This work demonstrates the importance of integrating sexual division of labour into the research of the transition to the Neolithic and its social implications. During the spread of the Neolithic in ...Europe, when migration led to the dispersal of domesticated plants and animals, novel tasks and tools, appear in the archaeological record. By examining the use-wear traces from over 400 stone tools from funerary contexts of the earliest Neolithic in central Europe we provide insights into what tasks could have been carried out by women and men. The results of this analysis are then examined for statistically significant correlations with the osteological, isotopic and other grave good data, informing on sexed-based differences in diet, mobility and symbolism. Our data demonstrate males were buried with stone tools used for woodwork, and butchery, hunting or interpersonal violence, while women with those for the working of animal skins, expanding the range of tasks known to have been carried out. The results also show variation along an east-west cline from Slovakia to eastern France, suggesting that the sexual division of labour (or at least its representation in death) changed as farming spread westwards.
Community differentiation is a fundamental topic of the social sciences, and its prehistoric origins in Europe are typically assumed to lie among the complex, densely populated societies that ...developed millennia after their Neolithic predecessors. Here we present the earliest, statistically significant evidence for such differentiation among the first farmers of Neolithic Europe. By using strontium isotopic data from more than 300 early Neolithic human skeletons, we find significantly less variance in geographic signatures among males than we find among females, and less variance among burials with ground stone adzes than burials without such adzes. From this, in context with other available evidence, we infer differential land use in early Neolithic central Europe within a patrilocal kinship system.
As a result of recent methodological and theoretical developments in approaches to the human body in archaeological contexts, the theme has recently become a particularly dynamic research area. This ...volume, building on the Neolithic Studies Group conference 2014, captures the variety of debates developing across research into the Neolithic bodies of the Near East and Europe. Papers are divided into three themes: living bodies, the body in death, and the representation of the body. In the first section, papers present new research assessing skeletal evidence alongside new interpretations of the body in the Southern British Neolithic to examine the lived experience of the body in the Neolithic. The second theme illustrates the variety of approaches arising from the study of death and burial, focusing on the many different ways the dead were treated during the Neolithic. The third theme examines the body as it is represented in Neolithic art, through artifacts and the stone stele found in Western and Mediterranean Europe. The volume begins with an introduction to the recent developments in the field and concludes with a discussion chapter from Julian Thomas, which sets an agenda for future studies on this theme. The approaches taken in the papers presented here bridge many different methodologies, ranging from theoretical treatises to methodological debates. Overall, the volume presents the study of the body in the Neolithic as a contested site, at which overlapping research themes meet, and addresses the insights provided by thinking about past bodies.
This poster presents the results of an archaeothanatological study of early Neolithic burials belonging to the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) culture (c. 5600-5000 cal BC). The dataset comprised 56 burials, ...from the settlements of Balatonszárszó, Hungary, and Vráble, Slovakia. Using high quality photographs from excavations, archaeothanatology was used to identify and categorise mortuary practice. The focus of this project was to identify evidence for diversity and intimacy in the treatment of the b...
This poster presents the results of an archaeothanatological study of early Neolithic burials belonging to the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) culture (c. 5600-5000 cal BC). The dataset comprised 56 burials, ...from the settlements of Balatonszárszó, Hungary, and Vráble, Slovakia. Using high quality photographs from excavations, archaeothanatology was used to identify and categorise mortuary practice. The focus of this project was to identify evidence for diversity and intimacy in the treatment of the b...
The detection of dairy processing is pivotal to our understanding of ancient subsistence strategies. This culinary process is linked to key arguments surrounding the evolution of lactase persistence ...in prehistory. Despite extensive evidence indicating the presence of dairy products in ceramics in the European Neolithic, questions remain about the nature and extent of milk (and lactose) processing and consumption. In order to investigate past patterns of dairy processing, here we analyse ancient proteins identified from Late Neolithic Funnel Beaker ceramics, scrutinizing the principle that curd and whey proteins partition during the production of dairy foods from milk. Our results indicate the presence of casein-rich dairy products in these vessels suggesting the creation of curd-enriched products from raw milk. Moreover, this analysis reveals the use of multiple species for their dairy products in the Late Neolithic, adding to a growing body of evidence for the period. Alongside palaeoproteomic analysis, we applied well-established lipid residue analysis. Differential interpretations between these two approaches show that palaeoproteomics is especially useful where the effects from isotope mixing may underestimate the frequency of dairy products in archaeological ceramics, highlighting the potential utility of a multi-stranded approach to understand life histories of vessel use.
Building on previous research, this study reports new stable dietary isotope results in conjunction with existing samples from the individuals buried at Mulhouse-Est. This was an early Neolithic ...cemetery located in Alsace and consisted of 24 articulated burials in addition to disarticulated remains, belonging to the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) culture. The main research question explored whether the diet thus reconstructed varies with burial practices, such as the presence or absence of specific ...
This paper explores notions of relationality and emotional communities to re-tell accounts of women's lives in the nineteenth century ce and second half of the sixth millennium bce, within the ...framework of posthumanist feminism. We argue that in both of these contexts women's work, spaces and material cultures have been devalued in comparison with those categorized as masculine. To counter androcentric accounts, we consider how different tasks and forms of material culture can create ‘emotional communities’ among groups, forming shared participation in social worlds. Our focus is first the mourning cultures of the Victorian period in the UK, where we argue objects of emotion may have operated to create shared spaces outside of the home, breaking down oppositions of domestic and private. Second, we turn to the ways in which tasks considered female have been downplayed in the Neolithic of central Europe, exploring the assemblages of bodies, grinding stones and hide working to show how emotional currents may have flowed through these materials, creating experiences of aging and different forms of prestige. In conclusion, we argue that the concept of emotional communities provides a useful methodology to answer the challenge set by posthumanist feminism of thinking difference as positive.
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