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

通过这个项目，我试图从广泛的后人类主义的角度来探索不列颠群岛新石器时代晚期社区之间的差异。在这段英国史前时期，考古记录突出了地区之间的巨大差异，这一趋势被考古学家如皮戈特（Piggott，1954年）所注意到，他在20世纪50年代将几种“次级新石器时代文化”分类。尽管这些独特的身份得到了承认，并且在过去的60年里发现了更多的数据，但这些差异尚未得到彻底的探讨。然而，新的数据以及新理论的发展为考古学家提供了新的机会，虽然在考古学中有关于身份的重要工作（例如Jones 1997），但差异的概念（身份形成的关键部分）在学科中的批判性分析较少。这不是新唯物主义的情况，在过去十年中发展的一个最近的理论框架，强调人类和非人类互动的关系性，差异不是一个消极的，通常是贬义的，表示事物之间的差异，但它是积极的，因为它探索了不同的事物如何在世界上存在（Braidotti 2013）。因此，我的项目的目的是利用一个新的唯物主义框架来重塑英国新石器时代晚期社区的差异。使用马恩岛、奥克尼和约克郡的案例研究（传统上被视为“不同”的地区在新石器时代晚期），我将编译一个访问数据库的新石器时代晚期考古记录为这些地区的基础上的数据从历史环境记录（HER），参观博物馆收藏品和现有出版物。这样做将使我能够批判性地分析和对比该地区的每一个考古记录，并帮助理解非人类变量的差异。我将重新思考这些地区的社区，因为它们是新兴的和情感的（感觉哈里斯2013; 2014），它们彼此不同，但总是比人类更多，因此将能够提供新石器时代晚期英国更微妙的画面。

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.