No abstract

Shortly after his retirement from a distinguished career in the Department of Archaeology at Edinburgh, the author gave the Rhind Lectures for 2009, bringing together his thoughts about the Neolithic revolution, and comparing Childe's ideas with today's. These lectures, summarised here, announced the modern vision to a wide audience. It is a reversal of the old: Epipalaeolithic people came together in the first large, permanent communities, to form extensive settlements which only later needed to be fed by farming.

The thesis proposed here is that architecture exploded in the early Neolithic of southwest Asia as a novel and powerful system of symbolic representation, the scaffolding of a pre-literate mode of external symbolic storage. The ability to construct settlements, houses and public buildings that represented constructs of the world that they inhabited allowed new kinds of human society to evolve. By comparing the long Epipalaeolithic period and the trend towards sedentary village life with the rich architectural symbolism of the early Neolithic, we establish the archaeological grounds on which the interpretations are to be founded. Contemporary architects, anthropologists and respected modern social thinkers agree that architecture is indeed a very powerful form of symbolic representation. However, we need to establish why the capacity of human societies to produce such concrete symbolic forms should arise at the end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene period. The answer, it is argued, is to be found in theories of the evolution of the human mind, and particularly in the co-evolution of human cognitive faculties and culture. The work of the psychologist Merlin Donald is of fundamental importance in this regard, especially his ideas concerning external symbolic storage systems. Architecture as a mode of external symbolic storage allowed Neolithic communities to become the first humans to inhabit a "built environment " rich in symbolic meaning, making possible the emergence of new, larger and more complex forms of social organization.

The accidental discovery of a souterrain beside the A9 road 14 km (8–7 miles) N of Perth led to its complete excavation and the investigation of several hundred square metres of the settlement with which it was associated. A single grave of the Beaker period was also discovered during excavation and is reported elsewhere in this volume. The souterrain was a massive example of the ‘southern Pictland’ group, and the settlement consisted of timber-framed circular houses of the familiar British Iron Age tradition. Little material cultural remains were recovered, but a series of radiocarbon dates places the souterrain's construction in the last century or so be, its use contemporary with the timber houses alongside, its destruction around 200 AD, and the continued use of the site into the 9th century at least.

The term ‘neolithization’ as it is generally used in relation to southwest Asia narrows the focus of research, and works against our efforts to envision explanations of the process in terms of the long-term evolution of human societies. Here, we re-frame the neolithization process, setting it within the framework of niche construction theory. We argue that the concept of cultural niche construction fits the purpose, but needs to be extended to encompass the more complex social worlds of the Holocene in the form of the cognitive-cultural niche.