Seeing things: perception, experience and the constraints of excavation

Recent attempts to problematize archaeological fieldwork concerned with excavation at the expense of surface survey, and with questions of procedure more than interpretations of the past. In fact these two kinds of fieldwork offer quite different possibilities and suffer from different constraints. Thought must be given to ways in which they can be combined if they are to make a real contribution to social archaeology. The argument is illustrated by a project carried out at a megalithic cemetery in Scotland.

A life less ordinary: The ritualization of the domestic sphere in later prehistoric Europe

This article, which is based on the fourteenth McDonald Lecture, considers two tensions in contemporary archaeology. one is between interpretations of specific structures, monuments and deposits as the result of either 'ritual' 'practical' activities in the past, and the other is between an archaeology that focuses on subsistence and adaptation and one that emphasizes cognition, meaning, and agency. It suggests that these tensions arise from an inadequate conception of ritual itself. Drawing on recent studies of ritualization, it suggests that it might be more helpful to consider how aspects of domestic life took on special qualities in later prehistoric Europe. The discussion is based mainly on Neolithic enclosures and other monuments, Bronze Age and Iron Age settlement sites and the Viereckschanzen of central Europe. it may have implications for field archaeology as well as social archaeology, and also for those who study the formation of the archaeological record.

The excavation report as a literary genre: traditional practice in Britain

Although ways of thinking about the past have changed, in Britain the reporting of excavations has followed a series of shared conventions for nearly 100 years. This article considers two of them. It investigates the relationship between accounts of stratigraphic evidence and the publication of the associated artefacts and ecofacts and suggests that it results from the combination of two separate intellectual traditions in the late nineteenth century. It also identifies certain widely shared proportions between the separate components of excavation monographs published over a long period of time. Their existence has never been acknowledged. The excavation report has become a well-established literary genre and authors who are familiar with such texts unconsciously reproduce the same structures in their writing.

The high-water mark. The siting of megalithic tombs on the Swedish island of Tjorn

In 1977 Grahame Clark suggested that the siting of megalithic tombs along the west coast of Scandinavia reflected the distribution of productive fishing grounds. Unlike the situation in other parts of Europe, these monuments were not associated with agriculture. Opinions have varied over the last quarter century, but enough is now known about changes of sea-level for his interpretation to be investigated on the ground. There seems to have been considerable diversity. On the large island of Örust some of the tombs located near to the sea appear to be associated with small natural enclosures defined by rock outcrops and may have been associated with grazing land. On the neighbouring island of Tjörn, however, the tombs were associated with small islands and important sea channels. During the Bronze Age the same areas included carvings of ships. Recent fieldwork in western Norway suggests that such locations were especially important in a maritime economy.

Display, disclosure and concealment: the organization of raw materials in the chambered tombs of Bohuslän

The Neolithic chambered tombs of Bohuslan on the west coast of Sweden were built out of locally occurring raw materials. These exhibit a wide variety of colours, textures and mineral inclusions, and all were used to contrive a series of striking visual effects. Certain of these would have been apparent to the casual observer but others would only have been apparent to someone inside the passage or the burial chamber. There is no evidence that the materials were organized according to a single scheme. Rather, they permitted a series of improvisations, so that no two monuments were exactly alike. The effects that they created are compared with those found in megalithic art where the design elements were painted or carved, but in Bohuslan all the designs were created using the natural properties of the rock.