Neolithic Archaeology c.4000-2500 BC
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Glasgow Museums has a large collection of Neolithic artefacts and related material which broadly dates from around 4,000 – 2,500 BC. The Neolithic (‘New Stone Age’) period saw immense changes to how life was lived in the land we now call Scotland, being the period when farming was introduced to the British Isles by immigrants from Continental Europe. These people brought with them a more settled way of life: living in houses, making and using pottery, and building and using new types of burial monuments, such as wooden mortuary structures, long barrows, and chambered cairns. Further, cursus monuments, henge monuments, and stone and timber circles were first constructed and used during this period. New object types such as stone maceheads, different forms of stone arrowhead, and carved stone balls were also made and used during the Neolithic. New forms of stone axes were sometimes distributed over large distances, with some hafted and used as tools for clearing the land for farming, and others probably used as ritual objects. Also, people began to carve rock art designs in chambered cairns and on rock outcrops and boulders in the wider landscape. Glasgow Museums holds confirmed Neolithic material from twenty-three of Scotland’s thirty-two Council areas, as well as from the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, England, the Channel Islands, France, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland. The material in the collection is from sites including chambered cairns and other burial sites, stone-working sites, settlements, shell middens, flint mines and other extraction sites, flint cache sites, and ritual sites. There are also many chance finds in the collection dating to this period, for example single stone axeheads, maceheads, and carved stone balls. Of particular note is material from scheduled monuments, three jadeite axeheads originating from the north Italian Alps, and material from UNESCO World Heritage Sites, such as the Spiennes flint mines in Belgium, the Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps World Heritage Site, and the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site. Artefact types include objects such as axeheads, adzeheads, arrowheads, maceheads, javelin heads, knives, scrapers, blades, anvils, polissoirs, querns, carved stone balls, potsherds, reconstructed vessels, and replica vessels. Further material includes Neolithic human remains, animal remains, charcoal fragments, carbonised cereal grains and hazelnut shells. The Neolithic material in Glasgow Museums’ collections has been acquired from the 1870s onwards. We are still actively adding to this collection group. It should be noted that only sites which contain solely Neolithic and related material, or Neolithic chance finds, are couched under the ‘Neolithic Archaeology’ heading on the Collections Navigator website. To view Site records with further Neolithic archaeological material, please look under the ‘Multi-Period Archaeology’ heading or carry out a general search using the term ‘Neolithic’.
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