TIME AND SPACE

If Chapter Two was really about time, Chapter Three is more concerned with space. The earlier part of the Neolithic period was interpreted in terms of origins and ideas about origins. If people introduced farming from the Continent, they also seem to have acknowledged their past by the kinds of monuments that they built. The construction of long mounds may have commemorated the houses of their ancestors, and causewayed enclosures the settlements in which earlier generations had lived. Chapter Two juxtaposed archaeological arguments about the character and chronology of the Earlier Neolithic period with an interpretation of the ways in which prehistoric people might have thought about their own histories (Figs. 3.1 and 3.2).

Chapter Three takes a different turn. It considers an even longer sequence, from the years preceding 3000 BC up to 1500 BC, but for part of that time communities in these two islands seem to have closed in on themselves, and links with Continental Europe may have lapsed. In their place there were stronger connections between different parts of Britain and Ireland. Those new alignments are summed up by the title ‘North and South’. The situation did not change significantly until the adoption of metals in the late third millennium BC.

In another way, the processes described in both chapters do have something in common. Chapter Two was mainly concerned with the ways in which unfamiliar practices were adopted in both islands.