New Thinking: Neolithic Revelations

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2019

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hetta Howes learns that the absence of dental floss in the Neolithic era has left archaeologists with invaluable information about how our ancestors lived and where they travelled to. While piles of pig bones near Stonehenge reveal a communal society that used feasting as a form of negotiation. Penny Bickle and Jim Leary, who both lecture in the University of York's Department of Archaeology, uncover their findings from research projects in the Vale of Pewsey, Alsace and Stonehenge. Penny's current project is 'Counter Culture: investigating Neolithic social diversity', while Jim has been working on 'Neolithic Pilgrimage? Rivers, mobility and monumentality in the land between Avebury and Stonehenge'. This episode is one of a series of conversations - New Thinking - produced in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research & Innovation.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?
0:23.3	It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.
0:28.8	Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds.
0:32.0	Hello, you're listening to the Arts and Ideas podcast.
0:35.3	I'm Heta Howes, and this edition is part of our series New Thinking,
0:39.7	looking at new research in UK universities. Today I'm joined by two archaeologists, Penny Bickle
0:46.0	and Jim Leary, both from the University of York. And they're going to be taking us way back in time
0:51.5	to think about the Neolithic period, what people were building,
0:55.2	what they were doing and what they were eating. So Jim, let's start with you. You were working,
1:01.9	I think, near Stonehenge when you realised that archaeologists have been missing a bit of a trick,
1:06.8	right? That's right. I was working at a huge, great big, neolithic mound called Silbury Hill,
1:14.7	which is not far from Avebury. So it's just to the north of Stonehenge, but it's part of the
1:20.5	World Heritage Site. The World Heritage Site, interestingly, is split into two components,
1:25.4	one being the Stonehenge landscape and then the other one further north being Avebury.
1:31.3	And I was working at Silbury Hill. In fact, we were excavating a tunnel into the centre of Silbury Hill.
1:38.3	And it really struck me that people were doing an awful lot of work within these World Heritage sites.
1:45.0	There were some big projects going on around Avebury, including my work at Silbury, and there
1:50.5	were some renewed work going on around Stonehenge and within Stonehenge at the time, too.
1:56.0	And it really struck me and my colleague, Dave Field Field how few people were actually looking at this
2:02.9	bit of landscape in between the Avebury and Stonehenge area. The landscape in between is
2:08.7	known as the Vale of Pusey and so that's where I've been working. Oh I see. So Avebury is that
2:13.6	similar to Stonehenge? Avebury is a huge Henge monument. Ahenge is a bank and ditch enclosure.
	...

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