ABSTRACT
Routines are the stuff of life: innumerable, repeated actions, which time after time keep the world in existence. It is impossible to envisage a Neolithic world in any detail without thinking about the conditions in which people, day after day, and from season to season, cooked, ate, gathered, talked, resided, looked after their animals, or moved through and attended to the landscapes which they inhabited. Routines comprise things that have to be done for life to go on, their very repetition creating what has been called a sense of ‘ontological security’. Because they are quite varied, though each one in itself is repeating, routines embrace different kinds and scales of social interaction or sociality, in varying settings. Many routine actions may be carried out unthinkingly or unconsciously, though not necessarily all of them, and their cumulative effect may often be what has been called the ‘unintentional reproduction of structures’. Routines are embodied, but rarely neutral in meaning or on reflection. They may be both generated by and in their turn help to generate culturally specific principles and worldviews. Because of this varied nature, routines are at the heart of considerable diversity and yet also of much that was held in common among people widely separated in space and time. They have been discussed widely in other disciplines, but rarely thought about in detail in interpretive accounts of prehistory. Rather, in the ways we divide up and write about our subject, the emphasis has tended to be on largely disembodied and asocial, separated procedures: residence as questions of numbers or duration; crop processing and animal husbandry as techniques and procedures; landscape as static settlement patterns; and so on. Routines are a potentially rich field of enquiry, and this chapter is an exploratory attempt to examine their importance for winning a better understanding of being there.
