12 papers from specialists covering a wide array of time periods and subject areas, this volume explores the links between identity and nationhood throughout the history of Scotland from the prehistory of northern Britain to the more recent heralding of Scottish identity as a multi-ethnic construction and the possibility of Scottish independence.

Select proceedings of the 4th University of Chester Archaeology Student conference (Chester, 20 March 2019) investigate real-world ancient and modern frontier works, the significance of graffiti, material culture, monuments and wall-building, as well as fictional representations of borders and walls in the arts, as public archaeology.

Despite a growing literature on identity theory in the last two decades, much of its current use in archaeology is still driven toward locating and dating static categories such as ‘Phoenician’, ‘Christian’ or ‘native’. Previous studies have highlighted the various problems and challenges presented by identity, with the overall effect of deconstructing it to insignificance. As the humanities and social sciences turn to material culture, archaeology provides a unique perspective on the interaction between people and things over the long term. This volume argues that identity is worth studying not despite its slippery nature, but because of it. Identity can be seen as an emergent property of living in a material world, an ongoing process of becoming which archaeologists are particularly well suited to study. The geographic and temporal scale of the papers included is purposefully broad to demonstrate the variety of ways in which archaeology is redefining identity. Research areas span from the Great Lakes to the Mediterranean, with case studies from the Mesolithic to the contemporary world by emerging voices in the field. The volume contains a critical review of theories of identity by the editors, as well as a response and afterward by A. Bernard Knapp.

Enclosures are among the most widely distributed features of the European Iron Age. From fortifications to field systems, they demarcate territories and settlements, sanctuaries and central places, burials and ancestral grounds. This dividing of the physical and the mental landscape between an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ is investigated anew in a series of essays by some of the leading scholars on the topic. The contributions cover new ground, from Scotland to Spain, between France and the Eurasian steppe, on how concepts and communities were created as well as exploring specific aspects and broader notions of how humans marked, bounded and guarded landscapes in order to connect across space and time. A recurring theme considers how Iron Age enclosures created, curated, formed or deconstructed memory and identity, and how by enclosing space, these communities opened links to an earlier past in order to understand or express their Iron Age presence. In this way, the contributions examine perspectives that are of wider relevance for related themes in different periods.

Considering that Orkney is a group of relatively small islands lying off the northeast coast of the Scottish mainland, its wealth of Neolithic archaeology is truly extraordinary. An assortment of houses, chambered cairns, stone circles, standing stones and passage graves provides an unusually comprehensive range of archaeological and architectural contexts. Yet, in the early 1990s, there was a noticeable imbalance between 4th and 3rd millennium cal BC evidence, with house structures, and ‘villages’ being well represented in the latter but minimally in the former. As elsewhere in the British Isles, the archaeological visibility of the 4th millennium cal BC in Orkney tends to be dominated by the monumental presence of chambered cairns or tombs. In the 1970s Claude Lévi-Strauss conceived of a form of social organization based upon the ‘house’ – sociétés à maisons – in order to provide a classification for social groups that appeared not to conform to established anthropological kinship structures. In this approach, the anchor point is the ‘house’, understood as a conceptual resource that is a consequence of a strategy of constructing and legitimizing identities under ever shifting social conditions. Drawing on the results of an extensive program of fieldwork in the Bay of Firth, Mainland Orkney, the text explores the idea that the physical appearance of the house is a potent resource for materializing the dichotomous alliance and descent principles apparent in the archaeological evidence for the early and later Neolithic of Orkney. It argues that some of the insights made by Lévi-Strauss in his basic formulation of sociétés à maisons are extremely relevant to interpreting the archaeological evidence and providing the parameters for a ‘social’ narrative of the material changes occurring in Orkney between the 4th and 2nd millennia cal BC. The major excavations undertaken during the Cuween-Wideford Landscape Project provided an unprecedented depth and variety of evidence for Neolithic occupation, bridging the gap between domestic and ceremonial architecture and form, exploring the transition from wood to stone and relationships between the living and the dead and the role of material culture. The results are described and discussed in detail here, enabling tracing of the development and fragmentation of sociétés à maisons over a 1500 year period of Northern Isles prehistory.

Archaeologists show us how the Neolithic human lived in mainland ScotlandWhat was life like in Scotland between 4000 and 2000BC? Where were people living? How did they treat their dead? Why did they spend so much time building extravagant ritual monuments? What was special about the relationship people had with trees and holes in the ground? What can we say about how people lived in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age of mainland Scotland where much of the evidence we have lies beneath the ploughsoil, or survives as slumped banks and ditches, or ruinous megaliths?Each contribution to this volume presents fresh research and radical new interpretations of the pits, postholes, ditches, rubbish dumps, human remains and broken potsherds left behind by our Neolithic forebears.From the APFWhat was life like in Scotland between 4000 and 2000BC? Where were people living? How did they treat their dead? Why did they spend so much time building extravagant ritual monuments? What was special about the relationship people had with trees? Why was so much time and effort spent digging holes and filling them back up again? What can we say about how people lived in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age of mainland Scotland where much of the evidence we have lies beneath the plough soil, or survives as slumped banks and filled ditches, or ruinous megaliths?This book will draw together leading experts and young researchers to present fresh research and outline radical new interpretations of the pits, postholes, ditches, rubbish dumps, human remains and broken potsherds left behind by our Neolithic forebears. Much of this evidence has come to light in the past few decades, putting the emphasis very much lowland, mainland Scotland as opposed to more famous Orcadian Neolithic sites. Inspired by the work of Gordon Barclay, the leading scholars of Scotland's Neolithic in the last 40 years, the chapters in this book offer a wide-ranging analysis of the evidence we have for the first farmers in Scotland.

Following its appearance, arguably in Orkney in the 32nd century cal BC, Grooved Ware soon became widespread across Britain and Ireland, seemingly replacing earlier pottery styles and being deposited in contexts as varied as simple pits, passage tombs, ceremonial timber circles and henge monuments. As a result, Grooved Ware lies at the heart of many ongoing debates concerning social and economic developments at the end of the 4th and during the first half of the 3rd millennia cal BC. Stemming from the 2022 Neolithic Studies Group autumn conference, and following on from Cleal and MacSween’s 1999 NSG volume on Grooved Ware, this book presents a series of papers from researchers specializing in Grooved Ware pottery and the British and Irish Neolithic, offering both regional and thematic perspectives on this important ceramic tradition. Chapters cover the development of Grooved Ware in Orkney as well as the timing and nature of its appearance, development, and subsequent demise in different regions of Britain and Ireland. In addition, thematic papers consider what Grooved Ware can contribute to understandings of inter-regional interactions during the earlier 3rd millennium cal BC, the possible meaning of Grooved Ware’s decorative motifs, and the thorny issue of the validity and significance of the various Grooved Ware sub-styles. The book will be of great value not only to archaeologists and students with a specific interest in Grooved Ware pottery but also to those with a more general interest in the development of the Neolithic of Britain and Ireland.