The passage tomb at Newgrange, the enclosed fields at Ceide and the dolmen at Poulnabrone are just three highlights from this period in prehistory which still have a place in our imaginations. In his new interpretation of the Irish Neolithic (c.4000-2500 BC), Gabriel Cooney sets out to rescue this phase of antiquity from obscurity, from the custodianship of those who see Irish prehistory as "fragmentary, unreadable, remote". He reminds us that in recent years there has been an explosion in the amount of archaeological material that can be assigned to this last stage of the Stone Age, which saw the introduction of farming and the construction of megalithic monuments.
The introductory chapter signals several strategic aims: to challenge traditional approaches in archaeology; to take account of gender issues; to understand the symbolic functions of material culture; to distinguish different scales of time as experienced by Neolithic people, and so on. All of this is focused on the idea of landscape as the defining context of life in the Neolithic.
Having raised our expectations, the book fails to deliver appropriately on this promise. In many areas, the material is just not available which would allow us to reconstruct the Neolithic mentality, or ideology, as it is called at one point. The text abounds in lame generalisations and conclusions such as: "Within the house it seems probable that there would have been symbolic and functional contrasts between the central area, signified by the presence of the hearth, and the peripheral areas." The perfect conditional, would have been, is endemic in the text, reflecting the uncertainty of the discussion. Furthermore, this reader's experience was frustrated by far too many obscure or ungainly sentences that should never have escaped the editors' scrutiny.
In spite of all this, the book has considerable merits. Its treatment of what Cooney calls megalithic tomb complexes builds a fascinating picture of sites where several different megalithic styles were elements in one sacred environment. He pays particular attention to the Bru na Boinne complex of Knowth, Dowth and Newgrange as it evolved over 1,500 years, from the early mounds over passage tombs to the later henges and sacred enclosures.
The most arresting image in the whole book is of the tall, massive wooden posts which enclosed ceremonial sites or henges in the later stages of the Neolithic, when the brooding ancestral power of the mounds was already a fixed element in the landscape. The entire hypothesis is brought to life in a brilliant series of fictionalised snapshots of primitive experience at Newgrange. Cooney pushes the archaeology of the Irish Neolithic far beyond the old days of megalithic tomb classification; like those early forest clearers, he opens up spaces for further research and speculation. On the way, he engages thoroughly with the material culture, the house types and the sacred architecture of the Neolithic, and he is not afraid to draw modern ethnographic parallels. It is a pity that this work's many solid elements should be marred at the outset by an inflated and, at times, tangled style.
Sean Lysaght is a poet and biographer whose life of Robert Lloyd Praeger was published recently