Enclosures in Neolithic Europe

These papers come from a conference on Neolithic Causewayed Enclosures in Europe held in London in 1999. They present a series of snapshots of some of the sites and regions at the forefront of current research on causewayed enclosures in Europe, and as such are a complement to the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME) project which has systematically recorded all known Neolithic enclosures in England by both analytical topographic survey techniques and aerial transcription. The detailed regional data collected by the RCHME project has allowed a radical reinterpretation of these sites and the recognition that there are regional groups of enclosures. This series of papers serves to broaden the discussion about the structure and form of causewayed monuments beyond lowland England, looking at a wide geographical range of sites across central Europe, as well as considering some sites which do not conform to the traditional type but which have been proved by excavation to have a Neolithic context. This collection of papers provides a long-awaited and important addition to the debate on these enigmatic prehistoric sites. Contents: Neolithic Enclosures of Scandinavia (Niels H Anderson); The Causewayed Enclosures of West-Central France from the beginning of the Fourth to the End of the Third Millennium (Claude Burnez and Catherine Louboutin); Le Mourral, Trebes (Aude) and the Final Neolithic Circular Enclosures of the Languedoc (Jean Vaquer); The Late Neolithic Settlement of La Hersonnais, Plechatel in its Regional Context (Jean-Yves Tinevez); The Neolithic Ditched Enclosures of the Tavoliere, South-East Italy (Robin Skeates); An Interrupted Ditch Alignment at Rivoli, Italy, in the Context of Neolithic Interrupted Ditch/Pit Systems (Lawrence Barfield); Aerial Survey and Neolithic Enclosures in Central Europe (Otto Braasch); From Lilliput to Brobdingnag: The Traditions of Enclosure in the Irish Neolithic (Gabriel Cooney); Billown Neolithic Enclosures, Isle of Man (Timothy Darvill); Lithic Artefacts from Neolithic Causewayed Enclosures: Character and Meaning (Alan Saville); A Causewayed Enclosure at Husbands Bosworth, Leicestershire (Adrian Butler, Patrick Clay and John Thomas); The Howe Robin Story: An Unusual Enclosure on Crosby Ravensworth Fell (Moraig Brown); The Seventieth Causewayed Enclosure in the British Isles? (Peter D Horne, David MacLeod and Alastair Oswald); Rethinking the Carrock Fell Enclosure (Trevor Pearson and Peter Topping).