Houses of the Dead?

ed edA Alistair Barclay, David Dav Field & Jim JimL Leary Oxbow Books Feb 20 2020

£32 pp2 pp216 pb isbn 9781789254105 97

Taken together, places where people lived, and where they buried their dead and held appropriate ceremonies, might seem so wideranging a topic to be almost meaningless. In the British earlier Neolithic, however, and in comparable contexts across much of Europe, it has long been noted that houses and funerary monuments had similar, distinctive plans: long, rectangular in general, and often in specific details such as orientations and divisions of space. This eclectic collection of essays derives from a Neolithic Studies Group seminar held

in 2018, and is informed by a wealth of new data. From specific excavations in Britain and Ireland (Cat’s Brain, Dorstone Hill, Parc Cybi and Ballyglass, with a strong case along the way that “Neolithic” field walls at Céide Fields are at their oldest Bronze Age) to wider surveys (Maltese “temples”, Linearbandkeramik houses, life and death in Scotland) the common theme is that better material and dating are encouraging more specific, local and shortterm visions of how people worked forms of architecture into inter-generational lives.