The seminal paper concerning structured deposition is the 1984 paper by Richards and Thomas, ‘Ritual activity and structured deposition in Later Neolithic Wessex.’ While the paper claims to seek a counter to the invocation of ritual as a ‘catch-all’ (189), it in fact makes concrete a
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line of reasoning that had previously been implicit (e.g. in Case 1973). Their argument began with the premise that ritual activity involves formalized and repetitive behaviour. They then analysed the spatial patterning of particular forms of deposition, and concluded that certain deposits were too formal to be utilitarian, that “the deposition of particular items was being controlled across the site” (1984: 204). The upshot, they argued, was that structured depositions can be an archaeologically visible aspect of ritual behaviour (1984: 215). (They later agreed that the rigid divide between ritual and mundane behaviour was inappropriate, see Garrow 2007: 6 for criticism).
Almost immediately, other British archaeologists focused on this type of analysis, whether offering alternative explanations (Healy 1988), interpreting proportions of deposited material (Cleal 1984) or expanding the inquiry of structured deposition into the Bronze Age (Bradley 1990) and Iron Age (Hill 1995). After Thomas's 1991 book, Rethinking the Neolithic, which had an entire chapter dedicated to a "geneology of depositional practices" which he suggested ought to be considered a "cultural practice in itself (1991: 56)" was published, the idea of looking at structured deposition was entrenched in interpretations of British prehistory. Unfortunately, the common phrase - structured deposition - was decorated with many purpoted synonyms in the explosion of publications that followed Richards and Thomas’ 1984 paper. These synonyms were often
contradictory, demonstrating that what they had accomplished was in fact a replacement of one “catch-all” with another.
Thomas, despite his role in introducing structured deposition, has done a great deal to add to the dialogue. He has suggested that the ability to affect the environment had an important effect on the people performing these acts (Thomas 1995: 211). A few years later, he claimed that the act of deposition is more important to the people performing it than the deposited items (1999: 73). Continuing the discussion of the relation of people to their depositions, David Fontijn has suggested that selective depositions cement new relations between people, land, and objects (Fontijn 2002: 34). The participant(s) give up an object to a location that has meaning to people, and all three are changed because of it.
Observable patterns in the location and types of material are based on cultural rules, implicit or explicit, about what is appropriate to put where. Needham calls these patterns selective deposition (1989). Among the patterns of structured deposition, many have been discussed in terms of location and placement, including the redeposition of midden (Healy 1988); placement of items in mine shafts (Russell 2000); placement of items in causewayed enclosure ditches (Sharples 1991); placement of items in post holes (Pollard 1995); in rivers and bogs (Bradley 1987); or in ritual pits near megalithic monuments (Richards and Thomas 1984). The concept of structured deposition developed in such a haphazard way that it came to mean any deposition that did not conform to a norm or an average pattern.
Some theorists focused on particular aspects of structured deposition, investigating the specific intent in deposition. For example, Cleal (1984) suggested that some items, due to
disproportionate representation, were specially selected for deposition. This idea was elaborated on by Pollard (1993), although their approach to intent instantly assumed symbolic significance. Patterns of discard must be understood within the context of social actions in which they were
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created (Moore 1982: 77), and so require an attempt to understand the symbolic or ritual value of different types of items. Hill, working in the Iron Age of England, has found that structure alone is not sufficient to claim a deposit is a ritual one (Hill 1995: 4, 95; but see also 2.3 for my discussion).
2.6.1 How structured deposition will be identified in this thesis
At the end of section 2.5, I proposed a combination of theories deployed with respect to Near Eastern evidence to analyse ritual acts that involve artefact patterning. While extrapolated from a different body of evidence, the similarity to the British concept of structured deposition is undeniable. The formalization of spatial patterning that was so crucial to the identification of structured deposits in the British Neolithic was largely due to the absence of other identifying attributes. In other words, the wider context at many of the British sites is restricted to the deposits themselves, without recourse to settlement data. This is rarely a problem in the Ancient Near East, where most instances of artefact patterning occur within settlements. The expansion of context allows for a more in-depth analysis, of which the identification of structured deposition is the starting point, not the end. By first becoming familiar with the norms of a site or structure, framing (as described in 2.5) can then be employed to determine any anomalies that might be indicative of ritual behaviour. The categories subsumed under context and contents will then be applied to determine the possible variants of ritual activity. As ritual is inherently a symbolic act, the symbolic content of ritual depositions is a crucial element, and cannot be overlooked as it often was in conjunction with British Neolithic evidence. As such, it is not appropriate to continue a discussion of structured deposition, as this categorization comes laden with biases, largely arising from its creation and misappropriation with respect to British evidence. Henceforth, I will discuss ritual deposition (see Garrow 2012 for a discussion of terminology).