In preparing for the publication of the seven papers in the special supplement of Cambridge Archaeological Journal, we were concerned to find an outlet that could find a worldwide audience, as we believe that these papers have more than regional or period significance. That is a big claim. The case studies presented in the supplement are all of early Neolithic long barrows and long cairns of the fourth millennium cal. bc in southern England. Why should a study of the dating of constructions that held the remains of selected human dead, from a particular region of northwest Europe, at a particular point in the regional Neolithic sequence, have any wider importance? We offer two reasons. First, we are applying, perhaps for the first time to a group of monuments rather than to individual sites, a method for the interpretation of radiocarbon dates which enables much more precise estimates of chronology. Secondly, from this promise of far more robust and precise dating come many implications for the kinds of agents that we may wish to people our pasts, for the kinds of lives they lived, and for the histories that we can try to write about them. These are two developments, we suggest, which any archaeology needs to embrace.

Archaeological studies of the material and historical conditions of life have in recent years stimulated discussion of the relationality of people and material culture. Engagement with the material world is one context in which senses of personhood and identity emerge and are transformed. People and materiality are interanimated in the more or less transient events and actions of daily life. Personhood and the material world are loaded with sense and made meaningful through citation and reanimation of cultural values and tradition. This contribution discusses the contingent and possibly transient senses of personhood that may have been constituted in some specific material and historical circumstances relating to early Neolithic monuments in southern Britain. A case study focuses on the relationality of people, animals, earth, stone, architecture and material culture.

The authors consider the impact that trees would have had on the visibility of the landscape from and around Neolithic monuments. It is suggested that woodland may have been an integral part of the way monuments were experienced.