Two in particular drew attention, on segments of animal rib bone. The first was the front half of a horse’s body, covered and preceded by a series of vertical lines, the second an upright shape interpreted by the discoverer as ‘a masked human figure in the act of dancing a ceremonial dance’.

In the mid twentieth century it was thought to have lasted for a few hundred years, and to have commenced after fully developed urban civilizations had arisen in Egypt and Mesopotamia, relegating Britain to the status of a barbarous frontier.

The basic modern division of European prehistory, based on the nature of tools, was worked out in Denmark in the early nineteenth century, as one of successive Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages.

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.

The first is whether it is possible to have either an archaeology or a history of prehistoric and early historic British religion, in view of the extreme limitations of the evidence.

All of these developments first appeared in the Near East, and spread slowly westwards across Europe. Together, they meant that human beings were no longer only living upon and off the land, but reshaping and redeveloping it as well: they marked the shift from a hunting and gathering lifestyle to a farming one. They also, unsurprisingly, produced s

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.

Goat’s Hole cave at Paviland, on the south-western coast of the Gower Peninsula in South Wales.

With him were placed hoops of mammoth ivory which seem to have been bracelets or castanets, and ivory structures like wands or batons, which were broken before being placed with the corpse.