Human skeletal remains from Bell Beaker graves in southern Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Hungary were analyzed for information on human migration. Strontium isotope ratios were measured in bone and tooth enamel to determine if these individuals had changed ‘geological’ residence during their lifetimes. Strontium isotopes vary among different types of rock. They enter the body through diet and are deposited in the skeleton. Tooth enamel forms during early childhood and does not change. Bone changes continually through life. Difference in the strontium isotope ratio between bone and enamel in the same individual indicates change in residence. Results from the analysis of 81 Bell Beaker individuals indicated that 51 had moved during their lifetime. Information on the geology of south-central Europe, the application of strontium isotope analysis, and the relevant Bell Beaker sites is provided along with discussion of the results of the study.

Any new knowledge that goes beyond the stone tools and techniques used in the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic is most significant as it reveals the cultural and technical capabilities of the people living in these periods. In 1963, two pitch finds were discovered in a lignite open-mining pit in the northern foothills of the Harz Mountains, in a layer the geological age of which was dated as being older than 80,000 years. The great significance of these finds was therefore immediately apparent. One of the finds showed a fingerprint as well as the imprints of a flint stone tool and the structure of wood cells. This was indicative of the pitch piece having served as an adhesive to secure a wooden haft to a flint stone blade.

Over 30 years later these finds were transferred to the Doerner Institut for investigation. The GC and GC/MS analyses revealed that, in both cases, birch pitches, well-known historical adhesives, had been used. These consist predominantly of pentacyclic triterpenoid components of the lupane type, with betulin forming the major component. The comparison with birch bark extracts showed that the biological peak profile (bio-marker) was surprisingly well preserved in these pitch finds and that hardly any degradation products were present.

Today, comparable pitches can easily be produced with modern technical methods, i.e. using airtight laboratory flasks and temperature control facilities. However, any attempt at simulating the conditions of the Neandertal period and at producing these birch pitches without any of these modern facilities will soon be met with many difficulties. This implies that the Neandertals did not come across these pitches by accident but must have produced them with intent. Conscious action is, however, always a clear sign of considerable technical capabilities.

The concept of ideology has figured centrally in recent accounts of the fundamental social transformation sweeping Europe from the mid-fifth to second millennia BC. In particular, many have focussed on the human body as a principal medium of ideological expression, notably in terms of a growing ‘prestige goods ideology’. This paper endeavours to expose the deficiencies of this model, which lie in its overly cynical nature and its disregard for the specific socio-cultural contours of status expression. Specifically, by linking the ‘ideological’ transformations of this Period to the development of a distinct institution, a male warrior status group, and its package of expressive themes - individualism, warfare, bodily ornamentation, horses and wheeled vehicles, the hunt, the ritual consumption of alcohol - I seek to demonstrate that the changing treatment of the human body in mortuary rites and in everyday life is more than ideological. In particular, it is implicated in the development of a coherent life style, and as such is fundamentally bound up with changing notions of Personhood and self-identity. Running through the fabric of this life style, through its embodiment of the subject in both life and death, is an equally distinctive notion of male beauty, unique to the warrior.

This paper is a study of diet and subsistence among Mesolithic and Early Neolithic populations in the Iron Gates section of the Danube Valley, with emphasis on the sites of Lepenski Vir and Vlasac in Serbia and Schela Cladovei in Romania. The first part of the paper reviews the evidence of animal and plant residues and human skeletal indicators; the second presents new data from stable isotopic analyses of human bone supported by AMS 14C dates. Isotopic and dental evidence suggest that Mesolithic people prior to 7600 BP had high protein diets in which the bulk of the protein was derived from riverine food sources. Significant differences are evident between the isotopic signals of Mesolithic males and females buried at Vlasac and Lepenski Vir, indicating differences in overall diet. These differences are most easily explained in terms of movement of individuals between groups, linked to the practice of local group exogamy. A shift in dietary pattern occurred at Lepenski Vir between ca 7600 and 7300 BP. The bone chemistry of individuals post-dating 7300 BP reflects the intake of significantly higher proportions of terrestrial foods. This change may reflect the introduction of stock-raising and/or cultivation in the Iron Gates. If so, then the transition from Late Mesolithic to Neolithic at Lepenski Vir was not characterised by a wholesale shift in subsistence from foraging to farming; the earliest Neolithic inhabitants of the site continued to obtain a significant proportion of their dietary protein from riverine resources. The wider implications of the AMS dates and stable isotopic data are also considered.

This paper examines differences in the nature of inter-regional relations in the Neolithic, Bronze Age, and early Iron Ages, in an attempt to define the specific characteristics of Bronze-Age world systems. It distinguishes between the slow spread of innovations and the active intervention of trade networks related to the expansion of urbanism. The former dominate in the Neolithic, and similar phenomena continue to occur in later periods. Following a suggestion by Jane Schneider, a distinction is drawn between a core area of urban consumers, a periphery that is actively altered by its role as a supplier of raw materials to the core, and an outer margin that is indirectly affected through the spread of innovations. For most of prehistory, temperate Europe acted as a margin to a Near Eastern/Mediterranean core-periphery system. The formation of long-distance routes linking northern and southern Europe (successive axial routes along the Danube and Black Sea, and from Italy to Scandinavia) was critically affected by the spread of urban-eentred trading systems along the Mediterranean. The ‘amber route’ was an important precursor of the structures underlying the later development of European polities.

New human aDNA studies have once again brought to the forefront the role of mobility and migration in shaping social phenomena in European prehistory, processes that recent theoretical frameworks in archaeology have downplayed as an outdated explanatory notion linked to traditional culture history. While these new genetic data have provided new insights into the population history of prehistoric Europe, they are frequently interpreted and presented in a manner that recalls aspects of traditional culture-historical archaeology that were rightly criticized through the 1970s to the 1990s. They include the idea that shared material culture indicates shared participation in the same social group, or culture, and that these cultures constitute one-dimensional, homogeneous, and clearly bounded social entities. Since the new aDNA data are used to create vivid narratives describing ‘massive migrations’, the so-called cultural groups are once again likened to human populations and in turn revitalized as external drivers for socio-cultural change. Here, I argue for a more nuanced consideration of molecular data that more explicitly incorporates anthropologically informed mobility and migration models.

In the second millennium cal BC, a new metal conquered Europe: the alloy of copper and tin that improved the quality of tools and weapons. This development, we argue, initiated a framework for a new political economy. We explore how a political economy approach may help understand the European Bronze Age by focussing on regional comparative advantages in long-distance trade and resulting bottlenecks in commodity flows. Links existed in commodity chains, where obligated labour and ownership of resources helped mobilize surpluses, thus creating potential for social segments to control the production and flows of critical goods. The political economy of Bronze Age Europe would thus represent a transformation in how would-be leaders mobilized resources to support their political ends. The long-distance trade in metals and other commodities created a shift from local group ownership towards increasingly individual strategies to obtain wealth from macro-regional trade. We construct our argument to make sense of available data, but recognize that our model's primary purpose is to structure future research to test the model.

The spread of agriculture is here examined from the perspective of changes in the composition of archaeobotantical assemblages. We apply multivariate analysis to a large database of plant assemblages from early Neolithic sites across South-West Asia and Europe and show that there are coherent and meaningful changes in their composition over time, to a large extent driven by a reduction in crop-taxa diversity. We interpret these changes as being partly caused by environmental factors, and partly caused by cultural reasons linked to the relatively rapid expansion of Linearbandkeramik (LBK) groups that inhibited diversification of crops until later in the Neolithic.

We present data on the chemical and lead isotope composition of copper and bronze objects from Nuragic Sardinia. The sample suite comprises, inter alia, objects from the hoard finds at Arzachena (21 objects), Bonnanaro (10), Ittireddu (34), and Pattada (20), all in northern Sardinia. With one exception, all ingot fragments (49) consist of unalloyed copper; the exception comes from Ittireddu and contains 11 per cent tin. In contradistinction, all implements (21) are made from standard bronze with a mean tin content of 10.8 per cent. A dozen sword fragments from the Arzachena hoard, all of fairly uniform small size, are pieces of a large number of different swords. The low tin content of only about 1 per cent would have made for poor weapons, confirming the archaeological identification of the fragments as pieces of votive swords. Scrap metal from Arzachena is remarkable for its wide range of trace element contents and lead isotope abundance ratios. It is dissimilar to all other metal samples investigated, possibly representing metal from local smelting experiments using a variety of different copper ores. Lead isotope data and trace element patterns, alone or in conjunction, do not allow us to tell oxhide ingots from plano-convex (bun) ingots. Most ingot fragments have a lead isotope signature similar to those of Cypriot copper ores but there are also a number of ingots whose lead isotope fingerprints are fully compatible with them being local products. Of the bronzes, none has lead with an isotopic composition characteristic of copper ingots from Cyprus. All contain local lead, suggesting the bronze implements were manufactured locally. Isotopically-fitting lead is found in copper and lead ore deposits from the Iglesiente-Sulcis district in south-west Sardinia and from Funtana Raminosa in central Sardinia.

Stable isotope measurements and radiocarbon dates on 54 burials from northern Scotland document trends in marine protein consumption from the late Iron Age to the end of the Middle Ages. They illuminate how local environmental and cultural contingencies interrelated with a pan-European trend towards more intensive fishing around the end of the first millennium AD. Little use was made of marine foods in late Iron Age Orkney despite its maritime setting. Significant fish consumption appeared in the Viking Age (ninth to eleventh centuries AD), first in the case of some men buried with grave-goods of Scandinavian style but soon among both sexes in ‘Christian’ burials. There was then a peak in marine protein consumption from approximately the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries AD, particularly among men, after which the importance of fish-eating returned to Viking Age levels. The causes of these developments probably entailed a complex relationship between ethnicity, gender, Christian fasting practices, population growth, long-range fish trade and environmental change.

This paper proposes that social identities can be studied through the cultural construction of appearance, since this is a powerful visual mediation of identities and is a component in the learning of social roles. Three analytical principles about the construction of appearances are outlined and applied to different case studies. This illustrates how differences are created in appearance. The main characteristics and trends in appearance during the Bronze Age are then outlined. The studies show that some of the categories cross-cut other principles of identity formation. In particular it seems that while the categorical distinction between male and female affects material culture from the earliest Bronze Age, during the Middle Bronze Age different categories of women are created as well. Through the studies neglected aspects of Bronze Age social relations and ideology are brought to our attention.

The article deals with the practice of phenomenological archaeological fieldwork, which is concerned with sensory experience of landscapes and locales. Phenomenological approaches in archaeology have cast light on aspects of past human experience not addressed by traditional archaeological methods. So far, however, they have neither developed explicit methodologies nor a discussion of methodological practice and have laid themselves open to accusations of being ‘subjective’ and ‘unscientific’. This article describes and explores three experiments in phenomenological archaeology developed in the context of the Tavoliere–Gargano Prehistory Project and carried out on Neolithic settlement sites of the type known as villaggi trincerati. Our aims are both to develop explicit methods for this type of fieldwork and to combine phenomenology with other more traditional approaches, such as those concerned with technological, economic and environmental aspects of landscapes and sites. Our work also differs from other phenomenological archaeology in its concern with familiar, everyday experience and domestic contexts, rather than exceptional, special experience in ritual contexts. We consider how our particular approach might be used to further understandings of past lives.

The article presents new results of stable isotope analyses made on animal and human bones from the Mesolithic–early Neolithic sites of Lepenski Vir and Vlasac in the Danube Gorges of the Balkans. It reconstructs the food web for the region during these periods on the basis of stable isotope analyses of mammal and fish species found at Vlasac. These results are compared to measurements made on human burials from the two sites. In the light of these new results, the article also discusses interpretations provided by previous isotopic studies of this material. It concludes that great care is required in the interpretation of stable isotope results due to inherent methodological complexities of this type of analysis, and suggests that it is also necessary to integrate stable isotope results with information based on the examination of faunal remains and the archaeological context of analysed burials when making inferences about palaeodietary patterns.

Farming can be shown to have spread very rapidly across the British Isles and southern Scandinavia around 6000 years ago, following a long period of stasis when the agricultural ‘frontier’ lay further south on the North European Plain between northern France and northern Poland. The reasons for the delay in the adoption of agriculture on the north-west fringe of Europe have been debated by archaeologists for decades. Here, we present fresh evidence that this renewed phase of agricultural expansion was triggered by a significant change in climate. This finding may also have implications for understanding the timing of the expansion of farming into some upland areas of southern and mid-latitude Europe.

A new procedure is described in which combined lead and strontium isotope analysis of archaeological human dental tissues can be used to comment on the lifetime movements of individuals. A case study is presented of four Neolithic burials – an adult female and three juveniles – from a shared burial pit excavated at Monkton-up-Wimbourne, Dorset. It is demonstrated that the adult's place of origin was at least 80km to the north-west in the area of the Mendips. It is also shown that all three juveniles moved over significant distances during their lives.

The breakthrough of the Nordic Bronze Age (NBA) c. 1600 BC as a koiné within Bronze Age Europe can be historically linked to the Carpathian Basin. Nordic distinctiveness entailed an entanglement of cosmology and warriorhood, albeit represented through different media in the hotspot zone (bronze) and in the northern zone (rock). In a Carpathian crossroad between the Eurasian Steppes, the Aegean world and temperate Europe during this time, a transcultural assemblage coalesced, fusing both tangible and intangible innovations from various different places. Superior warriorhood was coupled to beliefs in a tripartite cosmology, including a watery access to the netherworld while also exhibiting new fighting technologies and modes of social conduct. This transculture became creatively translated in a range of hot societies at the onset of the Middle Bronze Age. In southern Scandinavia, weaponry radiated momentous creativity that drew upon Carpathian originals, contacts and a pool of Carpathian ideas, but ultimately drawing on emergent Mycenaean hegemonies in the Aegean. This provided the incentive for a cosmology-rooted resource from which the NBA could take its starting point.

New radiocarbon determinations from Mesolithic, Neolithic, and/or Copper Age contexts at ten sites are presented, bringing the number of absolute dates available for the East Adriatic to more than twice that of a decade ago. The dates show that, from 6000 BC onward, pottery styles (Impressed Ware, Danilo variants, Hvar, Nakovana, and Cetina) emerged, spread, and disappeared at different times, places, and rates within the region. The implications for models of the spread of farming and other features of Neolithic life are discussed. The continued usefulness of the threefold division of the regional Neolithic into ‘Early’, ‘Middle’, and ‘Late’ phases is found to be dubious.

The process of the production of copper and bronze is presented in this paper as a sequential operation. Each stage of this process may influence the final product. The deconstruction of the process is a convenient way of examining each individual stage, using archaeological case studies from different places within the Old World and, where useful, ethnographic studies. The examination will focus on two aspects: innovation and specialization. It seeks to move beyond technological determinism by relating the study of technology to the context of those societies which shaped and practised it and which exercised certain choices in its execution.

Textile research has become an important field of archaeology. Although the established analytical methods are often viewed as specialized, their integration with other interdisciplinary approaches allows us to deal with broader archaeological issues and provides the interpretational base for a much more comprehensive investigation of textiles in ancient times. Analyses of fibres, dyes, archaeobotanical and archaeozoological remains, as well as palaeoenvironmental and geochemical investigations, provide information about available resources, while tool studies, experimental testing, and visual grouping are approaches that explore the technology and techniques. Together, these approaches can provide new knowledge about textile production and consumption and, thereby, about people and society in ancient times.