Dynamics of Neolithisation examines the development of early agriculture in Neolithic Europe, drawing on the work of the late Professor Andrew Sherratt. His untimely death coincided with an important period of research that moved beyond searching for singular causal mechanisms behind the "neolithisation" of Europe in favor of developing a better understanding of the complex interrelationships of cultural, ecological, economic and social factors. Andrew Sherratt's work is significant because it developed models for integrating the different evidential components and analytical scales involved in the prehistoric development of European agriculture. The essays in this volume examine such significant factors as plant and animal domestication, social organization, the development of monumental architecture, exchange and social identity and the cultural transmission of technology.
Foreword (John O’Shea)
Introduction: the dynamics of neolithisation in Europe (Erick Robinson, Sarah Viner and Angelos Hadjikoumis)
1. Grand narratives and shorter stories (Alasdair Whittle)
2. In constant motion? Recent radiocarbon advances in mathematical modelling and radiocarbon chronology of the neolithisation of Europe (Marc Vander Linden)
3. Time is on my side… (João Zilhão)
4. The Neolithic Revolution: an ecological perspective (John Barrett)
5. Farming regimes in Neolithic Europe: gardening with cows and other models (Valasia Isaakidou)
6. Interpretation of Scirpus from early farming sites in western Asia and Europe: a cutting sedge of archaeobotanical research? (Michael Charles)
7. Farming, material culture, and ideology: repackaging the Neolithic of Greece (and Europe) (Paul Halstead)
8. Enchantment and enchainment in later Balkan prehistory: towards an aesthetic of precision and geometric order (John Chapman)
9. Clutching at straw (Anthony Legge and Andrew Moore)
10. Pig-menting the Spanish Neolithic (Angelos Hadjikoumis)
11. The [environ-]mental contexts of earliest Neolithic settlement and architecture in western Hungary (Eszter Bánffy and Pal Sümegi)
12. Farming practice and society in the central European Neolithic and Bronze Age: an archaeobotanical response to the secondary products revolution (Amy Bogaard)
13. Technological traditions and ‘the dialectic of expansion’: contact, transmission, and neolithisation along the northwest fringes of the LBK (Erick Robinson)
14. Cattle and pig husbandry in the British Neolithic (Sarah Viner)
15. Tracing the future in the past: the introduction of the Neolithic in eastern Scania – tracking change in a local perspective (Anna-Karin Andersson)
16. Early farming and the creation of community: the case of northern Europe (Magdalena Midgley)
