An intriguing question posed by archaeologists following recent accurate dating results: "Was the building of the Ascott-under-Wychwood chambered cairn witnessed by a young person who then in old age directed construction of Hazleton North"
The multiplication of AMS (Accelerator Mass Spectrometry) radiocarbon dates for human skeletal material from Neolithic chambered tombs has revolutionised our grasp of their chronology. In favourable circumstances it allows us to generate precise chronologies that reduce the broad spans of vaguely defined prehistoric time to the historical specificity of individual life spans and generations.
This has had a major impact on our understanding of Neolithic burial monuments. In the first place, precision-dating of monuments and the deposits and activities associated with them allows them to enter more fully into the discussion of memory in the societies in question.
That is borne out by recent AMS dating (backed by Bayesian statistics) of a series of Early Neolithic long mounds in southern Britain, which found that the monuments most similar in form were not necessarily the closest in time. Such a conclusion challenges the assumptions of standard typological approaches and enables new questions to be considered.
Did these monuments of the dead consciously evoke a timelessness of tradition, or deliberately copy older monument styles “to align themselves with earlier generations and their renown?" (Ref: Whittle, A. and A. Bayliss, 2007. The times of their lives: from chronological precision tokinds of history and change.
Cambridge Archaeological Journal 17:21-8.).
The newly precise dating also enables us to contemplate the implications of a tight and rapid sequence of events assignable to periods of a few generations. We can now ask, for example, whether the building of the Ascott-under-Wychwood chambered cairn was witnessed by a child or juvenile who then in old age was able to direct the construction of Hazleton North (Ref: Whittle, A., A. Barclay, A. Bayliss, L. McFadyen, R. Schulting and M. Wysocki, 2007.Building for the dead: events, processes and changing worldviews from the thirty-eighth to the thirty-fourth centuries cal. BC in southern Britain. Cambridge Archaeological Journal
17 (supplement): 132)
More in Rocks of ages : tempo and time in megalithic monuments., European journal of archaeology by Chris Scarre. (2010)
https://www.academia.edu/1753104/Rocks_of_Ages_Tempo_and_Time_in_Megalithic_Monuments
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