Seminar series 2013: "Land use and community differentiation in the European Neolithic"

Next week's seminar will be by Prof. Alex Bentley of the University of Bristol, who been kind enough to send us an abstract (see below). This seminar will take place

Room A109

Newman Building

Thursday 6th February

17:30

Abstract:"Community differentiation is a fundamental topic of the social sciences, and its prehistoric origins in Europe are typically assumed to lie among the complex, densely-populated societies that developed millennia after their Neolithic predecessors. Here we present recent isotopic evidence for such differentiation in early Neolithic Europe. Among the indications of the new evidence is differential land use in early Neolithic within a patrilocal kinship system. This can be put in context with new work at Bristol University on stable isotopes and organic residues preserved in Neolithic pottery, to infer the changing roles of animals in human diets (particularly dairying), economies and evolutionary genetics of LBK populations. As these large-scale projects come together, we are obtaining bioarchaeological evidence for diversity and specialization within a culture previously referred to as a homogenous 'package'."