Paper short abstract:

The paper considers three differerent ways in which Scottish earlier prehistoric monuments were used and reused during later periods and considers how these processes provide information on attitudes to 'the past in the past'.

Paper long abstract:

Recent fieldwork has shown that many of the monuments built in the third millennium BC in Scotland were used again approximately a thousand years later. This happened widely, but it also happened selectively. This paper investigates three aspects of this relationship.

Firstly, it present the results of recent excavation at Broomend of Crichie where the positions of a number of unusual Beaker burials seem to have been commemorated by stone and earthwork monuments for nearly a thousand years before the site was abandoned. In this case there was an unbroken structural sequence.

Secondly, it considers the ways in which stone buildings were selectively reused and the striking manner in which elements of their architecture were copied in the construction of new monuments many years after their prototypes had been created. In this case it may have happened because their remains survived as prominent features of the terrain.

Lastly, the selection of monuments for reuse in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages seems to have been influenced by the sizes of the surviving structures. Large stone or earthwork enclosures were ignored, or renewed activity took place entirely outside them. Smaller, monuments, however, assumed a new significance and some of them were rebuilt. Perhaps this pattern reflects a change in the number of people who used them. It also suggests that public events no longer took place at secluded places, screened from the surrounding area. Now they were more visible and were integrated into the pattern of settlement.