Making a Mark: Process, Pattern and Change in the British and Irish Neolithic

Abstract

This paper presents key results of the Making a Mark project (2014–2016), which aimed to provide a contextual framework for the analysis of mark making on portable artefacts in the British and Irish Neolithic by comparing them with other mark-making practices, including rock art and passage tomb art. The project used digital imaging techniques, including Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), and improved radiocarbon chronologies, to develop a new understanding of the character of mark making in the British and Irish Neolithic. Rather than considering this tradition in representational terms, as expression of human ideas, we focus on two kinds of relational material practices, the processes of marking and the production of skeuomorphs, and their emergent properties. We draw on Karen Barad's concept of ‘intra-action’ and Gilles Deleuze's notion of differentiation to understand the evolution and development of mark-making traditions and how they relate to other kinds of social practices over the course of the Neolithic.

George Eogan and Elizabeth Shee Twohig, eds. The Megalithic Art of the Passage Tombs of Knowth, County Meath (Excavations at Knowth Volume 7, Royal Irish Academy Monographs in Archaeology. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2022, xli and 848pp, 218 colour and b/w illustr., 13 tables, hbk, ISBN: 978-1-911479-42-0)

“…bc ) are decorated with elements of ‘standard megalithic art’, then connections with Ireland seem difficult to refute. These artefacts include the Monkton Up Wimborne chalk block, decorated with nested arcs, and the incised plaque from Graig Lwyd, decorated with a series of fine triangular incisions (Jones & Díaz-Guardamino, 2022: 392) and form a distinct horizon of activity which differs markedly from what had come before in the British Neolithic. Notably, each of these artefacts are produced from local materials and decorated with different motifs in the repertoire of ‘standard megalithic art’.…”