The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe

by Chris Fowler

  Intact bodies were entombed successively over a period of probably less than 35 years at West Kennet, Wiltshire, during the thirty-seventh century BC, and disturbed during later activity at the tomb (Bayliss et al. 2007). At a number of tombs in Britain and Ireland remains were disturbed during the deposition of further bodies, such as Hazleton North, Gloucestershire (Meadows et al. 2007) or Parknabinnia, County Clare, where old bones were swept aside as new bodies were introduced (Beckett and Robb 2006). Such successive burial practices eventually left a pattern of dispersed and partial skeletal remains. Arrangements of bones in other chambered tombs suggest that this was not always a haphazard disruption but may have involved sorting or stacking bones, whilst in some cases the bones of the long-dead were manipulated without the introduction of further corpses (see Fowler 2010, 11–13 for a summary). To give just one example, at Millin Bay, Ireland, skulls and longbones had been separated from other commingled bones, and some teeth had been forced into the wrong sockets (Cooney 2000, 122). It is possible some bones or objects were removed from chambers, though it is often difficult to establish this with certainty (Smith and Brickley 2009, 69–73). Stalled cairns in Orkney and Caithness provided opportunity for prolonged contact with the dead. Bones were moved within the chambers: at Knowe of Yarso skulls were stacked in the rear stall, but no mandibles were found (Richards 1988, 49; Sharples 1985, 67). Reilly (2003) suggests that bones were even moved between some of the stalled cairns on Rousay, with skulls taken from the lowest-lying tombs to the highest ones on the island, such as Knowe of Yarso. Here we could suggest that the deceased were gradually transformed as distinct bodily elements became associated with specific parts of the landscape, possibly during an extended mortuary process.

  Other tombs provide evidence for mortuary practices that radically transformed the body soon after death. Cremated bones have been recovered from more than 50 chambered tombs in Britain and Ireland and perhaps cremation without interring the remains was yet more common. In Irish court tombs and passage graves, adults were predominantly cremated, but children rarely so (Herity 1987), suggesting a distinction between the personhood of children and adults (Cooney 1992; 2000, 125–126). Across Britain and into northern Ireland some bodies were laid out in groups in wooden chambers and burnt with the structures, as at Street House (Vyner 1984). In other cases bones were charred by fires within stone chambers. In such cases burning simultaneously transformed the mortuary site and the dead who had become integral to that place (Fowler 2010).

  In Irish court tombs and passage graves, objects found with cremated bones were often burnt. Herity (1987) points out that similar artefacts survive in a number of court tombs where conditions have not preserved unburnt bones. Typically, these objects include bone pins, beads, flint knives, and scrapers, suggesting that bodies were dressed and presented with quotidian tools during the funerary rite. In some cases potsherds and/or animal bones or complete animal carcasses have been found with the dead, as in Orkney (Jones 1998), or at Cotswold–Severn tombs where the remains of foetal or neonatal animals were sometimes placed in tombs (Thomas and McFadyen 2010). Fragmentary, probably disturbed, remains of pots and/or ornaments such as beads and bone pins have been recovered from some British chambers. In cases where there are few artefacts in the tomb it is hard to know whether objects associated with the deceased were retained by the living following the funeral, disposed of elsewhere, or removed from chambers in later interventions.

  Some of the remains deposited in Irish Linkardstown tombs (c. 3600–3300 BC) may have been exposed to the elements beforehand (Beckett and Robb 2006, 59). Smith (2006) has identified that the bones of at least four individuals which were placed in the Adlestrop chambered tomb, Oxfordshire, had been chewed by dogs or wolves for a period of weeks before deposition, and similar findings have been made at other British sites (e.g. Whittle and Wysocki 1998, 155–157). Two of the bodies from a collective burial at Wayland’s Smithy I showed signs of scavenging by canids whilst two arrowheads were embedded in skeletal remains from the chamber, and it has been suggested that relatives found and collected up the bodies of these people who had died in a violent clash and been left by their killers (Schulting and Wysocki 2005, 127–128; Whittle et al. 2007, 107). This might also explain why some other human remains from the period display injuries and/or signs of exposure, though the association of cut-marked and scavenged bones at Adlestrop, for instance, hints at a wider range of practices. Some cut-marks suggest the removal of heads (e.g. Smith and Brickley 2009, 49–52) or limbs from partially decayed bodies (e.g. Wakeley in Evans and Hodder 2006, 147–149), and an ear appears to have been cut from a head deposited at Coldrum, Kent (Schulting and Wysocki 2005, 129), but others seem to have been made just to mark bare bone.

  Given the low number of surviving remains we must assume that most of the Neolithic dead were not buried or left to rest in tombs. Exposure or dispersal following cremation may have been more normal funerary options—requiring us to reflect on exactly under what circumstances interring remains in the earth or tomb was deemed necessary. Smith and Brickley (2009, 88–90) determined that c. 62% of sexed remains from chambers in southern Britain were male, rising to 85% at Wayland’s Smithy I, and Schulting and Wysocki (2005, 114) report evidence of violent trauma to men, women and an adolescent from studying crania alone, mostly those found at tombs. Whilst it is possible that such traumata are (under)representative of background levels of violence, it is also possible that some monuments were appropriate places for the remains of those who died violent, unexpected or ‘abnormal’ deaths—in some regions it may even have been necessary to build certain monuments to ‘contain’ such deaths (Fowler 2010).

  MORTUARY PRACTICES AT LATER TOMBS

  Irish passage graves were built and used into the third millennium BC. The majority of the dead there were cremated, and sometimes bones from a significant number of individuals accumulated, with at least 181 adults from the tomb at the Mound of the Hostages, Tara (O’Sullivan 2005, 237). The bones were intermixed with bone pins, beads and pendants, stone balls, and Carrowkeel bowls, and placed in chambers and cists. Irish middle and late Neolithic tombs were also frequently part of larger complexes, situating the transformation of the dead within sophisticated choreographies of experience. At Fourknocks, a trench was used to cremate bones then taken to a nearby passage grave, and the cremation trench was later covered by a cairn and kerb, imitating a passage grave. The site displays an emphasis on cremating adult bodies, and child and adult remains were kept separate at the tomb (Cooney 2000, 103–112). At Mound of the Hostages, three cists held the cremated remains of 56 adults, dated to c. 3350–2900 BC, accompanied by the remains of seven unburnt children. O’Sullivan (2005, 237–238) also reports that ‘inhumed infant bones were found occasionally in virtually every significant collection of cremated bone’ across the site. Unburnt skulls, all from adults, were recovered from the chambers: these were probably deposited as skulls and have slightly later dates than the cremated remains. Overall, age distinctions seem highly relevant to the treatment of the dead during this period.

  Only in a few places in Britain did tomb construction continue through the middle and into the later Neolithic, notably in the form of passage graves on Orkney. At Quanterness, Richards (1988, 50) has argued that the jumbled unburnt bones from 157 bodies with a broad span of radiocarbon dates were brought to the tomb from older, smaller tombs, collected together as several communities came to share a single identity. He argues that as the social body of the community expanded in scale, so the ancestral bodies of those communities became combined. Middle and later Neolithic objects have been found in some earlier Neolithic tombs in Britain, even though the entrances to these were by now blocked off (Thomas 1996, 171–172). These objects (and those at other locations) may be votive offerings and/or extensions of persons, or possibly belonged to recently deceased persons whose bodily remains were processed elsewhere. Some late Neolithic graves were cut into older mounds: at Whiteground
s, Yorkshire, a crouched inhumation of an adult male with a jet belt-slider and a flint axe was inserted into a chambered long cairn subsequently adapted to become a round barrow (Brewster 1984).

  In western France, many earlier tombs were re-used (or continued in use) into the later fourth millennium and beyond. The disarticulated, intermixed, and incomplete skeletons of much larger numbers of bodies than before dominated the chambers of French fourth millennium sites, both in the western France (e.g. Tumulus A at Bougon which reportedly contained the remains of between 150 and 200 individuals: Mohen and Scarre 2002), and in the Paris basin and northern France, where sites such as La Chaussée-Tirancourt contain remains of over 200 individuals (Masset 1997). This is a typical ‘allée sépulcrale’, an elongated rectangular chamber with entrance and ante-chamber at one end. A series of successive burial deposits spanning the period c. 3200 to c. 2300 BC reveal changes in the arrangement and reordering of skeletal material over time (Fig. 53.2). The burials of the first phase are almost invisible to us, having been carefully removed, leaving only a few small fragments. In the second phase the interior of the monument was used as a structured whole, with bodies stacked extended in the central space, surrounded by a circulation corridor. Periodically, when the space became too full, bones were rearranged throughout the chamber. In the third phase, a new chalk floor was laid over these earlier burials and the interior reorganized. Individual burial containers of organic material were installed, perhaps for individual families or lineages; these were simply closed up and topped by selected skeletal elements when they became full. This partitioning of the tomb interior could indicate that the earlier sense of community and co-ordination was abandoned (Leclerc and Masset 2006), or suggest the emergence of a more distinct delineation of lineages within the community.

  FIG. 53.2. La Chaussée-Tirancourt (Somme, France): interior of late Neolithic allée sépulcrale showing burial layer V-3 with skeletal deposits in the central zone originally contained by wooden barriers leaving areas free of human remains against the chamber walls to left and right.

  (Photo courtesy of Claude Masset).

  MORTUARY PRACTICES AT UNCHAMBERED BARROWS AND ISOLATED GRAVES

  In parts of eastern England, both intact bodies and disarticulated remains were laid out in groups on the earth or on chalk platforms and covered with a short low cairn and then an earthen long barrow, the resulting monument sharing the form of many long cairns. For instance, at Giant’s Hills 1, Lincolnshire, four corpses and the disarticulated remains from four other bodies were deposited in a single event between two posts towards the end of the rapid construction of a long barrow with wooden façade (Phillips 1936). A similar sequence is documented at nearby Giant’s Hills 2, though only a bag of disarticulated bones was buried between the posts here (Evans and Simpson 1991). On the Yorkshire Wolds collective deposits were buried under round barrows from the second quarter of the fourth millennium BC, as at Towthorpe 18 and Wold Newton (Gibson and Bayliss 2010), whilst the split-post arrangement surrounding the collective burial below the round barrow at Callis Wold 275 and its façade trench indicate that such mortuary practices have much in common with unchambered longbarrows like Giant’s Hills 1 and 2. Such sites suggest collective funerals, votive events, and/or special acts of containment or commemoration deploying the dead in various states of decay.

  Some British single burials in graves date to the early fourth millennium, such as the crouched inhumation buried with pieces of a carinated bowl placed around the head at Yabsley Street, London (Coles et al. 2008), or the crouched inhumation of an adult female from Wormington Farm, Worcestershire (Darvill 2010, 137). At Nethercourt Farm, Kent, disarticulated bones were spread above a crouched inhumation covered with potsherds from an early Neolithic bowl, though it is unclear if there was one episode of burial or two (Dunning 1966, 8–11). A group of three burials at Barrow Hills, Oxfordshire, is among the largest collection of single graves (Barclay and Halpin 1999, 31–34). None of these were associated with barrows.

  Single burial covered by a dedicated barrow or cairn was seemingly rare throughout Britain, Ireland, and northern France, and most examples probably date to the second half of the fourth millennium or first quarter of the third. There are three examples from the Peak District, though one burial (Grub Low) was accompanied by a set of cremated remains. At Alfriston in Sussex an oval barrow covered a single burial, yet its closest excavated comparator, Thickthorn Down in Dorset, covered only small ‘empty’ pits (Drewett 1975), again suggesting that burial was only one among several acts that could precipitate barrow-building. Deposition of burials at Duggleby Howe, Yorkshire, was as successive as deposition at some chambered tombs, though sporadic over the long term (Gibson and Bayliss 2009). Early deposits at the site (c. thirty-fourth century BC) include a single burial accompanied by a skull: both crania show signs of trauma, some perimortem. A burial accompanied by a curated antler macehead, arrowhead, and flint adze was buried c. 3300 BC, and a sequence of single burials (the first adorned with or accompanied by twelve boar tusks, two beaver incisors and a bone pin, as well as associated with flintwork) followed only during the early third millennium when a large mound was raised over the burials (Gibson and Bayliss 2009). A flexed, crouched or contracted position was usual for mid to late-fourth millennium single burials—a pose also evident at many early to mid-fourth millennium chambers and unchambered barrows.

  Single burial deposits of cremated bone are known in some areas during the later Neolithic and may be more widespread than previously realized, but tend to be recovered in cemetery groups. For instance, six deposits of cremated remains buried within two ring ditches in the Thames Valley have been dated to c. 3200–3000 BC (Barclay et al. 2009, 5–6). On the Isle of Man cremated bones were placed in timber ‘cists’ or in presumed organic bags at a natural mound at Killeaba c. 3000 BC (Cubbon 1978; Chiverrell et al. 1999), whilst one of the cremation deposits immediately outside the chambered cairn at Ballaharra c. 2900–2600 BC contained cremated and unburnt human remains from between 33 and 40 individuals alongside animal bones and artefacts (Cregeen 1978; Chiverrell et al. 1999; Fowler 2001; 2004b, 93–94). As with inhumations, we must ask why these specific remains were deposited in the earth and consider it likely that most cremated remains were scattered, not buried.

  The formalized arrangement of single burials with specific types of objects, including Beaker pottery, between c. 2500 and 2200 BC suggest differentiation based on age and sex (Thomas 1991; Tuckwell 1975), and a few people were buried with distinctive and complex grave assemblages (e.g. the ‘Amesbury archer’: Fitzpatrick 2011). Whilst there is a distinctive grammar to single burials in Britain from this period onwards, the practice of burying the deceased crouched on one side had long been prevalent in Neolithic tombs and graves both here and elsewhere. The overall rate of burial was still relatively low, yet some burials cut into previous ones at the same locale (Mizoguchi 1993; Petersen 1972). Single burial was far from the only way to treat the dead in this period: cremation (e.g. at Stonehenge: Parker Pearson et al. 2009), dual and multiple burials in grave features (e.g. the ‘Boscombe bowmen’: Fitzpatrick 2011), disarticulation of bodies before deposition (Fitzpatrick 2011), and interference with buried remains have been identified. A similar range of practices are also evident in the following centuries of the early Bronze Age (Gibson 2007), when increased numbers of the dead were buried in graves or cists, and cremation before deposition increased as did the nucleation of burials into small cemeteries. In Ireland and in north-west France, Beakers accompanied bodies placed in chambered tombs of an earlier age, indicating that some of those places received renewed attention at this period. The general pattern of terminal Neolithic, Chalcolithic or ‘early Beaker’ burial does not suggest a rise in personal aggrandizement or in presenting the extended biography of the dead so much as an idealized identity (see Vander Linden, this volume)—whilst the funeral prior to deposition may have attempted such effects the same is true for all Neolithic mor
tuary deposits.

  MORTUARY STRUCTURES, THE DEAD AND ‘ANCESTORS’

  Barrett (1988) argued that Neolithic tombs might serve a purpose in ancestral rites concerned with the bones of the dead rather than just funerary rites transforming the person after death. Whilst this fits some of the evidence from tombs, cairns, and barrows well, there is a clear need to differentiate between various mortuary practices at such sites—not all of which involved veneration of ‘ancestral’ remains in the same way, or even necessarily at all. Sometimes bodies were broken down in tombs and bones commingled or removed, sometimes not; sometimes human remains were accessible to later generations, sometimes not. The frequent citation of ‘ancestors’ in accounts of Neolithic societies has justifiably been criticized on the grounds that is has often been little more than an imprecise catch-all (Whitley 2002). The concept has been defended with the observation that ‘ancestors’ need not be genealogically connected to the living community (Jones 2008, 192–193), and it is clear we need to be more searching and more precise in our discussion of how Neolithic people traced relationships between living and dead human beings and other entities in the social world, considering different models of ancestry and kinship to explain different Neolithic practices (cf. Fowler 2004a, 101–129; Jones 2008). At the same time other motivations for entombing the remains of the dead must be considered in some cases, and applied to burials away from chambers. We have already drawn out some examples both of these other motivations (e.g. containing difficult deaths), and of specific ways that human kinship might be traced (e.g. by lineage or more communally). Here we consider the application of a generic concept of ancestral veneration in interpretations of mortuary sites.