Abstract
As Martin Heidegger argued, anxiety is a vital element of Being-in-the-world. This recognition challenges us as archaeologists to incorporate emotions like anxiety into our accounts. Yet this has to be done in ways that do not create an essentialist account of the past. In this paper I seek to consider how we can do this by considering anxiety as a crucial element of the affective fields that textured the people, things and places of Early Neolithic Britain. By working at differing scales from the complex histories of the early fourth millennium BC to the practices at specific monuments, I argue that anxiety was a crucial element both of people’s lives and of the historical processes that produced communities and drove change in this period.
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Notes
- 1.
Dasein is the term Heidegger (1962) uses in place of human, person, mind or body. He does so to capture the always-already-contextualised nature of Being-in-the-world. There is no existential category of Dasein, separate from the world, which can be discussed apart from the world. Rather Dasein is always part of the world, always thrown into its own history.
- 2.
Of course this division between the social, material and embodied nature of emotions is entirely heuristic. People have social relations with things and material relations with one another, and all of this is embodied. Indeed I mean to imply no categorical distinction between how people relate to each other and to the world in the terms ‘social’ and ‘material’ (cf. Webmoor & Witmore, 2008).
- 3.
The kinds of community I am discussing here forms a scale of analysis between the affective fields instantiated in particular circumstances and the broader emotional communities defined by Rosenwein (2006).
- 4.
The understanding of this transition has somewhat been polarised between people who see it as solely the product of farmers arriving from the continent (e.g. Sheridan, 2010) and others who prefer to see it as the outcome of local hunter gatherers taking up a new lifestyle (e.g. Thomas, 2008). As is often the case, such oppositions do much to suppress the complexity of these processes in the past, and narratives involving both continental farmers and local people playing a key role are more convincing (Cummings & Harris, 2011; Whittle et al., 2011).
- 5.
This is not the place to conduct a detailed review of how Bayesian modelling works (but see Bayliss & Whittle, 2007; Whittle et al., 2011, chapter 2). Suffice it to say it involves the combination of prior knowledge (e.g. of stratigraphic sequence) with computer modelling to combat the scatter inherent in radiocarbon dates. Explicitly interpretive, the models proposed by Whittle et al. (2011) will be challenged or refined over the coming years. In this paper, however, this is not my aim. Rather I have adopted their chronology as the best available in order to develop the historical account I wish to offer. As a result I will not attempt to justify all the dates quoted here, and the reader who wishes to interrogate them should turn to the various references.
- 6.
This remains a very superficial summary of the complex chronology proposed by Whittle et al. (2011); readers are encouraged once more to examine this source for a fuller picture.
- 7.
For the sake of clarity and brevity, I shall gloss over the other forms of monuments constructed in the first half of the fourth millennium cal BC, though these obviously have their role to play as well in the narratives that follow.
- 8.
In commenting on this article Alasdair Whittle pointed out that the choices people had to make around food management in this period was something that processual scholars (e.g. Bogucki, 1988; Halstead, 1996) had tackled much more seriously than their post-processual counterparts. He is undoubtedly right that there would be much to gain from rethinking risk and reward at the beginning of farming from a perspective rooted in the archaeology of anxiety and emotion.
- 9.
See Harris (2011) for further discussion of these spectacular deposits.
- 10.
The cattle humerus, unlike its human counterpart, is still a leg bone of course (Harris, 2011).
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Acknowledgements
Thanks go to Jeff Fleisher and Neil Norman for the invitation to appear in this volume and their patience in waiting for my submission. I am also enormously grateful to Alasdair Whittle and the editors for their comments on this piece. They have improved the work immensely, but they should not feel anxious that anyone will hold them responsible for its inevitable shortcomings. The article was written during a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship split between Newcastle University and the University of Leicester. I am enormously appreciative of both institutions and the trust for their support.
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Harris, O.J.T. (2016). Communities of Anxiety: Gathering and Dwelling at Causewayed Enclosures in the British Neolithic. In: Fleisher, J., Norman, N. (eds) The Archaeology of Anxiety. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3231-3_6
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