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A Life Less Ordinary

A Life Less Ordinary: the Ritualization of theDomestic Sphere in Later Prehistoric Europe

a language that is dying too. That is how words havegained their ascendancy over the ideas they impart.One of those words is ‘ritual’.

The use of this term has a special importance inthe history of archaeology, and also in the ways inwhich the subject is practised now. Ritual has beentreated as a particular kind of communication, a wayof acting out fundamental propositions about theworld. It occupies a specialized arena in which thesacred penetrates the mundane. From this perspec-tive, ritual is often equated with the expression ofreligious belief and is marked by a high degree offormality (Turner 1969; Bloch 1989; Rappaport 1999).It is performed using prescribed movements, ges-tures and utterances and is often conducted throughparticular media such as music or dance. It can hap-pen at special places and times, and it may involverestricted groups of people and unusual kinds ofartefacts. To that extent at least it is cut off fromeveryday activity. These assumptions are most preva-lent in field archaeology, and I shall discuss someexamples later on.

A second level of analysis grows out of thisconception of ritual. It relates to the changing iden-

Richard Bradley

This article, which is based on the fourteenth McDonald Lecture, considers two tensionsin contemporary archaeology. One is between interpretations of specific structures, monu-ments and deposits as the result of either ‘ritual’ or ‘practical’ activities in the past, andthe other is between an archaeology that focuses on subsistence and adaptation and onethat emphasizes cognition, meaning, and agency. It suggests that these tensions arisefrom an inadequate conception of ritual itself. Drawing on recent studies of ritualization,it suggests that it might be more helpful to consider how aspects of domestic life took onspecial qualities in later prehistoric Europe. The discussion is based mainly on Neolithicenclosures and other monuments, Bronze Age and Iron Age settlement sites and theViereckschanzen of central Europe. It may have implications for field archaeology as well associal archaeology, and also for those who study the formation of the archaeological record.

Words gain a terrible power over the concepts theydescribe. They can be technical terms, like hillfort orchambered tomb, or they may convey more complexnotions. What usually happens is that they developin one tradition of scholarship and remain the sameas everything around them changes. They are likethe rocks that punctuate the course of a fast-flowingriver. And, like those rocks, they are dangerous.

Archaeologists have a professional fondness forrelics, but all too often this extends to the very lan-guage they use. They can change the definitions ofterms like Neolithic or Bronze Age, sanctuary ormetal hoard, but find it difficult to communicatewith one another unless they continue to employthem. Every one of those terms carries associationsfrom which they distance themselves, and yet theirvery language affects how they think about the past.

That is a real problem, but it becomes still moreserious when those terms are associated with ab-stract ideas. It would be hard to conduct a discus-sion of prehistory that did not refer to culture, nature,adaptation or landscape, and yet these are all wordswhose past connotations can easily lead to confu-sion. Archaeologists discuss the lives of the dead in

Cambridge Archaeological Journal 13:1, 5–23 © 2003 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

DOI: 10.1017/S0959774303000015 Printed in the United Kingdom

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tity of archaeology and to its position among thesocial sciences. There has been a striking oscillationin the dominant interests of scholars (Kristiansen1996; Sherratt 1997, 1–6). On the one hand, there areperiods in the history of archaeology which are char-acterized by a quest for general principles. This kindof research considers extensive geographical areasand long periods of time. In practice, it places aconsiderable emphasis on population, environment,subsistence and human ecology. That is not to denythat social factors have played a significant role aswell, but this tradition has certainly emphasized theimportance of universal processes rather than thelocal and particular. As Edmund Leach pointed outin 1973, archaeology of this kind is influenced byfunctionalist anthropology.

In that same paper, Leach predicted a rap-prochement with structural anthropology, and thisnew alliance represents the opposite pole in the cy-cle. It may have developed in ways that Leach couldnot have foreseen, but it is often concerned with thelocal and small scale and it places considerable em-phasis on symbolism, meaning and agency (Barrett1994; Hodder 1999a, ch. 4; Tilley 1999; Dobres 2000).For some scholars this approach is currently in theascendant but, for others, a middle ground remains.This is perhaps the situation of cognitive archaeology.

Colin Renfrew (1994a) was right to say that thearchaeologists of the 1960s and 70s were reluctant toinvestigate the roles of ritual and religion: a positionthat echoes the stance taken by Gordon Childe in hisstudies of European prehistory (Renfrew 1994b, 125).Ritual was either rationalized as adaptive or dis-missed as epiphenomenal. That view might seemnatural to a Marxist like Childe, yet for differentreasons the Cambridge school of ‘palaeoeconomists’took an equally hard line. Ritual, they said, was notimportant in the past and not worth studying in thepresent. Most activities that might be described bythis term played a role in human adaptation. As Higgs& Jarman put it, ‘the soul leaves no skeleton’ (1975, 1).

If there has been a change of emphasis, it hasbeen towards a greater concern with those areas thatwere declared out of bounds by an earlier genera-tion of archaeologists. To some extent this has re-sulted from the very process that Leach hadanticipated. After a prolonged period in which thetwo fields had drifted apart, there is more commonground today between archaeology and anthropol-ogy. To a large extent it is due to a new emphasis onmaterial culture. This can be illustrated by recentresearch on ancient art, mortuary practices, land-scape and architecture. The irony is that these had

formed part of a more traditional set of studies fiftyyears before. The main difference is not one of sub-ject matter, but approach.

Some of these changes register the play of fash-ion in academic archaeology, but rather more is in-volved. Two points are important here. There remainsa fundamental disagreement over the feasibility ofconducting any kind of cognitive archaeology (Ren-frew 1994a), and there is confusion among thoseengaged in fieldwork as to the right ways of distin-guishing between the residues of daily life and thoseof ritual activity. For the most part the specialistswho study excavated material offer little assistance.They seem to be more concerned with the formationof the archaeological record than they are with itsinterpretation (Schiffer 1996). This contribution con-siders each of these points in turn. But those issuesare closely intertwined. Paradoxical as it may seem,I shall make the claim that it is the very existence ofrituals in the past that makes much of prehistoricarchaeology possible.

Ritual is one of those words which have sur-vived from an older archaeology and continue tohaunt the discipline today. It is impossible to avoidtaking it into the vocabulary of modern research andyet it is difficult to do so without inheriting a legacyof confusion. That confusion affects both the studyof prehistory and its changing identity among thedisciplines that investigate the past. Without a clearernotion of what they mean by ritual it will be difficultfor field archaeologists to interpret their observa-tions. In the same way, archaeological theory willcontinue to drift between an obsession with adapta-tion and a search for meaning that will leave thesubject as divided as it was before.

I can illustrate this dilemma in concrete terms. Iwould like to consider two kinds of earthwork monu-ment which were supposedly used for rituals duringprehistory: the henges of the British Isles and theViereckschanzen of central Europe.

Let us begin with Durrington Walls, in south-ern England (Fig. 1). This is a large henge monumentwhich consists of a circular earthwork, defined byan external bank and an internal ditch, and enclosesthe head of a dry valley. Inside the enclosure therewere at least two timber circles, one of them ap-proached by an ‘avenue’ of paired posts which passedthrough a wooden screen in front of the building.All these features date from the later third millen-nium BC (Wainwright & Longworth 1971).

The excavation produced an enormous numberof artefacts, especially decorated pottery. Workedflint was also common and included some pieces of

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exceptional quality. Finds of faunal remains wereabundant too, and they were dominated by pig bones,as they usually are on sites of this kind (Albarella &Serjeantson 2002). Certain other items were rare orabsent. Flint and stone axes appeared in unexpect-edly low numbers and there were few wild animalbones.

The excavation report focused on several im-portant aspects of the site. The henge had been builton a massive scale and the construction of the perim-eter may have taken half a million worker hours.The timber structures inside the excavated area werealso large and it was uncertain whether they couldhave been roofed. The rich assemblage of food re-mains suggested that feasts had taken place withinthe earthwork. Like the other activities happeninginside that enclosure, these may not have been opento everyone, and the characteristic structure of the

monument might have meant that more people couldgather on the enclosure bank and observe what washappening in the interior (Bradley 1998a, ch. 8).

Taking these elements together, it seemed le-gitimate to suggest that Durrington Walls played aspecialized role. It was probably a ceremonial centreand it was interpreted in this way in the projectreport. Only four years later, however, the excava-tor, Geoffrey Wainwright, offered a new interpreta-tion and suggested that the enclosure had really beena major settlement (Wainwright 1975). What accountsfor this change?

Soon after the excavation of Durrington Walls,he investigated an Iron Age enclosure at GussageAll Saints, in southern England (Wainwright 1979).This was two thousand years later in date than thehenge but it had some of the same characteristics.Again it possessed an earthwork boundary, insidewhich there were timber structures, although it dif-fered from the other site as it also enclosed numer-ous pits (Fig. 2). Wainwright’s excavation identifiedmany finds of artefacts and food remains. Like the

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Figure 1. Outline plan of the henge monument atDurrington Walls, showing the positions of the twoexcavated timber circles and the location of a smallcircular enclosure which probably contained a thirdexample. Excavated post holes are shown in black and thelighter tone suggests the extent of these buildings beyondthe area investigated. Information from Wainwright &Longworth (1971) and Royal Commission on theHistorical Monuments of England (1979).

Figure 2. Outline plan of the enclosed Iron Agesettlement of Gussage All Saints during its first phase ofoccupation, showing the locations of storage pits withdeposits of specialized artefacts. Information fromWainwright (1979) and Hill (1995). Note how the pitscontaining structured deposits are ranged around theperimeter of a circle which does not conform to thelayout of the enclosure ditch.

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henge monument, some of those pits contained unu-sual deposits within their filling, but in this casethey included human and animal burials.

These pits are of particular interest, for it hasbeen shown by experiment that features of this typecan keep corn during the winter. This interpretationis confirmed by the deposits of carbonized grainwhich were left behind when the pits were cleaned.The human and animal remains, together with de-posits of artefacts, were placed inside the pits oncethe primary use of these containers was over. Simi-lar deposits are not unusual in the Iron Age storagepits of southern England and the near-Continent andseem to have conformed to a few fairly well-definedconventions (Hill 1995). Certain combinations of ani-mal bones or bird bones are often found in thesedeposits; there are recurrent associations betweendifferent types of artefacts; the human burials nor-mally shared a common orientation (Whimster 1981,5–18); and separate kinds of material might be asso-ciated with different stages in the filling of thesefeatures (Hill 1995). Further conventions seem tohave governed the placing of artefacts and bones inthe enclosure ditch at Gussage All Saints. It evenseems possible that much of the material initiallyinterpreted as occupation debris had been carefullyselected for deposition in the ground. An unknownproportion of the waste generated during the use ofthis site could have been removed and spread oncultivated land.

As I have suggested, the assemblage fromDurrington Walls is exceptional, and the same ap-plies to the configuration of the site itself. That is nottrue of Gussage All Saints, for the distinctive depos-its that have been found here have their counter-parts at many other Iron Age settlements. Moreover,there is evidence that this particular site played animportant part in the production of food and not justin its consumption. There are grain storage pits butthere are also what may have been raised granaries.The evidence for houses at Gussage All Saints ismuch more limited, but this may be due to the ef-fects of modern ploughing (Wainwright 1979).

In fact the comparison between the relativelymodest enclosures at Gussage All Saints and IronAge sites elsewhere has played a significant part indiscussions of the hillforts in southern England. Fora long time it appeared likely that these would havebeen high-status settlements and it even seemed asif it was from such places that food production wasmanaged by an élite (Cunliffe 1991, ch. 14). But re-cent work has questioned both these assumptions byshowing that there were few differences between

the archaeological evidence from the excavation ofhillforts and that from other Iron Age settlements(Hill 1996). The artefact assemblages were much thesame, but three features did distinguish the evidenceof the defended sites. They were defined by moreelaborate earthworks; they contained a higher den-sity of storage structures; and, it was claimed, theyprovided significantly greater evidence of ‘ritual’.

Oddly enough, such changes in the interpreta-tion of Iron Age hillforts were influenced by devel-opments in Neolithic studies. There is a certain ironyhere. Wainwright reinterpreted the henge monumentthat he had excavated in the light of his own work atGussage All Saints. Now it seems that Iron Agehillforts might have been ceremonial centres becausethey share so many features with henges.

An important influence on this debate was anew analysis of the finds from Durrington Walls(Richards & Thomas 1984). It investigated the waysin which different assemblages had entered the ar-chaeological record, placing a special emphasis onwhat has become known as ‘structured deposition’.It seemed as if certain items had been carefully placedat the foot of individual uprights in the main postcircle. There were specific patterns of association oravoidance between the contents of different compo-nents of the site. For example, in that same timbersetting pieces of pottery were deposited separatelyfrom flint artefacts, and across the site as a wholepotsherds with more complex decoration had differ-ent associations from those with simpler designs. Itseemed as if the placing of cultural material withinthe henge was governed by a number of conven-tions. That suggests a certain degree of formality,and Richards & Thomas argued that this is a defin-ing feature of ritual.

That was not the end of this particular debate.Fourteen years after he had published his reinter-pretation of Durrington Walls, the excavator returnedto the subject as part of a more general account ofhenge monuments. By now he had gone back to hisoriginal view that they were ceremonial centres(Wainwright 1989). He quoted the paper by Richards& Thomas, but this does not seem to have been adecisive influence on his thinking. In fact the prob-lem may not be resolved by the fine detail of thefield record. It needs to be thought about in a differ-ent way.

It would be wrong to suppose that such confu-sion is peculiar to the archaeology of the BritishIsles, or even to the monuments of the Neolithicperiod. Similar issues are just as apparent in the IronAge of central Europe.

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The German word Vier-eckschanze describes the formof a rectangular enclosure, butthe application of this term isusually restricted to a distinc-tive group of earthworks incentral Europe dating from thelate first millennium BC. Some-times it extends to rather simi-lar monuments in France,Belgium and the Netherlands,but it is with the sites in south-ern Germany and Bohemiathat this account is concerned(Buchsenschutz & Olivier1989; Bittel et al. 1990; Wieland1999).

These monuments arequite small and have just oneentrance, which is to the south,east or west. The earthworksare slight, and some enclo-sures were formed simply bya palisade (Fig. 3). These sitescan never have been defendedand they rarely occupy con-spicuous positions. In Bavaria,they are often located on poorsoils, but there are other casesin which they can be associ-ated with large Iron Age set-tlements. Viereckschanzen maybe found in isolation or canoccur close together in smallgroups. A number of thesesites are near to burial mounds(Fig. 4).

did not include any shafts and that other kinds ofbuilding could be found which were of similar char-acter to those recorded in settlements. Moreover,buildings very like the ‘shrine’ identified at Holz-hausen came to light amidst the structures on occu-pation sites of the same period (Venclová 1993; 1997;Murray 1995). How far was it appropriate to distin-guish between these earthworks and the remainingcomponents of the Iron Age landscape?

For a while it seemed as if a clearer distinctionmight be made on the basis of the excavated arte-facts, but they were limited in quantity and in manycases their original contexts were poorly defined.For example, a number of Viereckschanzen were builton the sites of open settlements (Fig. 4) and part ofthe artefact assemblage might predate these

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Figure 3. Outline plans of the Viereckschanzen at Ms &ecké Zehrovice andHolzhausen, showing the positions of the internal shafts and ‘shrines’. Informationfrom Schwartz (1962; 1975) and Venclová (1998).

Their interpretation has been controversial.They were originally considered as specialized ritualmonuments or shrines. As so often in archaeology,this view was strongly influenced by the results ofthe first large-scale excavation at one of theseearthworks. This was at Holzhausen, where the workrevealed a timber building and two deep shafts orwells, one of which contained an upright post to-wards its base (Schwartz 1962; 1975). It was thoughtto preserve traces of blood, and so it seemed logicalto suppose that this feature had been used for offer-ings. The building was exceptional too, and had anunusual ground plan which was compared with thatof temples in the Classical world.

As so often happens, later fieldwork modifiedthis outline. It became clear that some Viereckschanzen

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earthworks altogether. In certain cases this appliesto the structural evidence too, and at Dornstadt-Tomerdingen it is clear that even the excavated shaftpredated the enclosure bank (Zürn & Fischer 1991).Viereckschanzen contain deposits of burnt bone, butthere is little to show that they were different fromthose at nearby settlements. In the same way, Murray(1995) has suggested that the ceramic assemblagesfrom a number of the sites had an unusual composi-tion and might provide evidence of feasting, but amore recent study (Venclová 1997) has cast doubt on

even this claim. Other distinc-tive finds are rare. There arevery few human remains andthe occasional hoards of ironartefacts are similar to depos-its associated with settlementsof the same period.

Over the years the inter-pretation of Viereckschanzenhas become more contentious,perhaps because the evidencefrom Holzhausen has so rarelybeen repeated. Venclová (1993)suggests several possible in-terpretations of these sites.They may have played a spe-cialized role as places whereceremonial was performed.That is the traditional position.Alternatively, they might havebeen used for food storage andredistribution. This idea isbased on the remains of gra-naries within some of theseearthworks, but it also bearsthe influence of work on IronAge hillforts. Another possi-bility is that Viereckschanzenwere simply small farms,which archaeologists had dis-tinguished from the others bypaying too much attention tothe perimeter earthwork.

Again the difficulty arisesbecause prehistorians havebeen looking for an absoluteseparation between sacredsites and the settlements of thesame period and have failedto find one. There is a certainoverlap between the buildingsinside Viereckschanzen and

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Figure 4. The locations of Viereckschanzen. The outline plan of Ms &eckéZehrovice is shown in relation to an area of open settlement indicated by light tone.The example at Obermachtal is situated on the edge of a barrow cemetery and thatat Manching in the centre of the famous oppidum. A detail shows the lattermonument in detail and indicates the find-spot of an Iron Age sword fragment.Information from Venclová (1997), Wieland (1999), Gerdsen (1982) and Sievers(1991).

those on other sites. There are also cases in whichthese earthworks were located within a larger areaof domestic activity so that the distribution of timberbuildings extends well beyond the enclosure itself(Venclová 1997). A related monument, with part ofan Iron Age sword in its ditch, was found within thefamous oppidum at Manching (Fig. 4; Gerdsen 1982;Sievers 1991), whilst Waldhauser (1989) has shownthat some of the Bohemian Viereckschanzen wereplaced towards the outer edges of more extensivesettlements.

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If there is a spatial overlap between Viereck-schanzen and occupation sites, there was also a cer-tain fluidity in the evolution of these places overtime. Venclová (1993; 1998) has investigated the im-portant site of Ms&ecké Zehrovice where a stone sculp-ture was found many years ago. Her work showsthat rectangular earthwork enclosures played an im-portant role during just three of the six periods ofactivity that she identified in excavation. Indeed, inher view the one convincing shrine was confined toa single phase. The site began as an open settlementduring the Early Iron Age and was associated withhouses, pits and metalworking. There may have beenburials nearby. The first enclosure was entirelyempty. It was built alongside the settlement andtheir periods of use may even have overlapped. Thena second enclosure was constructed and, after that, athird. In her view this was the only earthwork to beassociated with a ritual building, and it dates fromthe second century BC. In the final period of use, oneof the older enclosures provided the site for yet an-other settlement associated with houses and storagepits. It may have been then that the sculpture wasburied, and it certainly seems as if this final phasesaw a renewal of industrial activity. Venclová claimsthat the use of this site oscillated between the sacredand the profane.

That does not seem likely. It is certainly possi-ble to qualify the sharp distinction between the ritualand everyday use of such places, but any attempt torationalize all the features of Viereckschanzen seemsto go too far. It is possible that the shafts were wells,but that hardly explains why those on a single sitelike Holzhausen were dug to such different depths.Nor does it account for the upright posts in the fill-ing of these features. In the same way, this class ofearthwork enclosure may have played a variety ofdifferent roles but that does not account for the strictconventions in the placing of their entrances, someof which were very elaborate structures. They werealigned on three of the cardinal points but never tothe north.

Venclová (1993) has suggested strict criteria fordistinguishing between sacred sites and ordinarysettlements in central Europe. These are very reveal-ing. According to her account, shrines should oc-cupy prominent positions apart from any domesticstructures. They should contain what she calls ‘vo-tive objects’, and domestic artefacts must not bepresent. The buildings associated with ritual activityshould be quite different from those on occupationsites, and in her study she identifies Iron Age shrinesthrough their resemblance to Classical buildings.

This scheme is entirely a product of modernassumptions about the past in which ritual and reli-gious belief are separated from the everyday. As thesettlements of the British Iron Age show, that neednot be the case. There seems no reason to insist thatshrines should have been set apart from domesticbuildings or that they should have been located atconspicuous points in the landscape.

Her second criterion raises even more difficul-ties, for it is not clear how we are to identify ‘votiveobjects’ as a class of artefact, nor how they should bedistinguished from those used in daily life. Archae-ologists can only work with those elements of mate-rial culture that have survived, and it seems clearthat this sometimes happened because they had beendeposited intentionally and with some formality(Bradley 1998b). If we follow that line of argument,virtually any kind of object could have been used asan offering. There is no sound basis for inferring thatexceptional pieces like the stone sculpture, a fleshhook or a carving of stags belonged to a special classof votive objects, whilst apparently mundane arte-facts found in similar contexts were somehow differ-ent in kind. These included metalworking tools, ironaxes and a ploughshare. All played a vital role in thetransformation of nature, and to ignore this simplyimposes modern values on the past.

Lastly, it may be correct to isolate certain typesof timber building as being different from those or-dinarily found in settlements and even to comparethem with temples in the Mediterranean, but that isno reason to suppose that other kinds of structuremight not have been imbued with a special signifi-cance. To suppose otherwise is to prejudge the issue.Archaeologists should accept that there was a cer-tain overlap between the contents of Viereckschanzenand those of domestic sites, but they must study thatrelationship in its own terms.

At the heart of these discussions there is a par-ticular conception of ritual. It seems to be somethingset apart from daily life, protected from scrutiny byits specialized procedures and connected with reli-gious belief and the supernatural. It is this combina-tion of formality and separation that has been lookedfor by archaeologists. As these examples show, thatapproach has ended in confusion.

Few, if any, of these features are invariable char-acteristics of ritual, and anthropologists, workingwith living populations, have found it increasinglydifficult to maintain this approach. For some, ritualis a universal characteristic of human societies: somuch so, in fact, that it has lost any value as ananalytical category (Goody 1977). For others, it is a

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specialized method of communication, shielded fromcritical appraisal by its own conventions (Bloch 1989).This may be true in certain cases, but rituals do notnecessarily refer to deeply-held or widely-sharedbeliefs, and they are more easily identified as actionsof a specialized kind than they are as propositionsabout the world (Bell 1992; Humphrey & Laidlaw1994).

In any case it is not true that all rituals areconnected with religious beliefs or, indeed, with re-lations to the supernatural. For some time it hasbeen accepted that there are secular rituals as welland that the two really merge into one another. Norare the procedures of ritual as formal as they mayappear, for there are often important divergences inthe ways in which they are conducted. What mattersis not to adhere exactly to a strict set of proceduresbut that they should work (Humphrey & Laidlaw1994). This may override the need to believe in theliteral message of any specific ritual. It is participa-tion and commitment that count far more.

Once it is accepted that ritual is a kind of prac-tice — a performance which is defined by its ownconventions — it becomes easier to understand howit can occur in so many settings and why it may beattached to so many different concerns. Once wereject the idea that the only function of ritual is tocommunicate religious beliefs, it becomes unneces-sary to separate this kind of activity from the pat-terns of daily life. In fact, rituals extend from thelocal, informal and ephemeral to the public andhighly organized, and their social contexts vary ac-cordingly.

That is why anthropologists have begun to placeless emphasis on ritual as a thing in itself and moreon the practice of ritualization (Bell 1992; Humphrey& Laidlaw 1994) This is an important developmentfor it acknowledges the range of behaviour that isactually observed. Once ritual is seen as a form ofaction rather than a specialized kind of communica-tion, it becomes easier to understand how it oper-ates, for it is a social strategy of a distinctive kind.That makes it possible to consider the contexts inwhich particular rituals are created and performed,and the consequences of such actions, whether theyhad been intended or not. In short, it allows archae-ologists to consider the development of individualrituals over time and to trace the social and politicalhistory of those practices.

Ritualization is both a way of acting which re-veals some of the dominant concerns of society, anda process by which certain parts of life are selectedand provided with an added emphasis. Again that

process is essentially historical, for it is unlikely todevelop instantaneously. In principle, that meansthat it can be traced over time and studied in itswider setting. By following the development of ritu-als in this way it should be possible to identify a fewof the ideas that they were meant to express.

Ritualization has another significance as well.If it is really a process by which certain actions gainan added emphasis through particular kinds of per-formance, that means that at any one time the in-vestment of ritual in particular domains will belargely a matter of degree: certain transactions maybe attended by a greater degree of formality thanothers. For that reason rituals can extend from theprivate to the public domains and from the local,even personal, to those which involve larger num-bers of participants.

As a result of such processes, rituals form acontinuum: they are not set apart from other areas oflife, as prehistorians have often supposed. But thatstatement introduces problems of its own. How farwill it be possible to trace such practices back to theirpoints of origin? Do rituals need to follow clear con-ventions before their very existence can be recog-nized by archaeologists? It may be that certainpractices became established more rapidly than oth-ers. This is particularly true in the state, wherechanges could be executed through an administra-tive infrastructure.

At the same time, it is important to distinguishbetween rituals that depend on successful perform-ance, with all the scope which that allows for inno-vation, and those that follow a prescribed liturgywhere there will be less room for manoeuvre(Humphrey & Laidlaw 1994, ch. 7). Much dependson the ways in which such rituals are transmitted(Bradley 2002a, ch. 1). In traditional societies thisprocess may well depend on the operation of socialmemory, but practices can also be governed by writ-ten texts. Although the interpretation of those writ-ings may change from one period to another, theyprovide an added constraint on the direction in whichparticular rituals can develop. Christianity is a ‘reli-gion of the book’ and this feature may have colouredmodern Western perceptions of the nature of ritualin the past. In later prehistoric Europe — and espe-cially in the regions discussed so far — there is prob-ably more evidence for rituals based on performancethan those constrained by a specific liturgy.

How do archaeologists distinguish betweenritual and the everyday? In prehistoric Europe, whereliterary sources are absent, they have done so on alargely intuitive basis, influenced by their experi-

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ence in an increasingly secular world. It is a world inwhich ritual and religious belief have been pushedto the margins. That has had two consequences, nei-ther of which has been good for the discipline. Theyhave seen ritual as something that involved specialpeople, special places and a distinctive range of ma-terial culture. They have also assumed that ritualwas quite separate from the concerns of daily life.That may not have been true.

The examples considered so far have certainfeatures in common. In each case confusion arisesfor two reasons. On one level, there are problemsbecause it seems impossible to make a clear distinc-tion between the evidence for domestic settlementand that of ritual activity. The henge monument atDurrington Walls contained huge timber buildings,but these show exactly the same organization of spaceas the houses of the same period; the difference issimply one of scale (Fig. 5). The Iron Age examplesraise more or less the same problem. In one casehuman bodies, animal remains and artefacts wereall arranged in the ground with some formality, butthey were placed in reused storage pits. In the sameway, the central European Viereckschanzen have manycharacteristics that overlap with those of settlementsites, but they seem to have been imbued with agreater formality, whether this extends to the pres-ence of deep shafts, to the orientation of their gate-

ways or even to the occasional finds of special ob-jects. It is evident that in none of these cases wasthere a clear division between domestic sites andmore specialized monuments.

That raises another point. Even the contextsthat do provide evidence of specialized activity con-tain the kinds of artefacts associated with daily life.By depositing them with such formality people im-bued them with a greater significance. This is not anew idea. The ritual importance of the house is fa-miliar from Ian Hodder’s work at Çatalhöyük(Hodder 1999b) and, in a very different way, fromColin Renfrew’s discussion of domestic ritual in hisstudy of Phylakopi (1985, ch. 1). The same concernswere expressed in the simpler settlements and monu-ments of northern and western Europe. That is notto suggest that every component of prehistoric ritualreferred, even obliquely, to domestic life, for thatwould not be true, but this relationship is so wide-spread and so persistent that it should not be ig-nored.

To illustrate these points it is worth returningto some of the examples used earlier. This discus-sion employs a different frame of reference.

Among the commonest monuments in NeolithicEurope are large earthwork enclosures. They seemto have originated in the Late Linearbandkeramikwhen they contained groups of longhouses, but they

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Trelystan Durrington Walls Down Farm, Woodcutts

Figure 5. The organization of space inside the Northern Circle at Durrington Walls and two Late Neolithic structuresinterpreted as stake-built houses. The diagram emphasizes how the building inside the henge monument is an enlargedversion of the other structures. The example at Down Farm was built near to two henges. Information fromWainwright & Longworth (1971), Britnell (1982) and Green (2000).

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continued to be built well after the settlement pat-tern had changed. By this time, it seems as if theenclosures were no longer inhabited, and some ofthem were placed on the margins of the settled land-scape (Bradley 1998a, ch. 5). The earlier of theseenclosures were defined by interrupted ditches, butthey could take other forms. In Britain and Irelandthey were eventually replaced by henges likeDurrington Walls. In central Europe rather similarmonuments may have been constructed throughoutthe Neolithic period (Modderman 1986; Trnka 1991).

For many years one question dominated theagenda: were they settlements? The question was

especially important in thearchaeology of the fourth andthird millennia as the remainsof houses became more diffi-cult to find. At first, it seemedas though an obvious answerwould be supplied by thesemonuments, for they con-tained nearly all the trappingsof daily life: pottery, stone ar-tefacts and deposits of food re-mains. There were domesticanimal bones, but there werealso cereals; there was evi-dence of craft production, butthere were also objects that hadbeen imported from a distance.Only the evidence of residen-tial buildings continued toelude the archaeologist. Eitherthe structures found in theseplaces were vanishingly slight,as they were in the latercausewayed enclosures ofContinental Europe, or theywere represented on an almostoverpowering scale, as hap-pened with the timber circlesinside henges.

A good example of theseproblems comes from a site inthe Ardennes (Marolle 1989).Like the other examples, Mairywas enclosed by an earthworkand possibly by a palisade, butthey did not form a continu-ous barrier. In that respect theycontrast with their prototypeswhich had marked the limitsof agricultural settlements. In-

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Mairy Flögeln

Figure 6. The upper part of the figure depicts two of the large timber buildings atMairy, compared with the Neolithic house at Flögeln. All three plans are drawn atthe same scale, emphasizing the monumental scale of the structures at Mairy. Inthe lower part of the figure the house plan at Flögeln is drawn at a larger scale.Information from Marolle (1989) and Zimmerman (1979).

side the enclosure at Mairy there were pits that couldbe compared with those on living sites, but they hadbeen filled with a sequence of deposits which in-cluded meat joints, cattle skulls, complete pots andartefacts of exceptional quality. The enclosure is unu-sual because it also contains the remains of severaltimber buildings, but again these have a quite excep-tional character. In plan they resemble houses of thesame period, but they represent enormously enlargedversions of that prototype (Fig. 6). Their closest coun-terpart is known from a settlement at Flögeln innorthern Germany (Zimmerman 1979), but the sepa-rate structures at Mairy are between three and six

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times as large and it couldhave been difficult to roofthem. This is comparable tothe way in which the pit de-posits had been treated. Ineach case, normal domestictransactions gained an en-hanced significance because ofthe ways in which they weredeployed. Everyday objectswere placed ceremoniously inthe ground; timber buildingswere erected which weregreatly enlarged versions ofnormal dwellings. Peoplewere not so much living do-mestic life as performing it.

Similar practices can berecognized at many othersites, and again they are liableto be misunderstood. Thecausewayed enclosure atSarup in Denmark provides agood example, for here the ex-cavator, Nils Anderson, hastried to distinguish betweenthe ritual and domestic aspectsof the site (Anderson 1997).Again that procedure hasproved unsatisfactory. In thiscase he was prepared to coun-tenance the existence of spe-cialized deposits associatedwith the earthwork perimeter.These included decorated ce-ramics, axes, animal bones andhuman remains which mayhave been displayed in theditch where they could be in-spected by people visiting thesite. In many cases individualsegments of that ditch hadbeen surrounded by a fence

had been dug specifically to receive offerings, mainlyof ceramics and axe heads. The proportions of thesetwo deposits changed during the sequence at Sarup.Whilst the earthworks were still in use, 30 per cent ofthe pits were associated with ritual and 70 per centwith domestic occupation, but after that time thenumber of specialized deposits fell, suggesting thatthe site had become an ordinary settlement.

That analysis makes some unwarranted as-sumptions, for once again it depends on a simple

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A B

C D

Sarup

'Domestic' pits 'Ritual' pits

Figure 7. Plan of the causewayed enclosure at Sarup, showing the pit depositsdistinguished by the excavator as either ‘domestic’ or ‘ritual’. A and B show thefirst phase of the enclosure and C and D depict the enclosure in its second phase.Information from Anderson (1997).

cutting them off from the remainder of the monu-ment. In no sense was the earthwork conceived as acontinuous barrier.

Anderson had more difficulty in analyzing thepits inside the enclosure. He attempted to distin-guish between those connected with domestic occu-pation and what he called ‘ritual’ features (Fig. 7).The first group he thought of in purely utilitarianterms. These were abandoned storage pits that con-tained artefacts in their filling, whilst the other pits

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dichotomy between the practical and the non-utili-tarian. A small selection of artefacts are identified asspecial and ritually-charged and the others are treatedas refuse that was casually discarded. This is a curi-ously arbitrary scheme. Collections of tools or rawmaterials are interpreted as occupation debris, eventhough they would be thought of as special depositsif they were found in isolation. In the same way,axes are accorded a particular significance in hisaccount, but this is denied to the quernstones thatplayed a role in preparing food.

There were deposits of human bones at Sarup.These occur widely at Neolithic enclosures and sug-gest important links with other kinds of monument.There were megalithic tombs near to the site, andthroughout northern Europe similar monuments areassociated with deposits of artefacts, most of themplaced just outside the entrance (Midgley 1992, ch. 9;Bakker 1992). Ceramics are particularly common here(Fig. 8). Although the settlements of this period arepoorly known, the great accumulations of potterydevoted to the dead have a rather similar composi-tion to the collections from these sites (Hulthèn 1977,

ch. 4; Tilley 1996, ch. 6). Thereare some variations, and a fewhighly decorated vessels maybe specifically associated withchambered tombs, but what isreally striking is how far thismaterial refers to the domes-tic domain. Perhaps these ves-sels once held offerings of food,making their link with the wordof the living even more explicit.

Similar concerns pervadeLate Neolithic society too andwere expressed in the formsof henges like DurringtonWalls. Here a variety of arte-facts associated with domes-tic life had been deposited —and perhaps displayed — withsome formality. Like the findsfrom causewayed enclosures,these deposits placed an em-phasis on the bones of domes-ticated animals, even thoughnumerous antler picks hadbeen used to built the earth-work (Albarella & Serjeantson2002). As happened at thechambered tombs in northernEurope, a restricted range of

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Exlo

Figure 8. Outline plan of the chambered tomb at Exlo, with a detail of three of thedecorated pots deposited on the site. Information from Brindley & Lanting (1992).

artefacts was organized in relation to the architec-ture of the monument (Richards & Thomas 1984).Again the timber circles associated with the hengewere enlarged versions of the normal dwellings ofthis period (Fig. 5). It seems as though people ritual-ized particular aspects of social life and providedthem with an added meaning.

We have already considered the distinctive de-posits associated with Iron Age settlements and thecurious enclosures known as Viereckschanzen. In onecase it was impossible to overlook the evidence forspecialized rituals taking place on occupation sites;in the other, it was just as difficult to distinguishthose sites from sanctuaries. The final example willconsider the distinctive practices associated withhouses and storage pits.

The best way of illustrating the ritualization ofthe domestic sphere is to compare the sequence intwo regions of Europe between about 1000 and 100BC. One region extends through southern Scandina-via to the Netherlands, and the other includes partsof the Rhineland, Belgium, northern France andsouthern England (Bradley 2002b). In both regions

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similar material was includedin a series of structured de-posits: pottery, animal bones,human remains and agricul-tural tools (Schirren 1995;Brunaux & Méniel 1997;Debiak et al. 1998; Méniel1998, ch. 8). But there is animportant contrast. Awayfrom the domestic arena thesedifferent kinds of material weredeposited in rather similar con-texts, whereas practices weremuch more varied in the set-tlements themselves.

To take these points inturn, the Iron Age of north-ern Europe is well known fora series of well-preserved de-posits found in bogs. Thesebear a striking resemblance tothe kinds of material that hadbeen placed there during theNeolithic period, but in theintervening phase a differentsystem seems to have pre-vailed: one which placed agreater emphasis on offeringsof metalwork (Bradley 1998b).The Iron Age deposits, how-ever, refer more directly to thedomestic domain and are par-ticularly characterized by potscontaining food (Becker 1971).These are often supplementedby deposits of animal bonesand also by finds of agricul-tural implements includingploughs (Glob 1951). Similarmaterial is known in lesserabundance in western Eu-rope, although conditions areless favourable for its sur-

striking contrasts which cannot be attributed to thevagaries of preservation. This is where those twogeographical traditions move apart. In the first ofthese regions, there was a preference for longhouseswhich were widely distributed across the later pre-historic landscape. Before the Late Iron Age thesewere rarely replaced in the same positions, so theyare generally described as the remains of ‘wander-ing settlements’ (Fig. 9). For a long time it seemed asif they had moved as the local soils became exhausted,

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Building

Pits

Oss-UssenEarly Iron Age

Late Iron Age

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Figure 9. Parts of the excavated area at Oss-Ussen showing the wide spacing ofdifferent buildings in the Early Iron Age (upper plan) and their superimposition inthe Late Iron Age (lower plan). Information from Fokkens (1998).

vival. The famous bog bodies probably form part ofthis tradition, and it is clear that examples have beenfound in Britain and Ireland to match the better-known cases from North Germany, the Netherlandsand Scandinavia (Turner & Scaife 1995; Van derSanden 1996). This is of particular interest in thelight of literary evidence that some of them mighthave been sacrifices to Nerthus, the goddess of fer-tility (Todd 1987, 166–7).

The settlement finds, however, show a series of

Oss-Ussen

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but now there is some reason to doubt this view, andin any case many of these structures were aban-doned quite rapidly, whilst they were structurallysound. Gerritsen (1999; 2000) has suggested that itmight be better to consider this evidence in relationto the domestic cycle. Perhaps buildings had to bereplaced when the circumstances of the occupantschanged; an example would be if one of them had

died. In that case the sequence would reflect the lifeof the household as a social unit rather than thecondition of the building.

This might be connected with the deposition ofofferings in these houses (Capelle 1987; Therkorn1987; Ullen 1994; 1996; Stålbom 1997). Some of thesewere clearly put there when the building was erected,for they were placed in the foundations. Others are

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Axe Bone

Pottery Quern

Pryssgården

=

=

Figure 10. The locations of placed deposits of artefacts and bones in the Late Bronze Age settlement at Pryssgården.The plans on the left of the drawing show the deposits apparently associated with the creation of the building. Those onthe right are perhaps connected with its use and/or abandonment. Note that the first two of the drawings may showsuccessive deposits within the same houses. Information from Borna-Ahlvist (2002).

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equally obviously associated with its occupation orabandonment. Where detailed evidence is available,it is clear that these two groups of finds may havedistributions distinct from one another, addingweight to the suggestion that they were connectedwith separate stages in the history of the structure.There are also cases in which these events weremarked by offerings of different kinds of material.This sometimes happened on a recently excavatedsettlement of the Late Bronze Age at Pryssgården inSweden (Fig. 10; Stålbom 1997; Borna-Ahlvist 2002).At other sites similar deposits might be associatedwith the construction and abandonment of granariesor even of whole farmyards. In such cases it seemsas if major events in the history of the householdwere marked by the deposition of cultural materialvery similar to that used as votive offerings in thewider landscape.

The other tradition is marked by the specialattention that was paid to storage pits, but again theofferings that were made there may have been closelyassociated with the history of individual houses(Brück 1999). In this region there is less to suggestthat these buildings changed their locations accord-ing to a regular cycle. In some cases their positionsoverlapped or were even superimposed, thus add-ing to the difficulty of telling them apart in excava-tion (Fig. 11). This can hardly have been fortuitous,especially on large sites where space was not at a

premium. There seems to have been a deliberateemphasis on maintaining the positions of settlements,and those of individual buildings, from one genera-tion to another. Although specialized deposits weresometimes associated with these structures, theseare not so obviously related to key points in theirhistory. Instead they emphasize important thresh-olds within the house.

This distinctive pattern is more common in theregion in which storage pits are a regular feature,and these seem to have provided an alternative fo-cus for deposits of artefacts, animal bones and evenof human burials (Fig. 12). It is usually supposedthat this practice is specific to southern Britain (Hill1995), but that is not the case, and very similar de-posits occur on the near-Continent and are increas-ingly often interpreted in the same terms (Müller1991; Jeunesse & Ehrestsman 1988; Delattre 2000).Their distribution extends from the Rhineland toNormandy and from the Channel coast into centralFrance (Bradley 2002b). I have already commentedon the kinds of material associated with reused silosand the ways in which they were organized, but itwould be wrong to overlook a still more basic point.These features had been intimately associated withthe keeping of seed corn which could be stored un-derground for long periods before it was sown. Thiswould provide a potent metaphor for human fertil-ity and also for the continuity of life, and it is surely

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Bancroft Juvincourt-et-Damary

Figure 11. Superimposed or overlapping Iron Age buildings at Bancroft, England, and Juvincourt-et-Damary, France.Information from Williams & Zeepfat (1994) and Pion (1996).

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why these features assumed so much significance inthe ritual practices of the Iron Age. That is particu-larly true if we couple this distinctive evidence withthe histories of the houses associated with them.Unlike their counterparts in the Netherlands andnorthern Europe, these were sometimes replaced onthe same sites, and it means that certain dwellingsexhibit a sequence extending over many years — farlonger than the individual human life. Where the de-posits made in northern European houses emphasizedthe distinct processes involved in building, using andabandoning these dwellings, here there were fewerbreaks and very much the same range of materialwas deployed in a different way. In this case theagricultural cycle itself provided an image of conti-nuity that was acknowledged through the provisionof offerings in storage pits. Again, some of the basicconcerns of domestic life became ritualized by thisprocedure. It is impossible to separate Iron Age farm-ing from the symbolic system that sustained it.

Why was domestic life such an important focusfor ritual? There are perhaps two answers, each re-

flecting the concerns of a dif-ferent kind of archaeology.Economic archaeologistswould emphasize the vitalimportance of food produc-tion throughout the prehis-toric period but especiallywhen domesticates were firstadopted in the Neolithic andwhen farming was reorgan-ised during the first millen-nium BC (Barker 1985). Bothinvolved irreversible changesin human experience of theworld. Social archaeologistswould take the argumenteven further by pointing outthat it was in precisely theseperiods that the accumulationand distribution of foodstuffsbecame central to the politi-cal economy. Thus the animalbones found at Neolithicmonuments have been inter-preted in terms of large com-munal feasts (Albarella &Serjeantson 2002), and sohave some of the deposits atIron Age settlements (Hill1995). The defended sites oflowland Britain and the

Obernjesa Les Rimelles

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Figure 12. Iron Age storage pits containing human burials at Obernjesa,Germany, and Les Rimelles, France. The shaded areas in the section drawingsindicate the position of the human remains. Information from Müller (1991) andDelattre (2000).

northern Netherlands have been identified as com-munal food stores (Waterbolk 1977; Hill 1996) andthe same interpretation has extended to some of theViereckschanzen in Central Europe (Venclová 1993).In each case rituals emphasized key transactions inancient social life.

That could almost provide a conclusion to thisarticle, but it would leave a more important pointunresolved. I have argued that the conventional op-position between ritual and the everyday has littleapplication in the study of later prehistoric Europe.Many of the problems that have afflicted archaeolo-gists have been of their own making, Rather thanworking with an inflexible conception of ritual — anotion whose origins lie far back in the past — itwould be better to think in terms of ritualization.That was a process that affected many of the compo-nents of domestic life. This is not to claim that it wasthe only source of ritual practices in prehistory, evenin those regions considered here. Rather, it was onedomain in which everyday acts could take on specialqualities until they assumed the character of a thea-

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trical performance. It is shown by the ways in whichartefacts and foodstuffs could be deployed with aparticular formality. The same applies to the organi-zation of settlements and monuments.

That raises another question. Why has it beenso much easier writing a social archaeology of theperiod from the Neolithic to the Iron Age than it hasin Mesolithic studies? The conventional answerwould be that the Mesolithic–Neolithic transitionmarks the meeting point between the different kindsof archaeology mentioned earlier (Thomas 1988). Oneis concerned with adaptation and the other withwhat Hodder (1991) has termed ‘the meanings ofthings’. That comparison would be unfair. A numberof writers have tried very hard to study the socialarchaeology of late hunter-gatherers, but often with-out much success. This is not just because the evi-dence is imperfectly preserved. Another factor couldbe at work. It may be that until the adoption offarming, domestic life did not undergo the sameamount of symbolic elaboration as it did during laterperiods. No doubt many practices were ritualized inMesolithic society, but perhaps fewer of these tookplace at the occupation sites where so much field-work has been concentrated. This makes it harder toconduct the fine-grained analyses that are familiarfrom later prehistory and for that reason interpreta-tions may be hard to extend beyond questions ofmobility and food procurement.

What does this imply for the archaeology oflater periods? Earlier, I made the comment that someof those who are most reluctant to contemplate acognitive archaeology prefer to study the evidencefor subsistence and settlement. An essential prelimi-nary to such work is to investigate the formation ofthe archaeological record, for without some under-standing of how particular deposits came into beingit would be hard for them to take their researchesfurther. In principle, the residues of past human con-duct should be completely disordered, and yet it israrely the case. Why is this? If domestic life reallyhad been ritualized in the ways suggested here, itmight mean that some of the deposits investigatedin a traditional manner had already been modifiedthrough social practices of which prehistorians arejust becoming aware. Perhaps ritual itself was one ofthe formation processes that gave their raw materialthe coherence that allows it to be interpreted at all. Ifso, the antipathy between economic and socialarchaeologies has no basis. Even the most orthodoxapproaches would be difficult to follow without theritualization of the domestic sphere. It is a soberingprospect, and yet it is also an encouraging one.

Acknowledgements

I must thank Colin Renfrew and his colleagues in theMcDonald Institute for inviting me to give the lec-ture on which this article is based and for making itsuch an enjoyable occasion. I am grateful to ChrisGosden and Lise Nordenborg Myhre for their com-ments on an earlier draft of the text and to MargaretMatthews for preparing the illustrations.

Richard BradleyDepartment of Archaeology

University of ReadingWhiteknights

ReadingRG6 6AB

UKEmail: R.J.Bradley@reading.ac.uk

Note

1. A Life Less Ordinary is a film which came out in 1997. Iam intrigued by its title but do not recommend itscontents.

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Author biography

Richard Bradley has been Professor of Archaeology atReading University since 1987. His main interests are inthe archaeology of prehistoric Europe, landscape studies,approaches to fieldwork and ancient art. Recent publica-tions include Rock Art and the Prehistory of Atlantic Europe(1997), The Significance of Monuments (1998), An Archaeol-ogy of Natural Places (2000) and The Past in Prehistoric Socie-ties (2002).

Title: Ancient interactions: east and west in EurasiaEditors: Katie Boyle, Colin Renfrew &

Marsha LevineSeries: McDonald Institute Monographs

Classifications: Archaeology; Eurasian steppeBinding: Cloth

Size: 286 × 220 mmPages: xii+344 pp.; 171 illustrations, 22 tablesISBN: 1-902937-19-8 hardbackISSN: 1363-1349Price: £45; US$80

Publication date: January 8, 2003Distributor: Oxbow Books, Park End Place, Oxford,

OX1 1HN, UK. Tel: +44 (0)1865 241249;website: www.oxbowbooks.com

NowAvailable

McDonald Institute for Archaeological ResearchUniversity of CambridgeDowning Street, CambridgeCB2 3ER, UK.

Tel: +44 1223 333538/339336Fax: +44 1223 333536

The history and archaeology of the Scythians and other steppe peoples arerelatively familiar, but what of their predecessors who colonized and

occupied this vast region, from the Carpathians to China, before the Iron Age?The papers in this volume provide an overview and reassessment of the periodfrom the Neolithic to Iron Age in an area which covers approximately one-sixthof the earth’s land surface. The subject matter of the papers ranges broadlyfrom East to West on a number of major themes: the development of pastoraleconomies; the diffusion of ideas, and the movement of peoples throughoutthis region and into adjoining regions. The authors too come from geographicallydiverse regions and the dynamic between them is a key feature of this volume.Different traditions and methods of research and their evolution are outlinedand debated. New analytical techniques are highlighted.

Arising from a symposium held at the McDonald Institute for ArchaeologicalResearch in 2000, this volume helps to fill an important gap in the literature andwill be essential reading for all those interested in the later prehistory of CentralAsia.

Edited by Katie Boyle, Colin Renfrew &Marsha Levine

Ancient interactions:east and west in Eurasia

MCDONALD INSTITUTE MONOGRAPHS

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