Material and practice led-approach to concealed landscape of the everyday: Shining light on the earlier Neolithic settlement practices in Pembrokshire

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This proposal seeks to bring a fresh perspective to a challenge set by the Research Framework for the Archaeology of Wales panel ('The Framework' 2017) to research 'the everyday life in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age in Wales, and how 'this could influence the types of settlements we are likely to find.' The implicit acknowledgement of the 'ordinariness' of the rhythms of everyday practices and processes of the daily existence of lives led from which traces of occupation emerge will be central to this body of research in the context of Pembrokeshire. It will drive scrutiny into the depositional material culture documented in the site archives and in artefact collections. The adoption of a material and practice led approach acknowledges the recursive nature of surviving fragments in association with one-another becoming proxy for past social practices and actions which may identify the often-ephemeral vestiges of occupation in the landscape (Barrett 2000:27). My study will tread lightly between the 'inflated set of expectations' (Thomas 2013:2) surrounding this period in the fourth millennium BC to avoid distracting from the detail and the lure of unhelpful depictions, such as 'the most important transition of the history of the economic life of people' (Edwards 1988:255). Instead the study will prioritise research on those patterns of artefact type indicative of everyday living where the material culture at sites is associated in the archaeological record with pits, middens and post holes as euphemisms for occupation evidence. The research will also respond to the 'Framework' (2017) rider to 'identify new settlement areas' in an acknowledgement that despite the data set for Neolithic settlement evidence in Wales per se being larger than considered hitherto (Burrow 2003:48), recorded interpretations have been constrained by the limitations of a preponderance of surface evidence or from excavators of previous decades lacking an appreciation of the current wider body of ethnographical understanding in the archaeological record (Baring-Gould 1903).