Daniela Hofmann

University of Bergen | UiB · Department of Archaeology, History, Culture studies and Religion

This article is based on an EAA session in Kiel in 2021, in which thirteen contributors provide their response to Robb and Harris's (2018) overview of studies of gender in the European Neolithic and Bronze Age, with a reply by Robb and Harris. The central premise of their 2018 article was the opposition of ‘contextual Neolithic gender’ to ‘cross-co...

The Neolithic Münchshöfen culture in southern Germany (5th mill. BC) lacks formal burial sites. Primary, secondary and partial burials are evidenced instead. Using the enclosure at Riedling, the largest burial collective known in the area to date, we gained more information on subsistence strategy, population structure and admixture by stable isoto...

The ERCA task force was set up in November 2019 with a view to make early-career researchers feel heard, empowered and supported (Brami et al. 2020). Here we explore and present personal experiences of recently-tenured archaeologists. In this first batch of interviews dedicated to Northern Europe - including Britain, Scandinavia and Northern German...

Telling apart instances of “ritual” versus “profane” deposition has been a central problem in several European archaeological traditions. In the UK, particularly but not exclusively for the Neolithic, the term “structured deposition” provides an opportunity to transcend this unhelpful duality, but has sometimes been too strongly weighted towards th...

This paper provides the first overview of deliberately placed deposits in the Linearbandkeramik culture. The focus is on “structured” deposits, here seen as those which can be considered to have a ritualised component. After outlining criteria for their definition, the paper distinguishes between single-category deposits (i.e. those with only one k...

This paper argues that personal and group migration (as a subset of mobility) was a central feature of Linearbandkeramik (5500-4900 cal BC) life, and not confined to short-term events along the agricultural frontier. The first part summarises the data currently available on individual migration (mostly interpreted as female exogamy) and the migrati...

Workshop Erlangen 17.04. - 18.04. 2020

In this essay, we interrogate how aDNA analyses have been blended with the study of migrations in European prehistory. Genetic research into ancient populations has given archaeologists and geneticists a new and rich data-set that sparks media coverage and public fascination. Yet far right wing and racist political activists also report on and repe...

In this essay, we interrogate how aDNA analyses have been blended with the study of migrations in European prehistory. Genetic research into ancient populations has given archaeologists and geneticists a new and rich data-set that sparks media coverage and public fascination. Yet far right wing and racist political activists also report on and repe...

David Reich. Who We Are and How We Got Here. Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, xxxi and 335pp., 28 illustr., pbk, ISBN 978-0-19-882126-7) - Volume 22 Special Issue - Daniela Hofmann

The fifth millennium is characterized by far-flung contacts and a veritable flood of innovations. While its beginning is still strongly reminiscent of a broadly Line-arbandkeramik way of life, at its end we find new, interregionally valid forms of symbolism, representation and ritual behaviour, changes in the settlement system, in architecture and...

The long-critiqued dichotomy between Mesolithic and Neolithic lifeways hides a vast range of adaptations, transitional and mixed economies, and alternative regional trajectories. However, these remain poorly characterised, both terminologically and from an economic and social point of view. In this session, we focus on this muddy middle part of the...

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...

In this paper, we briefly discuss the role played by the southern Bavarian Münchshöfen culture (c. 4500 – 3900 cal BC) in the wider European networks of material, social and ritual innovations which characterise the later Neolithic. Two key aspects are the construction of monumental enclosures – many of them causewayed – and the structured depositi...

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...

Book available online: https://www.archaeopress.com/ArchaeopressShop/Public/download.asp?id=%7BF472F2C0-8B59-4CBC-9747-DD3E4FF5D6C0%7D

Guido Brandt. Beständig ist nur der Wandel! Die Rekonstruktion der Besiedlungsgeschichte Europas während des Neolithikums mittels paläo- und populationsgenetischer Verfahren (Forschungsberichte des Landesmuseums für Vorgeschichte Halle 9. Halle: Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie Sachsen-Anhalt/Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte, 2017, 282pp.,...

With archaeogenetic data becoming ever more widespread, it is time archaeologists once again took the issue of ethnic identity in the past seriously. We now have the tools for identifying migration events, both individual and at the group scale, but we have a limited set of theoretical models of how these events actually worked, as well as a very r...

The 26th Annual Meeting of the German Mesolithic Workgroup took place in Wuppertal from 10-12 March 2017 and was organised and hosted by Annabell Zander (University of York) and Birgit Gehlen (CRC 806, University of Cologne). In sum, more than 70 academics, students and amateur archaeologists from 8 different countries attended this conference. The...

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...

Size matters? Exploring exceptional buildings in the central European early Neolithic - the role of extremely big buildings of the LBK culture in their settlements is demonstrated on five examples from Bylany, Harting, Geleen-Janskamperveld, Cuiry-les-Chadardes and Mold.

Migration played a central role throughout the LBK culture. After summarising the motivations for migration in the earliest LBK, the article outlines how some of these factors remained relevant in later phases. Beyond continued westand eastward expansion, at regional and site levels migration to better one’s social position provided an alternative...

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...

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...

Taster pages for the introductory chapter - full version can be obtained from the authors. Critically discusses the use of the term 'diversity' and its changing meanings in the context of LBK research history

This chapter summarizes the curent state of knowledge on the so-called La Hoguette pottery and asks why the trajectory of this ware (and possibly other 'hunter-gatherer ceramics') differed in different LBK regions. Two very complex social phenomena (La Hoguette pottery and LBK pottery), each with their own trajectory of development, intesected with...

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...

The Linearbandkeramik (Linear Pottery culture, LBK) is the earliest Neolithic culture so far defined in Central Europe. At its maximum extent, it reaches from western Hungary (where it emerges around 5600–5500 cal BCE) to the Paris Basin, into Ukraine, and as far as the Northern European Plain. The LBK is characterized by a distinctive style of pot...

This paper is concerned with the impact of ancient DNA data on our models of the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition in central Europe. Beginning with a brief overview of how genetic data have been received by archaeologists working in this area, it outlines the potential and remaining problems of this kind of evidence. As a migration around the beginn...

Cyrille Billard , Françoise Bostyn , Caroline Hamon & Katia Meunier . L’habitat du néolithique ancien de Colombelles ‘Le Lazzaro’ (Calvados). 2014. (Mémoires de la Société Préhistorique Française 58). 408 pages, numerous colour and b&w illustrations. Paris: Société Préhistorique Française; 978-2913745575 paperback €40. - Volume 89 Issue 346 - Danie...

Given an overview of the variability of LBK funerary practices and integrates them into a common interpretative scheme

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...

n the Anthropologie journal in 2008 (46, 2-3), Marek Zvelebil and an international team of experts presented the results from the Vedrovice bioarchaeology project, which detailed the life-histories of individuals buried at the early LBK cemetery. In combining a range of different bioarchaeological methodologies, this project was able to show that t...

This paper is concerned with the Neolithic buildings of the western Alpine foreland. As part of a wider shift in practices of inhabitation in Europe at this time, these dwellings are extremely impermanent and short-lived, allowing for considerable residential flexibility. Relations between household members and between households had to be maintain...

In this brief introduction, the editors outline the structure of the volume and explain its rationale, before drawing out some key themes that emerge from the various contributions. In particular, they critically discuss the recent ontological focus on materials and its relation to human agency, the role of architecture in routine practice, the pot...

Summarises archaeological, isotopic and osteological evidence from LBK burials in southern Bavaria

The early Neolithic in northern Central Europe ought to be the theatre in which incoming farmersmeet local hunter-gatherers, with greater or lesser impact. By way of contrast, the authors use isotope analysis in a cemetery beside the Danube to describe a peaceful, well-integrated community with a common diet and largely indigenous inhabitants. Men...

The Neolithic period is noted primarily for the change from hunter-gatherer societies to agriculture, domestication and sedentism. This change has been studied in the past by archaeologists observing the movements of plants, animals and people. But has not been examined by looking at the domestic architecture of the time. Along with tracking the mo...

Analyses of organic residues preserved in ceramic potsherds enable the identificationof foodstuffs pocessed in archaeological vessels. Diffeences in the isotopic composition of fatty acids allow diffeentiation of non-ruminant and ruminant fats, as well as adipose and dairy fats. This paper inestigates the trends in milk use in areas where sheep and...

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 fi...

This paper argues for a change in how the concept of culture is perceived in prehistoric European archaeology. Rather than as a set of prescriptive and fixed norms, culture should be related back to the daily practice of actual communities, its prime context of reproduction. In this view, culture is an enabling medium, not a restrictive codex. We i...

Stable isotope analysis is a new, not-so-secret weapon which promises much in mapping population movement on a regional and local scale. Lining up these movements with certain economic strategies, such as farming or foraging, with social strategies such as exogamy or with ethnicity and ranking constitutes forgivable temptation. Here our astute auth...

Todorova Henrieta (ed.). Die prähistorischen Gräberfelder (Durankulak II; 2 volumes). 732 pages, figures, 209 plates, tables. 2002. Sofia: Deutsches Archäologisches Institut; 954-426-465-5 hardback €86. - Volume 79 Issue 303 - Douglass W. Bailey, Daniela Hofmann