but rather starts from the notion that relationships are the critical determining factors of the universe (Bains 2006). In this context things are not absolute but contextually emergent – that is to say, relative to the circumstances in which they find themselves. This is not a new challenge, and archaeology has been experimenting with different forms of relational approach since at least the mid-1990s (Harris & Cipolla 2017). It was in this period that phenomenological approaches began to emphasise the importance of appreciating how people and things were never cut off from the world, as mentioned in Chapter 1. By drawing on the work of philosophers like Martin Heidegger (1962), archaeologists such as Julian Thomas (1996) clearly articulated how people and things are always already caught up in relations, or in their Being-in-the-world. This approach, which radically questioned archaeologists’ reliance on dualisms, has opened up a host of relational approaches to a great range of archaeological questions. In particular, it clearly demonstrated that to embrace the historical specificity of different kinds of humanity, and the different worlds in which we dwell, the past must be approached from a relational perspective. Taking a relational approach to the past is the first important step (Crellin et al. 2021, Chapter 2). Next, however, we need to find ways of setting these relations in motion if we want to map how they change and develop through time. A critical challenge for archaeology is to conceptualise this flow of relational emergence, and how this works in historically specific ways. Such an approach will take us beyond the world of static networks, as described by Latour (e.g. 1999), and into a more complex web of relations in motion and at rest, which we will discuss in the next chapter (Harris 2014a). This move begins to focus our attention on to the need to embrace process as a critical issue for archaeology, something recently emphasised by Chris Gosden and Lambros Malafouris (2015). Drawing on process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1979), Henri Bergson (1991) and Deleuze (1988), they argue that archaeology needs to place process at the heart of how it conceptualises the world (Gosden & Malafouris 2015, 702). Although process might seem old hat (after all processual archaeology is more than 50 years old), this emphasis on how the world is continually brought into existence is a central challenge for archaeology. This links to an emphasis on becoming over being, which is critical to the Deleuzian approach I will discuss in detail in Chapter 3 and to the three syntheses of time I will discuss in Chapter 7. An emphasis on process helps us to escape prioritising somethings over others (mind over matter, culture over nature) (Gosden & Malafouris 2015, 703). It also, critically, means that we cannot imagine matter, materials and things as ever being out of time. This requires us to locate non-humans in the specific processes they emerged through, in particular times and places. Taking the role of materials in history seriously is a critical move that this book will urge archaeology to make.

Seven challenges  29

However, equally as important is the recognition that materials themselves are intensely historical (Harris 2020, 253), emergent in specific ways with particular properties (Conneller 2011). Just as outside of humanism, archaeologists can recognise that people are not the same in all times and places; so the same is true with materials. A  life proper to matter (see previous discussion) requires us to place materials in specific relational contexts that bring out certain properties. In a famous article Tim Ingold (2007) asks his readers to get themselves a stone, dip it in water and then refer back to it as they read his paper. Through this process, Ingold, influenced by Deleuze and Guattari (2004), shows how the stone’s qualities, its feel, its look and so on, change. Stones, in this analysis, are animate, ‘hives of activity’ (Ingold 2007, 12), and their particular properties emerge depending on the specific historical relations in which they are located. At a larger scale, a range of archaeologists have explored how ancient cities can be understood from a new materialist perspective (see papers in Alt & Pauketat 2020). At the heart of many of these cities can be found two materials: water and stone. No surprise here, after all humans need water to survive, so water will no doubt have to be present, and stone is a common building material. What the papers show, however, is how different water and stone are in each urban context. In some places, such as at the city of Tiwanaku in Bolivia, which flourished in the first few centuries AD, stone is something that links specific buildings with certain mountains or comes alive in the form of statues (Janusek 2020). At others, like the southern Indian site of Maski, it formed a hill that attracted human beings over millennia (Bauer 2020). In one set of relations, such as on the Anatolian plateau in the Hittite period, the manner in which water seeped through the ground allowed it to be pooled in specific ways that facilitated it playing a very different role in the cities of that period (Harmanşah 2020). In another, around the hilltop city of Monte Albán in the Oaxaca valley of Mexico, founded around 500 cal bc, water in the form of clouds surrounded the city, creating different relations with rain gods (Joyce 2020). At Liangzhu in China (3000–3600 cal bc), a city was built around the control of water, just a few kilometres from the world’s largest tidal bore, up to 9 m high, which tore up the Qiantang River every full and new moon (Pauketat 2020). What water and stone could do here, in conjunction with people and with the change in the moon, was different to elsewhere. In each of these examples – and the others in that volume – water and stone draw on specific sets of historical relations to operate in particular kinds of ways both in conjunction and apart from human beings (Harris 2020). An emphasis on relations, process and history will be at the heart of this book. This approach does, however, raise some questions and provokes other challenges to which we need to attend. Indeed, some philosophers (Harman 2016a) and the archaeologists who draw on them (e.g. Olsen 2012), have become quite critical of relational approaches. They argue that relational approaches dissolve the things themselves, the pots, places, houses and people of the past into a set of relationships, leaving nothing that explains the objects themselves. If we really embraced this point of view, others have suggested, might we risk losing sight of what things have in common? If a house, or a person for that matter, is solely emergent from a

30  Assembling a posthumanist archaeology

particular set of historical relationships then how can we ever compare them over time and space? Where would this leave archaeology? The need to address these issues leads us to our next challenge.

(4) To hold on to things themselves In recent years archaeologists have begun to be critical of approaches focusing on relations. In his 2010 book, for example, In Defense of Things, Bjørnar Olsen (2010, 156) asks if we have reached the limits of where relational thinking can take us. Indeed, his subsequent publications seem to suggest that this is the case (e.g. Olsen 2012; Olsen & Witmore 2015). The issue, critics of relations suggest, is that an emphasis on how things connect, and are forged through connections, denies the reality of things themselves. Perhaps the foremost approach that is critical of relations, and certainly the one who has had the most influence on Olsen and others, is Harman’s OOO. Harman (e.g. Harman 2011, 2016a, 2018) is very critical of approaches that seek to explain how the world works through relations. Such approaches either undermine individual objects, explaining them as the outcome of smaller-scale relations, or overmine them, explaining them through the relations they have with other objects (Harman 2011, 7–13). Take a house, Harman (2011, 13) says. This can never be reduced to the relations it has at any one moment. It is more than just bricks, mortar and roof tiles. It is also more than just the relationships it has with the people who live there, and indeed the relations it has with the postal worker who delivers post, the ants that crawl behind its skirting board and the mould growing beneath the fridge. Objects (by which Harman means almost anything) are always more than their relations. Fundamentally, Harman suggests, this means we can never know an object in its entirety because elements of it will always withdraw. This withdrawn quality gives all objects an essence – although a very different kind of essence from ones we were critical of previously. This is not an essence we can know, which defines a person or thing as what it is, but the remainder of what an object is that we can never know. Importantly, this withdrawal is something that happens not just between people and objects but rather between all objects and renders everything in the world ‘alien’ to each other, to use the term favoured by another OOO philosopher, Ian Bogost (2012). This approach has appealed to archaeologists who are interested in finding room to talk about objects in non-anthropocentric ways. In particular, these ideas have become influential on a number of symmetrical archaeologists. Witmore (2014, 204), for example, urges us to remember the principle that ‘things are things’, whilst Olsen (2012, 22) suggests the most important thing about a boat is not its relationship to people, or what it lets people do, but the fact that it is a boat.6 These approaches are wrestling with an important challenge for archaeology. Relational approaches blur the boundaries commonly drawn around objects and people. When discussing a context, a find or a feature, archaeologists implicitly suggest it can be cut off from the world – if only analytically – in order for us to ­discuss it. In our analyses archaeologists routinely discuss things as objects, as though

Seven challenges  31

they were separated from each other. In Latour’s (1999) terms, they become black boxed, that is they are presented as if they were cut off from the world. Not only this, it is clear that people in the Neolithic, for example, did not approach the world solely as a web of undifferentiated relations but were able to construct and identify boundaries, and went to great efforts to divide up sites and monuments in particular ways and at times to treat one class of things differently from others. The fact that I can discuss a specific Neolithic pot with a colleague tells us something about it, that it can have effects in both the past and the present that make it an entity with greater powers than simply the substances from which it emerged. Does this mean, therefore, that we should embrace Harman’s notion of a withdrawn essence to help explain the object nature of the universe? I suggest not and that we can provide an account of relations that allows for emergence, historical continuity and comparison through the notion of the assemblage, and its adjacent concepts, which we will discuss in detail in the next chapter (see also Crellin et al. 2021, chapter 2). The reason that the notion of essence still fails, when it comes to developing a posthuman approach to archaeology, is that it prioritises a form of ahistorical interiority. When we examine the history of an object, say a house as in the Harman example here, when does its ‘essence’ emerge? When the architect completes the first round of plans? When the foundations are laid? When the walls are built? When someone moves in? As any homeowner can tell you, a house is never finished (would that it were so simple), and the work of maintaining it, repairing it, rebuilding it always continues. When Harman (2016a) has turned his attention to historical accounts, for example in his OOO history of the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, it is notable that major moments in the company’s history are described in terms of symbioses, or when new relations form within the object. In other words, when Harman wants to consider how history develops, he too is forced back to a discussion of relations.7 In archaeology it is notable that the work of OOO-inspired archaeologists has rarely discussed the historical emergence of the objects they describe. Þóra Pétursdóttir and Olsen (2018), for example, provide a rich and compelling description of the plastic floating in an Arctic inlet, but they offer little when it comes to explaining how it got there or the diverse histories of modern capitalism to which this might connect. An approach which is rooted in the essence of objects does not give us the tools to explain historical emergence and fails the third challenge we identified earlier.8 The approach we will develop in the next chapter will thus need to be able to talk about both things themselves and their emergence, without doing away with relations. It will need, in other words, to find a way of tacking between discussing an object, a person or a piece of architecture as a thing-in-itself and analysing the relations from which it emerges and in which it engages (Fowler & Harris 2015). We need to be able to discuss a pot, a pit or a monument by itself whilst recognising simultaneously that ‘a feature cannot be isolated’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1994, 53). In doing so, we will need to capture these elements in all their complexity; this means thinking about how these things forge relations in all kinds of ways,

32  Assembling a posthumanist archaeology

including connections that we might gloss as being about meaning or identity. We will therefore need to have a means of talking about representation, but without reducing the past to that. This brings us to our next challenge.

(5) To be more-than-representational One of the criticisms of post-anthropocentric approaches, especially within archaeology, is that they fail to deal with the complexities of past human lives. The suggestion is that these accounts have little room to talk about gender, for example, or power, or politics (e.g. Van Dyke 2015). These are not idle lacuna. The work done by archaeologists, especially feminist archaeologists, has shown us that there are at least three very serious issues here. First, if we do not confront these issues, we will tell incomplete and inaccurate stories about the past. Second, feminist archaeology has shown clearly how not talking about gender, for example, becomes a way of implying that all the people in the past were men and indeed more broadly that modern structures of gender are ahistorical and universal (Gero & Conkey 1991). This leads us to the third serious issue, which is that if such structures are timeless universals, they are much harder to challenge and undermine in the present. Gender is only one dimension of this (Battle-Baptiste 2011). We can think about sexuality, ethnicity, age, personhood and any number of critical ‘axes of identity’ that postprocessual archaeology brought to the fore that have been less prominent in the recent writings around the ontological turn. Alongside this, other critical issues have also faded from view. It was clear that one of the dominant concerns of postprocessual archaeology was the topic of meaning. Material culture, famously, was meaningfully constituted (Hodder 1982, 13). In other words, the way that material culture could best be approached by archaeologists was with meaning in the foreground. The archaeology of the 1980s in particular was strongly influenced in this regard by both structuralist and poststructuralist thinking. In the former case (and simplifying greatly) archaeologists argued that material culture was like a language that followed underlying rules of grammar (e.g. Hodder 1990; for an earlier application see Deetz 1967); in the latter case that material culture was like a text that could be read (e.g. Bapty & Yates 1990a). In both cases meaning, and the human interpretation of meaning, was centre stage. The emphasis on meaning, rather more than on identity, has been a point of attack for archaeologists motivated by criticisms of anthropocentricism. The argument is that the emphasis on meaning beloved of postprocessual archaeology reduces material things, animals, plants and landscapes to mere signifiers, always standing for something else – and that something else is whatever people happened to think of them (Olsen 2010). This kind of approach is known as ‘representational’; it is a tradition of thought of long antiquity going back to Platonic ideas of the mind in the cave and captured most succinctly once again by Descartes (Harris 2018a). In other words, not only is an emphasis on meaning and representation anthropocentric, it is also dualist, two sins which ontologically orientated

Seven challenges  33

thinkers decry. However, in the desperation to escape from the anthropocentric bathwater, it is clear that a rather important baby may have been thrown out. It is one thing to suggest that human accounts and understandings of the world should not be the sole focus of our attempts to write about the past. It is quite reasonable to argue that cattle, for example, are not just symbols of wealth, or ways for humans to trace identity, but also actors with their own material reality, one that exceeds what human beings think of them. It is quite something else, however, to suggest that what human beings thought about cattle is not relevant, important or interesting, or that we do not need to consider this if we want to talk about Neolithic politics (Bauer & Kosiba 2016, 133). Similarly, where it is quite reasonable to argue that gender or human experience should not be our sole focus, it is quite another to argue that these are not critically important to understand the past worlds in which human beings – and plants, animals and other materials – lived. Despite a handful of counter examples (e.g. Crellin et al. 2021, chapter 8; Harris 2016a; Normark 2014), it is certainly the case that the ontological turn has seen limited attempts to engage with difference, power and politics. Occasionally, authors have even advocated that we can abandon looking for things like personhood through these new approaches (e.g. Lucas 2012, 193). There does seem to be some evidence to show that these new approaches have sought to demonstrate their escape from anthropocentrism through rejecting these topics. This has led critics to argue that we must retain an anthropocentric approach if we have any hope of making political headway in the present (e.g. Van Dyke 2015, 18–20). As the discussion of our first challenge should make clear, I do not agree with this. On the contrary, given the centrality of feminism, for example, to new materialism and posthumanism (e.g. Braidotti 2013; Colebrook 2014; Grosz 1994), it seems odd to suggest such an approach has no connection with political aims in the present, or denies the importance of power and politics (on power see Crellin et al. 2021, chapter 8). Nonetheless, it is clear that the challenge for new materialism, and other post-anthropocentric approaches, is to develop a way of talking about meaning, human experience and so on that addresses the other challenges we have outlined here. How can we talk about people in a post-anthropocentric way? How can we talk about meaning in a way that allows us to incorporate the vibrancy of matter? One way of doing so, as we saw in Chapter 1, is to become posthumanist in our approaches. We will return to this task more explicitly in the next chapter, but here it is worth emphasising two parts of what will become our answer to this. The first is that we need to develop an approach that is not simply non-representational. Instead, we need to be more-than-representational (Anderson & Harrison 2010; Harris 2018a). That means we will need to develop approaches to representation and meaning that do not reduce the world to these things, but nor do they deny their importance, as those archaeologists influenced by Peirce have powerfully argued (e.g. Crossland & Bauer 2017). Second, we need to find ways of writing a postanthropocentric account of how difference produces alternative forms of humanity.

34  Assembling a posthumanist archaeology

Traditionally, understandings of gender, sexuality and so on are rooted in a logic of identity, which views difference in negative terms: these two people are alike because they share certain characteristics (particular body parts or sexual preferences) and other people are different to them because they lack these things (Braidotti 2011). Anthropocentricism itself is rooted in this logic of identity. It holds that what people share is a common set of attributes. In contrast, in the next chapter we will emphasise how processes of differentiation lie at the heart of how the world comes into being, and how approaches to human difference can emerge from this kind of perspective. These processes of differentiation allow us to begin to see the historical processes at play in the generation of different worlds (Deleuze 2004). Rather than asking about how people differed from one another, or from a vision of the standard human, which leads us back to the logic of identity, we will ask instead what was it that different people, different bodies, could do. This emphasis on difference guards against replacing one universal model of humanity (as bounded rational individuals) with another (an eternally relational and dividual being) by forcing us to once more engage with the specific contexts of historical emergence. This approach also raises new questions, however, which require us to explore what human beings share as rooted in historical process, rather than ahistorical essence. To explore this, we need to examine these historical processes at a variety of scales. This leads us to our sixth challenge.

(6) To work at multiple scales Archaeology has wrestled with the question of scale for some considerable time (Crellin 2020, chapter  4; Harris 2017a). What scale should archaeologists write about? Deep time has often been claimed as our subject’s unique perspective. Simultaneously, archaeologists have also sought to get at the detail of the daily lives, practices, beliefs and emotions of those who came before (e.g. Whittle 2003). In all manner of other ways archaeologists have argued over appropriate scales of analysis: should you lump different subclasses of material culture together or not? Should we divide the Neolithic into two or three sub-periods? Is gender a subject that can be discussed at a continental scale or only at the local level? For postprocessual archaeologists in particular, the past was about more than the great sweeping changes that came about through the evolution of our species, the colonisation of the globe or the invention of agriculture. It was about people themselves and their motivations and historical specificity. This move has been enhanced by our increasing ability to construct more specific chronologies via the Bayesian modelling of radiocarbon dates. With regard to Neolithic Britain, the pioneering work of Alasdair Whittle, Alex Bayliss, Frances Healy and others has developed a level of chronological specificity that is improving all the time – and one unimaginably more sophisticated than that which existed 15 years ago (e.g. Bayliss et al. 2020; Whittle et al. 2011; Whittle 2018). As noted briefly in the last chapter, Bayesian statistics work to counter the scatter of radiocarbon dates by modelling with information from other sources – so-called priors (Bayliss 2009).

Seven challenges  35

If we know from clear and secure stratigraphic information, for example, that one date must be earlier than another; this can be incorporated into our models. The results have been tremendous. Sites that were previously thought to be in use for centuries have been shown to span just a generation (e.g. Wysocki et al. 2007). We can trace the emergence of particular monument classes, and their disappearance, far more accurately. Yet the suggestion by some archaeologists, including Whittle (2018, 18), is that we should push this further still. Not only can we write at specific scales of analysis, these are the most suitable scales at which we should work. This argument proposes that we should primarily endeavour to write at the scale of human lives and generations, and that the larger scale will emerge from this level primarily (Whittle 2018, chapter  2). In contrast to this, others have called for a more multiscalar archaeology (Robb & Pauketat 2013). Timothy Pauketat (2012, 2013) has used the Native American concept of the bundle to articulate how different scales of analysis, from individual deposits to cosmological relations, can be understood. John Robb (2009, 2013) has argued that we need to work between smallscale t­ransformations and larger institutions across European deep time. Robb and I together have written a history of the body that tacks between continental wide narratives and particular moments of time (Robb & Harris 2013) from the Upper Palaeolithic to the present day. The argument this book makes is that a multiplicity of scales is critical to understanding the archaeological past (Harris 2017a). This does not mean ignoring the small scale – far from it. One level of essential analysis in the chapters that follows will draw on both the data from individual sites and the precise moments when things took place. These tell us about specific events in the past and their place in an order and sequence that we cannot ignore. If we want to think through the diversity of particular practices, the roles of historically active materials and the complexity of relations in the Neolithic, we have to place them in historically situated contexts. Yet at the same time we need to go beyond this. There are events that operate at greater than human scales, whether this is alterations to the climate, genetic shifts in bodies, or how monuments endure for millennia. Narrowing down the date of a construction of a long barrow, to say 3600 cal bc, is an excellent and essential archaeological endeavour. However, that long barrow also exists into the present (cf. Witmore 2007); it is – however short its initial use – a 5600-yearold monument. It is also one of many such barrows that were built; it is part of an assemblage much bigger than itself. The emergence of Neolithic worlds took place at multiple scales, and any one particular scale is in itself multiple. Our long barrow is a one-off event and an ongoing process. It is utterly unique and part of a wider set of relations. It changes at every moment that it persists and yet it endures (Fowler & Harris 2015). Nor should we see either the small or large scale as necessarily more complicated than the other (Gosden 1994, 166). The other reason we need to move away from celebrating solely the small scale is that this level of analysis is only small from a very particular point of view. After all, writing about events at a decadal or yearly cycle even is clearly not short term

36  Assembling a posthumanist archaeology

for flies, or cereal plants, or many other elements of the world. It is short and specific in human terms only. Authors like Whittle (2018, 247) are open and explicit about the primacy, for them, of human action. But non-humans operate at scales both much bigger and smaller than this. Indeed, human beings – as groups and as a species – do the same. Writing at multiple scales will allow us to begin to fold non-humans into our histories in more active ways. As ever, this does not mean we should avoid writing at decadal or shorter scales, that we should ignore events or the passing of time. But it does mean this is only one element of our past. If we want to meet our first challenge and to avoid the risk of anthropocentricism, we need to write a past that operates at multiple scales. This specific challenge facing archaeology is to develop an approach that interrelates scales together. Archaeology has previously attempted to work at multiple scales, often drawing inspiration from the Annales historians (e.g. Knapp 1992), or from the related ideas of time perspectivism (e.g. Bailey 2007). This has tended to divide the past into three different scales: the short-term nature of events; the middle-term level of practices and institutions; and the long-term, or longue durée, of geological and environmental time. This certainly has its strengths, especially in the explicit recognition of multiple scales, but unfortunately will not be sufficient for our purposes. First, these approaches often have little to say about the interrelation between different scales. Second, the implication often remains that culture operates at the smaller two scales, and nature at the largest, and as a result this reimposes dualisms we would do better to avoid. Third, we know increasingly that geological and environmental events can have an impact over very short periods of time (from a hurricane to an earthquake) whilst social processes can play out over millennia (Harmanşah 2020). Furthermore, a single event can be both long and short term at the same moment. For example, a hurricane is both a short-term storm and can be the outcome of long-term climate instability. A book is both the short-term9 outcome of a period of writing, part of a disciplinary tradition of more than a century, and a history of publishing over a much longer timeline. Our approach to scale needs to do several things, therefore. First, it has to be capable of operating at multiple scales from the very small to the very large. Second, we need an approach where the same rules apply at each scale. We must avoid having one set of rules for long-term events, and others for short term, because this reintroduces dualisms and can prevent us from understanding how scales interconnect. Third, and relatedly, we need a sense of how scales become folded together in a way that means they operate simultaneously but at different rhythms. In Chapter 3 we will set out how Deleuzian philosophy offers us an approach that allows us to meet this challenge.

(7) To create new concepts Our final challenge focuses on a much-disputed term: ontology. The word ‘ontology’ is used in multiple ways in archaeology (see Alberti 2016; Crellin et al. 2021, chapters 10 and 11). It can be used to mean a strong word for culture or worldview,

Seven challenges  37

or it can be an attempt to construct the metaphysics or ‘worlds’ of the past (Alberti 2016). Finally, it can be used to explore specific moments of ontological difference. It is the challenge that this latter form of ontological approach poses that I wish to explore here. This challenge demands that we adopt an approach that allows the full range of past differences to emerge – not just differences in people or materials but in the ontological concepts that past worlds generate (Alberti & Marshall 2009; Alberti et al. 2011; Marshall & Alberti 2014; Alberti 2016). ‘Alterity’ is the term these scholars use to capture the radical nature of this difference (e.g. Henare et al. 2007). The works of anthropologists like Martin Holbraad (2007, 2012) and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998) have been critical here. Holbraad (2007), drawing on his work with present-day Cuban diviners, asks what it would mean for ethnographers to take the specific ontological claims of their informants seriously. In a famous example he discusses the red powder that is used in divination, ache, and the claim that the diviners make about it: that this powder is power (Holbraad 2007). Many anthropologists would respond to this by discussing what it was about the powder that let it symbolise power, or represent power, or act as a metaphor for power (Holbraad 2007, 204). Holbraad (2012, 21–2) asks us to suspend this tendency, however, and instead to ponder what it would mean and what it takes for powder to be power, absolutely and without further qualification. This would require us, for example, to reject the usual distinction between concept and thing. In a similar vein, Viveiros de Castro (1998) poses a question about Amazonian people we have already encountered in this chapter: can a shaman turn into a jaguar? Or perhaps more accurately, what does it mean to operate in a world where a shaman can turn into a jaguar? To answer this, Viveiros de Castro (1998, 2013, 2014) has developed a concept from Amazonian worlds that he calls perspectivism, or multinaturalism. Western society is familiar with the idea of multiculturalism – that different people have different cultures in a single society – and this is counterposed with a mononaturalism; that idea that underneath we’re really all the same. This of course rests on the culture/nature distinction that has been thoroughly critiqued. For the people in the Amazon who Viveiros de Castro has worked with, however, this does not operate in the same way. They too recognise a split between culture and nature, but rather than culture it is nature that changes. For these Indigenous people most beings – animals, fish, humans – have the same culture; they all live in houses and drink manioc beer and so on; they just have different natures (Viveiros de Castro 1998, 478). This nature in turn is rooted not in biology but in perspective. So when a tapir sees a human, it sees a predator, and therefore sees the human as a jaguar. When a jaguar sees a human, it sees a prey animal, and the person looks like a tapir to it. Particularly powerful humans – shamans – and ­especially powerful animals are able to exchange perspectives and therefore to acquire new forms. The aim here is not to ask the reader to believe that, in the terms of biology, a person can become a jaguar, therefore, but rather to ask: what kind of world would have to exist, what kinds of concepts would their have to be, for that to be

38  Assembling a posthumanist archaeology

possible (cf. Viveiros de Castro 2013)? Possible not just as an idle belief, or a myth, or as a story, but actually, ontologically, possible. Many archaeologists, especially those working in the Americas, have begun to ask similar questions about past moments of radical difference (e.g. Alberti 2013; Fowles 2013; Wilkinson 2017). If there are moments of ontologically difference in the present, ones where powder is power, where people can turn into jaguars, then what equivalent forms of alterity might have existed in the past? Alejandro Haber (2009), for example, explores the emergence of ‘meat caches’ in the highlands of Argentina. These meat caches are piles of stone, which contain material suitable to be flaked or worked in order to skin and butcher animals that have been hunted. The traditional archaeological approach would be to assume a functional role for these caches as the sensible storage of resources. Haber shows, however, that the complexity of relationships with the animals being hunted – vicunas – meant that the location at which a hunt would finish could not be ascertained in advance (Haber 2009, 425–6). The stones hidden under the rocks of the meat caches therefore might not be used for up to a millennium after they had been prepared. Rather than thinking in terms of resources, therefore, Haber (2009, 426) draws on the local understandings of animism to reconsider the meat caches as locales of anticipation, as places which call the meat to it, rather than respond to the presence of meat. The vicunas, rather than wild animals as Western thought considers them, are perceived as the domesticated flock of the earth deity Pachamamma, and thus hunting them is a form of dialogue and engagement with this deity (Haber 2009, 426). The wider landscape, with lines of stones and trenches, behind which hunters could hide, forms a landscape of anticipation, which cannot be understood within standard Western notions of nature/culture, linear temporality and so on. Similarly, Benjamin Alberti and Yvonne Marshall (2009; Marshall & Alberti 2014) have looked at pottery from the first millennium AD in Argentina. These often look like human bodies. What if, Alberti and Marshall ask, they do not simply look like human bodies but actually are bodies? What if they capture moments of transformation revealing a substance that, rather than being fixed and bounded, is fluid and changeable. What would it mean for the understanding of this world if that position was taken seriously? A common misunderstanding of these approaches (which I have been guilty of myself; e.g. Harris & Robb 2012) is to presume that their discussion of moment of ontological difference presupposes entirely ontologically different worlds. Instead, it is the specific moment of difference – the body that is the pot; the powder that is power – that these approaches seek to explore. These encounters raise a serious issue for archaeology and one we cannot ignore. If we are not willing to recognise the ontological status of these moments of difference, then we risk re-imposing a form of colonial domination on these different periods. In effect, analyses that reduce these questions to ones of belief are saying that Western people, specifically scientists, understand how the world really works and other people merely have (mistaken) opinions about it. This reduces these differences to epistemological misunderstanding, rather than raising them to the status of ontology. If we can

Seven challenges  39

dominate the past like this, then potentially we also legitimate our domination of the present. However, engagements in archaeology with ontology are not without their difficulties (Crellin et al. 2021, chapter 10; Harris & Crellin 2018). The general approach taken by archaeologists has been to draw on Indigenous ideas in the present and employ them as a form of theory to understand the past (Alberti 2016). Alberti and Marshall’s famous study of body pots, for example, draws on the Indigenous refusal, identified by Henare et al. (2007), to differentiate between things and concepts. This approach is one that is particularly appropriate if you are working in a region where these ideas are still in circulation today, where there are Indigenous people to learn from directly, or historical records on which to draw (e.g. Wilkinson 2017). Could we employ Indigenous ideas to understand a past to which they are not historically connected, however? Perhaps. But when this has been attempted, we often find that there are close relationships between the ethnographic accounts of the present, and the interpretations of the past they generate (Harris & Crellin 2018). If I draw on the concept of perspectivist thought from Viveiros de Castro, I risk locating perspectivism in the European past – indeed as a number of authors have done when looking at Mesolithic hunter gatherers (Borić 2005; Conneller 2004).10 If European archaeologists embrace ideas of animism or totemism then, as Rachel Crellin and I have argued, we risk only finding animism or totemism (Harris & Crellin 2018). If this is the case, we need to ask whether we are really exposing past ontological difference. A second difficulty is that we run the risk of reifying Indigenous perspectives that are themselves always changing, complex and multiple, and without a central ontological claim (cf. Crellin et al. 2021, chapter 4; Harris & Robb 2012). In doing so we also run the risk of artificially othering Indigenous people as well (cf. Cipolla 2017, 225). This does not mean that Indigenous perspectives could not be used as theory in European archaeology, but that such an approach would require a deep engagement that bypassed notions of analogy, and one where ­considerable effort was put into considering the implications of such acts of translation. The challenge, then, is to access the ontological difference of the past through the creation of concepts in a region like Europe without a rich tradition of Indigenous thought on which to draw. Furthermore, it is a challenge that requires us to embrace the world-building – and therefore ontological – activities of a host of beings, not just humans (cf. Tsing 2015, 292).

Conclusion This chapter has argued that in order to develop a posthumanist archaeology we are faced with seven clear challenges: (1) to be post-anthropocentric (2) to embrace the vibrancy of matter (3) to recognise the importance of relations, process and history

40  Assembling a posthumanist archaeology

(4) (5) (6) (7)

to hold on to things themselves to be more-than-representational to work at multiple scales to create new concepts.

These are by no means the only challenges facing contemporary archaeological thought. We could easily add others from reconciling evolutionary approaches with other theoretical trends, to how to integrate ancient DNA studies with more nuanced understandings of identity (Crellin & Harris 2020). These challenges are, however, the ones I see as critical in order to develop a posthumanist archaeology that offers us a more robust philosophical starting point, more accurate narratives and a politically informed approach to the demands that feminist and non-Western scholarship are making of the discipline. If the European past remains colonised from the present by the eternal figure of European humanism – Man – then it will be harder to unpick this figure from the pasts that are written about other times and places. The challenges I have set out here are, of course, closely related. In order to escape anthropocentric approaches, for example, we need to embrace the vibrancy of matter and to work at multiple scales. To be more-than-representational we need to develop concepts that grant the differences between past and present ontological weight, whilst still recognising how people and things emerge as historically situated entities across time and space. These challenges thus not only present their own issues but also demand a coherent and connected response. In the next chapter we will set out in detail what this response will be. Drawing on the philosophy of Deleuze, Chapter 3 will articulate the approach that we can use to face up to the challenges described here. It will then be the job of the rest of this book to show how this can work in practice.

Notes 1 Of course, Deleuze’s philosophy is not entirely cut off from Indigenous concepts, as they can be found, filtered through Claude Levi Strauss and Pierre Clastres, in some of his work (see especially Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 2013). However, much of his thought is derived from readings of minor figures in Western philosophy, especially Baruch Spinoza (Deleuze 1988, 1990), Friedrich Nietzsche (Deleuze 2006a), Henri Bergson (Deleuze 1991a), David Hume (Deleuze 1991b), Gottfried Liebniz (Deleuze 1992) and others. There is clearly more work to be done exploring the interplay here between Indigenous thought and the history of European philosophy. 2 I use the term post-anthropocentric, rather than non-anthropocentric, here following Rachel Crellin (2020), Rosi Braidotti (2013) and Francesca Ferrando (2019) to emphasise that this is a move past anthropocentrism, not a rejection of the study of human beings. 3 The issue with dualisms, it must be emphasised, is not that they are philosophically or scientifically inaccurate – though many of them are. I am very sceptical of that idea that mind is opposed to body; I would argue strongly that culture is not, in fact, an entity that exists separate to nature; I suggest that male and female are points on a complex spectrum of identities. This is not the primary issue, however. A great deal of interesting

Seven challenges  41

archaeology has been done based in a philosophy rooted in dualisms, and there is, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us, ‘no point in wondering whether Descartes was right or wrong’ (1994, 27). Much more concerning than their inaccuracy, however, is the issue that, as concepts, dualisms are fundamentally limiting; they control and contain the kinds of history we can tell. In the next chapter we will meet a number of examples of paired terms that one could, if one wanted, accuse of being dualist. These terms (virtual/ actual, territorialising/deterritorialising, machinic/enunciative) will, however, prove to be useful, and none of them are rooted in a central anthropocentric conceit, and they are always understood as existing as a spectrum not as opposed totalities (see also Deleuze & Parnet 2002, 15). 4 This of course links to our sixth challenge concerned with scale. 5 To quote New Order. 6 As noted briefly at the start of the chapter, this move away from relations towards an emphasis on OOO defines the shift between what Craig Cipolla and I identify as firstand second-wave symmetrical archaeology (Harris & Cipolla 2017). 7 A reader might ask why the conjoining power of AND we met in the last chapter here cannot help us out. Why can’t we have an approach that celebrates relations AND essences? The answer is that AND, as we saw, does not mean a relativist anything goes philosophy where we can simply combine ingredients regardless of their constituent components. The idea of AND rests precisely upon the importance of relations. As Harman (e.g. 2018) himself explicitly recognises, new materialism and OOO are not compatible. 8 This is not a criticism of their work – rather it is a reflection on the different projects that are underway. 9 Although it doesn’t always feel that way. 10 Viveiros de Castro (2013, 475, 2014, 87) remarks that to translate is to betray, and so when we translate Indigenous concepts we have to make sure we betray our language and not theirs. When working in a location like Neolithic Europe, however, the translation is not dyadic, as between anthropologist and informant, but triadic, between archaeologist, theory and the material of the past (cf. Thomas 2004; Whittle 2003). This makes the act of translation, and with it betrayal, more complex. I am happy to betray both contemporary Western ideas and the philosophy of Deleuze – after all he demands conceptual disobedience (Braidotti 2011, 272) – but not happy about betraying the material past or Indigenous ideas from the present.

3 FRAGMENTS FROM PHILOSOPHY

Introduction Some Twitter accounts exist solely to retweet particular words or phrases, and one such account exists to amplify any mention of Gilles Deleuze. If you follow or visit the account, you are likely to encounter a popular meme where the author of a tweet demands, in colourful language, that someone ‘explain Deleuze’ to them. The joke is that Deleuze is famously complicated, and that in one sense cannot simply be explained. His work is not only filled with ideas drawn from a vast array of unfashionable – and unfathomable – philosophers, he then deliberately filters them through what he termed ‘free indirect discourse’ (Deleuze 1986, 73). This aims to avoid plainly explaining his ideas in familiar language. If he did, Deleuze argued, the reader would simply render his unfamiliar concepts in forms with which they were already comfortable, and thus domesticate them. Instead, he aimed to generate an ‘image of thought’ where you grasp his concepts indirectly. This also means he never uses one term for a concept where three, or even four, will do. None of this makes Deleuze an easy read. Nonetheless, I suggest that despite the difficulty, and despite the obscurity of his prose, it offers deep and transformative insights. Indeed, part of the intoxication of Deleuzian philosophy is this transformative potential. Once you start thinking in terms of difference, becoming, relations, assemblage and so on, it feels amazing that you ever saw the world as being made up of bounded and static entities. The previous two chapters have set out the aim to develop a posthumanist approach to archaeology, and the seven challenges that we need to meet to do so (see Table  3.1). To meet these challenges we will need to develop a toolbox of theoretical approaches rooted in Deleuzian philosophy. That is the aim of this chapter. If Chapter  2 set us a series of problems, this chapter offers conceptual solutions, and the next chapters explore those solutions in practice. Our focus here

Fragments from philosophy  43 TABLE 3.1  The seven challenges for a posthumanist

archaeology 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

To be post-anthropocentric To embrace the vibrancy of matter To focus on relations, process and history To hold on to things themselves To be more-than-representational To work at multiple scales To create new concepts

is unashamedly theoretical. Will this chapter explain Deleuze?1 No. But it aims to start a process of thinking with Deleuze’s concepts that will carry on throughout the volume.

Introducing Deleuze In an extended review of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (2004) and Logic of Sense (2015), first published in 1968 and 1969 respectively, Michel Foucault (1970, 885) postulated that ‘perhaps, one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian’. If for the 20th century that was somewhat ambitious, the 21st century has an increasingly Deleuzian feel. In circles where Foucault’s analysis of power or Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction once reigned unchallenged, it is Deleuze and his assemblages which are now pre-eminent. Previously dismissed as just another example of fashionable French postmodernism (e.g. Miller 2010, 79), the reexamination of his work by geographers, realist philosophers, feminist thinkers, pragmatists and others has led to a resurgence of influence. Peer under the surface of the references dotting influential cross-disciplinary texts whether labelled as non-representational thought (e.g. Thrift 2008), new materialism (e.g. Coole & Frost 2010), affect theory (e.g. Seigworth  & Gregg 2010) or feminist posthumanism (e.g. Colebrook 2014), not to mention the explicitly derivative forms of assemblage theory (e.g. Delanda 2016), and the impact of Deleuze cannot be ignored. When Anna Tsing (2015) discusses the polyphonic assemblages that surround Matsutake mushrooms, when Jane Bennett (2010) explores the complex interconnections that surround a power grid failure or when Rosi Braidotti (2011) speaks of the critical importance of nomadic thought, the echoes of Deleuze’s ideas – modified of course – abound. Archaeology is no different. At the peak of the postprocessual years, references to Deleuze, or more often to his writings with Félix Guattari, occasionally cropped up (e.g. Bapty  & Yates 1990b; Nordbladh  & Yates 1990; Tilley 1993; Treherne 1995; Yates 1993). These approaches tended to see Deleuze as another post-­structuralist, a philosopher who treated the world as a text open to m ­ ultiple ­readings. His influence on postprocessual thought, however, in comparison to

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Foucault, Antony Giddens or Pierre Bourdieu, was minor. Since then archaeological theory has taken another turn, however. Instead of meaning and representation, questions of ontology and material properties are at the fore, and with them has come a more engaged reading of Deleuze’s output (cf. Chapter 1; Harris & Cipolla 2017). Authors like Chantal Conneller (Conneller 2004, 2011) and Lesley McFadyen (2007a) are critical here. Conneller used Deleuze’s work, in conjunction with the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998), to reconsider the famous deer antler frontlets recovered from the Mesolithic site of Star Carr in Yorkshire. Rather than considering them as either functional aides to hunting or ritual masks, Conneller explored how they allowed people to take on the ‘affects’ of deer. Later, her 2011 masterpiece An Archaeology of Materials developed an approach deeply influenced by Deleuzian philosophy to examine how the properties of archaeological materials emerged in specific historical contexts. In the same period, McFadyen (McFadyen 2006, 2007a) drew on Deleuze’s work, both directly and through the feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz (1994), to reconsider space and architecture as the outcome of intensive flows of interaction, rather than being imposed upon the landscape. Since 2010, the influence of Deleuzian thought on the discipline has grown exponentially. Johan Normark has employed it to analyse Mayan houses, roads, water features and gender relations (e.g. Normark 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2020). Andrew Jones (2012; Jones & Cochrane 2018; Jones & Díaz-Guardamino 2019a) has explored how material culture can be rethought through a Deleuzian lens, especially in relation to art and affect. Perhaps most influential has been the concept of ‘assemblage’, taken from Deleuze’s work with Guattari. Chris Fowler (2013) and Gavin Lucas (2012) have used this to re-examine archaeology as a discipline. It has been employed by Rachel Crellin (2017, 2020) to rethink change, Yannis Hamilakis (2013, 2017) to reconsider the senses and Ben Jervis (2016) to rework notions of medieval urbanism. Indeed, Jervis’ (2018) book on assemblage thought is the best introduction to Deleuzian ideas in archaeology. Thanks to Hannah Cobb and Karina Croucher (2014, 2020), assemblage thinking has been used to develop new ways of teaching archaeology. These represent only a small selection of the different ways in which these ideas have been deployed (e.g. Acebo 2020; Alt & Pauketat 2020; Bickle 2020; Cipolla 2018, 2019; Cipolla & Allard 2019; Creese 2016; Harris 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2016a, 2016b, 2017a, 2018a; Jones & Hamilakis 2017, and papers therein). Why have Deleuzian ideas become so influential? The answer, in part, is because Deleuze deliberately wrote against the grain of much traditional Western thinking. Whereas the majority of philosophers trace ideas through dominant figures like Plato, via Augustine to Descartes and Hegel, instead Deleuze chose mainly to write about different thinkers. From medieval theologians like Duns Scotus, via writers like David Hume, Baruch Spinoza and Henri Bergson, Deleuze attempted to think through the minor keys of philosophy. Whether pitching to reread Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, and so overturn the dominant models of psychoanalysis in his work with Guattari (Deleuze & Guattari 2013), or his radical transformation of Friedrich

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Nietzsche (Deleuze 2006a), Deleuze offers something explicitly different. In place of dialectics and negation Deleuze explores multiplicity and affirmation. Rather than identity and being, he emphasised difference and becoming. Instead of dualisms of mind and body, he offers us the monism of Spinoza. Thus, whether for feminist posthumanists, non-representational geographers or archaeologists tired of endless arguments opposing nature and culture (e.g. Crellin  & Harris 2020), Deleuze offers a different language for thought, and with it the possibility of thinking something new. In addition, his work draws extensively on ideas from mathematics (especially differential calculus), thermodynamics and more. This makes his thinking attractive to open-minded readers with a scientific bent, as well as people interested in escaping the rather tired dualism that opposes the humanities and the sciences in the first place. Deleuze’s work can be divided into three groups. First, there is the work he wrote on other philosophers (e.g. Deleuze 1988, 1990, 1991a, 1991b, 2006a, 2006b) and, second, his own philosophical treatises (e.g. Deleuze 2004, 2015) and books on cinema (Deleuze 1986, 1989). There is also his work with Guattari, including the two famous volumes that make up Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 2013). The aim here is not to try and summarise this enormous body of work.2 Instead, the objective here is targeted at the needs of archaeology, and in terms of this book at two things specifically: first, to develop the tools to meet the challenges identified in the last chapter, and second, to outline the terminology for crafting a posthumanist, and Deleuzian, account of Neolithic Britain. The chapter begins by defining a series of ontological principles that provide the basis of the argument to come: univocity, immanence, becoming, relations and difference. These are the foundational tenets of Deleuzian philosophy. After this we turn to the concepts that structure the worlds Deleuze describes: the virtual and the actual, differentiation, morphogenesis, and the intensive flows of desire, affect and power. Finally, we will look at how these forces shape bodies, both human and non-human, and how we can understand those bodies as assemblages. Here we will set out tools for describing assemblages, including the processes through which they come together and break apart. As we move through the links with the seven challenges of the previous chapter will be indicated, and are summarised in Table 3.2 at the end of the chapter. All of these terms, as well as others we will meet later, are also briefly defined in the glossary at the back of this book. The chapter concludes by returning to the idea of concepts themselves. A critical understanding of what a concept is will turn out to be an important element of the argument moving forward.

Principles of a Deleuzian ontology Deleuze was unashamed about his philosophical ambitions; he once described himself as a ‘pure metaphysician’ (Villani 1999, 130). So, we need to begin first with the principles ourselves in order to construct a Deleuzian ontology. A word on ontology may be helpful here. In general, ontology refers to what actually exists.

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In archaeology and anthropology, however, as we saw briefly in the last chapter, it is a much-debated term. Sometimes it is used generically to refer to what people believe (e.g. Harrison-Buck & Hendon 2018), sometimes to make claims about the nature of reality (e.g. Olsen 2007) or sometimes much more specifically to explore moments of radical difference between different worlds (e.g. Alberti & Marshall 2009).3 In this book I am using ontology in its philosophical, rather than anthropological, sense.4 In other words, setting out a Deleuzian ontology means exploring what Deleuze argues are the building blocks of reality.5 There are many elements to what we might think of as a Deleuzian ontology. Here I  will examine five principles: univocity, immanence, relations, becoming and difference. These are no hard-and-fast categories; it is more like picking up a complex object and examining it from multiple angles. Rather than conceiving of these terms as defining different things, therefore, think of them as defining the same thing in different ways, just as we saw with the diamond engagement ring in Chapter 1.

Univocity Univocity is the key place to start when thinking about a Deleuzian ontology, the principle that everything is both made from the same substance and equally real (Deleuze 2004, 41–50). This comes from Deleuze’s reading of the 13th-century theologian Duns Scotus, as well as Nietzsche and Deleuze’s touchstone Spinoza, the ‘prince of philosophers’ (Deleuze 1990, 11). Univocity has much in common with calls in archaeology and more widely to develop a ‘flat’ ontology (e.g. Harris 2014b; Witmore 2014). Drawing either on the assemblage theory of Manuel DeLanda (e.g. 2002) or the object-oriented ontology of Graham Harman (e.g. 2018), these approaches make the claim that traditional ways of thinking separate the world into different realms of existence: ideas and matter, culture and nature, organic and inorganic, original and copy, and so on. Traditional archaeological approaches are thus dualist, in contrast to the monism that marks out a flat ontology, as well as the principle of univocity. In other words, if we want to escape dualisms, if we want to prevent ourselves from imposing modernist thought onto the past, we need to start from a position that does not automatically divide the world up into two competing parts. This is especially important in order to resist anthropocentrism, which divides the world into twin camps: humans on the one side and everything else on the other, with the former accorded a unique and special ontological status, as argued in both previous chapters. Univocity is thus essential if we are to meet our first challenge to be post-anthropocentric. Critics of a flat ontology identify two potential flaws. The first is that by treating the world as univocal, it becomes impossible to see differences; everything after all is just the same substance. Deleuze would argue the opposite: it is precisely because you begin with univocity that you have to trace the specific processes by which difference emerges, and which are driven by difference. The same DNA is in every cell of a cat, but it nonetheless differentiates into claws, fur, teeth and tail. The

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second flaw identified is that by taking a position where human beings are on the same ontological plane as everything else, a flat ontology creates an ethical blackhole in which we become unable to differentiate between human responsibility on the one hand, and the rest of the world on the other (Malm 2019). Thus, Artur Ribeiro (2016) has suggested that a flat ontology means being unable to separate out who to blame for the holocaust, from the railway tracks, upon which the trains transporting victims ran, to the SS guards at concentration camps. Similarly, Ruth Van Dyke (2015, 20) has argued that a flat ontology prevents us from working to stop human suffering as it leaves us unable to differentiate between murderers and murder weapons. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I do not agree that this reflects the reality of what univocity, or a flat ontology, implies. As Craig Cipolla (forthcoming; see also Crellin et al. 2021) has shown, a flat ontology in fact has quite the opposite effect. By refusing to decide, in advance of analysis, who or what is responsible, it places the ethical responsibility firmly on the analyst. It demands that we demonstrate the process of causation at play rather than decide in advance where the onus lies. This is critical. It absolutely allows us to pin blame on human actors who have acted wrongly, but it also requires us to understand that that their actions could only have taken place in specific material and historical circumstances. This is because Deleuze’s univocity is situated within a second critical concept, which he draws from Spinoza: immanence.

Immanence Immanence is a central partner to univocity in understanding Deleuze’s ontology. Deleuze develops the principle of immanence through his reading of Spinoza (Deleuze 1988, 1990). The easiest way to understand immanence is to contrast it with transcendence. A transcendent argument is one where some process or force from outside the context is invoked as explanation. So, for example, if you argue that human beings would have been highly competitive in the Palaeolithic, because ‘that’s human nature’ you are invoking a transcendent argument about human nature. You are taking something from outside the context you are writing about, in this case the Palaeolithic, to explain it. Similarly, when arguments treat particular historical conjunctions as examples of ahistorical universal features, they are invoking transcendence. If when asked to explain the Second World War you talk about the nature of ‘evil’, or if asked to explain poverty you turn to ‘capitalism’, or if you explain an archaeological event by reference to ‘the social’ (Webmoor & Witmore 2008), you are reaching for transcendence. Any archaeological interpretation that rests on these kinds of external factors invokes transcendence. In contrast to this, Deleuze (e.g. 1990, 165), following Spinoza, demands immanence. We need to explain things from within the historical circumstances we are investigating, rather than evoking external, ahistorical, totalities (cf. DeLanda 2006). The specific has to explain the general, and not the other way around (FT 2018a). Tsing (2015) explores this beautifully in her account of how the landscapes and lives of humans and non-humans intersect in the ruins of

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the modern planet, orientated around the specificity of Matsutake mushrooms. This emphasis on immanence, of course, ties to the critique of the concept of ‘the human’ that comes from posthumanism which we met in Chapter 1. Rather than presuming an eternal essence to our species, which humanism does, posthumanism demands instead that we recognise that human beings are thoroughly immanent – that is, emergent in and through particular historical conditions. This doesn’t mean that humans don’t share a history, that the relations we term ‘capitalism’ don’t exist or that nothing is social  – rather that it is capitalism and the social itself that require specific explanation – they do not form the tools of explanation themselves. They therefore emerge as historically specific and, critically, open to change (cf. Carter & Harris 2020). Immanence is essential if we are to be post-anthropocentric, our first challenge, and it is also critical if we are to be truly historical, in the manner demanded by our third challenge. Another aspect of our third challenge, which was to focus on relations, process and history, is also expressed in this concern with immanence and bridges to our next Deleuzian principle. An immanent approach requires us to recognise that things emerge in specific sets of historical conditions, rather than because of an underlying essence. An immanent approach, therefore, is relational (FT 2018a).

Relationality Relations have been central to many recent archaeological approaches (e.g. Fowler 2004; Ingold 2000; Thomas 1996; cf. Harris & Cipolla 2017). Elsewhere I have explored the different ways in which relational thinking has been incorporated in archaeology (see Crellin et al. 2021, Chapter 2). Perhaps the best definition of relations comes from Timothy Pauketat and Susan Alt (2018, 73): Relations are those physical properties, experiential qualities, and other flows or movements of substances, materials, and phenomena that become attached to, entangled, or associated with others and, in the process, define not only people but other organisms, things, places and the like. When we examine anything archaeologically, we can consider them relationally. A  Viking sword emerges through relations between the iron of the blade and its forging in fire and water, the silver, copper and horn of its handle and pommel, the people who made it and the people who used it, the traditions of sword making, long-term histories of metalwork and more. Similarly, a person emerges relationally through the material things they use: the house they live in, their friends and family, their work and so on. A critical realisation here is that relations are parallel to the entities we encounter. It is not simply the case that people have relations with other people, with things, with animals, and so on. Rather, it is that people, things, animals and places emerge through relations via an unending process of becoming (Bains 2006). Relations are central to Deleuze,

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and so this provides us the tools to address elements of our third challenge here as we have seen. One of the criticisms made of relational approaches, as we saw in Chapter 2, is that they reduce entities purely to their relations, that they leave nothing beyond the effects they have in the world (e.g. Harman 2018). This represents our critical fourth challenge: how can we hold onto things themselves from a relational perspective? Deleuze’s solution, taken from his reading of Hume is that ‘relations are always external to their terms’ (Deleuze 1991b, 66), which Manuel DeLanda (2006) refers to as ‘relations of exteriority’. What Deleuze means by this is that an object, or a person, or anything which we might term an assemblage (see Chapter 1 and later) is more than the sum of their parts. So at one moment you might have relations with the computer you are typing on, the window you are looking out of, the cat sitting on your lap and so on. However, the cat can jump off and decide to lie outside in the sun, you can look away from the window, you can stop typing at your computer. The change in these relations does not, by itself, mean that you are no longer the same person, it is no longer the same window or that it is no longer the same cat. Because, for Deleuze, we are always changing all the time, if at different rates, the coming and going of relations do not themselves necessarily create more or less dramatic moments of transformation (Crellin 2020). The potential to do something different is always already part of what you, the cat and the computer are. This means that we do not need to reduce an object, a person, or a place simply to the relations it has at anyone moment in time, where any change in those relations results in something radically new. Instead, we can see how the continuity of entities is guaranteed in the history of relations that persist at different temporalities. If entities do not pre-exist their relations, in turn relations do not pre-exist entities either (an approach tersely dismissed by the online philosopher FT (2018b) as the ‘primordial soup’ vision of relations). The two emerge in parallel. Human beings are in one direct sense the outcome of their parents’ relationship, but these relations are always in production: parents become parents through the emergence of the child – in parallel. In turn once created, things, people and animals have to maintain relations to continue to exist  – relations with the food they consume, with their constituent parts, with people who protect and feed them. The emphasis on relations of exteriority helps us to understand other critical elements of a Deleuzian ontology. In particular, it reveals the potential for new relations forming, and with that new capacities for acting in the world to come into existence. This constant change, the ever moving and shifting web of relations which Deleuze and Guattari (2004) refer to as a rhizome, the emphasis on process as ongoing, and not merely the journey between a start and a finish, is what Deleuze calls becoming.

Becoming For Deleuze (2006a), one of the major mistakes in the history of philosophy has been the emphasis on being over becoming, on defining what things are, rather

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than what they do. Instead, Deleuze emphasises how things form relations and how they are constantly shifting and changing. If one begins with univocity and immanence, like Deleuze, this makes sense; if you cannot define what something is outside of its historical context (immanence) then one immediately recognises that this will change through time. Because we begin with a single substance (univocity) then you need to explain difference, as we will see later, as the ongoing process of becoming as things shift and change. Process and history are key here, central elements of our third challenge in the last chapter. For archaeologists a move from being to becoming changes how we think about all manner of things. To give just one example we can think about typologies.6 Although few archaeologists would say this explicitly, typologies work by implicitly positing the perfect and ideal form of an object or a culture. A perfect henge monument, a kind of architecture we discuss in Chapter  6, will feature a bank outside a ditch, with two opposed entrances. Of course, in reality henges only partly match up to this. For many years, two henge monuments in Orkney, the Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar were presumed to originally have had banks around their ditches, despite no evidence for this, because they were henge monuments (Richards 2013b; Downes et al. 2013). Here what a site ‘is’ – fixed by the archaeological genre – determines what the archaeologist is supposed to find. Such typologies create a transcendent ‘type’ outside of history, rather than exploring difference on the ground. We can examine these monuments in much more sophisticated ways if we focus on their becoming, how they shift and change, and form new relations through time7 (e.g. McFadyen 2016). A move from what something is, from the verb to be, to what things do, links us to a critical Deleuzian term we met in Chapter 1: AND. Relations, as we know, are external to their terms, and so our entities can form new relations in the world and so gain new capacities for action. They are not defined by what they are at any one moment, therefore, but rather by the multiple potential connections they facilitate. The computer I am typing on can be used to write a book AND answer emails, AND watch Netflix, AND read Twitter, AND conduct Zoom meetings, AND be a warm seat for my cat. A Neolithic arrowhead can be used in hunting, AND be used to threaten another human, AND reveal the skill of its maker, AND so on. This is why Deleuze refers to things as a multiplicity (e.g. Deleuze 1991a; Deleuze & Guattari 2004; Deleuze & Parnet 2002, 43). Each entity, each person, object, place, animal, plant or planet is neither one thing nor many but both at the same time, shifting and becoming as they form new connections. As we saw in Chapter 1 this does not mean that anything goes, an arrowhead cannot be used to conduct a Zoom meeting, but it broadens the emphasis away from debates about what any particular object or entity is.

Difference So far our Deleuzian ontology has identified univocity, immanence, relationality and becoming as four critical principles. To this we can add another key idea

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from Chapter 1, difference, which Deleuze (2004, 2006a) draws from his reading of Nietzsche. In Chapter  1, we discussed how difference operates for Deleuze as a productive, or affirmative, force. Rather than difference existing in the gap between two things, say a red car and a black car, which share a prior identity (car), difference works as the productive force that helps to produce the world. Rather than difference being negative, identifying what certain things lack at the expense of others (Braidotti 2011), difference instead becomes positive. You make a difference then you press a key on the keyboard and begin a process of changing the blank page into one filled with words, a positive and productive difference. This move is critical to Deleuze’s ontology because it completes his critique of the idea that the world is made up of separated, transcendent entities. If we think of the world as being made up of always-already-defined objects, people, atoms, or whatever, then we are placing those categories, just like the archaeological types we saw a moment ago, outside of history. We are presuming that an underlying shared identity links these things, regardless of their historical context. This clearly would prevent us from embracing immanence. It would also prevent us from being post-anthropocentric. The principle that similar things share an identity is commonplace in archaeology. When we excavate a site, one of the first questions we ask is: what kind of site is it? Is the pile of stones under excavation a clearance cairn, a burial monument, or a burnt mound? From this perspective, it seems as though once we have identified what ‘kind’ of archaeological site we have, we can know what features we will find; it thus has a particular form and a particular identity. This raises all the issues with the typology we saw here; it is this kind of logic that underlies the insistence that henge monuments, like the Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar that we saw previously, must have banks around them as well as ditches. Instead, we need to recognise that identity, the similarity between things, is the outcome of historical processes, not their cause (Deleuze 2004, 147). Thus Deleuze emphasises the process of difference making, which we will revisit in more detail later. From this perspective henge monuments have similarities with each other (even if they lack banks) not because they are examples of the same imposed design but because they are examples of repeated processes of difference making. This is what it means to replace a logic of identity with one of difference. Because Deleuze begins with immanence and univocity, he has to make difference primary; it is only by recognising difference as the driving force of the world that entities come into existence, differentiated from the singular substance where all things begin. This process is ongoing, of course, it is becoming and it is inevitably relational. This emphasis on difference is also a critical part of Deleuze’s critique of representation. As we saw in the last chapter, one of the challenges faced by a posthumanist archaeology is that we need to get beyond approaches that reduce material things to meaning, to what they symbolise and represent. For Deleuze, concepts like identity, resemblance, analogy and opposition are not primary ways of categorising the world; they are forms of representation that flow from prior relations of difference

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(Deleuze 2004, 62; Smith 2020, 43). Whereas other traditions of philosophy have wrestled with how the human mind can represent the world ‘out there’, Deleuze concentrates on how that world comes into being prior to issues of representation. It is important to note here that Deleuze is not denying that representation, linguistic connections and symbolism exist or that they are important – simply that such processes of representation are secondary. This is why his work allows us to aim to be more-than-representational (Harris 2018a) and to meet our fifth challenge.

Critical concepts These five principles emphasise different elements of a Deleuzian ontology, and they provide us with the basic building blocks from which we can assemble Neolithic worlds. They are only a starting point, however. We now need to draw on them to develop analytical concepts. Our first concepts, the virtual and the actual, provide Deleuze with a mechanism to describe the critical potential for change and transformation – becoming – that exists in his philosophy. In turn, this allows us to return to difference as an ongoing process. From there we will examine how Deleuze makes space for the vibrancy of matter through the concept of morphogenesis as well as three intensive forces: desire, affect and power. Once again, it should be noted from the outset that these terms offer us a descriptive vocabulary not a typology: we are not identifying different kinds of things but rather emphasising different aspects of the world.

Virtual and actual Deleuze’s ontology is univocal – everything is equally real, and everything comes from a single substance – but his emphasis on difference means that not everything is the same. The virtual8 and the actual, both developed through his reading of Bergson, provide critical concepts Deleuze (1991a, 2004) uses to describe how difference emerges in the world. To understand these terms, the easiest way to begin is to think about something familiar and straightforward like a chair, one without a person sitting in it. How can we describe this chair? We can talk about what it looks like, how many legs it has, whether it has a rounded or a flat back. We might be able to measure its size or its weight. All of these things tell us about the specific chair at a particular moment. These are what Deleuze would describe as elements of the actual, or what DeLanda (2006) would call a chair’s properties. These are thoroughly real, but they are not all that a chair is. What is the single most important thing about a chair? Its primary defining factor? The fact you can sit in it. When we look at a chair with no-one in it, we describe it as ‘empty’. This absence can be used to humiliate a person who refuses to take part in a debate; they can be ‘empty chaired’, where their absence is specifically indicated by the presence of the empty chair. The potential an empty chair has for someone to sit in it is obvious yet absolutely critical to describing what a chair is; it is far more important than what a chair weighs or what it looks like. This capacity, in DeLanda’s (2006)

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terms, is absolutely real, but it is not actual; it exists even when no-one is doing it. These capacities are what Deleuze means when he talks about the virtual. The capacity of a knife to be used to cut cheese or threaten an intruder; the capacity of a cigarette to be smoked and to cause lung cancer; the capacity of a mask to protect you from germs or hide your identity; all of these are absolutely real but not necessarily actual – they are virtual. Being sat in is not the only capacity a chair has, of course. You can pick it up to attack a burglar, it can form a bed for a cat, it could attract value if someone famous sat in it, perhaps ending up in a museum where – thanks to signage – no-one else is ever allowed to sit in it again. These capacities depend upon the relations the chair has with the rest of the world. A chair only has the capacity to have someone sit in it if there are people around to do so. It cannot be a bed in the absence of the cat. In addition, if a cat is using the chair as a bed, you cannot sit in it (not in my house anyway; Figure 3.1); here the chair has gained a new actual property (a cat’s bed), which in turn has, temporarily at least, altered

FIGURE 3.1 A cat

in the process of transforming a chair from virtual human seat to actual cat bed

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its virtual capacities. This means that a thing’s virtual capacities are not ahistorical or transcendent but rather immanent, emergent and changing: they are becoming. This also means that the virtual is structured; rather than being a collection of random possibilities, it has a shape to it. You are, after all, much more likely to sit in a chair than to throw it at a burglar. Deleuze (2006b; Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 158) calls the shape of the virtual a diagram or an abstract machine; Brian Massumi (2015a, 117) calls it a ‘cartography of potential’. In archaeology we tend to focus on the actual – on what we can measure and record, and the virtual often disappears from view (cf. Lucas 2012, 167). Yet as with our chair, the virtual is absolutely critical to understanding what an object could do in a particular time and place. Not just objects either. As we saw in Chapter 2, oil has different virtual capacities (to be turned into petrol and plastics, to drive economic wealth, to spark wars) in the 20th century than it did in the Neolithic. The virtual capacities of materials are immanent and emerge historically. This perspective also allows us to think again about how new relations create new virtual capacities. Change is constantly emerging as new relations form. If you scatter the ashes of a close relative at the top of a mountain, a photograph of that mountain may gain the capacity to make you feel very emotional, something it did not have before. Now that photograph is a picture of a beautiful mountain AND a reminder of your grief. Of course, the same photograph does not have the same capacity to induce those emotions in someone else. This capacity for change also means we need to recognise how it is not the case that the actual is fixed and the virtual is changing, both change together and recursively. The actual is ‘what we are in the process of becoming’ (Deleuze  & Guattari 1994, 112). Including both the virtual and the actual in our accounts emphasises process and relations, and how they operate in specific historical contexts. They are critical to meeting our third challenge.

Differentiation So how can we explore the relationship between the virtual and the actual? How does the virtual become actual, and the actual reshape the virtual? Difference is central here. One metaphor that Deleuze uses to discuss the virtual and the actual is the notion of a problem and its solution. Imagine you are in a house bereft of furniture. One of the things you – and your cat – need is somewhere to sit. This is a problem, it is fully real, but not something that exists empirically in the world. You then ponder a host of potential solutions (the cat can sit on you, but that doesn’t solve your problem) and decide to build a chair. This was only one way you could solve this problem, and of course just making the decision doesn’t create the solution by itself, but you have started a process. Out of all the different things you could do, you have separated out, you have differentiated, a particular solution. You then need to gather together your tools, the wood and so on, and start making the chair. As you do, so the problem you had gets its solution; the virtual – I need somewhere to sit – is actualised in the form of a chair in which you, or more likely the cat, can sit. The empty space of your living room, where previously you could

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have sat anywhere on the floor, now has a point you are much more likely to sit in; it is now a differentiated space. The process of making a house a home is thus one in which a space becomes structured and differentiated, it emerges through a particular process of difference making.9 Deleuze uses specific terms for different parts of this process. The process of identifying a solution is what Deleuze calls either differentiation or individuation. That is moments in which the virtual goes from being an unspecified problem to a potential solution. In turn, Deleuze refers to the process by which the actual solution to the problem emerges differenciation or actualisation. ‘We call the determination of the virtual content of an Idea differentiation; we call the actualisation of that virtuality into species and distinguished parts differenciation’ (Deleuze 2004, 258, original emphasis). At times, it will prove useful to employ both of these concepts. When I refer to the process of difference making in general, I will term it ‘differentiation’. When I mean the specific Deleuzian concept, either differentiation or differenciation, it will be in italics. These ideas are complex, so here’s another example. Take a lump of clay in front of you. The clay has all sorts of virtual capacities: you could make it into a sculpture; you could use it to help seal something to keep water in; it could be a fun thing for a child to play with. However, you decide to use it to make a pot; the potentials the clay holds becomes differentiated. As your fingers press into the clay and shape it, the rather formless lump takes on a particular aspect; it becomes differenciated. At this stage of course, the virtual capacity still exists to roll the clay into a ball and start again. Nevertheless, happy with the shape you take the actualised item and fire it in a bonfire. Providing the whole thing doesn’t shatter, you now have a pot, which has a whole set of new virtual capacities – it can be used to hold water or flowers, it can be given to a friend or it can be sold at an art fair. Its diagram, the shape of the virtual, has changed quite considerably, because in addition to the new capacities the pot has gained, older ones, like being scrunched back into a ball of clay, no longer exist. The process of actualisation thus shifts the shape of the virtual, a process Deleuze (2015, 155) refers to as counter-actualisation. This example also points us to an essential aspect of how things emerge in the world. The metaphor of problems and solutions might imply this is something that has to involve human beings. However, the process of differentiation is not something that human beings simply impose onto the world. That position would be highly anthropocentric. Instead, we need to consider how materials themselves contribute to this process,10 and indeed, how processes of differentiation can take place with no human, animal or organic involvement whatsoever. To develop this further we need to set out the concept of morphogenesis.

Morphogenesis When thinking about how non-humans play critical roles in their emergence, Deleuze (2004; Deleuze  & Guattari 2004) drew on the concepts developed by Gilbert Simonden (1992; see also DeLanda 2007; Ingold 2011), which are often

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referred to under the label of morphogenesis. When archaeologists think about making something, traditionally they imagine a designer, whether a potter, a sculptor or a carpenter, imposing their pre-existing ideas on to the material with which they work. This is what Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 450) call the hylomorphic model. So, our putative chair maker here differentiated the idea of a chair before differenciating the object out of the materials in front of her. However, this simplified account is problematic because it ignores the role of the non-humans. In order to make the chair the carpenter needs hammers, nails, wood, a saw, and so on. These materials are not only required, they affect the making itself; the wood shapes how it can be cut (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 450). The possibilities for making the chair are located not solely in the mind of the craftsperson but in the relations between the materials and the person; if you do not have a particular tool, you may have to alter how you make the chair. The strength of the wood will affect how the chair has to be designed. The same is true of our potter as well. The clay’s own capacities for change and transformation affect how it can be worked and shaped. To survive the bonfire, you may need to add temper which changes how the clay responds to being heated. All of this changes the ‘morphogenetic potential’ at play (Deleuze 2004, 313). This discussion suggests that the world does not depend upon the intervention of humans to drive processes of differentiation. Badgers burrowing into the ground differentiate a badger set in the landscape, creating new connections and relations between different places and shaping new spaces. Rivers carve valleys through the ongoing process of difference making they carry out, differenciating softer and harder rocks through the processes of erosion. Oceans do the same thing, and their past actions have differentiated remarkable landscape features in the present (Figure 3.2). Each element of the world, human or non-human is vibrant in Bennett’s (2010) terms, actively contributing to the processes of which it is part, and which constitute it in turn. Difference making is not only an outcome of human decision making, therefore. Instead, it is the product of flows of forces that press into one another, active and reactive (cf. Deleuze 2006a), shaping and being shaped by the processes of morphogenesis that they reveal. Celebrated here is the ‘prodigious idea of Nonorganic Life’ (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 454, original emphasis). Deleuze and Guattari’s writings thus provide us with the tools to attend to the vibrancy of matter, our critical second challenge from the previous chapter. This emphasis on force and flow, central to how morphogenetic processes of difference takes place, also reveals the importance of our next critical concept: the intensive.

The intensive The stress Deleuze puts on flows, relations and difference shows that the individual thing – object or person – is not primary. Instead, individuated entities emerge in parallel with relational forces (Deleuze 2004, 100). How can we characterise these forces? How can we conceptualise the river wearing away at the riverbed, the thumbs pressing into the clay, and the hammer hitting the nail as you make a chair?

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FIGURE 3.2 Monument

valley: a landscape differentiated by the action of long-gone

oceans

How can we characterise the vibrancy of matter? Critical to this is the notion of intensity. Intensity, for Deleuze, captures the forces that emerge, like pressure or temperature, that are measurable but qualitative, and do not diminish through division. Imagine you have a room, the temperature of which is 25 degrees. If you put a wall up halfway along the room, you do not have two rooms each at 12.5 degrees, you have two rooms each at 25 degrees. Deleuze here is providing us with a language for thinking about real forces that are intensive as well as extensive. Extension refers to the dimensions of the actual that are both measurable and divisible. Our room at 25 degrees has many extensive elements, the height of the walls, the volume of space enclosed. As an extensive quality the volume of the room is halved by the building of the wall, but the temperature of the room is not. The intensive operates through topological forces that drive difference making processes.11 The notion of the extensive describes the multiple elements of things we can measure, weigh and study directly. The intensive, however, captures different forms of connections, ones that flow through bends, and folds, pressure and feeling, not solely measurement and quantification. This emphasis on bending and folding makes this topological. Think of moments where you pick up a souvenir from a favourite holiday and memories come flooding back. In one sense the place you went might be 1000 miles and 10 years away, but in another it is right here, right now; time and space are folded, the connection is topological, like a rhizome

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it criss-crosses in unexpected ways. Archaeology regularly bends time like this. When you’re excavating a site and lift off the lid of a Bronze Age cist for the first time in 3,000 years, the gap is both enormous and instantaneous; time collapses because of the intensive connections between these two events. Think of the force, or shock, that hits you when you hear a voice of a long dead relative, realising it is not just any voice, but it is a specific, singular voice. You register this force emotionally, affectively and mnemonically – the force itself is intensive. Intensive topological forces are thus critical in moments of difference making, when new connections, new moments of individuation, take place. Nor can the intensive be reduced only to a scientific reading (Mader 2017). Subjectivity too emerges from the ongoing interplay of these forces, and in particular we can identify three dimensions that will prove useful: desire, affect and power.

Desire We normally think of desire as a want or a need for something we lack. In other words, we think of desire as an emotion that arises within a human being, or an animal, for an absent thing. Thus, a hungry cat desires food, or you might desire a shiny new iPad. Similarly, when archaeologists have written about objects in the past, especially aesthetically pleasing objects, they have tended to assume that people desired them because they were hard to come by, they were something they lacked.12 Yet, as Deleuze and Guattari (2013) show in their critique of both capitalism and psychiatry in Anti Oedipus, this vision of desire is the product of a set of very particular historical circumstances, ones that are founded on particular ideas of sexuality and family life, and upon capitalist social relations. In the former case, Deleuze and Guattari (2013) map how notions of the family have produced ideas of lack in psychoanalysis; in the latter, how capitalism actively creates lack in order to capture desire. In contrast to this, Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze & Guattari 2013, 201; cf. Gao 2013) suggest that desire is better thought of as an intensive ‘pre-personal force’. This means that for Deleuze and Guattari you do not have subjects who desire things. Instead, subjects are the effect and consequence of desire. Desire, then, is a pre-personal force because it helps bring subjects into existence. It is not the case that you, as a person, have intrinsic desires, rather that desire itself (whether for food, an iPad or whatever) is what brings you, as a subject, into being. Desire here, critically, is not limited to human beings, to animals or to the organic. It is not anthropocentric; it is a force prior to such distinctions. Deleuze and Guattari (2013, 40) agree with Marx that needs follow from desire, and not the other way around. Desire, therefore, like all things for Deleuze and Guattari, is productive. Specifically, it is productive of certain kinds of relations between bodies (human and non-human) (Colebrook 2001, 82). In different historical circumstances this productive force becomes organised in different ways, and thus regulated and focused around particular interests (Colebrook 2001, 92). Desire is exclusively historical, because like all things, it is always immanent to the relations through which

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it emerges, not transcendent. We will explore how helpful this concept of desire can be in Chapter 4.

Affect A second way intensive forces register themselves is as affect (cf. Hamilakis 2013, 124–5). Deleuze (1988, 1990) takes his concept of affect from his reading of Spinoza. Here, affects are the ways in which bodies press into one another, although keep in mind there is no reason for these bodies to be human. Think of the way in which a knife cuts into butter, this is one body (a knife) affecting another (butter). This depends on the affective capacities of both bodies, in that the knife has to be hard and the butter has to be soft; as non-vegans know, butter straight from the fridge does not have the same capacity to be affected by a knife as warm butter does. Deleuze (1988, 124) famously draws on Jakob Von Uexküll’s discussion of a tick to identify how this insect body has three ‘affects’: a sensitivity to light, which allows it to climb upwards on a branch; a sensitivity to smell, which allows it to detect an animal beneath and drop on to it; and a sensitivity to warmth, allowing it to burrow into the animal to suck its blood. These affects are relational (no animal means no smell and no warmth) and involve two bodies coming together. This emphasis on the relational is critical, because it also shows us that the affects a particular body is capable of are emergent and historical, not universal. The question Spinoza asks, to which Deleuze (e.g. 1988, 17) returns again and again, is ‘what can a body do?’ To answer this, we have to explore a body’s capacity to affect and be affected in specific contexts, in specific conjunctions, in the specific assemblages we will define later. As bodies form new relations they gain new capacities to affect and be affected; new tools let bodies do new things, and place new demands on those bodies. Exercising your body allows you to run further and faster, AND wears away at your joints causing you pain. Affect is always recursive – to affect one body means being affected in turn. Process, history, relations, the vibrancy of matter and more are captured in this emphasis on affect. Drawing on Spinoza, Deleuze both alone (e.g. 1988, 127–8) and with Guattari (e.g. 2004, 287) emphasises that to understand a what body can do we need to engage in a creative process of mapping, of locating it via what he calls its latitude and its longitude. By the former, Deleuze means the affects of which a body is capable, the intensive engagements it has with the world. By the latter, he means ‘relations of movement and rest’, the extensive rhythms of a body’s existence (Deleuze 1988, 123). We will return to this in Chapter 5.

Power Our final intensive register here is power. In much archaeological writing, power is a possession, held by some people at the expense of others. Discussions focus on chiefs and rulers, and how they come to hold and sustain their power. In Europe this is especially true of the Bronze Age and later (e.g. Kristiansen 2018), but it is

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also present in discussions of Neolithic societies (e.g. Renfrew 1973; Earle 1991). This makes power anthropocentric, both because it is something humans hold exclusively and because the ‘kinds’ of people holding that power always turn out to be the male figures of classical humanism (Crellin et al. 2021, chapter 8). Whilst there have long been more nuanced discussions of power in the archaeological literature (e.g. Miller & Tilley 1984), and these have sometimes been applied to the Neolithic (e.g. Thomas 2002), they remain in the minority. Taking an approach to power that treats it not as a possession, and not as something held exclusively by people, but as a register of intensive force requires us to switch our perspective in a number of different ways (as Crellin has detailed, see Crellin et al. 2021, chapter 8). Deleuze (2006b, 60) outlines these in his book on Foucault. Power here is not essentially repressive; it is as much about the power to do things as it about power over others (Miller & Tilley 1984, 5). It not only forces, it seduces, incites and more. ‘Power is practised before it is possessed’, Deleuze (2006b, 60) says, meaning that it is always on the move, always in the process of becoming, rather than a fixed resource waiting to be spent. More than this, as Foucault (in Deleuze  & Guattari 2013, xiv) neatly summarises in his preface to Anti-Oedipus: ‘the individual is the product of power’. So rather than a person having power, people are the outcome of power relationships, just as they are the outcome of flows of desire and potential affects. As Foucault (1977, 1978) traced in his own work, power is at its most authoritative when it works through you without you even knowing, as you discipline yourself to act in particular ways. Because power is a relational force, it flows through the forces that characterise the world and it defines and facilitates forms of affect and desire. Thus, power flows through relationships that involve non-humans too; it is part of and contributes to their vibrancy. In Chapter 6 we will use this thinking on power to offer a new way of conceptualising monuments. Desire, power and affect are not three separate things here but rather three ways of characterising the intensive flows of force that are expressed relationally in the world’s differential becoming (see also Crellin et al. 2021, chapter 9). Intensity here, in a very real sense, is difference (Deleuze 2004, 281). Through the concept of the intensive, and these three registers, Deleuze offers us ways of capturing how the virtual and actual relate, the forces and flows at play. Critically, through their expression, all three registers help us to characterise the different kinds of bodies that exist and interact. Each of these bodies, as we have emphasised already, need not necessarily be human. They can be human, non-human or amalgamations of the two, and desire, affect and power flow through and constitute them all. Such an approach is central to being post-anthropocentric. In each case these emergent bodies can profitably be understood using another Deleuzian concept we met in Chapter 1: assemblages. Our third and final layer of analysis leads us now to consider these assemblages and set out the analytical vocabulary Deleuze offers for investigating them. Just as our concepts drew on the principles defined in the first part of the chapter, so our assemblage tools will flow from these concepts in turn.

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Assemblages as analytical tools What are assemblages? As we saw in Chapter  1, the notion of assemblage derives from Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 2013). It is the idea of theirs that has comfortably had the greatest impact, sometimes rather to the distaste of more purist Deleuzian scholars (e.g. Buchanan 2015, 2017). Its popularity in archaeology comes down to two things. First, we are already familiar with talking about assemblages (of finds, of pottery sherds or whatever) and its emphasis on the gathering together of different elements matches, at least superficially, the existing definition. Second, as a discipline, we are already attuned to processes of making and use, through concepts ranging from site formation to chaîne opératoire and object biographies. Assemblage thinking builds on these notions because it furthers our ability to see each object we encounter, each site, each period, not as a singular bounded entity but as the outcome of a specific historical process of the coming together of many different elements. In assemblages, Deleuze (2007, 177) remarks, ‘you find states of things, bodies, various combinations of bodies, hodgepodges; but you also find utterances, modes of expression and whole regimes of signs’. Assemblages can include materials, objects, animals, plants, landscapes and also languages, symbols and beliefs; they are fundamentally more-than-representational. They are complex and shifting amalgamations of different things that are only ever temporarily assembled together. Even the seemingly most stable of associations, like the rocks beneath our feet, are only ever transitory when seen from a different perspective.

Assemblages are tetravalent Needless to say, Deleuze and Guattari’s account of assemblages is more than a simple recognition of the world’s inherent multiplicity. A first important element of assemblages is that they are ‘tetravalent’ (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 556; cf. Dewsbury 2011; Harris 2018a). That is assemblages operate across two axes, and four dimensions. The horizontal axis reveals that assemblages are always both ‘machinic assemblages’ and ‘assemblages of enunciation’ (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 155). This means that assemblages are always made up in parallel of material and immaterial elements, from physical components, to languages and those ‘regimes of signs’ (Deleuze 2007, 177). This means we have no need to worry that issues of meaning, symbolism and so on will be ignored; these form critical elements of assemblages. However, we can also embrace critical material elements too, and celebrate the vibrancy of matter (cf. Bennett 2010). The second axis captures the way in which all assemblages are in the process of coming together on the one hand (territorialisation) and breaking apart (deterritorialisation) on the other. This means assemblages are never static, even if these processes operate over temporalities that are geological in scale.

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Let us return to our example of a chair to consider that as an assemblage. A chair is made up of machinic components, including wood, screws, nails, fabric, feathers in the cushions, glue and so on. It also has enunciative elements: it is associated with the linguistic term ‘chair’; the parts may have come from a popular Swedish manufacturer and so carry a form of branding; or it may truly be homemade, carrying a different cachet. It may be associated with a specific person – or cat – who lives in the house. The process of making that chair was a specific historical event, which territorialised the assemblage together; this process of territorialisation is ongoing in the glue that binds the fabric and in the nails and screws that keep the legs in place. At the same time, however, the chair is undergoing deterritorialisation. Each time you sit in it a little of the fabric is eroded, the screws weaken, the wood creaks and cracks. All assemblages, whether it is your body, your family, your house or the planet itself, are constantly engaged in these two competing flows. As components deterritorialise they can become parts of other assemblages. You might decide that a cushion on the chair would look better on the sofa. This process is what Deleuze and Guattari call reterritorialisation. Deterritorialisation almost always leads to reterritorialisation they point out (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 334). This captures the ongoing flow of becoming, and how elements of one assemblage become parts of another, thanks to relations of exteriority. Alongside de/territorialisation runs another process: coding and decoding. If territorialisation refers to the gathering of different things together (the nails, wood and so on) then coding is their organisation. How are they put together, in what order, in what relation? Take something (seemingly) straightforward like making a cup of tea. To make a cup of tea you need to mix tea leaves with hot water, and perhaps with milk and sugar; this is a process of territorialisation. But it is not that simple. The tea needs to infuse in the water, which means it needs to be left to brew to distribute its flavour throughout the liquid; otherwise you will have a very disappointing drink. It is not simply a case of bringing things together; the two substances need to be mixed or sorted – or coded. Yet we have only scratched the surface here. Are you using a teapot? Have you put the milk in before the tea or after? In earlier times this latter decision carried strong class connotations, but this is no longer necessarily the case: these social links are no longer coded into this process; they have become decoded. If you really like tea, you may even have two teapots: the first to brew the tea, the second to hold the strained tea after it has brewed.13 This prevents it from becoming stewed, for one element of the mixture to become too dominant, or, as Deleuze might refer to it, overcode the rest. Elements of material organisation (the mixing of tea and water) and meaning (social class) are caught up here. Both the machinic and the enunciative elements of assemblages therefore work through territorialisation and coding. Assemblages emerge through the historical expression of particular processes. They involve material and immaterial components, coding and decoding, territorialisation and deterritorialisation. They have both content (the things that make them up) and expression (the way that content is organised).14 These processes are

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always immanent to the expression of assemblages, drawing on the virtual diagrams and the differential processes we outlined here.

Assemblages are multiscalar A second critical point about assemblages, for our purposes, is that they are multiscalar (Normark 2009). As we saw in Chapter 1, we can approach everything from a single water molecule to a galaxy as an example of an assemblage. As DeLanda (2006) demonstrates, this matters because it means we can avoid evoking differing forms of explanation for different scales of analysis. We do not need to presume that different underlying processes explain changes that happen at the short-term scale of events, at social scales or over evolutionary history (Harris 2017a). Clearly, this is critical if we want to be able to tell histories that run both over millennia and capture specific transformative moments. Indeed, finding an approach that is multiscalar, and where the rules do not shift from level to level, was our sixth key challenge in Chapter 2. The multiscalarity of assemblages allows us to consider how different assemblages relate to one another, becoming part of larger assemblages, or breaking down into separate elements. You can treat a house as a particular assemblage, made up of multiple smaller assemblages – rooms – each an assemblage of walls, furniture and so on. Each of these assemblages is both territorialised from different elements (a room has a table, chairs and a sideboard) and coded (it is used for eating in and referred to as a dining room). The house can remain as an assemblage even as these smaller assemblages shift: the windows might be replaced; new furniture may be moved into a room recoding it as a study rather than a bedroom. The stability of the house as an assemblage, at this particular scale, means it is what Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 45ff) would call ‘stratified’ – a particular scale of assemblage that endures, and on which other assemblages emerge. Now of course, the house may be an example of a stratum when compared to the rooms that make it up, but it is a very short-lived assemblage in comparison to the geological formations upon which it is constructed. Similarly, for the ants that invade your kitchen, that room is a strata upon which their assemblages form. The notion of strata thus provides us with a term for thinking about how certain assemblages, from particular perspectives, become stabilised and long-term institutions (DeLanda 2016). Indeed, all assemblages reach both in the direction of this fixed, territorialised and bounded form, and away from it, towards the changing flows, the intensive forces and the virtual diagrams from which they emerged (Deleuze  & Guattari 2004, 45).15 Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 399) draw on these tendencies to explore how different spaces can be highly structured or organised (striated, in their terms) or open and free (smooth). Similarly, they examine how patterns of movement can be more sedentary or nomadic. The former elements all emphasise the actual and the extensive, the latter the virtual, the intensive and the topological. All assemblages involve combinations of these different element, and these different tensions provide us

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with analytical tools in the following chapters. None of them are opposed dualisms; rather, they capture different emphases that emerge.

Assemblages are events We have stressed throughout the chapter that Deleuze’s approach rests on the primacy of becoming, and with it the importance of conjunction, relations and active forces. Focusing on assemblages doesn’t change this. The ability to discuss a house, a pot, or a chair as an assemblage should not be seen as counter to the fundamental univocity of Deleuze’s approach, or to the notion that continuity is central at all times (cf. Adkins 2015). Assemblages allow us to recognise how, through the processes of differentiation we identified previously, individuated things nonetheless come into existence. These are, however, individuals in the truest sense. Not copies of some original, these are singularities. Each assemblage has a thisness to it; they are what Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 288) call haecceities: ‘a season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date, have a perfect individuality lacking nothing’. Assemblages are thus events (Massumi 2015a); they create something new, and they allow us to hold on to things themselves, our fourth challenge. This event-like quality is nothing to do with temporal endurance; it is not a measure of chronology: ‘this is in no-way an individuality of the instant’ (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 288). Events here operate in the virtual, across different ways of measuring time, the time of the event or Aion, as Deleuze (2015, 64) calls it. This is contrasted to the actual time we experience as the ongoing temporality of the world, which he refers to as Chronos, ‘a coiling up of relative presents’ (Deleuze 2015, 167).16 We will return in more detail to these different versions of time in Chapter 7. Becoming is constant, the world is univocal, but that does not mean we are reduced to an undifferentiated mass, that all things are the same. The emphasis on difference applies to the change and transformation of assemblages too (Crellin 2020). Moments of change can emerge, where multiple intensive forces intersect and create new things. The moment when a pan of boiling water begins to evaporate, changing an assemblage of molecules from water into gas; the moment that a relationship between two people breaks down irreversibly and friendships end; the moment a body ceases to breathe and dies; the moment you take a new job and with it a new identity. These dramatic moments of change can be thought of as phase transitions (DeLanda 2002), as lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari 2004), or even, in the moments that haunt you just before the change, as what Deleuze (2004, 145ff) ominously calls a ‘dark precursor’. Such moments and events of transformation operate outside of time – the pain of a parent’s death isn’t just four years ago when they died. It’s right here, right now. The event here, the change, is topological and intensive, coupled as it may be with transformations that are extensive as well. They need not be instantaneous. Dying takes time; so does boiling water.

Assemblages are tools The idea of assemblages brings together multiple elements of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. Assemblages emphasise multiplicity, becoming

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and difference, and provide a language and a terminology to write about the past anew. Rather than seeing static objects, used and manipulated by active subjects, we detect complex connections and collectivities. Using assemblages as a starting point for analysis allows us to concentrate on the differing components that make up the gatherings we study. Assemblages do not privilege the human over the nonhuman; they embrace and emerge from univocity. All assemblages are the outcome of specific historical processes; they are thoroughly immanent; they have virtual capacities and actual properties. Assemblages are expressed through the interplay of intensive forces that differentiate them. They recognise the creativity of human beings and the morphogenesis of matter. They are thoroughly relational. Thus, thinking with assemblages is a critical step for taking the Deleuzian principles and concepts we have outlined here and working them through with the archaeological materials we study. Assemblages also bring together the Deleuzian principles and concepts and emphasise how they meet our challenges: they are post-anthropocentric, they embrace the vibrancy of matter, they allow us to hold on to things themselves, they are more-than-representational and they are multiscalar.

Conclusion: the creation of concepts Attentive readers will have noticed, however, that in our discussion so far only six of our seven challenges have been discussed. What then of the challenge to create new concepts? In their final book together, What is Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) declared that the creation of concepts was the very purpose of philosophy. Different philosophers create concepts that can be put to use to answer various kinds of questions. It is not important whether these concepts are universally true but rather whether they work in the context in which they are deployed (Deleuze & Guattari 1994, 27). Concepts here are not simply ways of thinking; they are active engagements in the world. They are, in themselves, fundamental ontological statements. Like assemblages they emerge at specific times, involving complex histories of becoming, they shift and change and transform (Smith 2012, 124). They are singularities, as Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 7) put it, they are not universals. Deleuze and Guattari thus inverted the traditional task of philosophy; rather than identifying universal truths outside of time, they instead sought truths, or concepts, that operated within time (Smith 2012, 133). How could philosophers committed to immanence demand anything less? There is a danger here. Benjamin Alberti (2016) has suggested that employing an approach rooted in a specific philosophy risks replicating the concepts we have already developed in our study of the past. For example, in his exploration of the Neolithic of Europe and the Near East, Ian Hodder (1990) employed concepts of domestic and wild, recast as domus and agrios. Whilst inspirational, this clearly imposed a modernist distinction between nature and culture on to the past.17 Does this volume run a similar risk, that in this case that the Neolithic becomes a Deleuzian-like past full of becoming, assemblages, flow and rhizomes, that the ‘metaontology’ of new materialism will simply impose itself and prevent real difference from emerging (Alberti 2016; cf. Crellin et al. 2021, chapter 11)? Will a Deleuzian approach only sustain ideas we have already defined? Or can new concepts emerge?

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I suggest the latter. Deleuzian thought is rooted in a productive form of difference, which emphasises the historical processes through which the world emerges. This approach forces us to attend to the specificities of the time and place we encounter. The Deleuzian emphasis on difference lends itself precisely to attending to how we create new interpretations, new engagements and new understandings. It actively resists the imposition of transcendent notions; immanence is central. Indeed, in anthropology Deleuze’s work has been read in parallel with Indigenous concepts to produce new ways of understanding the world. The prime example here is Viveiros de Castro (e.g. 2014), whose work we briefly discussed in the last chapter. Deleuze’s philosophy plays a key role in conjunction with Indigenous thought in allowing Viveiros de Castro to capture the concept of perspectivism. A ‘becoming-Deleuzian of Amerindian ethnology and a certain becoming-Indian of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought’ (Viveiros de Castro 2014, 92–3). Furthermore, the Deleuzian emphasis on the AND, as we saw in the last chapter, means we can link multiple ontologies together. We can identify how a person can turn into a jaguar AND not; we can accord ontological reality to both of these claims (cf. Harris & Robb 2012).18 The challenge for this book will be to allow concepts to emerge through the conjunction of archaeologist, material and theory that do not merely replicate our existing ideas but reveal something of the difference and alterity of the past. This must be achieved in a manner, however, which does not artificially other the past and separate it from the present (cf. Cipolla 2017). One of the key aims of the next three chapters will be to deploy the principles, concepts and tools we have developed here (Table  3.2) in order to create new TABLE 3.2  Challenges,

principles and concepts. The numbers in the lower table refer to the numbered challenges discussed here, showing how these link back to the issues we identified in Chapter 2. Challenges for a posthumanist archaeology

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

To be post-anthropocentric To embrace the vibrancy of matter To focus on relations, process and history To hold on to things themselves To be more-than-representational To work at multiple scales To create new concepts

Deleuzian ontological principles

Deleuzian concepts

Univocity (1, 2) Immanence (1, 3) Relations (1, 3, 6, 7) Becoming (2, 3, 5) Difference (1, 5, 6, 7)

The virtual and the actual (2, 3, 4, 5) Differentiation (3, 4, 7) Morphogenesis (1, 2) Intensity (4, 5, 6) Intensive flow 1: desire (1, 2, 3, 5) Intensive flow 2: affect (1, 2, 3, 5) Intensive flow 3: power (1, 2, 3, 5)

Fragments from philosophy  67

concepts from the Neolithic materials around us in the world today. These chapters deal with materials, bodies and architecture. At the end of each one, as noted at the end of Chapter 1, specific concepts will emerge through the articulation of Deleuzian philosophy, Neolithic Britain, and my reading of both. To differentiate them from this chapter’s Deleuzian concepts we will term these neoconcepts – the neo standing both for new and for Neolithic. These neoconcepts will be neither wholly Deleuzian, nor wholly Neolithic, nor wholly mine. They are the outcome of the intersection of each, from the multiplicity thus formed. As Deleuze puts it: ‘to extract the concepts which correspond to a multiplicity is to trace the lines of which it is made up’ (Deleuze & Parnet 2002, vii). As we trace these lines, and create these neoconcepts, the critical questions we will need to ask of them will be: do they tell us something new? Do they recapitulate dominant narratives or open up alternative understandings? Can they build on work that recognises difference, or do they homogenise the Neolithic in unhelpful ways?19 It is to the worlds of these neoconcepts that we now turn. In the next chapter we will concentrate on the vibrant materials that made Neolithic worlds possible, asking: what were Neolithic materials capable of becoming? The principles, concepts and tools we have developed in this chapter must now be put to work.

Notes 1 I refer primarily to Deleuze here, rather than to Deleuze and Guattari not to diminish the importance of the latter’s contribution but to recognise that the approaches I will develop here reach out across Deleuze’s work from his first book through his writings with Guattari (and indeed Claire Parnet). In particular, Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 2004) is the key text for my work, even more so than A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari 2004). 2 It is worth noting here that multiple readings of Deleuze’s work are possible, from broadly phenomenological ones (e.g. Hughes 2008) to realist ones closer to the natural sciences (e.g. DeLanda 2002). This is as it should be from a Deleuzian perspective (Bryant 2020). As we saw in Chapter 1, and further in this chapter, difference is a productive force in the world for Deleuze; it helps make something new. Reading Deleuze’s ideas, therefore, is not about learning to faithfully recite them. Such a claim would imply that there was some fundamental essence to the ideas that could be accurately reproduced, hardly something a philosopher who aimed to overturn Platonism would endorse (Deleuze 2004, 71). Instead, reading Deleuze should allow one to think differently, to understand things in ways that will be different from, indeed, must be different from, others. Therefore, this chapter is not concerned with the accuracy of the depiction of Deleuzian thought being offered. 3 For a detailed discussion of this, see chapters 10 and 11 in Crellin et al. (2021). 4 With apologies to Darryl Wilkinson. 5 At the end of the chapter we will return to the risks in this approach to ontology, as identified by Benjamin Alberti (2016). 6 It is not only with regard to typologies that a shift to becoming changes our focus. It also allows archaeologists to rethink the processes of change. As Crellin (2020) has shown, by focusing on relations, and emphasising the constant process of change, we can explore how the archaeological past is not made up of static periods, interspersed with periods of transformation. Instead change happens all the time, if at different speeds and frequencies. Similarly, Cobb and Croucher (2020) show us how the notion of becoming helps us rethink what it means to train archaeologists in the present.

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7 This does not stop us talking about types, but rather means we should recognise that what we characterise as types are not the imposition of ideal forms onto the world, copies of some original (Deleuze 2015), but rather the vestiges of repeated historical processes (Crellin et al. 2021, chapter 3; Harris 2018b). 8 The virtual, I should note, does not refer here in any way to the modern concept of the internet or virtual reality. 9 This account rather underplays the role of the non-humans in this process (the tools, the materials and so on), however. We will return to this in a moment. 10 We can think here too of the related notion of affordances from the ecological psychologist James Gibson (1979), set out by Tim Ingold (2000), amongst others. 11 The intensive has been written about in quite different ways by scholars of Deleuze. Some, for example, interpret it as a critical third realm alongside the virtual and the actual (e.g. DeLanda 2002; cf. Clisby & Bowden 2017). 12 This tendency is especially pronounced in the metal ages. 13 Take a bow, Leif Fredensborg Nielsen. 14 Hard though it might be for the reader to believe, I am simplifying the process here. Deleuze and Guattari (2004) spend a considerable amount of the Genealogy of Morals plateau of A Thousand Plateaus exploring the double articulation of content and expression. Each consists of both form and substance, brought together in each case by de/ territorialisation and de/coding. This is the process of double articulation that Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 45) refer to under the striking statement that ‘God is a lobster’. 15 If strata represent the most structured and fixed an assemblage can be, then the opposite, the place of untrammelled flows, of intensity rather than extension, is referred to by Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 2013) as the plane of consistency, or the Body without Organs. We will discuss the latter in Chapter 4. 16 These versions of time, the multiplicity of chronologies that they demand, also link us to Bergson’s critical notion of duration (Deleuze 1986, 1991a). 17 Hodder’s concepts are also explicitly metaphors (e.g. Hodder 1990, 41) and are clearly symbolic and social, and so maintain a wide range of dualisms, in contrast to the concepts developed later in this volume. 18 Similarly, Craig Cipolla (2018) has recently demonstrated how new materialism can allow us to interweave differing ontological encounters. 19 In Deleuzian terms are they minoritarian or majoritarian, are they molecular or molar (Deleuze & Guattari 2004; cf. Braidotti 2011, 2013)? Our aim will be for the former in each case.

PART II

Assembling Neolithic Britain

4 WHAT WERE NEOLITHIC MATERIALS CAPABLE OF BECOMING?

Around 4800 years ago, a pit was dig on a hilltop overlooking a tributary of the River Fynn in Suffolk, at a site known today as Martlesham (Martin 1993, 49–51).1 Placed within was almost a kilogram of burnt, heat-cracked, flint, a rough ball of fired clay in which finger marks could be seen, flint tools including two scrapers, one of which had been partially burned, and around 90 sherds of grog-tempered Grooved Ware pottery, decorated on the exterior with a herringbone pattern. Think of the materials involved. We have soil, into which the pit was dug, flint, clay and pottery. Yet there is more here too. The scrapers link to the hides against which they were worked, removing layers of fat to help ready the skins to make clothes, bags, shelter and more. They also link to the acts of reduction that made those scrapers, the removal of flakes to create the cutting edges, the use of pressure flaking with another material – antler – to sharpen them. Relations run here between multiple materials, people and processes. The pottery links this pit to another close by containing parts of the same object (Figure 4.1). The vessel was made, of course, from clay. This has a source elsewhere in the landscape, bringing that place here too. It contains grog – older pots broken down to make new ones. Who made those old pots? Where did they come from? Who drank from them? What memories were reworked in the making of new vessels? The pot must have held other materials when it was in use, perhaps beer, milk, blood, meat, or water. These are present even in their absence, linking this deposit to plants or animals, to sources of food and drink, to times when people ate or drank together. The making of the pottery, and the burning of the flint, connects this deposit to fire, and through that to the wood that burned, the trees from which that wood was collected, the axes used to fell those trees, and more. Trees, as we will see, are not simply resources waiting to be harvested but ever-emergent places in a landscape, with histories that are transformed as they are cut down. Similarly,

72  Assembling Neolithic Britain

1

3

0

FIGURE 4.1 

5cm

Grooved Ware pottery from Martlesham

Source: After Martin 1993, figure 32, p 50 redrawn by Mark Hoyle.

axes had histories all of their own. These materials may be absent in one sense, but the relations that connect them continue to persist. Here too, the actions of people are preserved in the finger marks on the clay ball, in the shape and the herringbone decoration of the pottery, and in the finely retouched edges of the scrapers. A single pit like this, not in any way unusual or remarkable, both shows directly and hints at the remarkable range of materials at play in a Neolithic world, materials with different origins, histories, relationships and properties. These were materials that came together and moved apart, that flowed through the world and intervened in people’s lives. Materials are not passive and malleable, awaiting the enlivening hand of humanity, but vibrant and active players in the histories of Neolithic

Materials  73

Britain. Rather than asking what materials, were, or meant, in the Neolithic of Britain then, this chapter asks: what were materials capable of becoming? It is materials and their processes we will follow here (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 451; cf. Weismantel & Meskell 2014).

Introduction The previous chapters focused on the challenges facing archaeological thought, and the principles, concepts and tools we need to meet them. We now turn to Neolithic Britain (c. 4100–2400 cal bc), to put these tools to work. In this chapter we will move across Neolithic Britain both geographically and chronologically,2 focusing on materials. In the next chapter we ask what could a dead body do? In Chapter  6 we explore how architecture created different worlds. This doesn’t mean that burials, bodies and monuments won’t be mentioned here. It would be very difficult to discuss how people and wood related to each other, for example, without thinking about the timber halls that were built in the Early Neolithic or the palisaded enclosures of the Late Neolithic. Similarly, looking at the kinds of objects that turn up in graves requires us to touch on death and burial too. Nonetheless, by focusing primarily on materials we can develop a post-anthropocentric approach and embrace the vibrancy of matter. Materials, then, are where we start. The Neolithic was replete with different materials as our opening vignette shows, both those that survive and those whose presence we can infer. These materials are historical, with varying capacities and properties; stone can do different things in different periods as can wood, or antler, or clay (Conneller 2011; Jones 2012). More than this, different types of stone can do different things. Materials are so much more than both modern taxonomic schemas and archaeological typologies, which reify specific characteristics, usually lead us to think. They are multiple, shifting, complex and have their own histories; their relations were and are legion. Rather than attempt encyclopaedic coverage, therefore, this chapter will focus on some of the different processes in which materials were involved. Specifically, we will cover three topics: materials on the move, which deals with the flow and flux of materials; assembling and individuating materials, which examines how materials can be brought together to reveal new possibilities and potentials; and finally materials with desire, which explores how desire flows through and animates the world. The separation of these different processes is heuristic; assemblage involves movement, movement involves desire; each of our three processes always involves the other. By using these three different lenses, however, we can outline some of the different material processes at play, helping to generate new ways of thinking about the Neolithic. As noted earlier, the chapter will range far and wide across the Neolithic, looking at objects, processes and materials from different dates and different places (Figure  4.2). This is quite deliberate. The aim here is not to create a

Map of sites discussed in the chapter

Source: Drawn by Donald Sutherland, map outline ©Crown copyright and database rights 2020 ­Ordnance Survey (100025252).

FIGURE 4.2 

74  Assembling Neolithic Britain

Materials  75

1 Amesbury 42 2 Ascott-underWychwood 3 Avebury

15 Garn Turne

4 Barleycroft

16

5 6 7 8

Barnhouse Blasthill Cladh Aindires Crossiecrown

17 18 19 20

27 Langdale axe factory Graig Lwyd 28 Langworth Hall Farm Greenbogs 29 Lanyon Quoit Greyhound Yard 30 Martlesham Grimes Graves 31 Mid Gleniron 1 Haddenham 32 Pamphill

Crown Point Hall Dunragit Durrington Walls Eton Rowing Course

21 22 23 24

Hambledon Hill Hazleton North Hindwell Hinxton

9 10 11 12

13 Etton 14 Fussell’s Lodge

25 Holm 26 Knap of Howar

33 34 35 36

37 Skara Brae 38 Somerset levels 39 St Albans

40 Staines Road Farm 41 Stonehall Farm 42 Stonehenge 43 Warren Field 44 West Kennet, tomb and avenue Parks of Garden 45 Whitegrounds Ring of Brodgar 46 Woodford G2 Rowden 47 Wyke Down Silvertown

history of materials, although historical specificity will be discussed where appropriate. Instead, the aim is to create an assemblage that draws connections between seemingly separate things, a series of collages that operate at different intercutting scales: a rhizome. Through this I aim to set out a Neolithic version of what we have seen Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 454) call ‘a life proper to matter’.

Materials on the move Let us begin with movement. Materials are always on the move at different speeds, from the subtle shifts of particles in a rock, via the flow of water in a river, to the tumbling of stones down a mountainside (Conneller 2011). Pollen grains travel on the wind or the feet of insects, birds move leaves to build nests, beavers cut down trees to build dams, worms move pieces of flint around in the soil, and of course humans move materials too. When we think of materials moving in archaeological contexts, we always emphasise people, and this will be critical here. Nonetheless, it is essential to remember that materials move in other ways too. The key aim for this section is to explore what it means to think of materials as always on the move, shifting, changing, and becoming. Here I want to explore two particular dimensions of movement. The first looks at how movement flows, how it carves enduring, extensive connections across the world. The second looks at how movement creates intensive, topological, relationships between places (see Chapter 3 on these terms). In both cases we will look at examples of wood and stone, to see how the movement of these materials produced flows and relations in different ways.

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Materials that flow Movement is not a one-off; it is not something that occurs in the world and comes to an end. It is always and forever. Thus I emphasise the term flow here because it insists upon the ongoing nature of movement. Whilst the speeds and slowness of movement might vary, and the rhythms shift, the world is always in flow. These flows can be managed and controlled, accelerated or even slowed to a glacial pace, but they never end.

Flows of stone Let us start with the flow of stone, a material that the insightful work in recent years of Vicki Cummings (e.g. 2012), Andrew Jones (e.g. 2012), Colin Richards (e.g. 2013a) and Mark Gillings and Joshua Pollard (e.g. 2016) has done much to enliven. When we talk about stone, we are of course homogenising a complex and multiple material into a single type; different types of stone have different properties, histories and futures. In the Neolithic different stones moved and changed in different ways. Some were turned into axes, which we will discuss later in the chapter. Here I want to focus on flows of movement of other stones, those bound into forms of architecture. In the Early Neolithic we can identify how stone flowed as it moved to be incorporated into the different megalithic monuments that were constructed, mainly in the Western half of Britain. Sometimes these involved very local movements indeed. Portal dolmens, for example, the spectacular monuments found largely in Cornwall and Wales, were constructed by lifting a single large capstone upwards and balancing it on rocks underneath (Figure 4.3). Cummings (2009), both alone and in her work with Richards (e.g. Cummings & Richards 2015) and Alasdair Whittle (Cummings & Whittle 2004), has demonstrated that these capstones often originated from the same spot on which the monument was later built. Although there has been some debate about whether or not these monuments were ever surrounded by cairns, it seems most likely they were always exposed much in the manner they appear today (Cummings  & Richards 2014). They were then, in Whittle’s (2004, 82) evocative phrase, ‘stones that float to the sky’, or perhaps we might emphasise here, stones that flow to the sky. Rather than materials that moved from one place to another, these were stones that flowed upwards, at sites that were already important to people (Cummings & Richards 2014, 5; Cummings & Whittle 2004). As Cummings and Richards (2014, 5) have shown, such a transition was enhanced in several cases by the shaping of the capstones and their flattening underneath, for example at the site of Garn Turne, Pembrokeshire. At other Early Neolithic monuments, stone flowed from elsewhere. At the famous chambered tomb of West Kennet in Wiltshire, for example, stones with specific histories were gathered to the site, moving down paths to this specific place. We know of some of these histories because two of the large sarsen orthostats that made up the chamber had been used to polish stone axes before they become part of the monument (Piggott 1962). This drew upon the particular capacities of sarsen. These stones may

Materials  77

FIGURE 4.3 

Lanyon Quoit, a Neolithic portal dolmen

Source: Photo by author.

not have moved far, but they were already important materials which had relations with people and other stones through their use. Some stones at the site travelled further; parts of the dry-stone walling travelled over 20 km (Piggott 1962; cf. Fowler & Harris 2015). West Kennet also reminds us that working at sites like this, located on chalk geology, would cause other stone flows to form. Chalk is a material often used in the construction of barrows and chambered tombs. Lesley McFadyen (2016, 58) has written about how chalk works as a building material, how it responds to being included in the construction of tombs, bearing the weight of other stones and materials, drawing on its soft form to hold and support the mound’s weight. At the same time chalk refuses to become bounded. It flows across bodies and coats everything it touches (McFadyen 2016, 57). A  responsive and inclusive material, almost promiscuous, chalk is used where it is readily accessible, though even chalk has different qualities depending on the depth from which it was extracted.3 As it was worked, however, it created a blurring between people and places through processes of flow, dissolving the edges of the white mounds, the white ditches from which chalk was sourced, and the now white bodies of those who had been working it. Other sites reveal detailed histories of flow, and Cummings’ work is critical here. At the Scottish Neolithic tomb of Blasthill in southern Kintyre, she has traced how different stones were gathered into the building of the monument (Cummings 2012, 37–8). In its primary phase these were mostly local dolerites from the immediate area, but also included chert slabs from further away that had distinctive

78  Assembling Neolithic Britain

green bands; these were located close to the entrance of the tomb (Cummings 2012, 37). As Cummings (2012, 37) notes, even this may create too homogenised a picture. The local dolerites may have come from multiple outcrops meaning they had different histories and relations to places and people – they may seem like one rock to us today, but only because we cannot directly map all of the relations they had in the past. Blasthill is a monument with a history: like several other examples from Western Scotland, it begins life as a round monument before being converted into a long cairn.4 The second phase of the monument saw other stones incorporated including a conglomerate most likely quarried a couple of kilometres away, a pink siltstone coming from a coastal quarry, and the extensive use of quartz beach pebbles which were deliberately smashed (Cummings 2012, 37–41). The use of quartz is widespread at chambered tombs, its capacity to evoke different associations through its material properties, its shininess, its patchy ability to spark, its association with water, allowing further relations to be materialised at these sites (Fowler  & Cummings 2003; Cummings 2009; cf. Darvill 2002). As Cummings argues, each of these stones brought with them different histories, properties, landscapes and relations as they moved together and became part of the monument. By gathering together at a specific spot, these different flows of matter could become assembled, an act with recursive impact for the source of stones as well, as we explore in more detail at other sites later. Of course stone flowed in the Late Neolithic too. Take the henge monument at Avebury (Figure  4.4), constructed around 2500 cal bc, which consists of an enormous bank and ditch, 420 m in diameter, surrounding multiple stone settings,

FIGURE 4.4 Avebury

Source: MikPeach/CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0).

Materials  79

in the midst of a landscape already replete with monuments (Gillings et al. 2019). Gillings and Pollard (2016) have traced the manner in which this region became transformed through the movement of sarsens to form stone circles and avenues. In total they suggest at least 526 stones were moved around this landscape during the Late Neolithic alone (Gillings & Pollard 2016, 539). Gillings and Pollard stress that it is by mapping the flows of stone into Avebury that we can understand both the wider landscape and how specific stones were changed through the process of movement (Figure  4.5). Each stone would have been known, would have been remarkable, would have had lives and stories. Moving stones meant moving histories, therefore, and changing them in the process (Gillings & Pollard 2016, 554; see also Pollard 2013). Indeed, these movements would have left marks scored into the land, like ‘slug trails’ as they evocatively put it (Gillings & Pollard 2016, 553, fig 11). If movement enlivened the stones that dwelt around Avebury then sarsen, the material of these stones, was not just a single ahistorical stable substance but rather something with specific histories and capacities that changed through its encounters with the world (Gillings & Pollard 2016, 541). Indeed, Emily Banfield (2016, 106) has argued we can distinguish between different kinds of sarsen that do different things at Avebury. First, there are small blocks placed in stoneholes. These act to anchor the second kind of sarsen, the larger standing stones, which had the tendency to move and fall over. One material, in our terms, becomes two very different things once we attend to what materials could become in the Neolithic.

Flows of wood But stone was not the only material that flowed in the Neolithic. The world was constituted by a multiplicity of material flows, and here we will look at one more example: wood. As Kenneth Brophy and Kirsty Millican (2015, 313) have pointed out, the Neolithic was a period dominated by woodland, a veritable ‘world of wood’, as they put it. Indeed, Gordon Noble (2017) has recently done much to illustrate the centrality of this material, and woodlands in general, to Neolithic lives (see also Edmonds 1999, 20–3; Pollard 2004a, 63–4). To think about wood we need to start, as we saw with stone, with an emphasis on difference. Wood is not just one thing. There are different kinds of trees, each of which produces material that varies from trunk to branch to twig. The wood then varies again depending on whether it is fresh or old, wet or dry and how it has been treated (cf. Noble 2017, 125). Beyond the variety that each tree brings are the changes in landscape that trees both respond to and help to produce. Different geologies will support different kinds of tree cover, with different relative make ups of oak, ash, lime and hazel (Noble 2017, 34).5 This means movement to different places could in part be accompanied by changes in the surrounding trees. Whilst Britain is often imagined as unbroken woodland before the Neolithic, there would always have been clearances (Allen 2017; Farrell et al. 2020; French et al. 2007; Fyfe et al. 2013; Whitehouse & Smith 2010). Trees themselves also vary in their age, and thus their size, from newly growing saplings to 1000-year-old oaks. Some trees at 3000 cal bc could have been alive since before farming began, acting as

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FIGURE 4.5  Flows of stone in the Avebury Landscape. Image A shows a traditional landscape, image B what happens when the movement of stone comes alive

Source: (Gillings & Pollard 2016, figure 11, reproduced by kind permission of Mark Gillings) Incorporates data (c) Crown Copyright/database right 2007. An Ordnance Survey/(EDINA) supplied service.

Materials  81

landmarks and the keepers of memory; others would tell different stories of change and transformation; some would be coppiced revealing the ongoing interaction of people in their lives. Here though we focus on flows of movement, starting with wooden artefacts. From various waterlogged contexts we know these included bows, arrows, digging sticks, spoons, boxes, bowls, axe hafts, toggles, combs, pins, sheets made from bark, paddles, spades and more (Hillam et  al. 1990, 218; Schulting  & Wysocki 2005; Taylor 1998).6 These artefacts would move with people in their hands or strapped to their bodies or to the backs of animals, they could also, in the case of arrows, leap from one body to another. If wood could flow with people, then people could also flow with, or on, wood. Canoes are the most obvious example of this, such as the dugout recovered from near St Albans (Niblett 2001). Elsewhere wood reached out across bogs and marshes in the form of platforms, as at Parks of Garden in Stirlingshire (Ellis et al. 2002), or trackways as at Silvertown in London (Crockett et al. 2002), both of which broadly date to the Middle Neolithic. The most famous examples of this come from the Somerset levels where trackways and platforms dating to both the Early and the Late Neolithic are known.7 These include the famous Sweet Track, constructed in 3807/6 cal bc, on top of an earlier example known as the Post Track constructed in 3838 cal bc (Hillam et al. 1990), as well as the Baker platform which dates to the third millennium cal bc (Bond 2010), and the trackway on Walton Heath built from hurdles made of tens of thousands of interwoven pieces of coppiced hazel (Noble 2017, 135). These constructions reveal the ongoing interweaving of flows of movements between people and trees. The coppicing, which producing trackways often required, meant people had to shape trees and help them grow and move in certain ways. Then large amounts of wood had to be moved and gathered; in the case of the Sweet Track this included more than 4000 m of planks amounting to as many as 500 trees just for certain parts of the track (Coles & Coles 1986; Hillam et al. 1990). Once these movements had taken place then people could traverse bogs and rivers. Moving wood here helped to move people, but on both sides this was a lengthy process that drew on the capacities of wood to be shaped even as it grew, to flow in certain ways in conjunction with people. Interestingly, there is a complex relationship in this landscape between the scale of trackways and the amount of wider clearance (Farrell et al. 2020). At moments where the landscape was relatively open, smaller, less substantial, trackways were built; in contrast, when the landscapes were more wooded, in both the Early and the Late Neolithic, more substantial and labour-intensive ones were constructed (Farrell et al. 2020, 290–1). The movement of people and wood interweaved with the changing shape of landscapes in complex ways. Trees also move when they fall, collapsing to the ground at death, in storms, or under the influence of human beings. These transformations create new materials to be worked, and new spaces in the world which Noble (2017, 116) refers to as ‘subtractive architecture’, and Millican (2016, 90) calls ‘forest architecture’. Tears created in the earth where tree-throws formed which could be occupied, as shown at sites like Hinxton and Barleycroft in Cambridgeshire (Evans et al. 1999) and in

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the landscape-scale excavations undertaken at Eton Rowing Course in the Thames valley (Allen et al. 2013). The former saw the recovery of Neolithic pottery and flint, often worked in situ (Evans et al. 1999, 248). The removal of trees created new kinds of spaces and with that new possibilities for movement and rest. New kinds of plants could grow in new ways in sunlight created by gaps in the canopy. Animals, both wild and domestic, could graze on these plants in turn. Creating clearances thus creates new lines of movement, new forms of flow; in turn, people and animals visiting clearings help both to sustain them as clearings – preventing trees from re-growing – and to form routes through them. These are productive places therefore, emergent in the transformed world (cf. Tsing 2015), and subtractive only from particular perspectives. It is through such processes that movement becomes structured and shaped, that space becomes striated, as Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 524) would say. It is not the case that any forest was a blank canvas prior to the Neolithic, somehow awaiting the arrival of people to map it for the first time. However, the increased number of clearings, alongside the transfer of herds of animals, especially cattle, between those clearings, began a process where the flows of movement between places became channelled in specific ways. These movements would then facilitate stories associated with the clearings and the trees now gone, a ‘geography of myth’ in Mark Edmonds’ (1999, 26; cf. 1997, 101) redolent vocabulary. Further movement flows from this. A fallen tree creates the potential for positive additions somewhere else. As Brophy and Millican (2015) have argued, this can help us understand the relationship between the start of widespread clearance at the beginning of the Neolithic and the emergence of timber architecture in different forms, including timber halls, which we turn to in a moment, as well as post-defined cursus monuments (Brophy 2015; Thomas 2006). These latter sites are rectilinear settings of posts that range from 60 m to 570 m in length, although most are over 100 m, with a width between 20 and 34 m (Brophy 2015, 62–3). The posts were often 30–50 cm in diameter and could stand anywhere up to five metres high, as with the posts at one terminal at Dunragit, Dumfries and Galloway (Brophy 2015, 64; Thomas 2015b). These large post-settings, which were first constructed in the 37th century cal bc (Whittle et al. 2011, 906), clearly helped guide and shape flows of movement (cf. Thomas 2015b, 151). They emerged as new kinds of spaces, through the movement of trees from one place to another, new kinds of clearing, perhaps almost like an unroofed building as Keith Ray and Julian Thomas (2018, 151) suggest. Critically, however, these monuments may have often been piecemeal constructions (Brophy & Millican 2015, 23) meaning they too would have moved; as parts rotted or were removed or fell over, so other elements could be erected. One good example of this comes from the cursus at Holm in Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland (Figure 4.6). Here Thomas (2007a) has argued that there were different phases of building, burning and abandonment, meaning the linear plan we see when we stitch together the many different features that make up a monument can be misleading.

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FIGURE 4.6 

Holm cursus monument

Source: Image courtesy of Julian Thomas.

At Holm, three parallel lines of posts were identified running over 70 m, which may suggest that the whole monument moved sideways (Thomas 2007a; cf. Brophy 2015, 123). At the same time there is evidence for ‘kinks and changes in direction’ in the lines of posts, and multiple different histories for each post, some replaced, some burned down, some removed (Thomas 2007a, 244). Thus, whilst we tend to see monuments like these as single coherent constructions, the evidence from Holm suggests we may be better off embracing the idea that these were dynamic monuments that flowed through the landscape, moving from one side of a large clearing to another, as trees fell and stood again (Brophy & Millican 2015, 24; Thomas 2007a; see also Chapter 6). Trees, and the wood they made and were

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made from, flowed into and out of monuments that were built over time. As Brophy (2015, 191) puts it, these may be ‘creeping, moving monuments, linear features consisting at any one time of fresh posts, burnt stumps and abandoned, overgrown areas’. If some clearances, and thus some acts of building, were caused by trees falling over due to other-than-human action, then we can envision a world in which the movement and creation of monuments was by no means a solely human effort, but one that emerged through the conjunction of flows of people, wind and wood.

From flows to relations If flows emphasise the ongoing becoming of the world, and how movement never comes to an end, then we can also think about how such processes create new relations between places. The flows we have mapped so far have largely been linear, from one spot to another, along the line that matter travels. But such journeys also fold places together, places of origin and destination, places of pause along the way. Materials capture history, and this means they are not bound simply to one location but can bring multiple places together. When we think about movement through space, we usually concentrate on extensive properties, say how far one place is from somewhere else, how long it took to get from place A to place B, and so on. There’s nothing wrong with this Euclidian emphasis, but, as we saw in Chapter 3, we can also focus on different dimensions, not on length, width and height but rather on topology, the kinds of connections that can bend, fold and form links that work quite differently (Brittain 2013; DeLanda 2010). In topological space we encounter measurements like temperature and pressure, but also other forms of folded connection. If Euclidian space is extensive, then topological space is intensive, it is affective and forceful. This is no dichotomy; rather, all materials emerge through and form both extensive flows AND intensive topological connections.

The topology of trees One way of thinking about the importance of these relations is by conceptualising how specific trees were selected for certain forms of Neolithic architecture, creating new kinds of topological connection between different places through movement. Take the example of the Early Neolithic timber hall of Warren Field in Scotland (Figure 4.7). Here large posts stood at each end of the structure that were not architecturally essential and may have pre-existed the building’s construction (Murray  & Murray 2009; cf. Barclay  & Harris 2017; Harris 2017b). The site, constructed between 3810 and 3760 cal bc, was in use for less than 50 years before being burned down (Marshall 2009, 79). Critically, the axial posts were removed prior to the building being destroyed. Here we can begin to trace how specific large trees were transformed into posts, linking the place they came from to the house in new ways. Before the house was destroyed they were moved again; their removal must have anticipated the house’s destruction, a moment laced with potency, the ‘dark precursor’ of what was to come (Deleuze 2004, 145). Wherever

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FIGURE 4.7 

Plan of Warren Field timber hall

Source: After Murray & Murray 2009, figure 12 (redrawn by author).

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they finished their journey they could now link three places together: the place the tree grew, the timber hall and their new location. In similar fashion, particular D-shaped posts, which Noble (2006, 2017) has convincingly argued were single trunks split in two, were often important at long barrows. At Fussell’s Lodge, Wiltshire, posts were used to structure space within a mortuary enclosure around 3700 cal bc (Ashbee 1966; Noble 2017, 150; Wysocki et al. 2007). At Haddenham in Cambridgeshire, an initial mortuary structure of large split oak uprights was added to by a façade of posts probably in the 37th century (Evans & Hodder 2006, 289–91; Noble 2017; Whittle et al. 2011). These were cut down, leaving stumps, and a chamber made from a single enormous oak tree was set over the top of them in a shallow trench (Darrah 2006; Morgan 2006; Noble 2017). In each of these cases we can see how specific trees were being moved into specific places for specific purposes (Noble 2017, 159). In the case of Haddenham, the size of the trees used suggests these would have been old and wellknown individuals, their incorporation into the monument thus brought, through their movement, direct intensive connections with other places, other times and other stories. Moving specific trees folded different parts of the landscape together, bringing different connections, memories, associations, textures and histories into new places via the intensive affects of their materiality. This continued into the Late Neolithic, and in an increasingly cleared world, must have been even more powerful for it. There are multiple examples of trees being incorporated into different forms of architecture in the Late Neolithic from houses, such as Greenbogs in Scotland (Noble et al. 2012) or Wyke Down in Dorset (French et al. 2007), via timber circles such as at Durrington Walls, Wiltshire (Thomas 2007b), to huge palisaded enclosures. An example of the latter is Greyhound Yard in Dorset, constructed towards the end of the Late Neolithic.8 This site is a circular setting of 519 oak posts each of which would have been 11 m high and 1 m in diameter (Woodward et al. 1993).9 The excavators estimated that clearing sufficient trees would require the opening up of 74 hectares, presuming there were seven suitable trees per hectare (Woodward et al. 1993, 355). Yet in the more open landscapes of the Late Neolithic chalk of Dorset (cf. Allen 2017) this may more likely represent the gathering of trees over potentially a very wide area, indeed there is no need to presume that the trees selected were necessarily the closest oaks to the site. If the 519 oaks, each perhaps a century or two in age, were known, and came from specific locations elsewhere, then the movement of these materials gathered these different parts of the landscape into a single place (cf. Edmonds 1999, 101). In turn, these acts of movement helped to bend and fold time. Rather than having to travel for hours, perhaps days, from one famous oak to the next, people could step, in a moment, from place to place, from memory to memory, as they moved round the interior and exterior of the monument. No longer fixed in the places they had grown, the movement of trees to a monument like Greyhound Yard allowed all sorts of new relations to be created between the locales they had come from and the spots they

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now occupied. Here the world was intensively folded, forging new topological connections through the movement of these huge trees.

The topology of stone Returning to stone allows similar topological connections to emerge. In addition, a specific property of stone – the fact it survives into the present – has allowed archaeologists to trace these relations in more detailed fashion. One of the best examples of this comes from the Ring of Brodgar, Orkney, constructed most likely between 2600 and 2330 cal bc (Bayliss et al. 2017; Downes et al. 2013; Figure 4.8). Over 120 m in diameter, and originally surrounded by a ditch 10 m wide and 4 m deep, the site today consists of 21 standing monoliths10 out of an original total of perhaps 60 (Downes et al. 2013, 100). Around the monument different stones of similar geologies are grouped together, suggesting that particular parts of the circle link to specific places elsewhere in the landscape (Downes et al. 2013, 106). Furthermore, the shallow sockets of many of the stones, in comparison to the depth of the ditch, suggests that the stones may not have stood upright for very long (Downes et al. 2013, 104). Efforts focused not on standing the stones, therefore, but on moving them, and their falling over may have continued those acts of movement.11 Thus we can map the topological links forged between quarries, people and stones, relations that remained important through the construction of the monument.

FIGURE 4.8 

The Ring of Brodgar

Source: Photo by: Stevekeiretsu/CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0).

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The material connections revealed by the stones allowed the exploration of the geology and geography of Orkney through moving around the monument. It also recursively transforms the places of origin of the stone; these were now the places where the stones came from, they were places transformed through the stones’ histories.12 There is no clear division between geology and sociality here. The monument emerged through the transformation of place and the flows of people that the intensive connections the movement of stone made possible. The movements through Euclidian space allowed new topological connections to be bound into the fabric of the materials, and with them into the fabric of the communities of which they were part (see Chapter 6). In the examples we have traced so far, we can see how the movement of wood and stone both create flows across the world and forge new intensive topological connections between places. One final example from Stonehenge, Wiltshire, can bring these different elements together (Figure 4.9). The monument is made up of a circular ditch 98 m in diameter, surrounding stone and timber settings that were arranged and rearranged over more than 1,500  years (Darvill et  al. 2012). First constructed around 3000 cal bc, the site sees the arrival of materials from over considerable distances (Parker Pearson 2012; Parker Pearson et  al. 2013; Parker Pearson et  al. 2015; cf. Harris  & Crellin 2018). The longest of these journeys, famously, are the movements of the blue stones – a mixture of dolerites, rhyolites

FIGURE 4.9 Stonehenge

Source: Photo by author.

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and sandstones – from the Preseli Mountains in west Wales, a journey of 140 miles (Parker Pearson et al. 2015). Some of the bluestones may have stopped for a whilst at a monument close to Stonehenge where they were erected before being moved to the main site itself (Allen et al. 2016a; Parker Pearson et al. 2020). Others travelled far, but still from within Wales (Bevins et al. 2020). Here we can think about both the flows that brought these stones to the site AND the topological connections such journeys forged, emergent in the quarries they came from, the sites they stopped at, the bodies that were shaped by them and the other materials involved, from wooden rollers to pig fat to lubricate their journeys (Shillito 2019). These relations endured in the intensive relations forged in the material links that crossed hundreds of miles. Other stones at Stonehenge took smaller journeys. Chilmark stone used as packing in some stone holes came from 19  km to the southwest (Whitaker 2019, 151). The famous sarsens which were put up between 2620 and 2480 cal bc were largely sourced from the West Woods area 25 km to the north (Darvill et al. 2012; Nash et al. 2020). There are at least three different types of sarsen too, distinguishable by colour (Field et al. 2015, 129). The size of the sarsens perhaps suggests that intensity was a critical factor here, the power of relations forged through the movement of the smaller blue stones over a greater extensive distance matched by the larger size of the sarsens, and the concomitant intensive difficulty in moving them. Here we can see the distinction between extensive and intensive is not a dualism where one opposes the other; rather, each is productive of the other. The intensive energy required to move the larger sarsens was generated by their greater extension. Similarly, the extensive distances crossed by the bluestones generated their intensive affects. In both cases extension, in different dimensions, enhances intensity. The dressing of many of the stones at Stonehenge offers a different insight into their movement as well. At Avebury and its avenues to the north, most, though not all,13 of the stones remained entirely unworked, their histories visible on their flesh, the rootholes, cracks, bumps and folds and the marks made by polishing stone axes visible to the world around them (Gillings & Pollard 1999, 2016). The histories of where they came from, like the stones we saw in the Early Neolithic at Blasthill or West Kennet, or at the Ring of Brodgar, remained critical. At Stonehenge however, all bar one of the sarsen stones were altered (Parker Pearson et al. 2020, 174). The distinctive patterns that marked their histories were removed, they were shaped and altered; new processes and histories emerged. Through this the differences between individual sarsens were lessened, though never entirely removed. The same process affected a minority of the bluestones. Whereas for the sarsens the topological links emphasised were between the qualities of materials and the places they came from, not between individual stones and their specific stories, individual bluestones told different stories, some shaped, some left unaltered. Indeed, Parker Pearson et al. (2020, 213) have convincingly argued that the undressed bluestones that form the outer circle may well have had complex biographies involving their inclusion in multiple different monuments.

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The materials used at Neolithic monuments mattered. They mattered because of their properties, their histories, their futures; they mattered because of their stories and their memories. Part of why they mattered was their movements, the way this gathered people and stories to the stones, in this case, and allowed this lithic material to do new things, to evoke other places and other times. Such movements, as Gillings and Pollard (2016) have argued in relation to Avebury, both created new capacities and disrupted older connections; it changed both the places the stones went to and those from where they came. The movement of wood and stone created new geographies, whether those movements took place in the same exact location, as with portal dolmens, moved within a defined area as at Holm, travelled locally as at West Kennet, or over much longer distances as at Stonehenge and perhaps Greyhound Yard. The capacity of different materials to affect and be affected through these processes of movement reveals how these substances played a critical role in building the Neolithic world (cf. Leary & Field 2013). Stone and wood moved and flowed across the landscape and forged links between places that endured, even as the trails they had been dragged across faded and the people involved in these movements passed away. The materials themselves sustained these relations and these histories, and it is the materials that can tell us these stories as archaeologists today. Indeed, these similarities emphasise that we need to attend to the properties of materials as they emerge immanently, rather than contrasting broad, transcendent, categories like wood and stone. We can see this in one final example from Stonehenge. Wood and stone have been strongly contrasted at this site, with the former being seen as celebrating the living, the latter connecting to the dead (Parker Pearson & Ramilisonina 1998). Yet the two have more in common than one might think. Elsewhere, Rachel Crellin and I (Harris  & Crellin 2018, 68) have argued that at Stonehenge, stone itself had to become wood-like. The sarsens could be erected in their famous trilithon shape only by being bonded through the use of wood working techniques  – the imposition of mortice and tenon, and tongue and groove joints (Parker Pearson & Ramilisonina 1998, 316). Whilst today we laud stone for its long-lasting temporality, it is precisely the fact that at Stonehenge it imitates wood that has allowed it to remain standing 4600 years later (Harris & Crellin 2018). We obsess sometimes about the properties of materials, but we need to remember these are relational, they are immanent, and they are changing; wood and stone can be more similar than we sometimes think, outside of our own modernist categories of organic and inorganic.

Coming together and moving apart As materials move and flow so they have encounters and form new arrangements that in turn create new capacities for engagement in the world. This is the process of assemblage that we set out in Chapter 3, and specifically of territorialisation (Deleuze & Guattari 2004). That is to say materials do not just come together and move apart without consequence. In assembly they cause specific things to emerge as differentiated entities. So the gathering of leaves, twigs and feathers by a magpie

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not only assembles these things together; it differentiates a nest from the rest of the world. The productive force of difference we encountered in the last chapter marks this out as something, it individuates it. Alongside the processes of assemblage and individuation through which things emerge also come the movements by which things move apart, changing into other things. The nest falls from the branch and breaks down on the forest floor; the island differentiated by two branches of a stream is eroded away leaving only a single flow of water. This is deterritorialisation, the process by which the gatherings of materials move on in the world, in turn becoming parts of new assemblages. Here I want to examine these three processes in turn, not because they are separate from one another but once more because by studying them in turn we can open up different aspects of Neolithic materials to analysis.

Assemblage, or clay works The assemblage of materials takes place in all sorts of Neolithic contexts. Stone blades and hafts, along with twine or rope to hold them, were territorialised together to make axes usable. Building required the assembly of wood, or sometimes stone, chalk in some places and earth in others. It was not only in the actions of human beings that such assemblage took place – beavers assembled wood into lodges and dams, birds assembled nests, plants assembled soil and sunlight and turned them into energy animals could consume and so on. As archaeologists, however, it is the assemblages that involve people that form our primary interest, even as we decentre humans by focusing on the materials involved and their contribution. In Neolithic Britain one material gained new capacities that it had previously lacked, and as a result forms the perfect example for thinking through gathering, assembly and territorialisation: clay.

Assembling materials All pots are an assemblage of clay, of course, from specific locations as we saw in the opening vignette of this chapter, but also of water and temper of various kinds including potentially stone, flint, sand, shell, chalk, grog, bone, chaff and more (Darvill 2004). They also require heat. Once formed, other elements can be gathered into pots: flows of blood, water, food and more can pass through them; they can be placed in houses or moved to new locations. Other non-humans play critical roles too, including the microbes central to the fermentation of dairy products and cereals (Sibbesson 2019). We can explore this at a locale in southern England, the Early Neolithic causewayed enclosure of Hambledon Hill, Dorset, a complex site made up of two enclosures of interrupted ditches, two long barrows and a host of outworks and cross dykes, constructed between 3660 and 3325 cal bc14 (Mercer & Healy 2008; Whittle et al. 2011). Parts of 850 pottery vessels were recovered from the monument (Smith 2008, 587). Here I  want to look at two specific examples.

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The first was part of a carinated bowl, P3715 (Figure 4.10), around 13 cm in diameter with an externally extended rim with vertically perforated lugs set on its shoulders (Smith 2008, 588–9). It was made from a flint-tempered fabric, probably sourced less than 2.5 km from the site (Darvill 2008, 620) and had been used to contain dairy products (Copley et al. 2008, 528). Assembled here then, in just this one bowl, are clay from a local site, flint, dairy products and a design that was shared across Britain at this time. Not only this, the lugs show how the pot was assembled with other materials; it could be suspended above a fire through the perforations, or on the back an animal. The pot was eventually deposited in segment 8 of the main causewayed enclosure, becoming part of a wider set of deposits in the ditches at the site. A second pot shows how these technologies assembled different materials. P216 (Figure 4.10), a hemispherical open bowl, 30 cm in diameter, with horizontally

FIGURE 4.10 

P2 (top) and P37 (lower) from Hambledon Hill

Source: After Smith 2008, figures 9.1 and 9.3 (redrawn by author).

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perforated trumpet lugs (Smith 2008, 588–9), was assembled from clay taken from the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall some 240 km away, tempered by rock fragments crushed during the manufacture of the pottery (Darvill 2008, 615). The red and black burnish would have shown off its distant origins, and the horizontal lugs would have facilitated different kinds of suspension. The open bowl design without carination is typical of the south-western regional style that emerged in the 38th century cal bc (Whittle et al. 2011, 771), which, whilst widespread, was considerably more regionally specific than the carination of P37. Interestingly, this pot was deposited in a pit within the central enclosure at Hambledon containing another vessel made from the same clay source, and an axe also from Cornwall (Mercer & Healy 2008, 149), showing that people remained acutely aware of the relations that existed with the origins of these objects. People continued to interact with P2 after it had been broken, with some fragments showing evidence for having been refired (Smith 2008, 594). The design of the two bowls described previously, and the way they speak to local and long-distance connections, shows us how many elements are included with an assemblage and the impact they have. These of course include the different materials, how the inclusion of temper produced fabrics with different textures or altered the capacities of clay to withstand heat. These are what Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 81) call the ‘machinic aspects of assemblages’, as we saw in the last chapter. The way in which design, colour, shape and attachment also build in relations, however, shows that assemblages also have their enunciative elements, or elements that refer to meaning, language and other forms of connection (Deleuze 2007, 177). We can also employ the distinction we outlined in the last chapter between territorialisation and coding (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 58–61). Territorialisation refers to how machinic connections are forged, different materials gathered together and united. Coding on the other hand allows us to be more specific about how those materials are arranged. Two pots might be made from the same materials, from the same location, but being made by different people, decorated differently and so on, they could be coded quite differently from one another. If you don’t adequately work the temper through the clay, coding it as well as territorialising it, the clay will not gain the capacity it needs to survive the firing. These are not simply opposed dualisms but rather alternative ways of describing various elements of an assemblage; neither territory nor code depends upon human conceptualisation alone. We can explore this issue in a different context at the Late Neolithic settlement of Barnhouse on Orkney.17 Here Andrew Jones (2001, 2004, 2007) has traced how different houses at the settlement developed differing recipes for their Grooved Ware pottery. Certain houses used shell as the only source of temper, others relied on alternative recipes of stone from different sources in the landscape the site (Jones 2001, 128–30). These differences were not visible on the surface, however; each house decorated their pottery in the same way (Jones 2001, 130). Recent modelling of the radiocarbon dates at the site has confirmed that these different recipes were contemporary with one another, with ‘a considerable degree of consistency

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in ceramic design and manufacture over the life of the site’ (Richards et al. 2016a, 216). There are tensions here, therefore, between the kinds of relations materials make present, who knows about them and what they communicate to different people. We can tease out how these objects territorialised different materials together but were coded in a similar fashion.18 Besides pottery, clay can be territorialised into all sorts of other assemblages. It is used in the production of daub that played a role in the architecture of Late Neolithic houses like those constructed at Wyke Down on Cranborne Chase (French et al. 2007). At the Middle Neolithic ring ditch at Staines Road Farm, Shepperton, the ditch was lined with white clay (Jones 2008, 9). Amongst the stone settings at Avebury, Banfield (2016, 107) has traced how at least two different forms of clay, in parallel to the two different types of stone we saw she identified earlier, were assembled in different contexts to aid in the erection of the standing stones. On the one hand, a clean riverine clay was employed as a building material to secure upstanding megaliths, which drew both on its origins and on its specific material capacities (Banfield 2016, 107). On the other, a more mixed clay was used to line pits on the West Kennet Avenue that flows out of Avebury. Different forms of what to modern eyes look like the same material were employed for specific purposes and emerge as differentiated entities (Banfield 2016, 108). The purposes and properties of any material are processual and relational and emerge through assemblage.

Individuation and differentiation, or emergent flints The act of assemblage does not simply designate a particular coming together of different materials and relations; however, it also produces something, a specific arrangement or a haecceity, as Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 287) would call it, something with a specific thisness to it. Assemblages are more than the sum of their parts, they are emergent, differentiated from the background of potentials, actualised as individuated, if only loosely bounded, entities. The difference here, as we saw in Chapter 3, is not about difference from; it is about the productive force of intensive difference that makes the world and that allows us to have a fully relational approach without subsuming assemblages entirely to their relations (Deleuze 2004, 280). This productive difference draws upon the intensive potentials of materials as assemblages become territorialised, differentiated and emergent. The process of making pots was one that drew on the malleability of clay, its ability to be shaped in certain ways, and which employed the capacity of temper to change clay’s properties, to allow it to withstand firing. Thus, the emergence of an assemblage is not simply about mixing together appropriate materials; it is a complex processual event which draws upon the virtual capacities of the flows of materials, and where appropriate the skills of people, to bring itself into being through both territorialisation and coding. We emphasise the virtual here, which, as we saw in Chapter 3, captures the latent potentials in assemblages – the capacities things have that are real but not yet actual (Deleuze 2004).

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Let us explore this in more detail, and in doing so I want to turn away from the additive process of assemblage making we have seen in pottery, towards one where individuation emerges instead through reduction. Rather than talking about pottery, therefore, let us think about flint. Flint has various virtual capacities, in the hands of a skilled knapper, and in conjunction with other materials including hard stone hammers and softer antler points, it could be transformed into axes, as we discuss later, but also into a host of other objects including knives, scrapers, sickles, borers, denticulates, arrowheads and more. This of course depends in part upon the properties of the specific flint  – beach pebble flint is often only available in smaller sizes than the nodules available from sites on chalk geology for example. At Grimes Graves in Norfolk, a flint mine that began life in the Late Neolithic, people preferentially sought out the floorstone, the third in a series of seams of flint (Healy et  al. 2018), to work it into complex tools including polished discoidal knives. Furthermore, flint is never static: it changes the longer it is exposed to air, making it more difficult to work, and it can be soaked or heated to change how it fractures (Pitts 1996; cf. Ingold 2007). There may be flaws within a flint nodule that dictate how it can be worked and the kinds of objects that can emerge. Everything from an axe to a scraper emerges through processes of difference making. A flint nodule is comparatively undifferentiated, but as it enters into collaboration with other materials and people it can become increasingly individuated. Edges or points become territorialised that create new capacities that can be actualised in new ways. In order to make a tool like a scraper, such as one of the ones recovered from the pit at Martlesham with which we started this chapter (Martin 1993, 50–1; see Figure 4.11), a flint core has to be differentiated from the flint nodule. This creates the capacity for flakes to be removed, or deterritorialised. In turn, the removal of the flake creates the capacity for an edge to be sharpened through retouch: something produced through actualising the capacity of antler, when in conjunction with a skilled person, to remove smaller flakes and create a

6 0 FIGURE 4.11 

5cm

One of the flint scrapers from Grooved Ware pit 0004 from Martlesham

Source: After Martin 1993, 50, figure 32; redrawn by Mark Hoyle.

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sharp edge. This then creates the capacity for the scraper to be used to remove fat from the insides of skins, working and transforming the capacity of those materials in turn. This process of difference making is fundamentally intensive and affective, it creates new relations and new potentials. It involves energies being transferred through materials, changing the abilities of an object, and the person working with it, to affect the world and be affected by it. As we saw in the last chapter, the emphasis in Deleuzian thought on intensive processes is part of how we can move away from seeing the world as a series of discontinuous entities, towards an emergent set of relations, a rhizome of flows and connectivity. The emphasis on individuation here as a productive process is not a return to an idea of discontinuous beings but rather reveals how processes of difference making allow assemblages to emerge, temporarily, as distinct arrangements. It also reveals the thoroughly historical and relational nature of materials. Flint nodules do not contain the capacity to be made into scrapers hidden within them, like some sort of withdrawn essence, awaiting the enlivening hand of a human. Nor do humans have a secret knapping ability located within them, waiting for the chance to get out. Rather the capacities of both people and things, knapper and nodule, emerge in relation with each other and with other materials.19 As a flint core is individuated into a certain form through reduction (a form suitable for the production of narrow or broad blades say (Edmonds 1995)), so the potential for further difference making, the actual production of those blades, emerges. As we saw in Chapter 3, Deleuze (2004, 258) would divide this process into differentiation, where the potential for the blade to be produced is made real in the core, and differenciation, the actual production of the blade itself. Just as these capacities emerge so they can disappear. In the absence of anyone who can knap, flint nodules do not have the capacity to produce blades. Thus, specific historically situated connections emerge through the processes of making and remaking in which people and things are caught up, processes that individuate people as knappers and flint as a particular kind of material. Critically, this process of individuation is ongoing. It is never final, the flint loses its sharpness, knappers get out of practice; the continual process of individuation requires ongoing intensive commitment (cf. Conneller 2011). This consideration of how individuation differentiates an object also allows us to think about how in actualising certain virtual capacities, others become no longer present, the virtual shifts through counter-actualisation (Deleuze 2015). Whilst tools can be reworked, or sharpened to change purpose, each act of individuation closes off certain future potentials even as it makes others more likely. Thus how cores are prepared allows for the production of different forms of flakes and blades, which in turn allows for the production of some tools but not others (Edmonds 1995, 82). Interestingly in the Early Neolithic, Edmonds (1995, 37) has highlighted how the routine process of making flint cores focused on the production of narrow flakes and blades, which emphasised the efficient use of flint, even where the raw materials made this difficult to achieve, or flint was an abundant resource. This suggests there was a concern in preserving the potential in artefacts like cores and the

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possibility for making more blades and flints even when it was not ‘economically’ necessary or helpful. There is a clear concern with the virtual capacities of materials here, as well as the tools they produce. This changes how we think about flint nodules themselves when they are incorporated into the bodies of monuments, as at Fussell’s Lodge or Woodford G2 in Wiltshire (Ashbee 1966; Banfield 2018), or when knapping events take place but the materials produced from them are left behind. Banfield (2018, 78), for example, has explored how the in-situ processes of knapping three flint nodules in the long barrow ditch of Amesbury 42 near Stonehenge, can be understood in terms of the ‘latent potential’ of the material (cf. Ray & Thomas 2018, 173). Here flint nodules were differentiated into cores, and then differenciated into flakes, but these flakes, themselves capable of being worked and reworked in the processing of plant and animal bodies, were left in the long barrow ditch. As Banfield (2018, 79) notes, a focus on the process of making these flakes must be paired in this case with an understanding of the intensive virtual potential they have to become something else. There is an interesting tension here around the precise state to which an object is individuated: from the flint nodule with a host of potential; via a differentiated flint core; to a differenciated and fully knapped spread as at Amesbury 42. Each speaks to different relationships with the past, where the material came from, and to their potential futures, that is what could be done with them in due course (cf. Banfield 2018, 104). Individuation does not necessarily depend upon the presence of human beings. Lightning strikes that open up clearances individuate spaces within woodland. Carnivores killing prey make a kill site. Each of these moments changes the flows of intensity and produces new forms of relations, new ways in which places and materials can be affected and affect each other. Clearances create the potential for new plants to grow, attracting animals to eat them. Kill sites attract scavengers, the affective presence of a dead animal calling others there. The emergence of new affective relations, whether in conjunction with human beings or not, allows us to see that as materials come together and become individuated, they are always more than the sum of their relations. The intensive affects produced by such engagements overspill the parts that make them up and create new possibilities for acting in the world. Part of what made the Neolithic different from periods before and after was how materials became individuated in new ways and created new kinds of relational connections between the places from where those materials had come, the other materials with which they were assembled, the properties they brought into the world, and the spaces and temporalities such properties created. The processes of individuation which worked through pottery, flint or any other material, created something new.

Deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, or middens as the Body without Organs We cannot think about the processes of assemblage and individuation, however, without considering that just as assemblages territorialise and emerge as specific

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entities in the world, so they have an equal tendency to break apart (Pollard 2004b). This is the aspect of an assemblage Deleuze and Guattari (2004) refer to as deterritorialisation. The process of deterritorialisation, as we saw in the last chapter, is not somehow secondary to territorialisation. Rather both occur simultaneously, territorialisation AND deterritorialisation, both are always immanent to assemblages. The firing of a pot changes the structure of the clay and temper, territorialising them more closely. At the same time water is expelled from the clay becoming deterritorialised. As an antler is pressed down on the margins of a flint blade, it both territorialises an edge and deterritorialises tiny flakes of micro-debitage. Simultaneously, this process of deterritorialising causes these elements to become parts of other assemblages – the water escapes as steam and becomes part of the air, the flint flakes fall to the floor and become part of the ground. Deterritorialisation almost always leads to reterritorialisation as we saw in Chapter 3 (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 334). Although assemblages are always to some extent in the process of coming together and moving apart, there are moments of more radical deterritorialisation. This is when individuated entities disassemble for good, and their virtual capacities shift significantly: when a pot breaks and can no longer hold any content; when a flint flake is too small to be useful; when an animal dies; or when a tree falls. These moments mark phase transitions, significant points of inflection (DeLanda 2002; cf. Crellin 2017, 2020; Harris 2017a). At many Neolithic sites the deterritorialised remains of individuated entities were gathered – reterritorialised – into middens, producing a ‘new and potent substance’ as Pollard (2004b, 58) puts it. Indeed, the evidence from large-scale excavations such as those at Eton Rowing Course suggest that the formation of middens through deposition was a central part of Neolithic occupation practices (Allen 2013, 497). Here work has identified at least three well-preserved Early Neolithic middens made up of multiple materials: pottery sherds, animal bones, plant remains, querns, charcoal, soil, and more. The largest of these spread over 12.5 m by 4.5 m and was 22 cm in depth, despite later truncation. One quarter of this midden was excavated and contained more than three kilograms of pottery, over 200 pieces of animal bone and nearly 2,500 flints (Cromarty et al. 2013, 92). The Eton Rowing Course middens were probably initiated in 3830–3730 cal bc and went out of use 3520–3320 cal bc and so were formed through repeated acts of deposition over several centuries at least (Marshall et al. 2013, 243).20 These middens, when freshly added to, would have had powerful affective impacts in terms of their sight and smell, but their locations were clearly marked and returned to, aided perhaps by the fact this material created fertile soils that could also have been cultivated (Allen 2013, 498). The middens in this landscape formed in hollows and tree-throws, but elsewhere they could later be buried in large single pits, as happened at Rowden or Pamphill in Dorset (Pollard 2001; Harris 2009), or in smaller pits that marked repeated visits to certain places (Garrow 2006). In other locations, such as at Ascott-under-Wychwood or Hazelton North in the Cotswolds, chambered tombs were built above middens (Benson & Whittle 2007; Saville et al. 1990). At Ascott-under-Wychwood

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the midden was the outcome of several stages of transformation, with smashed pottery and materials from one location being transferred to the site (McFadyen et al. 2007, 34), as well as several examples of differential deposition and burning. Within the midden, multiple substances interwove including pottery, animal bone,  flint tools and flakes from at least five polished stone axes (McFadyen et al. 2007, 35). The midden here was a ‘mixture of mixtures’ in Andrew Cochrane’s (2007, 139) words, both of materials and of the events from which they derived. They were growing and shifting assemblages, always on the move, as Thomas (2013, 233) has argued. The sensory affordances of middens give away that these were transformative and intensive places; energy flowed through the material. These middens offered a powerful ‘resource’ as McFadyen (2007b, 351) notes, which could be used to draw on specific memories and connections with the past, to grow crops, or simply to structure specific spaces. In Neolithic Orkney people took advantage of these intensive capacities to surround their houses with midden material as at sites like Skara Brae, Crossiecrown and Stonehall Farm, or to insulate them by using it as wall-core as at Stonehall once again, and Knap of Howar (Richards et al. 2016b, 128, 157). Middens on Orkney also provided a source from which plants could be grown, showcasing their ‘generative capacity’ (Richards et al. 2016b, 157). Middens supplied a material that could be worked with; a potent substance that had properties all of its own even as it consumed the material memories of feasts in the form of animal bone, making in the form of flint tools, or drinking in the form of pottery vessels (cf. Pollard 2001, 323; Thomas 2013, 230–5). Elsewhere I have written about how material like this could texture certain sites with memory (Harris 2009) and Pollard (2001) has convincingly argued that there was a powerful aesthetics to the way this material was treated. Here I suggest we can go one step further. The description I have offered here is how territorialised and individuated objects become reterritorialised in middens. In so doing they bring with them relations with the past, but also future potential (McFadyen 2007b, 352). These capacities are no longer linked to individual objects, however, but become deterritorialised flows that criss-cross an undifferentiated material, a smooth and unstructured space of the midden. Middens thus reterritorialise the relations present in objects, animals, food and more but do so in ways that are linked not to specific bounded entities but rather to the midden material itself. Decay here is fundamentally productive of new forms of connectivity, unbounded and unleashed by the opening up of the individuated assemblages of which they had previously been part (cf. Fowler 2003; Pollard 2004b). Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 169) refer to the limit of deterritorialisation, to the place where flows pass unhindered, where intensities reign supreme, as the Body without Organs (cf. Deleuze 2015, 92). Here we can see midden material as the Neolithic Body without Organs, the unstructured limits of society that can be contained, or territorialised, in pits, under barrows, within walls or around houses, but nonetheless cannot be broken into definable constituent parts. If you bury half a midden in a pit you do not have half a midden left on the surface – you simply have a smaller midden, the intensity of the connection remains unchanged. Thus, whilst excellent recent work has gone

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into refitting pottery and flint fragments from between pits and ditches that contained midden material (e.g. Beadsmore et al. 2010; Garrow 2006) this may tell us much more about the processes that formed middens than what this material itself could do in Neolithic worlds. Through its affectivity, through its richness in smell, sight and memory, through its fundamentally unstructured form, middens acted as a material through which intensity flowed, an ‘enchanted surface’ as Deleuze and Guattari (2013, 24) put it. This was a material without parts, without territories, a Body without Organs, one that warmed houses, marked places and fostered the growth of life itself (cf. Fowler 2003, 46; Richards et al. 2016b, 158).

Materials with desire Desire only exists when assembled or machined. (Deleuze & Parnet 2002, 71)

In the previous section, we looked at examples of processes of assembly, individuation and de/reterritorialisation that materials went through. Like our discussion of movement, this emphasised process, flows and relations, and celebrated the intensive and the virtual as much as the extensive and the actual. In this last part of the chapter, I want to think more about some of the flows that helped to constitute materials, and that helped to drive the relations that formed people and things in Neolithic Britain. Specifically, I want to think about how materials played a critical role in the flow and flux of desire. By desire, of course, I do not mean the want or need for something we lack – the traditional definition – but rather the positive and creative force that Deleuze and Guattari (2013) describe, which we set out in Chapter 3. If Deleuze and Guattari’s aim was to map how the interests of capitalism overcode desire, here we need to think about how desire emerges as coded in different ways in the Neolithic, and how this flows through and animates specific forms of material.

Desire, power and prestige When thinking about this in the Neolithic one place to start is with what have been traditionally termed ‘prestige goods’ (Thorpe  & Richards 1984; Loveday 2009). From the early 1980s, archaeologists like Richard Bradley (e.g. 1982, 1984) and Nick Thorpe and Colin Richards (1984) identified that certain objects in the Neolithic played particular important roles. Polished stone axes formed one obvious example, but Bradley (1984, 48) identified 24 different kinds of artefact that became widely exchanged in the Middle and Late Neolithic and operated as he put it, as ‘weapons of exclusion’ (Bradley 1982, 37). These included jet belt sliders and beads, antler and stone maceheads, flint knives of different kinds, expertly made arrowheads, bone pins, carved chalk objects and different forms of axes including the waisted Seamer axes, and the edge-polished Duggleby adzes (Bradley 1984,

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48–9). These ‘symbols of power’ were interpreted as objects that were held in high regard, available only to an elite who used them in forms of gift giving to enhance their own power (Thorpe & Richards 1984, 68). These objects represented status, in this narrative, and were available only to the lucky few that could accumulate ‘personal power’, and who, implicitly at least, were clearly gendered male (Clarke et al. 1985, 63; Loveday 2009). The rest of the population lacked these objects, and therefore ‘desired’ them, in the traditional sense of the term. Thomas (1996, Chapter 6) set out an important critique of this model, arguing that it imposed too hierarchical a version of society onto the Neolithic, and also enforced a modernist view of objects as simply the vehicles for symbolic expression. Drawing on a relational approach rooted in Heideggerian phenomenology, Thomas (1996, 154, 164) proposed instead that archaeologists need to pay attention to how objects gather qualities, including colour, to them, link to their places of origin and speak to their complex life histories. Here the materials out of which objects emerged were critical in bringing these qualities, both visible and invisible, to bear. Although not using the language of assemblage theory, Thomas’ approach here has much in common with treating objects and materials as assemblages that we saw previously.21 Thus, rather than imagining that Late Neolithic objects, like polished discoidal knives, were symbols of hierarchy that people used to exclude others from accessing power, Thomas argued we might be better off thinking about how ‘people were created by artefacts’ (1996, 180). Whilst the language of new materialism might stress that the relations create both people and things together, the critical move away from the anthropocentrism of the standard prestige goods model remains a major step forward. More recently, Andrew Jones (2019a, 5) has pointed out the circularity of the standard prestige goods model, where the evidence for elites are found in the existence of finely crafted artefacts. In turn these artefacts are understood as symbols of power because they were wielded by elites (for which they are the only evidence). In contrast, the detailed analysis of multiple decorated objects from across the Neolithic by Jones and Marta Díaz-Guardamino (2019a) has shown that many were deposited shortly after making, or even before they were finished. Others were reworked and revised multiple times. In contrast to the notion of highly crafted specialised objects, only a few examples really stand out as revealing very high skilled levels of working (Jones 2019b, 184). How can we add to this by incorporating the ideas of desire developed by Deleuze and Guattari? Whilst Thomas’ (1996, 182) vision of the relational emergence of identity in the Late Neolithic is convincing, the explanation for why people sought these objects rests on claims about cosmological change, returning us back to more anthropocentric narratives. Instead, by foregrounding desire as a pre-personal force that flows through objects, indeed that constitutes the production of objects in the first place, we can imagine different possible understandings. This requires us to attend to materials themselves and their properties and capacities in more detail. To explore this, let us turn to the Neolithic object par excellence, the polished stone axe, and draw upon the different elements of assemblages we have

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discussed when analysing materials in the chapter so far: movement, individuation and deterritorialisation.

Axes of desire Neolithic stone axes are seen as central to the period, from the covers of books to the subject of monographs, they are one of the period’s premier prestige goods (Figure 4.12). It has long been appreciated that these axes come from particular sources, which were preferentially sought out (Bradley 2000; Bradley & Edmonds 1993; Schauer et  al. 2020; Topping 2019). These include: the Langdale Fells in

FIGURE 4.12 

Polished stone axe from Cambridgeshire

Source: Reproduced via Wikimedia commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Neolithic_ polished_stone_axehead._(FindID_867463).jpg.

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the Lake District, the source of Group VI axes made principally between 3800 and 3300 cal bc (Bradley et al. 2019; Edinborough et al. 2020); Graig Lwyd in North Wales, where many Group VII axes originated; and a source on the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall from where Group I axes emerged (Clough and Cummins 1988).22 Axes from these quarries travelled far and wide, especially groups I and VI (Schauer et al. 2020, 856); as many as 41% of identified axes in Yorkshire, for example, originated in the Lake District (Manby et al. 2003, 49). We find concentrations of Group I axes in Essex, and encounter Group VII axes at enclosures in East Anglia (Pryor 1998).23 The movement of axes is not somehow separate from the places from which they came. These are not the alienated products of modernity, where we all prefer to forget the factories and mines that produce our iPhones in intolerable conditions. Archaeologists have long noted the ongoing association between axes and the places they come from. They were, as Bradley (2000, 81) puts it, ‘pieces of places’, places that may have been at the top of mountains or approached by the sea. How does desire, in the sense we have developed, play out here? In the process of making an axe, desire pre-exists the axe itself, it is caught up in the making and shaping of rough outs, the interweaving movements of hands, bodies, stones, water, fire and more (cf. Edmonds 1999, 46–50). It flows through the hours spent polishing blades, the mixture of place, person, sand and water involved. It emerges in the sights and sounds at the top of mountains, the views that were gathered to places as Sally Taylor (2017) has recently described for Langdale. Each of these are relations with places that come down from the mountain and become something else. Each axe has its own qualities that emerge through the histories of desire that map its journey from specific source, with specific people, to be worked in specific ways and used on others. The inclusion of stones against which axes were polished in monuments like West Kennet or Avebury show that these histories of individuation could literally ‘rub off’ on other materials, transforming the relations of desire with those stones as well, forging connections that persisted topologically as we saw previously. Each axe was an event, a haecceity, a ‘territorial sign of desire’ (Deleuze & Guattari 2013, 175). Axes assemble colour, aesthetics, texture, history, places, function in a singular body. These things are not the properties of an axe; an axe is the coming together of these properties in a world where desire flows. It should not be forgotten that function is key here too. Evidence suggests that many axes of both flint and stone were produced during the Early Neolithic, with work at many flint mines and quarries beginning between 4000 and 3700 cal bc (Edinborough et al. 2020, 101). This was a period when large numbers of trees were being chopped down, creating cleared spaces across the landscape, new paths that were opened up, and the material properties of particular stones may have been critical (Schauer et al. 2020, 856). However, our analysis of desire inverts the traditional explanation here, which would posit that people wanted to chop down trees, but ‘lacked’ axes so went to make them. This narrative would return us to an anthropocentric image of the market: ‘production is never organised on the basis of pre-existing need or lack’ as Deleuze and Guattari (2013, 41) remind us.

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Instead, desire becomes the force that produces, axes, people and worlds alongside one another in the Neolithic. Axes carved lines across the landscape, down from mountain tops and through forests. In modern urban planning, there is a phenomenon known as desire paths (Figure 4.13) (Van Wolputte 2018). These desire paths emerge as people choose repeated routes across parks and commons not designed by urban planners. The desire paths are not planned by the people who create them either; they are emergent from flows of desire. Less ‘trade networks’ in any formal sense, and more desire paths, the routes Neolithic axes travelled up from Cornwall to Essex, or across from Cumbria to Yorkshire, are best understood as the emergent texture of the world. They were shaped by, and shaped in turn, the flows of desire that start with neither people nor things. Indeed, these desire paths not only took axes away from places, they drew people to them too (Taylor 2017, 28; cf. Price 2007). Desire flows through the end of axes’ lives as well. These objects could be fragmented, either accidentally, flint axes are especially prone to snapping (Pitts 1996), or through deliberate breakage (Ray & Thomas 2018, 310–11). At the causewayed enclosure of Haddenham in Cambridgeshire, a broken and burnt polished stone axe was deposited on top of a mound of soil with several fragments of human bone (Evans  & Hodder 2006, Figure  5.13; Garrow 2007, 18). Similarly, at the Etton causewayed enclosure in the same county, a deliberately broken and burnt Group VII axe was found in ditch segment 1 (Edmonds 1998, 261–2); one of several examples of deliberately broken axes from the site (Edmonds 1998; Pryor 1998). Other axes were returned to the earth in caches. For example, five flaked but unfinished flint axes were found together at Crown Point Hall, Trowse Newton in Norfolk (Pitts 1996, 356). Similarly, two finished Group VI axes were found with each other at Langworth Hall Farm, Bolton (Pitts 1996, 366). We saw earlier how the midden at Ascott-under-Wychwood included parts of at least five polished stone axes (Benson & Whittle 2007). In each case shifting relations of desire opened up new futures for these axes. As we will see in the next chapter, fragmentation allowed new connections to form, for an axe to be in more than one place at once, its history to multiply and expand. Axes in middens lent their complex histories of desire to the Body without Organs. Axes in caches tied multiple histories of desire to singular places, texturing and shaping the way those places worked. Here place, midden and relationship emerge out of the flows of desire, rather than prefiguring them, as axes shaped landscapes, mountains, and people as they moved across the Neolithic world.

Desire beyond axes Through rethinking one type of object and the materials out of which they emerged, we can begin to imagine the complex ‘prestige goods’ of the Middle and Late Neolithic quite differently. Although we do not have the space to explore it here, each of the 24 types of artefact Bradley identifies works through the flows and flux of desire. Jet brought relations with Yorkshire where it was sourced, just

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(a)

(b)

FIGURE 4.13 

Desire paths in (a) Leicester and (b) Wiltshire

Source: Photos by Mark Gillings.

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as beautifully knapped oblique arrowheads territorialised the skills and desires of their makers into their forms, and this in turn constituted their maker’s subjectivity. Indeed, given the multiplicity of lines of desire we could trace across these objects, the notion they form a restricted set of prestige goods becomes harder to maintain. The range of different artefacts, their sources, their production techniques, the complex interweaving of people and materials their assemblages bring together, suggest not a single suite of powerful objects dominated by a select few individuals but rather a complex multiplicity of lines of power and desire, with a host of different ways these could be gathered and juxtaposed. The burials we encounter in the next chapter, where these objects are included as grave goods, often do not have complete sets of ‘prestige goods’ but rather a few specifically selected examples. The burial at Whitegrounds, to name one dating to the Middle Neolithic, featured a jet belt slider and a Seamer axe (Brewster 1984). There is one final avenue worth exploring in relation to desire here: that is how particular forms of decoration cross over between different media (Bradley 1982, 36; Jones 2001, 107; Thomas 2010, 4). In particular, in different materials, across the Middle and Late Neolithic we can see how different kinds of mark making were critical, especially different kinds of lines (Jones & Cochrane 2018; Jones & DíazGuardamino 2019a) (see Figure 4.14). We find these on stone plaques, in rock art, on pots, on stone and antler maceheads and in architecture (Jones & Díaz-Guardamino 2019a; Thomas 2016a, 2019). These links between different artefact types can be understood as being iconic, in the sense meant by the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce: they form relations through visual connections (Crellin et al. 2021, chapter 2). Jones and Cochrane (2018) stress how we also need to understand these mark making processes as productive of particular relations of affect, that they create affective engagements between people and things. We can also think of them as forming lines of desire, desire to make marks that in turn mark their makers, desire to produce new connections, desire that forces the differentiation of an object or

FIGURE 4.14 

The Garboldisham macehead

Source: Photo by Marta Díaz-Guardamino, reproduced courtesy of West Suffolk Heritage Services. The item is on display at West Stow. Credit: West Suffolk Heritage Services.

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a place through a line that lives not just here but shares topological connections to other materials, places and times. Lines of desire created affective connections not just between people and the object or rock face being marked but between other places of decoration. As Jones and Cochrane (2018, 169) rightly argue, acts of decoration ‘relate to a moment in the journeys of things’ and designs themselves may move from one object or place to another (Jones 2019b, 205), each one linked by the flows of desire that made them and marked them.

Conclusion: a life proper to matter What then can we take from this tour of materials during the Neolithic of Britain? What were Neolithic materials capable of becoming? We have seen they were capable of moving up and down Britain, they were capable of shaping spaces and being shaped in turn. They could carry memories and associations with them, and both reveal the virtual potential of the world, and be worked into specific actual tools that created new capacities and new possibilities for the future. Whether it was trees making space in the forest, wood spreading out as a trackway, clay binding temper and heat together or antler knapping flint, Neolithic materials were always in the process of doing something. At Martlesham, where we started the chapter, Grooved Ware pottery bound people, animals and places together, and through its shared decoration, reached out to practices taking place at sites and monuments across the country. The flint cores at the site bound the virtual potential they held into the ground, and the pits themselves territorialised these relations and connections together. In conclusion, I want to define three critical concepts that have emerged from this discussion. By concept, it should be clear that, as we defined in Chapter 3, I do not simply mean a way of thinking but rather a critical way of intervening in the world, an ontological claim about how Neolithic worlds worked. These are neoconcepts, in the sense defined in the last chapter, in that they emerge through this study of Neolithic materials. They will intersect with those revealed by our study of bodies in Chapter 5 and architecture in Chapter 6. In Chapter 7 we will examine the historical interplay of these different concepts. Our first neoconcept is that Neolithic matter moved places. Archaeologists have long implicitly recognised the importance of this concept in the movement of stone axes (Bradley & Edmonds 1993; Bradley 2000), but it has a far wider significance. It was critical too in the kinds of topological connections forged when stones were gathered at the Ring of Brodgar or oak trees were erected at Greyhound Yard. These movements are not metaphorical or symbolic; rather, they are immediate and intensive. They involve the reworking of space to allow places to be close that were previously far apart. This concept emerges from both an understanding of the capacity of materials to forge these kinds of connections and the specific ways in which these capacities operated and were actualised in the Neolithic through the movement of objects and the building of architecture, as well as the awareness people showed of these relationships. This ability to move places is

108  Assembling Neolithic Britain

thus not a universal quality of materials but a specific historical capacity, actualised regularly in Neolithic assemblages. Critically, at the heart of this is the relationship of parts to wholes. In extensive terms, a part represents a fraction of a whole, some proportion that can be removed, measured and compared. Intensively, however, the relationship of part to whole is quite different, with connections that are topological rather than Euclidian as we have seen. The part and whole are not separate here; they are interwoven elements such that the part retains its connection to the whole unbroken (cf. Chapman & Gaydarska 2007). That people have been involved in the movement of matter, especially stone, has been long established in our studies of the Neolithic. However, the reverse has been less widely considered: the extent to which materials move people. Our second neoconcept, therefore, is that Neolithic matter moved people. Here we can work with the verb ‘to move’ in the terms we have relied on this chapter, both physical movement from point A  to point B and the emotional idea of being moved (Sheets-Johnstone 1999; Sørensen 2015). The process of feeling, including of course feeling desire, is a process of being moved, of causing bodies to move. Once we realise, as we saw previously, that desire does not emanate from a person, or from a notion of lack, but is rather a productive force, then we can begin to think about how the movement of people emerges from the flows of desire, affect and relations that constituted the world. Axe sources drew people to them, stones demanded to be dragged to new places and trees had to be stood upright once more. Each of these movements involved human beings, but the specific forms of Neolithic subjectivity that came into being were as much a response to these movements as their cause. Our final neoconcept is that Neolithic matter remembered.24 Now this may seem like a strange claim – surely memory is something that belongs to humans and animals? How can matter remember? But think of how places become territorialised in matter as it moves around the landscape, as with the pottery at Hambledon Hill. Think of how stones which are dressed or left unaltered, at monuments like Avebury and Stonehenge, recall their histories differently. In the Body without Organs of Neolithic middens, memories and relations erupt as sherds of pottery come to the surface, or as bones decay, or as smells leak out. In all of these moments memories contract; the range of pasts that materials contain come to the surface. Of course, these memories are no more buried in materials than their virtual capacities are; they are relationally emergent, in conjunction with people, places and powers. They are morphogenetic too; they speak to the vibrancy of matter, and how in specific Neolithic circumstances this vibrancy registered as a form of material memory, that itself territorialised and coded the past in new ways. These different concepts are not in any way antithetical to one another; rather, they capture different modalities of existence in Neolithic Britain, different elements of the conceptual assemblage that could be foregrounded at any moment. The memories of matter are part of how matter moved people; flows of desire help to underpin how matter moved places. AND, AND, AND. . . . As ever, we should not ask what materials were but what they did, and what they could become. In

Materials  109

the Neolithic they could become multiple; they always worked with one concept AND another. Our different concepts act to foreground different elements of the rhizomic emergence of the world in Neolithic Britain. This was a world in which materials were movers and shakers. They shaped places and connected spaces; they travelled the country and made people move in their wake. They were lively and vibrant, powerful and affective. Like people they emerged through flows of movement, webs of desire and processes of difference making. They came together to make and sustain bodies of different kinds, bodies of things, bodies of animals, bodies of buildings and bodies of people. In the next chapter it is to these bodies we turn, those of the dead in particular, to ask our next question of Neolithic Britain. What could a dead body do?

Notes 1 Feature 0004 (Martin 1993, 49–51). 2 The Neolithic was introduced in Chapter 1, but as a quick guide to chronology the Neolithic of Britain begins in the south-east of the country around 4100 cal BC, and then spreads outwards from there, with Wales, Scotland and the south-west all adopting these new lifestyles by around 3700 cal BC (Whittle et al. 2011). The start of the Neolithic (which varies depending on where you are) until around 3350 cal BC is referred to as the Early Neolithic; 3350–2900 cal BC is the Middle Neolithic; and 2900–2400 cal BC is the Late Neolithic. 3 Thanks to Mark Gillings for this point. 4 Other examples include Mid Gleniron I in Dumfries and Galloway and Cladh Aindreis on the Ardnamurchan peninsula (Cummings 2012; Harris et al. 2014). 5 For an excellent summary of the palynological evidence for the variance in tree cover across Britain, see Noble 2017, 29–38. 6 Wood may also have been decorated, as the Maerdy timber from Wales suggests (which may date to either the Late Mesolithic or the Early Neolithic) (Jones  & Díaz-Guardamino 2019b, 84). 7 See Farrell et al. (2020) for recent detailed modelling of this region’s landscape. 8 An even larger example comes from the site of Hindwell, Powys, which encloses 34 ha and would have been made of 1,400 mature oak trees (Gibson 2012, 8). 9 One thing to consider, and also in relation to the post-defined cursus monuments discussed here, is how much transformation these trees went through in their erection. Were these effectively trees stood up? Or were they carved or decorated? Stripped of bark and branch? Were they dressed in a manner analogous to the stones at Stonehenge or did they carry their histories like the megaliths at Avebury, as we will explore later in the chapter? 10 Eight of which were re-erected at the start of the 20th century (Downes et al. 2013). 11 Richards et al. (2013) have explored the processes of quarrying and moving stones on Orkney, and the risks that such processes might go wrong. The movement of stones depended not only on people but also on the stone itself, on it not fracturing at the wrong moment. Stones here were active in their own movement, even if they did not move alone. Indeed, their movement may have been far more important than the final form they came to embody, which due its survival has come to dominate the narrative (Gillings & Pollard 2016; McFadyen 2007a; Richards 2013a). 12 Indeed, if we return to Avebury, discussed earlier, we can see at least two locations from which stones within the monument were obtained that later became monumentalised themselves (Gillings & Pollard 2016). 13 See Pollard and Gillings (2009, 33) for an example of this from the Beckhampton Avenue.

110  Assembling Neolithic Britain

1 4 We will return to Hambledon Hill in Chapters 5 and 6. 15 I cite the illustration number here (Smith 2008, 605, figure 9.3). The full find number is HH75 1846, 2013. 16 Again, P2 is the illustration number (Smith 2008, 603, figure 9.1). The find number is HH75 402–6, 499, 500, 609, 624. 17 Which we discuss in detail in Chapter 6. 18 Other coded links can be found in the decoration on other kinds of pottery. For example, on Peterborough Ware, the form of ceramic that dominates in Southern Britain in the Middle Neolithic, impressed decoration reveals connections with the absent tools, be they whipped or twisted cord, fingernails or bird bone (cf. Ard  & Darvill 2015). These links of course may also have had other more symbolic elements, which are harder to map in the present. 19 Indeed, this can also allow capacities and properties to transfer across materials as Jones and Díaz-Guardamino (2019c, 46) show in relation to stone and antler in the production of maceheads. 20 Both of these figures given at 68% likelihood. 21 This is no surprise. As Craig Cipolla and I  have argued elsewhere (Harris  & Cipolla 2017, Chapter 6), it is clear that the turn towards relations that Thomas’ Heideggerinspired approach led in the 1990s was critical in directing archaeology towards new materialism and assemblage theory. 22 Rock types used for stone axes encompass fine-grained igneous rocks of many types including tuffs of various kinds, metamorphosed sediments including slates, shales and porcellanite, and medium to coarse-grained igneous rocks including greenstone of different kinds, quartzes and dolerites (see Pitts 1996 for a much fuller interrogation of the different stones used in axe production). 23 Interestingly flint axes often do not travel nearly as far from their mines as their stone counterparts do from their point of origin (Pitts 1996, 324). 24 This notion both builds on and expands the way in which Andrew Jones has referred to objects as ‘physical memories’ (2007, 225).

5 WHAT COULD A DEAD NEOLITHIC BODY DO?

In south Wiltshire around 3650 cal bc, a mortuary chamber was constructed in which people’s remains were deposited (Ashbee 1966; Bayliss et al. 2020, figure 16; Wysocki et al. 2007; Figure 5.1). Over the next 25 years or so both whole and partial bodies, some recently dead, others perhaps who had died some time ago, were brought to the site (Wysocki et al. 2007, 80). Towards the back of the chamber, close to a pit (the first of three, which may have held a linear arrangement of posts), long bones were stacked together in an ordered fashion, with skulls and partial elements of the cranium laid out along the side of these piles. Following a thin linear spread of children’s bones, another bundled stack was located, less ordered than the first. These bones overlaid the second pit. At least one bone from this group came from an individual also represented in the deposit at the back of the structure. On the other side of this pit two partially articulated bodies were present that were deliberately assembled from the parts of four different people. In total, at least 34 people including 26 adults and 8 children were interred (Wysocki et al. 2007, 67). The third pit, which was probably associated with an extension of the construction, was located at the end of the mortuary structure, overlain by a cattle skull. The structure itself was contained within a trapezoidal timber revetment and, after it had gone out of use, it was covered by a flint cairn. In the years around 3630 cal bc two large ditches were dug and a mound raised over the site, infilling the timber revetment (Wysocki et al. 2007, 80; cf. Bayliss et al. 2020), a burning event probably happened at the same time (Wysocki et al. 2007, 81). Excavated in 1957 by Paul Ashbee (1966), this site is known today as Fussell’s Lodge. It has played a key role in how archaeologists have understood this period: it has been seen as a place for the deposition of a generalised collective of ancestors (e.g. Shanks & Tilley 1982); a locale where relational ideas of personhood were cited (Fowler 2001); and a monument which demonstrates the evidence of the importance of cattle in Early Neolithic Britain (Banfield 2018; Ray & Thomas 2003).

112  Assembling Neolithic Britain 0

N 0

1

1

2

2 3

3 Flint Cairn

4

Burials 4 5

1

5

6 6 0

5

15m

Flint Cairn Burials

FIGURE 5.1 (A) Plan of Fussell’s Lodge, after Wysocki et al. 2007, 66, figure 1. (B) Plan of

the funerary deposits at Fussell’s Lodge, after Wysocki et al. 2007, 68, figure 2 Source: Both redrawn by Mark Hoyle.

Bodies  113 The motuary deposits

N Primary Mortuary Structure

Pit A

Axial: regular; ordered; multiple Bone Groups A1

Chalky, clean Some subaerial weathering Low frequencey hand/foot

A2 Scattered skull fragements from one child

Conjoining fragments

Diagonal: unordered; multiple sequence; charred bones, green bone fragments, main deposits.

Bone Group B

Reddish soil, clogged Some subaerial weathering Low frequency hand/foot

Pit B Secondary extension Single individual: recorded + fragments

Bone Group C

Bone Group D ?Composite skeleton: from two individuals

Dark soil, very root-etched High frequency hand/foot

Very root-etched High frequency hand/foot

Ox skull

Pit C

0

Ox skull: dark soil Very root-etched

2m

FIGURE 5.1 (Continued)

Perhaps three or four centuries later, between 3350 and 3100 cal bc (Jay et al. in Loveday & Barclay 2010, 128), an intact human body was deposited in a limestone cist on a ridge in the Peak District in Derbyshire (Figure 5.2). An antler macehead was placed behind the knees, and a number of artefacts piled behind the head. This included two boar’s tusks, two kite shaped arrowheads, two lozenge shaped spearheads, two partially polished flint axes, two edge-polished flint knives and three pieces of red ochre (Loveday & Barclay 2010, 109). On top of this pile was placed a small drinking cup. Whilst some of the grave goods parallel examples in Yorkshire, the macehead is the only local example in a burial and the small cup is

114  Assembling Neolithic Britain

FIGURE 5.2 

Neolithic Burial at Liffs Low

Source: By Thomas Bateman; courtesy of Museums Sheffield.

unique (Loveday & Barclay 2010, 117; cf. Jones 2012, 172–3). Excavated in 1843 by Thomas Bateman, this burial is known today as Liffs Low. Archaeologists have tended to see the site as evidence for the growing importance of individual power and prestige in the Middle Neolithic (e.g. Loveday & Barclay 2010, 121). Our third example takes us further north once again, this time into Perthshire in Scotland. Here, for perhaps a century or so between 2950 and 2850 cal bc, cremated human bodies were deposited (Hamilton in Noble & Brophy 2017, 224). The site in question would later feature a monument complex including henges, a timber circle, a palisaded enclosure and a penannular enclosure (Noble & Brophy

Bodies  115

FIGURE 5.3 Excavation

of a cremation deposit that has been placed in a small cut feature within Forteviot henge 1, Perth and Kinross

Source: Copyright: SERF Project and University of Glasgow.

2017, 213). The deposition of cremated remains predated these (Noble & Brophy 2017). In total the cremated remains of 18 people have been recovered from a variety of contexts. Some of the bodies seem to have represented the complete set of burnt remains, others only partial amounts (Leach in Noble & Brophy 2017, 221). Alongside the cremated remains, 16 fragments of worked bone pins were also recovered, which appear to have been burned along with the bodies. Excavated by Kenneth Brophy and Gordon Noble between 2007 and 2010, this site is known today as Forteviot (Figure 5.3). Archaeologists have seen this site, and others like it, as potentially revealing the importance of certain people, or groups of people, at this time, and as central to how new kinds of places were constructed at the turn of the third millennium cal bc (e.g. Noble  & Brophy 2017; Parker Pearson et al. 2009).

Introduction These three brief vignettes capture the standard ways archaeologists conceptualise changes in Neolithic burial practice. In the Early Neolithic, narratives often concentrate on the disarticulated and fragmented dead. Sometimes this involves excarnation, sometimes secondary burial, with parts being placed into pits, rivers, caves or other features. More commonly, human remains in monuments may

116  Assembling Neolithic Britain

simply have been disturbed as new bodies were added, as at chambered tombs like Hazleton North, Oxfordshire (Saville et al. 1990).1 The emphasis on identity here has focused on the corporate nature of these burials, stressing ancestry and forms of personhood that are partible and divisible rather than individual (e.g. Barrett 1994; Edmonds 1999; Fowler 2001; Shanks & Tilley 1982; Thomas 1999). In the Middle Neolithic, narratives emphasise single burial. Sometimes seen as a primarily northern phenomenon, centred on Yorkshire (e.g. Harding 1997), we actually find Middle Neolithic single burials in many parts of the country. In some narratives these are powerful individuals, elites, perhaps associated with cursus monument complexes, whose control is expressed in their lavish burials with the ‘prestige goods’ we discussed in the last chapter (Loveday 2002, 2006, 2009). In the Late Neolithic, cremation has been the main focus of archaeological interpretation. From examples like Forteviot, via the multiple cremations deposited at sites like Dorchester-uponThames, Oxfordshire, Duggleby Howe, Yorkshire, and Stonehenge, Wiltshire, this form of burial dominates narratives of this period. Here the themes of power and ancestry come together; Stonehenge, for example, is interpreted as the burial place of a powerful family who then formed an ancestral community, legitimating the power of the living (Parker Pearson 2012). Whilst this linear sequence (fragmentation – whole burial – cremation) dominates our narratives, archaeologists are fully aware that reality is more complex. There are cremation burials from the Early Neolithic across Britain (Ray & Thomas 2018, 116). Indeed, our vignette from Fussell’s Lodge glossed over the cremated remains in the mortuary enclosure’s central pit. Examples are known from the Middle Neolithic too. In turn Late Neolithic cremation cemeteries have been suggested as finishing at 2800 cal bc (Hamilton in Noble & Brophy 2017, 230), some four hundred or so years before the arrival of Beaker burials (Parker Pearson et al. 2019, 426). So cremation isn’t really a Late Neolithic phenomenon either, it’s a Neolithic phenomenon that waxes and wanes. Single burial too is widespread in the Early Neolithic, as we will see. There are also rare examples of Late Neolithic single burials. Archaeologists like Chris Fowler (2010), Frances Healy (2012) and Martin Smith and Megan Brickley (2009) have done much to trace the complexity of burial process in different periods. In this chapter we seek to answer: what could dead Neolithic bodies do? The question is taken from Gilles Deleuze’s (1988) reading of Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza (1996) argued that we cannot know in advance what a body is capable of, what its affects are. In Chapter 3, we defined affect as how bodies press into one another, as bodies’ capacities to affect and be affected (Deleuze 1988, 1990). As briefly mentioned in Chapter 3, Deleuze (1988, 127) develops Spinoza’s concept of affects and what a body can do to argue that bodies can be specified along two dimensions, which he terms latitude and longitude (see also Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 283). The former refers to the affects of which a body is capable, its intensive virtual capacities in the terms we used in Chapter  3 and when discussing materials in Chapter 4. Bodies also have longitude: the specific extensive relations of movement and rest that a body undergoes. By mapping these two aspects, Deleuze (1988, 128)

Bodies  117

argues, we can define what a body can do. All bodies are, of course, assemblages. This means they are heterogeneous, relational and historically specific. Because of this, just as we saw with materials in the last chapter, we cannot start out from a place where we know in advance the affects of which a body is capable. We have to investigate that, empirically and experimentally, on the ground. Given this book’s post-anthropocentric aims, it should be obvious that the term body here is not necessarily referring to humans. Bodies can be animals or plants, the body of a thing, or indeed the body of a building for that matter. These will all appear in this chapter. Nonetheless, our focus will fall, more often than not, on human bodies. This is important because it allows us to tease out what human bodies could do in death, and because, despite important overlaps which we explore later, human bodies were often different to other bodies in Neolithic Britain. Critically, however, this difference emerges in the specific immanent context of this period, through what it was human bodies – living and dead – and the assemblages of which they were part, could do. It does not emerge because of an underlying transcendent humanity. To explore what dead Neolithic bodies could do, this chapter will examine the three processes we have identified: fragmentation, whole burial and cremation. These are not opposed to each other but rather overlap and intermingle as complex elements of assemblages; fragmented bodies can be burnt, cremations are often fragmented and all bodies start off articulated, as we will see at a range of sites (Figure 5.4). By structuring our discussion around processes, however, rather than chronological periods, we can map multiple narratives across the Neolithic and avoid imposing singular blocks of time which we then have to explain the transition between (Crellin 2020). These intermingling processes can be treated as machines for difference making, which allow and insist that difference emerges in the world, and with it new possibilities for what different bodies – human and nonhuman – could do.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Adlestrop Balbridie Banbury Lane Beckhampton Road Cladh Aindreis Cold Kitchen Hill Coldrum Dorchester-upon-Thames Dorset Cursus Dorstone Hill Duggleby Howe Eton Rowing Course

13 Etton 14 Flagstones

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Forteviot Fussell’s Lodge Gatehampton Farm Haddenham Hambledon Hill Hazleton North Knowe of Yarso Liffs Low Llandygái Maiden Castle Monkton-up-Wimborne Nethercourt Farm

27 Pipton 28 Quanterness

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Radley Stanton Harcourt Stonehenge Street House Trumpington Warren Field Wayland’s Smithy 1 West Kennet Whitegrounds Whitesheet Hill Windmill Hill Wor Barrow, Handley Down 26 & 27 41 Wyke Down 1 42 Yarnton

Map of sites discussed in the chapter

Source: Drawn by Donald Sutherland, map outline ©Crown copyright and database rights 2020 ­Ordnance Survey (100025252).

FIGURE 5.4 

118  Assembling Neolithic Britain

Bodies  119

Fragments from antiquity Throughout the Neolithic there were various ways of fragmenting bodies, and the roles they played in the aftermath of fragmentation were equally diverse.2 The concept of fragmentation here both draws on and differs from the version proposed by John Chapman and Bisserka Gaydarska (2007). Whilst recognising it is a critical process, there is no connection here with a specific mode of personhood, or particular analogy drawn (cf. Brittain & Harris 2010). In the Early Neolithic we see fragmentation occurring in the earliest monuments. At Coldrum in Kent, one of the Medway megalithic tombs, bodies were fragmented inside its chambers from the first century of the fourth millennium bc, shortly after the start of the Neolithic (Wysocki et al. 2013; Whittle et al. 2011). One deliberately defleshed skull from the early phase of the monument came from an individual who died violently (Schulting & Wysocki 2005, 113; Wysocki et al. 2013). Later in the site’s history, the process of disarticulation of other individuals was speeded up through the cutting away of ligaments to separate the body into different parts (Wysocki et al. 2013, 67). There is little evidence for exposure here, so it is most likely that the decay took place within the confines of the monument. Cut marks are known on human remains at other sites including chambered tombs and at the causewayed enclosure of Hambledon Hill, Dorset, a site that reveals some of the great variety of ways in which bodies could be processed. Within the excavated part of the site’s central enclosure 42 people have been found in partially fragmented states (Mercer & Healy 2008). The evidence here demonstrates complex ways of fragmenting the dead, including cutting away the flesh, scorching bones, exposure, animals gnawing on bodies and more (McKinley 2008). The involvement of animals here, and at other sites such as the chambered tomb of Adlestrop, might seem, from a Western perspective, to suggest a lack of care for the dead. However, first, as Smith and Brickley (2009, 45) have pointed out, simply leaving animals, whether wild carnivores or domesticated dogs, to have free access to a body over an extended period destroys it beyond all recognition. Therefore, the role of animals in fragmenting the body was carefully limited, and in the case of Adlestrop, at least, came to an end once the bodies were incorporated into the monument (Smith & Brickley 2009, 45). Second, the involvement of animals may have played critical roles in the relationships between groups of humans and the carnivorous non-humans with which they shared the landscape. Once bodies had been fragmented they presented all sorts of opportunities. Within monuments they could be moved around to make room for new bodies, as happened within the mortuary structure underneath one of the Early Neolithic round barrows at Trumpington near Cambridge (Evans et al. 2018).3 Alternatively they could be carefully stacked and organised like the bodies at the back of Fussell’s Lodge, or the cache of vertebra in the northwest chamber of West Kennet in Wiltshire (Piggott 1962), or combined into composite bodies as at the megalithic tomb of Pipton in Wales (Wysocki  & Whittle 2000, 596), or at Fussell’s Lodge once again. At enclosures, bones could be transferred into the ditches, or kept for

120  Assembling Neolithic Britain

a while before being deposited. We know of at least one mandible from a skull at Hambledon Hill that was curated for 40 years or so before being deposited, in the ditch segment adjacent to where its partner cranium was located (Mercer & Healy 2008; Harris 2010). We find occasional bones in river channels and in pits, such as Eton Rowing Course in the Thames valley (Allen et al. 2013, 306–9),4 suggesting that disarticulation could lead to wider movement too. Cave burials also presented opportunities for bodies to be interacted with after death (Peterson 2019). Clearly, in the Early Neolithic fragmenting a body presented a range of potentials from simply moving the surviving parts out of the way, to circulating them around the landscape. Both the process of fragmentation and what followed involved multiple people, places, materials and potentially animals too. These processes continued through the fourth and into the third millennium, as Figure 5.5 demonstrates. Fragmentation was not just limited to humans, of course. Animal bodies would have been fragmented in many contexts, not least for consumption. Just as dogs and various scavengers would have consumed parts of human bodies, so humans consumed animals (Pollard 2004a, 2006, 140). Both played roles in the fragmentation of the other, although it is clear that humans fragmented the bodies of carnivorous animals – that also consumed them – less often than they did domesticated herbivores like sheep, goats, pigs and especially cattle (Pollard 2004a, 62, 2006, 140; Ray & Thomas 2003). These acts of mutual dissection show how engagement with anatomy must have been widespread in comparison to today. Materials like muscle, different organs, sinew and bones would be encountered in human and animal bodies, opening up opportunities for these materials to be compared and contrasted, the similarities and differences encountered empirically. The encounter with these shared materials needs to be understood when we consider how animal bones were treated, for example when cattle skulls were placed in significant positions in monuments, such is in the closing of the mortuary chamber at Fussell’s Lodge or in the butt ends of causewayed enclosure ditches at sites like Windmill Hill (Whittle et al. 1999; cf. Ray & Thomas 2003). Beyond animals, objects too were fragmented both in their production, as we saw with the individuation of flint artefacts in the last chapter, and at the end of their lives. In Chapter 4, we discussed how polished stone axes were deliberately fragmented at sites like the Cambridgeshire causewayed enclosures of Haddenham and Etton (Edmonds 1999, 125; Evans & Hodder 2006; Pryor 1998). Plants too were fragmented, whether in the hazelnuts that were taken away to be eaten, or in the gathering of branches and coppiced poles for making fires and building. Plants offered a differing form of fragmentation as they could be broken into pieces yet

1 2 3 4 5

Coldrum Quanterness Banbury Lane Duggleby Howe Monkton-up-Wimborne

6 7 8 9 10

Flagstones Cuween Stonehenge Wyke Down 1 Maumbury Rings

en te ra nc e

ed

ck

blo

ce

0

?

pit 192 disarticulated human bone

ance entr

10m

antlers in pit

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Middle Neolithic 7

6

2

9

10

5

8

3

4

1

10m

500km

N 0

10

15m

Unexcavated

Wyke Down 1 henge monument 2900-2630 cal BC A skull fragment located in the secondary fills along with Grooved Ware pottery and two cremations Barrett et al 1991

5

Phase 1

Quanterness Passage Grave c. 3400-2350 cal BC 58 people deposited whole then thoroughly fragmented Crozier et al. 2016

0

N

Source: Map drawn by Donald Sutherland, images by Mark Hoyle (after Barrett et al. 1991, 94, figure 3.18; Healy 1997a, 34, figure 22; Renfrew 1979, facing page 62; Yates et al. 2012, 22, fig, 2). Map outline ©Crown copyright and database rights 2020 Ordnance Survey (100025252).

of sites featuring fragmentation in the Middle and Late Neolithic. The sites represented in boxes here are examples, and the map and table provide others. The aim here is not to provide a comprehensive list but to give an illustrative picture (as with Figures 5.7 and 5.11)

FIGURE 5.5 Examples

Flagstones enclosure c.3300-3000 cal BC Child femur deposited with another child burial, in addition the site features two other child burials and an adult cremation. Healy 1997

N

Banbury Lane Enclosure 3360-3100 cal BC 130 individuals, no complete skulls, missing hands and feet bones Yates et al. 2012

antler in outer ditch

tra n

en

N

Bodies  121

122  Assembling Neolithic Britain

survive, with fruits and branches being removed without killing the plant. The capacity to be affected was very different for these plants in the sets of relations in which they found themselves. Architecture could be broken up and fragmented too, as we saw with the axial posts at the Early Neolithic timber hall of Warren Field in the last chapter (Murray & Murray 2009; cf. Barclay & Harris 2017), and so could elements of landscapes both in the production of axes, say, and in the extraction of stone to be incorporated into monuments.

Fragmentation makes a difference: individuating new affective capacities Fragmentation was a critical process that many bodies went through in the Neolithic, and one we may well be underestimating, especially in the periods and regions where collective burial in long barrows or chambered tombs was not practised. What does this mean for Neolithic bodies? What capacities to affect and be affected can we map here? What are the latitudes and longitudes at play? The most obvious point to make is that bodies gain new relational capacities once they become fragmented. For example, they can be in more than one place at one time, changing how they can move through the world. The singular skull fragments found in an Early Neolithic pit or a Late Neolithic monument relate to other bones that are elsewhere. This allows bodies to move after death, but in multiple directions simultaneously. Bodies can also move in time. The burial of part of a body fixes its location, but other elements can be curated and left in circulation like the mandible at Hambledon Hill, deposited 40 years after its companion cranium, discussed previously. Bodies can become part of multiple places, some elements buried in pits, some in monuments, some deposited in rivers or left in other places archaeologists do not encounter them. Of course, this is only a capacity; fragmentation doesn’t have to lead to these, or any other aspect, being played out. Many of the bodies fragmented within chambered tombs were left in these locations, but even here bodies could be rearranged. Skulls could be stacked along walls as at the Orcadian stalled cairn Knowe of Yarso (Henshall 1963, 217–8), or rearranged as we saw at Pipton, Fussell’s Lodge and Trumpington. These were new affective capacities gained through fragmentation, new things that bodies could do. Critically, the process through which these new capacities were gained was one of individuation. As we saw in the last chapter, individuation is the process by which entities become differentiated in the world, that is temporarily bounded and identifiable as a singular thing, with a specific and unique quality to it – a thisness – which leads Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2004, 287) to term them haecceities. The processes of fragmentation that bodies underwent allowed individual body parts to be differentiated from the collective body itself. A skull could emerge as different to its mandible through this process. Of course these parts were never entirely separated from the wholes from which they originated, part of their specificity emerged through their histories, through the memories they could evoke via the texture of their encounters, as people handled and engaged with them, cutting

Bodies  123

flesh and ligaments away, or examining the bones in the dark spaces of a chambered tomb (cf. Harris 2010). Memory here is not located in people’s minds; it is an intensive quality of a relationship that emerges between people and things, an affective capacity that bodies gain through fragmentation and in relation to other, still living, bodies. New affects – changes in latitude – emerge from changes in location and acts of movement – shifts in the longitude of bodies. Memories emerge as people encounter the bones, both memories of the deceased and memories of other encounters with the dead, with other times and places. Given the way fragmentation creates a capacity through which bodies can emphasise their multiplicity – they can be in more than one place and more than one time – memory only adds to that, contracting those links into the encounter with the bones themselves (cf. Deleuze 1991a). Human remains in their fragmented state become a topological technology; they create a moment of temporal collapse where past and future collide, where intensive relations bridge places extensively separated in time or space. Human remains attracted attention – we know this because people handled, washed, cut and cleaned them – and through that attention brought the past (those gone), the future (the death of the people yet to come) and places elsewhere, into stark relief (cf. Seremetakis 1991). Dead bodies are not just bone. Flesh offers other forms of memory and encounter through the capacities it has to engender relations. Flesh can become part of animals through consumption, as happened at Adlestrop (Smith & Brickley 2009), and at Hambledon Hill, revealed by the gnawed ends of a pair of femurs, deposited along with their articulated pelvis in segment 6.1 of the central enclosure (Mercer & Healy 2008, 72). The decay of flesh would have produced sights that would forcibly press themselves into other bodies around them. Leaking fluids would stain the ground of a monument, and the smells, however people and animals responded to them, must have been powerful elements of the chambers at Quanterness on Mainland Orkney, or West Kennet. The ability of flesh to directly enter other substances created sets of consumptive relations that offered a different temporality and form of memory than the bones underneath revealed. Emergent from the complex relational assemblages that Neolithic people, living and dead, formed, memory acts as an ongoing part of daily life. ‘There is no perception that is not full of memory’, as Henri Bergson (1991, 33) puts it. Yet alongside its ebb and flow there would have been moments that brought memories to the fore, which caused them to return overwhelmingly. The sight of a half-decayed loved one, the act of cutting into flesh, the smells in a chambered tomb; these would have created what Noble (2006, 58) calls ‘flashbulb’ memories that could return vividly at similar moments in the future. One way in which human beings and animals experience affect is through emotion, and memories and emotions are closely intertwined (Harris 2009, 2010; Tarlow 2000). Memory is empowered by emotion, the latter gaining meaning through the former. This interrelationship between emotion and memory lent fragmented bodies of the dead power as they were individuated, a power that was bound into parts of the body and allowed them to affect others in new ways. For example, the gathering of 130 bodies and their

124  Assembling Neolithic Britain

expedited disarticulation and deposition in a tightly packed pit at the enclosure of Banbury Lane, Northamptonshire (Yates et al. 2012), would have dramatically shaped that place. Here we can think of affective force erupting in these kinds of assemblages as the outcome of particular forms of individuation. These emerged in specific material encounters and transformed what bodies could do.

Animals, fragments and memories Attending to individuation allows us to think about how other bodies became differentiated in both life and death. Indeed, just as the individuation of human bones created affective material memories so did cattle bones. Whilst we can always speculate why certain cattle were fragmented and deposited in specific ways, in some cases detailed evidence can be uncovered. In particular, the work of Emily Banfield (2018; Banfield et  al. 2019) has revealed an extraordinary story of one specific cow skull interred at the long barrow of Beckhampton Road, Wiltshire. Beckhampton Road has long puzzled archaeologists; it is a long barrow but lacks any human remains (cf. Leary et al. 2020, 7). If long barrows are supposedly primarily funerary sites, why does it lack burials? Although human bones were missing, animal remains were recovered included three cow skulls positioned along the central axis of the monument (Ashbee et al. 1979). The cow at the centre had suffered a depressed fracture of the right frontal bone, almost certainly induced by a significant blunt force trauma delivered by a human being in an attempt to kill it (Banfield et al. 2019, 198; Figure 5.6). What is astonishing is that the cow survived this act of violence, as healing can be seen around the fracture. The blow must have stunned the cow, likely rendering it unconscious, before it arose, seemingly from the dead (Banfield 2018). Its central position in the barrow now becomes explicable; the affective capacities of this particular cow (its latitude) changing where its body moved in both life and death (longitude). Furthermore, it brings the widespread evidence for some human beings in long barrows also having suffered violence (Schulting  & Wysocki 2005; Smith  & Brickley 2009) into relief. One individual buried at Fussell’s Lodge had no less than three healed fractures to the skull (Schulting & Wysocki 2005, 118). Perhaps resilience and strength were affective capacities that both humans and animals needed to embody to be deposited in monuments. The comparison between human and animal bodies, and the similarity between cattle and humans in particular, is even more evident in an example from the 34th century cal bc from Windmill Hill (Whittle et al. 1999; Whittle et al. 2011, 69). Windmill Hill is one of the few causewayed enclosures in use for a long period of time, up to three centuries from its foundations between 3670 and 3635 cal bc (Whittle et al. 2011, 87).5 It was towards the end of its use that a deposit of fragmented remains was laid down in the inner ditch (Whittle et  al. 1999). At the centre of this deposit is the astonishing insertion of a human child’s femur within a cattle humerus, a deposit which has been much noted (Harris 2011; Ray  & Thomas 2003; Whittle et al. 1999). This is undoubtedly striking. It makes a clear

Bodies  125

FIGURE 5.6  Healed

depression fracture to left frontal cattle skull deposit B4 (DZSWS.1965.13.83a), Beckhampton Road long barrow

Source: After Banfield et al. 2019, 199, fig 3. With permission from Wiltshire Museum, Devizes, and Emily Banfield.

126  Assembling Neolithic Britain

and explicit comparison between the leg of a cow and the leg of a child; it reveals the affective capacities that these bodies had in death they did not have in life. As we noted earlier, unless you fragment bodies in this way these comparisons would not be materially available. Here the physical blurring of human and cow reveals a cow-becoming-human-becoming-cow that, like the treatment of cattle remains elsewhere, clearly shows that these relations were central to people’s and animal’s emergence as entities in the world (Banfield 2018). It is one of four close associations at the site between the bones of children and animals (Whittle et al. 1999; cf. Harris 2011). Yet we should look at that deposit one more time. Although the human/cow juxtaposition is striking, in the same location you also have bones of pig, dog, sheep/goat and 55 unidentified bone fragments (Whittle et al. 1999, 110). Whilst the anthropocentric gaze draws the eye to the specific connection with human beings, we actually have a more complex deposit. It is the fragmentation of multiple bodies, the individuation of multiple bones, that have allowed this assemblage to come together in this specific spot, histories of multiple animals bound together. The fact they are located within a monument already centuries old creates links further in time. More than just a statement of human/cattle connections, this deposit is a complex set of relations emerging through the association of multiple elements and multiple animals (longitude), drawing on the affective capacities of individuated and fragmented remains (latitude).

Fragments, affects, bodies: a return to Fussell’s Lodge What then does this discussion tell us? First, fragmentation actually covers a multiplicity of processes that drew both on death’s material effects and on the capacity to intervene in the afterlife of humans and non-humans. Different bodies followed different routes through fragmentation and were brought together with other materials in specific places in specific ways. It is clear, especially in the Early Neolithic where we have the best evidence for fragmentation, that, as Healy (2004) has argued, there were multiple ways of dealing with the body. Public and private decay, animals, people, flints, monuments, rivers, fire: all of these things could be brought to bear, or not, on a particular body. It makes no sense to look at the body as an isolated entity therefore, but rather it needs to be situated within the wider assemblage, and also set in motion, to map the processes of becoming through which different bodies went. In death the capacities of bodies emerge relationally  – just like in life. What you can do varies depending on the relations in which you are caught up. Treatment in death is not just a reflection of conceptions of life, therefore, but rather an engagement with what the body can do. New capacities for movement and rest (longitude) were revealed through fragmentation, and these produced new ways of understanding places and people through the affective relations of memory and power they formed (latitude), and the power these relations had on the people and places they encountered. All of this took place through the processes of

Bodies  127

individuating, assembling and disassembling, of which bodies, human and nonhuman, were part. Yet fragmentation would have been different every time, depending on the body in question, the site at which it took place, the relative involvement of humans and non-humans and so on. This emphasises the specificity of individuation and the haecceities it produces. The death of a body, human or non-human, means you can do different things, new virtual capacities become differentiated. In turn these can be actualised, or differenciated, in the terms we defined in Chapters 3 and 4, through the specific acts of fragmenting the body. The process of fragmentation, repeated body after body, always repeated differently. The outcomes are not standardised but rather follow uncharted paths to uncertain outcomes. People intervened with fire and flint to guide this process, but the material acted back, as did the histories of the person and animal they encountered. The cow at Beckhampton Road that rose from the dead forced itself into a history that humans had not planned. On other occasions people intervened violently to kill other humans, perhaps insisting that their bodies were then treated differently. What caused the treatment of the bodies in the mass deposit at Banbury Lane? We don’t know, but we can recognise the way in which the affective processes of dismembering those corpses, gathering them together and depositing them in that pit differentiated the site, and the people who had done that, from other places and other people. What could a body do, and what can you do to a body? It may be the case that nobody knows what a body can do, as Deleuze (1988, 17) says, but through fragmentation, Neolithic people were very eager to find out. Where does this leave the events that took place at Fussell’s Lodge, described in our opening vignette? How might we think differently about the processes that took place here during the use of the mortuary chamber and the construction of the monument? Fussell’s Lodge saw bodies being brought in from elsewhere, some long dead perhaps. It thus linked these individuated and disarticulated elements to other times and places. The time that passed between death and organisation of some of the bones within the mortuary chamber, estimated by Wysocki et al. (2007, 69) to be at least five to ten years and perhaps significantly more, suggests particular kinds of memory and recall, entwining narratives and stories told by one person to another. The affective relations within the mortuary structure would have included the sights and smells of the rotting dead, emergent through the capacity of bodies to transform. At the same time, these physical changes made new relations and combinations possible. It is only through the fragmentation of the dead that the composite bodies created at Fussell’s lodge could be constructed. Here the material memories emergent from individuated bones were used to assemble new bodies, and with that new memories and new capacities for action. This was not the production of generic ancestors (cf. Shanks & Tilley 1982) or even solely a sense of relational personhood – though relations were clearly critical, and such acts could very well be part of expressing new kinds of personhood. This was an exploration of what makes bodies different to one another. These bodies were not limited to humans; they included cattle as well (cf. Banfield 2018). Indeed, if the

128  Assembling Neolithic Britain

fragmentation of flint paralleled the fragmentation of human bodies, it is noticeable that it was flint that was used to cover the mortuary structure. The sealing and burning of the site, followed by the raising of the barrow, ended the possibility of participating in and altering processes of fragmentation. This was an act of radical deterritorialisation; it separated the contents of the structure from further engagement and stopped a process of individuating bodies and bones within. Still present in the landscape, still shifting and changing, still visible in one sense, the creation of the mound transformed the kinds of difference making that was possible at the site, and with that the affective capacities of the human and animal bodies within.

Keeping bodies intact If fragmentation offered a way of individuating bodies, differentiating elements, forging memories and creating places, it was only one of the three overarching processes we have identified. What new capacities emerge, and what fades away, when we consider the burial of whole bodies? This was a practice that whilst perhaps most common in the Middle Neolithic, first from c. 3400 cal bc and especially between 3100 and 2900 cal bc (Loveday & Barclay 2010), can be found throughout the Neolithic and across the country (see Figure 5.7).6 Like fragmentation, whole burial also covers a range of practices, and there are many examples that bridge the gap between the two. We have already seen how in many chambered tombs, from Hazleton North to Quanterness, whole bodies were deposited within tombs and subsequently fragmented. Other burials too blur the divide. At Windmill Hill an adult male was interred in an open grave, probably between 3650 and 3480 cal bc, and exposed to the elements for a short period of time (Whittle et al. 2011, 77). Here the body was whole, but elements of fragmentation, at least the separation of flesh from bone, would have begun to take place before the grave was backfilled. It is also worth stressing that whole burial is not in opposition to collective burial. An Early Neolithic burial at Nethercourt Farm in Kent saw two bodies interred with a plain pot (Dunning 1966), for example, and at the Middle Neolithic oval barrow at Radley in the Upper Thames valley, two individuals were buried intact with a flint knife and a jet belt slider respectively (Bradley et al. 1992; Barclay &

1 2 3

Yabsley Street Hambledon Hill Whitehawk

9 10 11

Radley Linch Hill Corner Handley Down 26 & 27

17 18 19

4 5 6 7 8

Offham Barrow Hills Nethercourt Farm Windmill Hill Liffs Low

12 13 14 15 16

Alfriston Biggar Ballevulin Duggleby Howe Monkton-up-Wimborne

20 21 22

Whitegrounds Kingstone Lacy Eton Rowing Course Flagstones West Kennet Horton

0

13

20

2

21

18

11 16

7

9

8

10 5

17

19 22

15

3 4

1

12

0

6

500km

flake spall

flake

1m

flake

wood

pot

flake flake

5cm

Yabsley Street Burial 4220-3980 cal BC Body with a large rim of carinated bowl by the head and a flint knife and six other placed flints. Coles et al. 2008

0m

N

knife

sand staining

Whitegrounds 3500-2900 cal BC Single burial of a man with a jet belt slider and Seamer style axe, inserted into an older Neolithic burial monument. Brewster 1984

Examples of inhumation bur ials from the Early, Middle and Late Neolithic

14

Source: Map drawn by Donald Sutherland and images by Mark Hoyle (after Barclay  & Halpin 1999, 32, figure  3.10; Chaffey & Brook 2012, 206, figure 14.5a; Coles et al. 2008, 219, figure 3; Edmonds 1995, 107, figure 78). Map outline ©Crown copyr ight and database r ights 2020 Ordnance Survey (100025252).

FIGURE 5.7

Horton 2840-2490 cal BC 45-55 year old woman buried near Early Neolithic occupation. Chaffee and Brook 2012, 212

Barrow Hills Cemetery 3700-3300 cal BC Three flat graves containing individual bodies, a child, an adult male and an adult female. Two with flints as grave goods. Barclay and Halpin 1999

N

Late Neolithic

Middle Neolithic

Early Neolithic

Bodies 129

130  Assembling Neolithic Britain

Halpin 1999) (Figure 5.8). There are also sites where the processes may have been mixed together. The final body at Hazleton North, for example, the so-called flint knapper, was not fragmented (Saville et al. 1990). The distinction between whole and fragmented burial, therefore, is not about the state of the body when people first encountered it; rather, it is the state when people last encountered it. Whether their final encounter with a body was whole or in parts: it is this distinction that defines this difference, and with it the kinds of relations the bodies could create. Non-human bodies were buried whole too (cf. Cooper et  al. 2020, 141–2). With our post-anthropocentric approach to bodies, the most prominent examples are grave goods, but once we think of material things as bodies too, other examples come to mind. At causewayed enclosures like Hambledon Hill, as we saw in the last chapter, and Etton, for example, we see the complete burial of pots in pits and specific ditch segments (Smith 2008, 588–9; Pryor 1998, 33). The latter site also saw complete axe blades deposited as well, notably in pit F263 (Pryor 1998, 103). Similar deposits of whole pots occur at Late Neolithic sites as well. One example is the probable deposit of a complete Grooved Ware pot in a pit at Stanton Harcourt (Bradley  & Lambrick 2004, 43). Deposition of whole artefacts into rivers, such

N

Disturbance by Grubenhaus

F 2143 Belt slider

Polished knife

0

FIGURE 5.8 

The double burial at the Radley oval barrow

Source: After Bradley et al. 1992, 133, figure 5, redrawn by Mark Hoyle.

1m

Bodies  131

as antler maceheads (Loveday et al. 2007; Simpson 1996), may well also parallel the deposition of human remains in similar contexts. Clearly, the affective consequences of non-human bodies being deposited whole were not identical to those of people, but nonetheless this still prevented the circulation and encounter with pot sherds and axe fragments that might otherwise have happened. Indeed, given that these objects were still entirely functional, then other affective elements may have been at play. As we saw in the last chapter, depositing artefacts that were still usable put their latent potential out of human reach; it located their virtual capacities in a specific place. With axes, specifically following our discussions in Chapter 4, we can imagine how separating these ‘territorial signs of desire’, to quote Deleuze and Guattari (2013, 175) again, would have had significant impact on the wider assemblages of which they had been part. Alongside people and things, we can identify occasional whole animals being buried too, especially at causewayed enclosures. At Windmill Hill complete skeletons of two dogs, a cow, a goat and a pig were interred (Grigson 1999, 189; Morris 2011, 28), a lamb was discovered at Whitesheet Hill, Wiltshire (Morris 2011), and complete dog skeletons were recovered from the Stepleton enclosure of Hambledon Hill (Mercer & Healy 2008, 215), and Maiden Castle, Dorset (Morris 2011, 28). At the long barrow of Cold Kitchen Hill, Wiltshire, a complete dog was deposited surrounded by four red deer antlers and two halves of a cattle mandible (Banfield 2018, 117; Pollard 1993, 132). The aim is not to equate these and other animal burials with humans in a direct manner – that is, to claim they are the same. Rather, it is to recognise that outside of the opposition of humans and animals we can begin to consider these in new ways. Not merely ‘sacrifice’, these animals take on their own significance, they make their own differences. The fact they are rare also suggests that such burials took place under very specific circumstances. One final example of whole burials is worth mentioning, the burial of structures. Long barrows often cover structures of different kinds. These can be open structures, like Wor Barrow on Cranborne Chase in Dorset, or the wooden boxes known from Haddenham long barrow in Cambridgeshire (Evans & Hodder 2006). They can be the post defined, as at Fussell’s Lodge, or at the long barrow of Wayland’s Smithy 1. At times the structures can be complex, as at Street House in Yorkshire, where a mortuary structure was associated with a very elaborate façade (Vyner 1984; Sherlock 2019, 2021). As Chris Fowler (2010, 12) has noted these structures, containing the bones of the dead, may themselves have been seen as a composite body (cf. Thomas 2013). Just as with the bodies they contained, the burial of many of these structures caused their relations to be irrevocably changed, and with that their capacities to affect and be affected.7

Whole burial: locating power, memory and affect Let us explore what it was whole burials could do in more detail. Deleuze (Deleuze & Parnet 2002, 39) urges us to start in the middle, so let’s start here with Middle Neolithic burials. We have already described Liffs Low, a classic single

132  Assembling Neolithic Britain

burial complete with a set of paired grave goods, an antler macehead and topped off with a unique pottery vessel. One of the most famous Middle Neolithic burials, it stands at the head of a wider tradition where individuals were interred with grave goods, often knives or jet belt sliders. One site that forms an interesting contrast with this, however, is the Neolithic round barrow of Duggleby Howe. Rather than one interment, this site features a series of single burials stretching through from the end of the Early to the start of the Late Neolithic (Loveday 2002; Gibson et al. 2009).8 The burials at Duggleby Howe began with the digging of a central grave, probably between 3555 and 3415 cal bc (Gibson et al. 2009, 68). Within this a series of four burials of human and non-human bodies were interred sequentially (see Table 5.1 for a summary). The first was made up of a young adult, buried with decorated bowl pottery, flint flakes and two flint cores; they died in the 35th

TABLE 5.1 The inhumation burials at Duggleby Howe that are certain or highly likely to

be Neolithic; all dates and data from Gibson et al. 2009 and Loveday 2002 (see also endnote 11) Burial

Age/ Sex

Grave goods

Date

K

Young adult, sex uncertain

Two flint cores, nine flint flakes and fragments of decorated pottery None

3520–3490 (cal bc) 31% probability or 3465–3415 (37% probability) 3445–3370 cal bc (68% probability)

None

3380–3360 cal bc (68% probability) 3335–3275 cal bc (68% probability)

I (accompanied by Mature male (J skull J) is young adult, possibly female) H 4 years old G

C

D F E B A

Mature male

antler macehead, one lozenge-shaped arrowhead and an edge-polished adze 3015–2895 cal bc One bone pin, 13 Mid-adult male, (95% probability) flint flakes, six original report transverse and estimates at 50 years oblique arrowheads, old 12 boars’ tusks, two beaver incisors Mature adult Polished flint knife 2925–2890 cal bc (68% probability) 9–10 year old None 2880–2800 cal bc (68% probability) 10–11 years old None 2815–2735 cal bc (66% probability) 6–10 years old None Did not survive for dating Infant None Did not survive for dating

Bodies  133

century cal bc (Gibson et  al. 2009, 71) probably contemporaneously with the opening of the burial pit. The burial of a mature male accompanied by a separate skull followed this. Both this burial and the skull showed signs of trauma. The next burial in this sequence was of a four-year-old child. The archaeological evidence and the radiocarbon dating suggest these burials were not contemporary. The second burial took place ‘in the generations around 3400 cal BC’ with the child burial following that some 30 or 40  years later (Gibson et  al. 2009, 71). The final burial at the very top of the grave was a mature male. This individual was interred perhaps 60 or 70 years later again, around 3300 cal bc, with an antler macehead, a lozenge shaped arrowhead and an edge polished adze (Gibson et al. 2009, 49). There is then a significant break of perhaps between 145 and 355 years9 before the next set of burials were interred around 3000 cal bc (Gibson et al. 2009, 68). This began with the burial of a mature man in a shallow grave accompanied by a bone pin, 13 flint flakes, transverse and oblique arrowheads, 2 beaver incisors and 12 boar’s tusks (Loveday 2002). Perhaps a century later another burial was laid on the ground surface, accompanied by a polished knife (Gibson et al. 2009). This burial overlaid both the older grave cuts and must have been swiftly covered by the first phase of the barrow mound. Two child burials were later inserted into the mound above the initial grave cut, and two further children were inserted above the second grave. The former date to the Late Neolithic, and the latter presumably do too.10 In addition to these complete burials (ignoring the lone skull), the site also features disarticulated material in the form of three parcels containing animal and in two cases human remains as well. Further the mound contained 53 cremation burials, which also date to the Late Neolithic (discussed later), three of which were associated with bone pins (Gibson et al. 2009, 49). The initial mound, which covered the burials and contained the cremations, was sealed by 30 cm of clay and then covered by a second chalk mound almost 3 m thick11 (Figure 5.9). A site like Duggleby Howe has long been associated with power, in the generic sense, going back to the original excavator Mortimer (e.g. 1905, 41). In his e­ ssential re-analysis of the burials, Roy Loveday (2002) argued that most of them represent the outcome of human sacrifice accompanying the death of a notable ruler. Although at the time of writing Loveday did not have access to the radiocarbon dates setting out a longer chronology, his analysis represents the most explicit statement of a position where, whether themselves noble or ‘downtrodden’ (e.g. ­Gibson et  al. 2009, 73), the burials at Duggleby Howe, and indeed Middle Neolithic ­burials with grave goods more generally, reveal the emergence of a ruling class of individuals (Harding 1997; Loveday 2006; Loveday & Barclay 2010). Without denying the potential for differential power to emerge, here I want to take a different tack and focus on the questions this chapter poses: what could the bodies of humans and non-humans interred at Duggleby Howe do? To answer this question we can begin by approaching Duggleby as an assemblage; it gathers in different elements to it: bodies, objects, parts of animals, earth and binds them into a specific place in the landscape. It is interesting to note that isotopic analysis demonstrates that none of the people buried at Duggleby grew up

134  Assembling Neolithic Britain

FIGURE 5.9 

The mound at Duggleby Howe

Source: Photo by author.

on the chalk geology where the site is located (Montgomery et al. 2007, 71), and the first person interred may have come from as far afield as Western Cornwall, the Hebrides, the Paris Basin or even Denmark (Gibson et al. 2009, 73). This was an assemblage that gathered distant places and brought them together in a single location. Power was certainly a critical element of this assemblage. The last of the burials in the central grave pit was interred with non-human bodies that connected that person to highly skilled moments of production, in the well-crafted edge polished adze, as well as other kinds of places and animals in the antler macehead. In the last chapter, we saw how these objects emerged from flows of desire. If we conceptualise power as another register of these intensive flows, we can imagine how these powers become folded into the specially worked artefacts buried with this individual. As we saw in Chapter 3, power isn’t a possession from this perspective, it isn’t something a person has or doesn’t have; instead it is a particular quality of relationships (Crellin et al. 2021, chapter 8). Not merely power over, as it is traditionally understood, the gathering of these artefacts reveals a positive side to power, a power to (Foucault 1977; Thomas 2002). This site shows how power can become territorialised, made materially manifest, through the artefacts at Duggleby, and at the monument itself, as we will see. The second rich burial brought other connections – via the arrowheads, boars’ tusks and the beaver’s teeth – to hunting practices and specific landscape locations. These again may have lain off the chalk where the individual grew up. Once more, if we think about each of these objects as emerging from flows of desire, then this powerful pre-personal force becomes bounded and located in this specific place.

Bodies  135

The power of Duggleby Howe emerges through the flows of affect and desire that were temporarily paused in the bodies of people and things deposited at the site. The burial of a body with objects is more than just the burial of a human body alone. This seems obvious, yet the tradition of writing about ‘powerful’ individuals and their grave goods reduces one set of bodies, the non-humans, to mere symbols: representations whose role in history is to signal – whether to the mourners at a funeral or the archaeologist doing the excavation – the power and prestige of the human they accompany. This hardly fits our post-anthropocentric narrative. Instead, therefore, we can approach the interment of bodies and things together as making an assemblage that is more than the sum of its parts, we can amplify the connections and potentials once we appreciate that power is a ­relational dynamic of affect and desire that flows through people and things. It is here that deposition changes things. Bodies and their affects (latitude) are tied to relations of movement and rest (longitude), but deposition fixes those movements to a single place. The bodies, human and non-human, though still changing and shifting in the ground, become cut-off from the wider possibilities of movement and transformation that occurred before. Rather than power becoming personified in the burial of people with these artefacts, then, it instead becomes emplaced through the way it changes what it is that bodies  – human and non-human  – can do. Personified power would see the movement of objects continue rather than halt, for the flow and flux of affect to shift, not remain static. Jan Harding (1997, 285) noted this importance of power and place with burials of this kind, but where for him this represented the how the ‘authority and power of specific groups and individuals became embedded in the landscape’, here I argue it is the place itself from which power emanates and becomes distributed. The archaeological emphasis on power at Duggleby has always seen the humans as the ultimate source of power, whereas here, power flows through things, humans and places and emerges from the specific history of their relations. In effect power emerged through stratification, in Deleuze and Guattari’s (2004) terms, through being laid down and firmly territorialised in ways that would become difficult to shift.12 Some of the people buried at Duggleby may well have wielded political power when they were alive, including the two who had richly furnished burials. But the potentially violent deaths of the second burial in the main grave, and the person from whom the lone skull originated, suggest that there are complex relations at play here, ones that cannot be reduced to easy models of hierarchy (cf. Thomas 2002). The human bodies are undoubtedly powerful, and so were the material bodies that accompanied them. Yet had power operated as we traditionally imagine, then both sets of bodies would have offered a critical resource that could have continued to be manipulated had they not been buried, just as human remains did when bodies were fragmented. Instead, these bodies were put away, covered and fixed into a single location. We thus move away from a position which sees the proof of a hierarchal society in Middle Neolithic Britain as revealed in the grave goods that represented that power; we can instead suggest that the act of burying whole humans and non-humans together was a way of contributing to the production of new forms of power, a point we return to in Chapter 6.

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The emplacement of power at Duggleby is emphatically emphasised by the relations of memory that are emergent throughout its history. This is a locale to which people returned episodically, a place that affected the bodies of the living at specific moments. The first sequence of burials lasts for 150 years or so and then a more significant gap takes place before the second set of burials begins. Here the power of the site means that burials are repeated, but each one repeated differently; it was through these repeated acts of differentiation that the site emerged, the place where one person AND another, AND another, AND another were buried. This recursive repetition produced memory and myth, terms which allow affects to flourish. Stories were remembered and other things forgotten, but the place itself remained critical.13

Remembering to forget Affective forces cut two ways – however, the capacity to affect always being accompanied by the capacity to be affected – and all assemblages have tendencies towards territorialisation and deterritorialisation. For memory this means that the capacity to remember is always accompanied by the capacity to forget (Rowlands 1999). How might this relate to certain aspects of whole burials? To consider that, let us turn to another Middle Neolithic site, Monkton-up-Wimborne, Dorset.

Memory at Monkton-up-Wimborne Monkton-up-Wimborne is not easily classified. Dating to between 3500 and 3100 cal bc (Budd et al. 2003), it was constructed in a landscape of extended grassland just to the south of the 9.8 km long Dorset Cursus. It is made up of a circle of 14 oval pits with wide entrances to both the east and the west (Green 2000, 77, 2007). In the centre of the monument, a huge pit was cut into the chalk, 11 m wide and 1.5 m deep (Green 2000, 78). In the side of this pit a grave was dug containing a multiple burial made up of an adult woman aged 30–45 years, and three juvenile individuals between five and ten years old (McKinley 2007, 373). The grave was covered by a large block of chalk surrounded by smaller lumps of same material, ensuring the burial was concealed with great care (Green 2007, 116). The bodies thus appear to have been deliberately hidden behind the chalk wall. Relations here were forcibly cut off. Within the monument, the hidden bodies contrasted with the other events that took place, including the digging of the 7 m deep shaft dug into the south side of the central pit, after the bodies had been buried, and the construction of a chalk platform around this (Green 2007, 116). Inside the shaft a variety of items were deposited beginning with the bones of a butchered piglet along with a sandstone ball and three animal vertebrae (Green 2000, 82). Close to these was a large decorated chalk block (Green 2007; cf. Jones & Cochrane 2018, 157–8; Jones & DíazGuardamino 2019a). Within the outer ring of pits at Monkton-up-Wimborne people could have stood and observed the performances on the chalk platform.

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Indeed people may well have got close to the action, packing in to the central pit, polishing the chalk floor with the movement of their feet (Green 2007, 121). As the shaft filled in there are repeated moments of deposition that mimic earlier elements including worked chalk fragments (Jones & Cochrane 2018, 157). Such actions must have rendered Monkton-up-Wimborne a rich resource for memory, a place replete with potential-for-recall, a virtual past, which could be actualised through encounter as people visited the site once again. It may seem counter-intuitive, therefore, to suggest that it is possible that these actions did not commemorate the four people buried there, as Andrew Jones and Andrew Cochrane (2018, 158) argue, but rather facilitated their forgetting. Nonetheless, whilst different people may have continued to remember of the dead (cf. Mizoguichi 1993, 225), the bodies were not referred to in the future rites and they remained hidden, as Martin Green has argued (2000, 79). The hidden nature of the grave, the care with which the chalk was packed in, suggests that the burial here may have become deterritorialised from the wider assemblages of people’s lives. Monkton-up-Wimborne the site was not, but the burial itself was. The power of the other active performances overcoded the memories associated with the people themselves. Fragmentation of the body allowed people to continue to engage with the dead, to involve them in assemblages of the living. In turn, prominent single burials tied those memories and affective flows to a singular place, transferring power and memory to that locale. In contrast, then, burials in places that were already affectively potent may have helped to deterritorialise and deny the force of affect. The power and impact of certain deaths, like the four people at Monkton-up-Wimborne, could have generated profound emotional responses to which forgetting rather than remembering was the desired response. Desire here is not about the feelings of individual people for things they lack, as we saw in Chapter 4, but about a pre-personal force that flows through the assemblages and helps to form subjectivities (Deleuze  & Guattari 2013). Desire precedes power, but both are fundamentally affective (Deleuze 2007, 125). The possibilities for subjectivity that this site offered the living did not include engaging with these bodies. This process was not confined to a site like Monkton-up-Wimborne, and indeed can be detected at a range of Early, Middle and Late Neolithic sites. Most obviously, these reflections allow us to think more about the four child burials at Duggleby Howe we encountered earlier. The construction of Duggleby as both burial site and mound created a sense of emplaced memory, I argued, where the intensive affects associated with the bodies of the dead and the bodies of powerful objects were tied to a specific location. In one sense, the child burials could enhance this, but we could equally see them as more closely tied to forgetting, the dissolution of these people into a pure past, rather than a specific set of memories (Deleuze 1991a). If a site like Duggleby Howe, which had existed for perhaps 500  years or more by the time the first child was interred there (Gibson et  al. 2009), was already replete with the virtual affective capacity to generate memories,

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then the burial of the children allowed their specific relations to be absorbed by the wider connections of the monument. As we saw in Chapter 3, Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 560) comment that deterritorialisation often leads to reterritorialisation. That means that elements that leave one assemblage usually become part of another. The adult burials at Duggleby Howe became separated from mobile communities but reterritorialised as part of the emplaced memories of the site; when bodies were fragmented they could become reterritorialised in a host of different places. With these child burials whilst physical elements of them remained part of the mound, other parts became deterritorialised in a more absolute way and located outside of memory. As noted, other examples abound. At Hambledon Hill the only two complete burials in the central enclosure were of children (Harris 2010) (Figure  5.10). Both were buried in adjacent ditch segments with grave goods and under flint cairns, but more than 170 years apart (Mercer & Healy 2008). This might seem to offer a classic example of the working of memory – people remembering the first child – but could equally inform us that this part of the site and this way of burying these kinds of people remained appropriate so the individuals could be forgotten. The other 42 individuals from the central enclosure were all disarticulated. Child burials are two of the three whole burials known from Windmill Hill (Whittle et al. 1999), a site that like Hambledon Hill was full of busy activities – feasting, consuming, trading and more. At the chambered tomb of West Kennet, eight children were inserted into the monument through the Middle and Late Neolithic (Bayliss et al. 2007). A final example from a causewayed enclosure comes from Gatehampton Farm, Oxfordshire, where a child burial was dated to 3100–2980 cal bc, at least 500 years after the enclosure was constructed (Whittle et  al. 2011, 407). In each of these cases the choice to bury children in places alive with either practices in the present or memories of the past suggests particular responses to these specific deaths.14 Whilst certainly not true of most children during the Neolithic, this still provides us with examples of how specific bodies required specific forms of treatment, how the location of bodies (longitude) shaped their ability to affect the world (latitude). This may also relate to the consequences of violence on bodies in the Neolithic, something we will encounter in the next chapter.

A return to Liffs Low Whole burials, especially with grave goods, have long been associated with ideas of power and hierarchy in Neolithic Britain (and indeed beyond). Liffs Low is seen as the classic example: a Neolithic burial of a rich individual who may have held unparalleled political power. Here I  have tried to take that singular argument and transform it into a multiplicity. Rather than a human individual holding power, we see the gathering of powerful bodies, human and non-human, bound into place. At Liffs Low this included the unique pottery vessel, which would have stood out as a remarkable object, memorably described by Jones as an

Bodies  139

(a)

(b)

FIGURE 5.10 

The child burials at Hambledon Hill (a) Segment 17; (b) Segment 18

Source: After Mercer & Healy 2008, 103, figure 3.34, redrawn by author.

140  Assembling Neolithic Britain

‘improvised performance with clay’ (2012, 173). Its particular form stood out as something different, something which may have bound in connections perhaps over considerable distances (Loveday & Barclay 2010, 121–2). Alongside this, the antler macehead entwined memories of hunting with the affective power of the deer from which it came. The paired artefacts in turn speak to specific sets of repeated relations, doubling down on the connections and relations embedded in each (Loveday & Barclay 2010, 120–1). The emergence of powerful places in turn helped to structure remembering and forgetting. At other contemporary sites this could lead to the locale attracting burials of other people, sometimes to remember them, sometimes to forget. Power is not simply something that a person wields over others; it is a particular register of intensity. It emerges through and alongside the intensive flows of desire and affect that structure worlds. Whole burials create new ways of empowering place but also seal off the interred bodies – whether those bodies are humans that might otherwise be fragmented, objects that might be worked with, animals that might be eaten or structures that might be entered. This radically changes the affective capacities of bodies, transforming what it is that a body can do, and opening up new possibilities for action in the future whilst foreclosing others. The person buried at Liffs Low certainly had powerful affects, ones that drew specific artefacts to them and sealed them in the ground, but this operated differently to the events at Duggleby Howe where power, memory and forgetting played out over a far longer sequence. Rather than two pieces of evidence for Neolithic hierarchy, these sites instead reveal how the whole burials of humans and nonhumans allowed differential relations of memory to emerge, and through those differences, new kinds of places to come into existence.

Burning bodies The final process of treating bodies we will examine here is cremation. Again, this process offered different possibilities for memory, for bodies to affect and be affected. It revealed different capacities that allowed bodies to interact differently in time and space, and to become something new. Cremations have been predominantly associated with the Late Neolithic, but in fact they represent some of the earliest evidence we have for the period, and can be found at several Early and Middle Neolithic sites (see Figures 5.11 and 5.12), and indeed in the Mesolithic as well. Less than a 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Cladh Aindreis Pitnacree Yarnton Brightlingsea St Albans Sale’s Lot Ascott-under-Wychwood

8 Hazleton North

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

West Kennet Fussell’s Lodge Wold Newton Flagstones Eton Rowing Course Milton Ham Imperial College Sports Ground 16 Forteviot

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Cairnpapple Hill Llandygái Sarn-y-Bryn-Caled Wyke Down 1 Bidford-on-Avon Dorchester-upon-Thames Duggleby Howe

24 Stonehenge

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Imperial College Sports Ground 3150-3040 cal BC (Hamilton in Noble and Brophy 2017, 232) Seven cremations of adults and children across a double ring ditch and a separate penannular ring ditch. Powell et al. 2015

Undated

Roman

Late prehistoric field system

Middle Bronze Age

Middle - Late Neolithic

Cairnpapple Hill 3350-3020 cal BC. Timber/stone circle later surrounded by a henge monument. 13 cremations recovered in or close to the stone / postholes along with two Late Neolithic bone pins. Barclay 1999

10

Examples of Early, Middle and Late Neolithic cremation sites

1

Source: Map drawn by Donald Sutherland and images by Mark Hoyle (after Barclay 1999, 33, figure 13; Barclay & Harris 2017, 223, figure 15.1; Jones et al. 2018, figure 4; Powell et al. 2015, figure 2.9). Map outline ©Crown copyright and database rights 2020 Ordnance Survey (100025252).

FIGURE 5.11 

Yarnton c. 3800 cal BC (for the hall cremations) 3655-3535 cal BC (for the cremation in a pit) Potential Neolithic timber hall with cremated human remains in four of the postholes, in one case mixed with cremated pig bones. A separate cremation of a possible adult woman was later deposited in a nearby pit. Hey et al. 2016

0

Bidford-on-Avon 0 10 20m 2925-2750 cal BC Two pit circles and two ring ditches featuring 11 cremation deposits. Jones et al. 2018

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142  Assembling Neolithic Britain

FIGURE 5.12  The

cremation under Cladh Aindreis in Swordle Bay, Ardnamurchan, Scotland

Source: Photo by author.

‘significant innovation’ (contra Brophy et al. 2018, 87) in the Late Neolithic, then, cremation was a way of treating the dead body that had earlier been temporally sporadic but geographically widely practised. It may also be underrepresented if cremated bodies were not being deposited in monuments. Between 3100 and 2800 cal bc, however, the practices that surround cremation change, and we see more of them (although still not huge numbers) and the appearance of a number of cremation cemeteries around Britain (Noble & Brophy 2017). This, clearly, is a significant moment.

Cremations as assemblages: burning the non-human To commence our more detailed discussion of cremation, let us begin with nonhumans. The reason to start here is that whilst processes of fragmentation and whole burial could be applied to non-humans, with cremation one set of nonhumans are always involved: trees. In the last chapter we discussed the importance of wood in Neolithic Britain. Trees would have been one of the defining features of the landscape, but the act of clearing them would have also been critical at different points in time. As we discussed, the act of felling trees that were centuries old on occasions, and others that people had watched grow, would have been significant. In turn, the emergence of material from these acts would have created both a resource on the one hand and a substance that had to be processed, potentially in particular ways (Ray & Thomas 2018, 72).

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The act of cremation transformed the bodies involved. This could have involved the selection of known trees of specific types, they may even have been named. In addition, the pyre would have been specifically structured with different parts of the trees placed in different positions, and perhaps other elements being added throughout the proceedings. The act of cremation would further have been enhanced by the effort required to gather the trees together, to move them from one location to another, as Joanna Brück (2009) has pointed out in a Bronze Age context. The gathering of multiple elements, and their arrangement into a particular configuration, would have been a powerful element of how specific places in the landscape emerged, and not just the place of cremation itself. As we saw in Chapter 4, trees focused and structured the landscape; their presence, and critically their absence, would have changed and transformed the world. The increasing openness of the Late Neolithic landscape, when cremation was at its peak, would only have enhanced this. We can understand the Neolithic landscape far better if we see trees not simply as backdrop, appearing at the edges of fields of wheat, but rather as critical actors (Noble 2017). Here then the act of cremation was an event that rippled across the landscape. In the last chapter we saw how the movement of trees (and indeed stone) created not only extensive paths of relations but also topological links that bent and folded places together. With cremation, the topological consequences of gathering folded different places, human and non-human bodies into a single fire. Fire deterritorialised the specificity of different trees – the places they came from could no longer be identified; instead, they registered as sights and sounds, and specific kinds of species-dependent smells. In the aftermath a new substance, an assemblage of charcoal and other materials, was produced through the intensive and affective heat of the fire. At many Neolithic sites cremations are well sorted, with the bone deliberately removed from the charcoal, showing that after this act of transformation tree and human bodies could be separated again, but this is not always the case. The Early Neolithic cremation at Cladh Aindreis was a mixture of charcoal and human bone, and at least one cow’s tooth.15 Here the burial was of animal, human and tree remains together, at a spot that was immediately transformed into a larger burial monument. The burning of the trees and the human and animal bodies at one locale bound them together, the singular and the multiple merging through the intensive and transformative force of fire (cf. Fahlander 2020; Sørensen & Bille 2008). Cremation could also involve the deliberate burning of different kinds of structures. In Scotland we see the partial burning of some post-defined cursus monuments we discussed in Chapter  4, though Brophy (2015, 198) has convincingly argued such events did not necessarily amount to wholesale destruction. Larger scale burning appears to have happened at a number of timber halls in Scotland, for example at Balbridie and Warren Field (Barclay  & Harris 2017; Thomas 2006). Recently examples of the burnt timber halls have been excavated by Julian Thomas, Keith Ray and their team at Dorstone Hill in Herefordshire. Here three timber halls were constructed, each one later burned down, and then buried under a long barrow – ‘the tomb of the house’ as Ray and Thomas evocatively term it

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(2020, 111), bringing to mind the transformation and funeral of the non-human. Such acts of burning, followed by barrow construction, parallel the example we saw earlier at Fussell’s Lodge. Similarly, other Early Neolithic mortuary structures, including Street House (Vyner 1984) and Haddenham (Evans  & Hodder 2006) were burned and then buried. If tombs such as these represent the community as a whole, as Fowler (2010, 12) has argued, then this can be seen as a way of cremating the community en masse; although clearly this is a community that is made up of both humans and non-humans, a topic we return to in the next chapter. Like the burial of these buildings under mounds, burning these structures played a key role in transforming the relations such places were capable of forming. Material things could be burnt too, sometimes alongside human bodies, most notably the bone pins we see at Forteviot, Stonehenge, Dorchester and Duggleby Howe, amongst other places. No doubt there are a great number of other materials that were placed on pyres that did not survive or were not selected for burial with bodies. Once more, when we broaden out our understanding of bodies to include the non-human we can stretch our understanding of cremation too. Different bodies were being burnt all the time during the Neolithic. Fires burned at night to cook and transform animal bodies, and we see many examples of burnt flint. Plant bodies in the form of hazelnut shells often survive for us to encounter, and there are large amounts of burnt grain at some timber halls from the Early Neolithic, including Balbridie (Ralston 1982). Pottery required larger bonfires to be constructed for the clay to harden and last. This of course might have been combined with the pyres on which bodies were burnt, as Brophy et al. (2018) have pointed out. The affective and mnemonic consequences of a nightly campfire are clearly not equivalent to the destruction of a structure or the burning of a human body. They are less intensive in the energy they required to construct, the heat they gave off or the transformations they wrought. Nonetheless, the recurrence of fire reminds us that burning and change were everyday events in the Neolithic, and the making and remaking of the world required these kinds of actions. Wood would have been at the heart of every blaze, so what we can recognise here is the way in which flames might echo from one context to another, one assemblage to another, a specific element of the world that could be evoked and provoked at certain moments, to achieve certain aims. Another non-human playing a critical role in the Neolithic world, fire forms an intensive rhizomic link between different contexts, one that could emerge through human action, but also through lightning strikes and wildfires.

Cremating human body: process and event What happens when we concentrate on the occasions when human bodies are included in these intensive acts of transformation? Differing treatments of the dead human body create possibilities, they create new capacities to affect and be affected, and cremation is no different. More so than fragmentation, with its emphasis on individuation, or even whole burial with its emphasis on place,

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cremation emphasises the event as well as the broader process (Ray  & Thomas 2018, 224). This claim shifts the emphasis in comparison to some recent writings on cremation. Brophy et  al. (2018, 74), for example, emphasise that cremation would have been a ‘transformative process’, and Jane Downes (1999) draws on ethnographic examples to show how cremations rely upon a whole set of practices including the gathering of sufficient wood, the right witnesses and so on, and so can stretch out over a considerable period of time. This is undoubtedly true, and the processual element should not be ignored.16 However, the spectacle of cremation cannot be underestimated; it would have involved intense heat, and produced sights, sounds and smells as the clothing, flesh and wood burned and scorched the earth. Brophy et al. (2018) rightly emphasise that the experience this would have had on spectators. Even the acts of preparation need to be understood as laden with anticipation of what was to come. There can be no argument that human cremations were transformative for both the living and the dead (Brophy et  al. 2018), but I think there is much to be gained from focusing on the event itself as something operating in the virtual as much as the actual. These events actualised the virtual capacity of bodies to burn, and the capacities for them to transform through intensive, powerful, flows of energy into a different form of material. In a different context, Howard Williams (2004) has written evocatively about the behaviour of the corpse on the pyre, the sounds and movements that emanate, something that modern Western cremations hide from those attending. Similarly, Tim Flohr Sørensen and Mikkel Bille (2008) have discussed the elemental power of fire itself. Whereas fragmentation drew on the human body’s capacity to change over months, cremation drew on its capacity, in conjunction with fire, to transform over the course of a few hours. Whilst no doubt involving practices that both prepared the body and the place for burning, the powerful affects generated by the event of transformation itself would have intensively generated memories, working on people and place in different ways to other forms of funerary practice (Noble 2006). Cremating a body changed its capacities, the event structuring the virtual space of potentials that a body occupies (Deleuze 2015, 58). Like the fragmented bodies we saw at the start of the chapter, cremated bodies could be separated out and be in more than one place at a time. To begin with the flesh had been removed, and perhaps was understood, as Fowler (2008) has argued, as heading towards the sky or otherwise becoming distributed in new ways. The bones too could then be distributed, and the analysis of the weights of cremations from various sites implies this was the case. At Forteviot, for example, the weights of the cremated bone recovered from the different features at the site suggest not all the cremains were being deposited (Leach in Noble & Brophy 2017). This is despite the ‘meticulous levels of care’ that was taken to recover them from the pyre (Leach in Noble & Brophy 2017, 221). Some will have been lost through various post-depositional events, of course, but as with other Neolithic examples like the small deposits in the postholes of the possible timber building at Yarnton (Hey et al. 2017, 645) or the pits forming the henge Wyke Down 1 (Barrett et al. 1991), the likelihood is that different

146  Assembling Neolithic Britain

parts of the body ended up being deposited in different places. In the process they would have been dispersed across the landscape. In addition to the potential for separation, bodies could also be combined after cremation. We see this at Forteviot again. Pit [529] contained a minimum of six different individuals spread across three contexts, which in turn was cut by a small pit [651] which contained a further four (Leach in Noble & Brophy 2017, 219). There are different sequences of combination here, sometimes people are deposited together immediately in a single context, in others there is a sequence over which bodies are deposited through time. The detailed study of the remains also suggests different temporalities with some cremations being deposited soon after the event, and others sometime later (Noble & Brophy 2017, 240). This again suggests that we need to think about both event and process, the drawn-out period before and after surrounding the intensive moment of burning itself. This capacity for combination suggests something different from the way bones from different bodies were combined together at Early Neolithic chambered tombs and long barrows like Pipton and Fussell’s Lodge. There different people were combined to make something that was explicitly body-like. The mixture of cremated remains made no claim to completion, or comparison with a ‘whole’ body. Rather they suggest that cremated remains were very different from the bodies that pre-existed them. Both separation and combination are only capacities; however, they were not compulsory. Sites such as Flagstones, Dorset, include cremations with every part of the body present. Cremation created options, therefore, through its role as what Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 358) call an ‘assemblage converter’: a key transformative moment in which intensive energies folded into and changed a body from one kind of assemblage to another. If the treatment of the body through cremation opened up new capacities for that body to be affected, what of the recursive element of this, the capacities of these transformed bodies to affect? We have already stressed the powerful eventlike status of cremation itself. The body, transformed in fire and smoke could be inhaled by people, changing their relations with the dead. The memories would be seared in the mind and seared in the ground. Through cremation, bodies have new capacities to shape place and memory, to reach out to multiple locales and form links between them. Fragmented bodies had this too, of course, but cremated ones were empowered further through the intensive events that produced them. Each cremation transformed where bodies could go, their longitude, and how bodies could affect and be affected, their latitude. By mapping these we begin to understand what it was that a cremated body could do.

Cremation cemeteries Cremations, at many Late Neolithic sites, were not just one-offs, and their repetition, though subtly different each time, combined to form a broader process that produced the cemeteries we see in Britain around the turn of the third millennium

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cal bc. The largest of these, in terms of numbers of cremations actually recovered, is Dorchester-upon-Thames (Figure 5.13).17 This site features a complex of monuments including a cursus, a long enclosure and a number of henges and hengiforms. These hengiforms, seven in total, contain 156 cremations. Where the cremations at Forteviot seem to have prefigured the site emerging as a monument complex, and the cremations at Stonehenge parallel at least the first phases of construction at the site, at Dorchester it is clearly the case that the cremations follow the monuments (at least on a site-by-site basis). The radiocarbon dating at Dorchester is unfortunately very limited, and little can be said about it in raw chronological terms beyond it belonging to the first half of the third millennium cal bc (Hamilton in Noble & Brophy 2017, 230). Loveday (1999), however, has argued convincingly that at many of the sites, cremations may have been a short-lived phenomenon as they are deposited at similar stratigraphic levels. Of the different enclosures present, Site I is of note because it also included a surface-laid inhumation at the centre, whilst Site II featured a cremation burial accompanied by a range of grave goods

VII

IX

IV

VI V

X

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VIII XI N

XII

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XIV 3

es ham er T Riv

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The numbered sites in the Neolithic and Bronze Age complex. Sites in Roman numerals were investigated from 1947-52, those in Arabic numerals in 1981

FIGURE 5.13 

Plan of the Dorchester monuments

Source: After Whittle et al. 1992, 147, figure 3, redrawn by Mark Hoyle.

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including a cushion macehead (Loveday 1999, 50). The former also had four cremations and the latter a total of 21, including the one with grave goods. Site VI is also worthy of mention; at only 10 m in diameter, it featured an astonishing 49 cremation deposits (Loveday 1999, 2006). The contrast between the inhumation burial at Site 1 and the cremations that follow forms a broader example of the general chronological trend away from single burials with grave goods towards cremation at this point in time. Yet this does not necessarily shift the debates about comparative power relations. Loveday (2002, 142) suggests that cremation burials might be low-status sacrificial victims, whereas both Thomas (1999, 156) and Noble and Brophy (2017, 239) have argued that the cremations represent high-status individuals. This has also been claimed for Stonehenge, where the cremation burials at the site have been argued to represent the remains of ‘powerful dynasties’ (Parker Pearson 2012, 206). Rather than concentrating on power as a possession that some people have (high-status families) and others do not (sacrificed retainers), what happens if we think more about power as something that flows through bodies and emerges relationally as we did with whole burials here? What happens when we consider the changing nature of bodily capacity? With whole burials, I argued that rather than powerful people, power became emplaced through the deposition of human and non-human bodies in marked places in the landscape. In these contexts, the creation of particular types of relationship with place and memory, and the absence of others, for example physical connections forged through the ability to handle and engage with the bones of the dead, meant that power became focused on a singular location. These sites would have become intensively overloaded and overcoded with the powers they contained. Cremation did something different. It brought together and blended the power of specific events with certain locales yet also allowed those powerful materials to become distributed around the landscape as well. It created a powerful event and contracted that power into the residue it produced: the cremated remains themselves. In other words, the bodily capacities to affect the world that cremation produced combined elements that were otherwise present when bodies were fragmented (the multiplicity, and the ways bodies could be separated or combined) with those that emerged when bodies were buried intact (the ability to produce new kinds of powerful places). However, they brought new capacities to the fore as well. Sites like Forteviot, Dorchester and Stonehenge saw extensive elaboration in the periods both during and after their existence as cremation cemeteries. The intensive, event-like, quality of cremation led to elaborations quite different from those at many sites of single burial. The importance of repetition is critical here. Perhaps because cremations always dispersed elements of the body (the burned flesh) and often parts of the skeleton as well, they did not bind bodies as tightly to places as did the burials of whole bodies and grave goods. Indeed, we do not know if cremations always took place at the sites which ended up as cemeteries; bodies may have been brought from some distance away. For locales to emerge as powerful

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cemeteries, therefore, these acts of depositing cremated remains had to be repeated. Each repetition, each moment of burning and deposition, would have layered the site with new connections, even as other relations were separated. Cremation cemeteries thus emerge as powerful places through the repetition of events that both territorialised certain elements and deterritorialised others, in contrast to whole burials that focused primarily on territorialisation alone. This contrast is not hard and fast. Some cremation burials, for example one of the ones at Site II at Dorchester, featured a wide array of grave goods, and perhaps emplaced power in a more singular fashion. Similarly, the initial cremation burial interred at the cemetery of Llandygái, Wales, was interred with an axe-polishing stone, a shell and pottery sherds (Noble  & Brophy 2017, 228; Lynch  & Musson 2001). The contrast is of course further blurred at a site like Duggleby Howe. Here we see repeated acts of deposition of inhumed corpses in a manner that prefigures cremation cemeteries, followed by 53 cremations located within the mound. At this site we see both the repetition of burial, in a manner very different from single graves, and the location of multiple cremations within a single mound. Difference and repetition here bring together the varying capacities of inhumed and cremated bodies. It was perhaps its repeated use as a site of inhumed bodies that made it appropriate to transform into a site of where multiple cremations could be deposited.

A return to Forteviot We began our chapter with the example of Forteviot; let us end this section there. Noble and Brophy (2017) are undoubtedly correct to note the place making power of this site, the manner in which the cremations transformed the locale into one rich in memory and affect, taking it from one kind of space, smooth and unstructured, to one of links and connections that would help shape its future as a monumental complex and burial site for almost a millennium (Noble & Brophy 2017, 213). Cremating human bodies and burying parts of them at Forteviot also changed other places. The rest of the burnt material could be taken and deposited elsewhere, the cremains mixing the power of the event of their burning, and the shifts in latitude this engendered, with their ability to be in more than one place at a time, to change in terms of longitude. The trees cut down and dragged to the site would have left holes in the forest, an absence that changed the environment and lives of humans and non-humans alike. Whether or not the individual humans themselves were powerful by the standards of the day is hard to say; there seems little doubt however that their fiery transformation made their remains, and the places at which they were deposited, remarkable in their aftermath. Bodies of non-humans were often transformed by fire in the Neolithic. What changed, in the Late Neolithic, was how commonplace it was to include human beings within these moments of transformation. Rather than presuming the addition of human beings transforms an act of burning ontologically from a simple fire to a funeral, we are better off thinking about the breadth of burning events that

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took place in the Neolithic from simple fires, to whole monuments being burned down. At different points it was clearly more or less common to include human beings and for a short period of time, perhaps just a couple of hundred years around 3000 cal bc, these became gathered into cemeteries, which in turn had major consequences for the places they created. Throughout the period, however, cremation offered one route for transforming bodies, for differenciating them, for creating ways they could affect and be affected. It was one way in which bodies could do something new, and become something new.

Conclusion: machines for difference making Death is always an interruption, a break and an intervention in the flow of becoming. For all bodies death is a process of radical change, a phase transition (DeLanda 2002), from one kind of thing to another. In this book we have met the concepts of the virtual and the actual that Deleuze (1991a, 2004) uses to describe different elements of assemblages. The virtual captures those elements that whilst real are not yet present in the world around us; the actual captures those that are already manifest. Death forms a good example of how real the virtual is (without being actual). Our own impending deaths can hardly be described as imaginary. The affective eruption of death changes bodies, not only the dying body but also bodies of the living too; it changes what it is a body can do. But it does not do so in the same way; rather, it does so differently. In the Neolithic we have identified three processes bodies went through in death, each of which drew out different capacities to affect and be affected. These processes were machines for difference making: they actively transformed bodies in specific ways, engineering new forms of difference in the world. The first of these, fragmentation, worked through individuation. Bodies followed differing routes, decayed at different speeds, helped along in a variety of ways by people, flint blades, animals, fire and more, shifting their longitude and latitude; through this they emerged as differenciated entities with new capacities. People and things collectively engaged with this productive difference and through them new capacities emerged, bodies were broken down and new materials created. Through fragmentation bodies could be in more than one place at a time, they could be combined with other bodies, they could generate multiple memories, they could move in time, and no doubt much more. In the last chapter we identified three neoconcepts through our study of materials. In parallel, we can think of fragmentation here not only as a process, therefore, but as a process that helps to reveal the first of this chapter’s specific neoconcepts: that power flowed through parts. The fragmentation of the body into parts, and the way those parts were treated, the capacities that emerged, allow us to map the ontological potentials not only of Neolithic people but of buildings, objects and animals too. In contrast, inhumation did not distribute bodies into multiple places. Instead, it located human and non-human bodies in specific locations. The differenciation of

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body parts, in which fragmentation revelled, was denied and enclosed, contained and located. If desire and memory flowed through the bodies of the dead when they were broken up, here they were bound into place. This created locales where the flows that had come to constitute powerful people and powerful objects, and the desires that had generated them, were sealed, empowering these specific places. In the Deleuzian term we met in Chapter 3, and touched on here, power becomes stratified, highly territorialised in a specific way. This stratification had consequences for memory too, however. The absence of bodies from the world, and their location in powerful places, meant that sometimes forgetting was as critical as remembering. The power of place, constituted through the binding of flows, through the way in which relations of movement and rest came to a stop in a specific locale, had the capacity either to enhance recall or to overcode it, depending on the specific relations involved. Inhumation reveals our second neoconcept here, therefore: that flows shaped Neolithic worlds. This in turn means that when flows of desire, affect, memory and substance were arrested, contained and captured in specific locations, the world both at the site and elsewhere was reworked and transformed (cf. Fowler 2008; Harris 2018c). So we can expand our neoconcept here: flows shaped Neolithic worlds, and Neolithic flows could be captured. Then there is cremation, a technology that blended aspects of both whole burial and fragmentation. Cremation worked through the controlled transformation of bodies, the event-like and intensive moments that converted bodies from one thing to another (Sørensen & Bille 2008). Through these events, and in the consequences they had for place making, cremation produced some similar affective consequences to whole burial. Yet at the same time it allowed bodies to be broken up and to move around the landscape, for parts to be deposited in multiple locations. Flesh flowed from the body in the fires, and bone hardened and whitened. The tempo of the transformations associated with fragmentation here was greatly increased. Indeed, if fragmentation is a technology that celebrates difference, cremation is one that attempts to reproduce a single process of differentiation from body and wood to cremains and charcoal. Cremation reveals a final neoconcept at play in this chapter: Neolithic bodies produced intensive events. This concept bridges the captured-flows of inhumation and the dispersed parts of fragmentation, it reveals how assemblages of bodies of humans and non-humans can bring an intensity to moments of transformation that have profound consequences. These are events: they create something new through the searing transformation of bodies in the fires of cremation. Each of these modes of treating bodies, and each of the concepts they foreground, should not be seen as opposed to one another. Whole burial had event like qualities AND captured the flows of substance that shape Neolithic worlds. Cremation was a spectacular event AND allowed the parts that emerged to have power. These processes blur into one another, and this blurring reveals the subtlety with which differences could emerge. Discussing them separately, however, has allowed us to tease out how the material processes that dead bodies went through helped to generate, and were generated by, these neoconcepts. In each case these

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bodily concepts were critical to the specific forms of subjectivity that emerged in this period (Braidotti 2019). There are clear links and overlaps between the three neoconcepts we have discussed here and those of the last chapter. How matter moved places across landscapes in the last chapter links to how parts have power here. The repeated return of people to a site like Duggleby Howe reveals both how inhumation could bind flows into specific places and how the material bodies enclosed there could guide people to return to the site again and again; matter moved people too. We argued in the last chapter that a critical concept was that matter remembered: here memory flows through the potent material remains of bodies, carrying histories into monuments, the landscape and the fiery intensity of events; matter’s memory forges the power of parts and the capture of flows. The bodies of people in Neolithic Britain shared a set of specific, historically located, capacities. These shared virtual capacities are what Deleuze (2006b) calls a diagram. These diagrams were not identical; however, they were shaped by both individual events and broader historical trends. They were immanent to bodies themselves. No doubt whether a body was to be fragmented, inhumed or cremated depended in part on that person’s life and death. Violence, which we discuss further in Chapter 6, seems to have played a part in the demise of some individuals in chambered tombs and long barrows, and also at causewayed enclosures, and perhaps this led to specific kinds of funerary treatment. Similarly, the richly furnished bodies buried at Liffs Low or Duggleby Howe may well have been people through whom power flowed in life AND in death. Traditional categories of identity like gender, age and so on mattered at certain moments at these sites but not at others. Children do seem to have been selected for specific forms of burial in older monuments in the Late Neolithic, and were targeted for combination with animal bones after fragmentation at Windmill Hill. There are slight differences in the sex of bodies deposited at chambered tombs and long barrows in southern Britain, with slightly more males, but the pattern is less than clear (Edwards & Pope 2013, 463–4; Smith & Brickley 2009, 88). It seems likely that whilst age, gender, manner of death and so on could lead to a specific form of funerary process, this by itself did not determine these matters, because the fate of bodies did not depend on such transcendent categories but rather on the immanent unfurling of becoming itself. Rather than ideas of identity then, it is difference we need to think about, what made specific bodies different in particular circumstances (cf. Robb & Harris 2018)? Which of our neoconcepts carried the most weight in particular moments of dealing with dead bodies? We can also recognise here that non-human bodies too shared many of the same virtual capacities as human bodies. They could be fragmented, cremated, or buried whole. This did not make them the same as people; the rarity of whole animal burial for example shows us that. Instead, by approaching a body as a set of affects – a gathering of ways to affect and be affected – we can think about how the capacities bodies share allow us to tease out difference in new ways. Both cattle and humans could be fragmented and buried in long barrows and

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causewayed enclosures, though only the former were eaten, by humans at least. Maceheads could be buried whole in graves, and bone pins could be cremated. Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 283) argue that when we think about the world in terms of affects our emphasis on drawing hard lines between species, or kinds of things, begins to fall away. The carthorse, they comment, has more in common with an ox than with a racehorse (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 283; cf. Deleuze 1988, 124). Whilst it might be a little strong to claim that the cremated elements of cow at Cladh Aindreis have more in common with cremated humans than they do with cows treated in other ways – death is only one aspect of life after all – it is important to remember they did have that in common, and that the capacity was shared amongst others as well. Our neoconcepts then – the emphasis on the power of parts, the ways in which flows shaped worlds and could be captured, and the way Neolithic bodies produced intensive of events – form elements of the diagrams of the assemblages of non-humans too. We will return to these concepts in Chapter 7. First though we will turn to a final scale of analysis and examine the worlds that emerged through the complex architectural forms of Neolithic Britain.

Notes 1 The same process of successive inhumation also dominates cave burials (Peterson 2019, 142). 2 The title of this section is taken from one of the great books about the Neolithic (Barrett 1994). 3 Interestingly, aDNA analysis has shown two of the burials were brothers (Scheib et al. 2019). 4 Such occurrences are known in a number of locations around Neolithic Britain. Genevieve Carver’s (2012) synthesis of 536 features such as pits and post-holes in East Yorkshire found eight of them featured human remains. 5 Modelled at 68% likelihood (Whittle et al. 2011, 87). 6 Whereas older studies tend to view single burial with grave goods, like the case of Liffs Low we saw above, as forming a tradition that then continued with Beaker burials from the middle of the third millennium cal bc onwards, we now know that almost all of them belong to the centuries around 3000 bc, with a significant gap between them and their Beaker counterparts (Bradley 2007; Healy 2012). 7 An exception may be the Haddenham long barrow, where the box may have been accessible after the mound was constructed (Evans & Hodder 2006, 101). 8 Although other sites too feature whole burials as part of a broader sequence of funerary activities, for example Whitegrounds, Yorkshire, where a single burial was added to an older Neolithic funerary monument (Brewster 1984). 9 Modelled at 68% likelihood (Gibson et al. 2009, 68). 10 They could not be located for dating during a recent re-analysis. 11 I will leave out burials L and M here. Burial L did not return a date in the recent reanalysis and burial M returned one from the Bronze Age. However, the location of both burials (with no sign of a grave cut for either (Roy Loveday pers. comm.)) and the presence of two child burials above burial M, which we know matches the sequence of deposition above two of the definitely Neolithic burial suggests that despite the single Bronze Age data, both L and M may in fact be Neolithic. Their date is not critical for the argument here, however, so I have circumspectly excluded them from Table 5.1 and from the narrative. Thanks to Roy Loveday for talking this over with me.

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12 We will explore the implications of the version of power for how we understand monuments more fully in the next chapter. 13 The importance of place for Middle Neolithic whole burials is present at other sites as well where whether through direct insertion or close proximity they clearly become associated with earlier practices (e.g. Whitegrounds, (Loveday 2002), Handley Down 26 and 27, Dorset (Allen et al. 2016b), Radley oval barrow (Barclay & Halpin 1999)). Interestingly, Rick Peterson (2019) has recently convincingly argued that the form of cave burials that emerge in the Middle Neolithic differ significantly from their Early Neolithic counterparts precisely in the way in which they separate the living and the dead and emphasise the importance and physical properties of the spaces themselves. 14 This need not imply that the response to these deaths matched our traditional notions of grief, as Marianne Hem Eriksen (2017) has rightly noted for Iron Age Scandinavia. 15 Other examples where animals were burnt alongside humans and included in mixed cremation deposits at the Early Neolithic site of Yarnton. In particular, a cremation deposit within one posthole at the timber structure here contained both human and pig remains (Hey et al. 2017, 468). The latter were not merely scorched from cooking but had been fully cremated, as was the case at Cladh Aindreis. 16 As noted in Chapter  6, in reality, process and event are not two opposed categories, instead they are different ways of measuring and describing the world. An equivalent distinction can be drawn between the manner in which an electron can be measured and located as either a particle or a wave – the electron is not one of those ‘in reality’ but rather emerges as one through its measurement (Barad 2007; Fowler and Harris 2015). 17 Though it is speculated that Stonehenge may have been home to between 150 and 240 (Willis et al. 2016, 341).

6 WHAT WORLDS DID NEOLITHIC ARCHITECTURE CREATE?

At some point between 3800 and 3680 cal bc, in Swordle Bay on the Ardnamurchan peninsula on the west coast of Scotland, a human body, accompanied by part of a cow, was placed on a cremation pyre and set alight. The mixture of charcoal and cremated human and animal bone that resulted was gathered up and placed in a slight hollow, a couple of hundred metres from the sea, close to a burn and beneath a steep bluff. As soon as the material was deposited in the ground, people immediately placed rocks above it. These stones, taken from the surrounding cliffs and hills were piled up to create a new place, a new kind of architecture, a circular cairn around 18 m in diameter. Lesley McFadyen (e.g. 2007b) has written evocatively about how at Neolithic monuments like this we can imagine people coming together, working to carry heavy stones into position, levering them into place, sighing as they rolled into inconvenient hollows, cursing as fingers and toes were trapped. Within this circular construction the builders created a box made of ten or so larger stones, with access provided by a stone lid they could lift off and replace. This, in turn, created a new kind of space for depositing the dead. Here they could place bodies that had rotted down elsewhere and rearrange them over time. In the undisturbed parts of the chamber, archaeologists have found tightly clustered bundles of bones, as if they had been deposited in bags. These practices lasted for a couple of hundred years, but during this time the monument itself was also altered and transformed. A  stone tail was added, extending its length and making the monument trapezoidal in shape. In addition to human alterations, stones moved independently, tumbling off the top of the cairn to settle in alternative locations. Lichen and grass grew on and around the stones, enveloping the architecture and changing it both in seasonal rhythms and, in a more linear fashion, over the years (Figure 6.1).

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FIGURE 6.1 

Cladh Aindreis chambered tomb

Source: Photos by author.

The final Neolithic act of engagement at the site was the digging of a ditch around the front of the monument, probably about the same time as the box chamber went out of use. The site, having been interacted with, altered and visited for two to three centuries, was then left alone by people, until the end of the Neolithic. This did not end the tumbling of stones of course, the growth of lichen, the decay of bodies, the actions of worms or the burrowing of mice. The site never stopped changing, and in the end, people would return to it again and again over the following 5500 years. The tomb is known today as Cladh Aindreis, or Andrew’s Stone, a name that it attracted at some point in the Middle Ages. This is just one piece of Neolithic architecture out of the hundreds known across Britain. Its story is not remarkable. It shows, however, how architecture is always fluid and changing, emerging from the interaction of multiple humans and nonhumans. Far from something reaching for finished final form, as if derived from a blueprint, the reality is that such constructions are always becoming. Through that becoming architecture has power, it calls people and things to it, and makes space for non-humans to dwell within its cavities. Its power creates new ways of seeing, thinking about and conceptualising the world, which in turn create new possibilities for action and engagement. Once you’ve built one monument, you can build others. Once you have started work on a monument, the architecture can always be added to and altered. We can think here of how architecture helps

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to produce more-than-human communities. Rather than the product of a solely human design, a monument like Cladh Aindreis is the outcome of stones, soil, bones, charcoal, humans and more. In turn it does not merely reflect those different elements; it brings them into conjunction and it forges them as a community. Building architecture brings bodies, human and non-human, together in new ways. It changes what it is that bodies can do as they gain new capacities through relations that emerge in the making of architecture. These acts of making, these acts of gathering, these acts of relating – these are new communities. Architecture and communities emerge in parallel, each part of the other. The aim of this chapter will be to map these dynamic and powerful processes of community building and through that to answer the question: what worlds did Neolithic architecture create?

Introduction Risking spoilers, the central conclusion to this chapter is that Neolithic architectures were world-building machines:1 they created complex, affective, assemblages through which Neolithic worlds emerged and thrived. Architecture helped to configure these worlds in multiple ways. It bound different humans and non-humans together, changed and transformed through both human intervention and other processes. Architecture demands and desires things of its own, and helped to configure the communities of this period. Architectures were singularities (Deleuze 2015; DeLanda 2002), knots in the flows of materials; the co-ordinates that provide the map to Neolithic Britain. In this sense Neolithic architectures, especially, but not solely, the forms we term ‘monumental’, were ontological constructions; ontological in that they are fundamental both to the very fabric of these worlds and in the sense that they reveal a radical difference between worlds today and worlds of the past. The term ‘architecture’, of course, covers a host of different things in Neolithic Britain, many of which we have already encountered in this book.2 One way of dividing this up might be to contrast ‘domestic’ architecture with its ‘ritual’ counterpart. This would mean we would have traditions in mainland Britain of houses running from the timber halls of the Early Neolithic, and their smaller counterparts, through to the four post structures of the Late Neolithic (Noble et al. 2012; Ray & Thomas 2018, 246), and the kinds of houses that existed in large numbers at Durrington Walls near Stonehenge (Parker Pearson 2007). To this we could add the wooden and stone houses from Orkney that, at the end of the Middle and into the Late Neolithic, come together to form agglomerated settlements like Skara Brae and Barnhouse (Richards 2005a). Then we could have the ritual sites: from the Early Neolithic chambered tombs and long barrows, via causewayed enclosures, passage tombs, cursus monuments and palisaded enclosures to all manner of henges; these might offer a different story. Such oppositions, needless to say, are hardly helpful (Edmonds 1999, 8–9). Durrington Walls is a site with multiple houses that gets turned into a henge monument (Parker Pearson 2012). Late Neolithic four-poster structures vary in scale up to and including the monumental.

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

1

Ascott-underWychwood Aston Avebur y Balbr idie Bar nhouse Birdlip Camp Braes of Ha’Breck Broadwell Car n Brae Cat’s Brain Chalk Hill

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

12

Claish Conygar Hill Cr ickley Hill Dorstone Hill Drayton Duggleby Howe Dur r ington Walls Etton Flagstones Green

Cladh Aindreis 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

23 Knap Hill Knap of Howar Knowes of Trotty Liffs Low Maes Howe Maiden Castle Marden Maxey Mount Pleasant Ness of Brodgar

Hambledon Hill 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

34 Rudston Monolith Sanday Silbury Hill Skara Brae Smerquoy Hoose Spr ingfield Staines Stonehall Far m Stonehenge Stones of Stenness

Ring of Brodgar 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

45

Wayland’s Smithy 1 White Horse Stone Whitehawk Whitesheet Hill Wideford Hill Windmill Hill Woodhenge Wyke Down 1 and 2

War ren Field

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Map of sites discussed in the chapter

Source: Drawn by Donald Sutherland, map outline ©Crown copyright and database rights 2020 Ordnance Survey (100025252).

FIGURE 6.2 

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Timber halls are neither helpfully thought of as ritual or domestic sites (Barclay et al. 2002; Barclay & Harris 2017), they are clearly much more complex locales than that. Houses may have been memorialised by barrows at Cat’s Brain, Wiltshire and at Dorstone Hill, Herefordshire (Leary et al. 2020; Ray & Thomas 2020). As Joanna Brück (1999) pointed out some time ago, the opposition between ritual and daily life obscures far more than it reveals. So the constructions discussed here will not be divided into a typology of ritual and domestic. The variation between forms of architecture will not be denied, and indeed I will argue that certain kinds amplify affect, for example, in very particular ways. Nonetheless, the critical aim here will be to explore the multiplicity of architectures and how they shape worlds both in an everyday sense AND at particular moments of gathering and celebration. We will ask what different forms of architecture did in the Neolithic in Britain. These acts of doing should not be confused with any simplistic notion of function; they were not solely the actions for which monuments were designed but rather the combination of both expected and unexpected occurrences. The argument develops in three parts. First, we will investigate architecture not as fixed and final but as fundamentally dynamic. This follows in the footsteps of exciting recent discussions of architecture in archaeology and anthropology (e.g. Leary 2010; McFadyen 2007a, 2007b, 2016; Pollard 2013; Richards 2013a; Ingold 2000, 2013) and parallels our discussion of materials in Chapter 4. This will explore how architecture gathers things to it and creates shifting webs of relations through the ongoing process of construction. Architecture is always on the move; there is no clear division between building and use. It creates a dynamic affective field that shapes, and is shaped by, the humans and other non-humans it encounters. It is immanent, as McFadyen (2016) argues. Exploring architecture as an assemblage that is becoming, in process, but also as a form of event, allows us to rethink the complex temporalities and experiences that such sites engender. The second part of the chapter looks at architecture and community. The dynamism of architecture lies at the heart of communities. Rather than seeing architecture as a conduit or a metaphor for community, though, I will argue that reconfiguring community as an assemblage locates architecture as part of communities. We will explore how this concept relates to the popular idea of house societies but goes beyond this in many important ways. Fundamentally, the chapter argues that Neolithic architecture was critical to creating and differentiating communities in new ways. Different kinds of architecture meant different kinds of community. The final part of the chapter examines the power of architecture. In Chapter 5 we saw how power can operate as a flow, a ‘power to’ that emerges from the complex forms of affect and desire that texture past worlds. Here we will focus more closely on how power emerges through architecture. Rather than taking the traditional view that Neolithic architecture represents the productions of a competitive human elite (Renfrew 1973) or the more interesting view even that it helped to produce an elite (Barrett 1994), the argument here will be that power works quite

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differently. Fundamentally, I will argue that through architecture, and specifically forms of architecture with monumental qualities, a new form of power emerged in the Neolithic. Power, like anything else, is historically immanent; thus there were specific forms of power in different periods in the past. This power, as we will see, was critical in shaping past worlds, and flowed from the dynamic affects of which architecture was capable and the communities this assembled. These three forms of analysis will reveal different elements of the multiplicities of architecture from Neolithic Britain. Architecture was dynamic AND powerful AND constructed communities. It is this interweaving, coupled with its eventlike singularity, which made architecture emerge at the heart of Neolithic Britain. Buildings, structures and monuments were, as we will see, machines for world making.

Dynamic architecture One of the most exciting recent developments in how archaeologists have conceptualised architecture has been the move away from presuming buildings and monuments were the static product of human design, towards understanding them as ongoing processes, as fundamentally dynamic. Neolithic archaeologists have been at the forefront of this (e.g. Cummings 2012; McFadyen 2007a, 2008, 2016; Loveday & Barclay 2010; Leary & Field 2013; Pollard 2013; Richards 2013a), in particular, McFadyen’s work has emphasised the emergent qualities of architecture. McFadyen (2007b, 2016) shows how approaching an example of Neolithic architecture like a long barrow with the presumption that its form pre-exists the process of building entirely ignores how architecture is immanent to its emergence. Her work has evoked the complexity of this coming together of people, place and material and revealed how form is only ever an after-effect of process. Similarly, in this book we have already seen examples of how Neolithic architecture has been reconceptualised as dynamic. In Chapter 4 we looked at timber cursus monuments and saw how authors like Julian Thomas (2006) and Kenneth Brophy (2015) have recognised that these sites are often best understood as ‘shifting’, as posts were erected, and then burned down or allowed to rot, or taken down and moved. These were mutating forms of architecture that might have ­dynamically crossed space over time – architecture on the move. In the same chapter, our study of the material flows of stone, and its topological and relational links, allowed us to see how Jane Downes’, Colin Richards’ and others’ work at the Ring of Brodgar helps us to view that site as the dynamic assembly of different places across the Orcadian landscape (Downes et al. 2013). In the last chapter, we saw how Fussell’s Lodge long barrow had a long history from a mortuary structure of two, and then three posts, followed by a trapezoidal timber revetment, a later flint cairn and finally a large earthen mound. To place this final earthen mound as the original ‘intended design’ is to take a very peculiar view of how places, people, architecture and things come to exist in the world (McFadyen 2007a). Later in this chapter we will see how a dynamic and emergent understanding of architecture has been

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deployed by Jim Leary (2010) in rethinking Silbury Hill, the enormous mound that lies just to the south of Avebury (see also Jones 2012; Pollard 2013). The traditional vision of architecture that archaeology has employed implicitly declares that when making architecture people come up with an idea of what they want a building or a monument to look like, and then impose that design on to the world around them. This is an example of a hylomorphic model, in which humans have all the agency, and the materials of the world are merely pliant actors (see Chapter 3; Ingold 2011). Instead, those archaeologists who emphasise dynamism and process have proposed a model of architecture that is morphogenetic – that is one in which form only emerges through process, is always temporary and also requires the input of numerous non-humans (cf. Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 451; Simonden 1992). This is not to deny the important role humans play in the emergence of architecture. Without human beings there would be far fewer examples of architecture in the world, but without the active role of materials there really would be none at all. How does this new approach emphasising immanence and becoming allow us to think about the different worlds that architecture creates? To answer this, we need to embrace three critical things: first, the role of architectural affect; second the event-like quality of architecture; and third the importance of architecture as process. The first of these requires us to take a fundamentally relational approach and understand how architecture acts as a body with the capacity to affect and be affected.3 The second emphasises how the creation of architecture brings something new into the world (cf. Deleuze 2015; Massumi 2015a). Finally, an approach that foregrounds process highlights the multiple roles of a site and prevents us from reducing architecture simply to form. To explore this, let us turn to a specific example of architecture: causewayed enclosures.

Causewayed enclosures: affect, event, process Causewayed enclosures, including those we have encountered in earlier chapters such as Windmill Hill, Etton and Hambledon Hill, were a popular type of architecture made up of one or more circuits of interrupted ditches, of variable size, constructed largely between 3700 and 3300 cal bc (Whittle et al. 2011, 703) (Figure 6.3). Around 80 certain or probable examples are known in Britain, largely confined to the south of the country (Whittle et al. 2011, 5; Ray & Thomas 2018, 141). Thanks to the pioneering work of Alasdair Whittle, Frances Healy and Alex Bayliss we have a better understanding of the chronology of these monuments than any others. As noted, in Britain they are first constructed in the decades around 3700 cal bc and spread rapidly in the following century or so. A gentle decline follows for the next couple of centuries, although smaller enclosures mimicking their form appear later in the fourth millennium, including Flagstones, Dorset, and Stonehenge, Wiltshire (Whittle et al. 2011, 698). These architectures witnessed multiple different kinds of practices, from feasting to the processing of dead bodies (Edmonds 1993). The presence on some sites of

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Briar Hill

Windmill Hill

Whitehawk

Road Palisade

Haddenham Whitesheet Hill

Bank 0

FIGURE 6.3 

200m

Plans of causewayed enclosures

Source: Redrawn by Mark Hoyle (after information in Oswald et al. 2001).

axes and pottery from distant locations suggests the possibility they were venues of exchange and trade, places where objects could be compared and contrasted: ‘tournaments of value’, as Edmonds’ (1993, 124) puts it.4 Matching this variety are the interpretations of the sites’ purpose, with archaeologists seeing them variously as causewayed ‘camps’ for long-term occupation (e.g. Parmenter et al. 2015; Piggott

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1954), ritual sites of gathering (Whittle et  al. 1999), the outcome of competitive accumulation by proto-elites (Whittle et al. 2011; Whittle 2018, 191), or as defensive architecture designed to withstand assault (Mercer 1988). Here I want to characterise the three dimensions of the dynamism of enclosures identified previously. Through this we will get a better sense of how architecture helps to bring particular worlds into existence. Such an approach will also allow us to touch on the thorny issues of typology.

Enclosure as an architecture of affective encounter The architecture of a causewayed enclosure created dynamic affects of encounter. It drew bodies of humans, animals and things to it from different locations and assembled them into a larger body, that of the monument. The bodies of enclosures were replete with surfaces, including ditches and banks, with fences and outworks at times. These lines could define singular locations as at the heart of a monument as at Knap Hill, Wiltshire, divide into multiple circuits as at Whitehawk, Sussex, or bifurcate a space in two as at Etton (Oswald et al. 2001; Pryor 1998; Whittle et al. 2011). Through their making and encounter a causewayed enclosure was differentiated from the world around it, emerging as a particular kind of space that had specific capacities to affect and be affected. Some of these qualities might be shared between different enclosures; how they gathered bodies creating encounters riddled with excitement and anxiety might be one example of this (cf. Harris 2016b). Others could be more specific: Hambledon Hill, as we saw in Chapter 5, was a site replete with dead bodies on a far greater scale than most monuments of this type (Mercer & Healy 2008). The capacity of this body to affect humans (alive and dead) was different to other enclosures. The affective encounters that causewayed enclosures generated in some ways resembled those of people’s daily lives. Meeting people, burying things, milking, killing and eating animals, dealing with the dead: these are not occurrences unique to causewayed enclosures. But this superficial similarity ignores how affect is itself processual, contextual and emergent. To understand something as fundamentally qualitative as affect, we have to understand how it draws upon the assemblage from which it emerges (Massumi 2018, 43). The body of a causewayed enclosure has a specificity to it, a thisness, a quality that means the way affect works varies: it ramps up the impact, enhances the sensory experience, overcodes the encounter. Depositing a cow’s skull in a linear pit cut into an older feature at the Chalk Hill enclosure in Kent, accompanied by flints and other animal bones, was not the same as the encounter with cattle, flint and other animals, dead or alive, in people’s daily lives (Clark & Weekes 2019, 60). This affective power comes from the dynamism of these sites, the fact they gathered people, materials and animals together in different ways. The rhythm of use of causewayed enclosures suggests that on occasions they were intensively used, at others less so (Whittle et al. 2011, 716). At times these gaps, at least between major gatherings, might be extensive, even up to a century at Hambledon Hill for example (Whittle et al. 2011, 716). This means that different

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kinds of affect would play out, sometimes drawing more potently on events in the present, at others actualising specific memories, a critical part of the practices that took place at these sites (Harris 2010; Pollard 2008). What bound them together was the space in which they took place, the body of the causewayed enclosure as it took shape, grew and shifted over the course of its history.

Enclosure as event The re-examination of the temporality of causewayed enclosures has led to an unparalleled understanding of individual site chronologies, as well as their rate of construction in the flow of history (Whittle et al. 2011; Whittle 2018). This chronological control is an unquestionable boon to archaeologists. However, like any form of control, it domesticates the sites in question, it brings them into order where sometimes we need to think about how they escape our control, run wild and free, challenging us and taking us on new journeys (cf. Teather 2018). Here we can emphasise them as events, the creation of something new in the world, what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2004, 23) would call a line of flight. A line of flight is not just another moment in time, it marks a turning point (Colebrook 2001, 57). This allows us to build on our discussion of dynamic affect, to understand how these sites are enacted through events (Jones 2012, 160). What kinds of events took place at causewayed enclosures? We can imagine people crowding around the deposition of two skulls into the outer ditch at the enclosure at Staines, Surrey (Robertson-Mackay et al. 1987, 36), or watching at the Stepleton enclosure at Hambledon Hill when a juvenile human was buried in a pit with a tooth from a younger child pressed against their mandible (Mercer & Healy 2008, 275). We can conceptualise the power of the event emerging in the performances surrounding the deposition of the sequence of deposits in ditch segment 7 at Etton, where two complete pots, a decorated antler comb and a fox skull were placed in a linear sequence at the bottom of the ditch (Pryor 1998, 33) (Figure 6.4). This line of deposits was a line of flight leading to new and unexpected places – no wonder it has featured repeatedly in archaeological discussions of causewayed enclosures (e.g. Harris 2005, 2017a; Pollard 2008). At a causewayed enclosure, each act of digging opened up newly differentiated spaces, new ditch segments to leave empty or fill, to clean out or recut. Each event thus differentiated something new, but always leaves something in reserve. Digging one enclosure section creates the potential to put something in it, or to leave it empty, or to backfill it. The virtual, in the sense we defined in Chapter 3, shifts here; new potentials come into being, they are counter-actualised (Deleuze 2015, 155). With that new events can take place, new potentials emerge, new forms of difference can be created. One event always creates the possibilities for others, it is thus located in the here and now, and reaches out to the past and future (Deleuze 2015). Each ditch segment was thus not the repetition of the same, each one like the other, but rather the repetition of difference (Deleuze 2004; Jones 2012, 160). These events altered not only the present but the future too. There were now

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FIGURE 6.4 The

sequence of deposits in ditch segment 7 at Etton; B10131, B10132, B10134, B10135 and B10136 are animal bones; B10138 is the decorated antler comb; B10133 is the severed fox skull; P2308 is the plain bowl and B2307 is the inverted Mildenhall bowl

Source: Redrawn by author after Pryor 1998, 33, figure 30.

new spaces to return to, new ditches which silted, new deposits to explore. More than this, the future helped shape the actions in the present; it was the potential to return that shaped the deposits in the future. The future here is what Deleuze (2015, 129) calls ‘quasi-causal’: it reaches into the present as the ditches are opened, in the moment of the event. When a skull without its mandible was laid down on the base of the ditch segment at Hambledon Hill, the potential to later bury the mandible nearby was not simply an afterthought; it was part of that initial event. The potential for an outwork to be burned, for an absent object to be missed, for a fence to divide an enclosure in two, these are not just the consequences of building; they are partly causal too. It is clear here that events operate in a manner of temporality very different from histories which position things in linear sequence, each event instead operates partly outside of linearity5 – they have specific temporal

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co-ordinates that call the past and future to them. We will return to these different kinds of time in the next chapter.

Enclosure as process With each moment of creation at a causewayed enclosure now rethought as the repetition of difference, we can lift our gaze from the event, towards process. Process here is the way in which events come together, it is a way of changing our focus from the timelessness of individual events, towards their shared emergent qualities. Process and event here are two different ways of analysing the same thing, they emphasise different qualities, like the manner in which an electron can be located as either a wave or a particle (Deloria Jr 2012, 60–2). Causewayed enclosures lend themselves to an emphasis on process (Jones 2012, 150). Their shape speaks to the cutting of individual segments over time. It is likely that at Windmill Hill, for example, the three circuits were constructed in a specific order – inner, outer, middle – defining its ongoing becoming (Whittle et al. 2011, 91). Hambledon Hill saw a complex process of building and constructing ditches, barrows, outworks and cross-dykes across several centuries (Mercer & Healy 2008; Whittle et al. 2011) (Figure 6.5). At these different sites the ditches themselves generated a sense of process and development. Each ditch would begin to silt up soon after it was dug, although at different rates depending on the local geology, weather and the shape of the individual features (Whittle et  al. 2011, 706–12). Ditches with steep profiles, like those at Whitesheet Hill, Wiltshire, would have accumulated fills very quickly (Rawlings et al. 2004; Whittle et al. 2011, 159). At some sites people deposited things in these ditches, sometimes they left them empty. At Etton there are determinable sequences of deposits that form specific assemblages in particular phases (Harris 2005, 2017a; Pollard 2008; Pryor 1998). Other deposits here may have had older histories, having been derived from midden material, something we also see at Staines (Robertson-MacKay et al. 1987) and Maiden Castle (Sharples 1991). At many sites these processes played out over a generation or two, at others they occasionally lasted much longer, probably between 380 and 510 years at Etton, for example (Whittle et al. 2011, 325).6 The emphasis on process helps to explain the sheer variety of causewayed enclosure shapes, which often respond to local topographical limits, cutting off and defining particular points on hills, as in the case of Birdlip Camp, Gloucestershire, or incorporating water courses as at Broadwell in Oxfordshire (Oswald et al. 2001, 64, 67). We can also think of how the cross dykes and outworks of Hambledon Hill snake around the oddly shaped chalk island on which the site was constructed (Figure  6.5). Whether close to circular, oval or simply curvilinear, causewayed enclosures, in plan, immediately lend the impression of an ongoing process of emergence, rather than a predesigned entity being imposed onto the landscape – ‘projects’, as Chris Evans (1988, 88) called them (cf. Edmonds 1999, 99). A good example of this is Chalk Hill enclosure in Kent, where the segmented ditch structure emerged from ‘the amalgamation of a sequence of pit digging rather than the

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FIGURE 6.5 

A plan of features at Hambledon Hill

Source: Redrawn by author after Mercer & Healy 2008, 5, figure 1.4.

deliberate creation of ‘ditch segments’ (Clark 2019, 207). As Peter Clark (2019, 207) notes, there is no need to see the final form as part of an original design. The emphasis on process is further enhanced when one considers the role of movement at the sites. The ditches moved, as we have noted, as new ones were dug and old ones filled in. People moved too, sometimes connected to these processes as they dug a ditch or recut a feature, and sometimes not. The shape of causewayed enclosures funnel movements in particular ways, through particular gaps both in their circuits and around the edges of ditches (cf. Harris 2018c, 17). The linear spreads of deposit at Etton, for example, incorporating pots, animal bones, deliberately selected stones and more, take on a different meaning when seen not as static statements but as material processes in flow, witnessed in movement alongside the edge

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of the ditch (Pryor 1998, 30–4; cf. Harris 2005, 2017a, 2018c). At Hambledon Hill, we can see how the process of movement was guided by the topography, the architecture, and detect it in the specific deposits of pottery in ditches next to entrances (Mercer & Healy 2008, 762; Harris 2010). In turn, this movement gathered some people and things from far away (Neil et al. 2018). What does this emphasis on process tell us? First, it makes it hard to assign a single function to these sites, as Mark Edmonds (1999, 93) rightly argues. Given causewayed enclosures’ complexity, their multiplicity, no doubt they featured ritual AND daily life, they were defensive AND about conducting ceremonies that united groups, they were collective constructions that emphasised community AND allowed for new claims on power. Clearly, claims that all such sites are or indeed are not a particular thing are unhelpful, such as suggestions that the processing of animal remains at a site mark it clearly as domestic (Parmenter et al. 2015, 821; cf. Thomas 2016b). Causewayed enclosures were always in the process of becoming. They were always in the process of doing things, not being things. Causewayed enclosures operate in the infinitive: they gather, they demand, they grow (cf. Deleuze 2015, 6). As Andrew Jones (2012, 159, original emphasis) points out, ‘causewayed enclosures are performances’.

Pattern, process and event Yet attentive readers may have a question: if enclosures, and indeed other kinds of architecture, emerge through these morphogenetic flows of repetitive difference making, through events that created something new in the world, and through processes that did not have a fixed goal, how is it that we can identify particular terms like ‘causewayed enclosure’ that have any meaning for architecture at all? Why is it that any patterns are discernible in the archaeological record? Surely there must be some design, some final form, some notion of an enclosure, or a tomb, or a timber hall that people were aiming for in the past? The answer to this question requires three things. First, we must acknowledge that yes of course people had purposeful plans, goals and intentions. I do not deny this but rather seek to situate it historically in an assemblage that also includes the capacities and properties of non-humans. Thus, we can see human beings’ roles as important alongside other elements of the world. Second, it requires us to rethink our conception of scale. Rather than scale being simply linear, from small to large, we need to conceptualise it as folded and topological. Events do not only take place at scales with which human beings are familiar. Whilst the examples here, say the deposition of a fox skull at Etton or a cow’s head at Chalk Hill, involve a few human beings, events can run at any scale (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 288). Causewayed enclosures, collectively, are an event too. They emerge at a specific moment, they have a specific history and they create something new in the world. Each enclosure is as much the repetition of difference as each ditch segment or each act of deposition. We do not need to sublimate this process of repetition to a notion of identity to understand this. We do not need to persist in demanding the

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existence of an external category of design from which these sites gain their coherence. Indeed, it is only through an emphasis on the repetition of difference that we can understand how the patterns, which archaeologists reify as typologies, emerge. The patterns we detect, the architectural forms we identify, are the consequences of, not the cause, specific historical processes. Third, we need to remind ourselves of the critical role for the relationship between the virtual and the actual. As we have seen, the virtual captures the capacities of an assemblage that are real but not yet actual. The virtual is not, however, an unstructured space of endless possibility; rather, it is a specifically structured realm of potential. This potential is structured through what Deleuze calls a diagram (see Chapter 3; Deleuze 2006b; Deleuze & Guattari 2004; Harris 2017a, 2020). A  diagram captures the differentiated shape of the virtual, the range of capacities that exist, that can then be actualised in particular ways through differenciation. The historical emergence of the Neolithic, the particular capacities of materials, landscapes and animals, the problems generated by their encounter, shaped the virtual diagram of this period (Harris 2017a; cf. Edmonds 1997, 104). This diagram could be actualised in many different ways, and one way was through the construction of causewayed enclosures. Here people assembled their capacities to dig, with the capacities of their tools to help them, the capacity of animals to provide food for feasts and plant foods to be stored, along with the capacities, perhaps, of stories of continental comparisons. Through these capacities they actualised new kinds of places, but they did so differently each time. Rather than seeing each causewayed enclosure as the repetition of the same, therefore, with an identical template being imposed, each becomes the repetition of difference, the repetition of intensive processes (Deleuze 2004, 143; cf. Somers-Hall 2013, 83). Thus there is no need to deny the similarities between causewayed enclosures, or to deny that they reveal shared elements of the lives of humans and non-humans more broadly between 3700 and 3300 cal bc in southern Britain. Rather it is to recognise that this shared identity is not primary; instead, it is emergent from the underlying playing out of intensive processes, events and difference – difference and repetition are prior to identity, always (Deleuze 2004; Massumi 2015a, 123). The similarities between causewayed enclosures are the outcome of multiscalar and multi-agential historical processes, not the imposition of an anthropocentric mental template.

Architecture and community Mapping the dynamic nature of enclosures reveals how architecture acted in the world differently, indeed how it acts to help produce different kinds of worlds: worlds that gathered people, things, materials and landscapes to them. These gatherings were not without consequence: the territorialisation of people, animals, plants and places, whether for a festival at an enclosure or in more routine evenings spent in smaller houses and homes, were critical in the emergence of communities in this period.

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Communities are not limited to human beings; instead, we can better think of them as particular types of assemblage of both humans and non-humans (Harris 2013, 2014a). The communities of Neolithic Britain included pots, flint tools, axes and animals. Architecture plays a critical role here as a nexus through which communities come into existence. The processes of building/using/repairing architecture drive rhythms that tie humans and non-humans together, with communities emerging in parallel with architecture’s dynamic flows of affect, desire and power. If affect, desire and power made the virtual actual, through their differential flows of intensity, then what was actualised were the communities of Neolithic Britain. We could think about how long barrows bound the bodies of dead humans together to create communities in death that may have matched or inverted communities in life (Shanks & Tilley 1982). The deposition of human and animal remains in long barrows, and thus the critical ways the dead of both groups could be transformed in particular architectural settings, would have been central to the emergence of community. The evidence that a significant minority of people, as well as animals, interred in long barrows may have experienced violence (Chapter 5; Banfield et al. 2019; Schulting & Wysocki 2005; Smith & Brickley 2009), suggests that communities may have emerged through the acts of building that followed such moments. Did the construction of Wayland’s Smithy 1 in Oxfordshire in the 36th century cal bc, for example, act as a response to conflict (Bayliss et al. 2020; Whittle et al. 1991; Whittle et al. 2007, 114; Whittle et al. 2011)? Here 14 people were interred in a small mortuary structure, three or more of whom may have died violently (Whittle et al. 2007, 118). We can imagine the aftermath of violence in this context, bringing bodies, living and dead, together with the bodies of trees in the form of the split oak posts that defined the central space, as well as materials like earth and chalk, to form a new place, a new architecture, and a new community (Thomas 2013, 332). Of course architecture did not do this alone: the cycles of animal reproduction, the rhythms of the annual lives of cereal crops, and the gatherings of water and materials on a daily basis also played critical roles in how the communities of which these elements were part came into being (for example on cattle see Ray & Thomas 2003; Thomas 2013, 408–10). Nonetheless, here we will concentrate on the role of architecture in helping to produce communities (Thomas 2013, 332). Let us begin by examining the popular concept of house societies.

House societies, architecture and community The concept of house society first emerged in the work of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1982). Lévi-Strauss (1982) argued that in certain societies the house acted both as an architectural setting for living in and a representation of the social group. Here the house creates kinship between people who may, or may not, be biologically related (Thomas 2013, 291). Continuity, descent and community are traced through the house itself. The ‘house’ in this context need not be a specific dwelling or family home; it can be a communal structure such as a men’s house (Thomas 2013, 292–3). For archaeology, Thomas (2013, 292) has argued we

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are better off thinking about how interactions with the concept of a house can act as a particular kind of process that can ‘overtake’ and transform societies. Thomas (2013, 293) argues that with house societies, the house helps to form specific social relations, to act as a moral person and to be the guarantor of descent. In so doing it acts to sustain communities, specifically at moments of rapid change.

Timber halls, house societies and new communities Both Thomas (2013) and Colin Richards (e.g. Richards & Jones 2016, see later) have put the concept of house society to work in thinking about Neolithic Britain. Thomas (2013, 296) argues that the construction of timber halls in the early part of the period entwined people in the process of changing from hunting and gathering to farming. Sites like Claish or Balbridie in Scotland, he suggests, may have been related to specific sets of practices, especially those involving the processing of plant remains, that were critical to the first stages of the Neolithic (Thomas 2013, 307). These halls date exclusively to the start of the Neolithic because once these transformations were complete they were no longer required. Rather than ‘houses’ in the strict sense, Thomas suggests that the buildings were critical technologies in becoming Neolithic, and the burning and destruction of some of them, touched on briefly in Chapter  5, created an ‘effective core of collective identity’ (2013, 313). More recently, Thomas and Keith Ray have referred to these as ‘invested lineages’ (Ray & Thomas 2018, 105). How might the approach we have advocated go further than this? To begin with we need to think about how the life of a timber hall helped to produce the communities of which it was part. Take the example of White Horse Stone, Kent (Garwood 2011; cf. Barclay  & Harris 2017) (Figure  6.6), constructed between 4065 and 3940 cal bc and abandoned around 300 years later. In contrast to other timber halls such as Warren Field, discussed in Chapter 4, White Horse Stone has been convincingly argued to be the product of two building events, with one 10 m long structure being added to by a second 9 m long counterpart to most likely form a single linked building (Garwood 2011, 65). A new community emerged at White Horse Stone through the construction and territorialisation of this new assemblage (cf. Jones 2007, 115). The members of this community included particular woods for the posts, potentially daub for the walls, meaning clay and other materials, and brush or maybe turf for the roof; these materials came together with human and animal bodies, clay bodies of pots, flints and others to create a new space in the world at the very start of the Neolithic. Architecture like this, located in a wooded landscape (Garwood 2011, 73), can be thought of as the outcome of the collective interaction of these material elements, of the affective relations that emerge as bodies of different sorts pressed into one another. The shape of the architecture produced specific patterns of engagement, both in its building and in the regular acts of maintenance and repair that human and non-human bodies took part in over the site’s 300-year history. The act of assembly coded the flows of desire that ran through the different materials, and a

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0

FIGURE 6.6 

5

10 m

Plan of White Horse Stone timber hall

Source: After Barclay & Harris 2017, 223, figure 15.1.

more-than-human community emerged. This was the outcome of intensive, affective, associations of repeated collectivity. That first act of construction created the space at White Horse Stone as something different, a place not like the others in the landscape. No longer smooth, space here was striated, shaped and structured. This process of difference making was of course repeated when the second half of the building was added, a moment that would have reinforced the affective connections to this place for new materials and new people as they worked together to extend and enhance the shaping of this place. The community here was all these elements coming together to differentiate themselves as a particular entity, a particular place, a particular group, a particular haecceity, far from human alone. Such an outcome was the result of what Anna Tsing (2015, 157) calls ‘shifting cascades of collaboration and complexity’. These were powerful enough to ensure that this place was cared for and repaired, with new materials and people coming to it, over 300  years, making it the central (yet changing) member of the community for centuries. Whereas Ray and Thomas (2018, 314) see halls as places where people invested their labour, we might invert this and think of how the house instead invested its time, protection and care in generations of people who dwelt within.

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House and community in Neolithic Orkney Where Thomas uses the model of house societies to think about architecture and communities at the start of the Neolithic, Richards and his colleagues employ the concept to the changing histories of Neolithic Orkney (Richards & Jones 2016). In contrast to mainland Britain, Orkney presents numerous examples of surviving stone built ‘domestic’ architecture, in addition to an increasing number of earlier wooden examples including at Wideford Hill on Mainland and Braes of Ha’Breck on Wyre (Richards et  al. 2016c, 227). The stone examples, beginning probably between 3410 and 3330 cal bc7 (Bayliss et al. 2017, 1181) represent a shift in architecture both in material and in permanence. Examples such as those at Knowes of Trotty and the Smerquoy Hoose on Mainland were clearly influenced by the earlier architecture of stalled cairns (Richards et al. 2016c, 229).8 For Richards et al. (2016c), however, the shift to stone domestic architecture represents the emergence of house societies for the first time. Rather than a critical technology in the process of becoming Neolithic, as in Thomas’ (2013) argument, house societies emerge as a specific historical element of the Orcadian Neolithic sequence. Here the move from timber to stone represented the ways in which houses promoted the longevity of communities and acted to transform kinship (Richards et al. 2016c, 230). Once stone architecture became popular, Richards et  al. (2016c) trace the changing nature of the emergent house societies. Initially this involved the move from singular to double houses at a number of different sites, including Knowes of Trotty as well as at Knap of Howar on Papa Westray (Figure 6.7), and Green on

FIGURE 6.7 

Knap of Howar, Orkney

Source: Photo by author.

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Eday (Richards et al. 2016c, 232). At other sites houses are enlarged. This trend towards communal living in larger numbers and the ‘conglomeration’ of settlements is enhanced in the final centuries of the fourth millennium and into the Late Neolithic. Different forms of houses emerge in small villages (Richards 2005a). These newly nucleated sites often involve the construction of particular buildings of importance such as Hut 7 at Skara Brae, House 2 at Barnhouse (and later Structure 8) and Structure 1 at Stonehall Farm amongst others (Richards et al. 2016b, 238–9). These can be understood, Richards et  al. (2016c) argue, as particularly important ‘big’ houses. In turn, the extraordinary site of Ness of Brodgar, with its multiple buildings of mixed styles gathered within a huge stone wall, may represent the gathering of these big houses, with monumental constructions beginning in a single location during the first centuries of the third millennium bc (Bayliss et al. 2017; Card et al. 2018; Richards et al. 2016c, 242) The story ends with the increasing fracture of house societies at the end of the Neolithic (Richards et al. 2016c, 246). How might we add to such an account to further consider how communities themselves emerge with and through these forms of architecture? Take the Neolithic village of Barnhouse (Richards 2005a) (Figure  6.8). Here we can see not just the emergence of a house society but rather a changing and transforming community of which those houses were active members. Barnhouse consists of 13 structures, with occupation beginning between 3135 and 3100 cal bc, and ending between 225 and 275 years later, probably between 2885 and 2860 cal bc (Richards et  al. 2016a, 207). The recent Bayesian modelling of the dates from Barnhouse reveals that the first phase of construction involved building five houses (2, 3, 9 and 5a) (Richards et al. 2016a, 211–5). This was followed by a second phase, which saw the further construction of three more (7, 12a, 13a) and the rebuilding of another (5b). Three further phases of construction and reconstruction followed (phase 3: 6, 10, 5c, 13b; phase 4: 1, 8, 5d and 12b; phase 5: 4 and 11). The monumental Structure 8 was almost the last structure to be built with only House 11, and possibly House 4 coming later. Many of the houses, although definitely not House 9 and possibly not House 7, were still in use when Structure 8 was built (Richards et al. 2016a, 215). The emergence of these houses allows us to trace the complex relations at play. The architecture of the stone houses and tombs in Orkney drew, as Jones (2004, 238–9) has argued, on the particular material properties of stone around these islands, specifically its capacity to sheer into evenly divided slabs. This allows for complex stone architecture to emerge in ways that would otherwise not be possible before metal tools.9 Thus, the emergence of the communities of which these stones were members was partially due to the material properties of these elements of the assemblage (cf. DeLanda 2007). The shared capacities of stone, however, do not mean that the community at Barnhouse was undifferentiated. As Sian Jones and Richards (2005, 202) point out, there are different patterns in the architecture between the houses on the interior and exterior of Barnhouse, and they are linked by separate drainage systems. Although partly an issue of chronology, the difference

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FIGURE 6.8 

Plan of the settlement at Barnhouse

Source: Redrawn by author after Richards et al. 2016a, 214, figure 12.

in drainage suggests that keeping the material elements of the community apart was important  – just as the human members dwelt in different houses (Jones  & Richards 2005, 202). Indeed, although the decoration of Grooved Ware was similar from house to house, the structures in the western part of the site all used individual ‘recipes’ drawing on different stone resources, as we saw in Chapter 4 (Jones 2001). Thus different parts of the landscape became incorporated into the communities that emerged through different houses. The specific architectural features

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of Barnhouse created specific scales of community engagement both materially and socially, producing particular affective encounters, in ways that relate to both humans and non-humans alike. The differences within the community at Barnhouse are emphasised in the architecture of two structures from different periods in the village’s occupation: House 2 and Structure 8. House 2, which dates to the earliest phase at Barnhouse, was at least twice the size of the other buildings (other than Structure 8) and employed a standard of masonry otherwise unparalleled at the site (Richards 2005b, 129).10 The house contained two hearths, and the internal architecture clearly refers to passage graves in its lay out. Structure 8 was probably built between 3000 and 2975 cal bc (Richards et al. 2016a, 213), and was on a massive scale, including a 3 m thick wall, contained by a wide clay platform, itself surrounded by another wall 1.3 m thick (Hill & Richards 2005). Both House 2 and Structure 8 assembled the community in differing ways. Structure 2 drew on a complex interweaving of past and present in its architectural form, which echoed older house architecture in its use of ‘divisional orthostats’ (Richards et al. 2016c, 237), and more contemporary passage graves. Powerful materials were physically incorporated into the house, including potentially a dead body (Richards 2005b, 137), alongside worked stone artefacts such as a polished chisel (Richards 2005b, 148). Structure 8, meanwhile, incorporated the material of older houses into the platform that surrounded it, as well as elements of the landscape, such as the clay that came from the nearby loch (Hill & Richards 2005, 174). A hearth in Structure 8 predates the building itself (Hill & Richards 2005, 160–3) and, although the characteristic hearthstones had been removed, the building was constructed around it, suggesting that memory was critical to how this assemblage emerged. Other houses at Barnhouse also incorporated hearthstones from older houses (Downes & Richards 2005, 125–6), demonstrating the importance of these material connections in reterritorialising communities in new locations, with new members – both people and houses – that were genealogically descended from older compatriots. Different times and places came together here in the new assemblages; as much as the material things themselves then, and the way they built the house, it was the textures and temporalities brought with them that made architecture matter. The materials included at Structure 8 included a complete Grooved Ware pot set into the ground, only decorated on the visible elements (Hill & Richards 2005, 159). Here a material we normally think of as mobile – pottery – became a fixed part of the architecture. Elsewhere 14 flint nodules, rich in virtual potential (cf. Chapter 4), were deposited in a pit. In both cases these materials bound flows of humans and non-humans, virtual capacities and actual properties into the architecture and thus into the community. It is notable that the Grooved Ware pottery at Structure 8 included examples made with all the different ‘recipes’ previously identified for the village’s Western houses (Jones 2001, 149–50; see Chapter  4). Whilst the chronological modelling shows that these houses were still in use when Structure 8 was built, and therefore this does not represent a change in pottery production (Richards et al. 2016a, 217; contra Jones 2001, 126–9), it suggests that

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Structure 8 acted as a territorialising force that gathered together members of the community – human and non-human – from different houses. Richards and colleagues (2016c, 234) write about the nature of competition and power within these communities, and differences in status might well be important at Barnhouse. However, the mode of power in their accounts remains, despite the subtlety of their exploration, primarily anthropocentric. In contrast we can begin to think this through in relation to the post-anthropocentric ideas of community we have explored here. Instead of seeing this as a set of social distinctions between people who live within houses, what if we saw it as a distinction between the houses themselves? There is no metaphor here, the houses do not stand for humans; there is no need for scare quotes when we speak of houses competing (contra Richards et  al. 2016c, 253). Here it becomes no surprise that Structure 8 reaches such a monumental scale because, as we will see later, monumental scale was a principal axis of power in Neolithic Britain, the means by which power becomes territorialised and gathered. At other Late Neolithic Orcadian sites power was drawn not so much from monumental architecture but from the sweeping flows of relations that crisscrossed the middens that surrounded the houses. At Skara Brae midden material may have formed the wall core at Hut 7, and clearly surrounded the houses of the village out to an outer boundary wall 3 m away (Childe 1931). It was also used as wall core at Knap of Howar and Stonehall Farm House 1, and played a critical role at Structure 8 at Sanday (Hunter et al. 2007, 67; Richards et al. 2016b, 157). The middens here acted to warm houses, meaning the intensity of the flows of relations they captured could be felt by human and animal bodies within the house, just as their smell would have permeated the worlds of humans and animals walking past. These were houses located within what we termed in Chapter 4 the Body without Organs, a ‘living assemblage’ as Richards et al. (2016b, 158) evocatively and accurately refer to it, the material of communities-past surrounding the houses, and becoming part of them in turn. Just like the hearthstones at Barnhouse, midden material allowed architecture to become multitemporal, to make multiple pasts present, its texture redolent of other times and different events.

From house societies to assembled communities The accounts of house societies offered by both Thomas and Richards et al. have much to recommend them. In both cases they see architecture as critical to the emergence of different kinds of community, rather than simply revealing the kinds of community that already existed. Architecture here plays an active role in the creation of new worlds (Whittle 1996). Richards et al.’s (2016c, 226) description of house societies as a social process, or as a set of relations, which includes nonhumans is especially important. In both cases I believe we can build upon their insightful engagements. However, I  wonder if house societies offer us the best model for developing these arguments further. Like many times in archaeological thinking, it is clear that anthropological analogy offers an important provocation to think differently

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about the worlds we study.11 It is clear that this analogy has provided precisely that in both the contexts Richards and Thomas examine. Nonetheless, if house societies explain the individual timber halls of mainland Britain in the Early Neolithic, the agglomerated settlements of Late Neolithic Orkney and indeed regions of the country where we do not even have evidence for houses (e.g. Thomas 2013, 322), then does the analogy foreground difference? Or does it risk homogenising important variations between these communities? Here I argue that an attention to assemblage, to materials, and to the non-human, coupled with a sense of how architecture gathers these elements together to form a community, offers us something different. It can allow us to build on the arguments that the engagement with the idea of house societies has brought about, but take them in new directions. These new directions specify how different communities may have been between Orkney and southern Britain, say, because their membership was different, once we no longer restrict communities to people alone. Houses here become even more active than they are in the house society model, because they no longer symbolise, or represent, descent groups; they are active players in the emergence of the communities of which they were part.

Multiscalar communities and Late Neolithic henge monuments The two examples of architecture and the emergence of community we have looked at so far have examined a particular scale of community interaction, based around houses or households. One of the striking elements of community in the Neolithic, however, is the multiple scales at which it emerged, from small gatherings around an isolated handful of pits, via the houses and halls we saw previously, to the monuments constructed at vastly different scales. Causewayed enclosures, discussed earlier in the chapter, are one example of a larger-scale community coming together, being territorialised, at certain moments in time. In Late Neolithic Britain we see a variety of scales at which particular kinds of communities were produced. Whilst some really substantial monuments may have been made by relatively local groups,12 others featured materials and animals that travelled over significant distances and suggest a much wider scale of community. In this period communities emerge via particular forms of material culture, artistic production, and architecture. In particular, henge monuments, and their associated timber and stone circles, created new ways in which different scales of community could be instantiated. Henges, typically defined by the presence of an internal ditch, external bank and various numbers of entrances, vary in both size, from small hengiforms to enormous enclosures, and date, stretching from the Late Neolithic into the Early Bronze Age (Gibson 2012). The range of size here is important, because it tells us about the variation in scale of community. From small hengiforms, like the Conygar Hill pit rings in Dorset (Healy 1997b), or their slightly larger compatriots to the north in the same county at Wyke Down (Barrett et al. 1991; French

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et al. 2007), via the middle-sized henges like Woodhenge in Wiltshire or Maxey in Cambridgeshire, to the giants like Durrington Walls, different kinds of gatherings took place in different ways and at different times. These involved varied numbers of people, objects, animals and materials coming together in different ways. Communities could vary from a few people working at a specific site over a couple of days to annual building parties to which members travelled from different places to work together (Madgwick et al. 2019). An example that captures much of this multiscalarity comes from one of the larger henge monuments in the country, Mount Pleasant, Dorset (Wainwright 1979; cf. Greaney et al. 2020; Harris & Sørensen 2010; Thomas 1996) (Figure 6.9). The henge is made up of an enormous bank and ditch, 320 m by 370 m, with at least five entrances (Barber 2004). The ditch itself was up to 3.2 m deep and varied between 8 and 14.5 m in width (Wainwright 1979). In addition to this Site IV, a post setting and enclosure ditch 43 m in diameter, was constructed in the middle part of the henge, situated so that its entrance was at the highest point of the monument (Thomas 1996, 197). Recent redating of the sequence here shows that building began with the construction of the bank and ditch of the main monument probably between 2580 and 2530 cal bc13 (Greaney et al. 2020, 219). A palisaded enclosure was then constructed, running around the inside of the main henge ditch, dramatically changing the way in which the site could be accessed. This was

FIGURE 6.9 

Plan of the major features of Mount Pleasant

Source: Image by and courtesy of Susan Greaney (published in Greaney et al. 2020; after Wainwright 1979, figure 99).

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probably put up between 2530 and 2465 cal bc14 and the Site IV ditch was dug likely between 2515 and 2440 cal bc15 (Greaney et al. 2020, 219). At Mount Pleasant specific acts of collective endeavour of people and things were clearly involved in the construction of the site and the building of the palisade. A scale of community emerged in these acts of building, far larger than those that people and things were involved in their daily lives, and this may also have been caught up in monitoring specific forms of movement and encounter as people moved in and out of the palisade and through Site IV. In this latter part of the site, Thomas (1996, 199) has persuasively argued that the wooden settings would have guided movement in particular ways, with people depositing items in the ditch on their way round. At the lowest levels these deposits included both Grooved Ware and Early Neolithic forms of pottery, suggesting that much older material was still encountered in some form (Bradley 2000, 128). The past was entwined here, creating a large-scale community that bound multiple temporalities together. At other times, practices at the site seem to have been less controlled, and different forms of community may have been produced through a somewhat chaotic choreography, an interweaving of encounter and co-presence. These different encounters involved feasting on both cattle and pigs, depositing deer bones, erecting temporary shelters and more (Brück 2001, 660; Thomas 1996, 205; Wainwright 1979, 31, 44). Feasting and deposition were ongoing performative acts, critical to the production of community, each one generating affective bodily encounters between human and non-human that although they took place in one location, at one point in time, spiralled out into the wider world, sustaining communities at a variety of scales. If Mount Pleasant helped produce different scales of community at the site, from large scale gatherings around moments of construction to small-scale relations around deposition, then the materials that were part of those communities sustained and enhanced these relationships elsewhere in the landscape. Grooved Ware16 played an important role here. Through its material properties, its capacity to hold liquids and food, to feed people, Grooved Ware became coded with the affective relations that formed the communities of which it was part (Ahmed 2004; Harris & Sørensen 2010, 158). Its use was central to the emergence of community, as Thomas (2010, 12) has rightly argued, through the way it drew on the architectures within which it was used. Using Grooved Ware at places like Mount Pleasant folded one scale of community into this form of material, the memories contracted into the tastes and smells it helped to generate, it became part of this place even when it was elsewhere. Handling it may have reminded people not only of visits to henges but of what it meant and how it felt to be part of that wider sociality. Small-scale communities away from henges were thus affectively shaped by the larger gatherings at these monuments. The portability of Grooved Ware allowed the memory of a monument to be taken out into the landscape. Individual fragments revealed the history of use and encounter that had led to their breakage, and with that a sense of time and community could emerge. The multiple scales of community that Grooved Ware sustained were enhanced by its decoration, as discussed in Chapter 4. There we saw how this material was

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coded with specific iconic relations that ran across multiple media, and different landscapes, from passage graves, to rock art, to decorated artefacts. Thus when Grooved Ware was used in houses, or at a smaller hengiform, or at a site like Mount Pleasant, it resonated relationally back and forth through these different spatial and temporal scales, collapsing them into its material form and territorialising the communities of which it was part. The boundary between object and architecture here is revealed to be permeable and contextual, their co-presence in the assemblages of communities allowing their qualities to transfer between different scales, the affective capacities of one kind of body shaping and being shaped by another (Love 2013; McFadyen 2006, 2014). Each sherd of Grooved Ware was a form of topological technology, enfolding and expressing multiple relations, temporalities and associations in the textures of its decoration and breaks. The multiple scales of community can be detected at henge monuments across the country as they gathered flows of people, animals and materials to them, sometimes over considerable distances (Madgwick et  al. 2019; cf. Barclay  & Brophy 2020). In so doing they forged topological and relational links that made new worlds possible. Yet we may be underplaying the scales at which henges brought communities into being, because it is clear that at their largest scale they brought together not only people, materials, animals and plants but the landscape and the cosmos too (Ray  & Thomas 2018, 263). Richards (1996, 2013a) and Bradley (1998, 122) have shown that henge monuments like the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness (Figure 6.10) on Orkney mimicked the landscape around them.

FIGURE 6.10 

The Stones of Stenness

Source: Photo by author.

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As Richards (1996, 324) notes ‘by virtue of their position, both monuments take the appearance of being surrounded by water that is encircled by hills’, a pattern matched by their surrounding ditches which would often have been filled by water. At Stenness the complex architectural connections between community and cosmos are added to by the fact the site has a central hearth and memorialised the location of a former house (Richards 2013b). At the Ring of Brodgar, we saw in Chapter  4 how the stones brought together different elements of the landscape physically into the monument. Such connections in the north are matched in the south (Bradley 1998; Gillings & Pollard 2016; Pollard 2012; Richards 1996). This is most notable at Stonehenge, where not only stones and people from Wales were emplaced, in the form of blue stones and cremation burials (see Chapter 4; Parker Pearson et al. 2015; Snoeck et al. 2018), but even wider connections were territorialised into the community. Here excavations have shown the avenue that connects the river Avon to Stonehenge is the embellishment of older glacial fissures that were aligned by chance on midwinter sunset (Allen et al. 2016a). At a dramatic piece of Neolithic architecture, not only were materials, people, landscapes, animals and plants assembled into a community, many of whom had perhaps travelled some distance to be there (Madgwick et al. 2019), but the very sun itself. More than just an act of community assembly, this was architecture that made the world.

Architecture and power Architecture played a critical role in the creation of communities, one that was as dynamic and emergent as the affective events that played out in their individual histories. This creative dynamism flowed from the intensive fields of individuation from which architecture emerged and, as we saw in Chapter 3, the intensive can register in flows of desire, affect and power. We discussed power in the previous chapter where we examined how the concept had often been associated with Middle Neolithic burials. In many accounts the individuals buried in these graves, like the one at Liffs Low, or the richly furnished examples at Duggleby Howe, have been seen as powerful people, rulers even, of regions of Neolithic Britain (e.g. Loveday 2009; Loveday & Barclay 2010). In contrast, I suggested we could conceptualise how power works quite differently, once we appreciate it as an intensive force and not as a personal possession. Power in Chapter 5 became something that flows through the world, drawing on the textures of desire we saw in Chapter 4, and emerging through powerful objects as much as powerful people. Through this it was bound into powerful places. Here we will develop this to focus on how architecture, and specifically monuments, may have been connected to power in the Neolithic.17 The idea that monuments and power are linked in the Neolithic is long standing, and indeed almost universally accepted. What changes in different accounts is the model of power proposed, and the consequences for past worlds. Colin Renfrew (1973) proposed that the Neolithic of Wessex saw the emergence of chiefdoms. Each causewayed enclosure in the region was the ‘home of an emerging chiefdom’

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(Renfrew 1973, 549; see also Earle 1991). These eventually became united under one ‘greater’ chiefdom in the Late Neolithic, indicated by the sizeable constructions at Silbury Hill and Stonehenge. Monuments here are taken as evidence that powerful people emerged in the Neolithic culminating in a single ‘paramount’ chief (Renfrew 1973, 553). Whilst not adopting precisely the same logic, Roy Loveday (2009) has argued that the cursus monuments centred on the Rudston monolith in Yorkshire – Britain’s largest standing stone – may have been a site of cultic pilgrimage associated with high-status goods and a highly stratified society. More recently, Loveday (2016) has made the sustained case that it is very hard to explain a number of features of cursus monuments in southern Britain without including a concept of power. In contrast to the timber cursus monuments we examined in Chapter 4, some of the earthen cursus monuments like Aston in Derbyshire, Springfield in Essex or Drayton in Oxfordshire have very set plans, including clear right-angled terminals. Loveday (2016, 93) argues that such monuments are ‘well planned and well executed’ and must reveal the existence of powerful individuals’.18 Even authors writing from very different theoretical perspectives to Renfrew and Loveday, such as John Barrett (1994, 29), have associated monuments and power. Barrett argued that the architecture of the mound of Silbury Hill, which we will return to in a moment, created a space through which an elite could emerge, rather than being produced at the orders of an elite (as per Renfrew). Its narrow top meant that only a select few could stand above others (Barrett 1994, 31–2). The architecture of henges, more widely, helped to produce a ‘ritual elite’, Barrett argued (1994, 105), by providing a form of architecture that allowed individuals to accumulate particular forms of knowledge. Whether Renfrew’s evolutionary models, or those like Barrett’s inspired by agency theory, power here remains eerily familiar from our modern world: possessed exclusively by people, exercised as power over and fundamentally repressive. In contrast, a more sophisticated discussion of monuments and power has come from Thomas (2002). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s and Deleuze’s critical insights (see Chapters 3 and 5), Thomas (2002, 38) calls on archaeologists to recognise that power is inherently relational. More than this, he also argues that as archaeologists we must recognise that present modes of power may not apply in the past, and thus we need to identify the ‘particularity of power relationships’ (Thomas 2002, 37). In relation to Neolithic monuments, Thomas (2002, 47) argues that multiple forms of power emerged, alongside ‘context-specific forms of authority’. This clearly gives us a model which can more easily fit the relational approach this book takes; it has much in common with the kinds of power we discussed in the previous chapter. Yet, here too, power remains primarily a human quality, even if one established in connection with material things. How does a post-anthropocentric approach to power build on this? To answer this, I suggest we develop a new concept of power that is specifically emergent in Neolithic Britain, drawing inspiration both from Thomas and from the work of Foucault and Brian Massumi. As Thomas (2002) notes, one of the critical contributions Foucault (1977, 1978) made was to identify how specific modes of power emerge in particular contexts.

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So, for example, Foucault (1977) traced how, in the Early Modern period, the power exercised over criminals by the state moved from the physical torture and punishment of the body, towards a form of discipline where bodies were taken, imprisoned and trained to act differently. This disciplinary power, Foucault argued, was not limited to the criminal justice system but played out in a variety of contexts from clinics, to schools, to the military. Disciplinary power was later added to by what he terms biopower, which worked through the regulation of human health, the monitoring of statistics of life expectancy and so on (Foucault 1978, 139). Today, from the census, to the records our doctors keep, to the pleas of the government to eat and drink responsibly, and the monitoring they conduct to bear witness to this, biopower  – as with disciplinary power  – is alive and well. Alongside these two forms of power, Massumi (2015b, 2018) has identified another: ontopower. Ontopower, for Massumi, is how modern states seek to anticipate criminal, and especially terrorist, activity and to remove the threat prior to it coming into existence, whether by arrest or execution. He also traces how ontopower operates in capitalist futures markets, where the ability to predict minor changes in stock price can allow large amounts of money to be made (Massumi 2018). Ontopower, for Massumi, is a form of power that does not just target the actual but also the virtual: the world of potential. Now clearly none of these forms of power are likely to have played a role in the Neolithic. There were no police forces, or other institutions, to imprison bodies. There were no workhouses to train the bodies of the poor, no census data to model population health, and there were no supercomputers calculating the chances of particular events against which financial futures could be leveraged. There is certainly plenty of evidence for violence against bodies (more of which later), but not for the organised infliction of that violence by a state agency. So neither disciplinary power, biopower nor ontopower provides concepts we can import into the past. Foucault and Massumi do not provide models for power we might relocate to the Neolithic but instead emphasise our need to recognise that power is itself always historically situated and immanent. Thus, we will not find specific Neolithic modes of power in transcendent notions of chiefdoms or elites. Such terms merely place power outside of history once again – they are no more appropriate than a discussion of Neolithic ontopower would be. Power in the Neolithic, so often seen as being represented by monuments, does not lie in such an ahistorical explanation. What we require here is an approach that does not rest on representation, symbolism or metaphor alone. What would happen if we rejected the divide between concept and thing, between power and monument? What if monuments were power (cf. Holbraad 2007)? Not metaphor, not representation, not symbol – but power in place, practised and instantiated by monuments. Monuments, after all, are perhaps the defining feature of the Neolithic. We have no monuments from the Mesolithic period, a few potential erected posts and perhaps shell middens apart, and those of the Bronze Age seem as much a continuity of Neolithic practices as anything new. If the Neolithic, then, is the period of monuments par excellence, and archaeologists have long recognised that these examples of architecture may be

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related to power, then it seems reasonable to coin a new concept of power for this period, and to speak not of biopower, or ontopower, but of monupower. Monupower may not be the most elegant neologism, but a portmanteau word can be useful when attempting to communicate something genuinely different (Deleuze 2015, 47). The aim is to disclose how monuments act to capture desire, affect and power, and how power operated through them in the Neolithic. Critical here is that power is not just repressive, it can incite and seduce as well, and remember that power does not depend upon intention, nor is it a possession (Deleuze 2006b, 60). These are essential elements if we are to appreciate the emergence of a form of power in the Neolithic that is not primarily anthropocentric.

Monupower in motion: the case of Silbury Hill So how did monupower operate in the Neolithic? Let us begin at the end of the period as this is when power is normally seen to be at its zenith, with a site that has been seen both as representative of the power of paramount chiefs and alternatively as a locale where elites came into existence: Silbury Hill (Figure 6.11). Silbury Hill stands today as the largest pre-Roman mound in Europe, 40 m in height and 150 m in diameter. Much discussion of the monument in relation to

FIGURE 6.11 

Silbury Hill

Source: Photo: Swindonian/CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0).

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power has focused upon its enormous size, and the concomitant workload of its construction, as well as its final form. It is this final form that marks it as emblematic of chiefdoms (Renfrew 1973) and makes it suitable to raise elites to new heights (Barrett 1994).19 Both Leary (2010; cf. Leary  & Field 2013) and Joshua Pollard (2013) have shown, however, that by attending to the monument’s emergence, and by critiquing the notion of final form, more nuanced and engaged understandings of the site emerge. As we have seen with causewayed enclosures, there is much to learn here from an emphasis on process and becoming. Silbury Hill did not spring into existence fully formed; rather, it was constructed over a period of between 55 and 155 years (Marshall et al. 2016, 105).20 It began, as Leary (2010, 144, 2013) has demonstrated, as a low mound under 1 m high and just under 10 m in diameter, made from gravels imported from a nearby river. This gravel mound would have been unstable, and collapsed easily (Leary 2010, 144). Above this a larger mound was constructed, around 16 m in diameter, from basket loads of turf, subsoil and topsoil. Known as the Lower Organic Mound, this has two pits cut into it containing animal bone and some evidence for flint knapping (Leary 2013, 40–1). Nearby two further small mounds, less than 1 m high were built – so Silbury started life as several different mounds. Above this was the Upper Organic Mound, which was considerably larger, perhaps up to 5 or 6 m in height and 35 m in diameter, which contained a number of sarsens alongside chalk, gravel, different soils and turves (Leary 2010, 145, 2013, 42; Leary & Field 2013, 203). Interestingly the material making up the Lower Organic Mound and the Upper Organic Mound were all derived from different geologies (Leary 2010, 145). The Upper Organic Mound was then surrounded by up to five banks of chalk, increasing in scale, two of which may have entirely covered the monument (Figure 6.12). Encircling this was a large ditch and internal bank, the former of which was over 6  m wide and 6.5  m in depth (Leary 2010, 145). Due to the necessarily limited nature of the excavations, it is hard to say how the rest of the mound formed; however, it is very likely this took the form of further repetitions of the deposition of chalk, dug from a new and enormous encircling quarry ditch (Pollard 2013, 183). The inner ditch was itself backfilled and re-dug several times as the mound expanded outwards, the ditch moving in the same direction, until it was finally covered by the mound quarried from the new outer ditch (Leary 2010, 145–6). To understand power at Silbury Hill we need to emphasise, as Pollard (2013, 191) and Leary (2010) have rightly done, the site’s complex amalgam of materials. Within its architecture different elements of landscape were gathered and territorialised, from rivers, to woodland, to sarsen, to the chalk that lay under the soil and more (Leary & Field 2013; cf. Jones 2012, 183). We saw in Chapter 4 how matter moved places, and Silbury here becomes a locale where places merged together. These materials came together in movement, and continued to move once they had arrived, the gravel mound shifting, ditches silting and being backfilled, banks slumping, grass growing, and more. Never static, the ‘mutability of the mound’ is critical as Leary (2010, 148) argues. The mound included many flint nodules,

1776 shaft

Tunnel

Chalk bedrock (Phase 1)

Bank 5 (Phase 11)

Section through Silbury Hill showing phases of construction

Bank 3 (Phase 9)

Bank 4 (Phase 10)

Later construction (Phase 16)

0

Bank bank 3810 (Phase 7)

Source: Image courtesy of Jim Leary (after Leary 2013, 35, figure 2.4, original drawing by Eddie Lyons).

FIGURE 6.12 

Bank 1 (Phase 7)

Tip lines

Bank 2 (Phase 8)

Lower organic mound (Phase 4) and pitting activity (Phase 5)

Further dump layers (Phase 6.2)

Gravel mound (Phase 3)

Upper upper organic mound (Phase 6.1)

Later organic mound (Phase 11) (approx. position)

1 (Ph. 7)

Scale 1:500

Ditches

4 (Ph. 14) 3 2 (Ph. 12) (Ph. 13)

Old land surface (Phase 2)

25 m

150m OD

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all unworked (Leary & Field 2013, 208), and we have seen how these could act as stores of virtual potential, intensive energy that remained gathered and sealed rather than expressed in the form of tools and artefacts (Chapter 4; Banfield 2018). Other materials emerged around the mound, including water, which Leary (2010, 150) has argued would have filled the external ditch at certain moments (cf. Whittle 1997, 151). We might see this as coming from the monument, something that the monument had the power to deliver. The dynamism of the monument lies in the materials it is made from, and the work of people to bring those materials together, to territorialise them. Its power emerges from how it drew in the landscape and drew in people. In its early phase the monument would have been more like an enclosure than a mound, as Leary (2010, 145) points out, a site that defined a space in which people and materials gathered, not a site of exclusion as the construction is often understood. As we saw in Chapter 5 with Duggleby Howe, the creation of a mound helps to capture the flows of desire that materials themselves embody. Power flows from desire, understood once again as a pre-personal force, and desire instantiated the processes of work which gathered people to the site. The hard labour of digging and backfilling and redigging ditches would have been ‘back-breaking’ as Pollard (2013, 182) puts it. Such actions can be understood as being emerging from desire, and through the repeated actions that shaped the monument, those desires amped up and reinforced the intensity of engagements again and again. More materials were added to the mound, more labour was undertaken, more memories formed, more attachments entangled, more people involved: each repetition adds to the gravitational pull of the monument itself (cf. Bryant 2014, Chapter 7). The materials changed and shifted, they created and demanded attention, the changing body of the monument requiring engagement and maintenance; the slippage of a gravel mound, the growth of grass, the silting of a ditch: time emerged through these transformations. Through this, Silbury Hill’s growth forged the desire to return, the need to build more; it became a chain reaction of desire and affect. Thus the site emerged as rich in monupower via the history and becoming of the intensive affects which gave birth to it as a beacon in the landscape, something to which people responded (Pollard 2013, 183). Monupower was seductive – not a power which commanded people to build, but rather one which produced them as people who wanted to build, a power that flowed through materials, that used the captured flows of desire in its architecture to call people back. The dynamism, which Pollard and Leary have highlighted, is critical here, because it is in that dynamism we see monupower in motion. Field et al. (2013, 237–44) discuss the political world in which Silbury emerges, from the arrival of Beakers and people from the continent to the construction of the sarsen phases of Stonehenge. Without denying the catalytic qualities of these events, do they really explain a process of building that lasted at least 55 years? I suggest not. To explain this, we need a different concept of power, the monupower of Silbury itself (cf. Whittle 1997, 166).

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Monupower: the wider context Our traditional understanding of the power of monuments comes from their apparent endurance, the way in which they last. Yet here we see that monupower comes from a very different place. It is not remaining the same which gives monuments their power but rather their ability to change, to be built again and again, to be returned to again and again, to shift again and again. Not endurance but rather duration is key here, because, as Henri Bergson (1911, 14) puts it: ‘the more we study the nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means intervention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the new’. This is a different way of thinking of time from the normal linear sequence our chronologies impose, a different kind of succession and co-existence (Al-Saji 2004, 205). Monupower emerges in the complex interactions that architecture generates, in the dynamic affects of encounter between bodies of humans and non-humans, memories and materials. Monupower is not a possession, it is a force that flows through monuments, a gravity that drags people and things in and forces them out, that transforms bodies, it was seductive and it could be fatal. As an example of the latter, consider the violent events that took place at Hambledon Hill, one of the causewayed enclosures we encountered earlier. Here, as part of the elaborate building events, we see the construction and burning of an outwork around the Stepleton enclosure, an event likely associated with the deaths of two adult males and a neonate in the 36th century cal bc (Whittle et al. 2011, 140–1). Two separate events took place sometime later, with two young men, each shot with an arrow, being deposited in the outer and inner Stepleton outworks (Whittle et al. 2011, 143). Whilst it is clear that low-level violence was widespread in the Neolithic of Britain (Schulting 2012; Schulting & Wysocki 2005; Smith & Brickley 2009), it is rare to see violence taking place at monuments. Indeed causewayed enclosures, including Crickley Hill, Carn Brae and others, are some of the few examples where this is the case. In a world of mobile people, animals and things, it does not make sense to see this kind of violence in strictly territorial terms. Hambledon Hill is not a Neolithic castle defended by troops; it is an oddly shaped chalk island, where even the ditches and outworks that were constructed could be circumvented. Thus the violence, the burning of the Stepleton outwork and the deaths of perhaps five people at different moments do not neatly map onto patterns of behaviour that match our modern expectations. No surprise there. Thinking about this in terms of monupower can help, however. Suddenly the place itself is powerful, a power it gained from the fact it was repeatedly engaged with, visited, built and rebuilt (Mercer & Healy 2008). It may or may not have contained cattle, or some other material thing we might gloss as wealth, at the moments of attack. It may or may not have been helpful as a means to control territory. Once we see monupower as something that emerged here, captured and stratified into the very fabric of the land through the way duration is sustained in continual production, Hambledon Hill’s place as an attractor of violence – just as it was a place that attracted material things – becomes much easier to understand. Burning the Stepleton outwork is

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thus an attack on this power, or the way it was working, as much as it is an attack on people themselves. Hambledon Hill attracted people from afar, and these were included in the victims of violence, as indicated by isotopic analysis (Neil et al. 2018). Of the four adult males who may have died violently in three separate episodes at the Stepleton Spur, the two associated with the burning of the inner outwork, may have come from a considerable distance, although there are geologies within 8 km where they could have spent their childhood (Neil et al. 2018, 198). Interestingly the other two killed by arrows, had very different backgrounds. One came from a place with a geology that matches that of the southwest of England, in tune with the gabbroic pottery and greenstone axes known from the site (Neil et al. 2018, 199). The other, the final death at the monument we know of, had certainly grown up locally. Thinking about the temporal intensity of violence – that it was occasional and punctuated – and the extensive geographical origins of these individuals helps us understand the events at Hambledon Hill, and at the Stepleton enclosure specifically. Rather than set piece battles, we can think of moments of performance, with relatively few deaths but dramatic scenes  – burning outworks, bleeding bodies, heat, pain, sounds and more. Rather than battles, can we imagine something more staged, and deliberate, performative violence that coded Stepleton as a certain part of Hambledon Hill, and added to the power of place through the memories and affects it generated. The potential for three of the four victims to have come from far away is disproportionate in comparison with the isotopic evidence from the rest of Hambledon Hill; this suggests most people could have sourced their childhood diets locally (Neil et al. 2018). People travelling here to take part in violence as a part of the engagements that happened at a powerful monument, as part of a way responding to that monument’s power, makes more sense than ideas of set piece battles. Even if we accept the idea that the inner Stepleton outwork represents a ‘box rampart’ (Mercer & Healy 2008, 745), and that it was constructed in preparation for an assault, we might be better off thinking of the two later episodes of violence as a performative re-enactment of such a moment. Here the deaths, in one case of someone local, and in one case of someone foreign, might suggest deliberate violent sacrifice rather than uncontrolled violent eruption. The sacrifice here, of course, only adds to the power of the monument. Across the Neolithic different forms of monument actualised monupower differently. Long barrows enveloped and enclosed powerful remains, driving people to visit them, to walk past them, to add to them, to construct other monuments that responded to them. Chambered tombs like Ascott-under-Wychwood were not only built to contain human remains but were built on top of a powerful substance – midden material. As we saw in Chapter 4, and briefly in this chapter with regard to Orcadian houses, midden can be conceptualised as a substance where relations ran unchecked, where the powerful links that formed animals, plants and things were no longer contained but rather flowed back and forth across this intensive material. This was the Body without Organs. We encounter midden material at numerous forms of architecture, including causewayed enclosures such as Etton or

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Chalk Hill.21 In each case we can see powerful matter, material criss-crossed with desire, being incorporated within architecture that bounds this matter into place, becoming the threshold at which the Body without Organs is encountered. Monupower in certain places flowed from this. Yet other monuments developed their power differently. Thinking of monupower allows us to understand the architecture of Late Neolithic henge monuments we discussed earlier, for example, in a new light. Archaeologists have long discussed why it is that henges like Mount Pleasant are designed with the bank surrounding an internal ditch. The ‘megahenges’ of southern Britain, which include Mount Pleasant, Durrington Walls, Avebury and Marden, are striking to the degree to which such enormous acts of digging enclose a central space. Archaeologists have been puzzled by this because sites which have a defensive aim (everything from castles to hillforts) have a ditch on the outside of the bank. One useful suggestion made by archaeologists like Pollard (2013) and Alex Gibson (2004) has been that henges aimed to contain dangerous entities located inside the monument, rather than keeping things out. Drawing on the animacy and dynamism of Avebury as the banks weathered and the ditches silted, Pollard (2013, 190) argues that the architecture shows a desire by people to ‘control states of extreme sacredness and the power that went with them, as well as enhance that power through physical connections deep into the earth and high into the sky’: monupower indeed. Monupower was never distributed equally though: some causewayed enclosures were built and abandoned in a generation; few henge monuments are anything like as substantial as Avebury; and no other Late Neolithic mounds match the size of ­Silbury Hill. The shift here, though, is from seeing this as the presence or the absence of power in the hands of builders to instead recognising it as an animating force of architecture itself. This peculiarly Neolithic power reveals the historical specificity of this world, a concept which makes only partial sense to us today. This explains precisely why we have reduced power repeatedly to ­something human beings wield or possess – something that makes sense to us – rather than ­recognising that the duration of monuments and their scale, which emerges because of, and not despite, their shifting dynamism, suggests something rather different. Monuments, not people, were the focus of power in Neolithic Britain, and it was through monuments, through monupower, that power flowed.

Conclusion: machines for world making Monupower emerged from the dynamism of monuments and the way they wove communities together. This was true both at sites like Silbury Hill and at smaller monuments such as Cladh Aindreis, the chambered tomb where this chapter began. Here people, stones and earth came together to form a place that was more than the sum of its parts, a place that was different. This difference emerged not through the imposition of form but through an ongoing and vibrant process of emergence. Architecture is defined not by its stability, by the fact that it doesn’t change, but rather by the fact that it survives because of its ability to change, to reoccur, to

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happen again (Stengers 2011). At Cladh Aindreis, we see the monumental capability of a site to dynamically retain its importance to people over centuries and millennia. From this dynamism emerges the power of architecture. The monupower of Cladh Aindreis emerged from how it repeatedly gathered people and things to it, how it enforced changes in the landscape, and how it allowed people and things to forge new relations in its interior. Indeed, whilst monupower may have been the form of power that truly defined the Neolithic, it did not vanish at the end of the period. From the Bronze Age blocking of the site, to burials from the same period, via Iron Age and Viking interventions, to the actions of archaeologists in the present, Cladh Aindreis keeps calling people back; monupower echoes and percolates through time. On each occasion monupower returns through the monument’s transformations, through its dynamic ability to change, through its duration (Bergson 1991; Deleuze 1991a) and not through its ability to simply endure. Finally, we can see how these powers helped to build dynamic communities at Cladh Aindreis. These were communities of the living, communities of the dead, communities of stone and communities of place, which shifted and changed through time. In each of the previous chapters we have identified three neoconcepts, those related to materials in Chapter 4 and to bodies in Chapter 5. Here we can define three neoconcepts in the Neolithic in relation to architecture. The first of these, as the chapter has shown, is that Neolithic architecture made communities. It did not do so alone, nor as a force of ahuman will, but rather through the interplay of materials, humans, animals, plants and places. This created new kinds of affective relations that provide the medium of duration for a community. Thus, the differing forms of architecture in the Neolithic, from small houses or enclosures to massive cursus monuments and henges, imply different scales of community, different temporalities of community, different sets of relations and different ways of living. The manner in which architecture emerged as a key element of a community, in parallel with humans, is also a critical element that leads to our second neoconcept: that architecture assembled power. Power was not solely a human commodity here, as we also saw in Chapter 5. Yet there is something more here, and that is that power did not emerge through different forms architecture equally. It is for this reason I coined the term monupower, because it is at forms of architecture with monumental qualities that power became focused, pooling and congealing, building up and overflowing, resulting in violence, or huge feasts, or new acts of construction in differing ways at differing places. It was not that power was absent from less monumental forms of architecture; houses and tents need maintaining: they call people to them; they make demands. But when architecture becomes monumental it increases that power exponentially, because of the force it exerts, the seduction it offers, the potentials it possesses. This is the case, fundamentally, because monumental architecture can happen again, can change and can shift, it has a duration that is different in degree to other forms of architecture. Thus architecture created communities, and power flowed through architecture. These two concepts help define the third and final neoconcept we can identify here: that architecture operated as a machine for world making. Deleuze and Guattari say

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that a machine ‘may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks’ (2013, 50, original emphasis). By this they mean something that intervenes in the world, something that does something, and as Pollard (2013, 192) has argued, there is much to be gained from asking what architecture, including monuments, do. Machines, for Deleuze and Guattari, make a difference, they differentiate something new. Architecture did that in the Neolithic through the way it assembled new communities, new places, new ways of thinking, feeling and moving across the landscape. In the Neolithic monuments were not simply reflective of a worldview: they did not stand for different myths or beliefs; they were active and engaged players, which drove worlds into existence that could not have happened without them. Across the three previous chapters we have now identified nine critical neoconcepts related to materials, bodies and architecture. These concepts are analytical abstractions that act to help define what matters and what was made to matter in the Neolithic worlds I have written about. They were not static; they ebbed and flowed, they took part in the ongoing becoming of the world and they were caught up in one another. These concepts have a history too, but their history only defines part of the complex temporalities in which they operated. To think more about this, the next chapter will outline a temporal map of our concepts. This will form what we will term an ontography of the Neolithic, which in turn will lead us to different concepts of time itself.

Notes 1 Thanks to Lesley McFadyen for pointing out the overlap here with Cedric Price’s conceptions of how architecture could work (see also Mathews 2005). 2 One of the many reasons I refer to architectures as well as architecture. 3 See Chapters 3 and 5 on affect. 4 At Maiden Castle in Dorset, for example, 17 axes have been found, at least 10 of which are of Cornish origin (Roe & Edmonds 1991, 230) and 9.1% of the pottery was made from clay from the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall (Sharples 1991, 254). 5 We saw in Chapter 3 that Deleuze (2015) refers to this time of the event as Aion. 6 At 68% likelihood on the basis of the Bayesian model (Whittle et al. 2011, 325). 7 Modelled at 68% likelihood through the Bayesian statistics presented in Bayliss et  al. 2017, 1181. 8 Perhaps revealing the close similarity in social role argued for by Thomas (2013) in mainland Britain between the house and the tomb 9 Though it is worth noting that the presence of stone with this virtual capacity was not enough by itself to cause this architecture – Caithness offers similar building materials without the emergence of stone houses in the Neolithic (Ray & Thomas 2018, 130). 10 Indeed, this standard was only matched at Ness of Brodgar and passage graves like Maes Howe (Richards et al. 2016a, 194) 11 Examples include debates around personhood (cf. Fowler 2004; Jones 2005) or the meaning of Stonehenge (Parker Pearson & Ramilisonina 1998). 12 The length of time it took to build Silbury Hill suggests this may have been the case for this mound as we will see later in the chapter (cf. Leary & Field 2013). 13 Modelled at 68% likelihood through the Bayesian statistics presented in Greaney et al. 2020. 14 Modelled at 68% likelihood through the Bayesian statistics presented in Greaney et al. 2020.

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15 Modelled at 68% likelihood through the Bayesian statistics presented in Greaney et al. 2020. 16 Of which 657 sherds were found across the site (Longworth 1979, 84). 17 There is, of course, no hard-and-fast line between the forms of architecture that acquire the moniker monumental, and those that do not. My aim here is not to create two forms of architecture, and indeed I would suggest that power flows, to differing degrees, through all forms of building. Nonetheless, it is clear in the Neolithic that different forms of architecture can be considered more or less monumental, and that the scales of architecture constructed in this period are radically different to what came before. The term monument, therefore, should be seen as describing particular forms of architecture of a certain scale, where certain qualities come to the fore. It is an adjective in that sense and not a noun. There will be many forms of architecture that cannot be easily described as either monumental or non-monumental, but equally many which can. 18 Although see previously for a discussion of how repeated forms need not come from a pre-existing singular design. 19 Although it is worth noting, as Leary (2010, 147) points out, that if the current flat top is a later truncation the image of elites raised above others (Barrett 1994) may not stand in any case. 20 At 68% likelihood working on the basis of the preferred Bayesian model of the most recent excavation report (Marshall et al. 2016, 105). 21 We also find it in critical landscapes such as that around Avebury and Silbury Hill (e.g. Field et al. 2013, 233; Thomas 1999, 210).

PART III

Assembling past worlds

7 TIME, HISTORY AND MEMORY Towards an ontography of the Neolithic

Introduction Over the last three chapters we have assembled different elements of the Neolithic worlds that existed in Britain between 4100 and 2400 cal bc. We have visited sites where bodies were broken up and could be in more than one place at a time as a result. We have seen how middens gained power as relations criss-crossed their surfaces and we have watched as communities were assembled through the architecture of villages on Orkney. We have explored what it was Neolithic materials could become, what dead bodies could do, and the worlds architecture could create. Our aim here has been to assemble worlds that were posthumanist and post-anthropocentric. In so doing we defined nine neoconcepts that emerged from this analysis. These neoconcepts were neither wholly Neolithic, nor wholly new materialist, nor wholly mine. None were decided upon or prefigured before the analysis. They do not explain the Neolithic – rather the Neolithic, or the assemblages that made up this period, explains them. The nine neoconcepts we identified were: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Neolithic matter moved places Neolithic matter moved people Neolithic matter remembered Power flowed through parts Flows shaped Neolithic worlds, and Neolithic flows could be captured Neolithic bodies produced intensive events Neolithic architecture made communities Architecture assembled power Architecture operated as a machine for world making

These concepts are not independent from one another; they interweave, interact and relate to each other. They draw on and shape each other. The capacity of

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Neolithic matter to move people lent architecture the capacity to assemble power. The fact Neolithic matter remembered is what gave parts power and allowed the flows that shaped Neolithic worlds to be captured. Each neoconcept is an ontological claim about Neolithic worlds. These are not statements about what Neolithic people believed, or what they understood, or what they interpreted about the world around them. These are not interpretations of Neolithic culture or religion. The argument that Neolithic architecture made communities does not depend for its verification on Neolithic people’s agreement. The idea that Neolithic bodies produced intensive events does not stand or fall on whether that claim accurately captures the phenomenological experience of a cremation in the Late Neolithic. The argument here is that these are ontological descriptions of concepts that operated through the actions of people, things and places in conjunction. These were the outcome of how Neolithic worlds worked; they are what emerged from the assemblages of events, materials, bodies and architectures that we have examined. Of course, this is not to dismiss the notion that Neolithic people recognised, worked with and actively shaped these concepts; but it is to acknowledge that they were not their sole creators either. These neoconcepts operated in different ways at different times in Neolithic Britain. They were not constant or universal; they ebbed and flowed. They shaped Neolithic worlds as they gathered momentum and dissipated, emerged as pre-eminent or retreated to the margins. Neoconcepts are not static. They have a history, and at certain points in time some of them reached particular levels of intensity, becoming central foci for the worlds in which they existed. In this chapter, we will explore something of the flow of these concepts, how they shifted and moved through time, and in turn how they created time. This exercise in mapping concepts is what I term ‘an ontography’. An ontography can be told like a traditional historical narrative (it can be set out as a linear story), but this is only one way in which it can be explored. Rather than a mapping exercise that focuses solely on the where and the when of things, what we might term the extensive, an ontography also asks us to think about the intensive: the qualitative force of concepts. This means, of course, that it needs to be both actual and virtual. This realisation has profound consequences for how we think about time in the Neolithic; it will allow this approach to be contrasted with other recent accounts that stress more linear narratives, as well as those that argue that memory, rather than history, should be archaeology’s guiding principle. The second half of the chapter is thus concerned with developing a new approach to time for archaeology, drawing explicitly on Deleuze’s philosophy (Deleuze 1991a, 2004, 2015). This will allow us to further develop our ontography from a linear account of changing conceptual prominence, to a more complex story of the multiple temporalities, intensities and encounters that assembled the worlds of Neolithic Britain.

Towards a Neolithic ontography Our first task, however, is to define in a little more detail what we mean by ontography. Although obscure, the term has been used by a number of thinkers. Martin

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Holbraad (2009, 83) has employed it for his ontologically inflected anthropology, stating that it refers to the ‘the attempt to chart out the ontological presuppositions required to make sense of a given body of ethnographic material’. More recently, Ian Bogost (2012) used it as part of his attempt to describe an Alien Phenomenology. Bogost (2012, 38) employs the term to discuss object relationships, but without ‘offering clarification or description of any kind’. This suits his object-oriented ontology (OOO), which seeks to examine how things work outside of relations with the world around them. For both Bogost and Graham Harman (e.g. 2018), objects have a withdrawn essence that is inaccessible to both human beings and all other objects they come into contact with. As should be clear from the perspectives outlined in this book, the approach taken here is not rooted in OOO, and I see no need to follow Bogost in avoiding the description of object relationships. Rather, I will draw on an earlier use of the term ‘ontography’ from the physicist Richard Kitchener (1988, 76), who takes the view that if ontology is ‘what exists’, then ontography is the description of what exists. We can build on this starting point. Because our ontological concepts are emergent, they have both particular histories and specific geographies. They are located in places and in materials; rather than free-floating ideas, they emerge from specific conjunctions of people, things, places and times: specific assemblages. Mapping these conceptual assemblages requires a kind of ontological geography that operates in both time and space, but in different and novel ways, as we will see later in the chapter. It is this specific form of ontological geography for which we can use the term ‘ontography’.1 Of course, the process of mapping does not neutrally reveal what is already present; instead, as both Latour (2013) and Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 13) point out in different contexts, mapping is fundamentally productive. Here we work with our concepts to map them, to link them together in a creative act that allows the ontological and rhizomic connections of Neolithic worlds to emerge. The aim of this ontography is not to generate a totalising description of every twist and turn of our neoconcepts’ histories; that would require another three chapters. Instead, our first aim will be to identify key moments when particular neoconcepts came to the fore and had a significant impact. To do so, we will start by breaking the Neolithic into different chronological subsets and examine the importance of our neoconcepts at these different times. As we go through, I will include the number of the particular concept in brackets, matching the list at the start of the chapter.

A Neolithic ontography 4100–3800 cal bc: concepts before monuments Perhaps the neoconcept that was most critical to the first few centuries of the Neolithic was that matter moved people (2). Whatever the role of hunters and gatherers in the eventual development of the Neolithic in Britain, it is clear that the arrival of new people, animals, plants and things from the continent was a critical moment in the emergence of new worlds and new ways of living (Brace et al. 2019). Central

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to these movements, however, were particular materials already present in Britain. Along the south coast of England flint mines are amongst the earliest evidence we have for the Neolithic, and extraction of stone from key sites like the Langdale axe production site in the Lake District also begins from very early in the Neolithic as well (Edinborough et al. 2020; Whittle et al. 2011). Clearly, materials in Britain were drawing in groups from continental Europe, setting up new forms of relationship, creating new kinds of spaces and new ways of living. It was within this world that architecture played a critical role in making these new kinds of world possible (9). As Julian Thomas (2013) has argued, timber halls would have played a critical role in creating spaces in which encounters between incomers and people already living in Britain could be managed. New kinds of architecture helped fill the spaces that had been opened in the landscape with the axes extracted from flint mines or hewn from places like the mountain tops of the Lake District. New connections began to form across and between locales, new kinds of space opening up and shaping connections that whilst still mobile, were less nomadic than previously; more oriented, shaped and striated through the maps such architecture helped to create.

3800–3300 cal bc: monumental concepts With a few exceptions, such as Coldrum in Kent, perhaps, which we met in Chapter 5, it is from 3800 cal bc that monuments begin to become more widespread, with long barrows and chambered tombs being followed from 3750 cal bc, and in increasing numbers after 3700 cal bc in southern Britain at least, by causewayed enclosures. The 3600s seem in particular to have been a critical century for monument construction (Bayliss et al. 2020). Further north the first post-defined cursus monuments probably appear from 3700 cal bc (Whittle et  al. 2011, 906). Here we see the first manifestation of the idea that monuments assemble power (8), the neoconcept of monupower that we met in Chapter 6. This clearly was not a constant refrain in this period. As Whittle et  al. (2011) have so brilliantly demonstrated, there was a punctuated rhythm to monument building. Sites emerged that gathered people, animals and materials to them for periods of time, often a couple of generations, before fading away. A handful of causewayed enclosures were important over a number of centuries, but even here their power swelled episodically, not uniformly, with intense moments of use or building contrasted with long periods of little activity. The power of monuments to draw people to them through the way they unfolded and changed through time was critical to the manner in which these forms of architecture made communities in this period (7). Whether assembling communities of the dead within long barrows, or assembling communities of animals at causewayed enclosures, these monuments offered opportunities to forge and reforge communities in new ways. This could be both a response to and a cause of violence, as we saw at Wayland’s Smithy 1 and Hambledon Hill in Chapter 6.

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Finally, we might note the critical importance of matter moving places in this period (2). In contrast to the prior period, where matter moved people, with flint mines and quarries attracting people to them, now those materials moved places. Monuments fold multiple places into their architecture. Whittle et al. (2011, 794) have traced how the widespread circulation of axes over a greater part of the country, combined with the movement of decorated pottery, emerges contemporaneously with the large expansion of causewayed enclosures in the 37th century. Here materials moved the places of their origin, now enhanced by histories of relationships stretching over centuries. Whether it is pottery from the Lizard peninsula travelling to Dorset, or axes from north Wales to Cambridgeshire, places moved with their materials. This neoconcept critically relates to the increasing power of parts in this period (4). The fragmentation of bodies allowed these materials to be in multiple places at once, and the fragmentation of places allowed materials to carry these connections into the wider world. Parts had power, and matter moved places. Alongside this, those materials remembered (3); carried in their material fabric, spoken through their colours and textures, materials told their histories to those who knew how to listen (cf. Edmonds 1999).

3300–2900 cal bc: power becomes emplaced The period from 3300 cal bc in southern Britain sees a world after causewayed enclosures, and largely, though not completely, after the making of chambered tombs and long barrows (Whittle et al. 2011, 724). In their place new forms of monumentality become predominant including the earthen cursus monuments of southern Britain. Whilst substantial earthen cursus monuments date back to the 36th century (Whittle et al. 2011, 724–5),2 it is clear they continue beyond the construction and use of most enclosures. These forms of architecture, stretching up to 9.8 km in length in the case of the Dorset Cursus, suggest that new concepts were becoming more intensively actualised. The first of these is that the flows that shaped Neolithic worlds were increasingly being captured (5). Cursus monuments themselves speak to this process. Although their role has been much debated and discussed, one consistent idea has been that they relate to particular forms of movement. This movements might be ongoing (e.g. Tilley 1994) or older movements now memorialised (e.g. Johnston 1999). Either way, the coding of flows of movement, their capture in one sense or another, is clearly critical to their architecture. The interrelation of the four cursus monuments orientated on the Rudston monolith, Yorkshire (Figure 7.1), demonstrates how flows of movement were channelled and shaped in these processes. A specific form of monupower was at work here, one that stretched across a landscape rather than one that folded materials intensively into a single locale. This capture of flows also worked its way through materials too. As we saw extensively in Chapter 4, flows of desire became caught up in so-called ‘prestige goods’ of the period, the finely polished knives, exquisite arrowheads, jet belt sliders, Seamer style axes and more. In turn these could be captured in the single

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FIGURE 7.1 

The Rudston monolith

Source: Photo by author.

burials that became more widespread, especially between 3100 and 2900 cal bc (Loveday & Barclay 2010). Rather than associating this with the increasing power of individuals, as per traditional narratives, I suggested instead in Chapter 5 that flows of affect, desire and power became emplaced in single burials, territorialised into locations allowing new kinds of relationships to emerge. In certain locales, like Duggleby Howe, these processes were repeated multiple times, creating a specific knot in the landscape around which flows of people, materials and things would circulate into the Late Neolithic.

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In Orkney in this period chambered tombs, both stalled cairns and passage graves, continued to be built (Bayliss et al. 2017, 1178), suggesting different trajectories for our neoconcepts, with singular points in the landscape continuing to prove more important than the flows of movement mapped by cursus monuments in southern Britain. This period also sees the emergence of nucleated settlements in Orkney at Barnhouse and Skara Brae. Here, as we saw in Chapter 6, new kinds of community emerged through architecture (7), and a new world was assembled (9) where houses themselves came alive, took power and collapsed. Through the transfer of their hearthstones they gave birth to new houses, and new gatherings formed at places like the Ness of Brodgar. The Grooved Ware pottery made at these sites remembered (3), but it remembered different things  – the secrets of its different recipes at Barnhouse contrasting with its public facing uniformity of decoration at the site.

2900–2400 cal bc: intensive events, memories and the manifestation of monupower Three neoconcepts appear to have been particularly critical during what we normally term the Late Neolithic. The first of these was the ability of bodies to produce intensive events, especially through cremation (6). Although cremation was a minor tradition of funerary practice throughout the Neolithic, we have seen how it became more prominent in the centuries around 3000 cal bc, particularly through the ways in which cremations became bound together in cemeteries (Noble  & Brophy 2017). These sites in turn fed on the power of these intensive bodily events. Linked to this it is clear that this period saw the emergence of monument complexes on a greater scale than in other periods. From the constructions in and around Avebury, Stonehenge, and Mount Pleasant in the south of country, via complexes of henges at sites like Thornborough in Yorkshire, to Forteviot in Perthshire, particular locales became heavily invested architecturally. Monupower reached its most intensive in this period (8). Whereas earlier in the Neolithic monupower had risen and fallen more episodically, here it became concentrated and highly intensive. Sites like Stonehenge bound in places near and far in its materials, drawing on the capacity of matter to move places (1). Bodies textured places like the monument complex at Dorchester through their cremation, a powerful intensive event, or reinforced the ongoing importance of Duggleby Howe. Central to this was the manner in which Grooved Ware pottery drew on its capacity to remember in order to create links between multiple scales of community (3). The decoration on its outside tied it to powerful decorated artefacts, places of artistic creation and enormous monuments across the sea in Ireland (Thomas 2016a). Its ability to inspire memories, to summon up images of feasts at henges within smaller houses, allowed it to operate as an assemblage converter, linking collectivities across different scales. Yet this linking device should not be read as any kind of unifying materiality, any sense of a singular community across the whole of Britain (Barclay  & Brophy 2020). Architecture helped to create communities in this period, but it did

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so differently (7). Stonehenge makes singular statements about its links to West Wales and to the cosmos as we saw in Chapter 6. Avebury and Silbury Hill created a different kind of community just 30 km north. Other contrasts emerge in Yorkshire, mainland Scotland and in Orkney where something very different was happening again. In the latter case a complex pattern of the use and abandonment of settlements suggests a particular pattern of power and prestige flowing through architecture, with sites like the Ring of Brodgar providing a means of binding parts of the landscape together through the way in which materials move places (1) just as the abandoned sites of Barnhouse and Ness of Brodgar had previously done (on this chronology see Bayliss et al. 2017). It is critical to remember here, as Barclay and Brophy (2020) point out, that there is no nationally emerging ‘Britain’ at this time. Instead, there were multiple collectives which emerged through the power of architecture to forge communities, for matter to remember and for monupower to transform the world.

A linear ontography? This brief outline only touches on the examples from the previous three chapters, of course, and readers will no doubt think of many other cases where our neoconcepts come to the fore. It would be possible to develop a more detailed history, especially for parts of the period where our chronological control is at its most sophisticated. Yet other questions persist. Is a linear explanation of these concepts sufficient? What happens to concepts that are not being intensively actualised? How did the potential for matter to remember, say, change how people acted at times when this concept was not in the foreground? If keeping a body whole, for example, actively prevented the flow of power through parts (as we discussed in Chapter 5) then this neoconcept is critical not only when it is actual but also when it is virtual, when it remains solely unutilised potential. Once again, the virtual is not in any way opposed to the real (Deleuze 2004, 260). How does the potential for concepts to be actualised in the future shape how the past was understood? Providing an ever more detailed history by itself will not be sufficient to address this. To understand concepts when they have future potential and past power requires us to move beyond a straightforward linear narrative (cf. Lucas 2005). Thus, we need to think in more detail about how our emphasis on concepts, set within a posthumanist, post-anthropocentric and Deleuzian approach, also requires us to rethink our approach to time and history.

Time, history and memory In recent years there has been a resurgence in debates around time, history and memory in archaeology (for summaries see Crellin 2020; Souvatzi et  al. 2019), building on the essential work of Gavin Lucas (e.g. 2005). Critical in this regard to the study of the Neolithic has been the emergence of the Bayesian modelling of radiocarbon dating that we have encountered repeatedly in this book (Whittle et al.

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2011). On the one hand this approach has provided us with new certainty around the chronology of the fourth millennium cal bc in particular, as well as specific sites like Stonehenge (Darvill et al. 2012) or Mount Pleasant (Greaney et al. 2020). On the other, it has also led to calls for a very specific approach to history. Alasdair Whittle (2018), for example, has argued that the power of Bayesian statistics should lead us to drop any pretence of a division between history and prehistory,3 and to embrace the potential for writing very specific accounts that trace in detail the developing narratives of different times and places. In one striking example, Whittle and Alex Bayliss explore southern Britain in the Neolithic in the 3630s cal bc (Bayliss & Whittle 2019). Taking us on a walk through the landscape we see many of the sites we have encountered in this book, including the causewayed enclosures of Windmill Hill and Hambledon Hill and the burning of the mortuary enclosure at Fussell’s Lodge. This is a wonderfully evocative and powerful image. For Whittle it is clear this kind of reconstruction is the holy grail, moments of insight operating at the scales of individual lifetimes; a history of the encounters that took place. Plot, narrative, and sequence are key, and humans are at the heart of everything (Whittle 2018). This is archaeology-as-history. There are clear theoretical differences here with the aims of archaeology-ashistory and the posthumanist and post-anthropocentric project of this volume. Yet there is nothing about Bayesian statistical analysis, or indeed historical specificity, that need create such an opposition (contra Draşovean et al. 2017; Ebersbach et al. 2017). Indeed, as Rachel Crellin (2020, 178) has explicitly demonstrated, there is no contradiction between Bayesian modelling and relational approaches. In fact, given the attention to historical emergence that new materialism demands, the two make for natural partners (Crellin 2020). The differences between these perspectives, then, rest not on the techniques used but on the theoretical approaches behind them. It is clear that Whittle’s vision of history is explicitly anthropocentric (e.g. Whittle 2018, 245). Both Bayesian analyses and the small-scale narratives they have generated are enormously powerful, and they offer one important route for future archaeological exploration. However, we might question whether they are the only line of enquiry worthy of further pursuit. As Richard Bradley (2020) has recently argued, the emphasis on chronology in these accounts tells us little about Neolithic understandings of time, focusing instead on a sense of order and sequence that provides the element, or perhaps the illusion, of archaeological control. From the perspectives of this volume, the emphasis on chronological precision draws our attention away from certain questions towards others. In particular three elements have become unhelpfully dominant. First, it has created an explicit focus on linear time – the ordering of events creates a time which flows in one direction only (contrast this with our discussion in Chapter  6 of the future being quasi-causal) (Lucas 2005). Second, it has created a focus on specifically human-scale events and histories. Whilst perfectly reasonable as one scale of analysis amongst others, this means our attention is drawn away from processes that happen at different rhythms. Humans are left here as the

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sole agents of history. Third, it focuses entirely on time in the actual, there is no room whatsoever for time within the virtual, or how past, present and future might operate quite differently in this realm. As hinted at previously, a proper account of our neoconcepts, a proper ontography, requires time in both its actual and virtual dimensions. Our neoconcepts do not operate solely in linear time: just as we have seen materials make topological links between different places, so the events of monupower can erupt at different moments in time. As Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 110) point out: ‘[w]hat History grasps of the event is its effectuation in states of affairs or in lived experience, but the event in its becoming, in its specific consistency, in its self-positing concept, escapes History’. Similarly Indigenous thinkers have long noted that an obsession with linear time is deeply debilitating (e.g. Deloria Jr 1973, 72; cf. Rifkin 2017). For our purposes, this version of time as a progressive straight line is not enough (Lucas 2005). If archaeology-as-history represents one approach to time, especially important in studies of the Neolithic, another has emerged in archaeology which emphasises memory instead. Bjørnar Olsen, for example, has argued that we need to move away from the ‘imperatives of history’ to focus instead on ‘disorderly presences that disrupt the projected stream of historical time’ (Olsen 2012, 25, 27). Similarly, Christopher Witmore (2006, 2007) has emphasised how any object, from a wall in Greece to a road in London, dates simultaneously to multiple times, collapsing our ideas of temporality. Rather than linear narratives, therefore, we have complex mixtures of time, non-linear connections between past and present where the two can never be clearly separated. For archaeologists like these, as well as for Laurent Olivier (2004, 2011) it is not history but memory that offers us the most productive metaphor for our discipline: archaeology-as-memory. The work here of Michelle Serres (e.g. Serres with Latour 1995) has been critical. Whilst it might seem as though these approaches have more in common with the ones advocated in this book than those of archaeology-as-history, this is not, in fact, the case. Treating archaeological remains as memory separates them from the relations of their emergence (Crellin 2020, 72). Whilst archaeology-as-history might overly privilege linear time, archaeology-as-memory makes no space for it at all. How then can we make any attempt to explore change through time? Finally, this approach still leaves no room for the virtual; its emphasis remains fundamentally upon the actual. It does, however, stress how archaeology-as-history is insufficient and rightly celebrates the complex and folded temporalities of the objects, sites and remains we encounter. Both versions of archaeological time offer us something, but both are partial; by themselves neither archaeology-as-history nor archaeology-as-memory will suffice for our purposes here.

Time in Deleuzian philosophy In contrast to models that privilege either anthropocentric scales of history, or reduce the past to memory, we need a different approach, and for that we can turn once more to Deleuze.4 One of the great strengths of a Deleuzian approach to

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time, from our perspective, is that it offers a non-anthropocentric method which emphasises the role of the virtual and of memory whilst still also allowing us to see how history can be synthesised as well. There are two critical sets of concepts we can bring out from Deleuze’s argument, the first are his three syntheses of time presented in Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 2004),5 the second are the concepts of Chronos and Aion we briefly met in Chapter 3 that are most extensively presented in Logic of Sense (Deleuze 2015). By exploring these ideas we can think about how our neoconcepts can work outside, as well as inside, of linear time, and how to offer a temporally situated account of the virtual as well as the actual. Such an approach will allow us to consider how both history and memory do not offer contradictory ways of writing about the past, as both Whittle (2018) and Olsen (2012) have suggested, but instead present different modes of synthesis (cf. Lucas 2015, 36–7). Our aim here will be to explore the past not as one thing or another but as multiplicity. The past as history AND memory, as linear AND non-linear, as part of the present AND separate from it. This will provide us with the tools to define five predicates on time in archaeology, on which we can then draw as we return to our neoconcepts.

The three syntheses of time Deleuze argues that our usual concept of time as a line running from past to present to future is entirely insufficient both to grasp how human beings, animals and indeed materials experience temporality and to explain any deeper ontology of time. In its place he explores an emergent and relational account of time, drawing in particular on the work of David Hume (Deleuze 1991b), Henri Bergson (Deleuze 1991a) and Friedrich Nietzsche (Deleuze 2006a), which chimes in many ways with accounts of time offered by modern physicists (e.g. Rovelli 2017). Our concern here is not with the scientific accuracy of Deleuze’s account, however, but the extent to which it allows us to develop an approach to address the problems set out earlier. Deleuze argues that time emerges through three specific syntheses. The first of these is habit. Deleuze (1991b) argues that habit gives rise to time because of the ordered expectations it creates. In keeping with his non-representational approach, Deleuze (2004, 100) does not suggest that subjects develop habits but rather that a series of habits gives rise to subjects, creating time through their repetition. ‘These thousand habits of which we are composed’, as he elegantly describes it (Deleuze 2004, 100). Our daily routine of brushing teeth, washing our faces, eating breakfast, going to work and so on is what synthesises the subject and creates time, rather than a subject deciding, in advance, on what routines it will employ within a time that already exists. This is because habit works, primarily, as what Deleuze terms a ‘passive’ rather than active synthesis.6 Habits only work through repetition, through the notion that you have done this before (the past) and will do this again (the future). Importantly, however, the emphasis on habits’ passive qualities also means that habits are central to the synthesis of time not just for human beings but for animals,

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plants and inanimate objects as well (Williams 2011, 38–45). This emphasis on both the habits of non-humans and the absence of an external explanatory force differentiates this significantly from Bourdieu’s (1990) concept of habitus with which archaeologists are already familiar. Deleuze aims explicitly at a non-anthropocentric account. A table is synthesised from its habits (supporting a computer as you type, or a dinner plate when you eat) as much as anything else is. A stone axe might have a slight flaw in it, that gets exacerbated each time you use it, the habit of the stone axe places each strike in succession, recorded in the slightly widening gaps forming in its interior. Habit thus emphasises a non-anthropocentric sense of time, which creates both the past and the future as dimensions of the present (Deleuze 2004, 97). Thinking through time in terms of habit both draws in the multiple times that operate in any context (think of all the different habits synthesising time in different ways) and allows for both past and future to be drawn on repeatedly in the making of the present. Time, in all three dimensions, is not an external measure but rather is emergent in the world through the synthetic qualities of habit. It is this synthesis of time that is closest to the kinds of time that archaeologists emphasising chronology have traditionally written about. This may sound like an odd claim – after all archaeologists don’t tend to write simply about habit.7 However, the first synthesis of time is what creates a flow of succession,8 one thing after the other, just as habit works by one event preceding and proceeding another. The difference between history and habit, however, is that history is an active version of the first synthesis of time, a deliberate ordering where what is sought out is the present-as-it-was, a particular moment understood in the flow of linear time. It takes the first synthesis of time and renders it as a particular form of representation. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this per se, but it is simply one way in which we can put time together. Deleuze’s second synthesis of time focuses on memory. If habit offers one way of pulling time together, one which ‘constitutes the life of the passing present’ (Deleuze 2004, 101) then memory works quite differently. Here, rather than the past and future being dimensions of the present, the present and future are understood as dimensions of the past. In his account of the second synthesis, Deleuze is especially indebted to his reading of Bergson. Bergson (1991) was highly critical of our tendency to describe the past in spatial terms, conceptualised as a distance from the present. Think of the way in which we ask ‘how “long” ago did something happen?’ Or the idea that something can be closer, or further away, in time. Whilst time and space have a close relationship, our continued reduction of time to space means we cannot fully understand the second synthesis. If you are of a certain age and I ask you where you were on 11 September 2001, you can probably tell me. If I ask you where you were on 11 September 2015, though, you may struggle to answer. To what extent does it make sense to argue that 11 September 2001, especially given how it shaped the politics, conflicts and economies of the next 20 years, is ‘further away’ than 11 September 2015? For Bergson, a spatial metaphor is not helpful for understanding how time works in this context. Instead,

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we need to consider the whole of the past, a pure past, a virtual past, as surrounding us all of the time, co-existing with the present (Deleuze 1991a, 59; Hamilakis 2013, 122). In this past, 11 September 2001 is no more (or less) part of the past than 11 September 2015, or yesterday for that matter. The reason that we recall it so much more easily is that it has a greater intensive force. In archaeological terms, this means that it makes little sense to say the Late Neolithic is closer to us than the Early Neolithic, or that either are further away than the Bronze Age. From the perspective of the past as ontology, they are all equally real, but equally virtual. So how does this relate to the synthesis of time? Deleuze draws here on Bergson’s notion that the present is the most contracted, or most concentrated, moment of the past, describing this as his ‘most splendid hypothesis’ (Deleuze 2004, 358). Bergson (1991) uses a metaphor of a cone to describe this process (Figure  7.2). At its wide end, the cone is the past at its most expanded, it then moves down through what Bergson calls planes of memory, each one more contracted than the last, towards the present, where the past reaches its most concentrated state at the tip of the cone. An example can help here: if I say think of eating a meal, you can remember the general act of eating. The pure past (everything that has happened) is now contracted to a range of different past activities (eating). If I say think of eating breakfast, your memories contract again – no more reflecting on that delicious veggie burger you had last week, or what you ate for lunch. Finally, if I say what did you have for breakfast this morning, your mind contracts the past into the one particular memory, the past is now highly contracted and what’s more, it is here in the present in your mind right now – the memory of the past actualised in the present. Here time is synthesised, but in a very different way from the synthesis of habit we saw previously. This example, however, is slightly misleading. Most of the time, memories emerge not through active recall, as in this exercise, but in response to sights, sounds and smells. They come back unbidden, recalling things we do not expect. In this sense, memory, as a passive synthesis of time just as we saw with habit, is prior to the emergence of an individual. Equally, once we recognise

FIGURE 7.2 

Bergson’s cone of memory

Source: After Bergson 1991, 162, redrawn by author.

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memory as passive, we do not need to limit it to human beings or animals. To return to our stone axe from the previous example, each blow which expands the flaw in the stone remains virtually present in the object after it has taken place. The actual flaw allows the past (the blows) to exist virtually, recalled in the moment of contraction when the axe finally breaks. Memory works through the way all things carry the past with them – the histories of their synthesis that operate virtually, ready to be actualised in different circumstances. This synthesis of memory is closer, of course, to the kinds of archaeology that Olivier (2011), Olsen (2012) and others have called for, and it reveals that their accounts are not antithetical to the aims of this volume. Archaeology can act as a kind of memory, a way of synthesising the past where chronological distance is not the primary organising principle. Here, though, the form of memory these archaeologists work with is not the passive recall that dominates Deleuze’s account of how time works. Instead, the approach Olivier (2011) takes, for example, represents an active synthesis. When archaeologists engage with objects, either through their deliberate excavation or study, or even in their chance encounter, they are actively synthesising and organising the virtual past in a particular kind of way. They ‘reactivate’ the past (Olivier 2011, 61). Archaeology-as-memory is an active process bringing these memories to light. Thus if archaeology-as-history represents the active version of the first synthesis of time, one that seeks the present as it was, organised around the principle of succession, then the archaeology-as-memory is the active version of the second synthesis of time, one that sees the past as coexisting with the present (Deleuze 1991a, 59). We are now in a position to see that these two competing visions for archaeology represent different elements of time, and our approach needs to be able to incorporate them both. Deleuze’s third synthesis of time is the most complicated, and the least easy to boil down to simple terminology. If the first synthesis is habit, with past and future as dimensions of the present created through succession, and the second synthesis is memory, which renders present and future as dimensions of the past through co-existence, then the third synthesis provides the driving force for both of these, and renders the past and present as dimensions of the future (Deleuze 2004, 117). Both habit and memory play key roles in the emergence of individuated entities, whether these be human or otherwise. The third synthesis of time, however, operates prior to these processes of emergence. If Hume is Deleuze’s key thinker on habit, and Bergson on memory, now Nietzsche comes to the fore (Deleuze 2006a). Here time emerges through the driving force of some of the key concepts we have already encountered in this book: difference and becoming. As we saw in Chapter 3, the underlying drive of the universe for Deleuze are flows of intensive difference, the shifting and changing encounters of energy that form the flux of the world.9 Here they drive the third synthesis of time, which provides in turn the resources for both habit and memory, the repeated actions that can be gathered as habits, or the enduring relations that can be contracted into memories. These differential relations, these flows and fluxes, operate outside of linear time as we normally think of it. The potential for pressure to drop and create a new

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weather system can happen again and again. It does not happen the same way each time – indeed it happens differently each time – but it repeats. This means that particular sets of intensive relations crop up at different moments of time, reemerging together in unexpected ways. Witmore’s (2006) useful metaphor of time ‘percolating’ can be employed here, to think about the how these intensive conditions can re-emerge. The role of the virtual is key in this context, but whereas the past was virtual in the second synthesis of time, here it is the future that is virtual. The potential for things to re-emerge to recur, to come back, to happen again: this is where the third synthesis of time operates. At the heart of this lies the way in which the third synthesis of time circles around critical events, the creation of something new, the moments where difference erupts. To return to our stone axe, the moment of its final breakage represents just such an event. From that point on time is ordered differently, there are moments before the axe broke, and moments afterwards. Death too operates in this manner, and the death of a loved one acts as an intercession in time, a moment of ordering and assembly around which time flows (Williams 2011, 90). This is the moment of a cut, a transformation, what Deleuze (2004, 112) calls a caesura, where ‘time as a whole [. . .] itself is divided, torn into two unequal parts’. These two aspects link together: events create punctuations around which time divides, and events return – although differently each time.

Chronos and Aion Deleuze (2015) provides two other ways of thinking about time, which we met briefly in Chapter 3, that we can draw on here, Chronos and Aion. These are useful as they provide different ways of highlighting elements of the syntheses of time and allow us to bring other qualities to the fore when we return to our ontography. Deleuze (2015) developed these two terms, drawn from the philosophy of the Stoics, in order to capture different aspects or qualities of time. Chronos captures the experience of time and thus bridges the first and second syntheses we saw previously. Far from any idea of universality, Chronos expresses time as it emerges within particular systems, as it comes into existence out of the intersection of assemblages (Lundborg 2009). It is the present as it exists and existed, experiential, though always more-than-human. Imagine yourself on an archaeological dig, around you are multiple presents, ‘coiling up’ as Deleuze (2015, 167) would say in a particular moment: the present of the geological shifts that have forged the marine cut terrace on which you are trowelling; the present of the past made material in the stone wall you are carefully defining; your body’s present as it yearns for the cup of tea at breaktime and its inevitable failure to refuse a second biscuit; the present of the earthworm slipping back into the spoil-heap on your right, and the present of the eagle flying high above you in the sky; all of these together form Chronos. There are multiple presents at any one time, those of people, objects, animals, architecture, each moving at their own speeds, generating different forms of temporality in the here and now

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(Deleuze 2015, 167). Chronos captures this without drawing our eyes away to the past and future (Deleuze 2015, 64). In contrast, Aion, as we saw in Chapter 3, is the time of the event. This relates to the third synthesis of time here, which operates outside of succession or co-existence. Events have their own time, their own emergence; they ripple and return in their own manner. Here we can identify how separate events, occurring at different chronological moments, have commonalities  – repetitions we recognise, echoes that percolate. It allows us to think about how things are linked outside of direct historical connection: the ‘event’ of enclosure, the ‘event’ of domestication, the ‘event’ of death. These events actualise shared sets of intensive potentials creating links between past and future, across time and space (cf. Harris 2017a). The time of the event operates as a means for thinking through commonalities that are not structured in the way we normally expect; as we saw earlier, we do not have to trace a specific historical linkage to explore what two lightning strikes share.10 This does not mean a rejection of standard historical connection or causation but rather a realisation that there are other ways of writing about linkages beyond our standard narratives. Aion lets us think not only of connection, therefore, but also rupture, disjuncture and emergence (Williams 2011, 151–2).

Five predicates on time Our discussion of Deleuze’s approach to time has operated at something of an abstract level (to put it mildly). Nonetheless, I suggest that these discussions offer us the critical resources to meet the concerns we outlined earlier and to help demonstrate why neither archaeology-as-history nor archaeology-as-memory are sufficient by themselves. These philosophical discussions offer us the tools we need to complete our ontography and to study how our neoconcepts emerge during the Neolithic in ways that both match and defy linear historical accounts. To bring this out clearly, let us finish our theoretical discussion by identifying five ‘predicates’ on time, in order to meet the goals of this chapter, and facilitate the aims of this book. First predicate: time is virtual as well as actual. The past exists not just as a dimension of the present (both the present as it is now and the present as it was). Thinking of the past as virtual allows us to conceptualise how it can be actualised, and actualised differently, through the synthesis of memory. The past exists here as ‘pure ontology’ (Deleuze 1991a, 56), as what is. Memory synthesises the past and renders the virtual as actual. Second predicate: time as virtual also allows us to see how the future operates within the present as a quasi-cause (cf. Roffe 2017). Not merely the outcome of the present, the future and past are actualised together in the present’s becoming. Habit synthesises time as succession and produces anticipation of the future, creating a flow of time, drawing on and building on the ground offered by memory (Deleuze 2004, 101). Third predicate: we need to include time as it is experienced.11 It is not sufficient to discuss time outside of how it emerges multiply for people, animals and things

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if we are to grasp the centrality of time to the past and the emergence of our concepts. This means we need to think about Chronos. This can be helped by the conceptualisation of the specific temporalities of sites that Bayesian analysis offers, but it cannot be reduced to that. Fourth predicate: we need to recognise that events operate, in part, outside of linear chronology, that is within Aion. Here, in the flux and flow of intensive connections, we no longer depend upon past, present and future, which are themselves outcomes of the syntheses of memory and habit. Instead, in the swirl of forces, events occur and erupt; they drive themselves into existence and so occur and return again. No event can ever return as the same; however, the intensive always returns through difference. Fifth predicate: archaeology-as-history, the chronological ordering of narrative, and archaeology-as-memory, the recognition that the past is co-existent with the present, are different ways of synthesising the past. Neither is wrong; both, in fact, are essential to our endeavours. However, neither, in itself, can claim to be complete. These five predicates provide us with the outline of a new archaeological approach to time, one which emphasises the virtual, facilitates both memory and history, allows for both linear and non-linear time and recognises the importance of the multiplicity of experience and the timelessness of the event. With these in mind let us return to our ontography.

A return to ontography How can we employ this approach to time to provide an account of our concepts that does not solely depend upon linear history and makes room for the virtual as well as the actual? To explore further, let us develop our ontography with regard to one of the nine concepts we have identified: that architecture assembles power, or to put it its more succinct version, monupower. By mapping the ontography of this particular concept with our new philosophical tools, we can offer a case-study of how our neoconcepts played a critical role in the production of time, and the assembly of past worlds

A partial ontography of monupower Monupower is our term for the intensive potential that monuments realised in the Neolithic. As we detailed in Chapter 6, it emerged though monuments’ gathering of people, plants and materials, and from how they bound those flows into particular places. More than this, it emerged from monuments’ ability to bind things again and again, to change and to move. Monupower persisted not through the unchanging endurance of these sites but because of their shifting duration. Throughout the Neolithic the potential for monupower was always present, it was a virtual element of the world from the very start, at first only occasionally being actualised. This potential, the existence of a capacity that could happen, is critical to

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understanding a time and place; the virtual is just as real as the actual. The potential to build a monument in the future, for a tree to be included in a post-defined cursus monument or a sarsen stone in a megalithic tomb are not idle possibilities. The latent potential of the future here needs to be seen as inserting itself into the lives of people and materials throughout the Neolithic, emerging from the intensive differences of the third synthesis of time. Monupower was a spectre haunting Neolithic Britain from the beginning. The construction of monuments, and with it the actualisation of monupower, played a critical role in the emergence of time itself. Bradley has recently discussed how different kinds of monuments imply different conceptions of time. Long barrows and chambered tombs imply a form of time that aims at closure, even if in the distant future, he suggests, because of the eventual construction of a mound sealing the funerary activity (Bradley 2020, 8). In contrast, causewayed enclosures were open-ended projects, each ditch and each circuit leading potentially to another (Bradley 2020, 8). We can go further than this, however. Each monument brought into existence countless contemporary presents, the overlapping and interweaving layers of Chronos. For people, seasonal acts of construction would have added rhythms to the yearly round, once monuments were constructed passing time could be detected in the rotting wood, or silted ditches or slumping stonework. Succession emerges here; the movement of time comes from these changes, it does not drive them. Alongside these times others emerge. Stones have their own times and cycles, the growing lichen, the slow erosion through wind and rain; they have their own habits. So did the bodies rotting in the chambers of monuments or in the ditches of causewayed enclosures. Monupower was expressed in this intensive swirl of intersecting temporalities, perhaps nowhere more powerfully than when the rise and fall of the sun could be entwined with the architecture as at Stonehenge or Maes Howe. At the same time that monupower flowed through intersecting presents, it contracted and selected memories. At the chambered tomb of West Kennet (Chapter 4), the past was built into the monument in the form of sarsen stones against which stone axes had previously been polished. Of all the potential memories that could be built into the monument, these were included, selected and contracted from the host of sarsens littering the landscape. Each selected stone incorporated memories into the monument, and monupower flows from the fact this matter remembered, another of our neoconcepts. At the Middle Neolithic enclosure of Monkton-up-Wimborne (Chapter 5), the past surrounded the site, actualised in the visible remains of long barrows and a cursus monument. At the site itself, the seven-metre-deep shaft reached into the ground, and had deposits placed within, each one a memory selected, actualised from a sea of virtual potentials, synthesised from the past. The shaft itself created the possibility for this synthesis of time, the potential for sequence to emerge, just as the need to deposit things created the shaft. The past here was called on to shape the future and the future is quasi-causal in its own right. These contracted memories co-existed with the four bodies that were buried in the hidden grave at the edge of the central pit, a past that quickly

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retreated from the actual, and returned to the virtual, a past not contracted into memory in the same way. Monupower was critical to the synthesis of these memories, because it was the driving force, the intensive vector that brought these things into the present. The memory we speak of here is not anthropocentric; it is the memory of the monument at work. Monupower does not happen just once; it happens again, a succession forming habits that creates sequence. The event of encountering a monument is not a one-off; it is a repeated act, the affective qualities of entering a tomb or walking a stone lined avenue, or of fire burning and consuming a standing post echo back and forth through the Neolithic. Each one calls to the time of the event, to Aion, yet each one reoccurs differently. No two are the same; there is no identity here. Each one emerges differentially from the affective and intensive encounters that the virtual potentials of monupower facilitated. At monument complexes we see this most clearly. A henge monument and stone circle like Avebury (Chapter 4) was made from repeated events happening again and again: the smashing of an antler pick into the earth to make the ditch; the dragging of huge stones across the landscape to stand them erect (Figure 7.3). The burning muscles, the chipped stones, white chalk covering bodies, materials, animals and more, each of these reveals the actualisation of the virtual, the eruption of monupower as an event, sustained by the repetition, the fact it could happen again, the habits that create the flow of time. The capacity of bodies to produce intensive events is key here, and in the erection of a single mighty sarsen this concept flowed through both human and non-human bodies, binding the event into place. The shaping of Avebury paralleled the emergence of the nearby Silbury Hill, which we encountered in the last chapter; both reworked the landscape, gathering it to them in different ways, gathering different temporalities again and again as it did so. Surrounding both monuments was the past, a vast potential that could be drawn on and reworked in the topological connections of stones dragged from one place to another, or piles of earth raised in the form of bank or mound, linking back to older practices at other sites. And the past changed too. Reworking the landscape of Avebury didn’t just change new sites. As we saw in Chapter 4, moving those stones changed the places from which they came; those places became locales where Avebury’s stones once lived. A sceptic might complain that this isn’t really changing the past – it’s only changing the present moment at which those stones were moved. But that is just a matter of perspective. The movement of a stone to Avebury in 2500 cal bc did not change what had happened to that stone at 3000 cal bc. The ‘present as it was’ remains unchanged. But the past as ontology, the past as co-existent with the present, the past as virtual; that is transformed by the rupture of Avebury’s creation. The source of the stone is now forever the place where an Avebury stone came from; the potential to do things with that place are forever transformed, including how it operates as a vector in the past and the present. The overcoding force of monupower drives this change, drawing on other neoconcepts such as the ability of matter to remember, the power of parts and the possibility for the flows that shaped Neolithic worlds to be captured. Recent research has revealed that the southern

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FIGURE 7.3 

Avebury in plan

Source: After Gillings et al. 2019, 360, figure 1, incorporates data (c) Crown Copyright/database right 2007. An Ordnance Survey/(EDINA) supplied service.

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inner circle at Avebury was located around a memorialised Early Neolithic house (Gillings et al. 2019) constructed and abandoned long before the monument was made. When this house was built, it was not the ‘house at the centre of a henge monument’; yet after it was gone, surrounded by a memorial in stone, actualised in the memories of the monument and now, of course, in the research efforts of archaeologists, this is what it has become. This doesn’t change the past as it was, but the past as potential changes nonetheless. One final point about monupower is worth making as our ontography of this concept draws to a close. Monupower may have emerged intensively for the first time in the Neolithic, but it did not end there; its echoes continued as we saw briefly with Cladh Aindreis at the end of the last chapter. This is clear in the Bronze Age, where henges continued to be made, as well as round barrows. But it continues beyond that too. The manner in which medieval castles and cathedrals create affective encounters that empower lords and gods alike, or today the way in which statues are put up, or torn down, captures debates around who is powerful, and which times and which memories we need to actualise. This shows that an ontography of monupower must stretch beyond the Neolithic itself. Perhaps most interesting is the way in which many modern attempts to deploy monupower, from those who argue that statues must stay up lest we somehow deny our history, to the Conservative MP Jacob Rees Mogg standing at the Neolithic monument of Stanton Drew for a political broadcast, fundamentally misunderstand how this concept works. Monuments do not gain their power from endurance, quite the opposite; they gain their power from their ability to change. Desperate attempts to deploy them in support of conservative appeals to an unchanging past thus entirely mistake how their power operates. What we see from this discussion is that we cannot simply explain the rise and fall of monupower through time, because monupower is itself in part responsible for the emergence of time and temporality. We cannot take time as an external measure and then seek to explore the emergence of concepts within it. Similarly, we cannot free these concepts from the flows of materials, architectures, events in which they emerged. Neither archaeology-as-history nor archaeology-as-memory is sufficient by itself. Instead, to understand not just the history of concepts but their becoming, not just their actual existence but their intensive virtual persistence, to comprehend how they return, but return differently, we have had to draw on a different understanding of time itself. An ontography of the Neolithic requires us to attend to the time of our concepts, and not just the development of concepts through time.

Conclusion As archaeologists we are always drawn into discussions of time and change, even if these are not always as foregrounded in our accounts as they should be (Crellin 2020; Lucas 2005). The recent developments we have seen in the discipline, where some archaeologists have called for archaeology to emphasise its memory-like

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qualities, whilst others have called for an ever more detailed crafting of historical narratives, have their strengths. One demands that we attend to the multiplicity of times present at any one moment, the other to chronological specificity and developments in history. As we have seen, neither by itself is enough for our purposes here. The former offers us no possibility for explaining change through time, as it treats the past as solely contemporary with the present. The latter only offers us succession, reducing time from a complex multiplicity to a single dimension. As Lucas (2015, 36–7) has rightfully argued, the dichotomy is hardly helpful. Archaeology-as-history in some manifestations has also called explicitly for an anthropocentric approach (Whittle 2018), but as we have already argued, there is nothing about such detailed histories that demands anthropocentrism, and the dangers of dwelling solely on humans have been set out in Chapters 1 and 2. Our archaeology and the ontography of this chapter have therefore required a different approach to time. Time does not operate in a single register; it is both present and past, a flow of succession and a generalised resource; it is both virtual and actual. Concepts in turn operate primarily in the virtual, being actualised in specific ways again and again. In the Neolithic, our neoconcepts emerged through moments of place making, monument building, stone working, pit digging and more. They emerged through materials, and in the flow of connections that bound together people, places, architecture, animals and things together. These concepts are distilled from the Neolithic past that surrounds us today; they emerge as ways in which we can conceptualise how those worlds operated, how they emerged, how they were assembled. They allow us to think about not only difference and change but also continuity, as we saw with monupower. Our ontography at the end narrowed to a single one of our nine neoconcepts. We could of course have chosen any of the others for this analysis, or indeed taken each of our concepts through a much more detailed linear history than we achieved at the start of this chapter. There is more that could be done, therefore, in exploring these concepts. Indeed, undoubtedly they are not the only ones at play; many others will have structured the virtual diagrams of this period, and there will be local manifestations of different kinds that could be explored in detail. The aim of this book, however, was not to create a detailed history of these concepts, which in any case only emerged through the analysis of the previous three chapters. The aim was to develop a posthumanist and post-anthropocentric account of the Neolithic and to meet the seven challenges that stood in our way. In our final chapter we return to these aims and to our challenges, before considering how our discussion in this chapter, and the emphasis on the importance of the virtual throughout this book, suggests new directions for archaeology as a discipline.

Notes 1 I did consider the term ontocartography, coined by another OOO influenced philosopher Levi Bryant (2014), but the slightly shorter ontography won out. 2 Although the dating of these sites is far from satisfactory.

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3 Something with which I entirely agree, if for rather different reasons (see Crellin et al. 2021). 4 For an excellent – and accessible – introduction to Deleuze’s philosophy of time, see Williams (2011). 5 These also appear in somewhat reworked form in Deleuze’s first book with Guattari (Deleuze & Guattari 2013, 86–128). 6 Deleuze happily acknowledges one can actively decide to take up new habits, or decide that a series of actions have become habitual. This conscious reflection, however, an ‘active’ synthesis, is not typical of how habit, and thus the first synthesis of time, works. 7 Although certainly discussions of practice have much in common here (e.g. Barrett 1994). 8 Here I differ from Lucas (2015, 10) who argues we need to dispense with succession altogether. Instead I would suggest it is one of the ways, but only one, that we can synthesise time. 9 As Deleuze (2015, 309) puts it, ‘the true subject of the eternal return is [. . .] intensity and singularity’. 10 Similarly, events endure here; the scar on my abdomen doesn’t (just) reveal the past – that I once had appendicitis – it also reveals the present fact that I am a person, right now, who had that disease (cf. Deleuze 2004, 98). The event endures, it does not vanish. 11 This description of time as experienced may be phenomenological for humans, and will undoubtedly challenge us to develop different descriptive vocabulary for describing time as experience by non-humans. However, as Bogost (2012) points out, this does not necessarily present a greater intellectual challenge than exploring the experience of another human being.

8 CONCLUSION Intensive history and virtual archaeology*

Introduction Over the last seven chapters we have explored how we can develop a posthumanist approach to archaeology, rooted in new materialism and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. There are different ways we can evaluate this process. One is to consider the interpretations, narratives and concepts generated in Chapters 4, 5 and 6 or the accounts of time outlined in Chapter  7. Do these demonstrate how these theoretical approaches can help us think differently about Neolithic Britain? Does exploring desire as pre-personal, or matter as vibrant, or difference as primary, offer us a new way of writing about this period? I suggest they do, but readers can evaluate those chapters for themselves. A  second set of questions arise, though, from the ethical and political commitments of posthumanism. The reason to take this approach to archaeology is not solely because of the new theoretical tools it gives us. Posthumanism is part of a broader commitment to engaging with the world differently. At the time of writing, large parts of the world economy are in lockdown, driven by concern over a virus, an entity that operates in the margins of living and non-living matter (Ferrando 2019, 111). This is not caused by the virus alone, of course, but this entity in conjunction with a globalised world of international travel, airplanes, offices, air conditioning and more – a veritable assemblage. We see debates over masks, increased policing of bodily hygiene, the boundaries of home and body defined in new ways. Alongside this, growing debates and cold-blooded murder have raised awareness that this is a moment where the endemic racism in much Euro-American society needs to be confronted. This has led to arguments about statues, the role of material things in history, the nature of memory. Behind all this there lurks the spectre of climate crisis and global mass extinction. In this moment, when material things and viruses are at the forefront of politics, we are duty bound to broaden our gaze beyond humans (Carter & Harris 2020). Not so

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that we can ignore human beings, imagine a world without human beings or deny human beings’ importance to history – quite the opposite. Turning to posthumanism is a means to provide an account of humanity not beholden to normative Eurocentric assumptions; it allows us to recognise that it is our failure to provide intersectional analyses (of gender, of race, of the role of non-humans) that has facilitated the political crises in which we find ourselves. This means that Western archaeologists need to learn to think in different ways, to open ourselves to new lines of speculation, to make space for a new kind of world, one with room for those that Deleuze and Félix Guattari call the ‘people to come’ (1994, 218). Difference lies at the heart of this. The logic of identity that underpins humanism has wielded its seductive reduction on our imaginations for too long. Resisting the clarion call to privilege humanity is not easy, but refusing to acknowledge the real differences that produce forms of our species, past and present, is no way to challenge the inequalities we see today (cf. Eddo-Lodge 2017). Taking difference as the driving force of the world fundamentally reorientates thinking away from claims of universalising humanity towards the intensive differentials that make the world what it is. Dealing with the problems we face demands we begin relationally, begin with difference, begin with the univocity of the world and do not elevate humans to an ontological plane that denies the primacy of historical emergence. It is for this reason that the approaches drawn on here relate so closely to the work of posthuman feminists (e.g. Braidotti 2013). In the world of decolonisation, of calls to change an academy that awards stature and privilege to people of particular genders and ethnicities, turning primarily to the writing of another white man, in the form of Deleuze, may be somewhat counterintuitive. Nonetheless, what Deleuze offers, to people like me brought up in traditions of Eurocentric thought, is a means to escape, a line of flight, a privileging of difference. As Claire Colebrook (2020, 347, original emphasis) has recently put it, in her consideration of precisely these issues, it may be that ‘only Deleuze and Guattari can help us imagine life without this world, life without the world’. By ‘us’ Colebrook is specifically referring to Western academics steeped in particular kinds of traditions of thinking (deconstruction, phenomenology, modernity in general). As she goes on to acknowledge, those who approach the world from alternative perspectives, Indigenous or otherwise, may well have no need of such a ‘grand exit’ (Colebrook 2020, 347; cf. Tuck 2010). Decolonisation, as Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2012) remind us, and as we saw in Chapter 2, is not a metaphor. It is not something a book about the British Neolithic, or archaeological theory, can directly contribute to. What such a book can do, however, is unpick the ‘image of thought’, as Deleuze (2004, 167) would call it, that justifies the unequal distribution of actual resources and power. It is one thing to assert this commitment to a posthumanist archaeology of course, another to see it through. In Chapter 2 we set out seven significant challenges to achieving this. It is against these that the work of this book needs to be measured. In the first part of this concluding chapter I will evaluate how far the theoretical and archaeological explorations of the book have met the seven challenges, and what more needs to be done. Then in the final part, of both the chapter

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and this volume, I will consider where this leaves archaeology. Specifically, I will stress that the concept of the virtual requires greater consideration, both when we write about the past and when thinking about what the process of doing archaeology involves (cf. Lucas 2012). This will prove central to further developing an archaeology orientated to the challenges and issues of the present, in equal part to its commitment to reconceptualising past worlds.

The return of the seven challenges Let us begin, though, with the seven challenges we set out in Chapter 2 that a successful posthumanist archaeology would need to meet.

To be post-anthropocentric Our first challenge was to write a post-anthropocentric account of the past. This was necessary in order to conceptualise a past not structured around dualisms, to fully embrace the differences that made past people who they were and to allow non-humans to take up their position as co-authors of the past worlds we investigate. Philosophically, Deleuze’s work provides a solid foundation for post-anthropocentrism, especially when we emphasise specific aspects of it found in Difference and Repetition and A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze 2004; Deleuze & Guattari 2004). Deleuze emphasises how differential intensive processes drive not only social transformations but everything from thermodynamics to geology. This does not reduce the world to biological or physical processes but rather celebrates the shared flows of difference that make each what they are. Empirically, we were able to foreground the role of non-humans to help counterbalance the exceptionalism of our own species that normally dominates archaeological narratives. In Chapter  5 we looked at the burial of non-humans, exploring how their bodies, in conjunction with the bodies of people, created powerful locales at sites like Liffs Low and Duggleby Howe. This power flowed through non-humans, driven by a form of desire recast not as a sense of lack but as a pre-personal force that brings bodies (human and non-human) into existence (Deleuze  & Guattari 2013). In Chapter  6 we looked at how different forms of architecture played critical roles as articulating devices, bringing communities into existence. Communities here were positioned as more-than-human collectives (cf. Harris 2013, 2014a). Alongside this, we examined how monuments were able to gather a form of power to them that flowed through their ongoing repetition, through their occurrence and re-occurrence in the lives of people, animals, plants and landscapes. Power here was explicitly post-anthropocentric.

To embrace the vibrancy of matter Our second challenge built on the first. If we want to develop a post-anthropocentric account of the Neolithic, it has to embrace the active role of materials, as

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well as animals and plants. Our theoretical analysis in Chapter 3 gave us the tools to begin to think this through, especially ideas of intensity, which focuses on how energetic interactions set up differences that create flows of becoming, of change and of expression. We saw how intensive flows shape the capacity to affect and be affected across bodies of all sorts, human and non-human. Deleuze’s work has been central to the assemblage thinking of DeLanda (e.g. 2002), Bennett (e.g. 2010) and others who have explicitly embraced the vibrancy of inorganic life; it offers us clear theoretical resources to explore this archaeologically. Empirically, we have seen how the vibrancy of matter works its way through the differentiation and individuation of pottery. In Chapter 4 we saw how the capacity of clay to bind different substances to it, and to contain others, allowed connections to be formed between different places, people and events as with the Gabbroic pottery deposited at Hambledon Hill. Similarly, the capacity for clay to bind and contain substances, and to carry decoration, allowed Grooved Ware in the Late Neolithic to instantiate memories of multiscalar communities in individual houses, or at larger henge monuments. Alternatively, the tension between the external decoration of Grooved Ware and its individual constitution, between the way in which it coded certain connections and territorialised others, allowed it to play a complex role in the communities that emerged at Barnhouse in Orkney at the end of the fourth millennium bc. Beyond clay, it was the vibrancy of matter that moved places in the gathering of stones at Avebury, or in the trees that formed the palisaded enclosure at Greyhound Yard. No doubt much remains to be explored here in the detail of individual materials and objects, and the specificities of how this worked through time, but the potential for different actors to emerge through the vibrancy of matter is clear.

To recognise the importance of relations, process and history Our third challenge provided the key means to situate the vibrancy of matter, by mapping the relations from which entities emerge, the processes that lead to this emergence and the specific historicity of these particular elements. Deleuze and Guattari’s (2004) work helps us here of course. Assemblages redefine the world as made up of expressive, temporarily congealed and heterogeneous gatherings, rather than bounded entities. These gatherings emerge in parallel with the flow and flux of relations. Deleuze’s emphasis on becoming, drawn from his work on Friedrich Nietzsche in particular, stresses the importance of process (Deleuze 2006a). The emergence of different assemblages is the outcome of particular processes, and each assemblage is in a constant process of becoming. Instead of emphasising being, or what a thing is, Deleuze’s work always asks us to think about the AND, about connections and relations, about what a thing can do and how that might change (e.g. Deleuze & Parnet 2002). In our analysis of the Neolithic, relations were critical to how flows were captured at Duggleby Howe in Chapter 5. There we saw how relations between different places can be revealed in the isotopes of dead bodies, and in the artefacts

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that bound together different practices, skills and connections. It was the centrality of relations to these objects and people that allowed the process of burial and construction at Duggleby Howe to capture flows in place. Similarly, in Chapter 6, at the even larger mound of Silbury Hill, we saw how Jim Leary’s (2010; Leary & Field 2013) work allowed us to map the process of making the monument. By attending to the relations present in the piling up of gravel and earth, and the digging and redigging of ditches, our conception of the monument changed from a static place of chiefly prowess to one that revealed a very different kind of power emerging from the duration of the site itself. No burials were needed at Silbury; the flows captured here emerged from the relations of building, the vibrancy of the materials and how the matter of the mound remembered the history of its emergence. Yet there is more that could be done. In Chapter 6 we contrasted the histories of different kinds of houses, the timber halls of the Early Neolithic in southern Britain and the stone villages that emerged in Orkney later in the fourth millennium. Here we built on Richards and Jones’ (2016) and Thomas’ (2013) useful ideas of house societies but suggested that reliance on ethnographic analogy risked supressing rather than celebrating difference. A reasonable criticism of the work in this book, however, is that there is still much more to be done to explore local patterns of history. Why did specific assemblages like Duggleby Howe come together in Yorkshire and not somewhere else? What are the broader histories of causewayed enclosures that mean that they were widely constructed in southern rather than northern Britain? The absence of such regional stories has emerged from the emphasis in this book on exploring a different kind of history, one emergent from collage and connection and not from linear narrative (cf. Deleuze & Guattari 1994, 111), but it still leaves space for future exploration.

To hold on to things themselves Our fourth challenge raised a specific danger with the turn to relations. As philosophers like Graham Harman (2018) as well as archaeologists like Bjørnar Olsen (2012) have warned, a reliance on relational approaches alone risks undermining things, objects, architecture and ignoring their specific qualities. In Chapter 3 we were able to show how Deleuze’s work avoids this danger. First, his reliance on relations of exteriority means that things can retain their individuality even as relations shift and change (Deleuze 1991b). Second, his emphasis with Guattari on the notion of haecceity provides a key element for recognising the specificity of any particular phenomena, their thisness (Deleuze & Guattari 2004). Assemblages are fundamentally more than the sum of their parts; whilst entirely relational, they cannot simply be reduced to their relations either (Fowler 2013). Exploring things-in-themselves in the Neolithic led us to many individual and individuated events: the burning of a body on the shores of the Atlantic in Ardnamurchan, a cow that rose from the dead at Beckhampton Road, the moment that Structure 8 was built at Barnhouse. Each of these tied relations, people, places,

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materials and animals together in new ways; they individuated specific elements in the world. We saw in Chapter 5 how cremations in particular revealed that bodies could create specific intensive events, where something new emerged in the world. Mapping relations matters here, even in talking of singular things, because each element of the world gathers these relations together in subtly different ways. Two pots might link the same materials physically but code them differently; two stones can bring specific qualities to a particular place. As we saw in Chapter 4, at the Ring of Brodgar, for example, Downes et al.’s (2013) work has shown how the geology and geography of Mainland Orkney could be moved to a single space through the specific histories of the individual stones. Here their relations do not supress or undermine the stones’ specificity but rather reveal and celebrate their individuation.

To be more-than-representational One of the main criticisms levelled at posthumanist and post-anthropocentric approaches, as we noted in Chapter  2, was their apparent disinterest in critical questions around meaning and identity. Issues of representation, in other words, had been ignored and or written out altogether. To deal with this, I  argued in Chapter 2 that we needed to develop an account that was more-than-representational; this was our fifth challenge. Deleuze’s work certainly offers us the tools to develop such an approach. His work aims precisely at overturning the representational accounts of Western philosophy that have dominated the major traditions of thought since Plato. Representation, for Deleuze (2004, 37), is the primary mode of thinking that his philosophy of difference seeks to challenge. In place of representation, Deleuze (e.g. 2004, 143) explores how difference, intensity and becoming are primary. It is not the case that Deleuze’s work makes no space for representation, however, but rather that representation is a secondary level of understanding, derived from a primary world of difference. Thus, in Chapter 7 we saw how the passive syntheses of habit and memory came first, with the active (representational) syntheses dependent upon this. In our Neolithic case-studies, we touched on how the decoration of different materials in the Middle and Late Neolithic created meaningful, iconic, relations between objects, pottery, rock art and more. Alongside meaning, power, something posthumanists are often accused of ignoring, was a prominent theme. In Chapter 5 we saw how power became gathered in particular places and emerged through acts of burial of objects and people that captured flows of relations. In Chapter 6 we explored how monuments were powerful actors in Neolithic Britain not because they symbolised or represented hierarchy but because of their own ability to intervene in the world, to happen again. Yet we might wonder at the absence of other critical themes. For a book influenced by feminist posthumanism, gender has not been a dominant point of discussion; age, personhood and other categories of identity have also remained in the

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background. The critical role of children’s bodies in relation to memory and burial was discussed in Chapter 5, but the potential for multiple different kinds of human bodies grouped around particular categories of identity has not emerged. In part this comes from the primary emphasis in the book on difference; the aim here was to explore how bodies could do different things in particular sets of relationships. It also emerges from the fact that gender in Neolithic Britain, indeed more widely across Europe at this time, operated in a manner very different from the present (Robb & Harris 2018). This clearly offers a critical future line of exploration; what modes of gender emerged in the Neolithic of Britain, and how can we explore these by emphasising difference, not reducing them to a logic of identity (cf. Bickle 2020)?

To work at multiple scales Our sixth challenge required us to work at multiple scales. Archaeology is by nature multiscalar. Each site we excavate emerges from hundreds of small-scale events and the intervention of numerous humans and non-humans. Similarly, the narratives we tell reach from particular moments, the digging of a pit or the shaping of an axe, through to stories that define and describe whole periods. Archaeology cannot afford to abandon either the small-scale or the large-scale. More than this, an approach needs both to avoid reducing the small-scale to the outcome of largerscale processes, or the latter to merely the playing out of smaller-scale events. Assemblages offer us the perfect starting point for such a multiscalar methodology (DeLanda 2006; Harris 2017a). From individual water molecules to galaxies, assemblages give us a terminology and a methodology to move across between scales without reductionism. The folding of scales within assemblages also allows us to see how an individual object can be both small and large scale at the same time; a flint arrowhead, for example, folds geological scales of material formation, historical scales of flint technology and an individual moment of knapping into its assemblage. We have tacked between multiple scales in our analyses of the Neolithic, from concepts that operated widely at different times to particular moments when a pot was made, a body was buried or a stone erected. With our discussion of bodies in Chapter 5 we were able to examine how the treatment of specific individuals, the processes of differentiation and individuation they went through, created new capacities to affect and be affected that stretched over time and space. When we looked at causewayed enclosures in Chapter 6, we saw how they not only emerged from interrelated processes, including individual acts of ditch digging, but also a shared ‘diagram’ (Deleuze 2006b), a specific form of virtual potential that guided the way different processes repeated themselves. This allowed us to explore both how individual enclosures emerge and why enclosures have things in common with one another, without having to impose the notion of a shared mental template in the minds of Neolithic people.

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As with our discussion of the importance of history, however, there is more to be done here still. Multiscalarity could be explored in more detail by comparing regional differences across Britain at specific moments. How did the Fen Edge differ from the Upper Thames, or western Scotland, or North Wales at 3000 cal bc, say? It is this middle scale, between local and large scale, to which we could add more detail in future, exploring how different events, processes, histories and affects played out in different ways at different times, and how different concepts were more or less critical at various moments in Neolithic Britain. The further development and refinement of Bayesian analyses of radiocarbon dates will no doubt be essential to such efforts (Whittle 2018).

To allow for the creation of new concepts Our final challenge was to allow for the creation of new concepts. A  powerful critique of new materialism, and other similar approaches, is that they offer a dominant metaontology, one that overrides the specific differences of past worlds (Alberti 2016; cf. Crellin et al. 2021). It is clear we need an approach that allows us to attend to the differences that the past itself provides, the ontological differences that emerge between past and present and that create dissonance between our expectations and what emerges. Despite Benjamin Alberti’s (2016) apprehensions, I do think that Deleuze offers us the possibility both to create a coherent philosophical stance, where we are open about the basic building blocks of how we approach the world, and to attend to what the materials we encounter from the past are telling us. The reason for this is Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) emphasis on the importance of concepts as ontological devices which play out in different ways at different times and Deleuze’s (2004) own emphasis on difference-in-itself as a productive force. In our engagement with the Neolithic we defined nine different concepts that emerged that helped us to map critical ontological principles at play. From how matter remembered, via how power flowed through parts, to the role architecture played as a machine for world making, each chapter defined these concepts as a means to bring out what mattered and what was important about Neolithic ontologies. In each case we were able to build from singular examples to create the general concepts with which we finished each chapter (cf. Smith 2012, 129). Are these concepts solely derived from Deleuzian philosophy? Not solely, no. To some extent all of them are influenced by these lines of thought, of course. This is a becoming-Deleuzian of the Neolithic, in the sense that the concepts arise from a reading of the past intensely influenced by this perspective. The role of desire as a pre-personal force clearly emerges from Deleuze and Guattari’s (2013) work and helped to generate the concept that matter moved people. But the concepts are also a becoming-Neolithic of Deleuze’s philosophy as well (cf. Viveiros de Castro 2014, 92–3; cf. Chapter 3). There is nothing in Deleuze’s output that suggests the concept of monupower, for example.

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There is, I suggest, no way of attending to the past stripped of any concepts from the present; any archaeology, as we discuss more in a moment, is an act of co-authorship, of co-assembly between archaeologist, past materials and the techniques and theories they bring to bear. Given this, the test is not whether the concepts that emerged from the Neolithic have a Deleuzian flavour – they surely do. The question is whether that is the only ingredient. Through an open combination of materials and a philosophy of difference archaeology can create its own concepts (cf. Viveiros de Castro 2014, 48).

Conclusion: towards an archaeology of the virtual Whilst there is work to be done, this brief survey suggests we have made significant progress in developing approaches to the seven challenges, and with that the posthumanist archaeology this book has called for. Yet the task of generating a posthumanist archaeology is not a one-off. There is no claim to paradigm shift here, of a rejection of what went before. Developing a posthumanist approach is by definition a process which is ongoing and cannot be completed. This book, both in its theoretical components and in its accounts of the Neolithic, could never be a final conclusion; it is merely a point on a journey, a moment of inflection, a line of flight, from which others will need to be taken. Where might we go next? In writing this book it has become increasingly clear to me that we need to think much more, and more carefully, about the virtual. To recap  – for anyone who happens to have skipped the rest of the book and leapt to the conclusion in the hope of finding out what this is all about – Deleuze’s (1991a, 2004) concept of the virtual has nothing whatsoever to do with current ideas of ‘virtual reality’ or the internet. Instead, Deleuze uses the concept of the virtual in tandem with the concept of the actual. The latter captures the empirical world we can measure and quantify around us – the size and weight of the computer I am typing this on, or the book or tablet in your hand. This doesn’t mean the actual is fixed – it’s changing all the time (Deleuze & Guattari 1994, 112), but it is present here and now.1 The virtual, by contrast captures all the potentials things have that are absolutely real but nevertheless not actual. You could use the tablet to surf the internet, or to play a game, or to tweet about the philosophical meanderings of your inner thoughts. All of these things are real about the tablet, but they are not, as you read this, actual. Deleuze shows us how in order to understand the world we have to consider the virtual. Throughout the book we have seen examples of how the virtual allows us to think about past sites, monuments, objects, animals and people differently. Thinking about the virtual changes how we understand the pooled potential of a flint nodule, or how a body can act in death. A Neolithic body, as we saw in Chapter 5, has different potentials – a different virtual space, or diagram, in Deleuze’s (2006b) term – to those of a body today. It could do different things in life and in death than my body can. The intensive events, the affects of which it was capable, are not the

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same. Including the virtual thus allows an important extra dimension when considering any past object or site. It raises our gaze from the here and now and builds in the past and future too. When you open up a causewayed enclosure ditch segment, you create the potential for all kinds of future actions – you could bury a body or a body part, a pot or an unsorted range of midden material. You could also allow it to silt up or backfill it immediately. These future potentials, however, are not just ‘possibilities’; they are active players in the process of opening up the ditch in the first place. The virtual is thus a critical element in allowing us to think about the future as ‘quasi-causal’, as we saw in Chapter 6 (Deleuze 2015, 129). This emphasis on the virtual also opens us up to thinking about the absent, the non-present, the chance missed and the potential foregone (cf. Fowles 2010). An axe deposited in the ground could have been reused. A tree in the forest is potentially part of a trackway, a palisaded enclosure or a house. The sarsen stone that lies still could one day move somewhere else. The Neolithic was a world filled with this potential, and every change, every moment something was actualised, altered and shifted that world of potential, creating new openings and foreclosing others. These potentials are in no way located in humans alone, of course; the virtual and actual are elements of assemblages which cut across long-standing dualisms like human and world, agency and structure, and culture and nature. The neoconcepts outlined in Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are virtual themselves, actualised in the different archaeological moments we investigated. Elsewhere, Nathan Acebo (2020) has demonstrated how an emphasis on the virtual allows us to reconceptualise concepts like resistance amongst Indigenous communities in the United States. His work demonstrates how a failure to consider the virtual impedes archaeological understanding and impoverishes our narratives. This emphasis on the virtual also opens up a wider consideration of our practices and process as archaeologists. In Chapter  7 we saw how Deleuze (2004) develops the notion of the second synthesis of time. Here the past itself is virtual and becomes actualised through a process of contraction, with specific elements being selected and brought into focus. Deleuze (2004, 117) refers to this process as memory, though he does not mean memory only in the anthropocentric sense of deliberate recall. For him, memory stretches out to include a host of non-humans as well; it emerges relationally and is present in all interactions whether involving human beings or not (Williams 2011). In Chapter 7 we also examined how some archaeologists have posited that archaeology operates as a form of memory, rather than history (e.g. Olivier 2004). The issue with this, as we saw, is that this vision of archaeology-as-memory seeks to reject the historical aspect entirely and thus loses the capacity for the construction of narrative. Yet there may be much to be gained for thinking through the archaeological record more broadly as an example of the past-as-virtual in the manner Deleuze (1991a, 2004) describes. What if we treated the archaeological record not as a text or as a record of past processes (cf. Patrick 1985), or even as the material conditions for human life (Barrett 1988), but as a source of virtual potential from which past worlds emerge in the present? Such an emphasis on the potential for reworking and transforming the past would render

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archaeology a discipline orientated to its future transformation as much as to what it says about the past. What would an archaeology of the virtual look like?2 Gavin Lucas (2012) has provided an essential account of how rethinking the archaeological record in assemblage terms, including ideas of the virtual, can play a critical role in helping us reconceptualise the discipline. He argues that the process of archaeology acts to materialise the virtual parts of the archaeological record, identifying how an archaeological excavation acts to bring together different elements, including material things, paper records, photographs and so on, drawing them into new assemblages (Lucas 2012, 258–9). Lucas (2012, 259) is explicit that this process of materialisation is parallel to the relationship of the virtual and the actual set out by Deleuze. More recently, Lucas (2015, 11) has argued that ‘the contemporaneity of the archaeological record is not about its existence in our present, but rather about its particular mode of persistence that interconnects past, present and future’. This critical argument, bringing together both archaeological practice and an advanced understanding of the nature of time, indicates how archaeology can be repositioned as working primarily with the virtual past (cf. Hamilakis 2013). Drawing on Lucas we can now see the process of archaeology, not just that of excavation but of writing, thinking and analysing the past, as a process of actualising the virtual, as an act of assemblage. Take a single archaeological object like a piece of animal bone. The bone has a host of virtual potentials, and as it is identified to species, dated to a particular period, or has its isotopes tested, those virtual potentials get actualised. This process of actualisation shifts the virtual and allows new processes to take place; it both creates new potential narratives and forecloses others. The return of a Neolithic radiocarbon date means the bone will feature in account of that period and not another. The date helps to confirm that the site at which it was found (an enclosure, say) is Neolithic, changing the virtual diagram, ‘the map of relations between forces’, of that site as well (Deleuze 2006b, 32). The same thing happens when we write about the site: we bring together and assemble different potentials in the materials, in the discipline, in our ideas, and express them, differentiating a particular narrative. As Chris Fowler (2013, 66) has brilliantly shown, archaeology is thus not the revealing of a pre-existing truth about what happened in history. How can it be when the process of putting it together changes what other people can say about it, when radiocarbon dating a piece of bone creates one thing (a date) but destroys another (the bone) (cf. Lucas 2012, 258)? Nor, however, is the past somehow simply created by the archaeologist in the present alone. Whilst the archaeologist plays a critical role in actualising particular connections, in creatively engaging with the virtual potentials, they are not free to write whatever they wish (Fowler 2013, 66). Traditions of scholarship, on the one hand, but also the past materials themselves on the other, are critical co-authors in the processes of differentiating our pasts. The virtual past surrounds us, and it holds the potential to be put together in multiple different ways. But multiplicity

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and relativism are not in any way synonymous. A multiplicity is neither one nor many, as Deleuze (2004, 230) teaches us. The process of archaeology depends upon pots and bones, on microscopes and mass spectrometers. It depends upon the things past people did, the concepts they worked with, and when and how those things happened. Archaeological materials are not simply here in the present for us to manipulate as we choose: they are multitemporal, they are multiplicitous, they are the past as virtual – but the virtual always has its diagram. If archaeologists can put the past together in different ways, can they change the past? Yes and no. Our animal bone in the previous example dates the enclosure to the Neolithic. But a re-examination of the stratigraphy might reveal that the bone is residual and the enclosure far more recent. None of this changes the past-as-it-was, the past-as-present for the communities that lived at the time. But the past as ontology, the past as virtual, the past archaeologists work with? That is changed every time a site is dug, a radiocarbon date is generated, a new narrative is put forward. Such a recognition does not mean, once again, that we cannot choose or differentiate between these actualisations. I can be critical of the idea that Late Neolithic society is characterised by chiefdoms (Renfrew 1973), and I can use the same evidence, with some developments and a different theoretical approach, to suggest a more productive and less problematic version which sees power as flowing from monuments rather than people. Others may in turn critique this and argue that power must be a primary human quality. There is no need to foreclose critique here, or to pretend that all explanations are equal. Archaeology is a fundamentally creative act, one where we work with the virtual resources, the differentiated problems that we are faced with, and from them differenciate a variety of solutions. Archaeology is thus the process of actualising the virtual past. It is relational, in that it emerges from the assembly of humans and non-humans past and present, but it is not relativist. It is not about the relativity of truth but rather about the truth of relations as Deleuze and Guattari remind us (1994, 130). It is also fundamentally intensive. Intensive forces, as we saw in Chapter 3, drive the actualisation of virtual, the differentiation and the individuation of particular entities. Archaeology is thus a form of intensive history. Those intensive flows come in the effort it takes to empty a ditch segment on an excavation, in the concentration of the specialist with their callipers measuring pig teeth to see if the animal they came from was wild or domestic, in the long hours of reading and the scrawled notes of the theorist trying to figure out a different way of thinking about the world. Archaeology emerges through this intensive activity as the active synthesis of history and memory, the selective actualisation of a virtual past that surrounds us. This actualisation allows us to identify ontological, virtual, concepts that in turn facilitate a focus on difference. It is this centrality of difference that will allow us to deliver a past that is post-anthropocentric and posthumanist, one positioned to deal with the political challenges of the present, and to focus on our futures.

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Why does this matter? By embracing archaeology as the process by which we actualise the virtual past in the present, we turn back to the position of our discipline in the world today. We have to confront the manner in which archaeological sites, including Neolithic ones, continue to be folded into debates around politics and heritage that shape the world in which we live. We cannot resist the deployment of Avebury as the parading ground for far-right groups, as happened in the summer of 2019, or decry Jacob Rees Mogg exalting Brexit from a stone circle, if we treat the past as fixed and absent, something that happened long ago, cut off from the present. Archaeology is here and now, the past as virtual, waiting to be actualised. When we work with archaeology the stories we tell, the worlds we create, must have the future in mind. It might seem like it is about the distant past, but archaeology must become what my colleague Rachel Crellin calls ‘future orientated’.3 Thus, it is the contention here that an attention to the virtual not only captures the process of archaeology more accurately, but also refocuses our discipline and builds towards the engagement with politics that posthumanism demands. A  more accurate past and a more engaged future: this is what a posthumanist archaeology of the virtual offers. In this book we have primarily engaged in this process through examining materials from Neolithic Britain: the pottery sherds in pits, the human bodies in long barrows, the stones that were stood up at monuments or were shaped into axes. We have taken these elements, these pieces, the dates they provide, the events they encapsulate, and used them to craft narratives, to distil concepts and to explore a different time and place. The work here has brought together and territorialised ideas, theories and philosophies with objects, animal bones, plant remains and features. By selecting specific scales of analysis, by foregrounding different elements of the multiplicity of Neolithic Britain, one particular way of putting these things together has emerged here: one virtual past has been intensively actualised. There is another component to this though: you, the reader. You too are part of the assemblage through which this past emerges, and what you have brought will make a difference too. The process of archaeology I have described here is one of assembly (Fowler 2013, 66; Lucas 2012). Archaeologists work with the virtual past to assemble narratives from our scattered evidence. Through our work as excavators, we attend to the qualities of soil to discern cuts and fills. Through the skills of archaeological scientists, and the capacities of their tools and machines, we can attend to what the materials that we excavate are telling us. Our narratives, as assemblages, both territorialise these past materials together and also organise, or code, them in particular ways. These assemblages exist in the present; they effect the world around us; they help to shape the worlds and the people yet to come. This is no idle task, nor indulgent pastime; how we assemble the past matters, and it is what we, as archaeologists, do. As we saw in Chapter 3, in their final book together Deleuze and Guattari asked: ‘what is philosophy?’ Their answer was the creation of concepts. At the end of this book, we can ask: ‘what is archaeology?’ The answer, presented here, is that it is the act of assembling past worlds.

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Notes * With cap-doffed to Manuel DeLanda (2002). 1 The actual changes as use your tablet to do different things, as its components slowly erode and so on. 2 With thanks to Nate Acebo for stimulating discussions on this topic. 3 Rachel Crellin, pers. comm.

GLOSSARY

The aim of this glossary is to provide a quick definition of many of the terms that are developed in the book, principally in Chapter 3, and referred to throughout. It is worth noting here, as others have done, that it isn’t a very Deleuzian thing to do to neatly define terms. Indeed, it is almost impossible, as Deleuze, both alone and with Guattari, sometimes uses the same term to mean different things in a single text. Deleuze would see strict definitions as a way of domesticating and limiting the work his concepts can do in freeing us from our traditional ways of thinking – however irritating that might be sometimes. It should be stressed, therefore, that these definitions are rough and ready and do not, and cannot, capture everything that a term covers or all the ways in which they can be employed. Furthermore, they are the ways in which I have used these terms. They are developed specifically through the engagement with archaeology and the Neolithic that this book sets out. I should also note that I have resisted providing extended examples here because these are provided both in Chapter 3 and in the case-study chapters, and it would be easy to turn a glossary like this into another equally lengthy exposition. The index will guide you to other places where these terms are defined or explored, and there you will find examples both archaeological and otherwise, as well as references to appropriate texts by Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari. Actual  The actual is the empirical world we can measure around us, the size, weight and dimensions of objects, the current occupant of a seat, what a computer is being used for right now, not what it might be used for later. Critically, the actual is not fixed, however, but constantly changing at a variety of scales. Aeon  Aeon is the time of the event, a mode of time Deleuze uses to contrast with Chronos. Rather than focusing on a specific date and time, Aeon

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captures the qualities of events that are timeless, that are shared. Think of how the death of a loved one echoes back and forth in time and can create a shared experience with someone else; the intensity, the shock, is not limited to one time and place. Affect  Affect captures the manner in which bodies press into each other, their capacity to affect and be affected. The way in which water quenches a cat’s thirst, a pen marks the page or a loud noise makes you jump: these are all affects. One body (water, pen, the source of the noise) affecting another (the cat, the paper, you). AND  Strongly linked to Deleuze’s emphasis on both relations and becoming, the emphasis on AND (capitalised) stresses the conjunctive nature of Deleuze’s philosophy. Because things are always changing, and they change through new relations, these relations change what something can do. A glossary is a way of explaining these terms to you AND a way for me to think them through for myself. Assemblage  Assemblages are the coming together and arrangement of different components into relational collectives. Assemblages are defined along two axes. On the horizontal axis they are both machinic assemblages (i.e. they contain physical components) and assemblages of enunciation (i.e. they include meanings, words, symbols, all sorts of other things too). On the vertical axis they run from territorialisation, the process of an assemblage coming together, to deterritorialisation, the process of assemblages coming apart. Assemblages are multiscalar; each one is part of larger assemblages, and made up of smaller assemblages in turn. Becoming  Becoming emphasises the ongoing change in the world, that things are never static and fixed but always in a process of flux. A position that emphasises becoming over being asks us to focus on what things do rather than what things are. Body without Organs  At the maximum limit of deterritorialisation, where energy flows without friction, we find the Body without Organs, or what Deleuze and Guattari also call the plane of consistency. If strata represent the most tightly packed and organised possibility for an assemblage to reach, the Body without Organs is the other extreme. Chronos  One of the two modes of time, along with Aeon, that Deleuze takes from Stoic philosophers. Chronos captures how any particular moment is actually made up of multiple simultaneous presents operating at different scales. Coding/decoding/overcoding  Coding captures how components are organised within assemblages. This can be done through language, in assemblages involving humans, but doesn’t have to be. How a riverbed sorts the gravel at its base is also an example of coding. Decoding refers to the loss of these organisational associations, and overcoding to when different systems come in and rapidly organise an assemblage in a new way. Counter-actualisation  The process by which changes in the actual recursively shape the virtual.

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Dark precursor  The hairs that stand up on the back of your neck, the calm in the middle of the storm, the intake of breath before the blow falls – Deleuze calls these moments the dark precursor to capture how intensities spill out beyond any one moment and echo back and forth in time. The dark precursor is the link between different forces, the thing that ties them together. De/re/territorialisation  Territorialisation is the process by which elements are incorporated into an assemblage, tied down and located in place for a period of time. Deterritorialisation captures the reverse of this, the process by which elements detach from an assemblage. As Deleuze and Guattari note, deterritorialisation almost always leads to reterritorialisation, that is leaving one assemblage usually means joining another. Desire  Rather than a longing for something lacked, desire for Deleuze and Guattari is a productive, pre-personal force that brings different subjectivities (human and non-human) into being. Desire is always assembled, Deleuze notes, meaning that it is always historical; desire in the Neolithic is not the same as desire today. Desire, in this book, is one of the ways in which intensive forces are registered. Diagram  A diagram, which Deleuze and Guattari also call an ‘abstract machine’, is the structure of the virtual that means that certain capacities are more likely to be actualised than others. I am much more likely to use my table to put my computer on than I am to dance on it (sadly). Both are part of the virtual space of the person-table-assemblage, but one is much more likely to be actualised. This shape of the virtual is called a diagram. Difference  Difference replaces identity at the heart of Deleuze’s philosophy. Rather than presuming that things have an essence that define what they truly are, Deleuze wants to focus on the processes of difference making that give rise to the thing in the first place. For Deleuze identity, what a thing is emerges from prior differential relations. Differentiation/differenciation  Differentiation and differenciation are the processes through which virtual potentials become actualised. The first part of this, differentiation, takes place in the virtual and captures how this space can be shaped, that is the way the virtual can be individuated without becoming actualised. A cat becomes aware that the noise it can hear could be a person in the kitchen, differentiating the potential for food to shortly emerge. Differenciation refers to the process by which the individuated element in the virtual becomes actualised. The cat goes down to the kitchen and through its unparalleled powers of persuasion – an intensive force if there ever was one – persuades a human to put some biscuits in its bowl, actualising the process of being fed. Duration  Deleuze takes the term ‘duration’ from his work on Bergson. Here I use duration to capture the manner in which time is emergent through the constant intervention in the world of multiple entities. Duration is itself a qualitative multiplicity therefore, one incorporating memories (human and

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non-human) and a host of temporalities, and indeed there are multiple durations operating at a variety of scales. Euclidian  The form of space defined by traditional measurements like length, width, depth, and mass. The familiar space definable in numerical terms. Extensive  Extensive and extension relate to the measurable parameters of the world around us, the distances, weights, diameters and relations present and actual in the world around us. If the extensive is one dimension of an assemblage, another is the intensive forces which equally make it up. Haecceity  Haecceity captures the specificity of particular arrangements, their location at a particular moment in time, the manner in which, for all their broader relations, this particular moment, here and now, is different. What is specific about this moment, this collection, the speeds of movement that make them up, right here, right now? The answer defines a haecceity. Immanence  The principle that rather than invoking ahistorical explanations the world needs to be explained in its own terms. An immanent approach develops an account of relations and entities on the basis of their specificity, rather than seeing them as expressions of a wider universality. Individuation  Individuation, Deleuze insists, precedes individuals. What he is trying to capture here is the process by which individual things emerge in the world, and how the continuous flow of intensive forces can produce (temporarily) discrete entities. It is a term equivalent to differentiation. Intensity  Intensity refers to the flows of forces which structure the world and which drive the processes of difference making. These forces include not only things like pressure and temperature, driven by physical processes, but also the intensity of a social atmosphere. Particular flows of intensity can register as desire, affect and power (amongst other ways). Intensive forces are how the virtual becomes actual. Intensity, Deleuze says, in an evocative line, dramatises. Latitude and Longitude  Deleuze uses the term ‘latitude’ and ‘longitude’ to answer the question: what can a body do? Latitude is the affects of which a body is capable, how it can affect and be affected. These are the intensive capacities of a body. Longitude captures the specific extensive relations of movement and rest that a body undergoes. Where is a body, and what are its affects? This tells us what a body can do. Line of flight  Lines of flight are the means by which elements escape assemblages; they are paths of becoming or transformation where one thing becomes something else. Introducing a new member of the household sends relations off in unexpected directions; the arrival of a new virus disrupts and transforms social interactions. These are becomings; these are lines of flight. Machines  Machines for Deleuze and Guattari are interventions in the worlds, things that create blockages and stops in the flows and flux of intensity that would otherwise pass untroubled. They are historically specific and emergent, and in many ways the term provides an earlier version of what they would later call ‘assemblages’.

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Majoritarian/molar and minoritarian/molecular  Deleuze and Guattari compare what they call ‘majoritarian’, or molar approaches, with minoritarian, or molecular, ones. Majoritarian approaches represent the standard accounts, which inherently privilege particular conceptions of what it is to be human, how time passes and so on. Minoritarian or molecular approaches slip through the gaps these dominant accounts leave open; these are routes through which other potentials emerge, the possibilities for change and becoming. Posthumanism, as defined by Rosi Braidotti and others, is an attempt to write through and from minoritarian and molecular ways of thinking. So is this book. Morphogenesis  Traditional understandings of making impose a hylomorphic model. That is, they presume that human beings have ideas that they impose onto the materials that surround them. Instead, an emphasis on morphogenesis celebrates how all matter is vibrant and brings its own capacities for growth, change and transformation. The tendencies of soap film to form perfect spheres, of rivers to erode their banks, and for ink to fade are all examples of morphogenesis. Multiplicity  Deleuze uses the mathematical concept of multiplicity to capture how things in the world are neither many nor one; instead, everything emerges as a patchwork of multiple differences. Tacking between discrete (bounded and extensive) and continuous (intensive) multiplicities allows Deleuze to explore the complex nature of the world. The term underpins the ideas that would go on to be called first machines and then later assemblages, which Deleuze would develop in his partnership with Guattari. Power  Power captures the relations between forces, how they facilitate particular kinds of connection. Rather than simple domination, power here is creative, seductive and everywhere; it plays a role in all relationships. As defined in this book, power is one of three ways in which intensive forces register, along with affect and desire. Relations  A relational approach focuses on the open nature of the world where connections come and go, changing the capacities and properties of a thing, a person or a material. Relations exist in parallel to entities they connect; that is to say, they neither exist prior to nor come after the terms they link. Representation  Deleuze’s philosophy argues that representation (how we think about the world, how meaning emerges and so on) is secondary to the processes of difference making that bring the world into existence. Deleuze defines representation as being dominated by identity, analogy, opposition and resemblance. When we place these things as primary, we privilege representation, and thus human perspectives. It’s not that Deleuze doesn’t think these things exist – it’s that they emerge out of difference rather than prefiguring it. Rhizome  Deleuze and Guattari use the metaphor of a rhizome to think about the entangled world of folded, non-hierarchical, relations that they envision. Like a complex intertwining tangle of roots, a rhizome doesn’t start in one

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place and end in another; there are multiple unpredictable ways through, multiple connections, eruptions and relations. Smooth and striated space  Smooth and striated space are the outcomes of forces or processes that act on the world, either to structure and control it (striating forces), or to break free and provide different possibilities for movement and engagement (smoothing forces). This is not a dualism but rather two processes of smoothing and striating that are in tension with one another. Shipping lanes, GPS, rocks, tides and charts act as a striating force on the sea, for example. Stratification/destratification  Highly organised and bounded, strata represent long-lasting assemblages. Like geological layers, one of three examples Deleuze and Guattari use to structure their exploration of how the world emerges, strata are laid down through processes of gathering and organisation and can be difficult to shift. Of course, in reality they are changing all the time, and what can seem like a long-lived stratum from one perspective is just a momentary assemblage from another. Topological  A form of space defined by bends, folds and intensities rather than extensive measurements. Univocity  The principle that rather than the world being divided into two hierarchically ordered realms (e.g. mind and body, culture and nature, human and world), everything emerges through the differentiation of a single substance. Virtual  The virtual is the part of an assemblage that is not currently actual; that is to say, it is the realm of potential. Emerging from Deleuze’s reading of Bergson, the virtual captures those things that are absolutely real but not currently present: the capacity of an empty mug to hold coffee, for a silent phone to ring, for a blank page to be filled. The virtual is actualised through intensive differential processes.

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INDEX

Acebo, Nathan 231 actual 22, 45, 52 – 5, 57, 60, 63 – 6, 94, 96, 100, 107, 145, 150, 170 – 1, 177, 185, 200, 206, 208 – 9, 212, 214 – 20, 223, 230 – 2, 236 – 7, 239, 241 Adlestrop 117 – 19, 123 aDNA 14, 16 affect 3, 23, 26, 43 – 4, 52, 56 – 60, 66, 84, 86, 89 – 90, 96 – 8, 100, 106 – 9, 116 – 17, 122 – 32, 135 – 40, 143 – 53, 157, 160 – 5, 171 – 3, 177, 181 – 3, 186, 189 – 91, 193, 204, 217 – 19, 225, 228 – 31, 237, 239 – 40 agency 5 – 6, 16, 24 – 6, 162, 184 – 5, 231 Aion 64, 209, 213 – 15, 217 Alfriston 128 Alt, Susan 48 Amazonia(n) 23, 37 Amesbury 42 75, 97 AND 10 – 11, 50, 54, 59, 66, 84, 89, 98, 108 – 9, 136, 151 – 2, 160 – 1, 169, 209, 225, 237 animism 38 – 9 antler 13, 24, 27, 44, 71 – 3, 95, 98, 100, 106 – 7, 113, 131 – 4, 140, 165 – 6, 217 archaeology-as-history 207 – 8, 212, 214 – 15, 219 – 20, 233 archaeology-as-memory 208, 212, 214 – 15, 219 – 20, 231 architecture 17, 26 – 7, 31, 44, 50, 67, 73, 76, 81 – 6, 94, 106 – 7, 122, 155 – 7, 160 – 4, 169 – 94, 199 – 200, 202 – 6, 213, 215 – 16, 219 – 20, 224, 226, 229 Ardnamurchan 15, 142, 155, 226

Ascott-under-Wychwood 75, 98 – 9, 104, 140, 158, 191 Ashbee, Paul 111 assemblage 9 – 10, 31, 35, 42 – 6, 49, 59 – 65, 73 – 5, 90 – 2, 93 – 9, 101, 106, 108, 117, 121 – 6, 131, 133 – 8, 142 – 4, 146, 150 – 1, 153, 157, 160, 164, 169 – 79, 182, 199 – 201, 205, 213, 222, 225 – 6, 228, 231 – 2, 234, 237 – 41 assemblage converter 146, 205 assemblage theory 43, 46, 101 Aston 158, 184 Avebury 75, 78 – 80, 89 – 90, 94, 103, 108, 158, 162, 192, 205 – 6, 217 – 19, 225, 234 axes 13, 24, 71 – 2, 76, 81, 89, 91 – 3, 95, 99 – 108, 113, 120 – 2, 129 – 31, 149, 163, 171, 191, 202 – 3, 210, 212 – 13, 216, 228, 231, 234 Balbridie 117, 143 – 4, 158, 172 Ballevulin 128 Banbury Lane 117, 120 – 1, 123 – 4, 127 Banfield, Emily 24, 79, 94, 97, 124 Barad, Karen 9 Barleycroft 75, 81 Barnhouse 75, 93, 157 – 8, 175 – 8, 205 – 6, 225 – 6 Barrett, John 184 Barrow Hills 128 – 30 Bayesian modelling/statistics 14 – 16, 34, 175, 206 – 7, 215 Bayliss, Alex 34, 162, 207 Beaker pottery 13 Beckhampton Road 117, 124 – 5, 127, 226

Index  271

becoming 9 – 10, 17, 25, 28, 42, 45 – 6, 48 – 54, 60, 62, 64 – 7, 71 – 3, 75, 84, 107, 126, 150, 156, 160, 162, 167 – 9, 172, 174, 187, 189, 194, 208, 212, 214, 219, 225, 227, 229, 237 – 40 Benjamin, Alberti 38, 65, 229 Bennett, Jane 9, 27, 43 Bergson, Henri 28, 44, 52, 123, 190, 209 – 12, 238, 241 Bidford-on-Avon 140 – 1 Biggar 128 Bille, Mikkel 145 biopower 185 – 6 Birdlip Camp 158, 167 Blasthill 75, 77 – 8, 89 body/bodies 7, 17, 21, 23, 34 – 5, 38 – 9, 45, 58 – 64, 77, 81, 89, 97 – 100, 103 – 4, 108 – 9, 116 – 17, 122 – 46, 148 – 53, 157, 162 – 5, 171 – 2, 178, 182, 185, 189 – 94, 199 – 200, 205 – 6, 213, 217, 222, 224 – 8, 230 – 1, 237, 239, 241 Body without Organs 63, 97 – 100, 104, 108, 178, 191 – 2, 237 Bogost, Ian 30, 201 Bourdieu, Pierre 43 – 4 Bradley, Richard 100, 103 – 4, 182, 207, 216 Braes of Ha’Breck 158, 174 Braidotti, Rosi 4, 9, 43, 240 Brickley, Megan 116, 119 Brightlingsea 140 Broadwell 158, 167 Brophy, Kenneth 79, 82 – 4, 114 – 15, 143 – 5, 148 – 9, 161, 206 Brück, Joanna 143, 160 Busby, Cecilia 23 Cairnpapple Hill 140 – 1 capacities 3, 27, 49 – 50, 53 – 6, 59, 65, 73, 76, 79 – 81, 90 – 9, 101, 107 – 8, 116, 122 – 6, 131, 140, 145 – 6, 148 – 50, 152, 157, 164, 169 – 70, 175, 177, 182, 228, 234, 238 – 40 Carinated Bowl 92 – 3, 129 Carn Brae 158, 190 Cat’s Brain 158 – 60 cattle/cows 13, 23 – 4, 27, 33, 82, 111, 120, 124 – 7, 131, 143, 152 – 3, 155, 164, 169, 171, 181, 190, 226 causewayed enclosures 13, 91 – 2, 104, 119 – 20, 124, 130 – 1, 138, 152 – 3, 157, 162 – 70, 179, 183, 187, 190 – 2, 202 – 3, 207, 216, 226, 228, 231 chalk 77, 86, 91, 95, 100, 113, 133 – 4, 136 – 7, 167, 171, 187 – 8, 190, 217 Chalk Hill 158, 164, 167 – 9, 191 – 2

chambered tombs 13, 76 – 8, 98, 116, 119, 122 – 3, 128, 138, 146, 152, 155 – 7, 191 – 2, 202 – 5, 216 Chapman, John 119 chert 77 Chronos 64, 209, 213 – 16, 236 – 7 Cipolla, Craig 8, 47 Cladh Aindires 75, 117, 140 – 3, 153, 156 – 8, 192 – 3, 219 Claish 158, 172 Clark, Peter 167 – 8 Cobb, Hannah 44 Cochrane, Andrew 99, 106 – 7, 137 Cold Kitchen Hill 117, 131 Coldrum 117 – 20, 202 Colebrook, Claire 9, 223 Conneller, Chantal 44 Conygar Hill 158, 179 correlationism 7 – 8, 21 counter-actualisation 55, 96, 165, 237 – 8 Crellin, Rachel 15, 44, 60, 90, 207, 234 cremation cemeteries 114 – 16, 133, 142, 146 – 9 cremations 13, 114 – 17, 121, 133, 140 – 53, 155, 183, 200, 205, 227 Crickley Hill 158, 190 crops 13, 99, 171 Crossiecrown 75, 99 Croucher, Karina 44 Crown Point Hall, Trowse Newton 75, 104 Cummings, Vicki 16, 76 – 8 cursus monument 13, 82 – 3, 116 – 17, 136, 143, 147, 157, 161, 184, 193, 202 – 5, 216 Cuween 120 dark precursor 64, 84, 238 daub 94, 172 de/coding 62 – 3, 93 – 4, 203, 237 decolonisation 20, 223 DeLanda, Manuel 46, 49, 52, 63, 225 Deleuze, Gilles 9 – 12, 17, 27 – 9, 40, 42 – 67, 75, 82, 93 – 4, 96, 98 – 103, 116, 122, 127, 131 – 2, 135, 138, 146, 150, 152 – 3, 165 – 6, 170, 184, 193 – 4, 200 – 1, 208 – 14, 222 – 34, 236 – 41 Deloria Jr, Vine 20 de/re/territorialisation 22, 61 – 3, 90 – 5, 97 – 102, 106 – 8, 128, 131, 134 – 8, 143, 149, 151, 170, 172, 177 – 9, 182 – 3, 187 – 9, 204, 225, 234, 237 – 8 Descartes, René 7, 21, 32, 44 desire 45, 52, 58 – 60, 66, 73, 100 – 9, 131, 134 – 5, 137, 140, 151, 157, 160, 171 – 2, 183, 186, 189, 192, 203 – 4, 222, 224, 229, 238, 240

272 Index

Despret, Vinciane 24 de/stratified 63, 135, 151, 184, 190, 241 diagram 54 – 5, 152, 170, 228, 230, 232 – 3, 238 Díaz-Guardamino, Marta 15, 101 difference 3, 6, 9 – 13, 17, 22, 33 – 4, 37 – 40, 42 – 3, 45 – 6, 50 – 60, 64 – 7, 79, 91, 94 – 6, 109, 117, 122, 128 – 30, 149 – 52, 165 – 70, 173, 175, 179, 192, 194, 209 – 10, 212 – 13, 215, 220, 222 – 4, 226 – 30, 233 – 4, 238 – 40 differenciation 55, 96, 150 – 1, 170, 238 differentiation 34, 45, 54 – 6, 64, 66, 94, 106, 136, 151, 225, 228, 233, 238 differentiation 55, 96, 238 – 9, 241 Dolerites 77 – 8, 88 Dorchester-upon-Thames 116 – 17, 140, 144, 147 – 9, 205 Dorset Cursus 117, 136, 203 Dorstone Hill 117, 143, 160 Downes, Jane 145, 161, 227 Drayton 158, 184 dualisms 7 – 8, 21 – 2, 26, 28, 36, 45 – 6, 64, 89, 93, 224, 231, 241 Duggleby Howe 116 – 17, 120, 128, 132 – 40, 144, 149, 152, 158, 183, 189, 204 – 5, 224 – 6 Dunragit 75, 82 duration 64, 190, 192 – 3, 215, 226, 238 – 9 Durrington Walls 75, 86, 157 – 8, 180, 192 Edgeworth, Matt 11 Edmonds, Mark 82, 96, 163, 169 Eton Rowing Course 75, 82, 98, 117, 120, 128, 140 Etton 75, 104, 117, 120, 130, 158, 162 – 9, 191 Euclidian space 84, 88, 108, 239 Evans, Chris 167 events 35 – 6, 47, 58, 62, 63 – 4, 94, 97, 99, 103, 111, 127, 136, 140, 143 – 9, 151 – 3, 160 – 2, 165 – 70, 172, 178, 183, 185, 189 – 91, 199 – 200, 205, 207 – 8, 210, 213 – 15, 217 – 19, 225 – 30, 234, 236 – 7 extension 57, 89, 239 extensive 57, 59, 63 – 4, 75, 84, 89, 100, 116, 200, 239 – 40 feminism 4, 7, 20, 33 feminist 4, 9, 11, 32, 40, 43 – 5, 223, 227 final form 156, 168 – 9, 187 Flagstones 117, 120 – 1, 128, 140, 146, 158, 162

flint 13, 71 – 2, 75, 82, 91 – 2, 94 – 100, 103 – 4, 107, 111 – 13, 120, 126 – 30, 132 – 3, 138, 144, 150, 161, 164, 171 – 2, 177, 187, 202 – 3, 228, 230 Forteviot 115 – 17, 140, 144 – 9, 205 Foucault, Michel 8, 43 – 4, 60, 184 – 5 Fowler, Chris 44, 116, 144 – 5, 232 fragmentation 104, 115 – 30, 135, 137 – 40, 142, 144 – 8, 150 – 2, 203 FT 49 Fussell’s Lodge 75, 86, 97, 111 – 12, 116 – 22, 124 – 7, 131, 140 – 4, 146, 161, 207 Garn Turne 75 – 6 Gatehampton Farm 117, 138 Gaydarska, Bisserka 119 gender 5, 21, 32 – 4, 44, 101, 152, 223, 227 – 8 Giddens, Anthony 44 Gillings, Mark 16, 76 – 9, 90 Gosden, Chris 28 Graig Lwyd 75, 103 Green 158, 174 – 5 Greenbogs 75, 86 Green, Martin 137 Greyhound Yard 75, 86, 90, 107, 225 Grimes Graves 75, 95 Grooved Ware 71 – 2, 93, 107, 121, 130, 176 – 7, 181 – 2, 205, 225 Grosz, Elizabeth 9, 44 Guattari, Félix 9 – 10, 27, 29, 43 – 5, 49, 56 – 9, 61 – 7, 75, 82, 93 – 4, 98 – 103, 122, 131, 138, 146, 153, 165, 193 – 4, 201, 208, 223, 226, 233 – 4, 236 – 41 Haber, Alejandro 38 habit 209 – 12, 214 – 17, 227 Haddenham 75, 86, 104, 117, 120, 131, 144, 163 haecceity 64, 94, 103, 127, 173, 226, 239 Hambledon Hill 75, 91 – 3, 108, 117 – 23, 128 – 31, 138 – 9, 158, 162 – 9, 190 – 1, 202, 207, 225 Hamilakis, Yannis 24, 44 Handley Down 26 & 27 117, 128 Haraway, Donna 9, 24 – 5 Harding, Jan 135 Harman, Graham 20 – 2, 30 – 1, 46, 201, 226 Hazleton North 75, 115 – 17, 128 – 30, 140 Healy, Frances 34, 116, 126, 162 Heidegger, Martin 8, 28 henge 13, 50 – 1, 78, 114 – 16, 121, 141, 145, 147, 157, 179 – 84, 192 – 3, 205, 217 – 19, 225

Index  273

hengiform 147, 179, 182 Hindwell 75, 86 Hinxton 75, 81 history 3 – 4, 6, 10, 18, 22 – 5, 27 – 9, 31, 39, 43, 48, 50 – 1, 59, 66, 84, 103, 127, 165, 185, 189, 200, 206 – 10, 212, 214 – 15, 219 – 20, 222 – 3, 225 – 6, 229, 231 – 3 Hodder, Ian 20, 65 Holbraad, Martin 37, 200 – 1 Holm 75, 82 – 3, 90 Horton 128 – 9 houses 15, 29 – 31, 37, 44, 48, 54 – 5, 62 – 4, 84 – 6, 91 – 4, 99 – 100, 157, 160, 170 – 9, 182 – 3, 191, 193, 205, 219, 225 – 6, 231 house societies 160, 171 – 5, 178 – 9 humanism 5 – 8, 10, 21 – 2, 24, 29, 40, 48, 60, 223 Hume, David 44, 49, 209, 212 hylomorphic 56, 162, 240 iconic 106, 182, 227 identity 22 – 3, 32 – 4, 40, 45, 51, 53, 64, 101, 116, 152, 169 – 70, 172, 217, 223, 227 – 8, 238, 240 immanence/immanent 45 – 8, 50 – 1, 54, 58, 63, 65 – 6, 90, 98, 117, 152, 160 – 2, 185, 239 Imperial College Sports Ground 140 – 1 Indigenous concepts 20, 66 Ingold, Tim 27, 29 inhumation 129, 132, 147 – 53 intensity 17, 57, 60, 66, 89, 97, 99 – 100, 140, 151 – 2, 171, 178, 189, 191, 200, 225, 227, 237 – 9, 241 intensive 44 – 5, 52, 56 – 60, 63 – 6, 75, 81, 84 – 9, 94, 96 – 7, 99 – 100, 107 – 8, 116, 123, 134, 137, 140, 143 – 8, 151, 153, 164, 170, 173, 183, 189, 191, 199 – 200, 203 – 6, 211 – 19, 223 – 5, 227, 230, 233 – 4, 238 – 41 Irigaray, Luce 11 isotopes/isotopic analysis 14, 16, 133, 191, 225, 232 Jervis, Ben 44 jet belt sliders 100, 106, 128 – 9, 132, 203 Jones, Andrew 8, 15 – 16, 44, 76, 93, 101, 106 – 7, 137 – 40, 169 Jones, Sian 175 – 7, 226 Kingstone Lacy 128 Knap Hill 158, 164 Knap of Howar 75, 99, 158, 174, 178

Knowe of Yarso 117, 122 Knowes of Trotty 158, 174 landscape 3, 13, 16, 27, 38, 44, 56 – 7, 71, 79 – 83, 86 – 7, 90, 93, 98, 103 – 4, 108, 119 – 20, 128, 133 – 6, 142 – 3, 146 – 8, 151 – 2, 161, 167, 172 – 3, 176 – 7, 181 – 3, 187 – 9, 193 – 4, 202 – 7, 216 – 17 Langdale axe factory 75, 102 – 3, 202 Langworth Hall Farm 75, 104 Lanyon Quoit 75, 77 latitude 59, 116, 122 – 6, 135, 138, 146, 149 – 50, 239 Latour, Bruno 8, 19, 24, 26, 28, 31, 201 Leary, Jim 161 – 2, 187 – 9, 226 Liangzhu 29 Liffs Low 114, 117, 128, 131, 138 – 40, 152, 158, 183, 224 Linch Hill Corner 128 Llandygái 117, 140, 149 long barrows 13, 35, 86, 91, 97, 122, 124 – 5, 131, 143, 146, 152, 157, 161, 171, 191, 202 – 3, 216, 234 longitude 59, 116, 122 – 4, 126, 135, 138, 146, 149 – 50, 239 Loveday, Roy 133, 147 – 8, 184 Lucas, Gavin 44, 206 – 7, 220, 232 Maes Howe 158, 216 Maiden Castle 117, 131, 158, 167 majoritarian 240 Malafouris, Lambros 28 Marden 158, 192 Marshall, Yvonne 38 Martlesham 71 – 2, 75, 95, 107 Marx, Karl 44, 58 Maski 29 Massumi, Brian 54, 184 – 5 Maumbury Rings 120 Maxey 158, 180 McFadyen, Lesley 16, 44, 77, 99, 155, 160 – 1 meaning 7, 32 – 3, 44, 51, 61 – 2, 93, 123, 227, 237, 240 megalithic tombs 119, 216 Meillassoux, Quentin 7, 21 Melanesia(n) 22 – 3 memory 18, 57, 71, 81, 86, 90, 99 – 100, 107 – 8, 122 – 8, 131, 136 – 40, 145 – 6, 148 – 52, 160, 165, 177, 181 – 3, 189 – 91, 200, 203, 205 – 6, 208 – 12, 214 – 19, 222, 225, 227 – 8, 231, 233, 238 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 9 metaontology 65, 229

274 Index

middens 97 – 100, 104, 108, 167, 178, 185, 191, 199, 231 Mid Gleniron 1 75, 78 Millican, Kirsty 79 – 82 Milton Ham 140 minoritarian 240 molar 240 molecular 240 Monkton-up-Wimborne 117, 120, 128, 136 – 7, 216 mononaturalism 37 Monte Albán 29 monument 3, 5, 10, 13 – 14, 17, 24, 31, 35, 50 – 1, 57, 60, 73, 76 – 9, 82 – 91, 97, 103, 107 – 8, 111 – 16, 119 – 27, 129, 134, 136, 138, 141 – 3, 147, 150, 152, 155 – 7, 160 – 4, 179 – 94, 201 – 5, 215 – 20, 224 – 7, 230, 233 – 4 monumental 149, 157, 161, 175, 178, 193, 202 – 3 monupower 186, 189 – 93, 202 – 6, 208, 215 – 20, 229 more-than-representational 32 – 3, 40, 43, 52, 61, 65 – 6, 227 morphogenesis 45, 52, 55 – 6, 65 – 6, 108, 162, 169, 240 Mount Pleasant 158, 180 – 2, 192, 205, 207 multiplicity 10 – 11, 35, 45, 50, 61, 64 – 5, 67, 79, 106, 123, 126, 138, 148, 160 – 1, 169, 209, 215, 220, 233 – 4, 238, 240 Neanderthal 5, 22 neoconcept 67, 107 – 8, 150 – 3, 193 – 4, 199 – 206, 208 – 9, 214 – 17, 220, 231 Ness of Brodgar 158, 175, 205 – 6 Nethercourt Farm 117, 128 networks 7 – 8, 26, 28, 104 new materialism 8 – 9, 16 – 17, 19, 21, 26, 33, 43, 65, 101, 207, 222, 229 Noble, Gordon 79 – 81, 86, 115, 123, 148 – 9 Normark, Johan 44 object-oriented ontology (OOO) 20, 30 – 1, 201 Offham 128 oil 27, 54 Olivier, Laurent 208, 212 Olsen, Bjørnar 30 – 1, 208 – 9, 212, 226 ontography 18, 194, 199 – 201, 206, 208, 213 – 15, 219 – 20 ontological 7 – 8, 17 – 19, 21 – 2, 24 – 5, 32 – 3, 37 – 40, 45 – 7, 65 – 6, 107, 149 – 50, 157, 200 – 1, 223, 229, 233 ontology 8, 20, 36, 38 – 9, 44 – 7, 49 – 52, 66, 201, 209, 211, 214, 217, 229, 233

ontopower 185 – 6 Orkney 13, 15, 50, 87 – 8, 93, 99, 123, 157, 174 – 5, 179, 182, 199, 205 – 6, 225 – 7 overcoding 217, 237 Overton, Nick 24 palisaded enclosures 73, 86, 114, 157, 163, 180, 225, 231 Pamphill 75, 98 Parker Pearson, Mike 89 Parks of Garden, Stirlingshire 75, 81 Parnet, Claire 43 passage tombs 121, 157, 177, 182, 205 Pauketat, Timothy 35, 48 Peirce, Charles Sanders 20, 33, 106 personhood 8, 16, 19, 22, 32 – 3, 111, 116, 119, 127, 227 Peterborough Ware 94 phase transition 64, 98, 150 phenomenology 8, 16, 22 – 3, 28, 101, 200 – 1, 223 Pipton 117 – 19, 122, 146 Pitnacree 140 pits 3, 11, 31, 71 – 2, 93 – 5, 98 – 100, 107, 111 – 16, 120 – 2, 124, 127, 130, 133 – 4, 136 – 7, 141, 145 – 6, 164 – 7, 177, 179, 187, 216, 220, 228, 234 Pollard, Joshua 16, 76, 79, 90, 98 – 9, 187 – 9, 192, 194 portal dolmen 13, 15, 76 – 7, 90 post-anthropocentric 5, 21, 23 – 4, 27, 32 – 3, 39, 43, 46, 48, 51, 60, 65 – 6, 73, 117, 130, 135, 178, 184, 199, 206 – 7, 220, 224, 227, 233 post-defined cursus monuments 82, 143, 202, 216 posthumanism/posthumanist 4 – 5, 8 – 9, 17 – 21, 24, 33, 39 – 40, 42 – 3, 45, 48, 51, 66, 199, 206, 220, 222 – 4, 227, 230, 233 – 4, 240 postprocessual 7, 19, 32, 34, 43 power 3, 7, 17, 23, 31 – 3, 37 – 8, 43, 45, 52, 58 – 60, 66, 89, 100 – 1, 106, 108 – 9, 114 – 16, 123, 126, 131, 133 – 40, 145, 148 – 53, 156, 160 – 1, 164 – 5, 169, 171, 178, 183 – 93, 199 – 200, 202 – 8, 215 – 20, 223 – 4, 226 – 7, 229, 233, 238 – 40 prestige goods 100 – 2, 104 – 6, 116, 203 process 9, 24, 27 – 9, 34 – 5, 39, 43, 48 – 51, 54, 59, 61, 66, 100, 144 – 6, 160 – 2, 167 – 9, 187, 225 processual 7, 19, 28, 94, 145, 164

Index  275

properties 29, 44, 48, 52 – 3, 65, 72 – 3, 76, 78, 84, 87, 90, 94 – 5, 97, 99, 101 – 3, 169, 175, 177, 181, 240 Protevi, John 17 Quanterness 117, 120 – 1, 123, 128 quartz 78 quasi-causal 166, 207, 214, 216, 231 Radley 117, 128, 130 Ray, Keith 82, 143, 172 – 3 relational 9 – 10, 16, 19 – 20, 27 – 30, 34, 48 – 51, 56, 59 – 60, 65, 90, 94, 96 – 7, 101, 108, 111, 117, 122 – 3, 126 – 7, 135, 148, 161 – 2, 182, 184, 207, 209, 223, 226, 231, 233, 237, 240 relations 8, 10 – 11, 19 – 20, 24, 27 – 31, 35, 39, 42 – 6, 48 – 59, 62, 64, 66, 71 – 8, 84 – 90, 93 – 108, 116, 122 – 3, 126 – 7, 130 – 1, 135 – 6, 138 – 44, 146 – 9, 151, 157, 160, 172, 175, 178, 181 – 2, 191, 193, 199, 201, 208, 212, 213, 225 – 7, 232 – 3, 237 – 41 Renfrew, Colin 183 – 4 repetition 43, 136, 146 – 9, 165 – 70, 187 – 9, 209, 214, 217, 224 representation 32 – 3, 44, 51 – 2, 135, 171, 185, 210, 227, 240 representational 32 – 3, 40, 43, 45, 52, 61, 65 – 6, 209, 227 rhizome 49, 57, 65, 75, 96, 240 Ribeiro, Arturo 47 Richards, Colin 15, 76, 100 – 1, 161, 172 – 9, 182 – 3, 226 Ring of Brodgar 50 – 1, 75, 87 – 9, 107, 158, 161, 182 – 3, 206, 227 Robb, John 35 Rowden 75, 98 Rudston monolith 158, 184, 203 – 4 Sale’s Lot 140 Sanday 158, 178 Sarn-y-Bryn-Caled 140 sarsen 76, 79, 89 – 90, 187, 216 – 17, 231 scrapers 71 – 2, 95 – 6 Serres, Michelle 208 Silbury Hill 158, 162, 184, 186 – 9, 192, 206, 217, 226 Silvertown, London 75, 81 Simonden, Gilbert 55 singularity 64 – 5, 157, 161 Skara Brae 75, 99, 157 – 8, 175, 178, 205 Smerquoy Hoose 158, 174 Smith, Martin 116, 119 smooth space 63, 99, 149, 173, 241

Somerset levels 75, 81 Sørensen, Tim Flohr 145 Spinoza, Baruch 44 – 7, 59, 116 Springfield 158, 184 Staines 158, 165 – 7 Staines Road Farm 75, 94 St Albans 75, 81, 140 Stanton Harcourt 117, 130 Star Carr 44 stone 3, 13, 15, 29, 38, 51, 73, 75 – 80, 87 – 95, 99 – 106, 108, 113, 120 – 2, 136, 141, 143, 149, 155 – 7, 161, 168, 174 – 7, 179, 183 – 4, 191 – 3, 202, 210, 212 – 13, 216 – 20, 225 – 8, 231, 234 stone circles 15, 79, 88, 141, 155, 179, 217 – 19, 234 Stonehall Farm 75, 99, 158, 175, 178 Stonehenge 15, 75, 88 – 90, 97, 108, 116 – 17, 120, 140, 144, 147 – 8, 157 – 8, 183 – 4, 189, 205 – 7, 216 Stones of Stenness 50 – 1, 158, 182 – 3 Strathern, Marilyn 22 Street House 117, 131, 144 striated space 63, 82, 173, 202, 241 symmetrical archaeology 8, 19, 26, 30 Taylor, Sally 103 tetravalent 61 Thomas, Julian 8, 28, 82 – 3, 99 – 101, 143, 148, 161, 171 – 4, 178 – 81, 184, 202, 226 Thorpe, Nick 100 timber circles 86, 88, 114, 141, 179 timber halls 13, 73, 82 – 6, 122, 141, 143 – 5, 157 – 60, 169, 172 – 4, 179, 202, 226 time perspectivism 36 Tiwanaku 29 topological 57 – 8, 63 – 4, 75, 84, 87 – 9, 103, 107 – 8, 123, 143, 161, 169, 182, 208, 217, 241 topology 84, 87 transcendence 47 transcendent 47, 50 – 4, 58 – 9, 66, 90, 117, 152, 185 trees 3, 26, 71, 75, 79 – 87, 98, 102, 107 – 8, 142 – 3, 149, 171, 216, 225, 231 tree-throws 81, 98 Trumpington 117, 119, 122 Tsing, Anna 9, 43, 47, 173 Tuck, Eve 20, 223 typology 19, 50 – 2, 73, 160, 164, 170 univocity 45 – 7, 50 – 1, 64 – 6, 223, 241 Van der Veen, Marijke 24 Van Dyke, Ruth 47

276 Index

vibrancy 9, 17, 24, 27, 33, 39 – 40, 43, 52, 56 – 7, 59 – 61, 65 – 6, 73, 108, 224 – 6 vicunas 38 violence 124, 138, 152, 171, 185, 190 – 1, 193, 202 virtual 22, 45, 52 – 5, 60, 62 – 6, 94 – 8, 100, 107 – 8, 116, 127, 131, 137, 145, 150, 152, 165, 170 – 1, 177, 185, 189, 200, 206, 208 – 20, 222, 224, 228, 230 – 4, 237 – 9, 241 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 37 – 9, 44, 66 Von Uexküll, Jakob 59 Warren Field 75, 84 – 5, 117, 122, 143, 158, 172 Wayland’s Smithy 1 117, 131, 158, 171, 202 West Kennet Avenue 75, 94 West Kennet chambered tomb 75 – 7, 89 – 90, 103, 117, 119, 123, 128, 138 – 40, 216 Whitegrounds 75, 106, 117, 128 – 9 Whitehawk 128, 158, 163 – 4 Whitehead, Alfred North 28

White Horse Stone 158, 172 – 3 Whitesheet Hill 117, 131, 158, 163, 167 Whittle, Alasdair 34 – 6, 76, 162, 202, 207, 209 Wideford Hill 158, 174 Williams, Howard 145 Windmill Hill 117, 120, 124, 128, 131, 138, 152, 158, 162 – 3, 167, 207 Witmore, Christopher 30, 208 Wold Newton 140 wood 13, 54, 56, 62, 71 – 5, 79 – 81, 83 – 4, 88 – 91, 107, 129, 131, 142, 144 – 5, 151, 157, 172, 174, 181, 216 Woodford G2 75, 97 Woodhenge 158, 180 Wor Barrow 117, 131 Wyke Down 75, 86, 94, 179 Wyke Down 1 75, 86, 94, 117, 120 – 1, 140, 145, 158, 179 Wyke Down 2 75, 86, 94, 158, 179 Yabsley Street 128 – 9 Yang, Wayne 20, 223 Yarnton 117, 140 – 1, 145