The project was inspired by considerations of human social development. Traditionally, the sequence flows from mobile hunter-gatherers who made few permanent marks on the landscape, to ‘settled’ Neolithic farmers who constructed monuments, to Iron Age communities who lived in defended settlements and hillforts, and finally, the emergence of monetary economies based around highly stratified societies. This is both oversimplified and contestable but inspires questions of how, over time, people might have become increasingly materialistic and perhaps more acrimonious. This idea led to considering whether land ownership and private property may generate problems within society based on inequality (both in the past and present) as a result of peoples’ materialistic preoccupations.

While considered typically Marxist (see Johnson 1999: 92-4) the foundations of these ideas lie with eighteenth century ‘enlightenment’ philosophers. A quote from Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality neatly sums up the above considerations:

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘This is mine’, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind by pulling out the stakes or filling up the ditch and crying to his fellows: ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself belongs to nobody.

(Rousseau 2003 [1754]: 17).

While this statement is not necessarily true, it is extremely powerful and provides excellent food for thought for this dissertation.

Discussions of ownership and inequality are rare in Neolithic archaeology, despite the interpretive revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. This might largely be attributed to politics in Britain at the time; right wing ideals were strong and capitalism and the concept that wealth was ‘all important’ were central themes. Within archaeology, some people wanted to break away from these ‘ideals’. The emergence of ‘post-processual’ archaeology brought with it reinterpretations, particularly of prehistoric archaeology, where ideas that society was hierarchical and wealth-driven were replaced with more ‘left wing’ ideals of equality and communality (see Greene 2002: 230-261 and Tilley 1989). In other words, archaeologists looked to the past for reassurances about the present. Inequality in the Neolithic has therefore either been ignored, for fear of contradicting ideals or, when mentioned, seen as equivalent to ranked chiefdoms (e.g. Renfrew 1973). Hopefully this dissertation, whatever its conclusions may be, will make its readers consider the world we live in today as well as tackling a subject in archaeology that has long been avoided.