Making sense of Scottish Neolithic funerary monuments: tracing trajectories and understanding their rationale

Abstract

• This contribution offers an overview of the appearance , spread and regionally specific developmental trajectories of funerary monuments in Neolithic Scotland, setting these within the broader context of the arrival of farming groups from Brittany and northern France in the early centuries of the 4th millennium, and the subsequent expansion of farming to the Northern and Western Isles and the northernmost part of Scotland a few generations later. The monuments are also considered within the broader picture of Scottish Neolithic funerary practices more generally. Possible reasons for the monuments' specific developmental trajectories are offered, with competitive conspicuous consumption argued to be a major driver of developments in northern Scotland and Orkney during the second half of the 4th millennium. Bayesian models are presented for the first time for Clyde cairns and for mainland Scottish-Orkney-Cromarty type passage tombs, and a chronological conundrum concerning Maeshow-type passage tombs are explored.