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Conclusion: A lived Neolithic

Why is the Neolithic period in Britain of continuing importance today? For one thing, as we observed in the Introduction to this book, places like Stonehenge, Avebury, and the components of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site such as Skara Brae, the Stones of Stenness, and the Ness of Brodgar provide an enduring fascination for a wide public, and therefore attract visitors from around the world (even if they don’t arrive presidentially, as Obama did). Confronted with these spectacular but enigmatic remains, it is inevitable that visitors will find themselves looking, and often struggling, for explanations that meet their expectations of the real world. Most obviously, they want to know who made these things, and why. Beyond this, many visitors also want to identify where these people came from, what mattered to them most in their lives, and, perhaps most important of all, how they are connected to those of us inhabiting ‘their’ space, however much it has changed, today. But an equally important issue is that the way we view the Neolithic can have important ramifications for our understanding of the contemporary world, and how it came into being. For example, the adoption of farming appears to have been an escalating process from which British societies have been unable to extricate themselves, and that has led to environmental degradation and other modern ills. But it has also been a process that has shaped our perception of the landscape, and of what is ‘natural’ in our environment. And while the majority of us live a metropolitan way of life in contemporary Britain, our everyday language nonetheless remains full of reference to the land and its working. The popular answers to the ‘whys’ of the Neolithic of Britain have been legion, ranging from the pre-industrial folk stories making intelligible the chambered mounds as giant’s graves or fairy caves, to antiquarian invocations of Merlin or the Druids, and more recent suggestions of priestly astronomers. Equally, as we saw in Chapter 1, each generation of academic archaeologists has brought new conceptual resources to bear on Neolithic Britain, and has come up with novel interpretations.