I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is beginning to look at the Neolithic period in England, or to anyone who is intrigued by Stonehenge, Avebury, or the marvelous Orkney sites. Castledon does a fine job of pulling together the current evidence and weaving it into a comprehensive picture of life in the U.K. in 3000 BC. Much of this involves interpretation, guesses, and imaginative reconstruction, but the author usually makes it clear when he is doing this, and carefully distinguishes between what the archaeological evidence can prove or not prove, and when analogies from anthropology are appropriate. Occasionally the text drifts into fashionable patter about the psychology of spaces and the relation of mind to landscape, but not enough to be annoying. There is only one embarrassing passage, where he talks about the “emergence” in the fourth millenium BC, of “literally self-conscious people, people like us, self-contained and self-aware”. The notion that human beings in some period or culture were not self-conscious or self-aware, and suddenly became so because of some sudden transformation, is, as far as I can tell, nonsense. Yet it constantly pops up in historical and anthropological writing, based on the flimsiest reasoning. One might as well claim that people became “self-aware” in 1950, because then they began to make individual purchases with credit cards. But this is only one blemish in an otherwise excellent and useful work. The book abounds in well-chosen maps, illustrations and photographs, the material is presented in an orderly fashion, and the prose style is pleasant.
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