25th June 2012, 01:42 PM
P Prentice Wrote:everybody is making pertinent points and it would seem that neolithic people (and meso and BA for that matter) dug pits. some got filled with material culture and some did not. i think it was ros cleal that pointed out that very often the decoration on neo pots got more elaborate the closer you got to a major monument, and that the fills of pits got more eloborate the closer you got to major monuments. this would suggest that people behaved differently in some places but not so differently cross-regionaly. given that the absence of causewayed enclosures or cursuses or henges or hengiform monuments appears to be real, we can safely assume that regional differences reflect differing aspects of neo life. i quite like the idea of cultifying the neolithic and seeing pottery as non domestic
Cool. Was thinking along those lines in my little study..........sort of. Do you have a reference for Ros Cleals work?
But there are also differences in the evidence between regions, suggesting people behaving differently on a regional or even smaller scale.
Could be a layered aspect to traditions e.g..........
Broader traditions including burying or not burying people, cremation, monuments, digging pits etc......
But with regional diversions as people try to demonstrate their identity (group identity) as different from their neighbours.
Also don't discount the functional aspects of life. For instance an easy way to obtain some materials is to dig a pit till you find it (e.g. chalk, clay etc). Once you've found that material in a place you frequent, surely you'd dig there again as you know its already there.............?
Not saying this explains Neo pit sites but it is a possible testable theory.
More likely scenario is different pits are being dug for different reasons. Maybe some for extraction, some for construction, some for storage, some for boundary definition, some for ritual use, and some for other uses not thought of.
As archaeologists we tend to lump things that we see as a category together and then study it, forgetting that the people that built/dug those things may have had their own or no categories