These papers highlight recent archaeological work in Northern England, in the commercial, academic and community archaeology sectors, which have fundamentally changed our perspective on the Neolithic of the area. Much of this was new work (and much is still not published) and has been overlooked in the national discourse. The papers cover a wide geographical area, from Lancashire north into the Scottish Lowlands, recognising the irrelevance of the England/Scotland Border. They also take a broad chronological sweep, from the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition to the introduction of Beakers into the area.
The key themes are: the nature of transition; the need for a much-improved chronological framework; regional variation linked to landscape character; links within northern England and with distant places; the implications of new dating for our understanding of the axe trade; the changing nature of settlement and agriculture; the character of early Neolithic enclosures; and the need to integrate rock art into wider discourse.
List of contributors
List of figures
List of tables and appendices
Introduction
Gill Hey and Paul Frodsham
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: Langdale and the Northern Neolithic
Richard Bradley and Aaron Watson
Chapter 2: Stainton West: a Late Mesolithic and Early Neolithic Site on the Banks of the River Eden
Fraser Brown
Chapter 3: The last hunter of a wise race: evidence for Neolithic practices in northern England
Seren Griffiths
Chapter 4: ‘Weird and atypical, even degenerate’… or then again, maybe not? Early Neolithic Enclosures in the North
Al Oswald and Mark Edmonds
Chapter 5: Documenting English Rock Art: a review of the ‘big picture’
Kate E. Sharpe
Chapter 6: New Light on the Neolithic: a perspective from North-East England
Clive Waddington
Chapter 7: Street House in the Neolithic Period,
Stephen J. Sherlock
Chapter 8: Recent work on the Neolithic landscapes of Cumbria and North Lancashire
Helen Evans, Antony Dickson and Denise Druce
Chapter 9: Out of the Shadows: an emerging Neolithic in the Yorkshire Dales
Yvonne Luke
Chapter 10: ‘A most noble work', at the Heart of Neolithic Britain. Some Thoughts on the Long Meg Complex in the Light of Recent Fieldwork
Paul Frodsham
Chapter 11: A View from North of the Border
Alison Sheridan
Chapter 12: Monumentality in Neolithic Britain: The Case of South West Scotland
Julian Thomas
Chapter 13: A New Survey of The Carles Stone Circle, Castlerigg, Cumbria
Al Oswald and Constance Durgeat
Chapter 14: Two Newly-Identified Possible ‘Hengiform’ Monuments in the North Pennines
Stewart Ainsworth, David McOmish, Al Oswald and Andrew Payne
Chapter 15: The End of the Neolithic?: Early Bell Beaker Groups in Northern England
A. P. Fitzpatrick
"The authors, editors and contributors are to be congratulated and commended on bringing these excellent volumes to publication."
Claire Nesbitt
Antiquity
(08/12/2021)
"This fine volume […] [is] a fine counterbalance to the biases at the very core of the historical narrative of the Neolithic in Britain"
Matt Leivers
Archaeological Journal
(09/12/2022)
"This book, like the 2016 conference in Carlisle from which it derives, is an explicit bid to sing the glories of stone axe quarries, rock art, stone circles and other landscape features which proclaim the intense regionality of Britain’s earliest farming communities. "
Mike Pitts
British Archaeology
(15/03/2021)
