Chris Fowler

Daniela Hofmann

Jan Harding

The Neolithic —a period in which the first sedentary agrarian communities were established across much of Europe—has been a key topic of archaeological research for over a century. However, the variety of evidence across Europe, the range of languages in which research is carried out, and the way research traditions in different countries have developed makes it very difficult for both students and specialists to gain an overview of continent-wide trends. The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe provides the first comprehensive, geographically extensive, thematic overview of the European Neolithic —from Iberia to Russia and from Norway to Malta —offering both a general introduction and a clear exploration of key issues and current debates surrounding evidence and interpretation. Chapters written by leading experts in the field examine topics such as the movement of plants, animals, ideas, and people (including recent trends in the application of genetics and isotope analyses); cultural change (from the first appearance of farming to the first metal artefacts); domestic architecture; subsistence; material culture; monuments; and burial and other treatments of the dead. In doing so, the volume also considers the history of research and sets out agendas and themes for future work in the field.

The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe

The Archaeology of Personhood discusses what it means to be human and, by drawing on examples from European prehistory, discusses the implications that contemporary understandings of personhood have on archaeological interpretation.

An Anthropological Approach

The Archaeology of Personhood

The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe provides the first comprehensive, geographically extensive, thematic overview of the European Neolithic - from Iberia to Russia and from Norway to Malta - offering both a general introduction and a clear exploration of key issues and current debates surrounding evidence and interpretation.

The Emergent Past approaches archaeological research as an engagement within an assemblage - a particular configuration of materials, things, places, humans, animals, plants, techniques, technologies, forces, and ideas. Fowler develops a new interpretative method for that engagement, exploring how archaeological research can, and does, reconfigure each assemblage. Recognising the successive relationships that give rise to and reshaped assemblages overtime, he proposes a relational realist understanding of archaeological evidence based on a reading of relational and non-representational theories. The volume explores this new approach through the first eversynthesis of Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age mortuary practices in Northeast England (c.2500-1500 BC). His study moves from analyses of changing types of mortuary practices and associated things and places, to a vivid discussion of how past relationships unfolded over time and gave rise to specific patterns in the material remains we have today.

A Relational Realist Archaeology of Early Bronze Age Mortuary Practices

The Emergent Past

Vicki Cummings (Ph. D.)

An Archaeological Investigation of the Chambered Cairns and Early Bronze Age Mortuary Deposits at Cairnderry and Bargrennan White Cairn, South-west Scotland

From Cairn to Cementary

Bringing together a wealth of research in social and cultural anthropology, philosophy and related fields, this is the first book to address the contribution that an understanding of personhood can make to our interpretations of the past Applying an anthropological approach to detailed case studies from European prehistoric archaeology, the book explores the connection between people, animals, objects, their societies and environments and investigates the relationship that jointly produces bodies, persons, communities and artefacts. The Archaeology of Personhood examines the characteristics that define a person as a category of being, highlights how definitions of personhood are culturally variable and explores how that variation is connected to human uses of material culture.

Chris Fowler

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