ABSTRACT

In the monuments they built to worship their gods and venerate their dead the first farmers have stamped their mark on the British Isles. But the hopes and fears, myths and legends, that motivated their construction have been irretriev ably lost. Archaeologists can do no more than recover the material traces the rituals have left behind. Yet even this makes it quite clear that we are dealing with a very different world from fantasies of Druids, Extraterrestrials or Golden Age Sages that have been conjured up from the imaginations of the romantics. For the sake of convenience the monuments are often divided into ‘Neolithic’ and ‘Bronze Age’, but this obscures their underlying continuity. Fashions in monuments might wax and wane, but all were constructed and used by the same types of communities to fulfil similar religious, emotional and social needs.