1.

Unsettling the Neolithic: breaking down concepts, boundaries and origins

Douglass Bailey and Alasdair Whittle

Introduction
To unsettle the Neolithic of central and eastern Europe is to recognise the limitations of fundamental concepts and structures that underlie research. It is to ask difficult questions and to think in new and challenging ways. Are we satisfied with our use of concepts such as sedentism and mobility, or domestic economy? Are we aware of the inherent assumptions that accompany ideas about the origins of or transitions to the Neolithic? Are we at ease with the very idea of an entity that we call the Neolithic? The major aim of this book, besides presenting a range of individual reports on innovative research, is to ask these questions and, in doing so, to unsettle our understanding of human activities in central and eastern Europe from 65003500 cal BC. If, as we suspect, the answers that emerge expose frailties in many of the core concepts that we use to orchestrate our research, our excavations and our interpretive efforts, then what are the consequences? If we become dissatisfied with the ways in which we engage the Neolithic of central and eastern Europe, then what are we to do? Unsettling the Neolithic is not only a stimulation to question the coherence and independent validity of phenomena such as mobility or sedentism, though these are important issues that contributors raise in the pages that follow. By attacking assumptions about the distinctions between hunter-gatherers and farmers, our idea of unsettling the Neolithic intends to unbalance the inherent equilibrium of the concept of the Neolithic as an essentialised cultural and archaeological phenomenon. Overall, our call is to abandon the widespread intellectual comforts of generalisation that permeate work on our common field of study. This is a process which requires critical examination of the metaphors and devices through which we speak and write about broad concepts, such as sedentism, and about explanatory and descriptive constructs, such as the type-site for a culture. For example, Kostas Kotsakis (chapter 2) undermines the way in which

the tell settlements at Argissa and Sesklo in northern Greece became official representatives for the Greek Neolithic. In a similar fashion, John Evans (chapter 12), Paul Halstead (chapter 5) and Ian Hodder (chapter 13) question the soft acceptance of a settlement tell as a generalised social and taphonomic construct, and Lszl Bartosiewicz (chapter 6) uses the Hungarian early Neolithic occupation of Maroslele-Pana, often quoted as some kind of reliable reference point, as an example of how much of our perception of such sites may be changed by more rigorous recovery methods and analysis. To borrow Kotsakis phrase, the invitation to reader (and contributor) is to anatomise the concepts of the Neolithic, to rupture the simple equations between residence, economy, materials, transitions and origins that underpin our understanding of central and eastern Europe in the Neolithic. The call is for a radical reappraisal or, at the least painful, a re-thinking of the traditional models and concepts that have conditioned the study of this region in this period.

Beyond sedentism, residence, mobility and settlement

Many of the papers in this volume critically examine the concepts of sedentism and mobility. Some suggest, like Laurens Thissen (chapter 8) that we speak of a Neolithic in terms of semi-sedentism, and that we recognise that the sites that are taken to represent the Neolithic in a particular region (for example sites such as Sesklo in northern Greece) are only one part, and importantly perhaps a significantly small part, of a regions total settlement system. Others, like Paul Halstead (chapter 5), make the case that sedentism does not preclude a significant degree of mobility, that there is a range of mobilities (daily, seasonal, inter-annual, generational and longer-term), and that different temporal and spatial scales of mobility can characterise sedentary villages. The closer that one looks at familiar, basic concepts in

Douglass Bailey and Alasdair Whittle entireties, of farming groups. The more critical the discussion that takes place, the greater becomes the risk that the faunal approach to documenting mobility/ sedentism is nothing more than an exercise to fill-in-theblanks of rigid sentences written decades ago, which themselves followed an inflexible structure and grammar that have remained unchanged and, indeed, which resist alteration. For the majority of Neolithic data sets, the critical qualifier is the presence (or in many cases absence) of appropriate excavation and analytical controls over interassemblage micro-chronology and taphonomic process. As important is the recognition that even in cases where high levels of attention to recovery detail are present (for example at Makriyalos in northern Greece: see Halstead, chapter 5), we are left with a site that gives itself equally to either a sedentary or a mobility interpretation. The questions to be asked are fundamental, yet often avoided. At a Neolithic site, can separate assemblages of bioarchaeological data be securely locked together into a single annual cycle of site use? This is what is assumed. If there is evidence for activity at a site from each season of the year, does each set of evidence come from the same individual year? Can the intense precision that we employ in our retrieval and recording activities permit us to answer these questions? If not, do we have any right to ask about sedentism and mobility? If not, is it not equally possible that the record we piece together represents a much more chaotic culmination of unpatterned sets of activities that, for example, might have occurred over a period of five or ten years during which winter activities might not have alternated so smoothly with summer ones as so often presumed? There are other assumptions that need similar scrutiny. Why is it commonly accepted that the presence of a built environment (that is, the presence of what we call architecture) is a proxy for sedentism and residential permanence? What if architecture represents nothing more (nor less) than claims for, assertions of, residential occupancy when actual residence was not possible or not desirable? Evans (chapter 12), Halstead (chapter 5), Hodder (chapter 13), Mills (chapter 9) and Bailey (chapter 10) all question in different ways the common-sense assumptions about Neolithic building and settlement which limit the current study of the Neolithic in central and eastern Europe. In a crucial contribution about the complexity of the settlement record in northern Greece, Halstead uses his deep engagement with faunal data to argue that settlement tells were not continuously occupied by all residents at all times and that flat sites, such as Makriyalos, were probably occupied continuously but only for a few years at a time. At a stroke, Halstead destabilises two of the major assumptions about Neolithic site typology and recognitions of sedentism/mobility: the widely held assumptions that tells equal long-term sedentism and that caves and flat-sites represent group mobility.

the study of the Neolithic, such as sedentism, the clearer become doubts about their applicability without considerable qualification and elision. A common aim in much work on the Neolithic in central and eastern Europe (though also to the west) is to seek out and document distinctions between sedentary and mobile communities. Indeed this distinction is at the core of many traditional definitions of Neolithic behaviour. A significant justification for these definitions is the assumption that what we understand as sedentism and mobility can be read from re-constituted records of homogenous, repeated, static human behaviour of the past. Importantly, the majority of serious searches for sedentism/mobility in the Neolithic rely on the use of proxy evidence. As Nicky Milner argues (chapter 4), there are substantial problems in using proxy evidence to support conclusions about human residential activities. The widely held bioarchaeological assumption is that patterns of faunal remains provide a proxy for seasonality of residential activities. Milner questions these relationships and examines the employment of seasonality studies in building models of mobility or sedentism. She reveals the simplicity of arguments that reconstruct degrees of sedentism or mobility and which rely on seasonal availability of plants and animals in order to do so. She notes variations in the use of concepts such as sedentary and permanent, and she highlights the frequent absence of explicit definition. The basic question to be faced is whether we can in fact justify the use of modern analogies to understand prehistoric plant, animal and human behaviour. Milner suggests that behaviour that we witness today (such as patterns of bird distribution) does not necessarily correlate with behaviour in the past. Thus, there are important variations in the birthing seasons of particular animals (such as sheep) which complicate simple correlations of sheep mortality patterns with human behaviour. The use of annual lines on oysters can vary depending on ambient environment. In the end, the utility that modern behaviour has for understanding the Neolithic rests not on the patterns of the data recovered but on the questions which direct analysis and fashion interpretation. Crucially, in ethnographic terms, a society may have had a significant element of mobility in its lifestyle, but the archaeological record of that society may well suggest sedentism. Equally important is Halsteads recognition (chapter 5) of the possibility that Neolithic mortality patterns of young livestock may display seasonality for reasons unconnected with actual temporal patterns of human residence. Critically, evidence for year-round Neolithic activity is related not to the type, location or date of a site, but to sample size and preservation, retrieval strategies, levels of detail of analysis of dental remains and chronological resolution of individual excavations. As Kotsakis suggests, we are very bad at understanding the logistical mobility for segments, as opposed to the

Unsettling the Neolithic In a similarly incisive questioning of the taken-forgranted, John Evans investigation of tell settlements draws our attention to the implicit conflict that tells present: how could it be that the growth of a tell was so purposeful and yet so incremental as to be invisible to adjacent generations? Evans asks basic, but critical questions: why do tells emerge where they do and when they do while they have not emerged in other times and places where environmental, social and economic conditions were similar? How do we tackle issues of intent when thinking about tells? Evans thinks through the visuality of tells in the landscape, provoking us to struggle with the ways in which the place of the tell would have been tempered by the surrounding woodland environment. Drawing on psychoanalysis and evocations of the unconscious, he investigates relationships between woodlands and sites. Evans focuses on woodlands and woodland clearings as arenas of the unfamiliar, as places away from the usual and away from the familiarity of the settlement and the tell. These stimulations move the debate towards an archaeology of the gaps, a consideration of the periphery and marginal, of negative landscapes in which the strong personalities of a community (as often supposed, its leaders) are absent. It is the rise of illogical worlds, without trends in relations of power and directedness. Evans provides a critically valuable and extremely noneconomic view of the landscape and its elements, far removed from discussions of locations of soil types for farming or access to water sources. At their simplest, Evans and Halsteads contributions highlight the over-simplified way in which most archaeologists have seen tell settlements as centres of agricultural production and distribution, as centres of control, or as the creations of social identity. As Evans argues, the contrast between tell and flat-site is unhelpful because it sets up the tell as special. There is no reason to see tells as endowed with greater senses of place then flat-sites, nor that a greater sense of place was a part of tell meaning and function. It may be more important to see alteration in the landscape as a dialectic of continuity and change within an unconscious world. Evans tempts us to think about the healing of a communal pathology through transference and, in this way, to readdress issues of abandonment or change in settlement locations over short distances. Fundamentally, he suggests that when we excavate a tell we engage past social and unconscious worlds. Not dissimilar are Hodders arguments (chapter 13) that the anatomical order of a tell is a part of the social order (and not merely a reflection of that changing order), that the tell is, itself, a social matrix. Hodder picks apart the vertical and spatial relationships embedded in the tell at atalhyk and, in doing so, sees how the anatomy of the tell can inform us on the nature of social relationships. Hodders attention focuses not only on the effects of a large agglomeration of people living packed against each

other, but also on the construction of memories, as well as on the transmission of rights and properties in a smallscale house-based society. What did it mean to live in these houses? How much time did people actually spend inside them? If the house was an important location for socialisation into roles and behaviours at atalhyk, did the house unit grow at the expense of the community at large? Hodder argues that practices within houses established specific sets of memories that were consciously passed down through time. Specific archives of memory were constructed within specific houses or groups of houses; the politics of commemorative memory, like the politics of habituated practices, were primarily house-based. Continuity was the product of the habituation of practices and a shift from myth to history within commemorative memory. Houses appropriated generalised myth and transformed it into history, while dominant houses were particular guardians of the archive of memories. Having proposed this for atalhyk, Hodder pushes on: can we see subaltern or contested memories in these places? These contributions of Halstead, Hodder and Evans make us look at a fundamental part of the Neolithic in radical and provocative new ways. Mills (chapter 9) asks us to listen to the Neolithic in similarly challenging fashion. Mills argues that the association of acoustic information with Neolithic settlement tells is a significant component of understanding their use and location in the landscape. Stimulated by work on auditory scene analysis, Mills redefines parts of a Neolithic river valley landscape in terms of the amount, range and density of acoustic information. The result is a new and otherwise invisible understanding about how people, animals, and the landscape itself are manifest in various ways. Bailey (chapter 10) also asks us to follow unusual avenues of approach to the Neolithic built environment. He suggests that we have been looking at Neolithic architecture at the wrong scale, that we have been sucked into hyper-detailed recovery and documentation and, in doing so, that we have missed the environmental effect that buildings, houses and villages may have had on people. Drawing on debates over specific objects, negative volume, repetition and seriality, he argues that in a sense it may not matter what any one house or village contained or what its function was. Rather the meaning of a Neolithic house or village may rest in understanding the ways in which houses were themselves specific objects which forced people to continually (re)assess who they were and what were their relationships with others. Taken together, all these papers urge us to move beyond the search for sedentism or mobility as a characteristic of a community or society. Halstead argues that sedentism (as a concept) is restrictive as it sets up a binary opposition to mobility; we know that life (Neolithic or otherwise) is not so simply defined and categorically bounded. In the end, notions such as mobility and sedentism may not be of much use to us as independent

Douglass Bailey and Alasdair Whittle game, about a middle Neolithic when cattle and pig gained importance, and about a late Neolithic when sheep/goat became much less important while large game became more so. On the other hand, one could see general variation in patterns across different regions, such as the long recognised distinctions between the north and south Balkans in which the former contain a dominance of bovids and the latter a preference for sheep/goats. Perhaps most critical is Bartosiewiczs demonstration that the range of species present at a site is at least as much a factor of faunal assemblage size as the result of behaviour or diet preference. Understanding the relationships between hunting and animal keeping at Krs culture sites rests on recognising that larger, better recovered assemblages more reliably reflect sheep/goat keeping, while smaller assemblages, less rigorously recovered, have given the impression of a false importance of hunting. There is further relevance for attempts to compare smaller middle Neolithic assemblages with larger ones from either earlier or later parts of the period and, most critically, to our attempts to identify significant trends in human/animal relationships. Furthermore, when comparisons (between regions or phases of period) rely on the pooled data from several sites (or phases within sites) then subtle inter-species relationships are smoothed into generalisation. If we are to continue to exploit faunal material from Neolithic sites, we would do well to follow Mills suggestions (chapter 9) that we consider animals (either wild or domestic, or perhaps beyond these restrictive categories) in terms of different significances. Mills attention to acoustic information provokes us to think in radically different ways about the bones that we dig up and which usually disappear into species frequency charts and MNI statistics. To take one example, Mills suggests that Neolithic people may well have placed a high premium on birds and mammals with respect to their contribution to the acoustic fabric and form of places. Birds, mammals and their sound were integral to ways that those places were acoustically defined. Variation in the contribution of birds to ambient sounds and noise is likely to have been unconsciously embedded in understandings of daily cycles; similar arguments can be played out through the seasons. Thus, although they may only be a minor element in the archaeological record, birds may have been of major significance in Neolithic understandings of the distribution of key resources, daily and seasonal cycles and the identities of place.

or bounded concepts. Even with the most securely assumed monuments to sedentism (tells) there is increasing evidence that reconstructions of static, permanent, sedentary life are misguided. It may be much more likely that the construction of a built environment represents claims for residence in situations where actual physical occupation was not always possible, though even here we are generalising at an unacceptable level. Generalised definitions and classifications of sites such as tells or flat-sites may do more damage than good; the difference between the two may only reflect a difference in Neolithic peoples attitudes to the material with which they lived their lives and to their practices of disposal, curation, hoarding, hiding and displaying. Indeed, perhaps we need to look beyond even the concept of site as an unsupportable generalisation that may deform our understanding of Neolithic existence. While it is not acceptable to equate a site-type with a degree of sedentism or mobility, it is profitable to address each place on its own; perhaps it is better to speak not of sites but of traces of the human and material engagement across dynamic and shifting landscapes. Halstead prefers to think of spectra of movements within a landscape.

Beyond economies and food production

In addition to unsettling sites, settlement, sedentism and mobility, these papers also question a second fundamental component of traditional definitions of the Neolithic: the shift from food gathering to food production. Kotsakis urges us to abandon the still dominant Childean tradition that conceptualises differing ways of life directed by economic subsistence strategies. The call is to avoid thinking about foragers, hunter-gatherers, and farmers (or Mesolithic and Neolithic groups) in terms of essentialist, dichotomous, economic concepts. Indeed, as Kotsakis makes clear, we know so little about the earliest agriculture that using it to define the Neolithic is a purely verbal exercise. Food producing activities need not be the privileged domain in our understanding of the earliest Neolithic groups. The argument throughout is that we should not privilege food producing strategies when we engage the Neolithic. If food is important, then its importance may best be found in the role(s) that it (and many other materials) played in constructing identities through the processes, consequences and significances of consumption: shared or private, open or restricted, cautious or carried to excess. Bartosiewicz argues (chapter 6) that it is no longer acceptable to speak of a single economic strategy such as domestication as a homogenous, coherent phenomenon. Nor can we assume that the same attitudes to animals (domestic and wild) prevailed throughout the Neolithic. On the one hand, relationships between people and animals vary though different parts of the Neolithic. Thus, one could generalise about an early Neolithic defined by the predominance of sheep/goats with few pigs or large

Beyond materials
If unsettling the Neolithic involves unbalancing accepted ideas about sedentism and economies, then it also requires new thinking about the materiality of life in central and eastern Europe after 6500 cal BC. For Hodder, one of the most basic aspects of the Neolithic was the massive increase in the amount of enduring materiality that came

Unsettling the Neolithic to surround people. From the settlement mounds themselves, to the houses within them, to the pottery and groundstone objects, people became encumbered in a world they had made. Hodder understands a significance of this materiality as the creation of memory that is indistinguishable from the object world; this type of memory is only possible when attached to an object, or a name. In the Neolithic, the increased constructed materiality of life provided a whole new arena for social manipulation and engagement: that of the material past and the memories embedded within the objects of daily and ritual life. Hodder sees the mound at atalhyk as a vast archive of highly selected memories. Some events were to be institutionally forgotten; they were stored away through the processes of infilling and abandonment. Some things such as cattle scapulae, some obsidian points, and some burials were to be left, filled in and not seen again. For Hodder, it was a politics of memory that determined what was retained in an archive (and thus made available for consultation) and what was hidden away so that it was not available. Specific archives of memory were constructed within specific houses or groups of houses. There are other, similarly provocative ways to think about Neolithic material culture. Thissen provides an excellent example in his discussion of pottery (chapter 8). In his treatment of early and middle Neolithic material from southern Romania, Thissen directs his attention not at typology and technology as much as at the feel of the sherds, and the weight and sound of fragments. He raises issues of ambiguity in surface decoration, and questions potential consequences of mistakes made while painting. In his argument, Thissen is not interested in chronology or in style or even in issues of identifying pottery workshops. Instead he writes about how craft-persons were able to insert ceramics into society, about the degree of a communitys willingness and readiness to embrace innovation, and about how innovation existed alongside existing practices. Thissen proposes that, for society in the early Neolithic of southern Romania, initial pottery use can be linked to the preparation and boiling of foods that employed pre-Neolithic practices. Most provocatively of all, he asks us to think about pottery in new ways, to consider how a pot felt in a persons hands or against their lips.

Beyond boundaries and origins to the flow of life

Equally important to re-think are the ways in which boundaries and origins are deployed in traditional archaeological thinking about the period. In his contribution, Duan Bori (chapter 3) asks us to break down the dichotomy of Mesolithic versus Neolithic. Boris request is that we question the boundaries of the Neolithic and that we explore their potential for porosity and

permeability. Kotsakis sees the metaphoric border become a territorial frontier, similar to the boundaries of colonisers (such as in the case of Hellas and the East). As Bori and Kotsakis expose the sources of the boundary and frontier metaphors, the long secure distinction between Mesolithic and Neolithic (as well as that which separates Neolithic from Early Bronze Age) loses its assumed stability. Equally important is Kotsakis argument that the direction of movement across boundaries and borders is essentialised. All temporality is suppressed, and what predominantly are the historically contingent results of agency are perceived as one decontextualised entity, within a framework of stability. Kotsakis makes it clear that, in reality, directions (like frontiers) can be many and conflicting, and can reflect variable temporalities. At times they can be stable, at other times shifting, reversed or eclipsed. The call is to move beyond the barriers of boundaries and the assumption of essential directionality. Kotsakis proposal (to think of multiple local frontiers) offers insight on the interaction that is active on the borders, not only between hunters and farmers, but also, and perhaps more frequently, among farmers of different social groups. The call is to look at the strong and dynamic processes that occur in the border zone and thus to re-examine the creation of a Neolithic that was clearly distinct from what had come before. Provocatively, Thissen argues that we should see the Mesolithic-early Neolithic as a single historical trajectory: the early Neolithic as incipient and implicit in the Mesolithic. Thus, the predominance of cattle in favour of sheep/goats in the record of StarevoCri occupations (and in the subsequent Dudeti phenomenon) should be considered in the contexts of pre-Neolithic practices, ideally to be explored along Mesolithic dealings with bovids. Furthermore, Thissens assessment of early Neolithic cooking pots that may have used boiling stones fits in with pre-Neolithic food processing patterns. Though the adoption of pottery within StarevoCri culture was fullhearted, Thissen suggests that its use was no more than an addition to existing ways of life. Within a semisedentary setting such as StarevoCri communities, possibly a range of techniques of cooking continued to be used simultaneously. People may have used the old ways of cooking (in non-ceramic containers) while groups were mobile and used the new method of cooking (in pottery vessels) only while resident. From these perspectives, the use of pottery can be explored fruitfully within a framework of continuity and incorporation, and it can be set off against, but more significantly perhaps treated as an addition to, existing traditions of non-ceramic containers in the Mesolithic period. In his discussion of skulls from Lepenski Vir, Bori agues for the use of human bones as relics that bridged the Mesolithic/ Neolithic border. Thissen suggests that the use of red ochre in Star evoCri communities is proof of unchanging ritual practice.

Douglass Bailey and Alasdair Whittle forces us to think about the performances and consequences of a house killing carried out by residents or their friends (and not by invading or warring hordes). Domicide may result in the destruction of a place of attachment and refuge, the loss of security, the partial loss of identity, the de-centring of place, family and community, the loss of historical connection, the weakening of roots and the partial erasure of sources of memory, dreams and nostalgia. If the house has multiple meanings then so do acts of its destruction. Tringham constructs a picture in which the burning of a Neolithic house was not only dramatic and sensual but also traumatic. If the purpose of the conflagration was to ensure a continuous place, to create social memory, to strengthen identity of community, and to incorporate social reproduction, then the performances that took place before, during, and after the fire ensured that burning events fulfilled these purposes. Tringham argues that house burning was a ritual performance that marked the end of a house (or household) in social memory and coincided with the death of a significant person (who was not burned or buried in the house). Both house burning and human burial within houses were strategies for ensuring the continuity of place and the construction of social memory. House killing bound people together, nurtured memories and contributed to the continuity of place.

Kotsakis asks us to think of the Neolithic in terms of a dynamic place of mutual exchange, where fluidity must have been prevalent and where identities and accompanying material culture expressions were constantly reformulated. Instead of the usual picture of a Neolithic culture winning over the Mesolithic, this process might have happened in a fluid landscape with multiple frontiers and conflicting directions, in a constant process of creating hybrid identities. All of these arguments blur the traditional boundaries between Mesolithic and Neolithic. If we can no longer assume that food production was simply a better, more efficient way of living or that buildings were inherently valuable because they provided shelter from the elements, then what are we to do? Alasdair Whittles suggestion (chapter 7) is that we think about the creation and practices of social values through which daily social existence is carried out. This is an invitation to investigate values, emotion, and lived experience. Whittle seeks an understanding of being in the Neolithic through considerations of conviviality, of the informal and the performative. To do this requires that we look at social groups in new ways, specifically not seeing them as villages or camps or even cultures, each of which is locked to a place, a set of architectures or a shared set of material forms. Rather, Whittle wants us to look at alternative possibilities for affiliation and choreographies of social existence, to generate models of lived experience, and to engage the mood of the people. In these terms, the Neolithic can be a willed creation of a distinctive form of social existence and not the inexorable spread of one way of life. As important as fresh thinking about the creation and practice of social values is the need to explore other dimensions of the complex lives of the Neolithic. In her contribution on the complexity of the destruction of Neolithic buildings by burning, Tringham (chapter 11) focuses on fire and its manipulation. To think about fire is to move beyond simple and static definitions of hearth, oven, kiln or thermal structure and to confront the phenomenon of burning. Tringham demonstrates not only that the burned house horizon is far from ubiquitous or homogenous but also that the human engagements, understandings and (mis)uses of fire range through diverse motivations, scales and stages. Fire is creative, inspiring and emotional; it is cunning, unruly, alive, exciting, sexual, and sensual. Dramas of house burnings evoke passion and fear and stimulate the senses, particularly with respect to colours and sounds. Furthermore, fires have life-histories and can be the sources of renewal and rebirth as well as of death and destruction. While fire can clean, heal and revitalise, its products are often considered dirty: soot, charred wood, ash. Tringham urges us to think about social memory and of the shocking and memorable event that a house killed by fire would have been. Using the terms domicide and domithanasia and writing about euthanising houses, she

Moving forward
In presenting these papers and making calls for a radical re-thinking of central issues, we do not want to separate ourselves from previous practice and literature. For a start, the contributors disagree among themselves on many issues, and it remains to be seen how for example dramatic events such as the house burnings just discussed relate to patterns of residence. Both Halstead and Andrew Sherratt in his elegant digestif (chapter 14) pick up on and turn the motif of unsettling, preferring notions of resettling and settling. Many others may prefer the same. We recognise the difficulties of our enterprise. As archaeologists working with archives of older excavations as well as with the results of colleagues current fieldwork, we are faced with clash of scales: between the types of evidence that we collect (and their temporally coarse resolutions) and the types of things that we want to talk about in the Neolithic. If we are to heed Whittles call (and those of others in this book), then we also must listen to Halsteads concerns that we may be replacing the traditional Neolithic package with a more fashionable but equally unfounded orthodoxy of gradual piecemeal adoption of domestication, sedentary life and Neolithic material culture. We note also Thissens warning that if we agree that it is better to characterise the early Neolithic commitment to land in terms of semi-sedentism, then we must be careful in our interpretations of what we find but more importantly of what we do not recover. Thus, the

Unsettling the Neolithic near absence of hunting and fishing evidence in the faunal record of a site in southern Romania (i.e. the Starevo Cri site Teleor 003; Adrian Blescu pers. comm.), may indicate that these activities were carried on off-site, or even off-area and, furthermore, that these might well relate to different seasons. We recognise that there is diversity and that we cannot always correctly predict the outcomes of our research. Thus the investigations at Ecsegfalva on the Great Hungarian Plain (discussed in chapters 6 and 7) were started with the hopes that it might prove possible to document occupation restricted to certain seasons of the year and by fine recovery methods to chart in more detail the apparent major contributions of hunting, fishing, shellfishing and fowling to subsistence practices. As those chapters will describe, the outcome has been rather different. In acknowledging all these problems and the likely diversity of styles of existence in central and eastern Europe between 65003500 cal BC, we do maintain the need for re-thinking, re-aligning and broadening present practices of interpretation. As Steve Mills notes (p.80), it is the nature of the world that things are always changing, beginning and ending, in cycles of life, death, seasons and rhythms. We need attention to the flow of life, its choreographies and socialities, its sounds and unconscious undertow, its links with shifting pasts and memories. We must embrace all this in our investigations;

instability, the unsettled nature of the world, is often the norm. To unsettle the Neolithic we must move beyond essentialised concepts. To rewrite the Neolithic we must not generalise; we need highly detailed studies from many particular contexts. To rethink the Neolithic we must not assume the homogeneity of human behaviour or archaeological phenomena; the value is in the particular.

Acknowledgements
These papers are the first outcome of a conference held in Cardiff University in May 2003. We are grateful above all to The British Academy for financial support, as well as to Liz Walker, Aled Cooke and Ian Dennis in our department for administrative and technical help. Vicki Cummings has contributed not only in the running of the conference but also in the editing of these papers. Many thanks to David Brown and Clare Litt at Oxbow and especially to Sarah Monks who greatly improved the final version of this volume. Not all those who spoke at the conference are represented in this volume; a second collection, focused on individual projects and specific analyses, is in production. School of History and Archaeology Cardiff University February 2005