The adoption of agriculture is one of the major developments in human history. Archaeological studies have demonstrated that the trajectories of Neolithisation in Northwest Europe were diverse. This book presents a study into the archaeology of the communities involved in the process of Neolithisation in the Lower Rhine Area (5500-2500 cal BC). It elucidates the role played by the indigenous communities in relation to their environmental context and in view of the changes that becoming Neolithic brought about.This work brings together a comprehensive array of excavated archaeological sites in the Lower Rhine Area. Their analysis shows that the succession of Late Mesolithic, Swifterbant culture, Hazendonk group and Vlaardingen culture societies represents a continuous long-term tradition of inhabitation of the wetlands and wetland margins of this area, forming a culturally continuous record of communities in the transition to agriculture.After demonstrating the diversity of the Mesolithic, the subsequent developments regarding Neolithisation are studied from an indigenous perspective. Foregrounding the relationship between local communities and the dynamic wetland landscape, the study shows that the archaeological evidence of regional inhabitation points to long-term flexible behaviour and pragmatic decisions being made concerning livelihood, food economy and mobility. This disposition also influenced how the novel elements of Neolithisation were incorporated. Animal husbandry, crop cultivation and sedentism were an addition to the existing broad spectrum economy but were incorporated within a set of integrative strategies.For the interpretation of Neolithisation this study offers a complementary approach to existing research. Instead of arguing for a short transition based on the economic importance of domesticates and cultigens at sites, this study emphasises the persistent traditions of the communities involved. New elements, instead of bringing about radical changes, are shown to be attuned to existing hunter-gatherer practices. By documenting indications of the mentalité of the inhabitants of the wetlands, it is demonstrated that their mindset remained essentially ‘Mesolithic’ for millennia.

Querns are special artefacts as they are concerned with subsistence and supporting life in a manner which few other artefacts can emulate: they transform raw material into a usable consumable commodity. Their association with women, the production of food and the movement of the upper stone, suggests symbolical links between querns and life cycles - agricultural, human and building. They can also be read in terms of gender relations and the turning of the heavens. It is not surprising therefore that they have a special symbolic role in early societies.In 1995 JD Hill published his seminal thesis that many of the rubbish pits commonly found on Wessex Iron Age sites, were carefully ‘structured’ deposits, with meaning reaching far beyond the mere disposal of refuse. He mentioned the special role of querns, but as his thesis focussed on animal bones this idea was not followed up – until now. This book analyses the deposition of querns in prehistoric south-western England, cataloguing how and where they are buried, the associated artefacts and their possible significance. The discussion is broader, however, exploring the object biography and symbolism of querns, taking the reader to unfamiliar territories around the world. This is a new ground-breaking work, which with its full bibliography will stimulate fresh studies and at the same time set the agenda for a new field of investigation. A long standing interest in querns led to the author taking a degree in archaeology as a mature student at the University of Exeter. This was followed by the in-depth research presented in this book, which formed the basis of a thesis for which she was awarded her doctorate at Exeter in 2012. She has studied and reported on querns from a wide range of sites, from Wharram Percy in Yorkshire to Dichin in Bulgaria, and has presented papers at both national and international conferences on the object biography and the function and symbolism of querns and millstones. She compiled the Data Sheet on querns for the Finds Research Group and has written and co-authored several articles. She lives in Devon with her husband, Martin, a leading molinologist, and two black cats.

Excavations at the Eton Rowing Course and along the Maidenhead, Windsor and Eton Flood Alleviation Channel revealed extensive evidence for occupation in an evolving landscape of floodplains and gravel terraces set amidst the shifting channels of the Thames.The most significant evidence was a series of early Neolithic midden deposits, preserved in hollows left by infilled palaeochannels. These deposits contained dense concentrations of pottery, worked flint, animal bone and other finds, and are put into context by other artefact scatters from the floodplain, pits on the gravel terrace and waterlogged environmental deposits from palaeochannels. Early Mesolithic lakeside occupation, later Mesolithic flint scatters along a former channel of the Thames, pits from the middle and late Neolithic and activity areas of the Beaker and Early Bronze Age, demonstrate longer term changes in patterns of occupation.The excavations also revealed early, middle and late Neolithic human remains in palaeochannels, middle Neolithic crouched inhumation burials and early Neolithic cremated remains. An oval barrow may have first been cut in the early Neolithic. Other ring ditches date from the late Neolithic/early Bronze Age; one contained a central cremation burial in a Collared Urn together with pyre material and the remains of a bier.

Archaeological fieldwork in the inter-tidal zone of the Severn Estuary over the past twenty years has revealed a rich landscape of prehistoric settlement. This latest volume by Professor Martin Bell presents the evidence for the Bronze Age, focusing on sites at Redwick and Peterstone in the Gwent Levels.At Redwick, a settlement of four rectangular buildings, defined by well-preserved timber posts dating to the middle Bronze Age (1600–940 cal BC), is surrounded by footprint-tracks of animals and humans. Peterstone and other locations in the estuary have revealed a variety of wood artefacts and structures, and features such as fish traps, trackways and sites of seasonal encampments.The relationship between the wetland and dry ground settlements around the estuary is explored in detail, through artefacts, pollen and stable isotope analysis. The author concludes that there is clear evidence for transhumance throughout the Bronze Age. In the final chapters the author compares the Severn Estuary with other coastal sites of the Bronze Age in Britain and continental Europe.

The Settlement at Dhaskalio is the first volume in the series The Sanctuary on Keros: Excavations at Dhaskalio and Dhaskalio Kavos, 2006-2008, edited by Colin Renfrew, Olga Philaniotou, Neil Brodie, Giorgos Gavalas and Michael Boyd. Here the findings are presented from the well-stratified settlement of Dhaskalio, today an islet near the Cycladic island of Keros, Greece. A series of radiocarbon dates situates the duration of the settlement from around 2750 to 2300 BC. The volume begins with a discussion of the geological setting of Keros and of sea-level change, concluding that Dhaskalio was in the third millennium BC linked to Keros by a narrow causeway. The excavation and finds (excluding the pottery, discussed in later volumes) are fully documented, with consideration of stratigraphy, geomorphology, organic remains, and the evidence for metallurgy. It is concluded that there was a small permanent population of around 20, increased periodically by up to 400 visitors who would have participated in the rituals of deposition occurring at the Sanctuary at Kavos, situated opposite, on Keros itself, for which the detailed evidence (including abundant fragmented pottery, marble vessels and sculptures) will be presented in Volumes II and III.

This investigation of the Lower Palaeolithic site at Broom, Devon, highlights the huge potential of old sites and the importance of the archaeological and geological legacy resulting from more than 150 years of field investigations. The site, which has produced large numbers of Palaeolithic artefacts and is located in Middle Pleistocene fluvial sediments approximately 300,000 years old, is generally regarded as the most important open-air archaeological site of earlier Palaeolithic age in south-western Britain. A key source of information is the collection of C. E. Bean during the 1930s and early 1940s, combined with his compilation of an extensive documentary archive. The primary focus of the volume is the Broom site itself, seeking to explain the distinctive character of its Acheulean archaeology, the environmental conditions in which the hominin occupants of the Axe valley flourished, and for how long. The setting of the Palaeolithic archaeology within the unusual terrace deposits of the River Axe is explored and the local and global factors affecting it, including bedrock geology, tectonic uplift, climatic conditions and changing base-level, examined. The findings add significant strands to the growing understanding of Pleistocene fluvial sequences at both a national and a global scale, the nature and technological attributes of Palaeolithic assemblages and highlights the value of the data that can still be extracted from such assemblages across the Acheulean world.

The three large henges found adjacent to the village of Thornborough, near Ripon in North Yorkshire, lie at the heart of one of the most important Neolithic landscapes in the British Isles While the henges were first recorded in the eighteenth century, recent fieldwork has shown them to be part of a much larger ‘sacred landscape’ of the later Neolithic and Bronze Age which includes barrows, pit alignments and a cursus. Surrounding fields have yielded a rich collection of prehistoric flint artefacts. While the henges have all been damaged, either by agriculture or quarrying, they remain major upstanding features in the modern landscape. This volume considers first the history of investigations and changing attitudes towards the monuments before describing the detailed geophysical surveys, excavations and fieldwalking programmes that have been carried out across this landscape in the past twenty years. The author concludes that this was an intensely religious landscape, situated on an important routeway across the Pennines. He considers how people, both those who lived locally and those who travelled long distances to visit the site as a place of pilgrimage, would have experienced and interacted with the monuments

The Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey has been world famous since the 1960s when excavations revealed the large size and dense occupation of the settlement, as well as the spectacular wall paintings and reliefs uncovered inside the houses. Since 1993 an international team of archaeologists, led by Ian Hodder, has been carrying out new excavations and research, in order to shed more light on the people who inhabited the site. The present volume reports on the results of excavations in 2000-2008 that have provided a wealth of new data on the ways in which humans became increasingly engaged in their material environment such that ‘things’ came to play an active force in their lives. A substantial and heavy involvement was with alluvial clays that surrounded the site. In the absence of large local stone, humans became increasingly involved in the extraction and manipulation of clay for a wide range of purposes – from bricks to ovens, pots and figurines. This heavy use of clays led to changes in the local environment that interacted with human activity, as indicated in the first section of the volume. In the second section, other examples of material technologies are considered all of which in various ways engage humans in specific dependencies and relationships. For example, large-scale studies of obsidian trade have drawn a complex picture of changing interactions between humans over time. The volume concludes with an integrated account of the uses of materials at Çatalhöyük based on the analysis of heavy residue samples from all contexts at the site.

Charting a decade of intensive fieldwork along a 2km stretch of the Colne Fen, Earith fen-edge, the scope of these books is formidable and together they include the work of 65 contributing specialists (with a forward by Ian Hodder). The fieldwork involved innovative methodologies, and groundbreaking scientific and micro-sampling studies are presented within the volumes. Portions of text are, moreover, avowedly experimental (e. g. intertextuality and antiquarian-informed perspectives) and it explores the long-term interplay of landscape process and (proto-) historicism. Appropriate to the practice of a comparative archaeology and the ‘challenge of numbers’, throughout emphasis is given to multiple-scale settlement and spatial/distributional analyses.Concerned with the landscape’s prehistory, Volume I, apart from relating the project’s palaeoenvironmental researches, outlines the excavation of two ring-ditch monuments (with accompanying cremation cemeteries), major Middle Bronze Age fieldsystems and their accompanying occupation clusters, and seven Iron Age settlements.

The Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey has been world famous since the 1960s when excavations revealed the large size and dense occupation of the settlement, as well as the spectacular wall paintings and reliefs uncovered inside the houses. Since 1993 an international team of archaeologists, led by Ian Hodder, has been carrying out new excavations and research, in order to shed more light on the people who inhabited the site. The present volume reports on the results of excavations in 2000-2008 that have provided a wealth of new data on the ways in which the Çatalhöyük settlement and environment were dwelled in. A first section explores how houses, open areas and middens in the settlement were enmeshed in the daily lives of the inhabitants, integrating a wide range of different types of data at different scales. A second section examines subsistence practices of the site’s inhabitants and builds up a picture of how the overall landscape was exploited and lived within. A third section examines the evidence from the skeletons of those buried within the houses at Çatalhöyük in order to examine health, diet, lifestyle and activity within the settlement and across the landscape. This final section also reports on the burial practices and associations in order to build hypotheses about the social organization of those inhabiting the settlement. A complex picture emerges of a relatively decentralized society, large in size but small-scale in terms of organization, dwelling within a mosaic patchwork of environments. Through time, however, substantial changes occur in the ways in which humans and landscapes interact.

This volume presents the results of two excavations on the gravel terraces of the Lower Kennet Valley, at Green Park (Reading Business Park) Phase 3 and Moores Farm, Burghfield, Berkshire.The Green Park excavations uncovered a field system and occupation features dating to the middle to late Bronze Age. Five waterholes or wells were distributed across the field system, the waterlogged fills of which preserved wooden revetment structures and valuable environmental evidence. The pottery from the waterholes makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the middle to late Bronze Age transition in the region. Later activity included middle to late Iron Age boundaries, a late Iron Age cremation burial, a Romano-British field system and post-medieval trackways.The Moores Farm excavations revealed occupation from the Mesolithic, Neolithic, middle Bronze Age and early Iron Age. The middle Bronze Age settlement included pits, ovens and possible post structures, and was again situated within a contemporaneous field system dotted with waterholes.As well as discussing these two sites, the volume provides an overview of all of the work to date in the Green Park Farm/Reading Business Park area, exploring the development of this important prehistoric landscape.

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.

First discovered by sport divers in the 1970s, the two remarkable seabed finds of prehistoric bronze metalwork described here quickly became a testing ground for the new discipline of underwater archaeology, initially under the leadership of the pioneering maritime archaeologist Keith Muckelroy. A haul of 361 bronzes from Langdon Bay, Kent, represents one of the largest deposits from Bronze Age Europe. Dating to the thirteenth century BC, the collection is diverse in character and originates in various parts of western Europe and the British Isles. The assemblage from Salcombe, Devon covered here is of similar date with a unique combination of types and materials; further finds have since been made at this site.Neither site having yielded any ship’s remains, all possible mechanisms for deposition are reviewed, including erosion of coastal deposits and ritual deposition at sea. Extensive comparative analysis favours the conclusion that the unparalleled Langdon Bay and Salcombe assemblages represent material spilled or jettisoned from boats in trouble.For the first time, maritime archaeologists, period specialists, scientists and coastal geomorphologists, bring together research on these two exceptional sites: history of discovery, evaluation of context and character, detailed scientific analyses and a fully illustrated catalogue. Nineteen further marine finds of Bronze Age metalwork are also documented, models for seaborne exchange are reconsidered and cultural attitudes to the terre/mare interface are discussed.

The archaeological sites on the Monastiriako Kephali hill analysed in this volume include the earliest known mortuary activity at the key Minoan centre of Knossos on the island of Crete. Two Bronze Age sites are presented, known as the ‘Tomb’ and the ‘Deposit’, originally excavated in the 1930s but until now never published in detail.The ‘Tomb’ represents the earliest known funerary site at Bronze Age Knossos, established in the late Prepalatial period and continuing in use until the Neopalatial. The function of the nearby ‘Deposit’ site is more ambiguous, but a mortuary interpretation is also possible for the phases contemporary with the ‘Tomb’, and is almost certain for the subsequent Late Minoan II–III era.This volume presents the excavated material held principally in the Stratigraphical Museum at Knossos. The stone artefacts, human remains, faunal remains, glyptic material and ceramics are described and discussed by Don Evely, Rebecca Gowland, Valasia Isaakidou, Olga Krzyszkowska and Laura Preston respectively, and the sites are placed within the broader framework of Minoan mortuary practices at Knossos during the second millennium BC.

The region of Rough Cilicia (modern area the south-western coastal area of Turkey), known in antiquity as Cilicia Tracheia, constitutes the western part of the larger area of Cilicia. It is characterised by the ruggedness of its territory and the protection afforded by the high mountains combined with the rugged seacoast fostered the prolific piracy that developed in the late Hellenistic period, bringing much notoriety to the area. It was also known as a source of timber, primarily for shipbuilding. The twenty-two papers presented here give a useful overview on current research on Rough Cilicia, from the Bronze Age to the Byzantine period, with a variety of methods, from surveys to excavations. The first two articles (Yağcı, Jasink and Bombardieri), deal with the Bronze and Iron Ages, and refer to the questions of colonisation, influences, and relations. The following four articles (Tempesta, de Souza, Tomaschitz, Rauh et al.) concern the pirates of Cilicia and Isauria who were a big problem, not only for the region but throughout the Mediterranean and Aegean during the late Hellenistic and especially Roman periods. Approaching the subject of Roman Architecture, Borgia recalls Antiochus IV of Commagene, a king with good relations to Rome. Six papers (Spanu, Townsend, Giobbe, Hoff, Winterstein, and Wandsnider) publish work on Roman architecture: architectural decoration, council houses, Roman temples, bath architecture, cenotaph, and public buildings. Ceramics is not neglected and Lund provides a special emphasis on ceramics to demonstrate how pottery can be used as evidence for connections between Rough Cilicia and northwestern Cyprus. Six contributions (Varinliog(lu, Ferrazzoli, Jackson, Elton, Canevello and Özy?ld?r?m, Honey) deal with the Early Christian and Byzantine periods and cover rural habitat, trade, the Kilise Tepe settlement, late Roman churches, Seleucia, and the miracles of Thekla. The final article (Huber) gives insight into methods applied to the study of architectural monuments.

Europe is dotted with tens of thousands of prehistoric barrows. In spite of their ubiquity, little is known on the role they had in pre- and protohistoric landscapes. In 2010, an international group of archaeologists came together at the conference of the European Association of Archaeologists in The Hague to discuss and review current research on this topic. This book presents the proceedings of that session.The focus is on the prehistory of Scandinavia and the Low Countries, but also includes an excursion to huge prehistoric mounds in the southeast of North America. One contribution presents new evidence on how the immediate environment of Neolithic Funnel Beaker (TRB) culture megaliths was ordered, another one discusses the role of remarkable single and double post alignments around Bronze and Iron Age burial mounds. Zooming out, several chapters deal with the place of barrows in the broader landscape. The significance of humanly-managed heath in relation to barrow groups is discussed, and one contribution emphasizes how barrow orderings not only reflect spatial organization, but are also important as conceptual anchors structuring prehistoric perception. Other authors, dealing with Early Neolithic persistent places and with Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age urnfields, argue that we should also look beyond monumentality in order to understand long-term use of “ritual landscapes”.The book contains an important contribution by the well-known Swedish archaeologist Tore Artelius on how Bronze Age barrows were structurally re-used by pre-Christian Vikings. This is his last article, written briefly before his death. This book is dedicated to his memory.This publication is part of the Ancestral Mounds Research Project of the University of Leiden.