ABSTRACT
It has often been noted that the evidence for funerary activity in Neolithic Britain is rather more extensive than that for everyday subsistence activities. The dead seem to be more visible than the living. Indeed, funerary monuments have sometimes been used in ingenious ways as an indirect indicator of human impact on the landscape (Atkinson 1968; Bradley 1984b, 16). It might consequently be expected that the lively and productive debate which has characterised mortuary archaeology over the past thirty years or so would have found an application in developing an extensive knowledge of Neolithic society from this material. Yet this is only partly the case. For while a very extensive battery of conceptual apparatus has been put together which could interrogate the funerary evidence, many of its individual elements are grounded in mutually antagonistic philosophies. Different schools of archaeological thought have perceived the dead in quite different ways, and have sought to extract distinct kinds of information from them. It follows that the forms of analysis which they have elaborated cannot be routinely applied without some consideration of the broader intellectual projects from which they have emerged.
