Douglass Bailey, Alasdair Whittle & Daniela Hoffman (ed.). Living well together? Settlement and materiality in the Neolithic of south-east and central Europe.

Douglass Bailey, Alasdair Whittle & Daniela Hoffman (ed.). Living well together? Settlement and materiality in the Neolithic of south-east and central Europe. DOUGLASS BAILEY, ALASDAIR WHITTLE Alasdair Whittle is Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff University, specialising in the Neolithic period.His publications include Europe in the Neolithic: the creation of new worlds and Sacred Mound, Holy Ring. & DANIELA HOFFMAN (ed.).Living well together? Settlement and materiality MATERIALITY. That which is important; that which is not merely of form but of substance. 2. When a bill for discovery has been filed, for example, the defendant must answer every material fact which is charged in the bill, and the test in these cases seems to in the Neolithic ofsouth-east and central Europe Central Europe is the region lying between the variously and vaguely defined areas of Eastern and Western Europe. In addition, Northern, Southern and Southeastern Europe may variously delimit or overlap into Central Europe. . vi+178 pages, 115 illustrations, 20tables. 2008. Oxford: Oxbow; 978-84217-267-4 paperback 38 [poundssterling]. Living well together? is the second volume (along with (Un)Settlingthe Neolithic, edited by Bailey and Whittle) to appear from a conferenceheld at Cardiff University Cardiff University (Welsh: Prifysgol Caerdydd) is a leading university located in the Cathays Park area of Cardiff, Wales. It received its Royal charter in 1883 and is a member of the Russell Group of Universities. It has an annual turnover of ��315 million. in 2003. In many respects the papers in thecurrent volume offer an equally diverse array of approaches to theNeolithic of south-eastern and central Europe as the first volume.Despite the suggestion that there is a less detailed theoreticaldiscussion in Living well together?, when compared to (Un)Settling theNeolithic, the papers are embedded in current theoretical discourse, andtake the debate forward by engaging further with empirical aspects ofboth landscape and site studies. In essence, volumes such as these arefundamental for our understanding of space and place, and'being' in the Neolithic; not least because of the developingsocial narratives relating to relating torelate prep → concernantrelating torelate prep → bez��glich +gen, mit Bezug auf +acccontinuity/discontinuity (e.g. Banffy) andembeddedness across the transition to agriculture. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the current volume a number of papers approach the subject oftells, and 'flat' sites (e.g. Roodenbeg &Alpaslan-Roodenberg, Souvatzi, Andrescu & Mirea, Raczky &Anders, Schier, Trick, etc.); elements of the landscape covered indetail by Evans (and others) in the (Un)Settling volume. In particular,the paper by Trick is hailed by Bailey and Whittle in their introductorychapter as being of some importance in allowing us to move closer to theexperience of 'being in the Neolithic'. The chapter byRoodenbeg & Alpaslan-Roodenberg gives significant insight into human'experience' by focusing on burial inventories andpalaeopathology. In particular, the burials of women and childrenbeneath the floors of early buildings are considered, for example bySouvatzi (Chapter 3), and their close symbolic relationship to thehousehold examined. By contrast, Raczky & Anders suggest, fromevidence from eastern Hungary, that the individuals they have studiedwere not considered to be members of the community. Clearly, childburial is a complex phenomenon which may well have had differingmeanings for different households (see also Bogaard et al. and Lukes& Zvelebil). In relation to houses, Lenneis notes that theparticular features of LBK LBK Lubbock (Texas)LBK Linearbandkeramik (European Archaeological Culture)LBK Landing Barge, Kitchen (US Navy)LBK Lutherske BekjennelseskirkeLBK Location-Based Key houses have no predecessors outside the LBKterritory, suggesting indigenous invention and a local role in the earlydevelopment of the LBK (see also Banffy). In terms of 'experiencing' the Neolithic, some furthercontrast with the work of Trick is the paper by Andrescu & Mirea whohighlight the fact that the tell sites of the Lower Danube appear to behidden in their respective landscape setting, and thus naturally wellprotected. It is conceivable, therefore, that at least some of the'sensory experience' (p. 86) of floodplains may simply be anartefact See artifact. of the protection afforded by site location. Furthermore,whilst issues of vegetation in viewshed analysis are mentioned by Trick,the suggestion that Neolithic floodplain floodplain,level land along the course of a river formed by the deposition of sediment during periodic floods. Floodplains contain such features as levees, backswamps, delta plains, and oxbow lakes. landscapes would be similar incomposition to modern landscapes is likely to be erroneous. In thiscontext, perhaps the construction of a 'digital narrative'approach to the landscape (sensu Gearey & Chapman 2006: 181) couldprove informative not just for tell studies, but for a range oflandscape studies in south-eastern and central Europe, and elsewhere. Anextra dimension to the understanding of floodplain landscapes isprovided by the work of Bogaard and colleagues. Indeed thearchaeobotanical evidence suggests that intensively managed fixed plotswere cultivated; further, weed assemblages indicate autumn sowing,implying that, whilst activity is located on the river floodplains,winter flood risk would necessitate sowing outside the floodplain areas. A number of papers in this volume consider material culture studiesas a way into earlier Neolithic society and social structure. Spataronotes that in Romania the composition of pottery (fabric and inclusions)can be used to identify local production, and also that the use oforganic temper might be related to mobility. This observation links backto papers in the (Un)Settling volume (e.g. Milner, Halstead andSherratt), wherein the concept of residence permanence is re-assessed.Similarly, Starnini uses the shift towards mineral tempers, away fromorganic tempers, as a marker for the shift from early mobile settlementstrategies towards a more sedentary sedentary/sed��en��tary/ (sed��en-tar?e)1. sitting habitually; of inactive habits.2. pertaining to a sitting posture.sedentaryof inactive habits; pertaining to a fat, castrated or confined animal. settlement patterns in the MiddleNeolithic (see also discussion by Greenfield & Jongsma in relationto 'pit-houses'). As noted by Banffy (Chapter 14), the study of the transition toagriculture in the Carpathian Basin and central Europe is a richresearch area, and as the papers in this volume demonstrate, there aresome significant results. However, many of the studies in thesecompanion volumes highlight the fact that there are numerous questionsthat remain to be answered. The editors (and individual authors) of thecurrent volume have succeeded in highlighting the need formultidisciplinary approaches to a diverse archaeological record The archaeological record is a term used in archaeology to denote all archaeological evidence, including the physical remains of past human activities which archaeologists seek out and record in an attempt to analyze and reconstruct the past. in orderto generate meaningful and realistic narratives of the past,illuminating the transition from food-gathering to food-productionsubsistence strategies in south-eastern and central Europe. Reference GEAREY, B.R. & H.P. CHAPMAN. 2006. Digital gardening, in T.L.Evans & P. Daly (ed.) Digital archaeology: bridging method andtheory: 171-90. Oxford: Routledge. MALCOLM LILLIE Department of Geography, University of Hull, UK (Email: m.c.lillie@hull.ac.uk) It seems that Stonehenge is never far from the pages of Antiquity(see, recently, vol. 83, March 2009). Amongst its multiple componentsare the bluestones, whose mode of arrival at Stonehenge is a matter ofdiscussion. Here a book which comes out in support of transport throughglaciation is reviewed by a reviewer sympathetic to the thesis. DrWilliams-Thorpe was a member of the Open University team that gainedpermission to sample at Stonehenge in 1987 (see for example Antiquity 65(1991): 64-73 and Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 57 (1991):103-14). She has carried out numerous geochemical analyses of bluestone bluestone,common name for the blue, crystalline heptahydrate of cupric sulfate called chalcanthite, a minor ore of copper. It also refers to a fine-grained, light to dark colored blue-gray sandstone. sources, monoliths, fragments and axe-heads, and, in collaboration withcolleagues at the Open University and elsewhere, has published widely onthe subject.