Pagan Britain

Richard Bradley set the pattern for this exercise in a series of studies which emphasized the novelties, rather than the continuities, which the adoption of farming has commonly brought to attitudes to the land. Farmers exploit nature rather than belonging to it, and enclose and own resources, rather than making paths through them and using them.

All these reflections provide a framework for considering the way in which those inhabitants might have conceived the monuments they built with such zest; and before going on to consider what those structures were, it may be worthwhile to think a little further about the nature of monumentality in a prehistoric society.

Traditional peoples also commonly lack the modern sense of the human self as indivisible, seeing it instead as penetrating and being penetrated by other beings in the world around.

This makes the fashioning of a tool or a vessel very much akin to a magical act: a rite in itself, as well as the production of a functional object.

They believed that material things create persons as much as persons make them, and that they likewise have life phases. Non-human bodies such as pots or houses were readily seen as the outward forms of non-human beings, which transform the social contexts in which they move and change their own meanings as those contexts are transformed.

Studies of traditional peoples in modern times have revealed that they commonly viewed stoves, weapons, tools and ornaments as living entities.

Furthermore, even when detached from the locations which provided them, building materials and artefacts were themselves not necessarily seen as inanimate. Posts could remain imbued with the spirits of the trees that they had been, and to build with stone could be to fill structures with the spirits of those stones.

This would suggest that farming had originally been brought from Europe by colonists who arrived in the Thames, and that it had swiftly been adopted by the natives: but none of this is securely proved by the better dating. All told, the problem of how the Neolithic arrived in Britain does not seem to have been solved at the time of writing; and wit

It has been suggested that a herding lifestyle may have made fishing for and gathering seafood difficult, or else that some kind of religious taboo was imposed on its consumption, perhaps (for example) because the sea had become associated with the dead. Whatever the answer, it is a powerful indication that the transition to the Neolithic brought c