ABSTRACT
In Britain, stone-built monuments were first constructed in the landscape during the Early Neolithic. These monuments have frequently been understood as representing the first stages of the domestication of the natural world. In recent years, however, the conceptual dichotomy between nature and culture has increasingly been called into question as it seems likely that Neolithic people may not have understood the environment in the same way that we do. They are likely to have had a quite different conception of what we call the natural world. Furthermore, it can be argued that the conceptual origins of monumentality may lie within the Mesolithic, a possibility which has implications for the ways in which we interpret the earliest monuments. Using examples primarily from south-west Wales, and also south-west Scotland, I will discuss how the first monuments were carefully fitted into a landscape already filled with potent and symbolic places. I will suggest that it was the presence of monuments in the landscape which began to transform peoples’ understanding of the world. We might understand this as the beginnings of the dualism between nature and culture. In prehistory, however, it might have been understood as part of a broader process of negotiation between people and ancestral places.
