Sustainable change:  temporality and the Neolithic in western ireland.

Andrew Whitefield

The aim of this project is to increase understanding of the social context of Neolithic evidence from the west of Ireland.  Becoming ’Neolithic’ was a dynamic and locally varied process spanning centuries.  Yet the material record is static – dated evidence provides only a fragmented series of isolated instants in a generalised chronology.  How then are archaeologists to understand unfolding social change? 

The developments in material culture and ideas associated with the transition to the Neolithic attest to changing relationships with time.  Enduring monuments to the past and new kinds of provision for the future reflect identities in flux. The events that have been isolated and fixed in archaeological chronologies represent moments from the flow of social time. They are manifestations of the particular social conditions at particular times in particular places.  This spectrum of contexts militated against a uniform and wholesale break with the past at a fixed point in time. The temporality of Neolithic lives cannot be reduced to an expedient social-evolutionary step. 

This project unpacks accepted narratives, examining how contemporary social and political concerns have helped shape the characterisation of prehistory in Ireland.  The archaeological evidence under investigation includes three principal case studies: Céide Fields and environs, Co. Mayo; Carrowmore-Carrowkeel and environs, Counties Sligo and Leitrim; and The Burren, Co. Clare. These are landscapes subject to ongoing research programmes, and provide exciting new evidence that challenges compressed chronologies.  Previously underrepresented interpretive approaches which draw on anthropology and social science complement new empirical research data.

The particular focus of the project is on bridging the gap between the measured time of archaeological chronologies and the social time – the temporality – of people’s lives.  Human engagement with space – spatiality – and material culture – materiality – are also vital components of the study. Critical engagement with theory, method and evidence provides new insights into life in Neolithic Ireland.

 Andrew Whitefield  (January 2012)

a.whitefield1nuigalway.ie    

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