stone axes

The bluestone circles at Stonehenge represent one of the best-known examples of Neolithic skill in the extraction and long-distance transport of stone, but archaeologists have recorded thousands of equally awe-inspiring feats of lithic working from this period and earlier in Britain and Europe. Chris Catling reports on the Prehistoric Society’s newly published research paper Neolithic Stone Extraction, in which Peter Topping turns to ethnographic evidence to argue that stone objects did not only acquire symbolic status once they had been extracted and worked, but that quarry sites and the extraction practices themselves had important symbolic dimensions.