Over 22,000 sherds of pottery were recovered during the excavation of the
small islet of Eilean Dòmhnuill in North Uist in the late 1980s. Analysis of the
assemblage has demonstrated that all of the main vessel forms and
decorative motifs recognised at the site were already in place when settlement
began in the earlier 4th millennium BC and continued to be deposited at the
site until its abandonment over 800 years later. Statistically significant stylistic
variation is limited to slow drifts in the relative proportions of certain rim forms.
Across the Outer Hebrides, decorative elaboration and the presence of large
numbers of distinctive vessel forms would appear to mark out certain
assemblages seemingly associated with communal gathering and feasting
events at key locales within which a distinctive Hebridean Neolithic identity
was forged.
Throughout, this study takes a relational approach to the issue of variation in
material culture, viewing all archaeological entities as dynamic assemblages
that themselves form attributes of higher-level assemblages. It is argued that
the various constraints and affordances that arise within such assemblages
constitute significant structuring principles that give rise to commonly held
expectations and dispositions, resulting in the kind of constrained temporal
and spatial variation that we observe in the archaeological record and which in
turn gives rise to the concept of the archaeological culture. / Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Bradford / Erratum:
Vol. 1: 196 and Vol. II: xii and 383 It should be noted that the Unstan-type bowl recorded as being from Loch Mor is actually from Loch Arnish (Chris Murray pers. comm.).
The appendices including 'An Doirlinn Report and Illustrations' and 'St Kilda Report and Illustrations' are not available online due to copyright.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/9064 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Copper, Michael |
| Contributors | Armit, Ian, Gibson, Alex M. |
| Publisher | University of Bradford, Faculty of Life Sciences, School of Archaeological Sciences |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, doctoral, PhD |
| Rights | <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/3.0/88x31.png" /></a><br />The University of Bradford theses are licenced under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Licence</a>. |
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