One of the principal characteristics of the European Neolithic is the development of monumentality in association with innovations in material culture and changes in subsistence from hunting and gathering to farming and pastoralism. The papers in this volume discuss the latest insights into why monumental architecture became an integral part of early farming societies in Europe and beyond. One of the topics is how we define monuments and how our arguments and recent research on temporality impacts on our interpretation of the Neolithic period. Different interpretations of Göbekli Tepe are examples of this discussion as well as our understanding of special landmarks such as flint mines.
The latest evidence on the economic and paleoenvironmental context, carbon 14 dates as well as analytical methods are employed in illuminating the emergence of monumentalism in Neolithic Europe. Studies are taking place on a macro and micro scale in areas as diverse as Great Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Germany, the Dutch wetlands, Portugal and Malta involving a range of monuments from long barrows and megalithic tombs to roundels and enclosures. Transformation from a natural to a built environment by monumentalizing part of the landscape is discussed as well as changes in megalithic architecture in relation to shifts in the social structure. An ethnographic study of megaliths in Nagaland discuss monument building as an act of social construction. Other studies look into the role of monuments as expressions of cosmology and active loci of ceremonial performances. Also, a couple of papers analyse the social processes in the transformation of society in the aftermath of the initial boom in monument construction and the related changes in subsistence and social structure in northern Europe.
The aim of the publication is to explore different theories about the relationship between monumentality and the Neolithic way of life through these studies encompassing a wide range of types of monuments over vast areas of Europe and beyond.
Author(s): Anne Birgitte Gebaer, Lasse Sørensen, Anne Teather, António Carlos Valera
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 320
City: Oxford
Cover
MONUMENTALISING LIFE IN THE NEOLITHIC
Contents
List of contributors
Introduction
Thoughts on monumentalism
1 Neolithic monumentality for the 21st century
Origin of monumentalism
2 Monumentality in Neolithic southwest Asia: making memory in time and space
3 Monumental – compared to what? A perspective from Göbekli Tepe
4 From communal to segmentary: an alternative view of Neolithic ‘monuments’ in the Middle East. Comments on Chapters 2 and 3
5 Elite houses or specialised buildings? Some comments about the special buildings of Göbekli Tepe in relation to Chapters 2 and 3
6 Response to comments by Ian Hodder and Christian Jeunesse
7 Response to comments by Ian Hodder and Christian Jeunesse with notes on a potential Upper Mesopotamian ‘Late PPNA Hunter-Crisis’
Monuments and social change
8 Monuments and social stratification within the early Funnel Beaker culture in south Scandinavia
9 Do hundreds of megalithic monuments signify a full Neolithic way of life? Investigating the establishment of Neolithic societies on Rügen Island, Germany
10 From hierarchies in balance to social imbalance – transformation processes in the later Funnel Beaker north societies in the western Baltic Sea region (3100–2900 BC)
11 Narratives of 3rd-millennium transformations: new biographies of Neolithic societies, landscapes and monuments
12 Settling the monumental issue in the Dutch Wetlands
13 Celebrating stones – megalith building traditions among Angami-Naga, northeast India
14 Megalithic structures and settlements in the Valley of Posic, Amazonas, northern Peru
Funerary monuments
15 Stones as boundaries – stones as markers: a megalithic tomb in southern Portugal
16 Putting earthen long barrows back on the map: remarks about the Middle Neolithic monumentality of northern Poland
17 In search of lost heritage: non-invasive exploration of the monumental Funnel Beaker culture long barrows in the region of Wietrzychowice in central Poland
18 Making sense of Scottish Neolithic funerary monuments: tracing trajectories and understanding their rationale
19 Group benefits? The story of a cluster of megalithic monuments in Danish Funnel Beaker society
Enclosures and landscapes
20 Storied structures, sustainability and resilience in Late Neolithic Malta: excavations at Santa Verna, Gozo
21 Ephemeral and cosmological monumentality: the ‘strange’ ditched enclosures of Chalcolithic south Portugal
22 Connecting stories of the Neolithic in north-eastern Portugal: walled enclosures and their relationships with the genealogy of the landscape
23 The Neolithic roundel and its social context on the furthest reaches of the Danubian World
24 The living and the dead – the early Neolithic monumental landscape of southwest Scania, southern Sweden
Conclusion
25 The lives of monuments and monumentalising Life
Index
