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Becoming Neolithic examines the revolutionary transformation of human life that was taking place around 12,000 years ago in parts of southwest Asia. Hunter-gatherer communities were building the first permanent settlements, creating public monuments and symbolic imagery, and beginning to cultivate crops and manage animals. These communities changed the tempo of cultural, social, technological and economic innovation. Trevor Watkins sets the story of becoming Neolithic in the context of contemporary cultural evolutionary theory. There have been 70 years of international inter-disciplinary research in the field and in the laboratory. Stage by stage, he unfolds an up-to-date understanding of the archaeology, the environmental and climatic evidence and the research on the slow domestication of plants and animals. Turning to the latest theoretical work on cultural evolution and cultural niche construction, he shows why the transformation accomplished in the Neolithic began to accelerate the scale and tempo of human history. Everything that followed the Neolithic, up to our own times, has happened in a different way from the tens of thousands of years of human evolution that preceded it. This well-documented account offers a useful synthesis for students of prehistoric archaeology and anyone with an interest in our prehistoric roots. This new narrative of the first rapid transformation in human evolution is also informative to those interested in cultural evolutionary theory.
Outgrowth of a symposium at the 2006 Society for American Archaeology meetings in San Juan, and of a seminar at the Amerind Foundation. Cf. pref.
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. This book is accompanied by a separate 422 page volume containing the appendices. These constitute a comprehensive inventory of 159, mostly excavated archaeological sites in the Lower Rhine Area.
This book employs contemporary theoretical perspectives to investigate the Neolithic period in southern britain. It is a fully reworked edition of the author's Rethinking the Neolithic (1991).
Reprint of another classic Neolithic Studies Group volume. 'It is a sign of the intellectual health of a specialist study group that its deliberations can generate collections of papers of general interest. The topical issue of landscape is addressed, although with the added complication of attempting to focus on the domestic as opposed to ceremonial aspects of Neolithic life'.
Dr. Whittle reviews the latest archaeological evidence on Neolithic Europe from 7000 to 2500 BC. Describing important areas, sites and problems, he addresses the major themes that have engaged the attention of scholars: the transition from a forager lifestyle; the rate and dynamics of change; and the nature of Neolithic society. He challenges conventional views, arguing that Neolithic society was rooted in the values and practices of its forager, predecessors right across the continent. The processes of settling down and adopting farming were piecemeal and slow. Only gradually did new attitudes emerge, to time and the past, to the sacred realms of ancestors and the dead, to nature and to the concept of community. Unique in its broad and up-to-date coverage of long-term processes of change on a continental scale, this completely rewritten and revised version of Whittle's Neolithic Europe: a survey reflects radical changes in the evidence and in interpretative approaches over the past decade.
This is the first book-length treatment of Neolithic burial in Britain to focus primarily on cave evidence. It interprets human remains from forty-eight caves and compares them to what we know of Neolithic collective burial elsewhere in Britain and Europe. It reviews the archaeology of these cave burials and treats them as important evidence for the study of mortuary practice. Drawing on evidence from archaeology, anthropology, osteology and cave science, the book demonstrates that cave burial was one of the earliest elements of the British Neolithic. It also shows that Early Neolithic cave-burial practice was highly varied, with many similarities to other burial rites. However, by the Middle Neolithic, a funerary practice which was specific to caves had developed.
The Raunds Area Project investigated more than 20 Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in the Nene Valley. From c 5000 BC to the early 1st millennium cal BC a succession of ritual mounds and burial mounds were built as settlement along the valley sides increased and woodland was cleared. Starting as a regular stopping-place for flint knapping and domestic tasks, first the Long Mound, and then Long Barrow, the north part of the Turf Mound and the Avenue were built in the 5th millennium BC. With the addition of the Long Enclosure, the Causewayed Ring Ditch, and the Southern Enclosure, there was a chain of five or six diverse monuments stretched along the river bank by c 3000 cal BC. Later, a timber platform, the Riverside Structure, was built and the focus of ceremonial activity shifted to the Cotton 'Henge', two concentric ditches on the occupied valley side. From c 2200 cal BC monument building accelerated and included the Segmented Ditch Circle and at least 20 round barrows, almost all containing burials, at first inhumations, then cremations down to c 1000 cal BC, by which time two overlapping systems of paddocks and droveways had been laid out. Finally, the terrace began to be settled when these had gone out of use, in the early 1st millennium cal BC.
Neolithic Britain is an up to date, concise introduction to the period of British prehistory from c. 4000-2200 BCE, covering key material and social developments, and reflecting on the nature of cultural practices, tradition, genealogy, and society across nearly two millennia.
The Neolithic of the Near East is a period of human development which saw fundamental changes in the nature of human society. It is traditionally studied for its development of domestication, agriculture, and growing social complexity. In this book Karina Croucher takes a new approach, focusing on the human body and investigating mortuary practices - the treatment and burial of the dead - to discover what these can reveal about the people of the Neolithic Near East. The remarkable evidence relating to mortuary practices and ritual behaviour from the Near Eastern Neolithic provides some of the most breath-taking archaeological evidence excavated from Neolithic contexts. The most enigmatic mortuary practices of the period produced the striking 'plastered skulls', faces modelled onto the crania of the deceased. Archaeological sites also contain evidence for many intriguing mortuary treatments, including decapitated burials and the fragmentation, circulation, curation, and reburial of human and animal remains and material culture. Drawing on recent excavations and earlier archive and published fieldwork, Croucher provides an overview and introduction to the period, presenting new interpretations of the archaeological evidence and in-depth analyses of case studies. The book explores themes such as ancestors, human-animal relationships, food, consumption and cannibalism, personhood, and gender. Offering a unique insight into changing attitudes towards the human body - both in life and during death - this book reveals the identities and experiences of the people of the Neolithic Near East through their interactions with their dead, with animals, and their new material worlds.