Alasdair Whittle

Cardiff University | CU · Department of Archaeology & Conservation

A prehistoic tell settlement in the Romanian Banat UIVAR I Uivar "Gomilă" is a Neolithic and Early Eneolithic tell site in the alluvial plain of the Romanian Banat. Archaeological field research has been carried out by a joint Romanian-German team between 1998 and 2009. The present volume is the first part of the final publication and presents the...

A prehistoic tell settlement in the Romanian Banat UIVAR I Uivar "Gomilă" is a Neolithic and Early Eneolithic tell site in the alluvial plain of the Romanian Banat. Archaeological field research has been carried out by a joint Romanian-German team between 1998 and 2009. The present volume is the first part of the final publication and presents the...

ABSTRACT-Long archaeological debate on the process of Neolithisation across Europe has been resolved at a broad level, thanks to aDNA and other scientific investigations, in favour of significant migrations virtually everywhere. This development has coincided with the establishment of more robust and generally more precise chronologies, and in the...

Kinship, diverse webs of relationship generated by people in their social practice, has long been analysed and debated by anthropologists, from an earlier dominance of lineage theory to the current, much more fluid emphasis on relatedness. Since the days of processualism, archaeologists have given more attention to kinship than in the early years o...

Archaeological research on Neolithic southern Transdanubia between Lake Balaton and the Drava River has received particular attention over the last 20 years. Besides large-scale excavations of early farming settlements, micro-regional surveys and various bioarchaeological investigations, one of the most significant research objectives has been esta...

This paper sketches the main facts and plausible current working hypotheses which characterise the Formative LBK phase, in Transdanubia and eastern Austria. The Formative phase with its perhaps 120–130-year span, probably in the 56th–54th centuries cal BC, appears to bridge the gap between the Balkan Starčevo culture and the Early LBK. There are st...

A new chronological study of the LBK in the central Polish lowlands shows that it emerged later, lasted for a shorter period, and ended sooner than has been supposed up till now. LBK communities emerged, probably in the middle of the 53 rd century cal BC, to form an enclave in the central Polish lowlands, probably as a result of colonisation from l...

A handful of new radiocarbon dates from three Balaton-Lasinja culture graves at the site of Veszprém-Jutasi út in western Hungary form the starting point for formal models for late Lengyel and post-Lengyel chronology in that region. The graves date to the later fifth millennium cal BC. They provide the opportunity to put the earlier Copper Age Bala...

Neolithic occupation of the Orkney Islands, in the north of Scotland, probably began in the mid fourth millennium cal BC, culminating in a range of settlements, including stone-built houses, varied stone-built tombs and two noteworthy stone circles. The environmental and landscape context of the spectacular archaeology, however, remains poorly unde...

New evidence has now come to light which suggests that the samples of human and animal remains datedto the Late Pleistocene, the Late Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age/Beaker period, and to the Iron Age,recovered from the central passage of the Parc le Breos Cwm early Neolithic Cotswold-Severn tomb,Gower, during excavations by Richard Atkinson in t...

This paper, presents formally modelled date estimates for the sequence of Lengyel funerary pottery in western Hungary, eastern Austria and south-west Slovakia. It is an extension of the dating and modelling already carried out by the project, The Times of Their Lives (ToTL), on the major Lengyel aggregation, including burials, at Alsónyék-Bátaszék...

Environmental reconstructions from pollen records collected within archaeological landscapes have traditionally taken a broadly narrative approach, with few attempts made at hypothesis testing or formal assessment of uncertainty. This disjuncture between the traditional interpretive approach to palynological data and the requirement for detailed, l...

The pivotal role of the western Carpathian basin in the transmission of key inventions of food production towards central Europe is an accepted fact in Neolithic research. Southern Transdanubia in western Hungary may serve as a unique ‘laboratory’ for targeted investigations, as north Balkan and central European characteristics overlap in the regio...

Bayesian chronological modelling of radiocarbon dates from the Brochtorff Circle at Xagħra, Gozo, Malta (achieved through the ToTL and FRAGSUS projects), provides a more precise chronology for the sequence of development and use of a cave complex. Artefacts show that the site was in use from the Żebbuġ period of the late 5th/early 4th millennium ca...

The strengths of formal Bayesian chronological modelling are restated, combining as it does knowledge of the archaeology with the radiocarbon dating of carefully chosen samples of known taphonomy in association with diagnostic material culture. The risks of dating bone samples are reviewed, along with a brief history of the development of approache...

The strengths of formal Bayesian chronological modelling are restated, combining as it does knowledge of the archaeology with the radiocarbon dating of carefully chosen samples of known taphonomy in association with diagnostic material culture. The risks of dating bone samples are reviewed, along with a brief history of the development of approache...

The emergence of separate cemeteries for disposal of the dead represents a profound shift in mortuary practice in the Late Neolithic of southeast Europe, with a new emphasis on the repeated use of a specific space distinct from, though still often close to, settlements. To help to time this shift more precisely, this paper presents 25 dates from 21...

The great site of Valencina de la Concepción, near Seville in the lower Guadalquivir valley of southwest Spain, is presented in the context of debate about the nature of Copper Age society in southern Iberia as a whole. Many aspects of the layout, use, character and development of Valencina remain unclear, just as there are major unresolved questio...

Pollen records contain a wide range of information about past land cover, but translation from the pollen diagram to other formats remains a challenge. In this paper, we present LandPolFlow, a software package enabling Multiple Scenario Approach (MSA) based land cover reconstruction from pollen records for specific landscapes. It has two components...

Longhouses are a key feature of Neolithic Linearbandkeramik (LBK) settlements in Central Europe, but debate persists concerning their usage, longevity and social significance. Excavations at Versend-Gilencsa in south-west Hungary (c. 5200 cal BC) revealed clear rows of longhouses. New radiocarbon dates suggest that these houses experienced short li...

This report contains details of all the publically available radiocarbon determinations obtained on samples dated from the Links of Noltland up to the end of 2016. The chronological modelling of these radiocarbon dates was undertaken as part of The Times of Their Lives Project (European Research Council Advanced Investigator grant 295412). The arch...

Starting from questions about the nature of cultural diversity, this paper examines the pace and tempo of change and the relative importance of continuity and discontinuity. To unravel the cultural project of the past, we apply chronological modelling of radiocarbon dates within a Bayesian statistical framework, to interrogate the Neolithic cultura...

As part of a major international research project, The Times of Their Lives, a programme of radiocarbon dating and Bayesian modelling was undertaken to refine the chronology of activities in one small but important part of the extensive Late Neolithic and Bronze Age settlement on Links of Noltland on the island of Westray, Orkney. The selected area...

Orkney is internationally recognised for its exceptionally well-preserved Neolithic archaeology. The chronology of the Orcadian Neolithic is, however, relatively poorly defined. The authors analysed a large body of radiocarbon and luminescence dates, formally modelled in a Bayesian framework, to address the timescape of Orkney’s Late Neolithic. The...

There is a considerable mix of models for house durations in the literature on Neolithic Europe. This article presents a summary of a formal chronological model for the Neolithic tell of Uivar in western Romania. We provide estimates of house duration and relate houses to other features of the development of this tell, from the later sixth to the m...

In the context of unanswered questions about the nature and development of the Late Neolithic in Orkney, we present a summary of research up to 2015 on the major site at the Ness of Brodgar, Mainland Orkney, concentrating on the impressive buildings. Finding sufficient samples for radiocarbon dating was a considerable challenge. There are indicatio...

Within a project exploring the difference which high-precision chronologies make for narratives of the European Neolithic, this paper examines the place of material culture in the flow of social existence. In contrast to approaches based on imprecise chronologies and stressing gradual change, we examine increasingly high-resolution dendrochronologi...

Starting from questions about the nature of cultural diversity, this paper examines the pace and tempo of change and the relative importance of continuity and discontinuity. To unravel the cultural project of the past, we apply chronological modelling of radiocarbon dates within a Bayesian statistical framework, to interrogate the Neolithic cultura...

Recent work at Vinča-Belo Brdo has combined a total of more than 200 radiocarbon dates with an array of other information to construct much more precise narratives for the structural history of the site and the cultural materials recovered from it. In this paper, we present the results of a recent attempt to construct formal models for the chronolo...

Resumen: Se presenta un estudio de la cronología del tholos de Montelirio a partir de 22 fechas radiocarbónicas y su modelado formal mediante estadística bayesiana. Después de considerar minuciosamente los problemas y limitaciones asociados a cada una de las dataciones disponibles se proponen dos modelos cronológicos alternativos en relación con la...

Resumen: Se presenta un estudio de la cronología del tholos de Montelirio a partir de 22 fechas radiocarbónicas y su modelado formal mediante estadística bayesiana. Después de considerar minuciosamente los problemas y limitaciones asociados a cada una de las dataciones disponibles se proponen dos modelos cronológicos alternativos en relación con la...

Zusammenfassung Vorgestellt wird der Versuch einer präziseren Datierung des Erdwerks von Heilbronn-Klingenberg “Schlossberg” am mittleren Neckar. Die angewendete Methode empfiehlt sich als Ausgangspunkt für weitere Untersuchungen zur Datierung und Belegungsdauer anderer Michelsberger Erdwerke des späten 5. bis frühen 4. Jahrtausends calBC. Vom Erdw...

This paper presents formally modelled date estimates,within a Bayesian chronological frame-work, for the sequence of deposits and material at the great Neolithic tell of Vinca-Belo Brdo near Belgrade, Serbia, on the basis of the first excavations, led by Miloje Vasic (1908-1934). This is part of a three-strand approach to dating the occupation and...

Imprecise chronology has entailed a fuzzy kind of prehistory. Prehistorians should no longer be content with timeframes that employ successive units of 200 years or more duration, or with slow change over the long term as their dominant chronological and interpretative perspective. The means to get away from very generalised accounts of the past is...

To the east of the main excavated area at Alsónyék, a small investigation took place which revealed a Sopot culture occupation, represented by pits, four ditches and 18 graves with the remains of 20 individuals. Some time-depth to the occupation is seen in the ditches cutting the pits, and some of the graves cutting the third ditch. The enclosed ar...

The Neolithic settlement of Alsónyék reached its greatest extent during the Late Neolithic Lengyel period. Nearly 9000 features, including postholes associated with 123 houses, pits and pit complexes, and ca. 2300 burials, could be assigned to it. The traces of Lengyel settlement and burials were found over the entire excavated area, with an estima...

Drawing on the papers in this volume that precede it, our discussion brings all the chapters of the long story of Alsónyék into a single narrative, discussing in more interpretive terms notions of persistent place, community, aggregation and coalescence, with an eye on different scales of analysis and the broader tempo of change. We look especially...

Perhaps nowhere in European prehistory does the idea of clearly-defined cultural boundaries remain more current than in the initial Neolithic, where the southeast–northwest trend of the spread of farming crosses what is perceived as a sharp divide between the Balkans and central Europe. This corresponds to a distinction between the Vinča culture pa...

A formally modeled radiocarbon chronology for a new profile through the great Neolithic tell of Vinča-Belo Brdo, Serbia, is the third interwoven strand in refining the chronology of the tell. This now joins models for the whole sequence based on the archive of early excavations, and for the last two known horizons at the top of the settlement mound...

The settlement of Racot 18 in the western Polish lowlands is used as a case study in the investigation of continued development and expansion following initial Neolithic beginnings, and in the formal chronological modeling, in a Bayesian framework, of settlement development. The site belongs to the Late Lengyel Culture of the later 5th millennium c...

Radiocarbon dating and Bayesian chronological modelling, undertaken as part of the investigation by the Times of Their Lives project into the development of Late Neolithic settlement and pottery in Orkney, has provided precise new dating for the Grooved Ware settlement of Barnhouse, excavated in 1985–91. Previous understandings of the site and its...

The settlement record of the Neolithic of the northern Alpine foreland is used to address the question of what difference having high-resolution chronology — in this case principally provided by dendrochronology — makes to the kinds of narrative we seek to write about the Neolithic. In a search for detailed histories, three kinds of scale are exami...

Recent work at Vin≠a-Belo Brdo has combined a total of more than 200 radiocarbon dates with an array of other information to construct much more precise narratives for the structural history of the site and the cultural materials recovered from it. In this paper, we present the results of a recent attempt to construct formal models for the chronolo...

Zalai-Gaál István , unter Mitarbeit von Köhler Kitti und Osztás Anett . Zur Herkunft des Schädelkults im Neolithikum des Karpatenbeckens (Archaeolingua Series Minor 27). 142 pages, 54 illustrations, 3 tables. 2009. Budapest: Archaeolingua; 978-963-9911-08-6 paperback €28. - Volume 83 Issue 322 - Alasdair Whittle

The pressures on honeybee (Apis mellifera) populations, resulting from threats by modern pesticides, parasites, predators and diseases, have raised awareness of the economic importance and critical role this insect plays in agricultural societies across the globe. However, the association of humans with A. mellifera predates post-industrial-revolut...