An Embodied Archipelago: Bioarchaeology and World-Building in the Neolithic British Isles

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the Neolithic of the British Isles is best understood not as the gradual adoption of farming or the diffusion of a cultural “package,” but as the rapid installation of a circulation-dependent, monumentally structured archipelagic world built through labor, movement, architecture, and the management of human bodies. Neolithization is framed as world-building: the creation of durable infrastructures of time, obligation, ancestry, and territorial continuity within an archipelago structured internally by maritime movement. Bayesian radiocarbon modeling and ancient DNA indicate a historically compressed and regionally uneven transformation beginning after c. 4000 BC, shaped by demographic turnover and maritime connectivity. The British Isles evolved as a coherent movement field in which western seaways and the Irish Sea Zone structured the circulation of people, animals, timber, and stone. This integration is visible in monumental architectures across Scotland,especially the Orkneys, Southern Britain, Ireland, and Wales, where timber complexes, stone ceremonial landscapes, long barrows, causewayed enclosures, and passage tombs materialized from coordinated regimes of labor and movement. Bioarchaeological evidence demonstrates that this world was paid for in bodies, recorded as workload stress, dietary disruption, trauma, and violence. Across monumental mortuary contexts, human remains are rarely encountered as intact individuals, but as disarticulated, commingled, curated, and frequently cremated assemblages, revealing the dead as enduring ancestral presences within architectural systems. Tombs functioned as infrastructures for managing accumulation, access, and duration, converting biological death into social continuity. Neolithic durability was sustained through the ongoing incorporation of human bodies—living and dead—into systems that stabilized labor, ancestry, and time.