Martin Furholt

Until today a detailed mapping of the megalithic structures from the 4th millenium BC in northern Europe seems a desideratum. The DFG-Priority Program 1400 “Early Monumentality and Social Differentiation” is currently working on the Neolithic of the northern European plain. One ...

In 2011, 2013 and 2014 our team engaged in geomagnetic prospections on Hungarian multi-period settlements. Our study began with fieldwork at the Tolna-Mözs and Alsónyék–Bátaszék sites in 2011. In 2013, we continued the survey on both sites, enlarging the program on the tell settlement of Fajsz-Kovácshalom and on other sites in eastern Hungary. Our main goal is to discuss the combination of excavation and geomagnetics which provides a great opportunity to estimate the size of the settlements as well as to study their internal structures. The results will be published in two parts. This first report focuses on the Alsónyék–Bátaszék site where numerous settlement remains and a large number of Late Neolithic burials were unearthed. Excellent prerequisites for prospection campaigns include rich comparative excavation data which are useful for understanding and interpreting geomagnetic anomalies from the unexcavated areas.

Summary: The multi-disciplinary research-project “Tell in the woods? Anthracological investigations in SE Europe and Turkey” deals with the woodland-management of Neolithic and Chalcolithic societies. As part of this project charcoal samples from several sites from a settlement-region in Bosnia and Herzegovina were investigated. First results show an open landscape with manifold vegetation. The investigation of different sites allows the tracing of vegetational differences on a micro-regional scale.

The past few decades have witnessed a growing realisation that market-based measures of human well-being —measures that centre on income and consumption distributions— miss some other perhaps even more essential elements of human well-being. This insight has found a prominent expression in the work of the Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen's so-called capability approach. At the same time, the market-based measure of inequality as a function of the distribution of material remains in graves and other locations remain dominant in archaeology. In this paper we explore the significance of the capability approach, and the associated concept of human well-being based on the idea of capabilities, to the archaeology of social inequality and social malintegration. We discuss these notions using the case study of the Late Neolithic Bosnian tell site Okolište and argue that there, in c. 5200—4600 BCE, the monopolisation of certain critical goods led to a critical capability inequality, malintegration and to a prolonged period of social unrest and decline.

The 3rd millennium BC in Europe is a period showing a new quality in the transregional distribution of material culture. What is more,
there is a more marked duality between the fragmented pattern of local styles and the new overarching transregional elements of material
culture, most notably expressed in archaeological terms by the Bell Beaker and Corded Ware phenomena. Such a duality, especially
marked by the concept of Bell Beakers and »Common Ware«, is surely not a total novelty. But the hitherto unknown width of distribution
of »global« Corded Ware, or Bell Beaker elements is evidence of a new character of this dialectic in the 3rd millennium BC.
In this workshop, we want to explore the background
of this new quality. To what extent is this re-arrangement of global and local frames of reference a consequence of a fundamental change in social organisation and economic practices? In how far does it reflect increased migration, new mobility patterns, or changing
networks of interaction? Or how can we disentangle the effect of different developments that might have lead to the culmination of the Neolithic sequence in European prehistory?

Traditional ideas about Neolithic societies were shaped by questionable premises. The modern concept of social and cultural coherence of residence groups and the ethnic interpretation of 'ar-chaeological cultures' fostered ideas of static and homogeneous social entities with fixed borders. Farming-as the core of the Neolithic way of life-was rather associated with sedentariness than with mobility. Furthermore, the widely used (neo-)evolutionist thinking, assumed an universally growing social hierarchization in the course of prehistory. After all, such 'top-down'-perspectives deprived individuals and groups of genuine agency and creativity. 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 based on Stable Isotope Analyses, aDNA etc. were produced. Yet the question of possible inferences regarding the social organization has not been addressed sufficiently. Therefore, the aim of the session is to study social practice and organization in Neolithic societies based on such results by adopting bottom-up perspectives. We want to discuss how data can be methodologically combined on the basis of corresponding theories as well as the potential of such bottom-up approaches to infer models of social organization which may live up to the diversity and dynamism of Neolithic societies. This might include perspectives on mobility, social complexity, the importance of (political) interests and factors of kinship. We welcome papers addressing the following questions: What are the models of Neolithic societies used in current research? What kind of premises are projected onto the past and why? What kind of data is available and how can we combine those to explore different forms of social organization? What theories are used to approach social organization in prehistoric contexts? How could archaeology thereby benefit from anthropological perspectives? What are the epistemological limits regarding the social organization of Neolithic communities?