INTRODUCTION

This volume probably requires a certain amount of explanation. Some books are written as a means of imparting a body of information which already exists in a fairly coherent form before the writing begins. In other cases, the writing itself forms the means by which ideas and evidence are brought together and synthesised. In this way of working, the author is writing as a means of collecting their thoughts on a particular issue. This book is certainly of the latter kind. When I was in the final stages of writing Rethinking the Neolithic (Thomas 1991a), one particularly perceptive reader suggested that what I was doing with that book was establishing a personal agenda for future work. What he had in mind, I think, was that I should follow up the rather broad-brush approach of Rethinking the Neolithic with a series of more detailed studies, concentrating on artefacts, funerary practice and so on. It is certainly the case that I no longer feel a need to attempt to rewrite a whole period of prehistory, and am happier undertaking a project which is much more focused. None the less, in this book I have followed a rather more perverse strategy than that of concentrating on a particular set of material. While Rethinking the Neolithic outlined a general approach to prehistory, by the time that it was published I found myself painfully aware of a number of problems which it had not addressed. These were both theoretical and empirical questions, several of which seemed to me to be linked to each other. My feeling was that I would be unable to find adequate answers to some of the problems which I recognised in British prehistory until I had addressed certain theoretical issues, and vice versa. As Gilles Deleuze once wrote, ‘practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another’ (Deleuze in Foucault 1977, 206).