The Role of Stone in Island Societies in Neolithic Atlantic Europe: Creating Places and Cultural Landscapes

Abstract

ABSTRACT. The focus of the paper is an engagement with the significance of the exploitation of stone sources to make objects, particularly stone axe heads on islands in northwest Europe during the Neolithic period (4000 -2500 BC). Case studies of Lambay Island in the Irish Sea, Rathlin Island off the northeast coast of Ireland, and the Shetland Islands explore the use of these three stone sources through the archaeological record, examining the biographies of objects (from quarries, through use, to discard or deposition) and applying a range of approaches to understanding material culture. What emerges is an understanding of the central role these three lithic sources played in how people engaged with and created their island places and landscapes. Through their daily engagement with different stone sources (including the ones focused on here) at a range of scales, people created and sustained social relationships and conventions. Hence it is argued that stone artefacts from local sources played a special role in shaping identities on the three islands.

Insular networks: An exploration of material distribution, insularity and island identity on the edge of Europe in the Shetland Neolithic

“…Felsite is a versatile lithic material (Reibeckite felsite is Group XXII in the British scheme of Grouping stone axes (Ritchie and Scott 1988)), and care seems to have gone into selecting felsite with distinctive phenocrysts, spherulitic crystals, and/or banding. The extraction, manufacture and distribution of these tools has been the focus of the North Roe Felsite Project (NRFP), an ongoing multi-disciplinary research project established in 2012, focusing on the North Roe quarry sites and the 416 felsite stone tools from the archipelago (Ballin 2011;Cooney 2017;Cooney, Ballin, and Megarry 2012). Results from the project have fundamentally changed our understanding of the Neolithic in Shetland and provide important wider insights into the character of island communities in this period.…”

“…Neolithic quarries such as the North Roe quarry complex represent major investment of time and labor; however, they have not conventionally been seen as equivalent to the effort invested in monuments elsewhere in the Neolithic world. Quarries are often located in what are regarded as liminal, marginal places like islands or high in mountainous regions (Bradley et al 1992;Cooney 2017;Cooney, Warren, and Ballin 2013;P etrequin et al 2012). These places took time and effort to reach, yet they become the centers of local, regional and even international distribution networks.…”

“…In Shetland, these networks are archipelago-wide while other quarries like those for Group VI volcanic tuff axes from Cumbria or Group IX porcellanite axes from Tievebulliagh and Rathlin island in County Antrim, Northern Ireland are the center of regional networks across Ireland and Britain (Bradley and Edmonds 1993;Grogan and Cooney 1990). The multi-scalar nature of quarries and quarrying is what makes them so valuable as they allow us to simultaneously explore the dichotomy of islands as both bounded units and as components of complex wider maritime landscapes (Cooney 2017). The interpretation of stone knives and axes as ceremonial as well as utilitarian tools is not just based on the labor that went into their production and polish, but also they were special objects from special places.…”

Debitage and Drones: Classifying and Characterising Neolithic Stone Tool Production in the Shetland Islands Using High Resolution Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Imagery

“…In establishing a methodology for their work at Great Langdale, Cumbria, the largest source (Group VI tuff) for stone axes in Britain, Bradley and Edmonds [14] emphasized the need to understand the process of stone tool making as 'a sequence of decisions and actions, choices that are made concerning the steps that can be taken in creating a particular artifact' and the importance of not losing sight of this perspective in thinking in terms of reduction sequences. At the same time when dealing with fine-grained lithic sources which are conducive to flaking and where stages in the reduction sequence can be recognised, the chaine opératoire approach has been widely used as a methodological framework to reconstruct quarrying and reduction processes [5]. Referring back to Bradley and Edmonds [14], their approach involved a detailed survey and analysis of surface material facilitated by a programme of experimental knapping followed by selective excavation to provide stratified contexts and potentially a chronology to deepen understanding of the process and the character of stone working.…”

“…Situated northeast of Orkney and west of Norway, the islands are rich in prehistoric and Viking archaeology ( Figure 1). As the northernmost part of Europe where farming was practiced during the Neolithic (3800-2500 BC), it has been the subject of a number of recent projects including the Northern Worlds Project by the National Museum of Denmark [1,2] and the North Roe Felsite Project (NRFP), a research project exploring the extraction, manufacture and distribution of Neolithic polished stone tools [3][4][5]. During the Neolithic period, a distinctive blue-grey rock called (riebeckite) felsite was used to manufacture ground and …”