When, in 2000, Eric Elstob set up and endowed the Marlborough Mound Trust, he was intent on focussing much-needed attention on the remarkable, but neglected, monument that nestled, largely obscured by trees and bushes, in a corner of the grounds of Marlborough College. Though the Mound played a part in the lives of college pupils, including Eric, serving as a place of escape for adventure and contemplation, and was occasionally referred to in the academic literature, it had little presence in the public imagination, nor did it feature large in current archaeological debate. The Trust changed all that. Working closely with the College over the last two decades, it has given the Mound a new visibility, in all senses of the word, and has worked to stabilize its fragile fabric for future generations to continue to enjoy.

The Marlborough Mound is a ‘special place’ – a location that, for four thousand years, has been of continuing significance to successive generations. As a place where springs break out of the ground and flow into the River Kennet, it clearly had meaning to the Late Neolithic population who, for reasons which we will never know, decided to mark the spot with a great mound sixteen metres high and nearly eighty metres in diameter. It echoed the even larger mound of Silbury Hill, eight kilometres up river, both being elements in a complex ritual landscape which we are only now beginning to untangle. In this way the monumentalizing of the landscape began, and this mound, built at the end of the third millennium BC, has dominated human actions ever since. Roman engineers used it as a siting point for laying out a road, Normans found it to be a convenient base for a castle, which flourished as a royal residence and regional stronghold throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and from the seventeenth century it became the visual focus of a formal garden belonging to the Seymour family. Thus it has an unusual and distinguished history and one well worthy of considered attention.

The first task of the Trust was to ensure the stability of the Mound by removing most of the trees and bushes and other encumbrances, restoring the spiral path constructed when the Mound became a garden feature, and stabilizing the slopes with an appropriate vegetation cover.

ABSTRACT.This contribution shows how the sea was an essential vector for the spread of material culture, technologies, ideas and belief systems amongst the communities of the Atlantic seaboard of Europe from Neolithic times. It argues that, as early as the fourth millennium BC, communities were connected by the sea over great distances, and it concludes with the suggestion that maritime enterprises stimulated and facilitated the development of Celtic as a common language amongst the peoples of these regions.

RÉSUMÉ.Cette contribution explique de quelle manière la mer fut un vecteur essentiel à la diffusion de la culture matérielle, des technologies, des idées et des systèmes de croyance parmi les communautés de la côte atlantique européenne au Néolithique. En arguant de la connexion par voie de mer de communautés même très distancées dès le IVème millénaire av. J.-C., elle conclut en suggérant comment les activités maritimes ont pu stimuler et faciliter la propagation du Celte comme langue commune parmi les peuples de ces régions.

The communities of Europe who face the Atlantic Ocean are unusually privileged, since they command a rich, varied and vibrant environment. The Gulf Stream which flows in a great arc from the Caribbean northwards across the Atlantic and then southwards down the European façade brings warm, nutrient-rich water, the quality of which is further enhanced by the sediment churned up over the shallow continental shelf and by additional silts brought down by the great rivers. Together these factors combine to create a rich environment for the growth of plankton which sustains the fish, crustaceans and molluscs and mammals living higher up the food chain. The turbulent Atlantic coastal seas are abundant with a great variety of wild life contrasting dramatically with the sluggish, species-poor Mediterranean.

At its most extensive the Atlantic façade confronts the ocean from about 25°N to almost the Arctic Circle – from Morocco to Iceland. Over such a distance there is much temperature variation favouring differing maritime faunas, from tuna off the Moroccan shores to the famous shoals of cod in the waters around Iceland and Greenland. Communities would have learned to specialize their gathering activities according to what nature had to offer.

No one who has read this far can be in any doubt that historical archaeology is alive and well. The individual contributions which make up this volume, as vigorous as they are varied, reflect a branch of the discipline of archaeology that is defining its scope, developing its theoretical constructs and honing its techniques. The purpose of this brief endpiece is not to review the individual contributions but to reflect on the position of historical archaeology, as it is here presented, in the broader field of archaeological studies. The viewpoint taken is unashamedly that of an archaeologist whose perspective is that history is a valuable way of studying some aspects of the most recent fragment of the archaeological record.

We need not spend too much time on definitions. Within 'historical archaeology' are nested various other kinds of archaeology: urban, colonial, industrial, maritime, each capable of subdivision; maritime, for example, embracing underwater and nautical archaeology. All are treated in the chapters above but we should not forget that there are other subsets of historical archaeology which have successfully demonstrated their value in recent years, the study of battlefields and of gardens, for example, both with their very distinctive methodologies.

In geographical scope historical archaeology covers the world but may, for convenience, be divided into three broad groupings – occidental Old World, oriental Old World and New World – each emphasising different aspects of the shared agenda. The present volume offers little on the oriental Old World, for the very good reason that the literature is inaccessible to the majority of the western audience, but it is well to remember that potentially this region, with its deep history, has an enormous amount to contribute to the general debate and must, in due course, be brought into the mainstream of the study.

In the western part of the Old World – essentially Europe, North Africa and the Near East – historical archaeology has, from the beginning, been an essential part of archaeological studies. One has only to browse through the early volumes of the British journal Archaeologia, the first volume of which was published in 1779, to appreciate the wide breadth of the study as it was, even then, practised.

In the opening sequence of his 1968 film 2001 – a space odyssey, Stanley Kubrick offers a stunning image of the beginning of warfare when one of his ape men picks up a long bone from a decaying animal carcass and uses it to bludgeon an opponent to death. In Kubrick's brilliant orchestration of this moment there is a palpable sense of awe and wonder among the creatures as their minds come to terms with the magnitude of the discovery. To Kubrick, it is a defining moment – the beginning of man's progress to civilization. This is a stark, uncomfortable, message which we need to examine in some detail.

Enter the philosophers

The nature of human aggression has long fascinated philosophers. One of the first to confront the problem head on was the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Oxford-trained, he lived through, and survived, the Civil War, an experience which cannot have failed to have had an impact on his thinking. Politically he walked a difficult tight-rope. He was a firm believer in strong government, and therefore supported the King against Parliament, but he was not prepared to accept the divine right of kings. His basic philosophy was that of a materialist who believed that rational explanations could be found for all human behaviour.

In his famous work Leviathan, published in English in 1651, he addresses the question of ‘the state of nature’.