Beyond the Grave ― New Perspectives on Barrows

Round barrows are the most common form of prehistoric monuments in Britain with over 30,000 sites known, and have been subject to over 200 years of research and excavation. Last (English Heritage) maintains that a new approach, drawn from recent work on Neolithic long barrows, provides a model that can be applied to round barrows, reasserting the complexity and significance of barrows as "four-dimensional monuments." The essays in this title are drawn from the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference session that focused on the round barrow in different regions of Britain. Chapter topics include discussions of barrows with geographical distributions from southern, southeastern, and eastern Britain, Somerset, Cheshire, Cornwall, and Wales, along with thematic chapters on Bronze Age monument construction as technological practice, round barrows and the dwelling perspective, and the cleverly-titled "A Thousand And One Things To Do With A Round Barrow," which explores the theory of the round barrow replacing henge sites as contemporary, communal-scale monuments. Distributed in North America by The David Brown Book Co. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)