ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the author’s experience as both archaeologist and, latterly, novelist. It draws on two of the author’s published novels (Undreamed Shores and Omphalos), set in the Neolithic of Northern France, the Channel Islands and Southern Britain, and explores the process of fictionalisation as a project of “translation” from the language appropriately and necessarily used by archaeologists in academic discourse, into the language of storytelling. The novels were always intended as literary, rather than archaeological, projects, but they draw directly and extensively on archaeological evidence, including the author’s own excavations and academic publications. Focusing on key themes of food and daily life, exchange and navigation, ritual and religious change, the structure of Neolithic societies and the nature of oral traditions, it asks whether this process of “translation” can, itself, contribute to the interpretation of the archaeological record.
