The articles in this volume provide examples of different approaches currently being developed on Prehistoric collective burials of southern Europe, mostly focusing on case studies, but also including contributions of a more methodological scope.
Western Iberia has one of the richest inventories of Neolithic chambered tombs in Atlantic Europe, with particular concentrations in Galicia, northern Portugal and the Alentejo. Less well known is the major concentration of tombs along the Tagus valley, straddling the Portuguese-Spanish frontier. Within this cluster is the Anta da Lajinha, a small megalithic tomb in the hill-country north of the River Tagus. Badly damaged by forest fire and stone removal, it was the subject of joint British-Portuguese excavations in 2006-2008, accompanied by environmental investigations and OSL dating. This volume takes the recent excavations at Lajinha and the adjacent site of Cabeço dos Pendentes as the starting point for a broader consideration of the megalithic tombs of western Iberia. Key themes addressed are relevant to megalithic tombs more generally, including landscape, chronology, settlement and interregional relationships. Over what period of time were these tombs built and used? Do they form a horizon of intensive monument construction, or were the tombs the product of a persistent, long-lived tradition? How do they relate to the famous rock art of the Tagus valley, and to the cave burials and open-air settlements of the region, in terms of chronology and landscape? A final section considers the Iberian tombs within the broader family of west European megalithic monuments, focusing on chronologies, parallels and patterns of contact. Did the Iberian tombs emerge through connections with older established megalithic traditions in other regions such as Brittany, or were they are the outcome of more general processes operating among Atlantic Neolithic societies?
The Celtic languages and groups called Keltoi (i.e. ‘Celts’) emerge into our written records at the pre-Roman Iron Age. The impetus for this book is to explore from the perspectives of three disciplines—archaeology, genetics, and linguistics—the background in later European prehistory to these developments. There is a traditional scenario, according to which, Celtic speech and the associated group identity came in to being during the Early Iron Age in the north Alpine zone and then rapidly spread across central and western Europe. This idea of ‘Celtogenesis’ remains deeply entrenched in scholarly and popular thought. But it has become increasingly difficult to reconcile with recent discoveries pointing towards origins in the deeper past. It should no longer be taken for granted that Atlantic Europe during the 2nd and 3rd millennia BC were pre-Celtic or even pre-Indo-European. The explorations in Celtic from the West 3 are drawn together in this spirit, continuing two earlier volumes in the influential series.
This volume comprises the proceedings of an international workshop that took place at the UCLouvain in Belgium on the 8th and 9th of December 2016. This workshop addressed the topic of collective burial practices, focusing on two main questions: "Who are the deceased buried together in collective tombs?" and “Why are these deceased buried collectively?” Archaeologists, ethnologists and ethnoarchaeologists were thus invited to discuss the identity of the deceased deposited in collective burial places, as well as the ideological and social motivations for gathering the dead in the same tomb over several generations. The chapters in the volume examine case studies ranging from contemporary Madagascar and Austronesia to the Prehistoric Mediterranean and Dynastic Europe. They also reinitiate discussions regarding the potential of archaeological and anthropobiological datasets to approach social organization among past populations.
The Oxford Handbook of the European Bronze Age is a wide-ranging survey of a crucial period in prehistory during which many social, economic, and technological changes took place. Written by expert specialists in the field, the book provides coverage both of the themes that characterize the period, and of the specific developments that took place in the various countries of Europe. After an introduction and a discussion of chronology, successive chapters deal with settlement studies, burial analysis, hoards and hoarding, monumentality, rock art, cosmology, gender, and trade, as well as a series of articles on specific technologies and crafts (such as transport, metals, glass, salt, textiles, and weighing). The second half of the book covers each country in turn. From Ireland to Russia, Scandinavia to Sicily, every area is considered, and up to date information on important recent finds is discussed in detail. The book is the first to consider the whole of the European Bronze Age in both geographical and thematic terms, and will be the standard book on the subject for the foreseeable future.
This collection of studies on the cultural reconfigurations that occurred in western Europe between the 3rd and 2nd millennium BCE focuses on the evidence from the West of the Iberian Peninsula, and one on the South of England. They explore regional diversity and challenge grand narratives regarding Chalcolithic and Bronze Age communities.
This volume explores the response of the living when dealing with the death of a child. Papers focus on juvenile burial practices in Europe and the Near East during recent prehistory and protohistory. The interpretation of normative, atypical or deviant is interrogated based on the context of the burials and the intentionality of the practice.
Deeply stratified settlements are a distinctive site type featuring prominently in diverse later prehistoric landscapes of the Old World. Their massive materiality has attracted the curiosity of lay people and archaeologists alike. Nowadays a wide variety of archaeological projects are tracking the lifestyles and social practices that led to the building-up of such superimposed artificial hills. However, prehistoric tell-dwelling communities are too often approached from narrow local perspectives or discussed within strict time- and culture-specific debates. There is a great potential to learn from such ubiquitous archaeological manifestations as the physical outcome of cross-cutting dynamics and comparable underlying forces irrespective of time and space. This volume tackles tells and tell-like sites as a transversal phenomenon whose commonalities and divergences are poorly understood yet may benefit from cross-cultural comparison. Thus, the book intends to assemble a representative range of ongoing theory – and science –based fieldwork projects targeting this kind of sites. With the aim of encompassing a variety of social and material dynamics, the volume’s scope is diachronic – from the Earliest Neolithic up to the Iron Age–, and covers a very large region, from Iberia in Western Europe to Syria in the Middle East. The core of the volume comprises a selection of the most remarkable contributions to the session with a similar title celebrated in the European Association of Archaeologists Annual Meeting held at Barcelona in 2018. In addition, the book includes invited chapters to round out underrepresented areas and periods in the EAA session with relevant research programmes in the Old World. To accomplish such a cross-cultural course, the book takes a case-based approach, with contributions disparate both in their theoretical foundations – from household archaeology, social agency and formation theory – and their research strategies – including geophysical survey, microarchaeology and high-resolution excavation and dating.