Prehistoric Materialities: Becoming Material in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland (Hardback)
$93.24 - Save $4.91 (5%) - RRP $98.15 Free delivery worldwide (to United States and
all these other countries) Usually dispatched within 48 hours | |Short Description for Prehistoric Materialities This volume focuses on the analysis of materials, from the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age periods of Britain and Ireland, in the study of prehistoric artefacts. Challenging the assumption that materials are inert and shaped by past societies, it argues that it is rather the materials which shaped the societies.
Full description- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Published: 07 September 2012
- Format: Hardback 256 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: British & Irish History | Ancient History: To C 500 CE | Archaeology
- ISBN 13: 9780199556427 ISBN 10: 0199556423
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Full description for Prehistoric Materialities
Humans occupy a material environment that is constantly changing. Yet in the twentieth century archaeologists studying British prehistory have overlooked this fact in their search for past systems of order and pattern. Artefacts and monuments were treated as inert materials which were the outcomes of social ideas and processes. As a result materials were variously characterized as stable entities such as artefact categories, styles or symbols in an attempt to comprehend them. In this book Jones argues that, on the contrary, materials are vital, mutable, and creative, and archaeologists need to attend to the changing character of materials if they are to understand how past people and materials intersected to produce prehistoric societies. Rather than considering materials and societies as given, he argues that we need to understand how these entities are performed. Jones analyses the various aspects of materials, including their scale, colour, fragmentation, and assembly, in a wide-ranging discussion that covers the pottery, metalwork, rock art, passage tombs, barrows, causewayed enclosures, and settlements of Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain and Ireland.
