EBOOK Prehistoric Materialities:Becoming Material in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland

Humans occupy a material environment that is constantly changing. Yet in the        twentieth century archaeologists studying British prehistory have overlooked this        fact in their search for past systems of order and pattern. Artefacts and monuments        were treated as inert materials which were the outcomes of social ideas and        processes. As a result materials were variously characterized as stable entities        such as artefact categories, styles or symbols in an attempt to comprehend them.          Inthis book Jones argues that, on the contrary, materials are vital, mutable, and        creative, and archaeologists need to attend to the changing character of materials        if they are to understand how past people and materials intersected to produce        prehistoric societies. Rather than considering materials andsocieties as given, he        argues that we need to understand how these entities are performed.Jones analyses        the various aspects of materials, including their scale, colour, fragmentation, and        assembly, in a wide-ranging discussion that covers the pottery, metalwork, rock art,        passage tombs, barrows, causewayed enclosures, and settlements of Neolithic and        Early Bronze Age Britain and Ireland.