Prehistoric Materialities: Becoming Material in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland

Abstract

Humans occupy a material environment that is constantly changing. Yet British archaeologists of the twentieth century have overlooked this fact in their search for past systems of order and pattern. Inert materials were treated as distinct from past societies, and as the outcomes of social ideas and processes. As a result materials were variously characterised as stable entities such as artefact categories, styles or symbols in an attempt to comprehend them. In this book Andrew Jones argues that, on the contrary, materials are vital, mutable and creative and archaeologists need to attend to the changing character of materials if they are to understand how past people and materials intersected to produce prehistoric societies. Rather than considering materials and societies as given, he argues that we need to understand how these entities are performed. He discusses various aspects of materials including their scale, colour, fragmentation and assembly in a wide-ranging discussion that covers the pottery, metalwork, rock art, passage tombs, barrows, causewayed enclosures and settlements of Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain and Ireland

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