ABSTRACT
The contributions to this volume offer a striking demonstration of diversity over time and diversity from place to place through what we now recognise as ‘Atlantic Europe’. From early standing stones separated from their natural sources on the Central Alentejan plain, and Iberian rock art set in impressive locations but with restricted views, to walled and bastioned constructions in northern Portugal placed for all to see and for those within to look out far and wide, there was clearly no one way of doing things. As such, these studies already begin to answer the question set by Christopher Tilley (1999, ch. 3), about the usefulness of common terms like ‘megalith’. It is not just the term ‘megalith’ that is potentially problematic, but practically all others in general archaeological usage, including ‘monument’, ‘monumentality’ and ‘landscape’ themselves. ‘Enclosures’ are another case in point (cf. Oswald et al. 2001). Our general language is rather clumsy and probably inadequate, but as the papers included here move to their specific studies rooted in times and places, this difficulty appears to fall away. Everywhere, so it seems, there was not just diversity, or different ways of doing things, but – as several of the authors bring out clearly, particularly with reference to the beginnings of the Neolithic – diversity in the form of a play between what was local practice and other ideas of wider currency. These contributions can be read as part of much longer debates about diversity from region to region and from sequence to sequence. The Iberian situations already cited, for example, can obviously be fitted into much wider contexts, and the same can be said of all the other studies here.
