Julian Stewart Thomas

• PhD
• Professor at The University of Manchester

Studies of early fourth-millennium BC Britain have typically focused on the Early Neolithic sites of Wessex and Orkney; what can the investigation of sites located in areas beyond these core regions add? The authors report on excavations (2011–2019) at Dorstone Hill in Herefordshire, which have revealed a remarkable complex of Early Neolithic monum...

Organic remains from excavated sites include a wide range of materials, from distinct organisms ('ecofacts') to biomolecules. Biomolecules provide a variety of new research avenues, while ecofacts with longer histories of study are now being re-harnessed in unexpected ways. These resources are unlocking research potential, transcending what was pre...

In this paper, we discuss how the history of our discipline continues to shape how we think with material culture to produce narratives. We argue that recent developments in scientific dating—in combination with New Materialist and Big Data approaches—offer the potential to produce radical new interpretations. However, we can only achieve this if w...

O volume que agora sai a público reúne um conjunto de estudos e reflexões apresentado no Colóquio Internacional Romper Fronteiras, Atravessar Territórios. Identidades e Intercâmbios da Pré-história Recente no Interior Norte Peninsular, que se realizou nos dias 23 e 24 de setembro de 2021, e organizado pelo Centro de Investigação Transdisciplinar «C...

For many centuries, scholars and enthusiasts have been fascinated by Stonehenge, the world’s most famous stone circle. In 2003 a team of archaeologists commenced a long-term fieldwork project for the first time in decades. The Stonehenge Riverside Project (2003-2009) aimed to investigate the purpose of this unique prehistoric monument by considerin...

Evidence for working rock crystal, a rare form of water-clear type of quartz, is occasionally recovered from prehistoric sites in Britain and Ireland, however, very little has been written on the specific methods of working this material, and its potential significance in the past. This paper presents the first synthesis of rock crystal evidence fr...

Investigation of British Mesolithic and Neolithic genomes suggests discontinuity between the two and has been interpreted as indicating a significant migration of continental farmers, displacing the indigenous population. These incomers had already acquired some hunter-gatherer genetic heritage before their arrival, and this increased little in Bri...

Introduction to The Stonehenge Riverside Project, Volume 1.

In their introduction to the discussion of Beiläufigkeit in archaeology, Pollock, Bernbeck, Appel, Loy and Schreiber build pleasingly on the theme of what Daniel Miller refers to as the ‘humility’ of physical things (2010, 50). By this he means that objects do not determine or prescribe the actions of human beings, but mutely establish the circumst...

For many centuries, scholars and enthusiasts have been fascinated by Stonehenge, the world’s most famous stone circle. In 2003 a team of archaeologists commenced a long-term fieldwork project there for the first time in decades. The Stonehenge Riverside Project (2003-2009) aimed to investigate the purpose of this unique prehistoric monument by cons...

The story of the Neolithic period in Britain as we so far understand it has been compiled from myriad individual archaeological encounters with the traces of human activity from the centuries concerned in different places within the landscape. These traces include the remains of partly earth-fast timber structures which often consist of recognizabl...

Human societies are held together by relationships, conventions, traditions, institutions, and tacit understandings. These things are intangible, and while humans themselves are reproduced as corporeal beings, their societies are sustained by practical activities that continually recreate knowledge, customs, and interpersonal bonds. Just as a langu...

Why is the Neolithic period in Britain of continuing importance today? For one thing, as we observed in the Introduction to this book, places like Stonehenge, Avebury, and the components of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site such as Skara Brae, the Stones of Stenness, and the Ness of Brodgar provide an enduring fascination for a wide...

Is it possible to experience the Neolithic period (c.4000—c.2400 BCE) in Britain today? Of course not, or not in any literal sense. And yet, there are devices that we can create, and places that we can visit, that can to some extent stand in for that experience. These enable us, however fleetingly, to bridge the gulf of time that separates us from...

It is just over sixty years since Stuart Piggott published his major work, Neolithic Cultures of the British Isles. This was the first comprehensive account of what was then known and assumed about the ‘New Stone Age’ in these islands, and it surveyed discoveries and summarized debates that had occurred over the previous century. This process of gr...

The archaeological evidence that has accumulated over the past five decades demonstrates that two very different situations existed successively in Britain in the centuries on either side of 4000 BCE. While this is in some ways an arbitrary date, it is nonetheless a convenient one, since there are very few indications that ‘Neolithic’ artefacts and...

The Neolithic in Britain was a period of fundamental change: human communities were transformed, collectively owning domesticated plants and animals, and inhabiting a richer world of material things: timber houses and halls, pottery vessels, polished flint and stone axes, and massive monuments of earth and stone. Equally important was the developme...

By the later part of the third millennium BCE, Britain had become connected to mainland Europe by the so-called ‘Beaker network’. This appears to have involved the circulation of people, materials, and cultural innovations over trans-continental distances. Most tellingly, it included direct evidence for cross-Channel contact and the movement of ind...

For traditional societies, by which we mean those peoples whose worlds are permeated by kin relations and obligations, and among whom past societies such as those of Neolithic Britain are mostly to be counted, the most precious inheritance is knowledge. Inherited knowledge is of many kinds, the most overt of which is instrumental knowledge—how to m...

This article takes issue with Parmenter, Johnson and Outram’s (2015) characterization of the faunal assemblages from causewayed enclosures as indistinguishable from those from domestic sites. Their study of bone processing at Etton is helpful and innovative, but they neglect other aspects of assemblage variability, while their account of Neolithic...

Stonehenge is a site that continues to yield surprises. Excavation in 2009 added a new and unexpected feature: a smaller, dismantled stone circle on the banks of the River Avon, connected to Stonehenge itself by the Avenue. This new structure has been labelled ‘Bluestonehenge’ from the evidence that it once held a circle of bluestones that were lat...

The assemblage of Neolithic cremated human remains from Stonehenge is the largest in Britain, and demonstrates that the monument was closely associated with the dead. New radiocarbon dates and Bayesian analysis indicate that cremated remains were deposited over a period of around five centuries from c. 3000–2500 BC. Earlier cremations were placed w...

No abstract is available for this article.

In this latest contribution to our ‘Archaeological Futures’ series, Julian Thomas reflects on the current state of Western archaeological theory and how it is probably going to develop over the next few years. Archaeological theory has not ossified in the period since the processual/post-processual exchanges. The closer integration of archaeologica...

Stonehenge is an iconic monument for people all around the world. Built around 5000 years ago, it stands for mystery and forgotten secrets waiting to be decoded. In this latest book in the Council for British Archaeology's ‘Archaeology for All' series, Professor Mike Parker Pearson presents an up-to-date interpretation of Stonehenge and its landsca...

Modern archaeology has amassed considerable evidence for the disposal of the dead through burials, cemeteries and other monuments. Drawing on this body of evidence, this book offers fresh insight into how early human societies conceived of death and the afterlife. The twenty-seven essays in this volume consider the rituals and responses to death in...

Hugo Anderson-Whymark, Duncan Garrow and Fraser Sturt are to be congratulated on an important find and a robust evaluation of its significance. As they point out, it was Roger Jacobi who first introduced the notion that Britain had been culturally isolated from the continent following the flooding of the English Channel; this was on the basis of st...

This article focuses on the use of Google Earth as a tool to facilitate public engagement and dissemination of data. It examines a case study based around one of the largest archaeological investigations of the Stonehenge landscape, the Stonehenge Riverside Project. A bespoke layer for Google Earth was developed to communicate the discoveries of th...

Was the British Neolithic a take-it-or-leave-it “package” which included building monuments and giving up fish? Julian Thomas thinks there was some room for creative packaging on the home front.

This article constitutes a reply to a piece by Steven Mithen, in which an earlier contribution in this journal (Thomas 1988) is criticized as misrepresenting the character of Mesolithic archaeology. Mithen contends that the ‘processual’ archaeology which dominates that period can be humanized by introducing a consideration of emotion into the adapt...

The inception of the Neolithic has always been one of the more vexed questions of British prehistory. As an issue, it has been obscured by a number of conceptual difficulties. Not least amongst these is that the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic coincides with the point at which two different and opposed approaches to prehistory and i...

The problem of dating cursus monuments has troubled British archaeology for some decades. A series of recent radiocarbon determinations from sites in lowland Scotland suggests that cursus monuments defined by posts and pits are generally earlier than the more familiar bank and ditch structures, and may have been constructed very early within the Br...

The beginning of the Neolithic in Britain is a topic of perennial interest in archaeology, marking the end of a hunter-gatherer way of life with the introduction of domesticated plants and animals, pottery, polished stone tools, and a range of new kinds of monuments, including earthen long barrows and megalithic tombs. Every year, numerous new arti...

This contribution responds to some issues raised by the papers in this issue by contrasting approaches to monumentality that emphasise scale and massiveness with those that concentrate on the experiential qualities of structures, and their capacity to engender memory. It is argued that there is no absolute distinction between large monuments and mo...

I congratulate Duncan Garrow on his very engaging history of the concept of structured deposition, although I find it slightly terrifying that this history now extends over nearly 30 years. I find much to agree with in his account, notably the distressing point that what was originally intended as a heuristic has sometimes become an end in itself:...

A new sequence of Holocene landscape change has been discovered through an investigation of sediment sequences, palaeosols, pollen and molluscan data discovered during the Stonehenge Riverside Project. The early post-glacial vegetational succession in the Avon valley at Durrington Walls was apparently slow and partial, with intermittent woodland mo...

Did our Neolithic ancestors really use earthen long barrows as cemeteries or did the structures have a living purpose, asks Julian Thomas

This chapter argues that the critical changes that we can identify across the so-called 'Mesolithic-Neolithic transition' are not limited to the presence or absence of particular resources or artefact types, or even their contribution to the overall diet of a community. Instead, we should address the way that people inhabit a landscape, and the ext...

The rise to prominence of pits within narratives of the British and Irish Neolithic is well-documented in recent literature. Pits have been cropping up in excavations for centuries, resulting in a very broad spectrum of interpretations but three main factors have led to the recent change in our perception and representation of these features: a bro...

"内容説明 時間・文化・アイデンティティというテーマをハイデガーの思想と新石器時代の事例研究を通して追究、先史考古学を再構築する。 内容（「BOOK」データベースより） あらゆる形式の考古学に潜在していながら、これまで取り組まれることのなかった「時間」「文化」「アイデンティティ」というテーマについて、ハイデガーをはじめ多くの思想家の研究と考古学の事例研究を通して精緻に考察。表面的な「解釈」に留まらず、綿密な吟味と事例研究を通じて、先史考古学に新しい地平を拓く。 "

Interpreting the Axe Trade: Production and Exchange in Neolithic Britain. By BradleyRichard and EdmondsMark. 260mm. Pp. xiv + 236, 24 pls., 65 figs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-521-43446-7. £37.50. - Volume 73 - Julian Thomas

The Grooved Ware complex in Later Neolithic Britain has proved a perplexing phenomenon for prehistorians. While originally identified by Stuart Piggott as one of a series of ‘Secondary Neolithic Cultures’, it was later recognized as a special-purpose assemblage, connected with inter-regional contacts between socially pre-eminent groups. Yet Grooved...

The Greater Cursus – 3km long and just north of Stonehenge – had been dated by a red deer antler found in its ditch in the 1940s to 2890-2460 BC. New excavations by the authors found another antler in a much tighter context, and dating a millennium earlier. It appears that the colossal cursus had already marked out the landscape before Stonehenge w...

Stonehenge continues to surprise us. In this new study of the twentieth-century excavations, together with the precise radiocarbon dating that is now possible, the authors propose that the site started life in the early third millennium cal BC as a cremation cemetery within a circle of upright bluestones. Britain's most famous monument may therefor...