Julian Thomas (University of Manchester, UK)

In Stuart Piggott’s Neolithic Cultures of the British Isles (1954), Grooved Ware appears as the type fossil of the Rinyo-Clacton culture, one of a number of ‘secondary Neolithic cultures’ imagined as emerging from the fusion of continental migrants and indigenous hunter-gatherers. Yet Piggott expressed dissatisfaction with these ‘pseudo-cultures’, which were defined principally on the basis of ceramics, shared the same stone industries, and lacked other distinguishing attributes. In recent years, however, Grooved Ware has come to be more firmly connected with a distinctive style of domestic architecture, a range of symbolic forms and an arrowhead type, as well as henge monuments. Moreover, several of these elements appear to have originated in the north of Britain, and to have spread south.

If the Grooved Ware ‘package’ now more adequately fulfils the requirements of the culture group that Piggott was seeking, why have the Rinyo-Clacton folk not returned to the pages of British prehistory? In a revisionist era where some archaeologists are again willing to invoke migrations and folk movements as explanatory mechanisms, why has this relatively strong candidate been neglected? In this contribution, I will consider why this should be the case, and suggest alternative interpretations for the Grooved Ware phenomenon.