ABSTRACT
Discussions of Neolithic settlement in northwest Europe have tended to focus on the scarcity of evidence for houses and to suggest that this indicates a change from the village-based social units that have been identified as the characteristic feature of the early Neolithic in central and southeast Europe. Instead of houses monuments are said to be the social foci for communities in northwest Europe (e.g. Hodder 1984; 1990; Sherratt 1990; 1995a; Bradley 1998a). In this interpretative scenario the Neolithic of Ireland and Britain is seen as the result of lifestyles created by indigenous hunter-gatherers encountering and transforming Neolithic material culture on the Atlantic fringe of Europe. Because settlement mobility is seen as the central characteristic of the pattern of life in these transformed societies, then by definition the settlement evidence will be ephemeral. More recently Whittle has advocated a view that sees settlement across the whole of Europe during the Neolithic as dominated by mobility, fluidity and lower levels of population than previously assumed (1996: 4–9). This has led him to review the status of the early central European Linearbandkeramik (LBK) settlements, normally viewed as classic examples of centres of settled life (e.g. as in Whittle 1985; 1988; 1994), and to suggest that they may represent ‘symbolic tethers for a population that still moved around a lot, following cattle through woodland, supplementing its diet with limited cultivation, gathering and some hunting’ (Whittle 1997b: 18; see discussion in Whittle 1996: 144–67; see also Thomas 1996a). Whittle questions the easy assignation of what he calls modern, Western terms such as ‘house’ and ‘household’ to prehistoric societies very different from our own.
