The Significance of Monuments

by Richard Bradley

The Neolithic period, when agriculture began and many monuments - including Stonehenge - were constructed, is an era fraught with paradoxes and ambiguities. Starting in the Mesolithic and carrying his analysis through to the Late Bronze Age, Richard Bradley sheds light on this complex period and the changing consciousness of these prehistoric peoples.
The Significance of Monuments studies the importance of monuments tracing their history from their first creation over six thousand years later. Part One discusses how monuments first developed and their role in developing a new sense of time and space among the inhabitants of prehistoric Europe. Other features of the prehistoric landscape - such as mounds and enclosures - across Continental Europe are also examined. Part Two studies how such monuments were modified and reinterpreted to suit the changing needs of society through a series of detailed case studies.
The Significance of Monuments is an indispensable text for all students of European prehistory. It is also an enlightening read for professional archaeologists and all those interested in this fascinating period.

Genres: History, Archaeology, Anthropology, Prehistory

192 pages, Hardcover

First published February 26, 1998

About the author

Richard John Bradley, FSA, FSA Scot, FBA (born 18 November 1946) is a British archaeologist and academic. He specialises in the study of European prehistory, and in particular Prehistoric Britain.

There is more than one author by this name. See also: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

Reviews

[Lee Broderick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard Bradley writes engagingly in this book as he argues for a rethinking of the British Neolithic and Bronze Age which places monuments as central not just to cosmology but to material culture. Linking monuments explicitly with subsistence systems and an economic worldview, as well as acknowledging the symbolism of circles, he argues persuasively but not entirely without conjecture.

Although principally concerned with British prehistory, the book does provide some interpretations of wider significance to those researchers interested in monuments elsewhere in the world. These are principally contained in the first four chapters of the book, which deal in generalities, whereas the remaining six deal exclusively with the place and time mentioned above.

[Rhiannon Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was not the book I was looking for. It was an interesting read, but it spent much more time engaging with other archaeologists than monuments.

[Sanjay Prabhakar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicely digestible but requires some revision following DNA evidence that the neolithic was a colonisation even on the fringe of Europe

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

As rewarding as Bradley's "The Idea of Order: The Circular Archetype in Prehistoric Europe " was frustrating. "The Idea of Order" is a detailed look at building and monument designs from the Neolithic era through the early Middle Ages. it reviews which sorts of structures -- straight-sided or round -- were favored in various parts of Europe and in various periods, but says almost nothing about what it might have meant, aside from noting that circular or oval designs seem to have often been associated, especially in Iberia, northwestern France and the British Isles, with death and religious ritual. "The Significance of Monuments," despite being published 14 years before "Order," is filled with educated guesswork about the ways in which the design of buildings, tombs, henges and other structures may have reflected prehistoric religion or ideology. A fascinating attempt to get inside the heads of Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age Europeans, made even more so by the parallels (not discussed in the book, unfortunately) between what was going on in Europe at the dawn of settled life and what we know about the earliest known communities in the Middle East during that region's own Neolithic.

[Jill Rooney]

Fantastic addition to landscape archaeology theory. I found it very inspiring and his ideas rang true to me.

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thought- provoking. I got to the end and then started all over again so I actually read it twice. Richard Bradley raises some interesting ideas about the hows and whys of the changes that took place in and between the Mesolithic, the Neolithic and the Bronze Age.