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As a species, we have always been mobile and migration was a habitual feature of prehistoric life. This open-access volume uses archaeological case studies mainly from the European Neolithic, but also from the Pacific, the US Southwest, the medieval Migration Period and the historical Great Lakes, to discuss how a focus on small-scale inter-personal relations – on the power struggles, negotiations and choices that people make in everyday settings – can help us understand migration events in archaeology. While much archaeological scholarship, using isotopes and aDNA, focuses on migrations as large-scale phenomena and crisis responses, this book offers a new approach by exploring how moving on was embedded in social practice. This book offers a novel reinterpretation of how the political aspects of migration shaped past people’s worlds in Europe and beyond, drawing on archaeological, historical, linguistic and aDNA evidence. Overall, the conclusion is that a bottom-up approach can help us to understand migration in the past at a variety of scales, in many different regions of the world The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Centre of Advanced Studies in Oslo.

Traditional archaeological ideas about Neolithic societies were shaped by questionable premises. The modern concept of social and cultural coherence of residence groups as well as the ethnic interpretation of ‘archaeological cultures’ fostered ideas of static and homogeneous social entities with fixed borders. Farming – as the core of the Neolithic way of life – was associated with sedentariness rather than with spatial mobility and cross-regional social networks. Furthermore, the widely used (neo-)evolutionist thinking universally assumed a growing social complexity and hierarchisation during prehistory. After all, such ‘top-down'–perspectives deprived individuals and groups of genuine agency and creativity while underestimating the relational dynamic between the social and material worlds. In recent years, a wide array of empirical results on social practices related to material culture and settlement dynamics, (inter-)regional entanglements and spatial mobility were published. For the latter the adoption of the relatively new scientific methods in archaeology like Stable Isotope Analysis as well as aDNA played a crucial role. Yet the question of possible inferences regarding spatial and temporal differences in forms of social organisation has not been addressed sufficiently. The aim of this volume is therefore to rethink former top-down concepts of Neolithic societies by studying social practices and different forms of Neolithic social life by adopting bottom-up social archaeological perspectives. Furthermore, the validity and relevance of terms like ‘society’, ‘community’, ‘social group’ etc. will be discussed. The contributions reach from theoretical to empirical ones and thematize a variety of social theoretical approaches as well as methodological ways of combining different sorts of data. They show the potential of such bottom-up approaches to infer models of social practices and configurations which may live up to the potential social diversity and dynamism of Neolithic societies. The contribution shed light on spatial mobility, social complexity, the importance of (political) interests and factors of kinship etc. We hope that this volume, with its focus on the Neolithic of Europe, will contribute to the ongoing critical debates of theories and concepts as well as on our premises and perspectives on Neolithic societies in general – and the practices of social archaeology as such.

Technology refers to any set of standardised procedures for transforming raw materials into finished products. Innovation consists of any change in technology which has tangible and lasting effect on human practices, whether or not it provides utilitarian advantages. Prehistoric societies were never static, but the tempo of innovation occasionally increased to the point that we can refer to transformation taking place. Prehistorians must therefore identify factors promoting or hindering innovation. This volume stems from an international workshop, organised by the Collaborative Research Centre 1266 ‘Scales of Transformation’ at Kiel University in November 2017. The meeting challenged its participants to detect and explain technological change in the past and its role in transformation processes, using archaeological and ethnographic case studies. The papers draw mainly on examples from prehistoric Europe, but case-studies from Iran, the Indus Valley, and contemporary central America are also included. The authors adopt several perspectives, including cultural-historical, economic, environmental, demographic, functional, and agent-based approaches. These case studies often rely on interdisciplinary research, whereby field archaeology, archaeometric analysis, experimental archaeology and ethnographic research are used together to observe and explain innovations and changes in the artisan’s repertoire. The results demonstrate that interdisciplinary research is becoming essential to understanding transformation phenomena in prehistoric archaeology, superseding typo-chronological description and comparison. This book is a scholarly publication aimed at academic researchers, particularly archaeologists and archaeological scientists working on ceramics, osseous and metal artefacts.

The early Neolithic site of Vráble (5250-4950 cal BCE) is among the largest LBK settlement agglomerations in Central Europe, and exceptional within the southwest Slovakian area. Geophysical surveys revealed more than 300 houses, grouped into three contemporary neighbourhoods, one of which is delineated by a complex ditched enclosure system. This enclosure is associated with a large number of human remains, which reveal new patterns of burial and deposition practices. This volume presents the first part of the results of an international research project that was started in 2012 and aims to explore the social implications of settlement concentration in the context of early farming communities, on the background of subsistence patterns and landscape use. This is the first volume of “Archaeology in the Žitava valley”, and it presents the finds, features and data uncovered and synthesised from our archaeological, pedological, geophysical, archaeobotanical, anthropological, zoo-archaeological and stable isotope studies on the site of Vráble “Veľké Lehemby” and “Fárske” in southwest Slovakia. These data are used to reconstruct the social and economic patterns and social processes, highlighting a growing tension between incentives of cooperation and sharing vs. monopolisation of resources and individual interests, driving the 300-year history of this site until its total abandonment. While the history of Vráble is unique, it holds clues for a better understanding of the overall, central European phenomenon of large, enclosed settlements of the later LBK, their association with rituals and violence involving human bodies, and the end of the LBK social world.