THE SECRET LIFE OF CEREALS 

By comparison with both central Europe and the Cerny communities, traces of permanent Neolithic settlement in Britain are rare.  They are also often contested.  It seems that commitment to animal domestication was not initially extended to humans.  Indicative is an early large longhouse style farm building discovered at Bluebell Hill, near Rochester in Kent, interpreted as probably used seasonally by nomadic people. (McKie, 2004)  Within a wider frame Francis Pryor (2001, pp.139-40) points to discovery of some two dozen rectangular buildings in Britain from the millennium beginning 6,000 years ago, but also notes their controversial character: some may have housed the dead, others (perhaps in addition to having housed the dead) might have served as special meeting places for the living, possibly in inter-community contexts.  Even when the word “house” is conventionally attached to such structures – as at Yarnton near Oxford, Lismore Fields in Derbyshire and Balbridie close to Aberdeen – their character and purpose(s) remain obscure. (Rowley-Conwy, 2002)  The elusiveness of British farming settlements, by contrast with those of central Europe, suggests that crop domestication played a quantitatively minor part in people’s lives until beyond the period known as the Neolithic.  Orkney, the single great exception, only highlights the rarity of substantial Neolithic crops elsewhere.  Whittle summarises this apparent marginality of cultivation (as distinct from animal herding) in the British and Irish Neolithic: 

“It is hard to find evidence of colonisation at the start of the Neolithic, for the sustained practice of mixed farming, or for permanent residence, until as late perhaps as the mid 2^nd millennium BC (the Middle Bronze Age).  Big regional archaeological projects which should have produced such evidence have signally not done so.  Instead the picture is of sporadic, episodic clearance, continued use of woodland resources alongside new domesticates, and of ill-defined occupations rather than homesteads, hamlets or villages.” (Whittle, 1996c) 

Thomas similarly sees domesticated plants in this period as limited to “…small-scale, garden horticulture, carried out on a sporadic basis…short-lived events of tillage, as opposed to the foundation of permanent fields.” (Thomas, 1999, p.25)  Confirmation comes from bone analysis suggesting that the first farmers of central and southern England relied heavily on meat and other animal products for food, with a marginal role for plants. (Richards, 1996)  That marginality, moreover, can itself be interpreted in a number of ways.  Where cereals were grown, traditionally there has been an assumption that flour was the intended product.  A powerful bias shaped by a narrow notion of subsistence long excluded consideration of the possibility that alcohol and its effects were driving motives, as Merryn and Graham Dineley have more recently proposed.  Their interpretation (which does not exclude purely nutritional cereal use) contends that rapid spread of cereals across Europe was essentially about the brewing of ale and diffusion of beer drinking. (Dineley, M. and G., 2000)  The great boon of cereal agriculture, it is being suggested, was less muesli or the daily fresh loaf than malted liquor and the alchemies of both fermentation and alcohol intoxication.  Much of the familiar Neolithic assemblage could have served such ends.  Querns, kilns, hearths and level floors are all consistent with production of beer or ale.  A brew based on unfermented grains and natural sugars would not only have been nutritious.  Further, it has been pointed out that its production would have been easier than that of baked bread. (SIRC, n.d.)  Moreover, Merryn Dineley offers a plausible account of the origin of animal domestication within the same development.  Since, she points out, ruminants are partial to spent grain, it is possible that goats, sheep or cattle were initially attracted to discarded fermentation waste around human settlements, in effect becoming partners in brewing. (Radford, 2002) 

The earliest known use of alcoholic drink was 9,000 years ago in Henan province, China.  There, as in Caucasian Georgia a millennium later, wine was produced from fermentation based on local produce around the times of the earliest agriculture. (McGovern, 2003)  This was no afterthought or compensation for long endured rigour of clearance and land labour.  Rather, the demon or more likely god(dess) of alcohol presided over the emergence of the Neolithic, with novel ceramic pottery as the ideal means of storage and libation.  Wine remains dated to around 7,000 years before the present have been discovered in the Neolithic village of Hajji Firuz Tepe in the Iranian Zagros mountains, while Limassol in Cyprus has yielded traces from 6,000 years ago.  In time the inebriating trail would lead to the vineyards of France and Germany, again perhaps based on local strains of vine. (Monastersky, 2003)  The Late Hallstatt and La Tene phases of the European Iron Age some 2,500 years ago are famed for alcohol use.  By that time the political significance of drinking is more apparent.  Its dispensation, involving ornate ceamic vessels, within collective contexts, apparently “…was a key part of a leader’s claim to rule.  Such feasts might take place at inauguration ceremonies or to accompany the distribution of loot or booty from raids or trading expeditions.” (Arnold, 2001)  Even earlier, however, alcohol production and consumption may imply complex hierarchical social arrangements and dynamics.  A recent study notes: "Feasts could be political tools for forming social alliances, fulfilling reciprocal obligations, creating social debt, collecting tribute and advertising social differences." (Jennings et al, 2005, p.275)  Alcohol use, in other words, could well be associated with both social solidarity and social differentiation, as it is today. 

The evidence for Britain is sparce, but possible brewed drink remains are known (North Mains, Strathallan) from around 4,300 years ago. (Dineley, 1996)  More definite are even earlier, 5,000 year old traces of cereal-based fermented alcohol - laced with hemlock and henbane - discovered near Skara Brae in the Neolithic metropolis of Orkney. (Gourlay, 2001)  The Orkney remains are contemporary with known beer drinking in Egypt, Sumeria and Mesopotamia.  They mark the limit of current knowledge of alcohol use in Britain, though barley had arrived some 500 years earlier.  It is already clear, however, that the early British farmers, like their counterparts further east, were familiar with the dopamine raising, anxiety reducing, endorphin releasing powers of alcohol. (Braun, 1996).  More likely than not they associated it with otherworldly powers, if only because it could make this world seem other for a while. 

REMEMBER WHAT THE DORMOUSE SAID... 

However important, alcohol is nowhere near the full story of induced Neolithic consciousness change.   In many cultures, psychoactive drugs and their effects are viewed as vehicles for making contact with other worlds, in particular those of the ancestors in the context of temple-centred ceremony.  Rudgley (1999, p.137-141) has proposed cannabis and/or opium as likely candidates in the early western Neolithic and a growing body of opinion points in the same direction. (Devereux, 1997: Sherratt, 1997; Thomas, J., 1998)  The Orkney brew described above, it will be remembered, was blended with henbane and hemlock.  Henbane, bearer of the trance-inducing, hallucinatory (and extremely toxic) drug Hyoscyamine, is one of what Sherratt (1996) terms “the Saturnine herbs”.  Sherratt recounts how during the 1980’s henbane was recovered from carbonised Neolithic porridge, eaten from Grooved Ware pottery in the context of a mortuary structure, Balfarg/Balbirnie in Fife, Scotland.  Discovery in the 1920's of three burial chambers at the Jersey La Houghe Bie site adds weight to Sherratt's thesis.  David Keys reports that the chambers "...contained 21 pottery vessels marked with a burnt, resin-like material.  Archaeologists believed that this was from drugs, possibly opium or hashish."  (Keys, 1992)  More recently, and more definitively, opium poppy seeds were retrieved from a long mound ditch dating to over five and a half millennia ago, in the river Nene valley, Northamptonshire.  Reporting in “British Archaeology”, Frances Healy and Jan Harding (2003) observe: 

“Opium poppy can grow as an arable weed, but the lack of both typical arable weeds and cereal remains from the Long Barrow ditches suggests this plant may have been a crop in its own right.  It can be used for its oil, as a spice, or for its opiate properties.” 

Why anyone should introduce an oil source from afar when local alternatives were available is unclear.  In addition it seems arbitrary to assume that the plant’s equally sensate spice and drug properties would be separated in the way implied.  The conclusion seems compelling: as well as being alcohol imbibers, accumulating evidence points to our Neolithic predecessors being stoners in a more broadly based and rounded way.  The Nene seeds reinforce multiple opium poppy discoveries at Rhineland LBK sites and in Swiss prehistoric lakeside villages (Carr, 1995, ch.4).  Seeds of the same plant were retrieved from a neolithic crannog at Loch Tay in central Scotland.  The traces found so far in Britain are too fragmentary to establish whether or not the various psychoactive preparations were differentially preferred between places and in different usage contexts.  Neither is it clear how access may have been restricted or controlled.  Did the shamans monopolise the magical plants?  Were women allowed to use, or even tend them?  Were they perhaps required to tend them either for the community or for a secton of it?  The Orkney discovery suggests simultaneous multiple drug use (“cocktails”), but a fuller picture, including the social profile of drug producers and users, is far from view.  What we have are glimpses of ceramic-mediated imbibing of alcohol and other intoxicating drinks, while smoking and wad or enema administered usage cannot be ruled out.  The affinity with mortuary and burial contexts strongly suggests that, at least for some, collective ancestral preoccupations were psychoactively enhanced and focussed. 

Sherratt (1997) interprets cord impressions on Baden, Bell Beaker and Corded Ware ceramics as denoting cannabis as mind alterant.  It seems only a matter of time before Rudgley is vindicated by direct evidence of Neolithic cannabis cultivation and consumption in Britain, matching the abundance of hemp seeds from central Europe. (Rudgley, 1998)  It is of course possible that the plant was grown there solely as a fibre source or for essential fatty acids, much as it is possible that former US president Clinton never inhaled. 

Oddly, recent discussion of prehistoric psychedelics has given little attention to the likelihood of mushroom use, if not cultivation.  Unlike opium or cannabis, here is a powerful native drug source throughout the western European monumental zone as well as many other places.   Rudgley (1998) points out that no clear case has been made for mushroom consumption outside of the Americas, where such potent psychedelics as the mescal bean and peyote cactus have been used for at least 10,000 years. (Onlooker, 2002)  Yet this absence of evidence need not be decisive.  Mushroom eating in central and southern America, often in the shamanic context of curing rituals (Wasson, n.d.; Schultes, 1998), is consistently described as organised on other than agricultural terms.  The plants are typically and traditionally gathered through a special form of foraging journey.  They are approached through exploration more intuitive – though knowledge based – and with a quite different logic from that of planting, tending and harvesting.  In “Plants of the Gods”, Richard Schultes and Albert Hoffman (1980, p.148) describe the gathering of sacred Psilocybe mushrooms in the Mazatec region of Mexico:  “The mushrooms are collected in the forests at the time of the new moon by a virgin girl, then taken to a church to remain briefly on the altar.  They are never sold in the marketplace.”  The archaeological implications are evident.  There would be no fields or tending places to excavate, just - perhaps - occasional concentrations of natural spores from undomesticated plants.  Mushroom use on such a basis would leave few traces. 

Around a dozen varieties of these psilocybin-bearing “magic mushrooms” are said to grow wild through Britain, most famously Liberty Caps (Psilocybe semilanceata).  Amanita Muscaria, widely "thought to be one of the most anciently used hallucinogens" (Stockwell, 1988, p.40), is also common through the northern temperate regions and its use is established in historic times.  It is almost inconceivable that early humans were unaware of such seasonal mushroom harvests.  La Barre (1972) points out that foragers, with a dynamic and exploratory relationship with potential foodstuffs around them, would inevitably encounter a range of psychoactive plants and be aware of their remarkable properties.  Their striking forms and speed of growth could not have gone unnoticed and the fruit was surely tried.  Building on earlier work by Lewis-Williams and Dowson (1988), Jeremy Dronfield has drawn parallels between some Paleolithic cave paintings and modern drug-influenced art, speculating on mushroom inspiration for the former. (Wainright, 1999; though see Bednarik, 1990)  Analysis of stones engraved in Southern Africa five millennia ago adds cannabis to the possible sources of entoptic imagery. (Thakeray, 2005)  If there were such a pre-existing European psychedelic aesthetic, it would have been of great significance to the early agro-pastoralists.  They would have seen the surreally phallic forms of the psilocybin-producing mushroom fruit emerging from the dung of their revered cattle and, surely, mythologised the vision-granting fungus.  Could this observed association be part of an explanation for the cattle cult of the Neolithic?  Could it be why, in addition to any alleged flavouring benefits, the Neolithic farmers of Orkney added animal dung – along with hemlock and henbane – to their ale? (Gourlay, 2001)  Perhaps the reciprocal exchange of alcoholic beverage and mushroom was important for the cultural settlement between farmer and forager.  Their joint or parallel consumption could have helped seal integration through a kind of psychological and emotional blurring within a festive and/or solemn frame.  This is in addition to likely shamanic uses by individuals, again in a collective context.  The causewayed enclosures invite consideration as formal sites of such community development. 

Prehistoric tripping is at last being given the attention it deserves.  A decade ago Andrew Sherratt proposed for the Neolithic generally: “The beginning of farming probably wasn’t a planned exercise in raising calorific productivity, but more likely a matter of swapping around certain valuable plants with special products, which then led on to the practice of ‘growing your own’ with some less exciting but carbohydrate-rich species.” (Sherratt, 1996)  Since then the status of those "special products" within early plant selection and domestication has become more generally accepted.  Certainly there is no obvious reason why psychedelics should not have informed the conception and experience of spiritual life during the Neolithic.  Soma, the legendary lost hallucinogenic of Hindu mythology, is celebrated unambiguously in the earliest sacred texts of that religion. (Thompson, 2003)  Whether it is the same or a parallel preparation, the equally unidentified ancient Persian mind-alterant Haoma is addressed in equally devotional terms in the verses of the Zoroastrian Avesta.  There, in what is widely viewed as a founding text of west Asian monotheistic traditions, Zarathustra appeals: “I call down, O yellow (Haoma), your intoxicating power, strength, victoriousness…that I may go about among beings autonomously, overcoming hostility, defeating the Lie…”  In this remarkable tribute the revelation of the prophet is inseparable from psychedelic consciousness.  Thus, for the Avesta: “…that intoxication which is Haoma’s is accompanied by gladdening Truth.” (“Haoma Yasht”, in Malandra, 1983, pp.153, 156).  Taking a wider view, the affinity in various societies between drugs and engagement with otherworldly entities and powers is an anthropological commonplace.  Even so, the application of the insight to the Neolithic apparently had to wait for a research agenda drawn up by graduates from the 1960’s.  Already little remains of an earlier vision of reasonably progressive Neolithic farmers pioneering crop domestication on the basis of rational food optimisation alone.  What is emerging is a more human picture of people with spiritual as well as culinary appetites, aspirations and potentials.  At least in some ancestor-related contexts, psychoactive plants were used by our predecessors in connection with identity-focussing activities.  They got stoned, therefore they were. 

AZTEC INTERLUDE (PSYCHEDELICS AND THE STATE) 

Notwithstanding Sherratt's touching allusion to "growing your own", a grounded aproach to archaic drug use should not be over-coloured by the more amorphous cosmic benevolence of nostalgic sixties ideals.  Setting (external environment) and set (attitudes, motives, preconceptions and intentions brought to the experience by individuals) have long been assumed critical for the impact of plant-based and other mind-alterants. (Aaronson and Osmond, 1971)  Such a framework can shed light on the following account by Marlene Dobkin de Rios (1990, p.142) of Aztec mushroom usage at state level: 

“We know that during the coronation feast of Montezuma in 1502, teonanacatl (the divine mushroom) was used to celebrate the event.  War captives were slaughtered in great numbers to honour Montezuma’s accession to the throne.  Their flesh was eaten, and a banquet was prepared after the victims’ hearts were offered to the gods.  After the sacrifice was over, everyone was bathed in blood.” 

Some “happening”.  Even allowing for exaggeration within early Christian missionary accounts, a clear enough picture emerges: one of Josef Stalin on stage at Altamont, or Charles Manson being inducted into the masons.  We are reminded that the social processes which structure available settings not rarely entail manipulation, coercion, violence and death – alongside and sometimes intermingling with festivity, solidarity, joy and healing.  Within the Aztec tributary state, religiously sanctioned human sacrifice – apparently on an industrial scale – was inseparable from display of absolute and unconditional state power. (Hassig, 1988)  The local organising unit of Aztec society was the “calpulli”.  Apparently it had originally been a self-regulating, clan-type grouping of families identifying with a common ancestor.  Centralized urban development around the capital Tenochtitlan saw the transformation of calpullis into political divisions of the Aztec Empire.  They became constitutive components of the astonishing Aztec military-priestly bureaucracy, peaked by a hereditary emperor. (Schmal, 2004) 

The Mexica tribe, whose culture came to dominate the Valley of Mexico and comprise the core of the empire, arrived as despised nomadic foragers and were initially relegated to inferior land.  Their rise through the role of mercenary allies of an existing city state was the framework of rapid internal as well as regional development.  Many urbanised calpullis came to specialise in particular crafts arranged in hierarchies of ranked esteem (Hooker, 1996), perhaps resembling the “jatis” of Indian society.  As in India, the social pyramid was not entirely inflexible, though among the Aztecs mobility took place through individual rather than group re-scheduling.  Elevation to the landowning “pilli” (nobility) strata could be achieved through distinction in battle, particularly in the taking of prisoners for sacrifice.  Women, of course, were systematically subordinate to men. (Hooker, 1999)  Male members of a calpulli comprised a fighting company for war.  They also formed compulsory work teams for city building and maintenance projects.  Fisher (2003) writes: "(U)rbanisation eventually took hold around the ceremonial centres, where an emergent theocratic class could be supported by tributary surplus extracted from the peasantry."  Within the framework of such an analysis, the brutality of European conquest need not lead to downplaying of the equally civilised brutality of the preceding class society.  Indeed the conquerers were aggressively aware of the the importance of  establishing continuity between their own grandiose violence and that of their predecessors.  As Molina Monte (1980) observes: "Cortes, for reasons of policy and symbolism, scavenged the old temples deliberately to build his own capital upon the ruins of Tenochtitlan." 

Before the Europeans arrived, religion and material life were inseparable.  Not only was the supreme “Tlatoani” (Great Lord) both military chief and highest priest, as befits a perceived descendent of the gods. (Smith, 1996)  Eduardo Matos Moctezuma (1988) describes how festivals and sacrifices at the Templo Mayor (Great Temple) of Tenochtitlan were structured around the dual economic foundations of the empire: water and agriculture on the one side; on the other, war and the human sacrifice as well as material tribute that – alongside or helping shape long distance trade – were its companions.  The beings that received such offerings were, respectively, Tlaloc and Huitzilopochtli, the gods of earth, rain and sun, and of sky and war.  Ritual killing, then, had systematic ideological cover through nature deities that were almost certainly adapted from spirits known within foraging life ways. 

Drugs were inseparable from the political organisation and collective experience of the Aztec spectacles.  It does not follow that ritualised mass violence necessarily took place in the ceremonies of Maiden Bower or Avebury.  The Aztec slaughters, however, should discourage dogmatically pacific images of prehistoric drug use at such places, particularly when - as with the British Neolithic - a proto-state may have been in the process of forming. 

STONE 53 REVISITED 

It may not be long before academic reappraisal of the Stonehenge “axe carvings” begins.  First noticed in 1953, they were immediately identified as representations of axes and a single dagger.  Half a century later more carvings have been revealed through high-resolution laser scanning.  The enhanced images of the “axes” on Stone 53 (a Trilithon sarsen) are striking and far more clearly defined than previous reproductions of the weathered indentations (www.archaeoptics.co.uk).  The general resemblance of these and other burial related carvings (Wessex Archaeology, 2003) to a well known type of early Bronze Age flanged axehead  (blade pointed upward) is evident.  However, two further points can be made.  First, the carvings resemble the metal axeheads alone: it is assumed that a decision was made not to represent the handles. (Fitzpatrick, 2003)  Second, the “axes” as imaged are oddly heterogeneous. 

In fact by the Upper Palaeolithic, stone axes had developed substantially in the direction of standardised production of a range of types. (Chase, 2003)  The trend became still more pronounced with the appearance of metallurgy and the increasing importance of casting within it.  Preceded by copper, the first bronze artefacts in Britain date from around 5,000 years ago, a millennium after their initial appearance in the cities of Mesopotamia.  Their various advantages over flint (in terms of sharpness, thinness, weight and durability) ensured rapid adoption of bronze axes in particular. (Pryor, 2004, p.266)  It is generally assumed that the earliest tools and weapons made from the new alloy were imported from mainland Europe.  Indigenous metal-smiths at some debated point began producing and their labour process underwent apparently rapid development.  The first flat-axes, as Dyer (1997, p.109) describes, were cast in open moulds carved into a stone block.  Subsequently two matching half moulds would be prepared and tied together with molten liquid poured into the resulting space.  An important innovation came with the “lost wax” method in the Middle Bronze Age.  Here a beeswax model of the intended object would be covered in clay.  Kiln baking allowed the wax to be poured out and replaced by liquid bronze.  Removal of the clay from the cooled metal would reveal a copy of the wax original for forging into final shape.  At a later point still the moulds themselves would be made from bronze. 

This line of technological development has implications for the types of products that would appear.  It is also significant for interpretation of the Stonehenge carvings.  The shift to “lost wax” techniques in particular permitted greater accuracy within casting and lessened the importance of forging.  The effect would be to reduce variation between products of the same mould.  Yet by contrast with the largely standardised bronze axes of around 3,800 years ago when, according to Wessex Archaeology (2003), the flanged type was being made, the “axes” on Stone 53 vary greatly in size, shape and “blade” curvature.  Unless extremely crudely executed, they more closely resemble natural variants of a biological species or cluster of related species – specifically mushrooms - than crafted human artefacts.  By contrast, the undoubted dagger on the same stone is realistic and unambiguous, distinguished by its clarity from the diverse constellation of “axes”.  It may also be significant that when seen as mushrooms, the “axes” represent entire fruits, requiring no interpretive additions. 

A curious parallel may be mentioned.  Schultes and Hoffman (1980, p.146) reproduce a section of an illustration from the “Codex Vindobonensis”.  The picture depicts nine deities receiving “instructions from Quetzalcoatl (the culture-bearing Aztec deity – D.B.) on the origin and use of the sacred hallucinogenic mushrooms.”  In the published image a god is shown holding a pair of mushrooms indistinguishable from the laser scanner “axes” on Stone 53.  Of course this proves nothing about the latter.  It may, however, help explain the strikingly non-literal character of the Stonehenge “axes”, if that is what, at least in part, they represent.  A glimpse of what may be to come appears in “British Archaeology”, where Thomas Goskar and colleagues (2003) note that “sacred or ceremonial mushrooms” are among non-axe interpretations of the carvings, which they nevertheless characterise as “almost certainly” axe representations.  In this context it does not help that some less mainstream commentators have jumped to conclusions as dogmatic as those of the axe-men.  In his sometimes revealing but uneven study “Kannabis Spirituality in the Ancient World”, for example, Dan Russell (n.d.) asserts that the “axes” represent “floating mushrooms”.  There is something reactive in this position: Russell seems to be reasoning along the lines, the straights say “alpha”, so I will say “omega”, and is unconcerned to relate historical or mythological drug lore to wider aspects of social development. 

A more independent framing of the issues was published in the "Mercian Mysteries" journal as early as 1993.  In response to the publication of a previous set of Stonehenge "axe" images (drawings) in the journal "Antiquity", Bob Trubshaw queried: "...could these not just as easily be considered as fungi?" (Trubshaw, 1993)  Ongoing research makes the question more contemporary now than when originally posed by Trubshaw.  What could be considered is a dual symbolisation invoking both axe and mushroom as iconic signifieds.  Despite the apparent discontinuity between shaped rock and grown fungus, they converge within a logic of development of social organisation as well as within an iconic form.  Within a single image the carvings could have denoted both axe as chiefly power and mushroom as shamanic power.  That iconic duality might have signified either unified leadership or the presence (or ideal) of some inter-elite alliance. 

The preceding discussion of Stone 53 is speculative in much the same way as traditional axe interpretation.  The axe proponents, however, limit their speculation to a single widely recognised artefact abstracted from the overall life of the society within which it was created and - everyone seems to agree - symbolically dramatised.  How might this relate to prehistoric psychedelics?  In her cross-cultural study of drug use, Dobkin de Rios (1990, p.201) generalises thus: “Global studies of plant hallucinogens indicate that with the advent of intensive agriculture and the ensuing social structural complexity and segmentation, elite segments of urban society usurp and manipulate hallucinogenic plant use.”  Such a scenario in some measure describes the direction in which the societies of the causewayed enclosures were moving.  Unlike in parts of western Asia, urbanisation in a recognisable sense was not an element of the British Neolithic.  However, in an echo of the continental longhouse settlements, proto-property was fitfully appearing and material accumulation was fast becoming an option.  Dobkin de Rios points to Aztec and Maya examples of monopolised drug use to explain the fast demise (though not disappearance) of central American drug knowledge upon western contact, “…when a specialized caste of drug users was quickly eliminated.” (ibid., p.202)  Something similar could have happened through an unknown crisis confronting Neolithic or early post-Neolithic elites, with alcohol finally displacing the alternative intoxicants.  It is tempting to associate this with the abandonment of the great megalithic sites noted by Ronald Hutton in the two centuries or so from around 3,350 years ago. (Hutton, 1991, p.132)  By then, in a time of more developed agricultural life, smaller, less spectacular and apparently more familial round barrows were coming to dominate both landscapes and social agendas.  A more exclusive cultural emphasis on alcohol appears to be associated with the focussed, settled pattern.  More than likely, among the available mind-alterants, the powers of alcohol were judged most predictable and least culturally disruptive in the new, labour-intensive conditions. 

OF FEASTS AND SOLIDARITIES 

It is now possible to begin to speculatively draw some thematic threads together.  Earlier I quoted Czerniak’s account of the agricultural settler/forager encounter in central Europe.  The tension and delicate mutual adjustment at such boundaries would have been no less pronounced further west.  Zilhao notes “…the ‘enclave’ nature of early Neolithic settlements in litteral-central Portugal, which occupy areas previously uninhabited by late Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.  The latter continue to thrive in their own territories for some 500 years after initial Neolithic settlement…but contrasts in material culture, economy, nutrition, and mortuary behaviour remain unchanged throughout this period.  Neolithic sites feature pottery, polished hand axes, and heat pre-treatment of flint, which are absent altogether from the Mesolithic, as are domesticates.” (Zilhao, 2001)  Even where the stand-off was less stark, there were options short of full and rapid conversion for the gatherer-hunters.  As Whittle’s discussion of the possible role of myth and narrative within the Neolithic transition in Brittany suggests, indigenous people could have been active partners with encroaching agriculture within a range of imaginable scenarios. (Whittle, 2000, p.254)  There are alternatives to both forager-farmer polarisation on the one hand and rapid, full subsumption of the former by the latter on the other.  Neither need incorporation be envisaged as foragers being dragged in by the ankles, fingernails scraping across a dusty chalk outcrop.  Pryor, for example, describes how members of the Larnian and Obanian cultures of Ireland and Scotland “adapted their essentially Mesolithic lifestyle very gradually”, accepting polished stone tools and pottery at an early date but apparently not a great deal else. (Pryor, 2004, P.124)  The continuing importance of wild food within early Neolithic diets in Britain (Robinson, 2000) further underscores the selectivity of change. 

There is no reason whatsoever to assume that the attitudes of European foragers, any more than those of colonial “converts” in more recent times, were shaped by unconditional gratitude to modernity and its agents.  The bearers of the new ways, in any case, were themselves manifestly resistant to the full-blooded sedentary side of Neolithic transformation.  Some at least of their settlements, Thomas observes, may have been year-round bases for some members of the community: “But they might equally have been seasonal campsites, or the meeting-places of dispersed populations.”  And this was no brief prelude to automatic settlement of a more permanent and systematic type, for Thomas adds: “By the later Neolithic the impression of cyclical return to known places appears to have given way to a less constrained movement across the landscape: a landscape in which larger open areas were gradually emerging.” (Thomas, 1999, p.23) 

The importance of such areas would only have grown as the foragers began to be absorbed.  Indeed the shift toward “less constrained movement across the landscape” could well be interpreted as at least in part the outcome of gatherer-hunter incorporation.  What Thomas is describing is emergence of new pastoralist type forms, retaining much of the mobility of Mesolithic forager life, but with additional and variable means of more controlled subsistence together with a framework of community expanding in scale and – at least potentially – in internal complexity.  The European Neolithic, it appears, was evolving chiefdom-like forms of social organisation (Baldia, 2001, section 4.5), but with egalitarian undercurrents evocative of the archaic collectivism of the forager bands.  Such a configuration might well have appealed to elements among the gatherer-hunters and facilitated their integration.  The Mesolithic communities, after all, were themselves the products of prior cultural development: towards the end of the Upper Palaeolithic (12,000-8,000 years ago) middle and high altitude Europeans undertook a substantial broadening of diet involving energy-intensive large seeds and nuts. (Stiner, 2001)  Now, in the earliest phases of  Neolithic development, their descendents were confronted by a dynamic way of life at least initially rich in both mobility and resources.  Veneration of cattle by the Neolithic pioneers suggests intense ideological motivation and it seems likely that proselytising was part of their worldview.  Conversion and recruitment would be on the agenda and one approach would be to construct dramatic venues for incorporation. The evidently non-defensive causewayed camps must be prime candidates.  Their scale and socially integrative logic of construction could contain solemnity or festivity and both probably had their place there.  Whatever else was said or done at such sites (music, dance and cementing of kin alliances if not sex itself quite naturally spring to mind), alcohol from the new grains, likely blended with other psychoactive substances, would have fuelled the events and the changes people experienced as they participated. 

WHEN THE SHIP COMES IN 

Recent rethinking on the earliest Neolithic crops and that on monumental chronology and significance are related developments.  In each case an essentially utilitarian reading of Neolithicisation is being challenged.  Now that prehistoric psychedelic life is being recognised, established interpretations of original agriculture being shaped by purely quantitative cost-benefit dietary calculations appear hopelessly ethnocentric.  The linear view of monumental construction as naturally underwritten by a surplus from prior food production is equally untenable.  As Bradley (1993) among others points out, in Britain (as well as in north America and elsewhere) monument building appears to have preceded the appearance of “advanced agricultural capabilities” and facilitated rather than expressed sedentary ways of life.  In Europe it was the foraging-dominated north-west that pioneered monumentalism, not the farmers of central Europe, whose concern was more with houses for the living than for the dead. 

The influence of the farmers can nonetheless be detected.  Not only did the long mounds of Britain and the Atlantic zone recall (and probably consciously evoke) the Bandkeramik longhouses (Bradley, 1998); this cultural reference to the European household form was matched by echoing of the central European enclosures in the causewayed enclosures of the west.  Such resemblances and convergences raise a question mark over Cunliffe's recent reflections (2001, p.155) on a distinctive "Atlantic mind-set" through the period in question.  That concept almost certainly represents a serious overstatement which could easily provide fuel or regionalist, even nationalist interpretive bias.  Modern geo-political identities (Britain, European, African, Pole, whatever) can be read into the past in a way that abstracts moments of the Neolithic into imaginary absolutes.  The most likely consequence is aggravation of contemporary commitment to national difference while shedding little real light on the past.  Even so, whereas the European enclosures look like TRB consolidations of prior settlement and inter-settlement development, the sequence appears reversed in the north-west.  Here the great collective enclosures were anticipative of settlement.  They may even have promoted agriculture and therefore steps toward settlement first and foremost to produce special ingredients for the large scale ritual gatherings.  As Thomas writes: “…just as human groups constructed monuments, so monuments created people – in the sense that they prompted a particular set of experiences and understandings of the world.” (Thomas, 1999, p.224)  The causewayed camps invite imaginings of great cultural solidarities where transformations could occur and new or adapted identities be affirmed.  New hierarchies were also implied, but these were probably muted in the serotonin-rich gatherings of the early days. 

Beyond initiation, such places as Maiden Bower, Thomas observes, “…could represent the fixed point within a seasonal round, places of sporadic or seasonal agglomeration for population and herds.” (ibid., p.26)   In Whittle’s formulation, they were “…built constructions (which) ordered collective allegiance to place against the tide of individual or small-group settlement mobility.” (Whittle, 1997, p.147)  After some time, the collective focus would harden into wooden then stone structures at the places of association.  The landscape would mutate, initially with earthworks and associated monuments.  These would reach their haunting crescendo with great projects like Stonehenge and the Avebury complex.  From around 4,000 years ago new realities of demarcated fields and more enduring domestic life among them were ascendant. (Pryor, 1998)   Like the dead, the living would now inhabit fixed sites within anchored homes.  Around the same time, as Barnatt (1998) describes, the large communal structures gave way to much smaller monuments apparently associated with settled agricultural groupings of a more recognisably proto-modern character.  From around a thousand years later, corresponding to agricultural intensification and introduction of new crops such as emmer wheat and hulled barley, a further wave of banked enclosures began to appear throughout the British Isles.  Known variously as “ring-forts”, “rounds” and “raths”, they typically surrounded human settlements of long duration. (Thomas, R., 1998)  The renewed freedom to roam, confirmed in the ceremonies of the early Neolithic causewayed enclosures, turned out to be the harbinger of property and, with that, new regimes of work and life discipline. By contrast with gatherer-hunter modes of subsistence, agriculture assumes human self-counterposition to the rest of nature with consequences (such as human-induced global warming) reaching fruition of sorts in our own times.  Tattersall observes of this new human role as would-be controller of nature: "...once outside, humans could - indeed, virtually had to - view their place in nature differently; for indeed, in a very real sense, their place was now apart from nature."   Henceforth, as Tattersall (echoing biblical Genesis) notes: “…it becomes a battle with nature, a matter of sidestepping  environmental vicissitudes through the application of technology.” (Tattersall, 1998, pp.217-8)  Little wonder that a couple of millennia later these regions would - more or less - endorse another, more ideological export from western Asia propounding a conception of a fall from Eden into worldly suffering, together with a promise of escape. 

Farming then presented itself as less a liberation than the morning after the great late Mesolithic celebration.

  

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David Binns, Autumn-Winter 2005-2006.  (Final editing 2nd May 2006)