Cattle Traction and Neolithic Monument Building at Newgrange

An excellent new paper on Newgrange, one of Ireland’s most iconic Neolithic passage tombs, offers fresh perspectives on its social and technological context. Published in Antiquity, the study critically examines claims of a dynastic elite.

Reference:
Smyth, J., Carlin, N., Hofmann, D., Frieman, C. J., Bickle, P., Cleary, K., Greaney, S., & Pope, R. (2025). The ‘king’ of Newgrange? A critical analysis of a Neolithic petrous fragment from the passage tomb chamber. Antiquity, 99(405), 672 doi:10.15184/aqy.2025.63.

Cattle Traction: A Game-Changer for Neolithic Construction

Among the paper’s insights on incest, elites, and mortuary practices, a note about cattle traction stood out to me. The use of domesticated cattle to pull heavy loads, evidenced by mid-fourth millennium BC zooarchaeological data, challenges traditional views of Neolithic monument building. This technology suggests that the construction of massive passage tombs like Newgrange did not necessarily require a stratified society, offering a new lens on social organisation in prehistoric Ireland.

By enabling the efficient transport of massive stones and materials, cattle traction reduced the human labour required which suggests that smaller, community-based groups could have undertaken construction through cooperative, episodic efforts, aligning with heterarchical social models where power was distributed rather than centralised.

The ability to harness cattle traction highlights how technological innovation, rather than social stratification, could account for the scale and complexity of these monuments. This emphasises how collective action and decentralised resource management in Neolithic societies may be more important than elite control. But critics of the community-based model suggest that some archaeologists may be influenced by modern preferences for egalitarianism, potentially leading to "wishful thinking" that underestimates the possibility of social hierarchies in the Neolithic.

For a detailed exploration of cattle traction’s role in Neolithic Ireland, including zooarchaeological evidence and its implications for resource exploitation, see:

Pigière, F. & Smyth, J.. 2023. First evidence for cattle traction in Middle Neolithic Ireland: a pivotal element for resource exploitation. PLoS ONE 18. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279556