ABSTRACT
The focus in previous chapters has been on aspects of human behaviour that have a spatial expression, such as domestic and sacred architecture. But, as we have also seen, no less important in understanding peoples’ lives is the range of objects that they used. Much of the meaning invested in sites and places involved the ways people used material culture and the patterns of production, use and deposition of objects. Just as building traditions are formed and then carried on by people constructing walls or roofs in the way they were taught to, in a similar way the objects that people make and use are influenced, to a greater or lesser degree, by tradition. While many of these traditions may be carried on as integral, unexamined parts of everyday life, the actual choices that people make reflect their value system and identity (see Glassie 1991). As Eriksen (1995: 176) using the work of Appadurai (1986) and Miller (1994) put it, ‘objects and artifacts form part of the taken-for-granted part of our environment and thereby contribute to shaping our habitus, they order people; on the other hand they are consciously selected through consumption to create meaning and a particular self-identity’. Seamus Heaney (1993), writing about the importance of objects in giving a sense of the past, has reflected on how objects hold meaning and memory, both for the individual and for society. Much of the significance of objects lies in the way that, through metaphor and metonym, they can be seen to stand for or symbolise many different kinds of social realities and relationships. The challenge is to proceed from this broad understanding to the question of whether we can recover any of the specific meanings that were embedded in objects by and for people during the Neolithic.
