Research interestsWhat were the circumstances in which people changed from being foragers to farmers, and how can we understand the distant world of the European Neolithic ? How were cattle, for example, simultaneously good to keep, good to eat and good to think with ? Why does the treatment of their bones often mimic that of human bones ? How can we get at the circumstances and textures of daily life, against which the special locales and monuments can be examined ? What sort of scales of time and space should we investigate in pursuit of answers ? These are some of the sorts of question which drive my research. My response to the last question has been to work at different scales. I have written about Europe as a whole on numerous occasions and am interested in the broad scales and questions that this requires. My 1996 book, Europe in the Neolithic: the creation of new worlds (CUP), was my most recent major statement of this kind. I interact closely with my departmental colleagues Douglass Bailey, who is interested in eastern Europe, Niall Sharples, who is interested in Britain, and Vicki Cummings, who is interested in north-west Europe. I continue to share many questions, partly to do with environment, settlement and subsistence, and increasingly to do with scales and contexts of agency. In this way we loosely form a team interested in a very broad range of approaches and problems to do with the Neolithic period in Britain and Europe. My own recent research has focused on southern Britain and central Europe. I carried out a big field project in Wiltshire on the Neolithic of the Avebury area, from the 1980s into the 1990s. Working closely with John Evans and many other colleagues, I was concerned here with getting a better sequence for a small region, a better understanding of the development of the Neolithic environment, and further insights into the context in which monuments were created, used and abandoned. We discovered the West Kennet palisade enclosures (now published with Silbury Hill as Holy mound, sacred rings, Oxbow, 1997), sampled Easton Down and Millbarrow long barrows, and put several cuttings across the circuits of the causewayed enclosure on Windmill Hill; we also carried out surface survey and limited excavation of features outside the enclosure. All this work is now published; the Windmill Hill report, with Joshua Pollard and Caroline Grigson, has now appeared as an Oxbow monograph (1999), The harmony of symbols: the Windmill Hill causewayed enclosure. I am still fascinated by this area, and I hope to undertake more field research in due course at West Kennet in particular, where RCHME (as was) has shown the existence of another subsidiary structure attached to Enclosure 2. Since 1998, I have been carrying out a Leverhulme-funded project with my assistant Mick Wysocki on human bone from the southern British Neolithic. Our aims here have been to revisit questions of population diversity, to apply new insights into the qualitative analysis of human bone to get fresh understanding of activities and lifestyles, and to reexamine variation in mortuary rites and processes. A pilot study on Parc le Breos Cwm, on the Gower in south Wales, was published in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society for 1998. I have just finished a project with Vicki Cummings, funded by the Board of Celtic Studies, on Megaliths in the Neolithic landscapes of Wales, looking at the range of settings in which megalithic and other constructions were placed. This is another dimension of investigations into how people experienced and understood their worlds. The volume, Places of special virtue, to be published by Oxbow is due out later this year. I have just started a project with Lesley McFadyen, which is re-examining the excavation at Ascott-under-Wychwood. I believe that we badly need more evidence for context and that there has been a tendency in recent Neolithic studies to rely on interpretation of monuments to supply that sense of context. I am particularly interested in the beginnings of the Neolithic period and then in the rate of subsequent development, and in issues of mobility and short-term sedentism. That has taken me to my next field project, on the Early Neolithic of Hungary. This began with survey in 1998, and has continued with excavation in 1999, 2000 and 2001. Working closely with Hungarian and British colleagues, the approach is micro-regional and the aim is to exploit the rich and varied remains of occupation to address questions of identity and date, and in particular questions of seasonality, duration of occupation, the range and balance of subsistence resources, and the scale of environmental impact. I also currently hold a NERC Small Grant for the radiocarbon dating of Körös and northern Starcevo samples. Helping me in this project are László Bartosiewicz (Budapest), Dušan Boric (Belgrade/Cambridge), Paul Pettitt (Oxford), Mike Richards (Bradford), and other colleagues in Hungary and Serbia. Watch this space for developments. Other current interests include decorated menhirs in Early Neolithic Brittany, for their representations of animals and other creatures and symbols, a possible clue to importance of myth in the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition, and cattle, developing out of the abundant remains we dug at Windmill Hill. My new book on the textures and connections of Neolithic social existence (developing among other themes my interests in individuals, identity, animals and ancestry), and on the beginnings of the Neolithic from central Europe to Britain and Ireland, is due out this year. The archaeology of people: dimensions of Neolithic life is due out soon, published by Routledge. TeachingUndergraduate MA
Administrative responsibilitiesMA Convenor and admissions tutor, research committee, postgraduate committee How to contact meTel: +44 (0)29 2087 5633 |
Last updated 16th April 2003