Stonehenge is one of the world’s most famous monuments. Who built it, how and why are questions that have endured for at least 900 years, but modern methods of investigation are now able to offer up a completely new understanding of this iconic stone circle. Stonehenge’s history straddles the transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, though its story began long before it was built. Serving initially as a burial ground, it evolved over time into a sacred place for gathering, feasting and building, and was remodelled several times as different peoples arrived in the area along with new technologies and customs. In more recent centuries it has found itself the centre of excavations, political protests and even conspiracy theories, embedding itself in the consciousness of the modern world. In this book Mike Parker Pearson draws on two decades of research, the results of recent excavations and cutting-edge scientific analyses to uncover many of the secrets that this prehistoric stone circle has kept for 5,000 years. In doing so, he paints the most comprehensive picture yet of the history of Stonehenge, from its origins up to the 21st century, and reveals how in some ways trying to explain its power of attraction in the present is harder than explaining its purpose in the ancient past.

Our knowledge about Stonehenge has changed dramatically as a result of the Stonehenge Riverside Project (2003-2009), led by Mike Parker Pearson, and included not only Stonehenge itself but also the nearby great henge enclosure of Durrington Walls. This book is about the people who built Stonehenge and its relationship to the surrounding landscape. The book explores the theory that the people of Durrington Walls built both Stonehenge and Durrington Walls, and that the choice of stone for constructing Stonehenge has a significance so far undiscovered, namely, that stone was used for monuments to the dead. Through years of thorough and extensive work at the site, Parker Pearson and his team unearthed evidence of the Neolithic inhabitants and builders which connected the settlement at Durrington Walls with the henge, and contextualised Stonehenge within the larger site complex, linked by the River Avon, as well as in terms of its relationship with the rest of the British Isles. Parker Pearson's book changes the way that we think about Stonehenge; correcting previously erroneous chronology and dating; filling in gaps in our knowledge about its people and how they lived; identifying a previously unknown type of Neolithic building; discovering Bluestonehenge, a circle of 25 blue stones from western Wales; and confirming what started as a hypothesis - that Stonehenge was a place of the dead - through more than 64 cremation burials unearthed there, which span the monument's use during the third millennium BC. In lively and engaging prose, Parker Pearson brings to life the imposing ancient monument that continues to hold a fascination for everyone.

The archaeology of death and burial is central to our attempts to understand vanished societies. Through the remains of funerary rituals we can learn not only about the attitudes of prehistoric people to death and the afterlife, but also about their way of life, their social organisation and their view of the world. This ambitious new book reviews the latest research in this huge and important field, and describes the sometimes controversial interpretations that have led to rapid advances in our understanding of life and death in the distant past. It provides a unique overview and synthesis of one of the most revealing fields of research into the past, It creates a context for several of archaeology's most breath-taking discoveries, from Tutankhamen to the Ice Man, and will find a keen market among archaeologists, historians and others who have a professional interest in, or general curiosity about, death and burial.

This first of two volumes presents the archaeological evidence of a long sequence of settlement and funerary activity from the Beaker period (Early Bronze Age c. 2000 BC) to the Early Iron Age (c. 500 BC) at the unusually long-occupied site of Cladh Hallan on South Uist in the Western Isles of Scotland. Particular highlights of its sequence are a cremation burial ground and pyre site of the 18th–16th centuries BC and a row of three Late Bronze Age sunken-floored roundhouses constructed in the 10th century BC. Beneath these roundhouses, four inhumation graves contained skeletons, two of which were remains of composite collections of body parts with evidence for post-mortem soft tissue preservation prior to burial. They have proved to be the first evidence for mummification in Bronze Age Britain. Cladh Hallan's remarkable stratigraphic sequence, preserved in the machair sand of South Uist, includes a unique 500-year sequence of roundhouse life in Late Bronze Age and Iron Age Britain. One of the most important results of the excavation has come from intensive environmental and micro-debris sampling of house floors and outdoor areas to recover patterns of discard and to interpret the spatial use of 15 domestic interiors from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age. From Cladh Hallan’s roundhouse floors we gain intimate insights into how daily life was organized within the house - where people cooked, ate, worked and slept. Such evidence rarely survives from prehistoric houses in Britain or Europe, and the results make a profound contribution to long-running debates about the sunwise organisation of roundhouse activities. Activity at Cladh Hallan ended with the construction and abandonment of two unusual double-roundhouses in the Early Iron Age. One appears to have been a smokery and steam room, and the other was used for metalworking.

This book presents the results of archaeological research in the extreme south of Madagascar between 1991 and 2003, and provides a synthesis of the regions archaeology. Madagascar is an island with many unique species of fauna and flora; its extreme south is a semi-arid region with remarkable vegetational adaptations. The project began as an ethnoarchaeological and ethnohistorical study of the origins and development of the monumental stone tombs which are built throughout the south, but expanded into a far wider archaeological study. The contributors trace the phases of the region's history from the first human colonisation and the extinction of much of the island's megafauna to the growth and collapse of the Manda civilization, contact with Europeans and right up to the present day.

Collaboration by the universities of Sheffield and Kalmar and Stockholm in Sweden led to two conferences being held. The second, held at Sheffield in 2006, sought collaboration and the sharing of information on archaeological data and theoretical thought on material culture diversity in the third millennium BC. Nineteen papers are presented in this volume arranged under three headings: material culture diversity in the Baltic; British Beaker burials and the Beaker People Project; Stonehenge and the Stonehenge Riverside Project. General overviews and wide-ranging discussions are joined by results from particular field orr laboratory projects.

It is a common assumption that prehistory was a time of war and violence, between species of humans competing for supremacy, between cultures and within communities. These nineteen papers, from a Prehistoric Society conference held in Sheffield, consider the archaeological evidence from sites across Europe, demonstrating how the prevalence, nature and experience of warfare and violence differed between regions and investigate the causes of war between hunter-gatherers. General studies of prehistoric warfare and how to detect it in the archaeological record, can be found alongside analyses of butchered human remains and mass burials at sites in Scandinavia, Iberia, Italy, Germany and Britain. Other evidence is also considered, covering the Mesolithic to the Iron Age, such as rock art, weaponry and deposited weapons. In addition to the editors, some familiar names can be found here: Pia Nystrom, Robert Layton, Christopher J Knuesel, Jorg Orschiedt, George Nash, Andreas Harde, Eduardo Sanchez-Moreno, Lynne Bevan, Richard Osgood, David Fontijn, Miranda Aldhouse Green, Rebecca Craig, Gillian Carr, Gonzalo Aranda Jimenez, Margarita Sanchez Romero, Jose Freire, Neil A Bishop, John Carman, Patricia Carman, Tim Taylor .

In the last twenty years historians and social scientists have seen a veritable explosion of research into food and its consumption and social context. And yet archaeology has been slow to catch on. This is all the more surprising since the 'bread and butter' of archaeology are the residues of food preparation and consumption - animal bones, pottery and other containers, cooking places and other technologies of preparation, plant remains (micro and macro), landscapes and settlements, grave goods, etc., etc. This volume of papers arises out of a conference held in Sheffield in 1999, organised jointly by The Prehistoric Society and the Sheffield University Archaeology Society, on 'Food, Identity and Culture in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age'. The aim was to bring together the different archaeological interests - from archaeological science and humanities perspectives - in food as cultural artefact/ecofact, to examine the potential of the new and developing scientific techniques for reconstructing prehistoric food habits, and to foster an integrated approach to the archaeology of food regardless of different researchers' specialisms.The 12 papers in this volume include: (1) Food, culture and identity: an introduction and overview; (2) Explaining the dietary isotope evidence for the rapid adoption of the Neolithic in Britain; (3) In the kinship of cows: the social centrality of cattle in the earlier Neolithic of southern Britain; (4) Animals into ancestors: domestication, food and identity in Late Neolithic Orkney; (5) Early Neolithic diets: evidence from pathology and dental wear; (6) The use of dental microwear to infer diet and subsistence patterns in past human populations; (7) You are where you ate: isotopic analysis in the reconstruction of prehistoric residency; (8) Diet and culture in southern Britain: the evidence from Yarnton; (9) Dairying, dairy products and milk residues: potential studies in European prehistory; (10) Neolithic and Early Bronze Age 'food' from northern Greece: the archaeobotanical evidence; (11) Changing paradigms: food as a metaphor for cultural identity among prehistoric fisher-gatherer-hunter communities of northern Europe; (12) Mead, chiefs and feasts in later prehistoric Europe.

Stonehenge is one of the world's most famous monuments. Who built it, how and why are questions that have endured for at least 900 years, but modern methods of investigation are now able to offer up a completely new understanding of this iconic stone circle. Stonehenge's history straddles the transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, though its story began long before it was built. Serving initially as a burial ground, it evolved over time into a sacred place for gathering, feasting and building, and was remodelled several times as different peoples arrived in the area along with new technologies and customs. In more recent centuries it has found itself the centre of excavations, political protests and even conspiracy theories, embedding itself in the consciousness of the modern world. In this book Mike Parker Pearson draws on two decades of research, the results of recent excavations and cutting-edge scientific analyses to uncover many of the secrets that this prehistoric stone circle has kept for 5,000 years. In doing so, he paints the most comprehensive picture yet of the history of Stonehenge, from its origins up to the 21st century, and reveals how in some ways trying to explain its power of attraction in the present is harder than explaining its purpose in the ancient past.