British Neolithic Axehead Distributions and Their Implications
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British Neolithic Axehead Distributions and Their Implications Peter Schauer 1 & Andrew Bevan 1 & Stephen Shennan 1 Tim Kerig 3 & Mike Parker Pearson 1
2
& Kevan Edinborough &
# The Author(s) 2019
Abstract Neolithic stone axeheads from Britain provide an unusually rich, well-provenanced set of evidence with which to consider patterns of prehistoric production and exchange. It is no surprise then that these objects have often been subject to spatial analysis in terms of the relationship between particular stone source areas and the distribution of axeheads made from those stones. At stake in such analysis are important interpretative issues to do with how we view the role of material value, supply, exchange, and demand in prehistoric societies. This paper returns to some of these well-established debates in the light of accumulating British Neolithic evidence and via the greater analytical power and flexibility afforded by recent computational methods. Our analyses make a case that spatial distributions of prehistoric axeheads cannot be explained merely as the result of uneven resource availability in the landscape, but instead reflect the active favouring of particular sources over known alternatives. Above and beyond these patterns, we also demonstrate that more populated parts of Early Neolithic Britain were an increased pull factor affecting the longer-range distribution of these objects. Keywords Neolithic . Britain . Radiocarbon . Stone axeheads . Spatial analysis . Cluster
analysis
Introduction Prehistoric edge-ground stone tools are a key form of human material culture, found across a vast range of cultural settings and interpreted with more or less regard to their potential roles as socially charged emblems, proto-currencies, and/or functional tools. Spatial distributions of stone axeheads have been a particular focus of study, not least as Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-01909438-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Stephen Shennan [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Schauer et al.
part of intensive efforts to understand prehistoric exchange mechanisms (e.g. Hodder 1974; Renfrew 1975, 1977; and see discussion below). A striking, early, and large-scale example of an ultra-long distance spread of stone axeheads from a single source region is provided by European Neolithic axeheads of Alpine rocks, including jadeitite, omphacite, and eclogite (Pétrequin and Pétrequin 2012). These visually distinctive, elaborately produced, onerously accessed, carefully curated axeheads were made from south-western Alpine sources, but ended up deposited in contexts across large swathes of western Europe, sometimes over a thousand kilometres away. Indeed, Alpine axeheads may well have played a culturally foundational role in promoting an ideology of virtuoso stone extraction and axehead production that led to many more localised but analogous industries acr
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