Abstract
Ten years ago I published a paper (Chapman 1981) in which I developed the argument proposed by Colin Renfrew that the earliest West European megalithic tombs acted as symbols of territoriality among agricultural communities. This argument was presented as an alternative to the discredited diffusionist model by which formal similarities between such tombs, and the mortuary practices that they embodied, were interpreted as measures of the degree to which ritual practices and beliefs were shared between communities on a regional scale. I was keen to develop the ideas that the variability visible in the archaeological record of such tombs from southern Scandinavia to the Mediterranean required explanation, that understanding would only appear when we studied variables not cultural traits, and that our interest was in a variety of problems, using different models and measuring different data at different scales of analysis. Reaction to the territorial model has been both positive and negative, and is instructive of the ways in which archaeologists pursue research. Hence, it is my intention in this chapter to look back on the last 10 years of such research, to examine critically the territorial model, and to use the archaeological record of megalithic tombs as a specific set of mortuary data relevant to the regional perspective adopted in this symposium.
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Chapman, R. (1995). Ten Years After—Megaliths, Mortuary Practices, and the Territorial Model. In: Beck, L.A. (eds) Regional Approaches to Mortuary Analysis. Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1310-4_2
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