1. Houses Foundational: Gathering Histories at Dorstone Hill, Herefordshire Keith Ray School of History, Archaeology and Religion Cardiff University Julian Thomas School of Arts, Languages and Cultures University of Manchester Introduction One way to think about Neolithic monuments is to regard them as a form of material narrative, in the sense that they represented the tangible embodiment of a collective history. For pre-literate societies, architecture has often served as a reminder of a shared past, and in this way as a means of reaffirming and consolidating traditions, identities, and social relationships. Houses, shrines, temples and tombs can all act as repositories of memory and foci of communal belonging (Helms 1998: 14). Across Neolithic Europe, however, the construction of some groups of monuments was both episodic and sequential in character, composed of a series of events which might individually have been of brief duration, but which were played out over a protracted period of time. Each of these events might have been connected with a significant happening in the life of its host community: the death of a leader, a memorable feast, a spectacular exchange of goods, or the creation of an alliance. Such structures and complexes therefore developed incrementally, as a series of material additions or transformations that corresponded with a kind of story, in which each new element responded to, and potentially transformed the significance of, whatever had come before. The outcome was a tangible accumulation, and intricate layering of activity across time, that embodied a shared past, and in doing so facilitated future acts of remembering and telling. A case in point is provided by Dorstone Hill in Herefordshire, located just inside the border between England and Wales, on a spur extending from a narrow upland watershed between the rivers Wye and Dore. Here, we have been conducting excavations over the past eight years, on a site that has long been known for surface concentrations of Mesolithic and Neolithic flintwork, and which had been subjected to small-scale investigations by Roger Pye and Christopher Houlder in the 1960s (Pye 1967; 1968; 1969). More recently, measured analytical field survey conducted by English Heritage drew attention to a low bank that ran across the modern field, at the narrow point where the hilltop becomes linked with the escarpment. At that time it was conjectured that a ditch might complement that bank on its northern side, and it seemed possible that Dorstone Hill had been closed off by a continuous rampart. Arguably, such a site might have been comparable with the final phase of the Early Neolithic enclosure at Crickley Hill in Gloucestershire, where a series of phases of interrupted ditch were eventually replaced by a