This outstanding new publication is the outcome of a long-running project investigating the ‘art’ of Neolithic Britain, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and principally inspired by Garrow, Gosden, and Hill's (Reference Garrow, Gosden and Hill2008) Rethinking Celtic Art. As the authors note, artistic expression is afforded a central place in evolutionary accounts of the Upper Palaeolithic ‘revolution’, but the topic declines in importance somewhat in later periods of prehistory. Further, although megalithic art and open-air rock art have been of perennial interest to scholars, the mobiliary decorated objects of the Neolithic have been relatively neglected. These provide the focus of the book. At the heart of this study is the application of a series of innovative new visual technologies, principally Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), but also Structure from Motion photogrammetry, and digital microscopy. These enable worked objects to be rendered in super-real detail, revealing traces that are barely visible to the naked eye. However, this is not an exercise in arid technological description, as it is informed by a series of current and interrelated theoretical approaches: process philosophies, assemblage theory, and nonrepresentational theory (Whitehead, Reference Whitehead1978; Deleuze & Guattari, Reference Deleuze and Guattari1988; Thrift, Reference Thrift2007). Some will find it ironic that the latter in particular should be chosen as a framework for the study of prehistoric art; but the authors are at pains to transcend a view of images as mental ideas or concepts that have been transformed into physical things, and whose hidden meanings can be recovered through painstaking analysis. Instead, they emphasize the process of mark-making over the final forms that are created and stress that the materials on which motifs are rendered are more than an inert canvas but are implicated in this coming-into-being. Arguably, the concentration on the completed artwork over the act of creation is a modern prejudice, which makes it harder for westerners to comprehend the importance of the repeated repainting of Aboriginal Australian rock art, for instance. In the case of British Neolithic art, the identification of specific meanings is especially problematic, since so little of it is figurative, and the remaining, often geometric forms appear almost deliberately ambiguous.

In recent decades, the dominant interpretation of Neolithic decorated artefacts has been as prestige goods, or ‘symbols of power’, monopolized by emerging social elites. While the authors do not deny that this may be an appropriate model for polished stone axes and Late Neolithic polished flint knives, many of the mark-bearing objects were not exchanged over significant distances, were manufactured expediently and promptly deposited, and were made from relatively ubiquitous materials using only moderate levels of skill. They argue that few of these items are indicative of craft specialization, which has often been identified as an index of social complexity. A case in point would be objects of worked chalk, which are singularly difficult to cast as high-ranking valuables. Scratched and engraved chalk surfaces and objects occur throughout the period, beginning with the Sussex flint mines. Both here and in the ditches and shafts of monuments the marking of chalk was folded into the rhythms of other activities on site, constituting an element of the making of artefacts and architecture. Moreover, both the scratches on the walls of flint mines and the Grooved Ware-associated chalk plaques of the Late Neolithic showed evidence of repeated reworking, so that each constituted a kind of palimpsest. Much the same was true of the worked chalk block from the base of the deep shaft at the centre of the pit-circle monument at Monkton Up Wimborne on Cranborne Chase in Dorset, which might originally have been mounted on an upright post. This may originally have been even more profusely decorated and had been subject to surface erasure before its deposition.

Perhaps the most enigmatic amongst the decorated chalk artefacts are the three cylindrical ‘drums’ from Folkton in Yorkshire, and the newly identified example from Lavant in Sussex. Although all had been purposefully buried (in a grave and a pit respectively), RTI demonstrated that all had been subject to multiple episodes of working, including the erasure of earlier motifs. There is a strong sense here of play and experimentation, leading toward a final design that may not have been on show for any great period of time. More surprizing is the way that mace heads of antler and flint, clearly objects that required considerable skill in their manufacture, also resist the prestige goods stereotype. Both were often abandoned and deposited (often in wet places) in various states of incompleteness, rather than having been used, displayed, and circulated. Two other important themes are introduced in connection with the maces. The Maesmore style flint mace heads appear to have been skeuomorphic, representing an attempt to replicate the form, decoration, and colour of an antler object in another material. And the Garboldisham antler mace head, with its conjoined spiral design, shares with the chalk drums and plaques the characteristic of not being appreciable from a single point of view. It must be turned over in the hands to be fully apprehended, demanding a physical engagement. The unfinished character of mace heads is matched by the carved stone balls that are concentrated in northeast Scotland. Even exquisite examples like that from Towie in Aberdeenshire have not been fully decorated on all of their surfaces. Nor were these objects placed in graves or formal deposits, turning up instead as stray finds, or in domestic contexts in Orkney. Jones and Díaz-Guardamino suggest that stone balls may have been something akin to trial pieces, with a didactic function, and that their distribution reveals a network of learning within which the skills of working stone were acquired.

One of the highlights of the volume is Antonia Thomas’ chapter on the decorated architectural stones of the Orkney Neolithic settlements, which adds another dimension to the analysis. The extent of these scratched and carved designs has only become apparent in recent years; and, here again, many of the stones have been repeatedly reworked. Some decoration is conspicuous, but much is hidden or located just above floor level, as particularly at Skara Brae. Some stones bearing singular designs on their upper faces were incorporated into walls as they were built and cannot have been visible subsequently. Although it is possible that this practice had some apotropaic significance, here the emphasis is again on the embedding of decoration into the flow of other actions. The reiteration of lines over time, and the occurrence of areas of pick dressing at the Ness of Brodgar provides a link with the art of the Irish passage tomb tradition, where many of the decorative forms of Neolithic art may have first been employed. Here, too, many of the motifs are hidden from view, and decoration appears to have taken place during the course of construction, concentrated in the junctures between the successive concentric ‘skins’ of the architecture. Inside the chambers and passages of sites like Newgrange and Knowth, there were uniquely intensive and protracted sequences of addition and reworking, culminating at the latter site with areas of pick dressing that are described as ‘additive subtraction’, or creative destruction. Jones and Díaz-Guardamino point out that these complex histories are not shared by the kerb stones that surround the tombs; and, in this respect, they resemble open air rock art, which lacks reworking and the superimposition of designs. They argue that a fundamental distinction exists been art that is primarily a performance, and art that is intended as a permanent and accessible record of activity, such as rock art in Britain and Ireland. In the context of Neolithic Britain, designs that were not added to or transformed were in the minority, another conspicuous example being decorated pottery, incised or impressed prior to firing. Nevertheless, in the case of Late Neolithic Grooved Ware, even pots came to be subject to transformation, repaired after breakage or incorporated into other vessels in the form of grog.

One important finding of the volume is that decorated artefacts, and their reworking and revision, became appreciably more common in the Middle Neolithic, after around 3400 bc, the period during which Impressed Ware pottery was in circulation. One interpretation might be that marking served to establish boundaries and cultural distinctions during this period; but the authors prefer to see the time as one of ‘assemblage formation’, in which decoration created new connections between distant places and separate artefact traditions. In this respect, although they reject the notion of ornamented objects as ‘weapons of exclusion’ (Bradley, Reference Bradley1982: 37), they build on Richard Bradley's (Reference Bradley1982) insight that the motifs on artefacts were more often shared over long distances than were the things themselves. Moreover, they identify a parallel between the recurring revision of the marks on mobiliary items and the redigging or recutting of the ditches of monuments. A significant piece of evidence here is the surprizing revelation that the engraved designs in the ditches of the Flagstones enclosure in Dorset had been reworked on several occasions. For Jones and Díaz-Guardamino, the reiteration or recreation of activity reaffirmed connections, and we might wish to push this argument further and suggest that these practices had a role in maintaining relationships between persons and things over the long term. As well as being bound up within activities of construction and extraction, Neolithic making is argued to have been particularly attentive to its materials. Rather than the imposition of a predetermined form onto unresponsive matter, artisans explored wood, stone, flint, and chalk, allowing shapes to develop out of their engagement. These materials were often redolent of their places of origin, so that applying the skills that were appropriate for one material to another substance entirely, in practices of skeuomorphism and miniaturization, provided another means of knitting together locations and objects through reference and connotation. These processes arguably became progressively more important as the Neolithic developed and as new networks were formed following the apparent diversification and regionalization of the fourth millennium bc.

The project that gave rise to this publication involved collaborations with both artists and specialists in digital image making. In a fascinating digression on these aspects of the work, Ian Dawson and Louisa Minkin reflect on the implications of applying the methodologies or techniques of one subject in a different disciplinary setting. For instance, they use RTI and photogrammetry to generate a series of striking images of London housing estates in a state of dereliction. In a curious way, this echoes the project's preoccupation with skeuomorphism, working stone to mimic antler, or using the techniques of carpentry on sarsen. What this underlines is that these visual technologies are not simply elaborate forms of realist representation, but transformations that reveal the world to us in unfamiliar ways. In a final meditation on the practice of drawing, Andrew Jones takes issue with John Berger's account of the page or paper as a neutral field, arguing instead for mark-making as a form of discovery. The media with which we work both constrain and condition what will emerge, and we achieve the outcome by attending to them and enlisting their help. In a similar way, the making of marks on Neolithic artefacts are understood as traces of engagement, through which the objects were ‘grown’.

This is a major and pathbreaking contribution both to Neolithic archaeology and the archaeology of art, and it will be read appreciatively by scholars in both fields. As befits a work concerned with visual culture, it is profusely illustrated with pertinent, high quality images. It is thoroughly recommended.