Elements of Being: Mentalities, Identities and Movements

This volume is the product of a Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) conference session (held at Lampeter, Wales, in December 2003) entitled Mentalités and Identities in Motion. Included here are all the papers held there, and more besides. The session centred on the role of past ways of thinking, feeling and acting in social transformation, and exploring past worldviews as (instead of being relegated to the æfictionalÆ or anecdotal) an integral part of every aspect of human life, not just explicit contexts of power struggles and domination, but also approachable from the material evidence. The contributions are widely spread across space and time, ranging from Northern Ireland to Sicily, from France to Bulgaria and covering almost every period from the Mesolithic to the Thirty YearsÆ War. On top of this, they are also very different in methodology, in the ways they have interpreted the session title and approached their evidence. Before rushing headlong into this kaleidoscopic mix, then, it is worth briefly explaining the rationale behind the session title and the selection and arrangement of papers. CONTENTS: (1) A taste of the unexpected: subverting mentalités through the motifs and settings of Irish passage tombs (Andrew Cochrane); (2) ôUn pour tous, tous pour unö, Communal identity and individualism in northern French villages during the Thirty YearsÆ War (Hugues Courbot-Dewerdt); (3) Private lives, public identities: a spatial analysis of privacy within Bulgarian tell architecture (Gary Jones); (4) Agents of identity: performative practice at the Etton causewayed enclosure (Oliver Harris); (5) æMending GaulsÆ fences with the RomansÆ: spatial identities from farmsteads to sacred places in northern Gaul (Cécilia Courbot-Dewerdt); (6) Fragments of power: LBK figurines and the mortuary record (Daniela Hofmann); (7) æWhat the Romans did for us.Æ A question of identity in the Broekpolder (Marjolijn Kok); (8) War and domestic peace in the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age of Abruzzo (Central Italy). Social reproduction and cultural landscapes as a starting-point for the construction of mentalités (Erik van Rossenberg); (9) Identity and change: the inception of the Bell Beaker phenomenon in the Central Mediterranean Sea area (Marc Vander Linden); (10) Movement as a mentalité: mobile lifeways in the Neolithic and Bronze Age Great Ouse, Nene and Welland Valleys (Jessica Mills); (11)Reopening old trails - Rethinking mobility: a study of the mesolithic in northeast Ireland (Thomas Kador).