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Windmill Hill—East or West?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2014

Stuart Piggott
Affiliation:
Abercromby Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology, University of Edinburgh

Extract

Twenty-five years ago Professor Gordon Childe laid the foundations of our knowledge of the foreign affinities of our British Neolithic cultures in a classic paper. In it he gave expression to the view which we have all of us held since that time, that ‘the culture associated with Windmill Hill pottery belongs, like the pottery itself, to a Western family’; ‘Western’ being used in the sense defined by Schuchhardt in his division of the European Neolithic groups. Our knowledge of the complexities of the Windmill Hill culture increased with new discoveries, and we were also able to grasp something of the diversity of the cultures within the Western family at large, particularly as a result of the work of Vouga, Vogt and von Gonzenbach in Switzerland. But the place of the Windmill Hill culture within the family seemed unchallenged, and the present writer re-affirmed a couple of years ago that it seemed to him ‘abundantly clear that the Windmill Hill culture is a member of the great Western family’. It is the purpose of this paper to re-examine the question in the light of certain new orientations in Continental prehistory which make it desirable to ask whether the culture of Windmill Hill can be regarded as an indivisible unit, or whether it may not contain contributions from more than one European source.

Type
Neolithic
Copyright
Copyright © The Prehistoric Society 1956

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References

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