Woodland-dominated landscapes provided the settings in which the lives of many Northern European Early Neolithic communities were played out. The scale of woodland, its composition, clearance and regeneration in some places have been the subject of palaeo-environmental studies; but within many synthetic archaeological accounts of the period, woodland features little—appearing more as a stage setting than an immersive environment of affordance, constraint and conceptual possibility. Gordon Noble's book seeks to redress that marginalisation within interpretive accounts, offering thoughts and examples on how human-environment relations during the period might be recast. Much emphasis is placed on working this through in relation to the new conditions posed by the beginnings of the Neolithic. Temporally, the study covers the fourth and third millennia BC; geographically, Britain and Southern Scandinavia.
The aim of Woodland in the Neolithic is to “capture the lively qualities” (p. 20) of Neolithic environments, and the reciprocal relations that probably existed between people, woodland and its constituent elements (e.g. trees). Noble's theoretical stance draws upon the anthropological critique of nature-culture opposition, and the mix of Actor Network Theory, relational approaches, hybrid geographies and post-human writings that are currently in vogue. Ultimately, however, it is his use of ethnographic literature that informs most. An introductory chapter lays out the problematic and theoretical groundwork. The book then engages with the palaeo-environmental record of woodland presence and composition, largely through detail from pollen and insect analyses. A chapter on ‘Altering the environment’ engages with processes of anthropogenic and natural clearance, including an extended discussion of the role of polished stone axes. Issues of woodland landscape perception and experience are then explored, linking palaeoecological and archaeological evidence, and using Scottish Neolithic sites and landscapes as case studies (including much from the author's own fieldwork).
In the chapter ‘Forest as architecture’, connections between what might be glossed as ‘natural features’ and human constructions are explored. Noble provides a compelling argument for the incorporation of standing trees and tree-throw hollows within a variety of earlier Neolithic constructions (the Springfield cursus, Sarup II enclosure and Scottish rectilinear timber settings, for example). Coppice growth within the Etton enclosure and Alvastra ‘pile dwelling’ blur the distinction between human and non-human agencies within the processes of building, while the architectural qualities of woodland clearances are highlighted. Here there is a sense of architecture as potentially animate.
Moving away from woodland per se, the final full chapter focuses on timber monumentality. For the earlier part of the Neolithic, in both lowland Britain and Denmark, substantial (‘megadendric’) timbers are used in linear mortuary chambers; during the latter, a range of new monument forms include timber circles and palisades. Given the considerable practical difficulties inherent in felling large trees with Neolithic technology, the use of substantial tree trunks in such monuments requires explanation (it cannot be reduced to practicality). Drawing on the detail of well-preserved contexts such as the Haddenham long barrow, Noble directs attention to how the making of wooden mortuary chambers reconstructed the form of tree trunks—the dead were effectively being buried within trees. He is keen to stress the potential connections between the life cycles of timbers in mortuary monuments and the transformation of the human dead; this being ontological rather than symbolic.
Noble concludes by stressing the reciprocal relationships between people and woodland. He argues that for Neolithic communities, woodland/forest was seen as an ancestor, a conclusion worked from both ethnographic analogy and interpretation of archaeological detail. Perhaps clarification is needed here in terms of the nature of that ancestorhood. Furthermore, while this position seems reasonable for the fourth millennium BC, does it hold for the later Neolithic, with often different ecological conditions and relationships?
The conscious attempt to create a more ‘symmetrical’ archaeology of people and woodland is to be welcomed. Legacies of thought can, however, be difficult to shake off, and there are points where Noble inadvertently falls back on more dualistic thinking. There is still an occasional undertone of Neolithic farmers battling to control woodland—“the environment also acted back” through regrowth and recolonisation (p. 44): “at times this character would respond in non-benign ways to human attempts to control the forest” (p. 60). When discussing the big timber architecture of the later Neolithic, the focus in places falls back to talk of effort expenditure, risk and prestige, which rather moves away from the material and ontological qualities of trees and timber that the author is targeting.
There are also specific points on which one might quibble. For example, the emphasis on stone axes as primarily tools for clearing forest rather ignores their more routine uses in woodworking and garden maintenance (as indicated by ethnography). Forest and woodland are used throughout seemingly interchangeably, but surely some definition or distinction is needed? And can more be made of the potential diversity of woodland, which must have afforded different qualities, textures, modes of engagement and so understanding? The lack of reference to the work of J.G. Evans on Holocene woodland, and latterly on sociality and environment, is something of an omission (e.g. Evans Reference Evans1972, Reference Evans2003). Stylistically, occasional repetition and redundancy rather detracts from the presentation of the argument.
Such matters aside, this is a book that merits a wide readership, certainly beyond the confines of those studying the European Neolithic. It performs an invaluable role in bridging the work of natural science and interpretive archaeology, of finding a middle way that unites palaeo-ecological and archaeological data in imaginative synthesis.
