Neolithic Europe (Other Keyword)

1-3 (3 Records)

The faces behind the façade: monuments and their associated practices in Neolithic Britain (2015)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Chan.

Over the last forty years the analysis of monuments has lain at the center of our understanding of Neolithic societies. Interpretative approaches toward monuments range in scale from the overarching view of Renfrew’s emerging chiefdoms to embodied perspectives focusing on their materiality. Regardless of analytical scale, most accounts treat monuments as complete architectural forms and fail to grasp the significance of the wider activities that surrounded their construction and use. This paper...


Long-term trends and the sustainability of early agriculture in Neolithic Europe (2015)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Katie Manning. Sue Colledge. Enrico Crema. Adrian Timpson. Stephen Shennan.

The domestication of plants and animals facilitated major changes in human ecology, demography, and social organization. Despite the seeming advantages of domestication, however, new analysis reveals major episodes of collapse in the early agricultural systems in Neolithic Europe. In this paper we present evidence for a progressive deterioration in arable farming conditions, alongside a reversion to wild resource exploitation across different regions in Europe. These apparent failures in the...


Validating niche-construction theory through path analysis (2015)
DOCUMENT Citation Only R. Alexander Bentley. William Brock. Michael O'Brien.

Under the conventional view of evolution, species over time come to exhibit those characteristics that best enable them to survive and reproduce in their preexisting environments. Niche construction provides a second evolutionary route to establishing the adaptive fit, or match, between organism and environment, viewing such matches as dynamical products of a two-way process involving organisms both responding to problems posed by environments as well as setting themselves new problems by...