**4. Second Approach: What Is** *Not* **Animistic in Neolithic Britain and Ireland?**

What can be gained by reflecting on this comparative approach, even if we do not adopt it as a model? In considering this I move into the second approach: noting things which do not seem to be animistic without identifying them as specifically totemic, analogic or naturalistic. The tracing of descent and organization of the community are two examples.

Neolithic communities in Britain and Ireland built chambered tombs in which the dead were placed, sometimes along with the remains of animals, pots and tools and probably organic materials long since lost. Diversity in the results of ancient DNA analyses suggests that some of these tombs were used to bury close kin, while others were not. The subdivision of tombs into different chambers may indicate the segmentation of a community producing descent and lineal transmission—connectivity over time played out in the repeated deposition of remains within connected chambers (Fowler forthcoming). This implies the veneration of the ancestral dead, or at least human ancestry, was important in the construction of at least some of these tombs (whether reckoned in terms of biological lineages or otherwise). Descola notes that among Amazonian animistic communities 'the very idea of an ancestor seems incongruous ... the dead are excluded from human collectives and have no power over them' (Descola 2014a, p. 466). Perhaps the Neolithic dead whose tombs did not revolve around biological lineages were lodged near to their spiritual point of origin, but many Neolithic mortuary practices do not seem to chime with the kinds of animism that Descola focusses on (although other Neolithic practices may do). The variety in Neolithic mortuary practices suggest some ontological diversity in either how kinship was reckoned or what role it played in the transformation of the dead or both.

The organization of time, space and social relations became formalized in some times and places in Neolithic Britain and Ireland. By c. 3000 BC a cluster of passage tombs in the Boyne valley included some extremely large examples, two of which have passages aligned on solstice events (midwinter sunrise at Newgrange, midwinter sunset at Dowth). These have been interpreted as indicating hierarchical relations since many people would have been involved in building them, and could gather outside them, but only a few could enter the chambers at any one time (including during solstice sunrises or sunsets). The megalithic stones of these tombs are carved with arcs, latices, spirals, concentric circles and other 'abstract' motifs<sup>6</sup> which may have been part of carefully curated knowledge systems: Hensey (2012) has suggested these may have had figurative significance in the way that motifs in Australian Aboriginal art do. This is a plausible inference, though it need not necessarily imply a totemic ontology. Hensey (2012, p. 172) further notes that the production of Aboriginal art forms a connection with the ancestral past; this need not necessarily be so for the Neolithic passage grave art, but if this was the case it might have been a very different kind of ancestral connection to those that could be produced by

<sup>5</sup> I am grateful to Ollie Harris for several discussions on this latter issue.

<sup>6</sup> It is also important to note that at least some of this art was openly figurative, depicting trees, snakes and rainbows, for instance (Robin 2012).

successive deposits of human remains. Other connections with place are evident: the tombs combined materials originating in different mountain ranges, including quartz from the Wicklow Mountains c. 30 km to the south, and some megalithic stones forming the passages at Knowth and Newgrange seem to derive from *older* tombs and bear incised motifs hidden on their 'backs' which are turned into the body of the mound (e.g. Cleary and Eogan 2017, pp. 72–74). The act of assembling a monument from different originary sources could be cosmogenic. Many passage tombs in Ireland were also constructed to a common pattern. Mounds were often composed of a series of concentric layers, with large stones bounding each layer. The layers 'wrap' a central point and a linear passage to that point, marked by a series of thresholds with distinct decorative motifs: dazzling arrangements of zig-zags, lozenges or triangles. Pairs of chambers either side of this line partly mirror each other, but are also differentiated slightly by type of stone, contrasting carved or pecked motifs, size and/or contents (Robin 2010). This structure might suggest a slight hierarchy between two inseparable principles—perhaps gendered, perhaps associated with senior and junior lineages—as well as a linear journey or process of transformation (ibid.). The resulting monument could then be seen as aligning social order and cosmos in a *cosmocentric* way.

Similar designs are evident in the central cup-marks enclosed by concentric circles and radial lines in landscape rock art, and in the central platform enclosed by a circular ditch and bank with usually one or two linear entrances at henge monuments. This may suggest similar cosmological themes, or ontological components (potentially even cosmograms), across these later Neolithic sites which do not seem to fit best within Descola's definition of animism compared with totemism or analogism. It is also likely that these media were not produced within a singular, static ontology. As Wallis (2014) argues, the passage tomb 'art' dates from several different periods and some of it embellishes, reworks or erases older markings so it may be inappropriate to try to allocate the production of this decoration to any singular ontological effect. Wallis therefore interprets a transformation in the forms of ontology present at passage tombs during the Neolithic (Wallis 2014, pp. 302–3), although these are described as a 'complex variety of animisms through time' explored by comparing the extent of hierarchy among animistic and totemic relations (*qua* Pedersen 2001). Despite the nuances in exploring change this again deploys a comparative anthropological model, albeit using a different framework to Descola's: the gains and costs are therefore similar. However, the key point is that Descola's description of animism does not fit all aspects of Neolithic art and monumentality.

#### **5. Third Approach: Exploding Ontological Frames**

Wilkinson (2017) argues that animism does not describe a set of ontologies 'out there in the world' so much as a western attempt to grasp a range of Indigenous practices and concepts which defy simple translation: 'animism is an analytical operation that we do, not a type of religion that actual indigenous people hold to' (ibid., p. 306). For Wilkinson, animism is an 'equivocation', a heuristic stand-in for something for which there is no equivalent (ibid.). Wilkinson concludes, '"Animism" does not help us understand indigenous practices; rather it illustrates how much we do not yet understand them' (ibid., p. 307). Some theories of animism have also been presented as a 'theory bomb' to explode western ontological frames and terms, perspectivism in particular (Latour 2009), but as Harris and Crellin (2018, p. 58) point out the bomb leaves 'some very specifically shaped pieces of shrapnel in its wake'. What *other* theory bombs might there be among other ontologies (including from communities Descola categorizes as totemic or analogic)?

Porr and Bell (2012), and Todd (2016), encourage academics to draw on the work of Indigenous theorists and recognise their descriptions of Indigenous ontologies in their own terms. This forces us to reflect on ontological diversity since many Indigenous concepts and theorists have been overlooked in discussions of ontology in Western academia (Porr and Bell 2012; Todd 2016). Todd (2016) cites Watts (2013), for instance, who presents an Indigenous theory of *place-thought*, developed from Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee ontology, in which 'we (humans) are made from the land; our flesh is literally an extension

of soil' (Watts 2013, p. 27), and in which humans engage in dialogue with the land. By contrast, relations with place, land and landscape are weakly attended to in Descola's scheme, except in his discussion of totemism.

Western academics (such as myself) have to take care not to co-opt Indigenous ontologies (Porr and Bell 2012, pp. 164–65), at the same time as acknowledging their influence (particularly via anthropology) on our recent understandings of past ontologies. Indigenous ontologies challenge the universalizing of western ontological frames (e.g., Watts 2013, p. 22), which is vitally important, but we need to be wary of using them as models for past ontologies from other parts of the world. At the same time, attending to the diversity in Indigenous theories and ontologies highlights the possibility of diversity in past ontologies. If we stick with a unitary category of animism we risk subsuming the distinctiveness of Neolithic European communities within a flattened and generic concept which does little justice to the ontologies of communities past or present. Arguably, a focus on diversity within Neolithic ontologies in Britain and Ireland is a crucial response.

#### **6. Fourth Approach: Ontological Difference and Diversity**

The move through the second and third approaches lead towards interpreting the specific ontological effects of Neolithic practices in processes of living, dying, and becoming. I will explore this for the Early Neolithic in southern Britain, where material worlds were arguably distinctive and different from those of any present-day communities around the world (and different from those of, say, Late Neolithic communities in the same landscapes). Inspired by Rosi Bradiotti's Deleuzian and feminist approach to identity (e.g., Braidotti 2011; cf. Deleuze [1994] 2009), Penny Bickle (2020) elegantly argues for placing *difference-initself* at the centre of analyses of past ways of becoming. She defines this as a process in which 'difference [is] a productive and energized space, out of which things, people, identity are created ... or 'become' ... ', and an approach in which we attend to 'the range of possibilities, not the average' (Bickle 2020, pp. 202–1) and to 'diversity within multiple ways of participating in identity in the past. (ibid., p. 204). Hers is a study of gendered differentiation in the Neolithic of central Europe. Without wishing to detract from the focus on sexual differentiation in Bickle's study, and acknowledging that I am not exploring bioarchaeological difference in the way she does, the focus on a process of becoming through multiple relationships can be applied to explore all kinds of identities. For earlier Neolithic southern Britain, for instance, we could consider *becoming-kin, becoming-child, becoming-herder, becoming-potter, becoming-adult, becoming-woman, becoming-man, becoming-parent, becomingdead, becoming-ancestor, becoming-emplaced, etc.* Such becomings would overlap with one another, including within one person's experience, and are always becoming-with-others, some of which are human and some of which are not, as Banfield (2018, p. 55) explores. These processes are bound up with specific affective fields and ontological effects (cf. Harris 2017; Harris and Sørensen 2010). The aim is then to differentiate ontological modes of engagement, different ways of becoming-as and becoming-with, within and between communities. In the remainder of the piece I briefly consider some ways of becoming that might have emerged in Early Neolithic activities in southern Britain as a way of exploring this approach.

The Early Neolithic is noted for the 'altering' of certain places in ways sympathetic to their local characteristics—or their personalities, as Dave Robinson (2012) has suggested. Such practices included: cracking outcrops or digging out boulders and elevating the rocks to make megalithic monuments such as portal dolmens; clearing stones, trees and undergrowth from patches of ground, and; splitting the tree trunks of massive oaks lengthways and erecting the two halves as paired posts which became the focus of later mortuary deposits and mortuary structures. David Field (2007, pp. 129–30) has suggested that the façades of some mortuary structures form horns like those of cattle, and the spineand-rib layout of withies during the construction of some long barrows and long cairns marked out a bovine body in plan. It is possible some wooden chambers, such as Fussell's Lodge, were wrapped in cattle skins, though there is no direct evidence for this (cf. Ray

and Thomas 2003 on Early Neolithic cattle as kin). Perhaps the placement of recently deceased humans within the 'bodies' of trees, rocks and cattle highlighted the equivalence between these bodies. Human and animal bodies were generally treated quite differently even if sometimes in equivalent ways: Banfield (2018, p. 196) notes an 'interweaving and interdependence between human and cattle lives' alongside 'the maintenance of species distinction'. She also points out the 'equity of treatment' and 'segregated togetherness' of cattle and human remains at Fussell's Lodge (Banfield 2018, p. 82). Perhaps the human dead, or aspects of the dead, became animals or entered the bodies of animals, rocks or trees through these mortuary practices7. Other treatments show no such equivalence, such as deposits of very young cattle, sheep or goat at some Cotswold-Severn chamber tombs which may have been sacrifices (Thomas and McFadyen 2010; Banfield 2018, p. 196). Perhaps lodging bodily matter (whether human, plant or animal) at shrines and tombs demonstrated the origins of such bodies in those locales: embedding the dead in place may be particularly significant given that most of the ancestors of humans and domesticated animals living in Britain and Ireland at this time came from Continental Europe during the first centuries of the fourth millennium BC (Brace et al. 2019).

In some tombs, such as those with a central passage with rooves high enough to allow crouching entry and pairs of side cells, the human dead were accessible and their decaying remains might be revealed, lit up, tended to or negotiated with when these tombs were visited. At some—but not all—tombs, projecting or tracing descent was arguably a key concern. The dead became different kinds of kin and ancestors depending on who their remains were interred with. Different architectural features and arrangements of chambers (which could be singular, or in a short single line, or paired either side of a mound, for instance) had different effects: there is no need to imagine a single ontology or way of becoming connecting the use of all chambered tombs given that these were built in such a variety of forms (cf. Fowler forthcoming). While the vast majority of stone-built tombs formed part of one tradition or another—or one tradition and *then* a second, given many were modified between their initial construction and abandonment even those built within a similar timeframe in a given region are sufficiently diverse to suggest that creativity and specific histories were as important as the repeated replication of architectural forms. The modification of some tombs illustrates their ongoing roles in tracing *histories of becoming* and *histories that were becoming—*long, sporadic processes of *becoming-lineages* or other specific social collectives that built and tended them, for instance. As tombs sedimented people in place these tombs became place *and* history.

Causewayed enclosures were large, roughly circular ditched constructions with numerous causeways dividing up the ditches. They seem to have been built by co-operating gangs working on different ditch segments, a few centuries after the first chambered tombs in the region. They show little concern with cardinal points of the compass or regular patterns of internal division. Nor do they seem to be focused on places with earlier activity or distinctive landforms to the same extent as tombs were—Whittle et al. (2011, p. 891) refer to enclosures as 'enchant[ing] by their freshness'. At the same time, like tombs, they articulated a very limited range of architectural elements—arced ditch segments throwing up banks and sometimes post arrangements or palisades—in quite varied ways and locations. Like timber-chambered tombs, they were arenas in which bodily remains decayed—the bodies of humans, trees, animals, pots—and the successive introduction of remains fed the growing monument: mounds covered decayed wooden tombs as midden material at enclosures was buried in ditches which were repeatedly recut. A cycle of commemorative deposition of the dead, physical transformation and forgetting, and commemoration of a transformed place and community could be inferred at some of these sites (Fowler 2003), though perhaps not all. Enclosures offered new ways of *becoming-dead* and *becomingembedded-in-place* and *becoming-the-past* and these were pursued more extensively at some

<sup>7</sup> To discuss a specific instance recorded by ethnographers, an aspect of a deceased person among the Orokaiva can become pigs and another aspect can become a wild animal living in the forest (Iteanu 1995). In this case becoming dead also means undoing kin relations and becoming wild.

enclosures than others. New, large gatherings perhaps involved cosmogenic acts drawing together widespread and perhaps diverse communities—differing co-residential lineages, households or clans, perhaps. At times, violence broke out in these landscapes—we see the impact on skeletal remains in tombs and enclosure ditches (Schulting 2012). People became enemies, became allies, became affines—potentially all with the same neighbouring communities—in different modes of engagement such as raiding or feuding, burying the dead, arranging marriages, digging ditches, herding cattle, holding feasts. These events involved more-than-human communities (Harris 2014), who might have shifted into new modes of engagement when gathering at such locales compared with times of the year when they lived in smaller groups (cf. Thomas 2002; Wengrow and Graeber 2015).

People also dug linear ditches and raised banks forming cursus monuments around archaeologically 'clean' routeways. These sometimes followed the courses of rivers. Such monumental transformations could be seen as part of a deferential dialogue with nonhuman beings, such as the rivers whose courses were respected. Cursus monuments directed the flows of humans and cattle just as the rivers beside many of them directed the flow of life-giving water. A concern with the origins of waterways was also reiterated in later centuries of the Neolithic (Leary and Field 2012).

The little that remains of earlier Neolithic art includes incised chalk pendants, carved chalk or wooden figurines, phalli and balls, sometimes found at causewayed enclosures. These are rare, ephemeral things with imagery related to human bodies but seldom producing 'whole' bodies. Carved chalk phalli are about comparable in size or rather larger than equivalent human body parts—up to 30 cm in length, reports Teather (2008, p. 192). Figurines are small, making the body of the viewer seem large by comparison and affording human beings the ability to easily manipulate the miniature. They seldom form complete inseparable bodies—though the decay of ephemeral parts is likely—and do not offer details such as hands, feet or facial features. If there were masks, these have not survived. Animal figures and depictions of objects are extremely rare, possibly confined to a few flint mines (e.g., Teather 2015), while incised lines in abstract patterns on chalk surfaces are more common. A few centuries later, chalk plaques and 'drums' or cylinders bearing incised geometric motifs were occasionally deposited in pits, ditches and a barrow on chalklands (Teather and Kenny 2016; Jones et al. 2015). While facial features are depicted on the Folkton drums, a lack of detail and ambiguity in the bodies and faces of this art as a whole seems deliberate (cf. Thomas 2005). The *process* of making and decorating objects may be key to understanding their ontological significance: as Jones et al. (2015) argue, carving in chalk, working with the material, may have been the main purpose of that activity. Human bodies became-with such objects through this work. If contemporaneous human bodies were also decorated in parallel ways then decoration might acknowledge the embodied character of these things and other things, such as pottery, suggesting a sharedsense of becoming. Human bodies might have been decorated temporarily, highlighting their affinity with these decorated objects in certain events, or in more enduring ways. Yet even if human bodies were decorated like ceramic bodies, highlighting their similarity as vessels, perhaps, other differences were clear—there are no anthropomorphic vessels in this region and period, for instance. While the became together they did not become the same kinds of beings. Issues of preservation have to be considered, but it seems that entire bodies (human or otherwise) were not represented in enduring materials at the human scale either.

In common with the work of other authors cited in this article who are influenced by new materialist thinking, this approach has focused on some of a wide range of Neolithic ways of becoming without trying to categorize them in specific anthropological terms. To co-opt a phrase, this tries to take Neolithic material seriously. As such it prioritises ontological difference, diversity and specificity. We could suggest that in many cases non-human entities were what they were 'on their own terms' and had to be engaged with as such: they were present, *presented* at monumental locales—sometimes decorated, some composites, sometimes fragmented—and in most cases did not need *representing*. Of course, the exceptions might be significant, such as shaping some tombs like the bodies (or hides) of gigantic cattle. Earlier Neolithic bodies—human, cattle, rock, tree and others—were therefore in a process of becoming alongside one another in equivalent ways to some extent, but with different effects on one another in any interaction. Monument construction could be understood as part of dialogue with the landscape and its constituent features and materials—a dialogue that said different things in different places and over time. Making small figurines or chalk phalli, building a large tomb that would endure across generations, encountering the decayed remains of past feasts; all these interactions created and drew attention to different ontological effects for the human and other beings involved.

#### **7. Conclusions**

Although the new animism has helped us to think productively about the Neolithic, we do not need to evoke animism to understand Neolithic ontologies. If we do so then we must be clear about how we are using the concept and how our definition of animism relates to other ontological terms such as totemism or fetishism. Yet, such categorization constrains as much as it enables our ability to appreciate Neolithic ontologies, and pushes our accounts in specific directions. There is seldom a firm archaeological basis for choosing between alternative categories in schemes such as Descola's, even if animistic and totemic art are defined in contrast with one another—and analogism is so broad a church that it risks swamping the analysis. Neither will other comparative schemes—other models avoid this result, even if they provide finer gradings or combinations of categories. While trying to get a sense of 'something else' beyond the categories and terms we start with (*qua* Wilkinson 2017), we will never understand Neolithic ontologies in the terms of the people who lived them, and whatever approach we take (including new materialist ones) we fuse contemporary concepts with the remains of Neolithic practices in order to arrive at an accommodation of the two that is meaningful and effective in the present. This is not a pessimistic conclusion as I think this is a valuable endeavour. We do not need to refer to animism as an ontology (or any other 'type' of ontology) in order to talk about non-human persons, relational personhood, non-human beings, or the potency and efficacy of things, materials, animals or places in the Neolithic. Instead, we can focus on diverse Neolithic practices and their effects, recognising these as ontological in nature8, and situating that in a broader project to appreciate diversity within as well as across time periods and regions.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Acknowledgments:** This article started life as a keynote presentation given to the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Research Student Symposium in Newcastle in 2015, and a talk at the Department of Archaeology at Cambridge in 2016, and I would like to thank the organisers and audiences at those events for the discussions that ensued. I would also like to thank students who participated in the module 'Themes in Prehistoric Europe: art, cosmology, bodies and persons' which I led at Newcastle between 2004 and 2017, the editors for the invitation to publish, and Chantal Conneller, Vicki Cummings, Ollie Harris and Robert Wallis for insightful comments that helped greatly improve my thinking and the article.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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