The typology and chronology of the Neolithic monuments of the Carnac region of Brittany have been much debated. However, the landscape of which they are a part has been under-researched, in part due to the difficulty of conducting landscape research in the field. Through complimenting fieldwork with digital approaches, this paper demonstrates that the Neolithic monuments were deliberately situated in distinct landscape settings. By investigating the characteristics of the locations of the various types of monuments, new insight can be shed on the ways in which the monuments were experienced and perceived.

This paper is based on the 2012 Europa Lecture and discusses the relationship between the forms and structures of domestic buildings and those of public monuments. Its chronological scope extends between the Neolithic period and the Viking Age in western, northern and central Europe, with a special emphasis on the contrast between circular and rectilinear architecture. There were practical limits to the diameters of circular constructions, and beyond that point they might be organised in groups, or their characteristic outlines were reproduced in other media, such as earthwork building. By contrast, the main constraint on building rectangular houses was their width, but they could extend to almost any length. That may be one reason why they only occasionally provided the prototype for specialised forms of monument such as mounds or enclosures. Instead rectangular buildings played a wide variety of roles from domestic dwellings to ceremonial centres.

Analysis of radiocarbon dates has established the chronological contexts of three kinds of Neolithic monument in Britain: long mounds or long cairns, causewayed enclosures, and cursuses. It is more difficult to appreciate how such structures developed over time. The building of a barrow or cairn was sometimes the final act in a place that had already experienced a longer history. The construction of the monument brought activities to an end, and the site was effectively closed. Individual sequences were shorter than once thought but might be repeated at different locations over several hundred years.

On the other hand, the construction of causewayed enclosures according to a widely accepted template occurred almost simultaneously. Once those earthworks were established some went out of use, but a few others were adapted and changed so that they could play an increasing variety of roles over a longer period. The same contrasts are illustrated by cursuses. Timber structures in the north had finite histories before they decayed or were destroyed by fire, whilst earthworks had a wider distribution and enjoyed a longer currency. A similar approach might shed light on later monuments, including henges, stone circles, and round barrows. It is important to consider how the chronologies of all these structures are related to past conceptions of time.

The Beaker phenomenon in Britain is typically represented by a particular form of pottery and its inclusion in graves with flexed or crouched inhumations referred to as Beaker burials. Analysis of the full range of burial evidence, however, reveals a high degree of variability in funerary rites including cremation and skeletal disarticulation. Summed probability distribution analysis of radiocarbon dates provides evidence for continuity of these other, atypical rites from the pre-Beaker Late Neolithic (c. 3000–2450 cal bc) through the Chalcolithic (c. 2450–2200 cal bc) and into the Early Bronze Age (after c. 2200 cal bc). Regional diversity is apparent in Beaker period funerary treatments and grave good provision between these typical and atypical rites, as is differential selection of rites on the basis of age and biological sex. This evidence for within and between community funerary diversity has implications for understanding the large-scale processes of cultural and genomic transformation across this period of major transition in British prehistory.

In 1884 I was initiated into the study ot flint and its fracture while accompanying Mr. John French, of Felstead, Essex, on his rambles alter “Chipped Flints,” some of which were for many years accepted as Palæolithic implements. From 1887-92 my apprenticeship continued under the late John Allen Brown, F.G.S., who did so much pioneer work among the Thames gravels. From those days to the present I have spent most of my spare time “Flint-hunting” in Essex, East Anglia, and the London District.

From 1896 to 1900 (in view of the geological positions in which they were found), I gradually became dissatisfied with the law laid down by authorities, that facetted flints and bulbous flakes were prıma facie evidence of Man; and I began to wonder whether man had really made them, or whether Nature in her diverse methods had chipped them during the more recent geological formations. These doubts were strengthened in 1906 by the discovery that my treasured Palæos from Felstead were probably derived from the base of the Westleton gravels, which out-cropped near the fields in which we found them. In a pit I found chipped and facetted flints of absolutely meaningless shape.

In 1934 a schoolboy found ‘under a rubbish heap, but practically on the surface’ within the boundaries of the city of Norwich a socketed sickle (fig. 1, and pl. xxv, 14). The type is familiar to students of the Bronze Age since Wilde published an Irish example in his Catalogue of Antiquities in the National Museum at Dublin.

The present handsome and perfect specimen, which I publish by courtesy of the Corporation of Norwich, and of the Curator of the Norwich Museum, Miss G. V. Barnard, measures 5.9 inches in greatest length, and 3.0 inches in height. The blade is double-edged: its bold curved outline is emphasized by raised beads defining a central rounded rib which expands towards the socket. On the socket, above a moulded necking from which the lower edge of the blade springs, is a decorative pattern in the form of an M, the upper angles of which extend to form outward-curving scrolls on which the headings of the blade are aligned more or less tangentially. The outer scroll, which is more complete than the inner, forms a moulded rim to a large circular hole. The hole was probably a loop for a thong; the sickle then may have dangled from the owner's waist.

The pioneer study of seed and plant-finds from prehistoric and Roman sites in this country was made by Helbaek and Jessen in 1944, and it was with the assistance of their findings that the present paper was originally written. Subsequently Helbaek carried the same research further, publishing his results in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society for 1952. These new results have considerably modified our notions of the cereal crops grown in both the prehistoric and Roman periods in Britain, partly owing to the examination of hitherto unanalysed finds and partly to the accumulation of experience in identification, which made it possible to correct previous errors. Thus, it has now been established that Triticum vulgare (Breadwheat) and Triticum compactum (Clubwheat) are much rarer among prehistoric finds than previously thought; and many specimens previously identified as Emmer were found by Helbaek to be Spelt. These modifications have necessitated a reconsideration of the bases of the present paper, but seem to the writer to confirm its main thesis.

During the course of archaeological investigations in advance of a business and residential development, an unusual structure was discovered. The site is located on a silty clay-capped terrace of the River Kennet immediately to the north-west of Hungerford, Berks, (SU 334692).

The structure, initially thought to be a round house, comprised a ring of seven equally spaced pits in a 6 m diameter circle. At its centre was an area of fire-reddened clay over 1 m in extent. Two shallow scoops cut this burnt area (fig. 1). The pits were generally bowl shaped, 60–80 cm across and 15–30 cm deep. Some of the pits had clear evidence for the presence of small posts. These posts had been burnt and replaced on more than one occasion. There was no evidence for an encircling ditch or a covering mound. A single 14C date of 3360 ± 40 BP (BM–2737) was obtained on oak charcoal from pit 5008, which is consistent with the Early Bronze Age date of the pottery.

Two celebrated archaeological studies laid the foundation upon which the prevailing conception of the Late Bronze Age in Britain has been built. In ‘A Prehistoric Invasion of England’ O. G. S. Crawford isolated a number of intrusive forms characteristic of British Late Bronze Age hoards, pointed out how these could be connected with intrusive ‘Deverel-Rimbury’ types of pottery by means of the maple-leaf razors, which occur in settlements as well as hoards, and inferred that these types, including leaf-shaped swords, represented an invasion, which he at first attributed to Goidelic Celts. Peake's Bronze Age and the Celtic World was wider in scope but less critical in method. The evolution of the sword in Bronze Age Europe was analyzed and an almost exclusive reliance placed on the diffusion of the successive types of sword as evidence for far-flung folk-movements. The importance of Peake's work for this study lies in the special turn given to its leading idea a few years later by Estyn Evans, who, in an able paper laid special emphasis on a particular type—the ‘carp's-tongue’ sword—as evidence of a definite folk-movement from the West Alpine area into south-eastern England. Soon afterwards Professor Hawkes gave fuller definition to the ‘Carp's-tongue’ sword complex, to which he assigned bag-shaped chapes, end-winged axes, socketed axes with winged decoration, ‘bugle-shaped objects,’ ‘hog-backed’ razors, and various other types, and clarified the distinction between it and the more widely distributed group of undifferentiated Late Bronze Age hoards regarded as representing the reaction of the native bronze industry.

Survey in the inhospitable steppe lands of eastern Jordan has revealed late neolithic settlements, part of a settlement pattern probably of the sixth millennium BC. Faunal and artefactual evidence is sparse, but the sites are characterized by lithic assemblages dominated by burins. Analysis of the structures and their relationship to artefactual deposits offer opportunities for further research.

This round barrow, a bowl type, was built in two phases, its construction and use extending from about 1600–1400 bc (2000–1675 B.C.). The first mound was constructed with a mixture of chalk and sand from an oval ditch, covering a contracted burial of a child in a grave cut out of the chalk. The child was accompanied by a hybrid beaker. In the second phase the centre of the first mound was removed and partly pulled back into the ditch, and a contracted burial of an adult accompanied by a late beaker interred just off centre of a new mound built of sand covering the first, and capped in chalk obtained from a second ditch. Either simultaneously, or within a very short time a further burial, unaccompanied, in a tree-trunk coffin, was placed nearby, and this was followed by subsequent interments, the earliest of which was accompanied by jet beads and a spacer plate. Finally a further digging out of the mound took place on the east side to establish a cremation area, afterwards mounded over.

The excavation of this site on the southern outskirts of Ramsey (nat. grid ref. SC452936) was undertaken as a rescue operation when a building estate was to encroach upon the large mound which formed a conspicuous feature in the field. The Manx Museum and National Trust acknowledges the co-operation of the Planning Committee of the Isle of Man Local Government Board in stipulating as a condition of planning approval that opportunity must be given for scientific examination of the site. The excavation (necessarily accommodated with other commitments, and briefly delayed through snow) took place within the period December 1968 to April 1969.

Early References to the Site. As well as a strong local tradition that the mound was a burial place, references to the site occur in the local antiquarian literature. The earliest appears to be that in Oswald's Vestigia (1860, 57–58), where he notes the inspection of this site by the Rev. W. Kermode of Ramsey at the time when it was first given over to the plough, c. 1850. Kermode remarked that the ‘mound of considerable dimensions … had on the top the usual kist vaen,—a rude stone grave, consisting of a few upright stones with a large heavy slab resting on the top; within were found some very small pieces of unbaked pottery, with a black substance which was probably charred human bones.’ From the north–south orientation of the cist he surmised that it might have been a Viking grave.

Two farmsteads, one of late Iron Age (second-first centuries BC) date and the other dating to the early Romano-British period (first-second centuries AD), were excavated at Copse Farm, Oving. The site is situated within the Chichester dykes on the Sussex/Hampshire Coastal Plain. The Iron Age farmstead produced pottery spanning ‘saucepan’ and ‘Aylesford-Swarling’ traditions, a transition in ceramic production which is poorly understood in Sussex. Information on the agricultural economy and small-scale industries (principally metalworking) practised at this site give an insight into the way the Coastal Plain was settled and exploited at the end of the first millennium BC.

As a result of the exclusive use of extremely small megaliths (miniliths), the prehistoric stone settings of Exmoor, south-west England, challenge current approaches to the interpretation of monumental stone architecture during the later Neolithic and Early Bronze Age. Whilst the broader context of the practice of erecting tiny upright stones (a seemingly diverse and widespread phenomenon) and the reasons why this diminutive architecture has tended to escape sustained critical comment have been explored (smaller stone elements being relegated to a generalised background or subsidiary role such as ‘packing’), attempts to explain the settings have been remarkably few. Drawing upon the results of ten years of piecemeal fieldwork on the moor the present paper seeks to rectify this, arguing that far from being generalised ritual structures or metaphorical expressions of hunting groups, the tiny stones were, instead, an integral part of a dynamic human–animal landscape of movement and pause.

The original draft of this paper was read at the First International Congress of Prehistoric Sciences in 1932, and a summary was printed in the ‘Proceedings of the Congress’ (p. 144). It has since been re-written and incorporates new evidence.

The English long barrows have not been dealt with as a whole since the classic paper of Dr Thurnam in 1868, but a series of regional studies, mainly the production of the archaeological department of the Ordnance Survey, have made the material available in convenient form. The publication of the Survey's complete map of British megaliths will enable many problems to be approached from the view point of distribution, but the southern English material, which is already published, raises one problem, at least, of first-class importance.

The recent discovery in the reserve collection of the Cyprus Museum of a bronze cut-and-thrust sword of the form well known as Naue Type II provides an opportunity for a fresh consideration of the significance of the appearance of this weapon type in the Eastern Mediterranean during what, in that area, were the closing stages of the Late Bronze Age.

This paper begins with a detailed account of the sword in the Cyprus Museum both on its own account and as an illustration of the class as a whole. Then follows a catalogue, illustrated by the distribution map (fig. 1), of the known examples from the Eastern Mediterranean, in which emphasis is laid as far as possible on the dating evidence for individual examples. Finally, a general summary is attempted of what is known about their origin and some discussion is offered on their general implications.

This article tracks the formation of the rich and socially complex Nordic Bronze Age (NBA), c. 2000–1500 bc, by applying a scalar methodology and using the entrepôt and early metalworking site of Pile in Scania as its point of departure. By regarding the Bronze Age as an ancient example of globalisation, Island Melanesia at the outskirts of contemporary globalisation is first examined to provide an analogue to the Nordic entrepreneurial and maritime culture into which metallurgy was first adopted. How did this northern margin become ‘Bronze Age’, and what impact did its inclusion have? Various scales, from local to Bronze-Age-global were found to intersect in the Pile hoard, and in similar sites near and far. By c. 2000 bc, metals and other commodities travelled along well-established local, regional, and super-regional networks, which even incorporated the British Isles and Únětician hubs at the Middle Elbe–Saale. Back in Scandinavia, metal and metal-related culture provided a comparative advantage when navigating local competition for influence and leadership. The transculturally global was strategically appropriated locally, using the reinvention of tradition as a principal strategy. The first metal boom caused friction and slow social change, rather than a social revolution. The real tipping point came in 1600–1500 bc, when the nearly full-blown NBA emerged, through engagement with a considerably expanded world. By this time, large amounts of metal were in circulation. Seen from the non-urban north, this unprecedented expansion of their world brought new opportunities but likely also deep social tensions. Thus, the effects of adopting metallurgy permeated society and connectivity at every level, even at the outskirts of the Bronze Age world.