Ancestral Geographies of the Neolithic: Landscapes, Monuments and Memory

Ancestral Geographies of the Neolithicis a vivid portrait of life in the small, dispersed communities of Neolithic Britain. Focusing on the landscape and monuments of the fourth millennium B.C., Mark Edmonds provides a dramatic interpretation of how these prehistoric peoples understood the world in which they lived. Central to this study is the idea that communities of the time thought about the land, and about themselves, in ways different from those we take for granted today. Kinship, ancestry, the presence of the dead, and various forms of affiliation were significant elements of their world view. These themes were brought into sharpest focus during gatherings at the monumental enclosures and tombs that appear in our record for the first time, where communities engaged in ancestral rights and acknowledged their ties to the land, to the past and to each other.