Overview

The significant body of stone and flint axe-heads imported into Britain from the Continent has been poorly understood, overlooked and undervalued in Neolithic studies, particularly over the past half century. It is proposed, in this study, that the cause is a bias of British Neolithic scholarship against the invasion hypothesis and diffusionist model, and it is sought therefore to re-assess the significance accorded to these objects. The aim is to redress the imbalance by re-focusing on the material, establishing a secure evidence base, and exploring the probable conditions in which these often distinctive items made their way to Britain. The narrative presented here rests upon the argument that imported axe-heads came into what is today called Britain as objects of considerable significance. Specifically, they were items of high symbolic value that played a crucial role in fostering particular ways of thinking about, and addressing, social identity in the Neolithic period. These issues are the context for the study, whose main objectives are the close and detailed cataloguing of relevant material, and a documentation of the investigative work needed to establish the credentials of each artefact.

Full Product Details

Author:   Katharine Walker
Publisher:   Archaeopress
Imprint:   Archaeopress Archaeology
Dimensions:   Width: 20.50cm , Height: 2.00cm , Length: 29.00cm
Weight:   1.260kg
ISBN:  

9781784917449

ISBN 10:   1784917443
Pages:   334
Publication Date:   31 January 2018
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Preface and acknowledgements; Chapter One: Introduction; Chapter Two: Re-connecting British and continental research traditions: dynamic approaches to the relationship between axe-heads and identity; Chapter Three: ‘Afterlives’; Chapter Four: An investigation into the contexts of jade axe-heads found in Britain, using GIS terrain modelling of HER data; Chapter Five: ‘Projet Breton’ and the search for Group X; Chapter Six: ‘Crudwell’ type, ‘Smerrick’ type, and marbled all-over-polished axe-heads in Neolithic Britain; Chapter Seven: The rectangular-sectioned axe-head in Britain and its implications for understanding the Neolithic; Chapter Eight: Answering the original questions; Appendix One: Table of all known published jade axe-heads with attributed British find-spot locations (correct until 2017). Shaded in grey are axe-heads with ‘precise’ find-spot locations, included in Appendix Two); Appendix Two: Find-spot locations, and archaeology of Mesolithic to Roman date within a 1000m radius, for 43 jade axe-heads found in Britain, presented as 41 GIS terrain models with accompanying text; Appendix Three: A table of all known Group X axe-heads and a table of Breton fibrolite axe-heads with attributed British find-spot locations; Appendix Four: Table of all published ‘Crudwell-Smerrick’ type axe-heads; Appendix Five: Table of all known axe-heads with rectangular sections which have British find-spot locations attributed. Highlighted in grey are axe-heads of probable Scandinavian origin. This is a summary of the information presented in Appendix Six; Appendix Six: Corpus of all known axe-heads with rectangular sections which have British find-spot locations attributed (summarised in Appendix Five); Appendix Seven: Caches and hoards of axe-heads in Britain. Please note, almost all of the data included in this corpus has been taken directly from Pitts 1996, Appendix One, with a few additions by the author; Bibliography; Index

Reviews

'It is excellent to see all the disparate data collected together with a persistent reminder of the problem of fakes and manuports (most axe-heads are stray finds, others form part of donated antiquarian collections, or, these days, bought on eBay); it allows, for the first time, an overview of the `oddities'. This clearly shows that a re-examination of the material is overdue, and the need for the original lithological descriptions/attributions to be confirmed is the author's constant and timely cry (but for safe progress it must to be done by a competent petrographer). The questions this book (re-)raises are important and are clarified. Most notably (placing jade to one side), why, after the early Neolithic, were so very few axes imported?' - Rob Ixer (2018): Current Archaeology #343 `Overall, this book provides a wealth of interesting ideas and observations of the British Neolithic and its relations with its nearest neighbours. It highlights what the author has rightly identified as a greatly neglected class of objects... For those with a fascination for stone tools, this provides an enjoyable wander through the problems and pitfalls, but also the considerable potential, of axeheads with possible Continental associations.' - Barry Bishop (2019): Archaeological Journal, DOI: 10.1080/00665983.2019.1591070

Author Information

Katharine Walker is a prehistorian who specialises in the Neolithic of northwest Europe. She is Visiting Research Fellow at Bournemouth University, Ecademy Project Officer at the New Forest Centre in Lyndhurst, and a freelance lithics and stone axe specialist. She studied at the Universities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Southampton where she completed a PhD in 2015. Her current research interests focus on materials and material culture, and she has also published on the first metalwork and the origins of social power in The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe (2015). She is an active Committee Member of the Implement Petrology Group, as well as Editor of their newsletter Stonechat.

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