Pagan Britain

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.

At a point where a pocket would have been was a collection of perforated periwinkle shells, presumably either decorations for clothing or a necklace, or objects to be cast as some kind of divinatory process.

Archaeologists at present divide the period in two different ways. One is into an Early (4000–3300 BC), Middle (3300–2900 BC) and Late (2900–2400 BC) Neolithic, the other more simply into Early (4000–3000 BC) and Late (3000–2200 BC).

It was Sir John Lubbock, one of the founders of the modern British discipline of archaeology, who divided the Stone Age for the first time, into Old and New, in 1865 (the Middle Stone Age did not push in between for another seventy years).

The idea of a Neolithic has lasted because it makes such good sense, describing as it does the adoption of a package of new activities which between them radically changed human life.

Magic embraces any formalized practices by human beings designed to achieve particular ends by the manipulation and direction of supernatural power or of spiritual power concealed within the natural world.

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.

No period of British history or prehistory has been so dramatically reconfigured than the New Stone Age.

It is associated with an outstanding scholar, William Buckland, the son of a Dorset clergyman who had lost his vision in an accident.