This paper is intended to show the incorrect uses of archaeological documents to legitimise current political positions. In accordance with these aims, a better knowledge of poorly known archaeological concepts is proposed to guard against such wrong practices. Concepts such as ‘ethnic groups’ will, of course, remain in use regardless of these considerations. This question is discussed from two different viewpoints: the dialectic relationship between the prevailing history and ‘intrahistory’, and the relationship between the individual aristocratic power and the power held by communities or rural groups during the Iron Age in Europe.

Este articulo quiere destacar el abuso que se hace del documento arqueologico como legitimador de situaciones politicas actuales. Tambien propene defenderse de este tipo de actuaciones profundizando en el conocimiento de conceptos arqueologicos poco desarrollados. No por evitar el debate conceptual de cuestiones como la etnia, se evitara su existencia por ultimo el articulo plantea dos puntos de partida para el debate: de un lado la realcion entre la historia dominante y la intrahistoria, y de otra parte la relacion entre el espacio de poder individual y comunal durante la Edad del hierro en Europa.

Taking German Siedlungsarchäologie as its starting point and background this article attempts to turn from a critique of traditional approaches in settlement archaeology to a new definition of landscape and a new apporach in landscape archaeology. Landscape is defined via its constituting parts: space, place, and boundary. From here a theory of landscape is developed as the plenum which is at the same time a passive social and economic resource and active in structuring perception, in socializing, in giving meaning to the world. Key concepts in this approach are therefore experience and perception, or making and seeing.

Most people are used to forgetting the past quite quickly and are inclined to consider the recent situation as normal and forever valid. Comparisons of the East and the West often neglect the depth of the historical development between 1945 and 1990. Descriptions of East German situations and occurrences from the forties to the sixties often unconsciously suggest a comparison with the present-day Federal Republic.

In this article, the author analyses a group of articles discussing the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic in South Scandinavia from the standpoint of their rhetorical and narrative structure. She uses Hayden White's categories of emplotment, the time-orientation of the articles and their attitudes to centre-periphery to characterise the articles. In this way, the attitudes to modern ideological and rhetorical themes buried in each article is elucidated. In a final section, a debate is opened up on the relationship between agricultural origins and post-processualism.

A two component model is proposed for description of the underlying mechanisms of the emergence and spread of early farming in Europe. Two basic mechanisms are established. The first one is a short-term, rapid transition based on the internal evolution of the late Epi-Mesolithic communities which drives the system defined by those communities to a higher technical and socio-economic state i.e. introduction of more productive activities: agriculture, domestication etc. The second mechanism describes the spread of early farming over vast regions in relatively short time. This involves the processes of culture diffusion, culture drift and has boundary solution. On each boundary the process of early farming spread stops and after considerable time delay starts again thus constituting ‘travelling wave’.

This paper addresses the way in which social identity is articulated through the body at death and linked up with cycles of gift-giving and the architecture of tombs during the Neolithic and earlier Bronze Age in eastern Yorkshire. The dynamics of funerary rites are explored and longer-term historical changes in the archaeological record are interpreted in terms of modifications to these ‘everyday’ dynamics. Grave goods, seen as part of a network of gift-giving, articulate this process by closing/initiating debts in the course of death which threatens to rupture this network. In a later transformation, however, different practices involving grave goods serve to marginalise death from strategies for the maintenance of social identity.

I argue in this paper that monuments such as megaliths can be understood in terms of ‘prospective’ and ‘retrospective memories’. They were originally built as permanent and widely visible mnemonics in order to transmit a particular message to the future, but that message is now lost. Megaliths were then, and stayed for much of their later history, ‘sites of memory’. In later ages, people considered such ancient monuments as part of their ‘cultural memory’ and interpreted them within the framework of the ‘history culture’ of their given social context. Since such re-interpretations are often equally significant and also contain hopes for the future (prospective memories), they can be termed ‘subsequent origins’ of monuments. One example for a ‘subsequent origin’ is the way megaliths are studied and treated according to the academic values of present-day archaeologists. In the paper I discuss several case-studies of megaliths’ ‘life-histories’ in different European regions. I conclude with the wish that a true chronology of monuments may be developed that reaches beyond chronographical tables and includes theories about monumental time: the pasts and futures of monuments, in each present.

This paper presents a new approach to analysing and interpreting the Neolithic and Chalcolithic clay figurines of Southeastern Europe. Using an example from the Gradešnica-Krivodol culture complex, a contextual approach based on attribute analysis is discussed. This new approach has the potential to replace earlier approaches, all of which were based on form-typology and analogy. The interpretation of the figurines as representations of ‘acting human beings’ rather than of mother-goddesses, deceased villagers etc., is demonstrated by analysing decoration, gender, gesture, masks and the breakage of the figurines. A contextual analysis of the decoration of the figurines in relation to all these attributes indicates that a known system with rules of creation existed, that the makers were aware of it and that they conformed to it. Decoration represents much more than clothing, jewellery or aesthetic ornaments. Seen as a combination of elaborate symbols, it can be a first step in uncovering a communication system. When understood, even if only in part, such a communication system can provide great insight into the figurines’ functions through time and place.

This paper attempts a consideration of possible combinations of Neolithic and Eneolithic miniatures, their locations and disbibution in space, taking account of respective precise contexts and discovery associations, when available. Neolithic and Eneolithic miniatures (figurines and models) have usually been found in domestic contexts, either in large sets, small groups or isolated. It is further attempted an examination of possible situations, meaning displaying or concealing figurines and models, occasionally or permanently. Vehicles through which and ways and locations in which these alternatives could take place are mentioned. Evidence tends eventually towards alternating restricted access and common display, as periodic occurrences, as well as definite concealment under particular conditions. The range of possible alternative interpretations regarding these combinations of chosen concealed or displayed symbols in different locations and under various circumstances, in specific contexts, extends from public communication, such as narration or transmission of common knowledge, including initiation, to use as apotropaïc tokens, play and eventual performance of rites of sympathetic magic. Examples are taken from Greece, mostly its northern part, as well as from adjacent areas.

Two strategies for social relations are defined for the Neolithic and Chalcolithic of south-eastern Europe: enchainment and commodification. Enchained relations are based upon inalienable objects exchanged between relations, while barter relations are concerned with the re-contextualisation of exotic objects into local communities. The metaphor of fragmented artefacts is explored in relation to enchained relations, while those complete objects subject to formal deposition are interpreted as symbolising integral social relations. Fragmentation analysis conducted for a variety of materials indicates the varying potential of fired clay and metals (copper and gold) for relations based on enchainment.

The social practices surrounding fragmentation and structured/formal deposition are explored in two socia-spatial contexts - the domestic arena and the mortuary arena. Fragmentation of figurines is analysed at the late Copper Age tell of Goljamo Delcevo, in north-eastern Bulgaria. By contrast, three north-eastern Bulgarian Copper Age cemeteries are analysed to examine the extent to which material culture is used to express gendered social competition in the mortuary domain. It is proposed that the tension between enchained relations and commodification is one of the key factors in the generation of dynamic hange in the Balkan Copper Age, at the time of the Varna cemetery.

This paper outlines some basic trends of social evolution and devolution that occurred in Central Eurasia mostly in the second and first millennia BC. These main long-term, cyclical regularities were characteristic for the whole Eurasian territory and comprised the alternation between complex social structures and simple, extensive lifeways. The factors stimulating social development were ecological and technological crises, which conditioned a search for the most effective forms of social adaptation. The social landscape of the temperate zone in the second millennium BC was represented by a variety of simple chiefdoms interacting with forest-zone tribes and steppe zone hunter-gatherers. These groups were succeeded by an extensive spread of population, including the colonisation of new landscapes and the discovery of new mineral resources. The transition to the Iron Age is marked by the disintegration of these chiefdoms, which stimulated a chain of recurrent westward migration, disrupting social developments in Central Eurasia. During the first millennium, the process of social stratification and élite military development resulted from the growth of the Eurasian ‘world system’.

The dendrochronological dating of timbers from the grave chamber and the wagon from Wehringen Tumulus 8 provides the opportunity for a re-examination of Hallstatt Iron Age absolute chronology for southern Germany. Revisions to the southern German oak-based master curve provide a complete sequence through the 1st millennium BC, enabling the provision of a solid sequence for the first time. This sequence is based upon dendrodates from some twenty sites, including Villingen and the Heuneburg. The authors provide an interpretation of the significance of the new dates for the Hallstatt period in the western Alpine foreland.

In presentations of prehistory in museums and heritage centres in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, the ‘Celts’ often appear as a prehistoric ethnic category. This single name, however, carries different meanings in these three contexts. This paper examines the range of prehistoric presentations across these regions in order to discover the relationship between the meaning of the word ‘Celt’ and the type of authority invoked to convey that meaning. It is found that ‘Celt’ is a malleable enough category to accommodate different nationalist agendas and that archaeological authority can be devalued when it does not support a desired meaning for the category. Recently, archaeologists have been making calls for critical self-reflection as they generate knowledge about the past which also has an impact on notions of heritage. By focussing on some of the primary media through which the public learns about the past, this paper argues that it is in archaeological presentations, not merely in archaeological discourse, that critical reflection must take place.

The paper describes four characteristics by which surplus growing of grain might be detected: 1. the calculated local production exceeded the calculated local consumption; 2. farmers practised monoculture; 3. storage capacity surpassed local needs; 4. grain was clearly produced elsewhere and represented the import of a surplus.

Examples are given concerning Iron Age farms and Roman villa's in the Netherlands and comparable regions. Although each approach brings its own problems, a combination gives encouraging results. The analysis provides a tool for the writing of a history of surplus production which, in its turn, can be related to social history.

This paper presents a new approach to the social analysis of Anglo-Saxon inhumation burials from the fifth to seventh centuries AD. It defines a range of stylistic attributes which encapsulate a succession of decisions and actions by others concerning the burial of a single individual. It seeks to develop a new methodology which starts with the unit of burial and works outwards in scale to the cemetery and region beyond, and applies this methodology to examine the treatment of age and sex and identify the similarities and variability which exists across a range of burial attributes. The analysis summarised here employs data derived from twelve cemeteries, and examines the results at different scales, treating each cemetery both in isolation and as member of a wider group.