Northwest Europe in Transition. The Early Neolithic of Britain and South Scandinavia

The project is concerned with the developments that followed on from the introduction of farming into Britain and Southern Scandinavia (Denmark and Southern Sweden), and the idiosyncratic social and cultural patterns that emerged as the revolutionary potential of the Neolithic was gradually realised. Fundamental to our comparison will be a concern with the ways in which communities inhabit their landscape. If the Neolithic involved the introduction of new species of plants and animals and new forms of material culture into indigenous contexts, the longer-term consequences of this development should be gauged through changing practices of dwelling: patterns of occupation and mobility, the organisation of space, the location of ritual activities, the dead, and the sacred; and degrees of impact on ecological conditions.  This project seeks to use a theoretically-informed approach to address the relationships between material culture, subsistence regimes, monumentality, ceremonial activity and social relations.  In particular, it aims to identify the means by which various aspects of human life were made durable, through the sedimentation of traditions of practice, and the establishment of enduring material conditions.  Consequentially, our research will be informed by elements of both practice theory and phenomenological or hermeneutic social science.