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10. Beyond the meaning of Neolithic houses:specific objects and serial repetition

Douglass Bailey

In doing this, I wish to imply neither metaphor nor analogy

(Bochner 1967).

What do we know about Neolithic houses?

As archaeologists we have become very good at studying

Neolithic houses. We have perfected the application and

extrapolation of geophysical methods to the point where

we can locate Neolithic buildings beneath the soil and

accurately predict their sizes and depths. We can uncover

these structures with precise excavation, pick them apart,

peeling back extra-ordinarily thin layers and fragmentary

traces of activities, rubbish, debris and fragments of floors,

ceilings, ovens and hearths. We can produce excavation

records and floor-plans to millimetric precision and we

can reconstruct highly intricate and often truncated

patterns of long extinct human behaviour. We can rebuild

structures on paper (and at full size on land) and

manipulate complex stratigraphic matrices, inventories

of artifacts and refuse, positions of grinding stones, storage

bins, and looms in order to produce authoritative

reconstructions of household living in 8000 year old

houses. As material scientists we can recreate the recipes

with which house walls and roofs were made; we can

determine the relative proportions of each constituentelement of plaster or paint. We can identify the season in

which the grass, clay and mud daub was mixed. We can

reveal the method by which a particular tree was split and

from what distance the wood had to be transported before

it was placed in the foundation trench that had been dug

for it. We can reconstruct the processes and order in

which these foundation trenches and post-holes were dug,

infilled, redug, shored up and covered over through series

of repairs and reconstructions. We can identify and count

sequences of wall and floor replasterings and create

genealogies for buildings long dead. We can measure

soils, sediments and patterns of artifact fragmentation

and erosion in order to reconstruct alterations in building

usage from human to animal and back to human. We can

track subtle sequences of construction, extension and

abandonment of buildings and building complexes. As

forensic experts we can recreate the sequences, causes

and consequences of house destruction and decay. We are

very good at using the evidence of Neolithic architecture,

floorplans, investments of labour, patterns of construction,

reconstruction, destruction and neglect as proxies for social

structures, hierarchies, conflicts and intra-community

political dynamics. We speak with confidence of unequal

access to private space as well as of the social value of

shared, communal, open space. We recreate household

units and their ceremonies of membership, incorporation

and exclusion. We use floor-plans and intra-mural spatial

organization in order to extrapolate entire structures of

community relations and metaphors for living. We are

terribly confident about our progress in improving

archaeological techniques and experience, our strategies

of fieldwork, our interpretive inspiration and philosophic

complexity.

But is this enough? Are these the right sorts of tools

and methods? Are these the right kinds of knowledge we

should be eager to accumulate? Does any of it really get

at the meaning of Neolithic buildings?

What dont we know about Neolithic houses?

On the one hand then, we are very good at the archaeology

of houses from the Neolithic of south-eastern and central

Europe. We have become experts in taming the house as

an archaeological beast, in controlling it, in domesticating

these buildings within our settled, shared world-view of

an understandable, interpreted Neolithic. Despite our

accumulated knowledge, technological expertise and

intellectual sophistication, however, we are very bad at

understanding what buildings from the Neolithic mean

today to us and what they meant to the Neolithic observer.

We have been particularly unsuccessful, negligent even,

at understanding two of the most obvious patterns that

we have been so diligent in reconstructing.


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Beyond the meaning of Neolithic houses 91

Morphological similarityFirst, we do not competently understand the morph-

ological similarities among Neolithic buildings, whether

they are curvilinear pit-features of many early, and

significantly, later, Neolithic landscapes or whether they

are the rectangular surface-level structures of settlement

tells and flat, extended sites (Fig. 10.1). What does it

mean that there was so little variation in form of

individual units of Europes earliest built environments?

Why are pit-features so similar in shape? Why are the

forms and sizes of buildings in tell villages repeated with

such similarity?

The explanations to date do not satisfy. Least sufficient

are culture historical attempts that see building form,

like other elements of a society, as essential constituents

that define a community: similarity of building morph-

ology as just another example of shared material culture.

While there may be something to the building similaritywithin one settlement or, even across one coherent region,

it is a less sustainable explanation when one recognizes

that morphological similarity crosses the borders of

established culture groups. Why are there similarly

shaped multi-roomed rectilinear buildings in northern

Greece as well as in southern Romania? While it is true

that variation at greater distance is apparent (Linear-

bandkeramik longhouses are not Kodzhaderman-

Gumelnia-Karanovo VI tell houses), there are significant

repetitions of formal building similarity within andbetween individual LBK sites that themselves are

separated by substantial geographic distances. Equally

insufficient are the functional suggestions put forward,

for example by me (Bailey 1999; 2000) following the

lead of others such as Kent Flannery (1972; 2002), in

which building morphology follows the most efficient

use, division and extension of built space: that rectilinear

structures are more suited to sub-division and extension;

oval and round structures to less anchored concentrations

of activities.

None of these attempts at explanation really deals with

the repetition of building form across space and throughtime. None of them touches the conceptual core that sits

beneath the formal similarity in architecture. How does

similarity of structures work? Why should it happen? Is

it mere coincidence? Or is there something that we, as

Figure 10.1 Selection of house plans from tells Ovcharovo, Polyanitsa, Radingrad and Turgovishte, northeasternBulgaria (after Todorova 1982).


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Douglass Bailey92

expert house archaeologists, are missing in our hyper-

detailed, millimetrically precise, explicit research

strategies? We are left not understanding what the

similarity of Neolithic buildings meant to Neolithic

people and what it means to us.

Building aggregation

Second, we do not understand the aggregation of

Neolithic buildings into the communities that we call

villages or, for the pit-features, camps. Why did people

construct these similarly-formed buildings in such tight

congregations? Indeed why does the village emerge as a

tectomorphic (and political) institution in the Neolithic

of south-eastern and central Europe? Is it enough to

recognize that the phenomenon that we choose to

recognize as the Neolithic in south-eastern and central

Europe has precedents in the Near East and in Anatolia

where there also occur aggregations of buildings withrectilinear floorplans? Are these (eastern or western)

aggregations merely other facets of being a community of

a particular economic sort, literally another consequence

of a groups culture history and functional dynamics?

Are these aggregations a requisite of early agricultural

life, if indeed such a concept ever existed? Older traditions

of archaeological interpretation found satisfaction in an

essential need for defensive buildings and for safety in

numbers, as well as in some hard-wired stimulus to

shelter, work, share, store, and live together. None of

these answers satisfy. Though explanations may service

particular approaches to the subject (the culture historical,

the economic), they do not get into the meaning of villageaggregation in the south-east European Neolithic.

Questions

Despite the advances of our growing skills and inter-

pretive enthusiasms, two fundamental questions have

gone unasked: why are the south-east European Neolithic

buildings similar in appearance; and why do these

buildings occur in aggregations? We have failed to answer

these questions, indeed many of us have failed even to

ask these questions, because we have been studying the

wrong things in the wrong way. Critically, we have been

looking at Neolithic architecture from the wrong per-spective. We have been looking at building and settlement

composition, at the material and political interiors, of

Neolithic sites. We have sought understanding in the

increasingly fine-grained and minute internal details of

Neolithic houses and villages: we have sought answers in

the precise patterns of artifacts, residues, traces and social

contexts. Two propositions push us in a different

direction, towards a radically altered understanding of

the structural similarity and spatial arrangement of

Neolithic architecture; it is also a direction in which lies

a more dynamic meaning of Neolithic buildings.

First, what if none of what we have discovered about

Neolithic houses matters? What if it is unimportant what

happened inside Neolithic houses? What if it is un-

important how a Neolithic house was built, abandoned or

destroyed? What if it is unimportant if a Neolithic house

represents a social unit such as a household?

Second, what if building morphology and aggregation

are interesting only when we see them as uninteresting?

What if Neolithic buildings are of interest only when westep away from the accepted questions and methods that

seek compositional interpretation or explanation? What

if Neolithic architecture becomes interesting only when

we stop focusing on the building itself and on its internal

components? What if Neolithic buildings are only of

interest when we start to think about them in terms of

external relations: more specifically, when we start to

think about them from the eyes of the spectator?

An anticompositional attitude

In late April 1966, an installation opened at the JewishGallery in New York. The work gathered at this show,

which was called Primary Structures: Younger Americanand British Sculpture, had been made by a group of peoplewho shared a common approach to material objects and

to space.1 The artists were developing a shared philo-

sophical commitment to the abstract, anti-compositional

material object: it was a movement that had several names

(ABC Art, Cool Art, Primary Structures, Rejective Art)

but which now rests most easily under the title of

Minimalism. These artists made work, showed it and,

perhaps most helpfully for us, wrote about it, wrote about

what they were trying to do, and they wrote about the

work of others.2

Primary Structures was full of seminal pieces of theemerging Minimal movement and included especially

important work by a core of Minimalists: Donald Judd,

Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Tony Smith, Judy Chicago,

Robert Smithson, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Anne Truitt,

and Robert Bladen. One example will suffice to provide

a way into their shared way of engaging material and

space.

Robert Morris showed two, extravagantly large,

identical, grey-coloured, right-angled, three-dimensional,

L-shaped forms (Untitled, 2 L Beams; 196567) (Fig.

10.2). These were big objects; the arms of each of the Lswere over two metres long and the measurement around

the girth of the arms was the same dimension. In addition

to its size (the pieces were taller than most visitors to the

installation) 2 L-Beams was a strangely stimulating piece.Like much of the work in Primary Structures, peoplereacted to the L-Beams in new and different ways. Morris

had placed the identical L-shapes in different positions:

the first sat securely on the floor with one arm running

with a flat side along the ground and the other arm

standing up perpendicular to the floor. Morris placed the

second L-Beam in a very different position, with the

outside tip of the right-angle pointing upwards and the

ends of the two arms of the L, pointed down, like legs,

supporting the shape but almost teetering, with only a


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thin edge of each touching the ground. Though identical

in size, form and colour, the different positionings made

these objects appear to be different forms; while one Lwas solid and stable, firmly grounded on the floor of the

gallery, the other was balanced precariously, ready to

topple over. The visitor to the Jewish Gallery was faced

with an apparent contradiction: these were objects that

were the same but did not appear to be so. From this

contradiction came a tension that bounced between the

two pieces (same or different; different or same) and

between the pieces and the gallery visitor (I see the same

thing but in different ways). The Minimalists were

especially successful in creating and positioning identical

three-dimensional objects in particular ways to confront

the spectator with apparent contradictions: for MorrisLs, it is the same form but it is not the same.

Environmental objects

Like much Minimalist work, Morris Primary Structurespiece stimulated the spectator not only through the

contradiction that came from the repetition of a right-

angled, chunky, cubic, L-shape, but through the way that

the size and positioning of the Ls forced spectators to

consider things and places beyond the pieces displayed.

In this sense, Morris Ls, like the pieces of many of his

colleagues, were environmental; they focused the viewers

eye not on the object itself but on the objects articulation

of space. Where traditional sculpture was self-contained

and attracted the viewers gaze towards it and then into

its component parts, Minimal art pushed the spectator to

look elsewhere and in doing so activated the space beyond

and around the piece itself.The environmental engagement of the space beyond

the work of art took various forms. Some Minimalists,

such as Donald Judd3 and Robert Morris4 made work that

occupied space. Morris geometric shapes and Judds

series of empty wooden or metal boxes physically

encompassed space. Other Minimalist work conquered

space. For example, Ronald Bladens The X (1967),shown at the Scale as Context show at the CorcoranGallery dominated the gallery space: the piece was a

massive three-dimensional X-shape made of wood and

clad in black covering; the piece filled a large two-storey

gallery, straddled the centre of the gallery floor, andreached up to the roof. TheXdominated the space to suchan extent that, in order to experience the piece, the viewer

literally had to walk through the art by moving between

the legs of the X. Other Minimalists, such as Sol LeWitt5

and Tony Smith, made work that incorporated space.

Smiths Smoke, also in the Scale show at the Corcoran,was also massive; it filled the gallery like a modulated

canopy of smoke rising up to the ceiling. Again the viewer

was in amongst the work, walking through it looking up,

around, behind. The person looking at Smoke shared acommon space with the work itself. Yet other

Minimalists, like Carl Andre6 and Don Flavin7 made work

that dispersed space. Andre used bricks and tiles laid out

in sequences on gallery floors and pushed viewers to

Figure 10.2 Untitled (L-beams) installed at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (1965). (Photograph by RudolphBurckhardt; after Potts 2000)


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Douglass Bailey94

follow the sequence with their eyes and their feet (Colpitt

1990, 82; Lippard 1969). In all of these ways, Minimal

art was environmental. It pushed around the spectator,

sometimes moving him or her away from the object itself,

other times drawing them in before twisting them

sideways and sending them off again. In all of theseways, Minimalist works existed outside of the individual

pieces themselves; they engaged the spectator, the piece

and a shared space all at the same time.

Engaging the spectator

The consequence of Minimal arts environmental stim-

ulation and activation of spaces outside of the individual

works of art was that Minimal art brought the spectator

and the piece of work into a shared space. Minimalist art

established important perceptual relationships across and

within the space that traditionally separated spectator

and object. The large size of MorrisL-Beams, BladensXand Smiths Smoke and their presence within galleryspaces had unavoidable implications for spectators

participation in these works. Critically, the meaning, if

there is to be a meaning, which emerged out of Minimal

art was not to be found in a formal analysis of the objects

contents or internal relationships. On the contrary, any

meaning that could be located was going to come out of

the experience that each spectator had with each object

or sets of objects.

In this sense then, Minimalist art engaged the viewer

in ways different from those of traditional representational

art. Sol LeWitt made this point most clearly (LeWitt

1969), arguing that when spectators look at traditionalrepresentational art (e.g. a sculpture or a painting), they

have to make a series of rational decisions. Furthermore,

representational art was made up of series of relations

that we as spectators need to understand. Once we have

understood these rational relations, we arrive at the

meaning of the object we are looking at. For example,

when I walk through the Main College building of Cardiff

University, I pass by W Goscombe Johns 1906 sculpture

of John Viriamu Jones. When I give visitors a tour, we

stop and look at this statue. Our process of looking involves

a series of rational decisions. This is a statue of a man

(and not of a child or a woman). The man is sitting in achair (and not standing). In the mans hand is a sheaf of

papers (and not a hammer); is this a manuscript, or a

lecture or a sermon? This man is wearing a suit and collar

(and not a dress) and over that suit is an academic gown

(and not a white laboratory coat) which has rabbit fur

(and not a fox-tail) around the collar, and so-on and so-

on until we understand the sculpture and it takes on a

meaning to me and to my visitor. The sculpture stimulates

us to ask a set of rational questions to which there are

rational answers that help me (and my visitor) to

understand who this man is/was and why there is a statue

of him here. In fact this man was the first Vice-Chancellor

of the University of Wales and the first Principal of the

College; he has an MA, a BSc and was an FRS; and he

is not some other man, such as Dr. William Price. 8

We are trained to approach Neolithic houses in a

similar manner to the way we approach the statue of John

Viriamu Jones: this is a rectilinear, two room-structure

and not an oval pit. The walls of this house are made of

wooden posts (of 10cm diameter oak) and not of stone ormudbrick. The walls are covered with 17 layers of

alternating white and red plaster and not with 54 layers

of red, brown and white plaster. This structure in the

corner of the inner room is a grain silo and not an oven;

the silo is in the inner room and not the outer room. This

house contains the produce of the physical labour of a

small group of people and not of the entire community.

This group lives in this building and not somewhere else.

This group of people control the grain which they are

storing for the next sowing season and which they are

parching in this domed structure. This domed structure

is an oven. It is not a small oven; it is a large oven. Andso-on, and so-on, until we understand the house and what

it means to us and to our understanding of the Neolithic.

In his writing (and in his work), Sol LeWitt suggested

that there was another way of putting things together and

thus another way in which an object can engage a

spectator. This other way does not follow a rational

sequence of decisions, questions and answers; indeed,

this other way is not rational at all. It is logical and in a

logical sequence each part is dependent on the last. The

sequence already has a logic to it and if a spectator

engages it, then such engagement does not require

(indeed removes the necessity of having) any set of

decisions, questions or answers. The logical, then, is theirrational. In a logical sequence, you do not think; indeed

it is not even a way of thinking. Logical things just are

(Colpitt 1990, 58).

Minimalist art was logical. It offered sequences of

visual, physical, material stimuli that spectators did not

have to think about. Indeed if viewers start to think about

a Minimalist object or sequence in a rational way, then

they quickly become lost. Worse, once they start asking

questions, they become increasingly frustrated, because

when they think that they have located a possible answer,

they are dispirited to find that there is no way of

confirming (testing even) whether or not that potentialanswer is correct.

A good example of the logical aspect of Minimalist art

is Carl Andres Lever (1966), a sequence of 137 fire-bricks placed in a line along the floor. People who try to

read this work in a rational way quickly become frus-

trated: if they try to understand each individual brick,

asking rational questions about it, seeking answers before

moving on to the next brick, they become irritated because

there are no decisions to be made, there are no questions,

and there are no answers. In fact, people who approach

Minimalist art expecting a rational experience frequently

end up asking the ultimate and, in a Minimal logical, the

most futile questions. Question: what does it mean?

Answer: I cant see that it means anything. Question:


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why cant I understand this work? Answer: Because it

isnt art.

Objecthood and specific objects

To follow LeWitts suggestions about the logical sequence

of Minimalist art then is to reject the rational referenceand representationality of traditional art that seeks answers

in internal elements and composition. If we reject the

importance of internal composition and its series of

rational decisions then we are forced to focus on the

object itself and on notions of objecthood. Minimalist

artists were very concerned with creating objects which

were non-representational things, objects which offered

no illusions of rational representation, but which, at the

same time, were real and palpable, that were present in

the space that they occupied. For Minimalists, objecthood

was three-dimensionality with none of the illusion that

accompanies representation. Minimal art was notimitation; there was no illusion to something else,

somewhere else. Their work was non-referential.9 The

critical thing about an object was not what it alluded to;

the critical thing about a Minimalist object was its shape.

Indeed, the shape was the object. It was the whole thing.

There was nothing else. Specific objects were simple,

single (but also repetitive and modular) shapes that had

no internal meanings or rational relationships (Judd 1965).

One of the most successful objects that appeared in

Minimalist work was the cube. The cube worked as well

as it did because it was the ultimate, most basic and most

standard empty shape. It had no referential components

to catch the attention of the spectator. If you looked insidethere was nothing to be seen but the inside of the cube. If

you looked on the outside, again there was only the cube.

There was nothing there. Furthermore, the cube was solid

and stationary; it wasnt going anywhere and it wasnt

going to take the spectator anywhere with it. In an

environmental sense, the cube might push the spectator

away from the object, but the cube was immobile and was

not going to accompany the viewer on that voyage. Of all

three-dimensional shapes it is the most basic, the most

standard, because the only thing that the cube represents

iswellthe cube. In this important sense the cube is

interesting as an object, simply because it is uninteresting.It means nothing but itself.

The fact that the cube is empty of anything but itself

has further significance. Because it is hollow and empty

it directs the spectator outwards and away from itself. If

there is meaning, then it is somewhere else. It might be

in the person looking at the cube. It might be in the

relationship between the position of the cube and the

spectator. It might be anywhere else but it will not be in

the cube. More importantly, the cube had the extra-

ordinary power of making explicit its empty hollowness.

By surrounding empty space with solid areas, the cube

created emptiness. A cube surrounds but doesnt fill the

space within. Because of this, and in a sensationally,

apparently contradictory, physical fashion, the cube

creates negative volume, an emptiness that is environ-

mental, a manifestation of emptiness that pushes the

spectator away into thinking about anything and every-

thing except the cube itself.

With specific objects such as the cube, we become

interested not in the thing itself, but in the externalarrangements, repetitions and series of the specific objects

orchestrated by the artist. MorrisL-Beams and AndresLeverare good examples. Morris arranged his beams tocause them to appear to be different forms, although they

were identical in every physical way. Morris arrange-

ment of the Ls, especially as identical forms that appeared

to be unidentical, set up in the viewers mind a tension of

contradictory visual impressions. Contradiction came

from the arrangement of identical objects. For Andres

linear series of bricks on the floor, the interesting thing

is not the bricks as objects, which are identical. Rather

the interesting thing is the way that Andre arranged andrepeated the identical units.

By arranging identical units in logical series, Morris

and Andre (as well as many other Minimalists10) imposed

an order that operated beyond each physical object itself.

Along with the environment, repetition of form, and

attention to the specific object, the serial ordering of

objects was a powerful tool of the Minimal artists:11 the

placement of a series of bricks, the series of empty cubes

that Judd attached to gallery walls and floors. The

imposition of a serial order to the arrangement of specific

objects was more than a method; the serial order was an

attitude through which the execution of a work was

subsumed under the order and the repetition of form(Bochner 1967). The perception of serial work has

important consequences for spectators. Since internal

relationships did not exist, since there was no content

and no set of rational decisions, the Minimal objects

become easier for the spectator to consume. Minimalist

art required less perceptual work on the part of the person

looking at it. Spectators consumed serial pieces in

radically different ways than they did traditional rational

representational work. Where rational work had to be

chewed over, through rational sequences of decisions,

questions and answers, Minimal work slides right down

in one logical gulp.12

However, while the Minimalist work was simpler to

consume, the simplicity hid an unexpected impact on the

role that the spectator had to play. Identical forms arranged

in series may have been more easily taken in, but they did

not sequentially reveal the object or its meaning. In fact

they did the opposite, pushing the spectator away to think

and look elsewhere; they frustrated meaning. In doing

this, Minimalist work increased the work-load that the

spectator had to carry: there was no easy visual path to

deriving understanding or meaning. In fact, there was no

particular meaning at all, only sets of tensions and the

stimuli to think. Among these tensions and thoughts was

the critical realization that individual specific objects13

were less important than the systems within which those


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Douglass Bailey96

individual objects existed and were arranged. As important

was the final level of understanding: the individual objects

didnt really matter at all. The only important entities

were the ordered sets of objects. The arrangement became

the end; the individual form had become nothing more

than the means.

In doing this I wish to imply neither metaphor nor

analogy.

Neolithic significances

Thinking about the Minimal art of the 1960s in these

ways helps us in our investigation of the meaning of

Neolithic houses, and in our desires to better understand

the formal similarities of the Neolithic built environment

and the aggregation of Neolithic buildings into villages.

We can begin to finish by thinking in different ways

about what we excavate and what it is that we interpret in

such precise ways.

First, we should think about Neolithic buildings as

anti-compositional and non-referential. Their importance

lies not only in what they contain or in how each building

in a village was constructed. If we accept this, then most

of the explanations and interpretations of Neolithic

building and building morphology14 have only offered us

a portion of the meaning of buildings. In fact in the terms

sketched out in this chapter, our existing schemes and

attitudes to the Neolithic built environment could be

rejected as the anti-thesis of meaning. Second, it is useful

to think of Neolithic buildings as empty spaces, asnegative volumes, and as the manifestations of hollowness

and empty space. Third, we should think about Neolithic

buildings as environmental, at least as that term is applied

to the Minimalist object. Neolithic buildings, thus,

positioned Neolithic people in space, not simply in the

sense of architecture directing movement or choreo-

graphing social relations, but in the sense of buildings as

objects that push the spectator/villager/visitor away from

the building and its contents.

If we think in these ways, then spectators are turned

away from the individual components of a particular

architectural design or form and find themselves lookingat, living among, studying and excavating logical series

where repetition of a common form pushes them to think

away from the house and its contents. Furthermore, the

importance of Neolithic buildings is not to be found only

inside any particular one of them or only through the

detailed analysis of any one of them. These buildings

were/are specific objects. They are physical and palpable

but they are not representational or illusionistic. Their

shape is their meaning; their shape is the object. They

are anti-compositional; in this sense they are not rational

and thus will not repay rational decisions based on

rational questions seeking rational answers.

What was a Neolithic building in the Neolithic? In

addition to the existing understandings, we would be

well served to consider an additional perspective. From

this perspective we see a Neolithic building as a specific

object that forced people to think externally about

themselves in relations to others, as a specific object that

slid down without chewing, and as a specific object that

was accepted without thinking. Likewise, the importanceof aggregations of Neolithic buildings may not be found

in any particular building but in all of them in a series of

repeated, almost identical objects: it is this series that we

have been calling a village or a camp. What is a Neolithic

village from a Neolithic perspective? It is a serial order

of specific objects. In fact it is, in itself, a single specific

object. At yet another remove, it is just one specific object

within a longer serial order of villages across a landscape,

up a river valley, across a region and through a sequence

running for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years.

The most important significance of invoking these

concepts for thinking through the meanings of Neolithichouses, through the similarity of their form and through

the logic of their aggregations is less specific. The

Minimalist perspective may not be of value because it

presents new information; indeed I am not suggesting

that it does. Rather, conceits such as the serial order, the

specific object, serial repetition and environmental

engagements between spectator and work, have sig-

nificances because they push us away from the search for

a single, closed meaning of the Neolithic built environ-

ment. This is/not a house. This is/not a household. This

is/not a place of shelter. This is/not evidence of privacy

and social inequality. This is/not a village. The challenge

will be to see if the perspective elaborated in this chaptercan work alongside the current knowledges, methods and

accumulated understandings of Neolithic buildings and

villages that we have become so proficient in developing.

This is the provocation, but so, I suggest, were the houses

and villages of the Neolithic.

Notes

1 For an excellent and detailed discussion of the PrimaryStructures show see Meyer (2001, 1330).

2 Key essays and discussions are included in Meyer (2000;

2001), Batchelor (1997), Battcock (1968), and Strickland(2000).

3 For more on Donald Judd, see his collected writings (Judd

1975; 1987; 1991), especially Specific objects (Judd 1965)and the main synthetic and summary work (Serota 2003).

4 For more on Robert Morris, see Tsouti-Schillinger (2001),

Meyer (2001, 15366) and particularly the series Notes onsculpture (Morris 1966a; 1966b; 1967).

5 For more on Sol LeWitt, see his Paragraphs on conceptualart(LeWitt 1967), as well as Legg (1978), Garrels (2000),Baume et al. (2001), and Batchelor et al. (2002).

6 For more on Carl Andre, see Cole (1997).

7 For more on Dan Flavin, see Govan (1998) and Ragheb

(1999).

8 Dr. William Price (1800-93), doctor and eccentric, believed

himself to be a descendant of the Druids, and at


8/8


Pontypridds Rocking Stone he held ceremonies which the

Puritans considered to be Satanic. His home-made costume

clashed with the normal Victorian idea of sartorial decorum:

white cloak, green trousers, scarlet waistcoat, and on his

head a fox fur with legs and tail dangling. This is how he

stands in bronze in his hometown Llantrisant, with a bushy

beard, a crescent moon in his hand, and both arms

outstretched like the Christ of Rio. Dr Price was also a free

thinker and an advocate of free love, an avid defender of

the countryside, who gave early warning of the con-

sequences of industrialization, a supporter of the working

classes, who took part in the 1839 Chartist uprising in

Newport. He was a very unusual doctor. He considered the

wearing of socks to be unhealthy, prescribed a vegetarian

diet instead of pills, and refused to treat patients unless

they gave up smoking. He also attracted nationwide

attention as a pioneer of cremation. On January 13, 1884,

a Sunday, to the horror of his neighbours, he went to a hill

near Llantrisant, and there used an oildrum to burn the

body of his son Iesu Grist (Welsh for Jesus Christ). Thevillage policeman was called for, tipped up the coffin, and

rolled out the body of the boy. Only his immediate arrest

prevented the good doctor from himself being cremated by

the outraged mob. At court in Cardiff he vehemently

defended the right for people to be cremated instead of

buried. It was this trial, in which he won his case, which

led to the legalization of cremation in Britain. Dr. Price

returned in triumph to Llantrisant, where he lived happily

ever after with his young housekeeper Gwenllian, became

a father again at 90, and when at last his strength began to

ebb away, he lay down on a couch, asked for a glass of

champagne, and died. His own cremation in 1893 was

attended by thousands of sightseers, and afterwards the

pubs ran dry (Sager 1991, 136).

9 This of course is not completely true as a major stimulus of

much minimalist art was the particular material used to

create the objects: non-traditional, industrial materials such

as concrete, aluminium, Perspex, steel. These materials

had very particular reference to a non-artistic world which

was not the one inhabited by traditionally appropriate art

materials such as marble, clay, plaster and bronze.

10 Dan Flavin used fluorescent light bulbs as objects to be

arranged and repeated; Andre also used stacks of blocks of

wood; Judd used plywood or metal cubes lined up

horizontally on walls or vertically on the floor (he also

used identical rectangular boxes in series running from

floor to ceiling his stacks).11 On seriality, see Bochner (1967) and Meyer (2001, 17883).

12 Think about this process next time you eat a McDonalds

BigMac (regardless of the location of the restaurant) or

stay in a room at a Hilton Hotel (regardless of the city).

13 And indeed the archaeologists Neolithic house.

14 My own included (Bailey 1990; 1999; 2000).

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