Ancestral Geographies of the Neolithic: Landscapes, Monuments, and Memory


Ancestral Geographies of the Neolithic is a vivid portrait of life in the small, dispersed communities of Neolithic Britain. Focusing in on the landscape and monuments of the fourth millenium BC, Mark Edmonds provides a dramatic, colourful interpretation of how these prehistoric peoples understood the world in which they lived.Central to this study is the idea that communities of the time may have thought about the land, and about themselves, in ways very different to those we take for granted today. Theirs was a world shaped by kinship, ancestry and various forms of affiliation, a world in which the dead were a powerful presence, and where distant times and places held a particular fascination. It was through both routine and ritual experience that dispersed and fragmented communities acknowledged their ties to the land, to the past and to each other.