Moving on in Neolithic Studies by Leary Jim; Kador Thomas; & Thomas Kador

Author:Leary, Jim; Kador, Thomas; & Thomas Kador
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Europe / General
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Published: 2016-02-29T05:00:00+00:00

STATEMENTS OF POWER?

If cursus monuments as large, well-planned and well-executed as those in the Midlands and East Anglia are unlikely to have been the products of egalitarian or minimally structured interaction (whether transhumance assembly, festival pilgrimage or elements of both) should we accept them as statements of power? The equation of monument building with power and prestige is near universal since it constitutes their most public material embodiment; exotic artefacts and esoteric ritual procedures being, by contrast, visible only to a few (Trigger 1990, 126). Great religious monuments bore permanent witness to the power of those who organised/financed their construction and quite literally framed ideological perception and discourse in terms of that elite: they alone could be seen to mediate with the gods within them.

Why though would populations have acquiesced to the elevation of individuals? Lineage/kin membership undoubtedly circumscribed identities in the Neolithic, so strong senses of sectional interest are likely to have been evoked if a member of another lineage were to have been elevated. Local disparities of wealth (in cattle) deployed through social debt inducing potlatching or bride price financing are obvious routes to elevation in mature pastoral society but wider legitimation is likely to have presented difficulties. In the Middle Neolithic context under review here, lineage control of a cult site (cf. Quyrash at Mecca) might furnish the least contested route. Earle (1997) has argued that cross culturally an ideology linking chiefs with the gods was a common and crucial strategy, while Drucker Brown has noted the unifying influence of kingship in the heterogeneous Mamprusi region of Ghana; adjacent kin-exclusive regions lack significant ranking (2005, 173–4). Nor need such a role be disassociated from pastoral concerns (Bonte 1991).

The four intersecting cursuses that box in the tallest monolith in the British Isles at Rudston conceivably materialised a pooling of identity within a confederation (cf. the Iroquoian) or even a unifying chiefdom/kingdom (Harding 1999; Loveday 2009). Ideas associated with that site may have been transmitted in association with Group VI axes (Bradley & Edmonds 1993), and such items as jet belt sliders that appear as grave goods. We have noted a broad association of both of these with southern British cursuses, or at least cursus zones. Of the southern British cursus complexes, it is that at Maxey-Etton that most closely reflects the multiple monument patterns witnessed at Rudston, and it appears to have lain athwart one of the principal entry routes of Group VI axes. Perhaps additionally significant is the fact that the complex extends across an adjacent causewayed enclosure. This relationship is repeated at the Fornham All Saints complex (also potentially associated with an entry route for Group VI axes) but is otherwise rare. Elsewhere distribution patterns seem mutually exclusive (e.g. the Upper Thames Valley where the two types of monument strikingly occupy quite distinct zones: Harding 1995; Barclay & Hey 1999). This intersecting (overlying) relationship could signal respect, sectional seizure of an earlier communal site or iconoclastic slighting, but less debatably it would seem to point to

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