From regional identities to assemblages of difference: rethinking the communities of Late Neolithic Britain

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With this project I seek to explore the differences between Late Neolithic communities in the British Isles from a broadly posthumanist perspective. During this period of British prehistory the archaeological record highlights substantial variation between regions, a trend noted by archaeologists such as Piggott (1954) who in the 1950s classified several 'Secondary Neolithic cultures'. Despite the recognition of these distinctive identities, and the subsequent uncovering of more data over the past 60 years, these differences have not been thoroughly explored. However new data as well as the development of new theories provide archaeologists with new opportunities and though there has been important work on identity in archaeology (e.g. Jones 1997), the concept of difference (a key part of identity formation) has had less critical analysis within the discipline. This is not the case in new materialism, a recent theoretical framework developed over the past decade that stresses the relationality of human and nonhuman interactions, where difference is not a negative, often pejorative, term denoting the difference between things, but is positive in that is explores how different things come to exist in the world (Braidotti 2013). The aim of my project, then, is to recast the differences seen in British Late Neolithic communities utilising a new materialist framework.Using the case studies of the Isle of Man, Orkney, and Yorkshire (regions traditionally viewed as 'different' during the Late Neolithic), I will compile an Access Database of the Late Neolithic archaeological record for each of these regions based on data from Historic Environment Records (HERs), visits to museum collections, and pre-existing publications. Doing this will allow me to critically analyse and contrast each of the region's archaeological records and help to understand the differences in nonhuman variables. I will rethink communities in each of these regions as emergent and affective (sensu Harris 2013; 2014) that are differentiated from each other but always more-than-human, and therefore will be able to provide a more nuanced picture of Late Neolithic Britain.