Donovan Hawley

Life beyond the monuments: lithics, landscape and settlement in Guernsey

Supervisor: Dr. Fraser Sturt

Abstract:

As a result of their visual prominence in the landscape, the Neolithic and Bronze Age megalithic monuments of Guernsey have been the focus of intense archaeological investigation and excavation over the past two centuries. This site-centric approach has given us a fine appreciation of the funerary architecture and the votive deposits of those times, but conversely, has revealed remarkably little about the patterns of residence of those who built these structures. In order to further our understanding of the human occupation of Guernsey throughout the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Ages, this study will focus on changes in the morphology and technology of the lithic collection, both in an insular island context, and in relation to lithics of the adjacent French coastal area. This approach, it is intended, will reveal something of the people who made the tools, their movements, where they lived and their strategies for adapting to an island environment.

email: donovan.hawley@virgin.net