 Ffais presiden Straight, gus. Thank you very much for the invitation on behalf of myself of Alex Baylis who is here at the front. But I am going to do the presentation and we can take questions at the end jointly. I hope you don't think this first image is any reflection on your tea, which is very good. But it just gives me a chance to catch my breath and to acknowledge our funders very warmly one more time A'r amser yun i'r unidol yn ymgyrch yn ymyddion'r pryd-serion, mae'r hyn yn oed yn gweithio'r pryd-serion, yn ei ddysgu'r ffordd. Rydyn ni'n dweud cyfan i eich ddweud yma. Llywodraeth Lywodraeth Gweithio'r Alistair Barkley rwy'n deall yn fawr ifanc arwied o'n gweithio'r gweithio pob atnod mae ddysgu'r hyn o'n ddysgu'r pryd-serion. Mae'r defnyddio på gwcidio'r bydd hyn yn gwelltyfrifyngu. Si'n gwybod, mae'n gweld eich barod diolch yn ystod yn cyfrifio'r gafodd y Bydd yw'r wyf yn ei wled tolydd y peth a'r gbellethau, Dollopol pa'r adeiladau o'r 뭔가'n radigol sy'n ni o'n allan i'w sgwrth. A bod yn olygu i symud yn radigol mae'r gyrhau a'r adeiladau yn cael ei ddechrau ar y dda yna, is that we would see it being both desirable and possible now to take the pre out of pre-history. We've been accustomed to write about remote pasts like the neolithic or the neolithic and the copper age in stick terms in rather fuzzy generalising and we think deep powering sorts of ways and we would like to help to change that. There has been a tradition of thinking in a more historical way, aligning archaeological interpretation a bit more closely with history. We think that move could be strengthened in the signs around just in fact it's becoming weakened and if we seek a better closer alignment with history that of course instantly begs the question of what sort of history we might be able to achieve. So just before the effects of the tea wear off and you sink into a post-tea torbur let's just look at a couple of slides about these issues here drawing on the work of the American historian John Lewis Gaddis in his very readable book The Landscape of History. I won't go through all this you'll be glad to hear but there are three key things I want to pull out of this slide. Firstly the importance of narrative which I'll go on about several times in course of the lecture. Secondly even for historians even for modern historians that the inevitable partiality of their evidence if we think away from the written word as being the key card in the pack I think that sets up much greater possibilities for archaeology of various kinds and history of many many different kinds to be more closely aligned. And thirdly although this is a complicated issue Gaddis makes the distinction between and on the whole more particularising discipline in the form of history contrasted with the on the whole more generalising kind of approach found in the social sciences. I would submit that many kinds of archaeology including what we've been used to call pre-history have over the past decades been in that latter camp the generalising camp. We'd start and end with generalisations and it would be a big and in my view our view I'll say my and our interchangeably I'm not always sure if Alex agrees with me but she can speak for herself very well at the end. It would be a big disciplinary and welcome shift if we became much more particularising on the basis of much more detailed narratives in the future and this lecture is an attempt to give you a sense of how that might be possible. Just briefly also a word about narrative this is these are some extracts from the book Time and Narrative by Paul Ricard French commentator one of the best reflections that I know of about the character of narrative treating it essentially as emplotment but always temporally based and in the second last quote they're making an important distinction between simple chronology and moving on from mere chronicle to get at history and his final quote I find very pertinent as well as very moving narratives of acting and suffering as as their theme this is the province of humans I want us to concentrate on human actions decisions choices values beliefs which for me in the end constitute history so I'm setting myself very much and I use deliberately use the eye there setting myself against the so-called post humanist turn turn that has become very fashionable in in the last few years when we last spoke here in a few years ago exactly when it could have been five or so years ago we were at the end more or less of our previous project that carried out jointly with France is Healy on the date and lots of others on the dating and modelling of course rate enclosures in southern Britain that story has gone on has become more refined what we're proposing here is a hypothetical walk someone going from the upper 10s back to visit their continental cousins with whom they were still closely in touch in the later 37th century cow BC Alex can tell you more later if you're interested about the probabilities behind this but this is a plausible scenario for things that could have been visible in the course of the single walk from the upper 10s down to the English coast in the decade of the three six thirties and the fact that we're able to talk in those terms as in inverted commas pre historians is I think remarkable we published all that in the the the two volumes of of gathering time as some years ago other evidence has come along since more enclosures been discovered like lark hill and a new one has just come up which is the image you're seeing down at the bottom at Datchett in the middle 10s Alice de Barclay could tell you more about that in the discussion but if I get the animation right we can imagine our person or persons walking across the 10s going past West Kennet on to Fassel's Lodge on to Warborough which has now been dated by a historic England team and then finally on past Hamilton hill where they might have witnessed exciting attacks on the outworks on the Shrogan spur and then on leaving all that mayhem behind them to visit their continental cousins now that theme of enclosures we continued partly in our next project but I'm not going to I'm going to leave that as a as a hanging thread and not to talk about them further today but to draw from our big European project as you heard in the introduction the times of their lives funded by the European research council carried out in 2012 and 2017 and that involved in a sense more of the same more radiocarbon dating and more Bayesian modelling to end up with much more precise data estimates than we would get by just looking out or eyeballing the radiocarbon dates but this time we we were deliberately choosing a rather ambitious scatter of targets themes including settlement or current themes including settlement and monumentality materiality and underlying all that the sociality of the social formations the social relations of neolithic and copper age communities at various times and places across Europe and we saw ourselves as deliberately challenging the application of the method to engage with approaches that we haven't needed or been able to apply in the breeder study in southern Britain and this was a mixture there for site based investigations and to some extent small regional investigations run two cases bigger regional investigations but it wasn't a deliberately not a a rerun of of gathering time that could be that that would be a cumulative cooperative effort would probably take several research generations to achieve the same sort of coverage but it could certainly we think now be be hailed as a realistic goal for the discipline to work towards now we began seeing ourselves as refining the very fine chronological edifice edifice of understanding of the chronology of the sequence for the European neolithic and copper age which goes back over a century more and very very distinguished contributors to it but as time went on we we also found ourselves wanting to challenge many of the things that have been taken for granted through repetition often and especially we we found ourselves wanting to challenge the default chronological perspective which has tended to be that of emphasising the long term and emphasising continuity and expecting and finding a slow change so that in in drawing out just four of the case studies here a sort of pre-Brexit tour going from Vincere just near Belgrade to Orsiniac in southwest Hungary and moving from the sixth and fifth millennia and then jumping up to Orkney in the later fourth millennium and into the first half of the third millennium and then dropping down into the first part of the third millennium in southern southwest Spain just outside Sevilla at the great site of Vincina de la Concepcion want to give you a some flavour of what we were doing but showing how we can get it much more detailed narratives and how those can contribute to this claim sense of a much more historical particularising approach and all the time as we unpick the long term I don't want to do away with the long term but as we unpick it as we can get it down routinely if we do the right things to the timescales of lifetimes and generations we find over and over again a much more dynamic punctuated and lively past and we've been all been guilty in the past of smearing so many things into into a single rather slow moving kind of sequence so that's what this this lecture is trying to be all about so here's the first case study this takes us to the great famous site already recognised in the days of Gordon Child of Vincia Belabondo just outside on the Danube just outside to the south of Belgrade in Serbia wonderful excavations carried out in the first part of the 20th century by Mochi Vasic and the impressive run thing that what remains of which is a lot of the great settlement mound or town some eight metres or more of neolithic deposit can speak for the long term it can certainly speak for continuity it can certainly speak for for steady change it takes its part in a wider context of development of the neolithic way of life in this part of Europe it's not the first phase this is all beginning in the later part of the sixth millennium BC several centuries after the first beginnings and in the regional grouping named after this site the venture culture we see a lot of consolidation expansion of the areas of settlement more numbers more settling down and other developments of of that kind so in its own right it's a very interesting target long use is a key yardstick for the chronology of this part of the european neolithic sequence um for any british well allison knows this joke any british neolithic pottery specialist this this is not romano british fineware this is vincia pottery this is vincia fineware which makes our own neolithic pottery often look like dog biscuit in alex's immortal phrase um and we were confident one of the reasons why we took on various attempts you see various strands of our approach here was that um we felt there was already a demonstration of chronological order here which had been provided by the correspondence analysis studies of our german colleague from now from berlin wrthran shear uh and he and busian borritts uh had done some preliminary dating but our first major strand was to raid the vassage archive for some as you see some 80 samples and um successfully date them and put them into a successful age depth model alex can tell you later if you're interested about the technologies and process but uh with a we think very respectable amount of um respectively small number of residual and or intrusive samples that old archive some of which had been moved around bits of the Balkans during various exciting 20th century episodes on the backs of donkeys and back again to belgrade has stood up very well so archives are key do the right things uh there is a coherent story there about the long term getting at the shape in more detail than the previously been established uh of the whole sequence of the town development at the bottom here that's the early millic so-called starchivore occupation a lot of what you're going to hear this afternoon is or is already published in our various papers i think the other one that's not yet out is the last one that you'll hear another strand was to help to date closely the top of the town where a lot of the more recent fieldwork had been concentrated in the last few decades amongst others by the tassaches nicola and nanad father and son respectively and they were finding uh not just individual houses but rows of houses and succession of rows of houses some of which were burnt so there's very interesting issues there about what burning on um considerable scale may actually mean is it is it peaceful is it is it aggressive is it ritualized um many issues which we've discussed in an article published in antiquity but what i want to concentrate on here is the detail it gives us a sort of timing of the end of the life of the town there's a significant fire one here and then after probably a 25 year interval there's another farmer fire too which is burning down structures which had been seen to have been in use for a very short period of time perhaps as little as 15 years so you can find you can sort of easily fall into paraphase and ask a while here to get one settlement layer burnt down extensively um once is uh is careless um and so on and so forth what's happening here in the circumstances of of the ending does does the pace of of these sorts of events accelerate and is that then contributing to the moment when finally this great settlement my own which has now been here had a history but underneath it literally underneath it of several centuries is is brought to an end and just to pull out to the wider context we know from provisional modelling but this is very much a a task for for detailed work in the future that other tales are beginning to come to an end and be abandoned from about 4700 onwards this is coming to an end adventure in the 45 very end of the 4550s or in the 4540s again we've got things down to this almost decadal scale in this instance so we can contribute time to the various models that are out there in the literature about the conditions in which this whole great system um was coming to an end interestingly also from a comparative point of view is the near complete agreement between our model uh on the left for the classic work at the top of the tail and the equivalent uh stratigraphic position using the the older vassage archive there provide punchline their mediums are out by by three years so this gives us confidence that we are getting the right sort of answer and interestingly this may be the last one of the last or perhaps the last of the venture culture tales to be abandoned the final strand here was exploiting a new cutting that was made possible because the part of the tale is about to fall into the Danube here behind Alex obviously and our colleague Kniroslav Maritz and the opportunity was taken by our Serbian colleagues to excavate quite a small cutting but with modern single context recording very carefully with now discrimination between burnt and unburnt buildings which have been missed routinely in the match of the earlier work at the site and other comfortable sites so much more detailed record the opportunity to gather lots and lots of samples from house floors house destruction levels and so on and so forth uh thanks to erc funding we could throw lots of dates of this and um model the results in in these terms there's always a a fly in the ointment in this case it was at the top and the bottom were not so well preserved but what we're seeing exciting in in in the in the middle of the cake as it were is a series of detail unprecedentedly detailed estimates of the durations of the individual houses that go to make up the the body of the of the accumulation of of the town and you can see them stacking up in in time in the upper part of the graph and in the lower part Alex has pulled them out as durations your time scale here is in all years so some seem quite short lived some in the middle unusually longer but they're still probably not much more in use than than half a century this variation up at the top and there's an interesting story of there about um how houses relate to the beginning of the town the the variation between burnt and unburnt houses and so on which i won't go into on this occasion it's all published finally this work at the single site gave us one of the keys into putting proper time scales onto the great venture culture sequence which has been worked on by generations of distinguished colleagues especially through the analysis the typological analysis of pottery and so now we can put a time scale on all the venture ABCD schemes and so on and in all that another paper we took that as it were sideways and gathered up some 600 not our own dates but other published dates to create a kind of regional map of the expansion of the venture network so what we're doing is is firstly creating much better timings but we're also unpicking the long term and through the lens particularly of an individual site venture Bella Bordeaux we're able to see much more detail than we could previously about the process of telecumulation about the nature of household history and finally the the conditions in which things perhaps accelerated at the end and in the years immediately running up to its final abandonment and this is a big tipping point across many parts of europe as a whole this middle 5th millennium period things are changing also in the longhouse world it's a phase when new kinds of enclosure are being built with rondeau enclosures and a series of other changes that take us through saturn and western europe and perhaps not here but we can think much more about the connections there tend to be different research communities that engage with different problems the venture lot with the venture and other phenomena in southeast europe then there's an lbk crew and then there's a monument's crew out in the west and we don't often get together enough so this kind of work allows that sort of more global approach to become possible between within a particularising much more historically or oriented approach a next case study moving on takes us into southwest hungry and we're now looking at a site that in broad terms belongs to the first half of the fifth millennium cal bc where in the so-called lengel culture this again in big terms represents continuity from the initial setters represented by the famous lbk culture so continuation of house existence more sites becoming visible in the landscape perhaps with time more differentiated mortuary practices and more social differentiation things like that going on but again this world doesn't last forever and it too seems to come to an end in the middle of the fifth millennium so that's just a very quick thumbnail sketch of the kind of context to which this wonderful site orshonyak apologies for my hungarian pronunciation belongs this is a recent discovery thanks to motorway investigations on a very big scale north to south it was well over a kilometer that was investigated and it has earlier occupation but it also has a lot of uh lengel first half of fifth millennium cal bc occupation in fact the site is estimated to be as big as 80 hectares an extent at least twice if not more bigger than any other previously known lengel site in in in this part of the lengel distribution and there's a wonderful rich archaeology of of houses and great pit complexes that go with them the houses scattered around without obvious central buildings and then a whole series of burials from the excavated slice on 2300 or 400 burials from the from from the road slice nearly all of them individual burials men women children grouped around the site in smaller and bigger groups giving the impression that they're their neighbourhood cemetry is scattered in and around the different constituent parts of this this great settlement complex so big site what would we normally think well it's going to have a long history because it's big that's the kind of way we tended to to think rather crudely part in in the past and yes indeed it does have quite a long history as you can see here this is the number of dated features of a generational scale a generation being defined for purposes of the irelanders with 25 years there it has a respectively long history but what's particularly striking about Orsiniac and we've published this extensively with Hungarian colleagues the team led by Esther Banffi is the way that a lot of this activity seems to be concentrated into the early part of the site it becomes a big site very rapidly on this sort of scale and then it has a peak as a major coalescence or major aggregation something of that kind borrowing terms and comparative literature and then tails off quite rapidly to have a long slow decline so there's something very interesting why is there suddenly this great concentration of people we don't understand that there's still a lot of post excavation probably years of post excavation to to do and all sorts of scientific analyses to be done the Hungarians of in carrying out all sorts of isotopic and adna work and so on so forth in the comparative literature one of the conditions in which sites of this kind often form are under troubled times with the the push of regional violence but this so far according to the skeletal investigations no major upsurge in trauma or or or anything of that kind visible on the human skeletons involved so we don't know for the time being what is actually causing people to come together in this way but it seems again to be something important within that envelope of a couple of centuries just before four thousand seven hundred through to about four thousand five hundred when things are changing and then ending in this part of in this part of Europe we can go further using the dates to make estimates and we think of a much more reliable and robust certainly explicit and quantifiable and changeable if you like than other kinds of population modelling that are going on at the moment for example through rounding up the density of radiocarbon dates which we think is unreliable of course you have to make assumptions some 120 houses houses were excavated in a road slice is an estimate of perhaps 400 or so across the site as a whole we need to make assumptions about how long a house was in use we have chosen a figure of perhaps 25 years as a defensible house duration but we can we can we can put in other estimates and you get different results but with that 25 year figure it could be that at the peak of occupation round about 4,700 there could have been as many as 200 houses in in use whereas at the end of the history maybe just a handful so we get a much more explicitly quantified sort of measure of numbers of structures and we can do something comparable with population because we can extrapolate up to the possible not from the excavated number of burials to the possible total we we have to normalise them because of missing the children from the mortuary record and then we have to play around with different mortality rates and so on and so forth and Alex can talk you through this if you're interested it's published in great detail in the barrifter of the romanish and commission but again it gives us a an explicit quantifiable figure probably for a population at the peak of this site of some low thousands of people coming together for a short period of time perhaps before social tensions led to the whole thing splintering and becoming much less important and finally this even possibility of using these figures to get at the possible size of households putting number of houses and possible number possible population numbers against the number of houses and coming up with a household size of perhaps somewhere between 10 and 18 which doesn't compare too badly if you can calculate the same figure using the rolls method of household constituents being a roughly a tenth of floor area again a lot of assumptions going into here but they're they're explicit and they're also informative so again working closely with our Hungarian colleagues we were able to not only better time this site but unpick its history show that it wasn't just in use for three centuries as a more or less smeared kind of site biography but that it had an accelerated beginning a briefly maintained peak and then a long slow decline and that in turn set in a wider regional context a whole series of changes and eventually the disappearance of the vincia culture and the langelle culture and a whole series of transformations usually talked about in terms of the early copper age by the regional specialists but I won't go into that on this occasion now if you're still with me up relatively briefly last two case studies takes us quickly up to Orkney where we dated a series of individual sites one example here is Barnhouse this is structured too I think at Barnhouse excavated by Colin Richards and we were able to produce a much more detailed site chronology the bars here the numbers of the various individual structures is that two there and a structure the great building structure eight coming slightly later earlier time is up at the top on this particular coming slightly later so this is getting going in the 32nd century and coming to an end in the early part of the 29th century so a finite existence quite a long existence in this case but a finite one and that's definitely one of the messages that we think also came out of our modelling which we carried out with Nick Card and his team at the now famous Nesaf Brodgar site in the mainland main island of Orkney this is an unfinished story because they haven't got down to the lower levels yet and it may take them a long time to get there if ever but we'll see live in hope but this too seems to not be something that was in use for a thousand years which was the initial informal estimate of the excavation team but to have a peak perhaps roughly of the same order as that of Barnhouse now again and you can follow this in detail in an article published in antiquity last year we gathered up other existing radiocardin dates for the region and obviously there's a whole heap going on here which I don't have time to talk about but the sorts of key things that we sought to draw attention to were again the constituents of a much more dynamic and punctuated or late Neolithic Orkney story it's not all the same when you get into the detail we can see first of all a period of overlap between older traditions round-based pottery and and the innovation of grooved ware perhaps coming in in the 32nd century interestingly stored cans and the developed passage gaze the so-called mace how tight may not go back that far in time before that overlapping with this big sites are not like Barnhouse and NASA Brodgar are not lasting forever and if I can find it yes other parts of this landscape the ring of Brodgar on the basis of its existing and as we modelled them OSL dates optimally stimulated luminescent states coming significantly later at the time of its great neighbour the nest of Brodgar was probably a place of ghosts being infilled with deliberately with midland dumps and generally abandoned the ring of Brodgar gets inserted into a seemingly much more empty kind of landscape and this plays out also on regional scale on the basis of the numbers of data science activity drops away in the in the as it were the core of mainland Orkney after the initial flow and then continues rather more episodically and sporadically in the outline so-called the outline areas so-called periphery so again that's just a brief introduction to what we see again as as a much more dynamic much more punctuated history when we unpick things get under the skin as it were of the long term and down to the timescales of lifetimes and generations my last example jumps us down into the south west of spain to the end of the fourth millennium and the early part of the third millennium this drops us into a very different kind of archaeology so I apologize for the the the very rapid changes of scenes but it makes the same sort of point it also introduces a little bit more explicitly the the the sociality of some of these communities Valencina de la Concertfield is a very large site or complex with a series of monuments and features which have been excavated in many many different places or sectors across the small town that it sits largely under there we are with our Spanish colleagues led by Leonardo Garcia San Juan and the these pictures just give you an idea of that kind of archaeology pits and ditches and often quite many burials often of a pretty simple kind in pits or so-called artificial caves but there are also notable monuments the long-known and very wonderful Larkasora with its great passageway and stone-corvaled roof and the more recently excavated and recently published Montelerio tholos tomb with with a round chamber and probably a mud vaulted roof and 20 or so are very interesting burials in it another example just to illustrate the general nature of this archaeology comes from an immediately adjacent area or sector so called pp4 Montelerio here's the lower level an individual buried with all sorts of exotic themes flint and rock crystal and ivory and we know that ivory has been imported in some quantities into this area from north Africa even from the eastern Mediterranean and it's all very impressive now there are many technical challenges in getting enough dates in this kind of environment but we did our best and what I want just to concentrate very briefly is I come to an it's on these two green bars for the two kinds of tholos and our sample we have to remember here is actually very small so there's another task for Spanish colleagues in the future to get more sites like this data but we think against a longer history of use of this complex there is probably a quite short lived phase of megalith tholos construction into which the vast majority of these exotic grave goods are being put with people that seem interesting and different there may be a slightly later phase when the very biggest most architecturally elaborate stone vaulted tholori are constructed as a last gas before beaker practices are introduced into this part of southern iberia so we think it's and our Spanish colleagues think this is part of a story of the emergence of elites with very wide spread far flung connections who carried out extravagant funerals as part of establishing their social position but from the chronology provisional chronology that we were able to establish with them it looks as though this was not maintained for for very long maybe the effort of it all is simply something that in the conditions of the neolithic and copper age that was not sustainable that's something that that I think we see over and over again in in the story of the development of the neolithic before the bronze age there is social differentiation but it never seems to last for for very long in so we can just pass over that in concluding I'd just like to note again the importance of the archives we see here are French colleagues who work closely in a study on the upper rhineland Anthony de Merin on left and Philippe Lefranc on your on your right sorting through excavated material looking for the right sort of short life material for us to to date and that's what we were after over and over again but this is only possible if people keep their archives for long enough across all the countries of Europe and if modern rescue excavations is also carried out in such a way as to make this kind of search possible if we if we misguided them reasons don't do this we will not be able to achieve the ambitious agenda which I see in front of the discipline in the future so finally let's end with with this I've tried to argue for not only the importance not only of a much better time neolithic and copper age but as we get under the skin of the long term getting us down to the much more interesting timescales of lifetimes of generations where things never seem to stay the same for very long that leaves hanging questions of what the overall shape of the neolithic trajectory may be I've just written a book about this it's probably about practice to put in a shameless plug but um oxbow have kindly provided you with a pre-publication offer in a leaflet you can find that on your way out sorry mr president if I'm breaking every protocol of the anti-creeds so on this sort of basis I think we can't not only offer these much more detailed narratives but use them to think in a much more particularizing historical kind of way for me centered on on people and I hope I've done enough to get you to agree with this wonderful quote from the French analyst historian in conclusion the concept of prehistory is one of the most ridiculous that can be imagined thank you very much