4 - Who Were These People? A Sideways View and a Non-answer of Political Proportions

Summary

Introduction

Gordon Barclay raised this important question – who were these people? – in 2005 when it was demonstrated, thanks to the National Museums of Scotland's dating of cremated human bone project that the central Food Vessel cremations at North Mains, Strathallan, Perth and Kinross, were broadly contemporary with the construction of the henge within which they were found (Barclay 2005: 92). As has always been the case during my friendship with Gordon, the questions he poses, even during casual conversation, are always worth considering. They are also deeper than they may often appear. ‘Who were these people’ is a question not just relevant to North Mains, but it can be taken further and extended to the whole range of Neolithic and Bronze Age burials not just in Scotland, but in Britain and Ireland as a whole and indeed elsewhere in Neolithic Europe. This study is by no means exhaustive, rather it plays devil's advocate by examining a range of interpretations, many unprovable but by no means ignorable, and hopefully it may stimulate thoughts (or not) amongst colleagues and challenge some current thinking. These musings are offered to Gordon as a small way of thanking him for the work over the past few decades on which I have been hugely reliant and by which I have been significantly influenced. We have mainly been in agreement: we may not be now. They are also offered in the hope that they may be entertaining, questioning and contentious, but also in the full understanding that they may bore him to tears now that his research has changed to things more modern.

The old division with which Gordon and I grew up of multiple disarticulated burials in the Neolithic and crouched inhumation, then cremation, burials in the Bronze Age is now known to be totally inadequate (Gibson 2007, and see Chapter 5, this volume). Thanks to the widespread application of radiocarbon dates from carefully selected samples, crouched inhumations can be seen to span both periods, the rite of cremation is equally long-lived and disarticulated remains persist into the second millennium. Cremations, crouched inhumations and disarticulated inhumations are still all classed as burials, and those that are accompanied by broadly contemporary artefacts are normally classed as ‘rich’. Bronze Age burials in particular are often deemed to be those of a ‘social elite’.