Some deposits are more structured than others

Extract

I congratulate Duncan Garrow on his very engaging history of the concept of structured deposition, although I find it slightly terrifying that this history now extends over nearly 30 years. I find much to agree with in his account, notably the distressing point that what was originally intended as a heuristic has sometimes become an end in itself: the identification of a class of deposits that are ‘structured’. Thus, for instance, Bishop, Church and Rowley-Conwy argue (2009, 82) that pits in Neolithic Scotland may have represented ‘places of structured deposition rather than domestic settlements’, and that therefore the plant remains contained within them should be regarded as unrepresentative. Here, structured deposits take on the abject character that used to be afforded to ‘ritual’ phenomena in archaeology: having been identified as irrational and abnormal, their interpretation is considered beyond archaeological competence, and they are not subjected to further analysis.