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The monumental forms of Early to the Late Neolithic include round ceremonial enclosures and circular settings for the burial of human remains. In Ireland, the developed passage grave or passage tomb consists of a large round mound, entered by a long passage of megaliths leading to a stone-built chamber. Neolithic inhabitants also built the largest chambered long barrow causeway enclosure and cursus and the largest henges: the Avebury henge, Marden and Mount Pleasant Henges, and the Durrington Walls. About two miles and southwest of Durrington is the most famous prehistoric monument in the world: Stonehenge.

The villages in Tana Toraja, Sulawesi, host some of the most lavish feasts in Southeast Asia, especially for funerals or memorials. In addition megaliths were raised for the wealthiest deceased family members. There is also considerable variability in economics, sociopolitical organization, and feasting within the Torajan area. This chapter discusses and tries to explain some of this variability, from low level transegalitarian villages in poor mountainous areas to the proto- or real chiefdom levels of the valley bottoms where paddy rice produces major surpluses. The corporate kindred with its ancestral house as the center of ritual and feasting activities is a distinctive feature of Torajan societies. Slavery was very developed, and secondary burials were strongly associated with elites in order to provide enough time to amass as much wealth as possible for proper funeral feasts. Why funeral feasts feature so prominently in Southeast Asia tribal societies is discussed. Other feasts were hosted by households, reciprocal work groups, lineages, corporate kindreds, villages, districts, and village alliances.

The most active and still vibrant megalithic tradition in Southeast Asia is probably found in Sumba. Given the importance of megaliths and their interpretation in prehistoric archaeology, and given the intimate association of megaliths and feasting in the Torajan area, we focused considerable attention on the feasting traditions of Sumba, especially as they related to megaliths. The megaliths are also associated spatially and behaviorally with ancestral corporate lineage houses. The logic of megalithic construction is discussed together with benefits sought by hosts for sponsoring feasts. The range of major feasting types is described.

This chapter surveys a range of community commemorations in Northern Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada and the United States that constitute smaller scale, vernacular counterparts to officially sanctioned (and nationally scaled) monumental projects. Whether navigating volatile commemorative geographies marked by sectarian divisions; editing and refashioning traditional monumental forms like the high cross or megalithic stones; or indulging in fictive melodrama through bronze figurative groups – diasporic monuments reveal a surprising continuity with nineteenth-century methods of visualising Famine, substituting the heroic for the ugly, optimism for despair, sentimentality for horror. Adopting a transnational approach, the survey and case studies of this chapter demonstrate how Famine memorials bear a striking resemblance to one another and share a repetitive, often romanticized visual vocabulary, as well as strong threads of interconnection that bind monuments across three continents to one another. Though the rallying cry ‘Remember the Famine’ unites these memorials, their form indicates that questions of what diasporic Famine memory actually is and why it should be remembered remain far from consensual.

This chapter develops a theory of the border structure of the fence. The fence introduces the first major kinopolitical divisions into the flows of the earth. It divides the earth from itself and creates the first social borders between people. However, the border regime of the fence is no mere relic of the past. Once it was invented by early humans, it persisted throughout history wherever we find the social practice of cutting up the body of the earth and compelling it into a centripetal accumulation: corrals that hunt down and capture disjoined flows (dragnets, manhunts, kettling); palisades that erect defensive stake structures to protect a kinetic stock (houses, plots of land, military limits); and megalith practices of verticality and directional signage that mark the boundaries of a territory (road signs, memorial sites, sacred sites).

This chapter turns towards artefacts, tracing the sudden rise in interest in prehistoric sites and monuments across Scotland during this period. It shows that cutting-edge approaches to the study of material as diverse as Roman forts and ancient megaliths could interact with older syncretist theories of knowledge and human origins to produce surprising, sometimes radical, reinterpretations of the distant past. Archaeologists and writers as diverse as the opera singer-turned-antiquary Alexander Gordon and the freethinker John Toland used these ancient monuments as telescopes through which to glimpse an almost unimaginable antiquity, one which could exert a dramatically destabilizing effect on present-day hierarchies of culture and geography.