5. Underlying Social and Economic Themes

The foregoing account has criticised attempts to synthesise the region's archaeology for being hidebound by chronological divisions which, as presently constructed and deployed, do not account for the full range of available archaeological evidence. Indeed, despite the subsequent critiques of those such as Higgs and Jarman (1969), it might be said that we are still living in the shadow of Childe who, in his Presidential address to the newly founded Prehistoric Society, suggested that 'the classifications of Old Stone Age, New Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age draw attention to real revolutions that affected all departments of human life' (1935, 7 – our emphasis). Without getting distracted by the question of whether change should be viewed as revolutionary, transitional or evolutionary (for us, ultimately, simply a matter of the level of chronological resolution with which one views the past), the notion that a period defined in terms of a single attribute can be allowed to stand for all other social functions is as problematic in later periods as it is in those with which Childe was specifically concerned.

This failure to 'think outside the box' can have two debilitating effects. On the one hand, it allows one defining characteristic of a period to stand for many, thus restricting investigation of the interplay of different functional categories of evidence, and the diverse activities which they represent. On the other, related to the first, it obscures resonances between human occupation and landscape exploitation which cross period boundaries. In each case, this means that we are making less than full use of the data that we have painstakingly accumulated. What follows tries to suggest some more productive ways forward. It is, perhaps, inevitable that these alternatives will appear speculative, with only an oblique relevance to the detailed evidence provided by Yorkshire's archaeology. However, we feel that it is only by first tackling interpretation at this general level that more incisive analyses of the region's past development are likely to emerge.

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