Living Well Together? Settlement and Materiality in the Neolithic of South-East and Central Europe

Living Well Together? Settlement and Materiality in the Neolithic of South-East and Central Europe
Author: Alasdair Whittle
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Total Pages: 522
Release: 2008-03-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1782974814

Living Well Together investigates the development of the Neolithic in southeast and central Europe from 6500-3500 cal BC with special reference to the manifestations of settling down. A collection of reports and comments on recent fieldwork in the region, Living Well Together? provides 14 tightly written and targeted papers presenting interpretive discussions from important excavations and reassessments of our understanding of the Neolithic. Each paper makes a significant contribution to existing knowledge about the period, and the book, like its companion (Un)settling the Neolithic (Oxbow 2005) will be a benchmark text for work in this region. The reports in Living Well Together? play out the critical questions posed in the earlier volume: how should one interpret settlement; what of the difference between tells and flat sites; what do we mean by permanent occupation; can we avoid the assumptions that underlie claims for year-round residence or seasonal occupation; why, in some regions and at some times, did people maintain residence for so many generations that monumental tell settlements grew to dominate the visual and social landscape; what would a viewshed analysis of tells reveal; what are the dynamics of households in Neolithic Greece; how should we see the emergence of pottery in terms of material culture; and what were the origins of the LBK, and how can we understand its development? The volume's authors have succeeded in attacking existing thought, in provoking new discussion and in creating new paths to understanding the nature of human existence in the Neolithic. Together they set a new agenda for studying the Neolithic across and beyond southeastern and central Europe.

The Neolithic of Europe

The Neolithic of Europe
Author: Penny Bickle
Publisher: Oxbow Books Limited
Total Pages: 499
Release: 2017-05-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1785706578

The Neolithic of Europe comprises eighteen specially commissioned papers on prehistoric archaeology, written by leading international scholars. The coverage is broad, ranging geographically from southeast Europe to Britain and Ireland and chronologically from the Neolithic to the Iron Age, but with a decided focus on the former. Several papers discuss new scientific approaches to key questions in Neolithic research, while others offer interpretive accounts of aspects of the archaeological record. Thematically, the main foci are on Neolithisation; the archaeology of Neolithic daily life, settlements and subsistence; as well as monuments and aspects of world view. A number of contributions highlight the recent impact of techniques such as isotopic analysis and statistically modeled radiocarbon dates on our understanding of mobility, diet, lifestyles, events and historical processes. The volume is presented to celebrate the enormous impact that Alasdair Whittle has had on the study of prehistory, especially the European and British Neolithic, and his rich career in archaeology.

The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe

The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe
Author: Chris Fowler
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks
Total Pages: 1201
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199545847

'The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe' provides a comprehensive, geographically extensive, thematic overview of the European Neolithic - from Iberia to Russia and from Norway to Malta - offering both a general introduction and a clear exploration of key issues and current debates surrounding evidence and interpretation.

The First Farmers of Central Europe

The First Farmers of Central Europe
Author: Penny Bickle
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Total Pages: 561
Release: 2013-07-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1842179128

From about 5500 cal BC to soon after 5000 cal BC, the lifeways of the first farmers of central Europe, the LBK culture (Linearbandkeramik), are seen in distinctive practices of longhouse use, settlement forms, landscape choice, subsistence, material culture and mortuary rites. Within the five or more centuries of LBK existence a dynamic sequence of changes can be seen in, for instance, the expansion and increasing density of settlement, progressive regionalisation in pottery decoration, and at the end some signs of stress or even localised crisis. Although showing many features in common across its very broad distribution, however, the LBK phenomenon was not everywhere the same, and there is a complicated mixture of uniformity and diversity. This major study takes a strikingly large regional sample, from northern Hungary westwards along the Danube to Alsace in the upper Rhine valley, and addresses the question of the extent of diversity in the lifeways of developed and late LBK communities, through a wide-ranging study of diet, lifetime mobility, health and physical condition, the presentation of the bodies of the deceased in mortuary ritual. It uses an innovative combination of isotopic (principally carbon, nitrogen and strontium, with some oxygen), osteological and archaeological analysis to address difference and change across the LBK, and to reflect on cultural change in general.

Coming Together

Coming Together
Author: Attila Gyucha
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2019-02-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1438472773

Archaeologists, anthropologists, and classicists discuss how urbanization first emerged in strikingly different sociopolitical contexts in North America, Europe, and the Near East. The pursuit for universally applicable definitions of the terms “urban” and “city” has frequently distracted scholars from scrutinizing processes of how ancient nucleated settlements evolved and developed. Based on the premise that similar social dynamics to a great extent governed nucleation trajectories throughout human history, Coming Together focuses on both prehistoric aggregated and early urban settlements. Drawing from a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, archaeologists, anthropologists, and classicists discuss how nucleation unfolded in strikingly different sociopolitical contexts in North America, Europe, and the Near East. The major themes of the volume are nucleation’s origins, pathways to sustainability, and the transformative role of these sites in sociopolitical and cultural change.

Ancestors, Territoriality, and Gods

Ancestors, Territoriality, and Gods
Author: Ina Wunn
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2016-07-27
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 366252757X

This books sets out to explain how and why religion came into being. Today this question is as fascinating as ever, especially since religion has moved to the centre of socio-political relationships. In contrast to the current, but incomplete approaches from disciplines such as cognitive science and psychology, the present authors adopt a new approach, equally manifest and constructive, that explains the origins of religion based strictly on behavioural biology. They employ accepted research results that remove all need for speculation. Decisive factors for the earliest demonstrations of religion are thus territorial behaviour and ranking, coping with existential fears, and conflict solution with the help of rituals. These in turn, in a process of cultural evolution, are shown to be the roots of the historical and contemporary religions.

Europe Before Rome

Europe Before Rome
Author: T. Douglas Price
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2013-02-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199914702

Europe before Rome uses the extraordinary archaeology of prehistoric Europe to explore questions about the origins and evolution of human society

The Rise of Metallurgy in Eurasia

The Rise of Metallurgy in Eurasia
Author: Miljana Radivojević
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 700
Release: 2021-12-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1803270438

The Rise of Metallurgy in Eurasia is a landmark study in the evolution of early metallurgy in the Balkans. It demonstrates that far from being a rare and elite practice, the earliest metallurgy in the world was a common and communal craft activity.

CAA2014: 21st Century Archaeology

CAA2014: 21st Century Archaeology
Author: F. Giligny
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 664
Release: 2015-03-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1784911011

This volume brings together a selection of papers proposed for the Proceedings of the 42nd Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology conference (CAA), hosted at Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne University from 22nd to 25th April 2014.

Creating Communities

Creating Communities
Author: Penny Bickle
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1782973281

The aim of this book is to raise questions about the investigation of identity, community and change in prehistory, and to challenge the current state of debate in Central European Neolithic archaeology. Although the LBK is one of the best researched Neolithic cultures in Europe, here the material is used in order to further explore the interconnection between individuals, households, settlements and regions, explicitly addressing questions of Neolithic society and lived experience. By embracing a variety of approaches and voices, this volume draws out some of the cross-cutting concerns which unite LBK studies in their different regional research contexts and paves the way for further debate on the subject.