This work starts with a brief history of interpretation, bringing the reader up to date with how lithic studies have been conducted over the past three centuries. The disparate knowledge concerning scatters in Scotland led to the creation of the Scottish Lithic Scatters Project, which is outlined in chapter one. Of specific concern is the Lithic Scatters Database, and its analysis. Descriptions of each field give an intriguing insight into the extent of bias which is incorporated into the final data. It is also made clear that much information concerning the lithic scatters resource which can be related to a social landscape is gained through the creation of the database, rather than any final analysis of the data. Chapter two turns to the processes whereby lithic scatters are created in south and central Scotland, as it is through a study of these that an understanding of the information contained within the database can be gained. The creation of the lithic scatters resource is intimately bound to the practices and routines of individuals, as well as to the natural occurrences across the country today. These range from the farmer ploughing his field, to the movement of sand dunes in storms. Ultimately, it is the fieldwalker him/herself who creates the recorded scatter. The fieldwalkers who have created the scatter resource, are described in chapter three, and the extent of the resource across south and central Scotland is given. The people mentioned in the previous chapter are described more intimately, and it is possible to gain a glimpse of the faces responsible for the scatter resource. The discussion also centres on the fact that the information within the database is not necessarily representative of prehistoric activity; rather the activity of collection and recording in recent history. By looking at the database alone, and ignoring the background information given in this chapter, only an apparently polished set of data would be seen. The way data is often accepted in archaeology today can be seen as a major problem. Chapter four considers this problem in more detail and shows that personal experience must be documented to place the data within a social, historical and cultural context. Recent thinking in theoretical archaeology has led to similar strands of thought, especially where the recording of the process of fieldwork is considered.

Theoretical perspectives on landscape and bodily engagement with place inform an approach to the medieval pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Focused primarily, but not exclusively, on the central Middle Ages, this research confronts two core questions: how did transient, mobile groups perceive and experience the diverse terrain of the pilgrim route in northern Spain? And how may their ephemeral presence be traced in the archaeological record? This thesis is underpinned by the conviction that the journey of medieval pilgrims, as opposed to their destination, deserves greater scrutiny. Three topographically distinct Study Areas along the length of the Camino in Navarre, Burgos and Galicia from the basis for the analysis of localised sets of material culture. Within these areas, historical and geographical information, surviving monuments and structures, and a fieldwork plan designed to engage with the processes of making a linear journey, combine to form data-sets from which to tackle more refined contextual research questions. The main thrust of my argument is that large numbers of pilgrims were heavily influenced by contemporary medieval narrative tradition in which landscape was a powerful metaphor for religious meaning, experience and deportment. Material culture along the Camino speaks volumes about a powerful “culture of the route”, ritual performances, thresholds, transitions, and social relations across landscapes. The sum of evidence indicates a radical impact on local landscapes with some sectors of the community benefiting from the unfolding movement while others appear to distance themselves from the perpetual stream of pilgrims.

This thesis is a study of the record of the monuments of the Firth of Clyde region in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age. Six type monuments which were the foci of ritual and/or burial practices during this period are considered: chambered cairns of the Neolithic, stone circles, standing stones, cup-marked rocks, early Bronze Age burial cairns and unmarked burial monuments. A difference from previous work is the historical perspective of the research. This marks a departure from traditional period based studies, while investigation at a regional level avoids the restrictions of more localised research. The monuments are placed as far as possible in the context of the social relations and routines of everyday life in which they played a part, and transformations which took place are identified in a synthesis of the monument record through time. A catalogue of sites is provided. This was compiled in a form suitable for computer analysis, and a package of computer programmes prepared with specific purposes in view. Quantitative analyses of the frequency of occurrence, spatial distribution and relationship to eight locational factors are carried out for each of the type monuments at the regional level and for sub-regions identified within the study area. The results are discussed in the light of a systematic study of the effects on the formation of the archaeological record of social and economic development in the area of study over the last two hundred years, and in relation to the findings from reviews which are undertaken of the evidence of Mesolithic activity, of settlement and cultural evidence and of environmental studies. Additional insights are gained from considering the architectural form of the monuments in relation to meaning and function. One aspect of the study thus concerns the observation of changes in the relationships between the living and the past, or between the living and the dead, from the spatial location and topographical positioning of monuments, while another concerns the ways in which these are reflected in the architectural form and function of the monuments. It is found that the spatial division of the region in the Neolithic indicates that the chambered cairns do not reflect the full extent of settlement and farming, and that their occurrence, as occasional foci in the landscape, is closely related to land use traditions established in the Mesolithic. With the transition to the Bronze Age a different spatial division is seen to emerge in which stone circles are located in a small number of particular locations, whereas the burial cairns and unmarked burials occur throughout the region, and appear to be much more closely related to areas of settlement than were chambered cairns. Standing stones are known in association with both ceremonial and burial monuments, and their distribution also suggests areas of settlement. Many aspects of cup-marked rocks remain enigmatic, but they seem to represent ritual activity of a different kind, which may have taken place mainly in areas marginal to the main foci of other activities. The island of Arran is found to have played a distinctive role within the region. This cautions against regarding Arran as a typical example of monumentality on the Atlantic seaboard of Europe. Traditions and practices were established in the Mesolithic which were seen to have contributed to this development. In addition it is likely that its physical prominence made it a natural reference point for the region, which through its central location was focal to maritime communications.

From the eighteenth century, the material environment of the southern Scottish Highlands underwent radical change. This material change formed part of a wider process of social change known as Improvement. In this, a re-ordering of space within the house and throughout the wider landscape was intimately linked to change in the daily routines of the farming population and, thus, to change in the ways in which people related to each other. Prior to Improvement, people routinely experienced their world as part of the community of the farming township or as part of the family. Houses, settlements, and fields were organised in such a way as to maintain these forms of experience. Against this background, an ideology of clanship, that is of a wider community, and concepts of hereditary tenure appeared as common sense. Improvement sought to re-order routine in such a way as to privilege experience of the world as an individual, apart from the community and the family. With this achieved, an ideology of the individual and concepts of private property would in turn be privileged. Improvement sought, in this way, to introduce capitalism to the countryside of the southern Highlands. This thesis is in part an exploration of this process of Improvement through two case studies, in Kintyre and in Kilfinan parish. Changes to the material environment and to routine practice are traced for these areas; the intellectual context of Improvement, the Scottish Enlightenment, is discussed as the source of inspiration and justification for Improvement on the landowners part; and the specific motives of the various Improving landowners are explored as the process is restored to its specific social and historical contexts. However, to conceive of Improvement as imposed by a small group of landlords on a passive population is to misunderstand the dynamics of that process. As such, the penultimate chapter focuses on understanding how that population accepted, rejected or manipulated their landlord's initiatives in negotiating their position as occupants of the land. Improvement in practice took on specific local forms that were primarily defined in relation to the question of land rights. The narratives of Improvement constructed in what is to follow are of more than parochial interest. They form part of the global story of the emergence of capitalism and capitalist society. A major aim of this thesis is to consider how we should go about writing social histories and archaeologies of capitalism. There are two main conclusions that will be drawn. First, that capitalism (an ideology of the individual made knowable in routine practice) should be differentiated from capitalist society (where capitalism is widespread, but not necessarily universally or homogenously accepted). This distinction allows us to perceive alternative forms of social relationship within capitalist societies. In accepting the distinction, writing histories of capitalism involves considering how capitalism emerges and interacts with those alternative forms of social relationship in particular historical situations. The second main conclusion is that, in accepting the definition of capitalism given above, archaeology has a significant role in understanding capitalist societies as it has the material environment and routine practice as one of its basic concerns. It is in those environments and through that practice that the conditions allowing or denying acceptance of the ideology of the individual are created.

The research in this dissertation concerns methods and theories involved in the analysis and interpretation of burials related to wars and other conflict situations. Its core is a conflict interment model that I developed to facilitate the identification of material differences in burials that will help in understanding burial circumstances (e.g., whether a death occurred in direct conflict on the battlefield, as a direct consequence of battlefield injuries or other trauma, or as an execution, or was unrelated to the conflict; and whether the subsequent burial was by a ‘friendly’, ‘neutral’ or ‘hostile group’). These is a great need for such a model, because exhumations tend to focus on the recovery of remains – while assuming the circumstances of death and burial – and therefore lack the structured methods and procedures that might provide additional information about what actually took place. I analyse nine datasets from seven different conflict episodes spanning the 15th century to the late 20th century. The reason for using data from different centuries, types of conflict, culture, and grave type (or level of a particular type of grave) is to test the applicability of the model to: a) known grave types, in order to discern any common elements to be found in friendly, neutral, or hostile interments; and b) unknown grave types, in order to tentatively identify those responsible for interment and the circumstances surrounding the burials. The model takes account of both normative (cross-cultural) and situational behaviours in the death and burial process, and includes variables dealing with body positioning, cause of death, presence or absence of mutilation, burial container, and ritual markers including clothing and grave goods. The ultimate goal is to develop an approach to burials in archaeology applicable in a wide variety of recent, historic and, possibly prehistoric contexts.

Offering a social approach to landscape through the systematic study of communication routes, this study redresses the balance between previous social, historical and data driven archaeological studies of roads, paths and communication routes, while providing landscape survey projects with the techniques through which to address social interaction on a regional scale. Research on roads, paths and communication routes completed over the past 50 years focuses on the technology of road building, descriptive historical accounts of roads, and anthropological investigations that focus mainly on the role of communication routes in movement, memory and landscape. Unlike these previous studies, this research addresses communication routes as socially embedded material culture. Since the 1970s many archaeologists working in the Mediterranean have employed regional survey techniques in order to investigate broader patterns of human activity in the landscape. Communication routes are notoriously absent from these survey projects. Interaction is instead extrapolated from topographical information and sherd densities. In the current climate of landscape archaeology where interdisciplinary regional survey projects employ ever more complex and insightful GIS systems in the attempt to understand social landscapes, the absence of communication data appears glaringly obvious. Within this thesis I argue that the importance of roads and paths goes beyond the places they may or may not connect or intersect. Instead, roads and paths are products of daily practices that reaffirm, redefine and reproduce social and cultural relations. Through the intensive survey of communication routes in three distinct regions in Cyprus, (North Palekhori, Mandres and the Akamas Peninsula Survey Zones), I gained a greater understanding of the interplay between human activity, expressions of identity, land use and settlement from the Roman to the British Colonial period. iii Although the morphology and structural features of roads, paths and communication routes vary between these survey zones the underlying themes involved in the construction, maintenance and use of communication routes cut across geography and time. This thesis pushes the boundaries of landscape archaeology and survey methodologies to address: human-land relations, traditions of road and path building, the role of roads and paths in the negotiation of power and the entwined nature of communication routes and perceptions of landscape.

This study concerns the social and political organization of the early medieval kingdom of Fortiu which occupied present day Strathearn in eastern Scotland. Archaeological and historical sources are used to examine the develoent of the administrative structure at the root of the Medieval state of Scotland. There are three main aspects to this study. First, the historical evidence bearing on social organization in early medieval Britain and Ireland is used in conjunction with archaeological evidence for economic activity to produce a generalized model of early medieval society suitable for Pictland. Second, the archaeological evidence of settleent in Strathearn, both upstanding sites and cropmark sites revealed by aerial photography, is examined as a means of assessing the character of Pictish settlement systems, their agricultural practices and, ultimately, Pictish social organization. The third line of enquiry is to compare the archaeological evidence with the details of docinentary evidence. This is done at two levels: the archaeology around specific ll documented sites is discussed in relation to that evidence and then a broader assessment is made of the evidence with respect to the pre-feudal administrative structures. It is argued that during the Pictish and early Scottish periods as the polities in the east grew more state-like the importance of kin-based social relations diminished and protofeudal social bonds became increasingly important. However, throughout the period land tenure and agricultural production retained central to the maintenance and reproduction of social and political relations . Archaeological evidence is essential for an historically sound study of these develoents.

Glass is one of several early modern industries where the development from small-scale workshop to large-scale industry offers a valuable insight into wider socio-economic trends. Previously, medieval and early modern forest (wood ash) glass has been studied using a range of analytical techniques. However, characterisations of production centres and exchange systems for forest glasses are difficult to verify, in part because very few examples of raw glass from furnace sites have been investigated. The necessity for an independent means of provenancing glass used in the study of exchange systems is clear. Compositional analysis can provide evidence for the raw materials used and can sometimes provide compositional groupings specific to sites. However, strontium, neodymium and oxygen isotope determinations can actually provenance the glass by linking the geological ages, or sources, of raw materials to production sites. The potential of using Sr and O isotopes in the study of plant ash glasses has recently been established (Henderson et al., J. Archaeol. Sci., 32, 2005). Using EPMA-WDS over 179 raw glass samples from 12 English production sites in operation between the 14th and 17th centuries have been analysed. These analyses have shown compositional types which are relatable to the region or, in some cases, the period of production. Over 60 archaeological glass, raw material and model glass samples from these sites have also been analysed using mass spectrometry to determine strontium, neodymium and oxygen isotope ratios. The isotopic analyses have also been very effective in showing differences between sites, even those within the same region. This thesis will argue that the combination of these techniques offers a promising new way of provenancing archaeological glass and provide an insight into the organisation of production at this time.

This dissertation analyses the spatial and contextual organisation of thermal structures (hearths and ovens) on thirty excavated Neolithic sites from Macedonia and Western Thrace throughout the Neolithic period in Greece in diverse habitation environments (tells, flat-extended sites and lake-side sites). Unpublished material from two settlements, Avgi and Dispilio in Kastoria, will also complement this study. This dissertation raises the question of how communities were organised and how different forms of habitus or different kinds of entanglements tell us something of daily life and the formation of social identities. My principal field of research lies in the social interfaces developed around consumption practices in diverse spatial contexts in the course of everyday life. Key questions of this study involve the overall emergence and dispersal of social and cultural traditions in time and in space through the examination of different spatial and material entanglements. My analysis clarifies that intra-site spatial organisation in the area studied does not directly correspond with settlement types. The examination of archaeological data showed that similar configurations of social space can be found in dissimilar settlement types. My study demonstrates that cultural ‘assemblages’ in prehistory do not correspond to geographically broad united community groups but instead they show local diversity and social complexity. Instead of being modelled as unified, monolithic ‘cultures’, people seem to have come together around a sequence of chronologically and geographically focused forms of local identities. A local-scale examination of intra-site spatial patterns from Neolithic Macedonia and Western Thrace demonstrated that, although different settlement types are recorded within particular geographical regions, comparable organisation of space among contemporary sites indicates the development of similar social structures.

A large number of dry caves scattered across the mountainous Santa Barbara backcountry, in south-central California, have yielded a unique collection of indigenous artefacts. The xeric environmental conditions in these caves have resulted in exceptional preservation of perishable materials; and the assemblage contains items such as wooden bullroarers, feather bands, deer bone whistles, basketry and curated plant materials. A significant proportion of this material appears to have been deposited in the colonial period (AD 1769 – late 19th century). This region was occupied primarily by the indigenous Chumash people, semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers who were characterised by their complex political organisation, diverse subsistence base, and rich ceremonial tradition. Indigenous life was plunged into turmoil from AD 1769 when the Spanish missionisation programme heralded the start of the colonial period. Over the next hundred years Spanish, Mexican and Anglo-American colonisers dramatically changed the economic, political and ecological landscape of south-central California. The majority of archaeological studies pertaining to the Chumash have focused on the prehistoric period. Most previous colonial-period studies have concentrated on the missions and closely adjacent indigenous sites where colonial influence was strongest. The study of cache caves and their artefacts provides a novel opportunity to explore indigenous practices during the turbulent colonial period within the more autonomous context of the Santa Barbara hinterland. This thesis provides the first collation of all the data relating to cache cave sites and their associated artefacts in the Santa Barbara hinterland. This information has been used to provide a basic chronological and geographic framework, and in turn, to propose models for indigenous caching practices in the Santa Barbara hinterland. These caching models are explored in terms of value systems in order to consider processes of indigenous resistance and acculturation during the colonial period.