The Neolithic of Europe comprises eighteen specially commissioned papers on prehistoric archaeology, written by leading international scholars. The coverage is broad, ranging geographically from south-east 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 worldview. A number of contributions highlight the recent impact of techniques such as isotopic analysis and statistically modelled 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.

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Tabula gratulatoria
• 1. Introduction: Alasdair Whittle and the Neolithic of Europe
• 2. ‘Very like the Neolithic’: the everyday and settlement in the European Neolithic
• 3. The end of the tells: the Iron Age ‘Neolithic’ in the central and northern Aegean
• 4. Encounters in the watery realm: early to mid-Holocene geochronologies of Lower Danube human–river interactions
• 5. Buried in mud, buried in clay: specially arranged settlement burials from in and around the Danubian Sárköz, Neolithic southern Hungary
• 6. The chosen ones: unconventional burials at Polgár–Csőszhalom (north-east Hungary) from the fifth millennium cal BC
• 7. A tale of two processes of Neolithisation: south-east Europe and Britain/Ireland
• 8. Stag do: ritual implications of antler use in prehistory
• 9. Towards an integrated bioarchaeological perspective on the central European Neolithic: understanding the pace and rhythm of social processes through comparative discussion of the western loess belt and Alpine foreland
• 10. Size matters? Exploring exceptional buildings in the central European early Neolithic
• 11. Feasts and sacrifices: fifth millennium ‘pseudo-ditch’ causewayed enclosures from the southern Upper Rhine valley
• 12. From Neolithic kings to the Staffordshire hoard. Hoards and aristocratic graves in the European Neolithic: the birth of a ‘Barbarian’ Europe?
• 13. Sudden time? Natural disasters as a stimulus to monument building, from Silbury Hill (Great Britain) to Antequera (Spain)
• 14. Art in the making: Neolithic societies in Britain, Ireland and Iberia
• 15. Community building: houses and people in Neolithic Britain
• 16. Passage graves as material technologies of wrapping
• 17. Rings of fire and Grooved Ware settlement at West Kennet, Wiltshire
• 18. Remembered and imagined belongings: Stonehenge in the age of first metals
• 19. Interdigitating pasts: the Irish and Scottish Neolithics