Regional Monumental Landscapes (3700–2500 BC)

• Main Authors: Bradley, Richard, Haselgrove, Colin, Vander Linden, Marc, Webley, Leo
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University Press 2015
• Subjects: Fennoscandia
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199659777.003.0008

By about 3700 BC every region of the study area had been settled by farmers (Fig. 3.1), although there must have been local differences between the areas that were colonized by immigrants and those where the indigenous population had changed its way of life. The expansion of agriculture would extend little further and, when it did so, it would be mainly a feature of Fennoscandia. In some of the regions discussed here farming had already been practiced for between a thousand and fifteen hundred years. That was certainly true in the Rhineland, the southern Netherlands, and parts of France, but in other areas it had been adopted only recently. Such was the case in the northern Netherlands, Jutland, Britain, and Ireland, but by the period considered in this chapter the process was virtually complete. Not only did these parts of the study area have different histories, there were significant contrasts in the roles played by local monuments. For the most part such structures were not a feature of the earliest Neolithic period, although even here there were significant contrasts. In the Rhineland, the earthwork enclosures of the LBK were associated with the last settlements in that tradition, and in certain cases may even have taken the place of houses that had been abandoned. In Brittany, on the other hand, the first stone monuments seem to be closely related to the oldest evidence of farming. There was a significant difference between developments in those two regions. From the beginning, the LBK had been associated with enormous longhouses, but on the Atlantic coast of France early settlers may not have occupied such impressive structures. Here stone monuments, especially menhirs, could have been erected from the outset. A similar contrast was found in other regions studied in Chapter 2, but it is even more apparent in the phase considered now, for this was a time when enclosures and mounds were built at an increasing pace. There is little evidence of houses except in Scandinavia, Ireland, and the Northern Isles of ...