Revealing a Prehistoric Past: Evidence for the deliberate construction of a historic narrative in the British Neolithic - Anne Teather (UCL)
Over the past decade, event based narratives have become a norm in discussions of the British Neolithic. Statistical analyses of radiocarbon dates, combined with a detailed approach to individual contexts, have produced chronological resolutions that have enabled a greater understanding of the construction and use of some monuments. While these have been informative, they include interpretive nomenclature with terms such as 'outliers' and 'residuality' applied to data that does not agree with other data. Not only are these terms untheorised and their meanings unclear, they could be said to create a ghetto for dates that are not useful for Bayesian analysis, or any other analysis. This paper argues that this position is inadvertently ignoring evidence of wider cultural understandings. In particular, evidence of the deliberate inclusion of already old bone in Neolithic deposits has been identified, in dates rejected from Bayesian statistical analyses. This is argued to represent a cultural practice that may suggest a complex social reinforcement of Neolithic beliefs at their time of deposition that created a manufactured history of domesticity for Neolithic people.
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