Chapter 9 House societies and founding ancestors in Early Neolithic Britain Julian Thomas, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester INTRODUCTION The combination of AMS dating, high‐precision calibration and the use of Bayesian statistics is gradually creating a more refined chronology for the Neolithic of northwest Europe (Whittle et al. 2008, 66). While the more precise dating of particular sites and artefact types is an immediate consequence of these developments, the implications for our understanding of Neolithic social relations and social practices will take rather longer to work through. One specific area in which a chronology that operates at the level of generations rather than centuries or millennia will potentially have a profound impact will be in the investigation of mortuary practices and funerary monuments. Until recently, it was possible to consider particular sites and structures as individual manifestations of processes that distinguished entire blocks of time (‘the Early Neolithic’, etc.). But as our temporal resolution begins to render the construction and use of these sites as increasingly event‐like, some of our established interpretations will need to be modified. In this contribution, I will begin by revisiting two important accounts of megalithic burial in northwest Europe, before showing how new dating evidence from Britain raises difficulties for each, and finally suggesting a revised reading of the evidence. In 1981, Robert Chapman built on an approach to the social significance of mortuary practices that had been pioneered by Arthur Saxe, Lewis Binford, Joseph Tainter and others to suggest that megalithic tombs in Europe should be understood as formal disposal areas linked to emerging territoriality on the part of human groups (1981, 75). While traditional perspectives had focused on architectural similarities with structures in the east Mediterranean in order to establish the ethnic or cultural affiliations of the ‘megalith builders’, Chapman sought instead to emphasise the demographic and social circumstances of the earliest Neolithic communities. In particular, he argued that where critical resources become increasingly restricted, corporate descent groups may use the conspicuous placing of the dead as a means of laying claim to these resources and controlling their transmission through the generations (Chapman 1981, 74). One important effect of Chapman’s approach was to erode the exotic and exceptional character of megalithic tombs by lodging them more firmly within the continuum of West European prehistory. For although the megaliths represented something new in the scale of their monumentality and their architectural elaboration, in another sense they could be seen as a continuation of trends that had developed during the later Mesolithic. In Portugal, Brittany and Denmark, a series of flat‐grave inhumation cemeteries of Mesolithic date had been identified in locations of enhanced ecological productivity, such as estuaries, straights, peninsulas and islands. These reflected a shift toward the intensive exploitation of aquatic resources, such as migratory fish and marine mammals, as the postglacial period had developed. Later, when agriculture was introduced, the construction of megalithic tombs could be seen as a continuation of an extant tradition of mortuary practice, building on the idea that access to key resources was