Talk
A persistent place: a new chronology for Neolithic Dorchester
FULLY BOOKED
The area underneath and around the town of Dorchester was an important place for Neolithic people, who built a variety of monuments here over a period of 2000 years. From the early Neolithic causewayed enclosure at Maiden Castle and middle Neolithic sites like the Alington Avenue long barrow and the 100m enclosure known as Flagstones to late Neolithic constructions like Mount Pleasant ‘mega-henge’ and Greyhound Yard’s 380m-wide palisaded enclosure, these sites form a rich and wide-ranging ceremonial landscape spanning hundreds of years.
Recent work as part of Susan Greaney’s PhD has obtained new radiocarbon dates for the major monuments in this complex, enabling a new and detailed chronology for the area to be constructed. This talk will present these results, and discuss their implications for how we understand changes in beliefs, burials and gatherings during the Neolithic period, including how these people may have viewed older monuments. It will also present insights that this new chronology provides into fundamental questions about what happened at the start of the Bronze Age.
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Dr Susan Greaney
Susan Greaney is an archaeologist with specialist knowledge of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments of Britain and Ireland. She works as a Senior Properties Historian for English Heritage, where she is responsible for the archaeological content of interpretation at the charity’s prehistoric sites, including Stonehenge. Susan has recently completed her PhD on Neolithic monument complexes at Cardiff University, which involved new radiocarbon dating of all the major monuments in Dorchester.
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