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.

Examining the earliest grand mortuary monuments of the Neolithic, the authors question the assumption that they mark the resting place of society's higher ranks. Using the skeletal remains, the grave goods and the burial rites, they find no great differences in commemoration between the monumental cemeteries, with their long barrows, and the flat graves, without structures. In this analysis, the children proved to be the most vivid players: while the very young are largely excluded, some toddlers were selected to carry hunting equipment, a distinction shared with selected adult males. Some children were also laid to rest in the long barrows, with some adults. Thus hunting has a spiritual value for these agriculturalists, and whether inherited or marked at birth, the children signal something more variable and subtle than linear rank.

In preparing for the publication of the seven papers in the special supplement of Cambridge Archaeological Journal, we were concerned to find an outlet that could find a worldwide audience, as we believe that these papers have more than regional or period significance. That is a big claim. The case studies presented in the supplement are all of early Neolithic long barrows and long cairns of the fourth millennium cal. bc in southern England. Why should a study of the dating of constructions that held the remains of selected human dead, from a particular region of northwest Europe, at a particular point in the regional Neolithic sequence, have any wider importance? We offer two reasons. First, we are applying, perhaps for the first time to a group of monuments rather than to individual sites, a method for the interpretation of radiocarbon dates which enables much more precise estimates of chronology. Secondly, from this promise of far more robust and precise dating come many implications for the kinds of agents that we may wish to people our pasts, for the kinds of lives they lived, and for the histories that we can try to write about them. These are two developments, we suggest, which any archaeology needs to embrace.

The long houses of the Linear Pottery Culture and its immediate successors are usually interpreted in functional terms, but they have certain anomalous features. This paper considers the processes by which they were built, lengthened, abandoned and replaced and suggests that they may have charted the development of the households who lived inside them. The buildings in Linear Pottery settlements were generally orientated towards the areas of the origin of the communities who lived there.