Putting Things in Place: A Material Culture Approach to the Study of Early Neolithic Houses in Britain and Ireland.

The transition from the Mesolithic to Neolithic period is often understood as a direct progress during which a mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle was simply replaced by permanent settlements with an agricultural based economy. This picture of Neolithic society has been significantly influenced by the archaeological evidence coming from central and SE Europe, where the presence of permanently occupied households dated to this period appears to be well established (e.g. Hodder 1990). Considering the processes such as domestication and transition to sedentarism, it is not surprising that houses appear to figure strongly in the Neolithic narratives of the region. In the meantime, the character of evidence from the British Isles does not always seem to adhere to this simplified, often routinely accepted view of the Neolithic. Although there is evidence for the presence of houses in this period, when compared with other parts of Europe, the data appears to be rather scanty. This makes the Neolithic of the British Isles particularly interesting. While the timber, earthwork and megalithic monuments are as widely distributed as on the continent, the evidence for houses, and by extension, the character of settlement appear to be quite unique when moving west of the North Sea and north of the English Channel.
In Britain and Ireland, the earliest Neolithic constructions which can be equated with houses are the timber structures. These buildings represent the first examples of the Neolithic architecture in the British Isles, preceding the development of monumental projects such as causewayed enclosures, long barrows and passage graves (Bradley, 2007: 42). However, their construction and use appear to