The chronology of the eastern Fennoscandian Neolithic is organized with the help of pottery styles, one of which is southwestern Finnish Jäkärlä Ware. In this paper a number of new radiocarbon dates connected with Jäkärlä Ware and other relevant ceramic groups are presented and discussed. The radiocarbon dates of each group are modelled within a Bayesian chronological framework...
The main subject of this article is to define the specific nature of the Palaeolithic-Neolithic transition in East Asia. A comparative analysis of regional East Asian data was run in order to achieve this. As a result, three dissimilar models of the Neolithic transition were distinguished: Meso-Neolithic, Subneolithic, and Neolithic proper. The first and last are similar to their...
The article focuses on the current state of research of the first Neolithic culture in Slovakia. So far around 70 sites are known from Slovakia dated to the Early Linear Pottery Culture and the Early Eastern Linear Pottery Culture. Most of the sites are known only from surface collections, and in only four cases have dwellings been documented. Settlement features/pits have been...
The origins of the Neolithic in Polish territories are associated with migrations of groups of the Linear Band Pottery culture (LBK) after the mid-6th millennium BC. Communities of this culture only settled in enclaves distinguished by ecological conditions favourable to farming (‘LBK neolithisation’). This situation persisted into the 5th millennium BC, when these enclaves were...
The origins of pottery technology in Eastern Jazira and the Zagros Mountains can be seen as a process of several stages, from unfired clay and plaster vessels to the fully ceramic technologies of the Proto-Hassuna period. This paper reviews this process and presents a technological analysis of Proto-Hassuna ceramics to investigate the relationships between the pottery traditions...
The appearance of the Neolithic in the Upper Volga region is to be associated with infiltrations of notch-ware pottery-makers into the indigenous Mesolithic populations. Most likely the first vessels were imported into the region as final goods. The undistinguished differences between the Final Mesolithic and the Early Neolithic stone industries prove that this invasion was not a...
The small group of early ceramics was found between the 1930s and 1990s, but was previously underestimated as a source that points directly to the origins of ceramic production in the boreal forest zone c. 5500–5000 BC. The Kargopol type ceramics demonstrate very archaic technological traits: a straight rim with round holes below the rim and clay paste with sand temper. This type...
The Ekaterinovsky Cape burial ground is located on the territory of the Samara region of Russia on the left bank of the River Volga. The excavation of the burial ground was carried out in 2013–2018. During this time we studied 100 graves, including sacrificial sites with ceramics of collar type and sacrificial complexes. Most of the skeletons were in an extended position on their...
The Neolithic way of life was accompanied by an increase in various forms of physiological stress (e.g. disease, malnutrition). Here we use the method of tooth cementum annulation (TCA) analysis in order to detect physiological stress that is probably related to calcium metabolism. The TCA method is applied to a sample of teeth from three Mesolithic and five Neolithic individuals...
The Necropolis of Chirnogi – Suvita Iorgulescu (Calarasi county) was located on the high terrace of the Danube and was investigated by Done Serba˘nescu (in 1989) by means of the archaeological excavations carried out for the construction of the Danube-Bucharest Channel. For this study, we analysed the archaeological assemblage preserved in the Museum of Gumelnita civilization...
In the 1960–70s, fieldwork in the central Zagros Mountains produced evidence of early Holocene Neolithic settlements in this mountainous zone along the ‘Eastern wing’ of the Fertile Cre-scent. Following a long hiatus in fieldwork, new investigations have highlighted once more the po-tential of the transitional Neolithic (c. 9600–8000 BC) and early Neolithic (c. 8000–7000 BC) se...
This paper provides an overview of our current knowledge about the transformation towards the Neolithic in western Anatolia and the Aegean, and offers a narrative for their interpretation. Within the longue durée perspective of the long revolution in the Near East, the first millennia of the Holocene of the Aegean and western Anatolia are contrasted with each other. Economic...
The lithic assemblages from the principal early Neolithic sites in Northern Dalmatia have been analysed with respect to the technological aspects and principles of schéma and chaîne opératoire, débitage economy and raw material economy. Northern Dalmatia, the most fertile region of the Eastern Adriatic, hosts the most important Neolithic open-air sites. Early Neolithic is...
Recent excavations at the site of Barcın Höyük provide a detailed view of a settlement founded and inhabited during the early stages of the Neolithic of the Marmara Region of northwestern Anatolia. The occupation history of the site complements and extends further back in time the regional sequence as it had been established for the eastern Marmara Region on the basis of...
This article analyses ground stone discoveries from the late neolithic site of Pericei located in north-west of Romania, in Șimleu Depression. Combined characteristics of chisels and adzes in working process are discussed along with their context, especially those connected to stone working: the layer, dwellings and pebble agglomerations. We conclude that Pericei was a production...
The objective of this paper is to set the Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic transformation (ENT) within the truly long-term of human evolutionary history. The Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic transformation take us out of the world of Palaeolithic mobile foraging into a new world, in which the scale and organisation of the social group and the tempo of socio-cultural evolution were transformed...
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 approaches to the radiocarbon dating of...
Researchers have traditionally paid little attention to mining by Bronze Age communities in the south-east of the Iberian Peninsula. This has changed recently due to the identification of new mineral exploitations from this period during the archaeo-mining surveys carried out in the Rumblar and Jándula valleys in the Sierra Morena Mountains between 2009-2014, as well as the...
Ritual burials probably appeared, when human beings became aware of their existence not only at a given moment, but also in the future. Death then became something to be afraid of, since it annihilated the identity of the deceased. Consequently a belief appeared that rituals at the time of death and proper handling of the corpse could preserve the identity of the dead, so that...
Recent surveys led by the author in Karaburun Peninsula discovered multiple prehistoric sites. This article introduces one of the Neolithic sites called Kömür Burnu in this marginal zone of coastal western Anatolia. The site offered various advantages to early farmer-herders including freshwater and basalt sources as well as proximity to agricultural lands, forested areas and...
“Pottery depot”, as a buried group of vessels, is well known term within the Bronze Age archaeology however in Neolithic and Eneolithic archaeologies the term comes into attention only rarely. In article we are discussing the case-study of Pit PO 118, discovered at site Turnišče. In the past, Pit PO 118 has been interpreted as potential storage pit or as remnants of past economic...
In this study, we reconstruct population dynamics in the Early Neolithic of the Eastern Balkans and the Great Hungarian Plain using frequency of radiocarbon dates as a population proxy. The method of summed calibrated radiocarbon probability distributions is applied to a set of dates recently published in Bulgaria and Hungary. The aim is to test the hypothesis of the Neolithic...
The Upper Volga culture (UVC) in the Volga and Oka basin is one of the earliest pottery cultures in Eastern Europe. The Sakhtysh IIa site is attributed to the core area of the UVC, with pottery encompassing all stages of this culture. A detailed analysis of artefact deposition in different layers allows the creation of chronological models of early pottery development in this...
This article discusses a radiocarbon-based chronology for the Neolithic–Eneolithic period in the present-day Republic of Karelia (Russian Federation). The main goal is to present all currently available radiocarbon datings, including the previously published dates, as well as the ones recently obtained by the authors. In total, there are 194 dates from 77 sites covering the...
Thessaly in Central Greece is famous for settlement mounds (magoules) that were already partly formed in the Early Neolithic period. Some of these long-lived sites grew to many metres in height during the subsequent Middle, Late and Final Neolithic periods, and were also inhabited in the Bronze Age. Such magoules served as the backbone for defining relative chronological...