RICHARD CALLAGHAN AND CHRIS SCARRE SIMULATING THEWESTERN SEAWAYS Summary. Recent debates on the introduction of Neolithic features to Britain have emphasized the role of the western maritime routes and the possibility of direct or indirect connections from Brittany to Ireland and Argyll. Here we present the results of simulation modelling of maritime voyaging by paddled or sail-powered boat, indicating the likely lengths of the journeys that would have been required. The issue of direct travel vs. short crossings and coasting is explored, and the implications for specific connections, such as those posited to account for cattle remains in a pre-Neolithic context in Ireland, are considered. Some 40 years ago, Humphrey Case in a much-quoted article in Antiquity discussed the material conditions that would have constrained the early Neolithic colonization of Britain, and the archaeological evidence then available that could be brought to bear on the question of origins. He discussed boat technology, and the difficulty of transplanting crops and livestock to a novel environment. His concluding vision recognized a melding of indigenous and incoming populations in the societies that built and decorated the great passage tombs of the Boyne Valley (Case 1969, 185). 1 They were the product, he argued, of long-distance connections in the centuries following the Neolithic transition. The initial Neolithic colonization would have been a more precarious process, and Case concluded that the earliest immigrants ‘are unlikely to have come from further away than the north European coast’ (Case 1969, 181). He summarized this vision in a diagram (Fig. 1) where arrows linked the Chasséen and Michelsberg traditions of Belgium to the three principal early Neolithic traditions of southern and eastern England. Case’s diagram also acknowledged a minor input from the ‘Breton Chasséen’ to the West Country Neolithic. The latter was one of three early Neolithic groups in southern and eastern England showing evidence of ‘stable adjustments’. The links with Brittany were discussed essentially in terms of ceramic parallels (Case 1969, 183), although it was also suggested that the practice of multiple inhumation encountered in British Neolithic long barrows might have had its origin in the early passage graves of Brittany and Normandy. Case also went on to suggest that these patterns of contact may have had Mesolithic origins, and that they continued into the later Neolithic period when seasonal movements might explain ceramic parallels between Ireland and Scandinavia, and might have brought the ‘cult’ or ‘idea’ of the passage grave from Iberia or Brittany to Britain and Scandinavia (Case 1969, 185). 1 We were saddened to learn while this article was in press of the death of Humphrey Case, whose 1969 paper has been the starting point for most subsequent discussion on cross-Channel contacts during the British Neolithic. OXFORD JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY 28(4) 357–372 2009 © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA. 357