PROCESS

Throughout this book, I have maintained that the archaeological literature on art and architecture has largely focussed upon form to the exclusion of process. This can be seen at a range of scales. Discussions of Neolithic art have tended to treat the ‘decoration’ of architectural stonework just as the term implies: superficial, and belonging to a single phase. The unique contexts and survival of Neolithic buildings in Orkney, however, both demand and allow a more nuanced approach, which takes account of the subtleties of the long sequences of attention on sites and the social practices of stoneworking. In Chapter 4,