Moving on in Neolithic Studies: Understanding Mobile Lives

Mobility is a fundamental facet of being human and should be central to archaeology. Yet mobility itself and the role it plays in the production of social life, is rarely considered as a subject in its own right. This is particularly so with discussions of the Neolithic people where mobility is often framed as being somewhere between a sedentary existence and nomadic movements. This latest collection of papers from the Neolithic Studies Group seminars examines the importance and complexities of movement and mobility, whether on land or water, in the Neolithic period. It uses movement in its widest sense, ranging from everyday mobilities – the routines and rhythms of daily life – to proscribed mobility, such as movement in and around monuments, and occasional and large-scale movements and migrations around the continent and across seas. Papers are roughly grouped and focus on ‘mobility and the landscape’, ‘monuments and mobility’, ‘traveling by water’, and ‘materials and mobility’. Through these themes the volume considers the movement of people, ideas, animals, objects, and information, and uses a wide range of archaeological evidence from isotope analysis; artifact studies; lithic scatters and assemblage diversity.

Table of Contents

Foreword
Preface and acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Movement and mobility in the Neolithic
Jim Leary and Thomas Kador
2 Varied mobility in the Neolithic: The Linearbandkeramik on the move
Penny Bickle
3 Resourcing Stonehenge: patterns of human, animal and goods mobility in the late Neolithic
Benjamin Chan, Sarah Viner, Mike Parker Pearson, Umberto Albarella and Rob Ixer
4 Movement and thresholds: Architecture and landscape at the Carrowkeel-Keshcorran passage tomb complex, Co. Sligo, Ireland
Sam Moore
5 Monuments to mobility? – investigating cursus patterning in southern Britain
Roy Loveday
6 Routeways of the Neolithic
Fiona Haughey
7 Coastal Connections: Coastal mobility in the Neolithic
Alice Rogers
8 Should I stay or should I go? Movement and Mobility in the Hebridean Neolithic
Angela Gannon
9 Scattered in time and space: Ploughzone lithics and mobility in the Neolithic
Jonathan Last
The social construction of place, mobility and stone in Neolithic South-West Britain: A case study from Mendip
Clive Jonathon Bond

Jim Leary is director of the Archaeology Field School of the Department of Archaeology, University of Reading. His main areas of research are in Neolithic and Early Bronze Age monumentality; the social impact of sea-level rise and submergence of landscapes in the past; and mobility and movement in the past.

Thomas Kador is Assistant Teacher and Research Fellow in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol. his main research interests concern everyday life in prehistory and in particular the practices of movement, mobility and migration, with a particular focus on Ireland; and in community archaeology