This article is a proof-of-concept that archaeologists can now disseminate archaeological topics to the public easily and cheaply through video games in teaching situations or in museum or heritage communication. We argue that small but realistic, interactive, and immersive closed- or open-world 3D video games about cultural heritage with unscripted (but guardrailed) oral conversation can now be created by beginners with free software such as Unreal Engine, Reality Capture, and Convai. Thus, developing tailor-made “archaeogames” is now becoming extremely accessible, empowering heritage specialists and researchers to control audiovisual dissemination in museums and education. This unlocks new uses for 3D photogrammetry, currently mostly used for documentation, and could make learning about the past more engaging for a wider audience. Our case study is a small game with two levels, one built around 3D-scanned Neolithic long dolmens in a forest clearing and an archaeologist and a prehistoric person, who are both conversational AI characters. We later added a more open level with autonomous animals, a meadow, and a cave with a shaman guiding the player around specific cave paintings. We tested the first level on players from different backgrounds whose feedback showed great promise. Finally, we discuss ethical issues and future perspectives for this format.

A concern with ethics and commitments to ethical conduct and standards has increasingly been raised within archaeology, recently also concerning aDNA data. We suggest that codes, whether for working with ancient DNA or other archaeological practices, need to be multi-faceted, or layered, to reflect the different situational contexts of research. We further argue for a more reflexive text addressing “issues of attention” or “concerns.” We address a number of concerns that should be considered and balanced against each other in the research process. They include respect, rights, appropriation, access, and collaboration.

This paper re-evaluates recent kinship studies in Neolithic Ireland through a close analysis of biomolecular and fine-grained archaeological data. It outlines the rich possibilities these datasets offer when interwoven to enhance our understanding of diverse webs of social relationships. We synthesize a range of archaeological and scientific data to form a new model of kinship and its relationship to shifting traditions of megalith building and funerary and cosmological practices. This model is put in dialogue with recently published genetic data and used to test a variety of explanations for the patterns of biological relatedness revealed using these methods. We argue that the detected genetic patterning is best interpreted as reflecting a reconfiguration of social relations after 3600 bc linked to the consolidation of emergent social and religious communities.

This paper questions whether forms of female mobility and their relation to kinship were uniform throughout later European prehistory. Patrilocality has become the primary way in which sex-based differences in isotope and ancient DNA (aDNA) data are interpreted for this period, but often without discussing or differentiating this concept further. Using a meta-analysis of existing studies from the Neolithic to the Early Iron Age, we argue that scholars have collapsed kinship and residence, patrilocality and patrilineality. This has implications for how these societies are characterized, with implicit assumptions of patriarchy now underpinning many models of movement across prehistory. We argue that, while powerful, methods such as isotope and aDNA analysis provide only a partial window on what are complex patterns of social behavior. They can achieve their full potential only when contextualized within further proxies. A critical overview of the intersection of gendered mobility and kinship is used to outline alternative avenues for exploration. We present selected archaeological case studies (Neolithic Greece, the Early Neolithic Linearbandkeramik, Copper Age Iberia, and Early Iron Age southern Germany) to argue for the central importance of historical dynamics in understanding the diversity of practices that are currently hidden behind the label of patrilocality.

Recent genomic analysis of a skull fragment from Newgrange, Ireland, revealed a rare case of incest. Together with a wider network of distantly related passage tomb interments, this has bolstered claims of a social elite in later Neolithic Ireland. Here, the authors evaluate this social evolutionary interpretation, drawing on insecurities in context and the relative rarity of engendered status or resource restrictions in the archaeological record of prehistoric Ireland to argue that the status of individuals during this period is better understood through unstable identity negotiations. Inclusion in a passage tomb, while ‘special’, need not equate to a perpetual elite.

As a species, we have always been mobile and migration was a habitual feature of prehistoric life.This open-access volume uses archaeological case studies mainly from the European Neolithic, but also from the Pacific, the US Southwest, the medieval Migration Period and the historical Great Lakes, to discuss how a focus on small-scale inter-personal relations – on the power struggles, negotiations and choices that people make in everyday settings – can help us understand migration events in archaeology. While much archaeological scholarship, using isotopes and aDNA, focuses on migrations as large-scale phenomena and crisis responses, this book offers a new approach by exploring how moving on was embedded in social practice. This book offers a novel reinterpretation of how the political aspects of migration shaped past people’s worlds in Europe and beyond, drawing on archaeological, historical, linguistic and aDNA evidence. Overall, the conclusion is that a bottom-up approach can help us to understand migration in the past at a variety of scales, in many different regions of the world The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Centre of Advanced Studies in Oslo. As a species, we have always been mobile. But while we are now very good at recognizing that migrations happened (using e.g. isotopes and aDNA), to date we have developed only a limited range of ideas about why they happened and how. Using case studies from the Pacific, the US Southwest and Great Lakes areas and the medieval Migration Period in Europe, we build up a coherent theoretical focus on small-scale inter-personal relations – on the power struggles, negotiations and choices that people make in everyday settings – and use this to better understand migration events in archaeology. To show the potential of these insights for prehistoric settings, we offer a novel reinterpretation of how these political aspects of migration shaped the European Neolithic, which provides the majority of the case studies in this book. These cover different scales: larger-scale processes of ethnogenesis at the time when Denmark, Britain and Ireland were first settled by farmers; how household migration and mobility helped settle the Alpine foreland region; and how migrant individuals may have facilitated processes like linguistic change in the third millennium BCE. Overall, we argue that a bottom-up approach focusing on small-scale decisions can help us understand the archaeological record at a variety of scales, in many different regions of the world. While these narratives are less linear than many of the more overarching models on offer, this focus on the inter-personal also offers a necessary corrective for how we envisage migration today.

The Linearbandkeramik (LBK) Neolithic communities were the first to spread farming across large parts of Europe. We report genome-wide data for 250 individuals: 178 individuals from whole-cemetery surveys of the Alföld Linearbankeramik Culture eastern LBK site of Polgár-Ferenci-hát, the western LBK site of Nitra Horné Krškany and the western LBK settlement and massacre site of Asparn-Schletz, as well as 48 LBK individuals from 16 other sites and 24 earlier Körös and Starčevo individuals from 17 more sites. Here we show a systematically higher percentage of western hunter-gatherer ancestry in eastern than in western LBK sites, showing that these two distinct LBK groups had different genetic trajectories. We find evidence for patrilocality, with more structure across sites in the male than in the female lines and a higher rate of within-site relatives for males. At Asparn-Schletz we find almost no relatives, showing that the massacred individuals were from a large population, not a small community. Gelabert et al. examine genomic and archaeological data from Europe’s earliest farming communities in Central Europe (5500–5000 bce). They find differentiated genetic networks but no evidence of unequal access to resources linked to sex or kin.

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-contextual Bronze Age gender’, which created uneasiness among the four co-organizers of the Kiel meeting. Reading Robb and Harris's original article leaves the impression that there is an essentialist ‘Neolithic’ and ‘Bronze Age’ gender, the former being under-theorized, unclear, and unstable, the latter binary, unchangeable, and ideological. While Robb and Harris have clearly advanced the discussion on gender, the perspectives and case studies presented here, while critical of their views, take the debate further, painting a more complex and diverse picture that strives to avoid essentialism.

In this article, we critically review recurrent tropes, implicit frameworks, and unexplained concepts in current research on the process of "Neolithisation" in the western part of southern Norway. Two models are on offer, as also seen elsewhere in the European research: either 1) the transition to agriculture is rapid and substantially carried by migrants, or 2) the Late Neolithic transition builds on a long history of local adaptation. After outlining these models, we scrutinise especially west Norwegian evidence, pointing out ambiguities and limitations in the material which mean that neither of the two models fit. In the final section, we consider which new questions could be asked to move beyond the current, somewhat polarised debate: Who are the actors of the transition, how are boundaries between groups created, and can the acknowledgement of the complexity of the process of 'migration' result in new narratives? Addressing these questions remains a fundamental challenge for archaeological migration studies as a whole.

In the light of discussions surrounding the social changes attributed to the arrival of the Corded Ware culture in central Europe, here we investigate the economic strategies of one of the cultural complexes of the immediately preceding Late Neolithic. The Cham culture of southern Bavaria is characterised by a variety of economic choices but problems remain in synthesising and combining archaeozoological and archaeobotanical evidence. Using lipid residue analysis from Cham culture pottery excavated at the unenclosed settlement of Riedling, Lower Bavaria, we succeed in identifying a dairying economy at this time. Compound-specific lipid radiocarbon dates are then combined with other samples to provide a formal estimate for the duration of activity at Riedling and the first Bayesian chronological model for the Cham culture as a whole. Although data are currently not fine-grained enough to distinguish between competing models for site permanence, we suggest that the Cham culture pattern fits into a wider central European trend of greater mobility and economic flexibility in the pre-Corded Ware horizon, concluding that key economic strategies previously associated with ‘steppe invasions’ were already present in the preceding centuries. Finally, the demonstrated use of cups for milk-based products, as opposed to alcoholic drinks as previously suggested, leads us to propose possible alternative uses and users for these items.

This paper explores the current narratives of migration for the start and spread of the Neolithic with a particular focus on the role that the new ancient DNA data have provided. While the genetic data are important and instructive, here it is argued that archaeologists should also consider other strands of evidence. More nuanced appreciations of migration as a long-term process can be created by exploring modern mobility studies alongside considerations of continued mobility throughout the Neolithic in Europe. We can also re-interpret the material evidence itself in the light of these approaches to help trace multiple possible links and migrations from multiple different origin points. This involves the investigation of complex, but connected, practices, such as monument construction and deposition across wider areas of northern Europe than are currently normally investigated. Such an approach will enable us to address long-term processes of movement, migration and interaction and investigate how new, shared social experiences emerged in a setting in which mobility and migration may have been the norm.

Article Stefanie Samida, 2021, Molekularbiologie und Archäologie. Eine ungewöhnliche Beziehung (Wien, Berlin): Turia+Kant. 18,00 €. 141 pages, 3 figures SW. ISBN 978-3-85132-982-7 was published on June 1, 2022 in the journal Praehistorische Zeitschrift (volume 97, issue 1).

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 isotope analysis of the human skeletons. The remains of 39 individuals were discovered in the enclosure and the osteological investigation indicates burial of selected individuals. Radiogenic 87Sr/86Sr isotope ratios revealed that nine out of 20 individuals were not local to the site and that some of them had even migrated during childhood. The nearest possible place of origin is found across the Danube river, which obviously did not constitute a geographical obstacle. Isotopic sourcing of collagen δ13C and δ15N ratios revealed marked sex differences in the daily diet and showed that at least some of the non-locals had lived on different diets. Diet and isotopic provenance did not correlate with burial rite and no clear social hierarchies could be inferred. Morphology combined with stable isotope analysis revealed a dynamic Neolithic population with a multi-resource subsistence economy and interaction across a topographical boundary.

DANIELA HOFMANN , EMILY HANSCAM, MARTIN FURHOLT, MARTIN BAČA, SAMANTHA S. REITER, ALESSANDRO VANZETTI, KOSTAS KOTSAKIS, HÅKAN PETERSSON, ELISABETH NIKLASSON, HERDIS HØLLELAND AND CATHERINE J. FRIEMAN Department of Archaeology, History, Culture Studies and Religion, University of Bergen, Norway Amsterdam Centre for Ancient Studies and Archaeology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Norway Department of Archaeology, Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia Department of Environmental Archaeology and Materials Science, The National Museum of Denmark, Brede, Denmark Department of Ancient World Studies, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy Department of Archaeology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece Sydsvensk Arkeologi AB, Kristianstad, Sweden Department of Archaeology, University of Aberdeen, UK Department of Heritage and Society, Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research, Oslo, Norway School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

Our study presents a Late Neolithic enclosed settlement from Lower Bavaria. This site arouses interest not only regionally but also on a Central European level, as several phenomena emerged during this period along the Danube in Lower Bavaria that are strongly linked to the Carpathian Basin and other parts of Central Europe. In our present report, we focus on one phenomenon of the many at Riedling, the so-called structured deposits. These find assemblages are probably results of intentional selection of the material culture deposited deliberately, perhaps related to single ritual events.

This paper argues that personal and group migration (as a subset of mobility) was a central feature of Linearbandkeramik (c. 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 migration of households or groups of households. It is noted that in current models, migratory behaviour is often seen as pertaining to lower-status groups or that it constitutes a crisis response. In the second part of the paper, I outline the evidence, both isotopic and archaeological, for migration as a constant behaviour and show where this has opened up avenues for new research, notably concerning the use of non-loess areas. In turn, narratives suggesting an increase in hierarchical differences throughout the LBK as a whole are challenged. It is argued that migration was an accepted social strategy that could be used to gain status, and counteracted the creation of hereditary and durable social stratification in established settlement sites. Seeing migration as a constant in LBK life can thus lead to a reinterpretation of other aspects of this early farming society.