Dynamics of Neolithisation in Europe: Studies in honour of Andrew Sherratt

Dynamics of Neolithisation examines the development of early agriculture in Neolithic Europe, drawing on the work of the late Professor Andrew Sherratt. His untimely death coincided with an important period of research that moved beyond searching for singular causal mechanisms behind the "neolithisation" of Europe in favour of developing a better understanding of the complex interrelationships of cultural, ecological, economic and social factors. Andrew Sherratt's work is significant because it developed models for integrating the different evidential components and analytical scales involved in the prehistoric development of European agriculture. The essays in this volume examine such significant factors as plant and animal domestication, social organisation, the development of monumental architecture, exchange and social identity and the cultural transmission of technology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Oct 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9781842176696

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Introduction: the dynamics of neolithisation in Europe

Erick Robinson, Angelos Hadjikoumis, and Sarah Viner

Introduction

What remains unsettled is not the Neolithic (as Halstead convincingly argues) but opinions on what parts of this enormously complicated set of processes were taking place where. We can agree on a possible range of scenarios, but disagree on which one was actually happening in a particular area. The archaeological record, as usual, is often unhelpful in enabling us to choose between them. In such a situation, competing interpretations are vital; the emergence of consensus would signal a failure of imagination and almost certainly the espousal of a partial or even completely false reconstruction. Let the debate continue: the one thing we must never allow to settle is the dust. (Andrew Sherratt 2005, 145)

This remark, typical as it is of Professor Andrew Sherratt’s unique ability to place a finger on the pulse of an entire landscape of research, offers great insight into contemporary research on the neolithisation of Europe and gives apt advice for future generations of archaeologists. Over the past decade the paradigmatic debates regarding the prime movers in the transition from foraging to farming that were waged so heavily since the 1970s have begun to subside in favour of a ‘new synthesis’ (Price 2000) that, as Professor Sherratt put it, places greater emphasis on the specific roles of both foraging and farming societies in ‘the dialectic of expansion’ (Sherratt 2007). He advises us that this new moment of synthesis should not coincide with the end of debate, but rather be based more on the actual substantive components of the transitions from foraging to farming at the many different spatial and temporal scales at which they occurred. In a period of synthesis the man that viewed his role in archaeology as a great synthesizer (O’Shea, this volume) has called for ‘the dust’ to never settle.

This volume pays homage to Andrew Sherratt’s contribution to the study of the transition from foraging to farming as a dynamic process that included a complex combination of cultural, ecological, economic, and social change. Neolithisation, as defined in this volume, is the process of introduction and development of domestic animals and plants in Europe. Neolithisation was used in the title of this volume because we believe it is true to the way that Professor Sherratt approached the development of early agriculture in Europe. More than any archaeologist since V. Gordon Childe, Andrew Sherratt focused on the enormous changes during the transition from a foraging dominant to a farming dominant economy as a long and ever evolving process of change that continued long after the conventional ‘end’ of the Neolithic. As John O’Shea notes in the foreword, he was less focused on the whys of the initial appearance of domesticates, but rather their long-term consequences. From his first major publication on the subject (Sherratt 1972) to his last (Sherratt 2007), Andrew Sherratt concerned himself with the development of models for investigating the ways that different kinds of cultural, economic, ecological, and social change worked together diachronically. He viewed the dynamics of neolithisation as a ‘fractal’ (Sherratt 2004) in which smaller scales of change were intertwined with larger scale social and economic trajectories. Andrew Sherratt’s extraordinary ability to draw from different specialisations and across various scales of variability are an inspiration to archaeologists in a world of rapidly changing scientific techniques and an archaeological record burgeoning with diverse new lines of evidence for early developments of agriculture in Europe. Few archaeologists have been able to explicate so effectively the dynamics of neolithisation in Europe as Andrew Sherratt.

The sixteen chapters in this volume focus on a wide range of evidence at an equally wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Together they exhibit the enormous diversity of contemporary research into the development of early agriculture in Europe. Three general themes (or problem areas) arise between each of the sixteen chapters. Continuing development of knowledge of the complexities of neolithisation processes in Europe depends on refining approaches to the intersection of these three themes.

Scale and tempo

In his paper on chronological modelling Marc Vander Linden (Chapter 2) notes how interpretive models of the spread of the Neolithic are tributary to readings of its temporal structure. The same could be said for the issue of scale. For example, many of the debates regarding the role of prime movers in the spread of agriculture have been muddled by incompatible scales of analysis that have led to interpretations that are non-mutually exclusive. Together the chapters in this volume exhibit the central importance of scalar demarcation in the interpretation of neolithisation processes. The temporal, geographical, and evidential scales of analysis assessed will determine the possible scope of interpretation.

Three papers focus specifically on problems of chronology (Vander Linden, Whittle, Zilhão). Both Vander Linden (Chapter 2) and João Zilhão (Chapter 3) discuss the methodological factors, such as sampling and stratigraphy, that are fundamental to the absolute dating of agricultural spread. While emphasizing different geographical scales of analysis, both chapters highlight the importance of critical appraisal in the development of robust absolute chronologies. In moving beyond the rigidity of ‘migrationist/indigenist’ debates, Vander Linden cites the arrhythmic model of Guilaine (Guilaine and Manen 2007) as the best suited to incorporating the variability of local-scales into larger global-scale processes of change. Zilhão’s chapter returns to the migrationist/indigenist debate and offers a critical appraisal of dates from the Iberian peninsula, drawing the conclusion that small-scale migrations of pioneering farming groups was the most likely process by which agriculture spread in the region.

Alasdair Whittle (Chapter 1) and Vander Linden (Chapter 2) discuss the Bayesian approach to mathematical modelling. Whittle argues that Bayesian approaches allow for a better understanding of regional variability amidst larger inter-regional scales of analysis, thus enabling the integration of shorter punctuated ‘stories’ into grander narratives. Referencing Andrew Sherratt’s call for ‘reviving the grand narrative’ (Sherratt 1995), Whittle shows how Bayesian models can assist greatly in its refinement. Vander Linden highlights some of the important methodological requirements of the Bayesian approach and argues that while the approach has great potential, the need for high-precision data cannot be met for many regions of Europe at present. As a result, concludes Vander Linden, the Bayesian approach to modelling neolithisation is poorly suited beyond the level of intra-site analysis. Both Vander Linden and Zilhão suggest that Bayesian statistics are of most benefit when used in conjunction with other quantitative methods.

Each of the chapters in this volume suggest that the neolithisation of Europe was a dynamic process of varying scales and tempos of socio-cultural, ecological, and economic change. In some regions the development of agriculture proceeded at a fast pace (Legge and Moore, Halstead, Zilhão), while in other regions change was more marked, and perhaps punctuated by more intense episodes of alteration (Andersson, Bánffy and Sümegi, Barrett, Midgley, Robinson, Whittle). The task for future research will be the continued integration of these different temporalities of agricultural development. Recent advances in chronological modelling have allowed greater opportunity for refinement. However, in utilizing these advances to their full capability researchers must not abandon their critical eyes for the qualitative appraisal of the data investigated and the scales at which they are evaluated.

Ecological complexities and economic trajectories

One of Andrew Sherratt’s greatest contributions to our understanding of the neolithisation of Europe is in our appreciation of the relationship between ecological complexity and the economic trajectories of early agriculture. His contribution, in this respect, is epitomised in two different periods of study. First was his earliest work (Sherratt 1972; 1976; 1982) on the role of social interaction between different ecological contexts. With the Carpathian Basin (Hungary) as his setting, he developed a diachronic model for interaction and exchange between populations inhabiting the lowlands of the Great Hungarian Plain and the upland mountain areas. This elegant diachronic model (Sherratt 1982) proposed that an incoming farming population settled in the lowlands and through time began to exchange their domestic cattle for upland materials such as stone, which established close social ties and determined the further cultural and economic trajectories of both societies. Years later he made a comment that, in our opinion, will only increase in its resonance in the coming years of research on neolithisation processes in Europe:

‘Economic models’ in particular should be about more than just types of food production (or rather their bone and seed residues) than the term usually implies to archaeologists. What is needed, then, is not so much a non-materialialist evolutionism, but rather one that goes beyond the crude dichotomy of materialism and idealism: one that is epitomised in the concepts of communication and value. (Sherratt 1995, 3)

The second contribution made by Andrew Sherratt to this thematic area was undoubtedly his most important and likely most long-lasting contribution to neolithisation studies: ‘the secondary products revolution’ (Sherratt 1981). Establishing a link to his earlier model, Sherratt saw domestication not merely in terms of subsistence, but rather in terms of labour, social relations, surplus, and the possibilities of demographic expansion and urbanization. The ‘secondary products’ model proposed that the spread of the plough was arguably the most important development in Old World prehistory after the adoption of cereal cultivation itself (Sherratt 1981, 300).

A large number of the chapters in this volume pay homage to the two main contributions of Andrew Sherratt to our understanding of ecological complexities and economic trajectories during the development of early agriculture in Europe. On the general theoretical level of ecology and the idea of ‘the Neolithic Revolution’, John Barrett (Chapter 4) considers the simplest basis by which we might distinguish hunter-gatherer and agricultural systems. Using the single category of ecology, Barrett proposes that the process of neolithisation was not some sort of monumental product of change in human motivation, but rather an evolving ecology. According to this model, farming ecologies are separated from foraging ecologies due to the fact that farmers store their energy resources in the growth of domesticated stock and cultigens, compared to foragers’ sole reliance on the extraction of energy immediately from plants and animals.

The relationship between ecological complexity and economic trajectories is addressed specifically by Anthony J. Legge and Andrew M. T. Moore’s (Chapter 9) investigation of neolithisation on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia. Lying along a key zone of environmental transition between the Mediterranean vegetation zone and the deciduous woodlands of inland Serbia, Legge and Moore show how the very abrupt appearance of domestic plants and animals in the Dalmatia region occurred in ecological contexts that were unsuitable for foraging populations. They argue that this rapid appearance in much of the Mediterranean zone was made possible by the deliberate use of fire, while hunting continued as an important adjunct to farming in the deciduous forest zone to the east.

The specific question of animal domestication and husbandry practices forms the focus of two chapters in the volume from two very different ecological contexts, the first focusing on pigs in Spain (Hadjikoumis, Chapter 10) and the second focusing on both pigs and cattle in Britain (Viner, Chapter 14). Both papers suggest that animal husbandry must be investigated on a species by species basis with explicit knowledge of local and regional archaeological contexts. They suggest that neither domestication nor husbandry practices were uniform during the neolithisation process, but were rather very complex. In the case of Spain, the biometric analyses carried out by Angelos Hadjikoumis indicate that on some Early Neolithic sites pigs were hunted exclusively, while others had evidence for the co-existence of domestic husbandry and hunting of wild boar, as well as sites where husbandry was dominant and hunting was only practiced secondarily. In the case of both pig and cattle domestication in Britain, Sarah Viner argues against coupling species together under a single concept of a uniform ‘package’ of husbandry practices. Also using biometric analyses, Viner shows how the comparison of aurochs and cattle suggests an abrupt change, whereas comparisons of wild boar and pig indicate a much more gradual, less extensive change. The evidence for pigs exhibits a much higher intersite variability compared to cattle, which suggests that they were used in different ways by different societies. Together these chapters exhibit the enormous complexities that were involved in the process of animal domestication and the precision and critical evaluations necessary for their understanding.

Specific focus is placed in this volume on the evaluation of Andrew Sherratt’s ‘secondary products revolution’ and extensive floodplain cultivation model (Sherratt 1980; 1981). Michael Charles (Chapter 6) investigates the meaning of Scirpus maritimus (sea club-rush) seeds on Early Neolithic sites in southwest Asia and Europe, and emphasises the challenge faced by archaeobotanists when trying to accurately understand the route by which different plant species were brought to sites, utilized, and subsequently preserved in the archaeological record. Like the zooarchaeological analyses of Hadjikoumis and Viner, Charles notes the critical importance of evaluating the evidence on a sample-by-sample basis. The results of his analyses dispel the traditional assumption (e.g. Flannery 1969) that Scirpus seeds are indicative of the earliest domestic cereal cultivation taking place in wetland environments. Charles’ analyses show that Scirpus thrives in wet conditions that would have been very unsuitable to early cereal and pulse crops, and that they were incorporated into archaeological deposits due to their transport by animal dung which was used as fuel. The results of Charles correspond with the further findings produced by Amy Bogaard (Chapter 12), Paul Halstead (Chapter 7), and Valasia Isaakidou (Chapter 5) that reject the Flannery/Sherratt extensive floodplain cultivation model in favour of intensive garden cultivation which was enabled by integrated plant and animal husbandry practices.

Resulting from her archaeobotanical analyses of weed assemblages from Neolithic-Bronze Age sites in central Europe, Amy Bogaard proposes that – contrary to the extensive cultivation model – intensive garden cultivation would have been more conducive to a broad range of environments and soil types. Focusing on the Early Neolithic Linearbandkeramik (LBK) culture site of Vaihingen, Bogaard notes the high level of social complexity involved in a cultivation system of this type, specifically the likely non-equitable distribution of the most easily accessible and most highly valued infield plots of land.

Taking a much broader critical appraisal of the dominant plant and animal husbandry models for Europe, Valasia Isaakidou focuses on the role of cattle as aids for tilling soils, as well as for producing and transporting manure to adequately fertilize the intensive garden plots. The evidence presented in this chapter indicates that there is little reason to assume that cattle were not utilized for traction and ploughing from the earliest stages of the Neolithic in Greece. Isaakidou finds that the intensive farming model withstands empirical testing better than both the slash-and-burn model of Clark (1952) and Sherratt’s (1980; 1981) extensive floodplain and ‘secondary products revolution’ model.

A major advance of recent research exhibited in this volume is the dynamic interrelationship between ecological complexities, economic trajectories, and socio-cultural transformations, which established the local and regional specificities of neolithisation processes. These advances are best expressed in the chapters by Paul Halstead (Chapter 7), Eszter Bánffy and Pál Sümegi (Chapter 11), and Magdalena Midgley (Chapter 16). In ‘repackaging’ the Neolithic of Greece, Halstead rejects models favouring ideological change over economic change. Instead, he develops an integrative model that explains the dynamic nature of the Neolithic package, and in which the development of early agriculture is interrelated with the development of the household, village and identity, and the issues of rights to land, food, and labour that they encompassed. The considerable regional variability of this Neolithic package, Halstead argues, calls for the process of neolithisation to be understood in a more contextualized and holistic manner that does not focus on shared origins, but rather similar responses to the inherent and widely encountered tensions in the early farming mode of production.

Bánffy and Sümegi focus on formation of the LBK culture in the important environmental transition zone of Transdanubia. This chapter suggests that the Starčevo migrant farmers who settled in the lacustrine region were unable to practice their traditional agriculture and were transformed by the preceding hunter-gatherer lakeshore subsistence practices. The transitional phase in the spread of agriculture to this region was not a point-of-no-return, but rather a contemplating period in which agriculture had to be adapted to the uniqueness of these lacustrine ecologies. Bánffy and Sümegi connect these ecological factors with the development of new social ties which enabled the formation of an entirely new form of longhouse architecture. As they clearly show, the formation of the LBK culture was due to a combination of a new colder and wetter environment and the challenges of fusing different ideologies. Magdalena Midgley examines the similar impacts of environmental change on cultural transformation in the context of the transition from the LBK to the TRB culture in northern Europe. The evidence from this region indicates that the lake belt across the North European Plain was highly productive for a foraging economy but unproductive for the particular farming economy of the LBK. Like the formation of the LBK culture, the formation of the TRB culture did not come from nothing, but was a dynamic interaction of different traditions in response to new social and ecological contexts. Together the chapters from Bánffy and Sümegi and Midgley exhibit the integral relationships between ecological complexities and cultural transformations during the neolithisation of temperate Europe.

Material culture, ideology, transmission

The discussion of the processes of cultural transformation during the neolithisation of Europe is a dominant theme running through this volume, particularly the relationship between material culture, ideology, and the transmission of skills between different cultural traditions and different generations responding to new social and ecological challenges. In the context of the ‘long durée’ of Balkan prehistory, John Chapman (Chapter 8) illustrates the role of learned behaviour as a form of habitus. He focuses on the core principles of precision and geometric order as learned behaviours that were transmitted from the Upper Palaeolithic through to the Chalcolithic. The transmission of these skills across a long span of time established what he terms a ‘prehistoric aesthetic’. Craft skills validated the power and agency of certain individuals in early agricultural communities, and worked as processes of enchainment and enchantment between different individuals. Chapman exhibits the implicit role of skill transmission in cultural transformation during neolithisation processes.

Numerous papers address the complexities of cultural transmission as mediators of social and ecological change (Andersson, Bánffy and Sümegi, Halstead, Midgley, Robinson). Anna-Karin Andersson (Chapter 15) focuses on mixed sites of the Late Mesolithic Ertebølle culture and the Early Neolithic TRB culture of southern Sweden. Andersson provides a critical appraisal of local variations in small, mixed assemblages of the Ertebølle and TRB cultures and shows how they are not as sharply divided as previously considered. Analyses of small mixed assemblages, Andersson shows, enables a better understanding of the relationships between artefacts, places, and narrative as never fixed but in constant flux. The conclusion that the neolithisation process was something that was being continuously negotiated is common to Andersson and Halstead’s papers.

The specific problem of forager-farmer contact and the transmission of different technologies is confronted in the chapter by Erick Robinson (Chapter 13). With the western fringes of the LBK culture as the setting, Robinson suggests that pottery and lithic technologies were transmitted in very different ways according to specific social and ecological complexities that occurred during the spread of agriculture from the Central European Loess Belt to the North European Plain. The role of material culture in the mediation of different ideologies and the development of new cultural traditions in this major environmental transition zone was a subject that Andrew Sherratt provided great insight to in his 1990 ‘monumentality’ paper. The chapters from Midgley and Robinson focus on this zone of transition and correlate changes in material culture with the need for media enabling social interaction between very different cultural and ecological traditions.

The challenge of integration

The strength of this volume lies in the diversity of the individual chapters. They each frame specific problems that exhibit the continuing advance of research on the development of early agriculture in Europe. Rather than falling within one of the three thematic areas discussed above, their insights come from the particular ways in which they reach across and attempt to integrate these different themes. As methodological and theoretical advances continue at great pace researchers will be increasingly challenged to search for correlations on a multitude of evidential, geographical, and temporal scales of analysis. One of the central things we can all learn from Andrew Sherratt is that not only was the neolithisation process a dynamic one, but the very landscapes of research in which we work are also highly dynamic and constantly being negotiated. As he noted in the remark on which this introduction began, continuing refinement of our knowledge requires a diligent combination of debate and imagination. Never allowing the dust to settle is truly hard work, and possibly no one has worked harder at this than Andrew Sherratt.

Bibliography

Clark, J. G. D. (1952) Prehistoric Europe: the economic basis. London, Methuen.

Flannery, K. V. (1969) Origins and ecological effects of early Near Eastern domestication. In P. J. Ucko and G. W. Dimbleby (eds.) The domestication and exploitation of plants and animals, 73–100. London, Duckworth.

Guilaine, J. and Manen, C. (2007) From Mesolithic to Early Neolithic in the western Mediterranean. In A. Whittle and V. Cummings (eds.) Going over: the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in north-western Europe, 21–51. Oxford, Oxford University Press for the British Academy.

Price, T. D. (2000) Europe’s first farmers: an introduction. In T. D. Price (ed.) Europe’s first farmers, 1–18. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Sherratt, A. G. (1972) Socio-economic and demographic models for the Neolithic and Bronze Ages of Europe. In D. L. Clark (ed.) Models in archaeology, 193–206. London, Methuen.

Sherratt, A. G. (1976) Resources, technology and trade. In G. Sieveking, I. H. Longworth, and K. Wilson (eds.) Problems in economic and social archaeology, 557–581. London, Duckworth. Sherratt, A. G. (1980) Water, soil, and seasonality in early cereal cultivation. World Archaeology 11, 313–330.

Sherratt, A. G. (1981) Plough and pastoralism: aspects of the secondary products revolution. In I. Hodder, G. Isaac, and N. Hammond (eds.) Pattern of the past: studies in honour of David Clarke, 261–305.

Sherratt, A. G. (1982) Mobile resources: settlement and exchange in early agricultural Europe. In C. Renfrew and S. Shennan (eds.) Ranking, resource and exchange: aspects of the archaeology of early European society, 13–26.

Sherratt, A. G. (1990) The genesis of megaliths: monumentality, ethnicity and social complexity in Neolithic northwest Europe. World Archaeology 22(2), 147–167.

Sherratt, A. G. (1995) Reviving the grand narrative: archaeology and long-term change. Journal of European Archaeology 3(1), 1–32.

Sherratt, A. G. (2004) Fractal farmers: patterns of Neolithic origins and dispersal. In J. Cherry, C. Scarre, and S. Shennan (eds.) Explaining social change: studies in honour of Colin Renfrew, 53–63. Cambridge, McDonald Institute Monographs.

Sherratt, A. G. (2005) Settling the Neolithic: a digestif. In D. Bailey, A. Whittle, and V.

Cummings (eds.) (Un)settling the Neolithic, 140–146. Oxford, Oxbow Books.

Sherratt, A. G. (2007) Diverse origins: regional contributions to the genesis of farming. In S. Colledge and J. Conolly (eds.) The origins and spread of domestic plants in southwest Asia and Europe, 1–29. Walnut Creek, Left Coast Press.

1

Grand narratives and shorter stories

Alasdair Whittle

What we talk about when we talk about time

When Andrew Sherratt arrived in Oxford in the early 1970s to take up his post at the Ashmolean Museum, I was in the middle of my doctoral thesis. Andrew brought with him from Cambridge the excitement of the ‘new archaeology’, in his case a whole series of ideas played out on a canvas of global change in prehistory and history. One of his favourite topics at that time was the structure of chronologies across Europe, and I owe a great deal to the broadening of my horizons that this brought, in conversations under the neo-classical portico of the museum, when Andrew would be out of his office for the inevitable cigarette and myself from the library for air, or over cups of mid-morning coffee in the Playhouse Theatre across Beaumont Street. No one else that I know has been able to condense so much of European and other prehistory literally on to the back of an envelope.

This desire to seek order in the data across both space and time was not just a personal enthusiasm, informally conveyed with both learning and a sense of performance. Andrew’s broad perspective soon manifested itself in his publications, and can be followed in his work on, for example, exchange systems, the secondary products revolution, Neolithic settlement in the Carpathian basin, and megaliths (Sherratt 1976; 1981; 1982a; 1982b; 1983; 1987; 1995b; 1997). His model for a secondary products revolution relied on a sense of chronological relationships, at the big scale, between the Near East and Europe, and later, as he brought alcohol into the account, between the Mediterranean and Europe (Sherratt 1981; 1995b; 1997). No matter that chronology is also the undoing of parts at least of the model, since it has now been shown that the use of dairy products in Europe long precedes the late fourth millennium BC initiation from the Near East proposed by Andrew (Copley et al. 2003; Craig et al. 2005; Evershed et al. 2008), and the jury is still out on when ploughs were first used. Even in his pioneering, more detailed work on Neolithic and Copper Age settlement on the Great Hungarian Plain, there was a strong sense of connection with wider areas and trends, such that the focused survey and limited excavation around Dévaványa were used to generate a model of dynamic change at a regional scale (Sherratt 1982a; 1982b; 1983).

Although Andrew knew the evidence of individual sites and areas intimately, they were not usually his main focus. His normal units of currency were big areas, continents or swathes across them, often with bold, connecting arrows on his beloved maps, and sequential blocks of time, a few centuries or more at a time. But there are other ways of thinking about human existence. I have adapted the heading of this section of my paper from the American short story writer, Raymond Carver (who died, also before his time, in 1988). His stories have little narrative in them, the spare prose style evoking instead particular situations and moments, which nonetheless manage to evoke universal themes of longing, comfort and alienation within the intimacy of personal relationships, set against the context of an often bleak outside world. At the close of the eponymous story in the collection, ‘What we talk about when we talk about love’, the four protagonists sit silently together, and the narrator recalls the moment thus:

I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.

How much detail do we want or need as archaeologists interested in time and change? The anthropologist Johannes Fabian (1983) noted some time ago how his discipline tended to use the contrived ‘allochronism’ of the present to maintain the people it observed as a separate category, and other anthropologists have written recently about the need to escape atemporal ‘presentism’; they wish to move from description of static cultural representations of time to discussion of how notions of time affect action in time (James and Mills 2005). Andrew Sherratt was, with his wide knowledge, well aware of other possibilities for archaeologies of change. At the close of a late paper on lake dwellings in the Alpine foreland, he wrote (Sherratt 2004, 274):

Who could be satisfied by a rough structural sequence of Phases 1, 2 and 3 (a relative ordering of units of uncertain length) when they have become used to noting, say, that an extension had been added to House 5 in the spring of 3752 BC? This is a new and different world, where the precision of prehistoric archaeology out-performs that of classical archaeology, and even of much of Egyptology. Science and art converge when it becomes possible to construct a narrative on the timescale of an individual human life, and when changes can be so precisely fixed in time that we can call them events, and think of how they were actually experienced: the methodology of Collingwood made possible in a dendrochronological laboratory! What a paradox, that archaeological science makes possible an anthropology of the past more comparable to the close observation and understanding of Malinowski than to the homogenized stadial succession of the evolutionists!

Detailed monographs showing just such possibilities continue to emerge from the Alpine foreland, most recently on the Bodensee site of Arbon Bleiche 3, probably occupied for just 14 years (Jacomet et al. 2004). But rather curiously, since this appears to be giving up the notion of dealing with shorter timescales in archaeology before we have really begun, there seems in several other recent archaeological discussions to be a reaction against too narrow a timeframe. John Robb has written of a need to get beyond a kind of ‘ethnographic present’ to accounts of change at much longer timescales (2007, 287, and see further below). Gavin Lucas has argued that ‘when it comes down to it, an event defined from a historical or sociological perspective does not really work well with archaeological phenomena’, and suggests that concepts of palimpsest, evoking the ‘aggregate nature of the record’ are more appropriate (2008, 61). In the Mediterranean field, despite the possession of much tighter timeframes (Foxhall 2000), Christopher Witmore has urged the use for landscape studies, especially those based on survey data, of ideas of ‘percolating time’, which the ensemble of the landscape produces, rather than the other way round (2007, 196). A rather similar position has been expressed by Laurent Olivier; ‘the past itself is not made up of a series of successive temporalities but is basically multi-temporal at any time’ (2001, 69–70).

What I want to do in this short tribute to Andrew Sherratt is to reflect on his most explicit discussion of the grand narrative, to consider one or two other approaches to how we might approach change, and, in contrast to all of these, to advocate the much wider application of formal Bayesian chronological modelling to European prehistory. We have now the means to think at generational and lifetime scales across European prehistory (and any other archaeology), and that provides opportunities to think of telling our stories now in different ways.

Reviving the grand narrative

In view of the 2004 lake dwelling paper quoted above, I am conscious that it may be unfair to go back to a paper published a decade earlier, though there is perhaps still a ‘grand narrative’ approach behind Andrew’s treatment of lake dwellings as a special case. But ‘Reviving the grand narrative’ (Sherratt 1995a) remains an important statement in discussions of the scale at which we should approach change in general, as well as informing on the wide perspective seen in most of Andrew’s published work, as already noted. Its date is significant, since it came a decade or so after the emergence of post-processual or interpretive approaches. Andrew had already reacted to those in other publications (e.g. Yoffee and Sherratt 1993). In the ‘grand narrative’ paper, his discussion of new alternatives is rather brief (Sherratt 1995a, 1–2), and his criticism of the myopia of ‘fine-grained’ studies is implied, rather than explicitly stated, in his own formulation of the ‘big picture’ approach. It is a moot point whether, in the long run, post-processual or interpretive approaches have represented a ‘rejection of large-scale problems’ or the ‘collapse of the dominant meta-narratives’ (Sherratt 1995a, 2). I would rather suggest an evolution from early critique and polemic, accompanied by particularising studies (in the early 1980s), followed by a certain amount of manifesto writing (e.g. Hodder 1986; Shanks and Tilley 1987), in turn followed by longer treatments and more ambitious projects which cannot easily be reduced to the fine grain, though they certainly include them (e.g. Hodder 1990; 2006; Tilley 1996; 2004; Thomas 1999). To be charitable, it is perhaps easier to suggest such trends now with the benefit of hindsight, than in the context of the early 1990s when the ‘grand narrative’ paper must have gestated.¹

‘Reviving the grand narrative’ makes it clear what it is about from its very first sentence; archaeology provides ‘evidence of human behaviour over a timespan of millennia’ (Sherratt 1995a, 1). Having a grand narrative means being able to put ‘events on a historical timescale in their proper perspective’, in ‘a coherent unfolding’ (Sherratt 1995a, 1). Similar phrases are repeated several times in the first three or four pages: ‘the big picture of human development through time, painted on a broad canvas’ (Sherratt 1995a, 1); ‘large structures’; ‘systematic long-term change’; ‘coherent, long-term change’; ‘directional sequence’ (Sherratt 1995a, 3); and ‘the current lack of thinking about the large scale and long term’ (Sherratt 1995a, 4). Archaeology, Andrew argued, ‘needs a grand narrative to articulate its individual understandings’ (Sherratt 1995a, 4).

My contribution does not seek to analyse everything in this paper, and in fact its long middle section covers a lot of other ground, including a rejection of giving primacy to economy or population; this part is more about large scales of explanation than the long term. In the latter section, however, having set out his stall, Andrew developed some examples, covering, briefly but with characteristic brilliance, the urban, Neolithic and industrial revolutions. The most extended example is that of the urban revolution in Mesopotamia. The story is one of linkage, and ‘added value’, exchange systems running on exotic valuables in complementary but intensifying ways; ‘the network precedes the phase of agricultural intensification and urbanisation, and grows in step with it’ (Sherratt 1995a, 18). In one sentence he boldly suggests that this kind of model could fit Egypt, parts of Iran, the Indus valley, China, the Andes and Mesoamerica (Sherratt 1995a, 19), and in half a paragraph sketches the similarity and difference (not enough ‘added value’) of the European prehistoric sequence (Sherratt 1995a, 20). Sedentism developed to provide a ‘setting for social drama’ (Sherratt 1995a, 21). He concluded:

In all of these motivations, there is a common urge to seek excitement, which was fuelled as the ritual and consumption practices that crystallised at nodal sites spread outwards to create new contexts for performance and the creation of value: the coming of the Neolithic was never as boring as just the invention of porridge (Sherratt 1995a, 21).

It is instructive now to look back not only on the panache of these ideas (still of value for thinking about Neolithic Europe as I comment further below) but also what is not in the account. Although in the Mesopotamian case it is clear that the account begins with a contrast between the early and late ‘Ubaid phases and goes on with Uruk expansion, there is no further chronology! How quickly did this all begin? Were the supposed relationships always spatially symmetric, or can we see beginnings in one area before another? Was the tempo of change even across the span of time (centuries? or longer?) that is implied? And where are the people, the social actors, who are otherwise masked by generalising references to exchange systems and social drama? The account reads more like a high-level model of causation and relationship: a broad canvas rather than a long-term narrative as such. As far as I know, Andrew made little or no reference in his work to the Annales school, in which there is, for example, the famous advocacy by Braudel of individual, social and geographical time (cf. Bintliff 1991; Braudel 1975; Knapp 1992). What has come to be called ‘time perspectivism’ might have helped to bring more sense of different scales to the account of the emergence of Mesopotamian civilisation, but it seems clear that Andrew Sherratt’s ‘big picture’ was not the same as Braudelian longue durée. For one thing, there is no claim in Andrew’s account that the environmental, geographical setting is what endures; rather, it is the specific ‘axiality’ of the two rivers which enables the articulation of Mesopotamia into wider networks (Sherratt 1995a, 18–9).

Long centuries and infinitesimal small steps

Andrew Sherratt has not been alone in advocating a broad-canvas approach. More recently, for example, John Robb has argued that we should renew our attention to long-term factors, referring to a scale of ‘spans of time up to several centuries’ (2008, 57). For him, as well as for Andrew Sherratt, ‘explaining long-term change has been a striking lacuna in recent archaeological theory’ (Robb 2007, 287), with accounts trapped in a kind of ethnographic timeframe, of a generation or so (Robb 2007, 291). Specifically in his study of long-term change in the Neolithic Mediterranean, he has called for fresh perspectives on ‘how humans make their history on a scale beyond experience of a single lifetime’ (Robb 2007, 3), and argues that ‘the timescale of most interest for observing historical workings of practice is likely to be neither the span of decades nor of millennia, but on the order of a few centuries’ (Robb 2007, 294). At this timescale, and across broad geographical areas, that encompass other parts of Europe as well as the Mediterranean itself, a ‘general transformation’ and ‘great changes’ are played out between 4000 and 2000 BC, in a shift from the world of tells, villages and ritual monuments to that of dispersed settlement, cemeteries and concentration on individualising, gender-marked statuses (Robb 2007, 287–9). Here, in comparison with ‘Reviving the grand narrative’, there is chronology; ‘the pace of change is likely to be highly variable, with great stability and slow, gradual change punctuated by episodes of rapid change’ (Robb 2007, 295). But overall, the sequence is in general smoothed, though there are ‘at least three distinct moments of change’, with much continuity, change happening ‘in degrees without abrupt ruptures, even when the aggregate transformation over long epochs was dramatic’ (Robb 2007, 320–1). In this approach to the long-term, there is a chronological frame, but timing and tempo tend again to be subjugated to the bigger, overall picture.

A related approach has recently been suggested by Ian Hodder, in a provisional synthesis of the main results so far of the Çatalhöyük project on the development of early Neolithic settled existence and symbolic and conceptual schemes (running since 1993, and thus another counter-example to Andrew Sherratt’s claim of a rejection of large-scale problems at that sort of time). Hodder’s wide-ranging account covers many individually important themes, including the nature of memory, the articulation of households within the community, the relational nature of personhood, and so on, but he also argues for a ‘big picture’ change over the span of the occupation of the east and west mounds (ca. 7400–6000 BC), from what he calls the ‘prowess-animal spirit-hunting-feasting network’, involving also notions of ancestry (Hodder 2006, 236–7, 245), to one concerned more with the individual house, domestic and specialised production, and exchange, evident in the upper levels at Çatalhöyük (Hodder 2006, 251, 255–6). The big picture is made even bigger, and the sequence longer, by claiming that practices of feasting and public ceremony did not begin with settled life, but preceded it (Hodder 2006, 236), and like Andrew Sherratt, Hodder argues that sedentism was the long-term outcome of other factors and processes (including what he calls ‘material entanglement’) rather than the other way round (2006, 242).

What is further distinctive in this account is the view of timescale. Not unlike in the argument of John Robb, noted above, the emphasis is on very gradual, slow change: through ‘myriad small steps’ (Hodder 2006, 251), a ‘long-term process of slow gradual change’ and ‘infinitesimal moves in daily life and daily practices’ (Hodder 2006, 236). The process of social and material entanglement ‘happened incredibly slowly’ (Hodder 2006, 240). Now this may well fit the likely sequence at Çatalhöyük, but there is no demonstration yet that this is so. We are aware of overall site sequences, histories of individual buildings and individual people buried within them (Hodder 2006, fig. 96), and have an estimate of overall site duration, but once again we lack a sense of specific timings and tempo. This lack of temporal resolution also weakens the otherwise powerful argument about the importance of house-based memory through much of the sequence at Çatalhöyük, until its upper levels (Hodder 2005, 136–7).

Timing and tempo: the short stories of generations and lifetimes

So far, therefore, I have considered various approaches including that of Andrew Sherratt to big-scale characterisations of time and change. Andrew certainly provided the big picture, within specified chronological frames, and he was obviously aware of the possibilities of working with very fine chronological resolution, within what he regarded as the special case of the Alpine foreland, but his temporal resolution was in fact often rather coarse. Both Robb and Hodder have added a sense of change happening step by step, the former emphasising the scale of centuries, and the latter the barely perceptible moves and changes within the setting of the house, phase by phase and level by level. Both add a more general sense of temporal resolution than Andrew, but both tend to smooth or blend this into the longer-term view.

What these varying accounts, each powerful in its own way, have in common, and share with most archaeologies until now except in restricted situations better served by dendrochronology or historical evidence, is an inability to provide robustly precise estimates of timing and duration. That is not to say that their chronological frames are likely to be, in outline, importantly wrong (Bayliss et al. 2007a), but that the detail of them may be, and is certainly imprecise. This failing certainly extends to my own past work, for example on the sequence of Neolithic settlement and monument building in north Wiltshire (Whittle 1993; 1997; Whittle et al. 1999), and can fairly be claimed to be a general one. But this situation need not go on. Formal chronological modelling in a Bayesian framework has been available for some time, and has become standard practice, for example, in projects sponsored and supported by English Heritage (Bayliss and Bronk Ramsey 2004; Bayliss et al. 2007; Bayliss 2009; Buck et al. 1996). It is not my intention to repeat exposition of this method, which combines the probability distributions of calibrated radiocarbon measurements with archaeological knowledge to constrain the inevitable scatter of radiocarbon dates around a given phenomenon, resulting in date estimates of much greater precision than we have normally been accustomed to in prehistory. I simply follow earlier claims that this is currently the best available practice in prehistory and other archaeologies reliant on radiocarbon dating for the construction of chronology (Bayliss et al. 2007; Bayliss 2009). What is important here is to reflect on the implications of what has been achieved so far within this framework, and to consider implications for the future.

Previous dating projects within a Bayesian framework have covered individual sites and topics, as has been noted already elsewhere (Whittle and Bayliss 2007, 22), including single monuments such as Stonehenge (Bayliss et al. 1997), specific problems such as the date of the eruption of Santorini (Friedrich et al. 2006), refining the chronology of proto-historic sequences such as the Zhou Dynasty in China (Lu et al. 2001), and dating cultural series such as those for the Aegean Late Bronze Age (Manning et al. 2006) . What has been possible beyond this have been wider projects still which have looked at groups of monuments. Thus it was possible, first, intensively to examine five Early Neolithic long barrows from southern Britain (Bayliss and Whittle 2007), and then, even more ambitiously, a large sample of Early Neolithic causewayed enclosures, also from southern Britain, considered together with other available dating evidence for the first centuries of the southern British Neolithic (Bayliss et al. 2008; Whittle et al. 2008; 2011).

The latter project was still in the process of final completion when my paper was written (Whittle et al. 2011), but the projects together have thrown up many fundamentally new perspectives. Key issues include the timing and tempo of change, and the scales at which we can best approach them (Bayliss et al. 2008; Whittle et al. 2008, 2010). Instead of an Early Neolithic which has either all its features lumped together in one broadly defined phase or informal estimates of succession made on the basis of the visual inspection of radiocarbon dates (backed by typological study of material, chiefly pottery, and monuments), we can begin to offer formal models for the timing of phenomena, using Lévi-Strauss’ dictum in La pensée sauvage that ‘there is no history without dates’ (1966, 258). Thus, it may be the case that the very first part of the Neolithic in southern Britain saw little or no monument construction, and it certainly seems to be the case that causewayed enclosures started to be built after the first appearance of, or acceleration in the rate of, the construction of long barrows and cairns – respectively probably at the beginning and end of the 38th century BC (Bayliss and Whittle 2007; Bayliss et al. 2008; Whittle et al. 2008; 2011). Timing can here include issues of duration, and the same methodology has served to break down and differentiate the spans of time over which given monuments were in primary use. This has proved to be often much shorter than commonly supposed in the generalising literature on monuments. Taking a generation to be 25 years, southern British Early Neolithic long barrows were in primary use, on the basis of detailed modelling so far, for from within a generation to three to five generations only (Bayliss and Whittle 2007), and the full publication of the causewayed enclosure project will add further examples of short histories alongside a limited number of longer histories (Bayliss et al. 2008; Whittle et al. 2008; 2011).

Likewise, these formal estimates for the start, duration and ending of phenomena throw up patterns of difference and congruence. It is far too early to say with any confidence whether there was a definable main horizon at which the construction of long barrows and cairns came in, but we can certainly point to the marked phenomenon of congruence in the dates for endings; four of the five formally modelled long barrows were closed in the decades around 3625 BC (Whittle et al. 2007a, fig. 9).² We are now able to publish further evidence for the varying rates at which causewayed enclosures were constructed, from the very end of the 38th century BC onwards (Whittle et al. 2011). Suffice it to stress here that the Bayesian framework throws up the opportunity to consider the tempo of change as well as timings, and from results in these two projects so far, we can fairly claim that the tempo of change does not look to have been steady or even throughout the sequences in question.

Date estimates within a formal Bayesian framework can be sufficiently precise to enable us to think in terms of generations and lifetimes (Whittle and Bayliss 2007; Whittle et al. 2007a, 2008; Bayliss et al. 2008). It is even possible in given circumstances that we may be able to grasp events or at least very compressed or concentrated horizons of change (Whittle et al. 2010). Even though the case has been made that, archaeologically, a given context is in fact always an assemblage of depositions and processes (Lucas 2008), we are more optimistic that the date of both constructions and endings of monuments can, other things being equal, be modelled with considerable precision; contexts date to the latest material in them – and hence the need for careful search for short-life material such as articulated bone, to convert assemblage into event. The formation of the primary mortuary deposit in Wayland’s Smithy I long barrow is a case in point; our preferred model suggests a span of a decade or less, and circumstantial evidence for the possibility of a massacre or group killing helps to encourage a view of this episode as an event or event-like (Whittle et al. 2007b). But this is not the same as claiming that events are all that we need. Comparisons with well dated historical sequences suggest rather that in any given process there are normally a series of events, rather than single transformative events (contrast Sewell 2005). So for our purposes, it seems possible to work at the scales of generation and lifetime, or with prehistories of the short- and medium-term (Bayliss et al. 2008, 68; Whittle et al. 2010; 2011). And although many prehistorians have been accustomed to think in terms of the longue durée as already noted, it is worth noting here that the substance of Braudel’s classic treatment (1975) of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean is in fact precisely at these shorter scales. The opening rhetoric, which has swayed many prehistorians resigned to having coarse or fuzzy chronology, is about long duration and deep time, but the vast majority of the book deals with a combination of individual and social histories.

An example and an agenda

I have argued that we can now begin to achieve much more precise timings, much more precise estimates for durations, and a sense of varying tempos of change, and can begin to work effectively at the scale of generations and lifetimes, or with short and medium-term sequences. The focus, however, has been on a comparatively short span in the first part of the fourth millennium BC in southern Britain. What of bigger themes, involving longer spans of time and wider geographical areas: a grander narrative in Andrew Sherratt’s term?

I do indeed see this detailed work in southern Britain as part of a bigger picture, involving the establishment and initial transformation of the Neolithic in central and western Europe. On a personal level, following the publication of research on the Körös culture on the Great Hungarian Plain (Whittle 2007), I have become engaged, with colleagues, in a field project on the earliest Linearbandkeramik (LBK) in Bavaria, and in a broad investigation of diversity in LBK diet, health and mobility across a transect from Alsace east to Hungary;³ and this sits alongside my work with Alex Bayliss, Frances Healy and others on the early centuries of the Neolithic in southern