Archaeologists show us how the Neolithic human lived in mainland Scotland, with new research, first publication of key datasets and radical reinterpretation of both burial practices and ceramics across 3rd millennium BC mainland Scotland.

A reappraisal of the geography and lifestyle of the Scottish Neolithic What was life like in Scotland between 4000 and 2000 BC? Where were people living? How did they treat their dead? Why did they spend so much time building extravagant ritual monuments? What was special about the relationship people had with trees and why was so much time and effort spent digging holes and filling them back up again? This collection examines what we can say about how people lived in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age of mainland Scotland where much of the evidence we have lies in the plough-zone, or survives as slumped banks and filled ditches, or simply appears as ruinous megaliths. It draws together leading experts and young researchers to present fresh findings and outlines radical new interpretations of the pits, postholes, ditches, rubbish dumps, human remains and broken potsherds left behind by our Neolithic forebears. Much of this evidence has come to light as a result of rescue or developer-led fieldwork in the past few decades, putting the emphasis very much on lowland, mainland Scotland as opposed to high-profile Orcadian Neolithic sites. Inspired by the work of Gordon Barclay, one of the leading scholars of Scotland's Neolithic over the last forty years, this new compilation offers a wide-ranging analysis of the evidence we have for the first farmers in Scotland. Kenneth Brophy is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Glasgow. His specialisms are the British Neolithic and early Bronze Age, and over the past two decades he has excavated a range of prehistoric monuments and cropmark sites across Scotland including ceremonial enclosures, timber halls and stone rows. He is the author of Reading between the lines: the Neolithic cursus monuments of Scotland (2015). Ian Ralston is Abercromby Professor of Archaeology and Head of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. Over his career he has worked on many aspects of Scottish Archaeology before the Vikings, as well as on the later prehistory of western continental Europe. He is the co-editor of Scotland After the Ice Age: Environment, Archaeology and History 8000 BC-AD 1000, (Edinburgh University Press, 2003). Gavin MacGregor is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow. He has worked in Scottish archaeology in both research and consultancy contexts and is currently a Director at Northlight Heritage where he is responsible for a range of applied heritage projects and programmes.