ABSTRACT
The still dominant understanding of the Neolithic in Britain rests upon its identification as a primarily economic phenomenon. Because the essence of the Neolithic is believed to lie in agricultural practice, a relatively homogeneous economic base is presumed to underlie the evident cultural variability of the period. In this chapter I will contest this assumption, and will suggest that a quite different set of economic practices prevailed in the Neolithic of southern Britain. Some aspects of this argument may apply to other parts of Britain and Ireland, but it is not my intention to replace one set of global generalisations with another. At the larger spatial scale I will hope to stress variability: the Neolithic in Britain was not characterised by a single economic system.
