ABSTRACT
In the second part of this book, I will present three studies which make use of the ideas which have been developed in the earlier chapters. These studies are arranged in broadly chronological order, since they are concerned with the earlier Neolithic, the later Neolithic, and the end of the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age respectively. Additionally, the scale at which the analysis is pitched is different in each case: the first example involves developments which took place across the whole of the northwest of Europe, the second is restricted to the British Isles, and the third is focused on a single site and its surroundings. This kind of an exercise demands some discussion of the issue of scale, since it could easily be construed that what is being presented here is a series of approved ‘scales of analysis’. This might imply that ‘the site’, ‘the landscape’, ‘the region’ and ‘the continent’ represent given entities which are host to particular forms of social interaction, and which constitute the spatial equivalents of Braudel’s temporal scales. Thus face-to-face interactions would be expected to take place in ‘micro-time’, while continent-wide social transformations might be a feature of the longue durée . However, I would argue that such an understanding would be both flawed and simplistic. Particular social and cultural phenomena have a spatial range or extent over which they operate, and this range may expand or contract across time. As a result, these phenomena will not fit comfortably into any pre-given entity such as a ‘region’.
