In recent years a number of important studies have endeavoured to address the question of the symbolism embedded in prehistoric funerary structures and practices (Shanks and Tilley 1982; Tilley 1984; Hodder 1984; Morris 1988). This reflects an optimism which is prepared to ignore Ucko's warning, illustrated by a wide range of ethnographic parallels, of the difficulty of interpreting beliefs from burial practices, even at a fairly general level (Ucko 1969). It may indeed be fair to dismiss some of Ucko's reservations as rare exceptions to the general run of human beliefs, but the methodological question remains. How far is it possible to investigate past ideologies and beliefs in the absence of written records?

The answer will, to some extent, depend on the precise meaning we attach to terms such as ‘ideology’ and ‘belief’, since some aspects of past human behaviour are naturally much more accessible to us than others. We may indeed think in terms of a Hawkesian ‘ladder of inference’ (Hawkes 1954), where it is relatively easy to infer the form of treatment given to the dead, but clearly impossible, in the absence of written records, to know the names of deities or the details of myths. Hawkes, however, took a gloomy view: