Bailey, D., A. Whittle & V. Cummings. Eds. 2005. (Un)settling the Neolithic. – Oxford, Oxbow Books

Abstract

We have come a long way since Childe’s introduction of the concept of a Neolithic Revolution. Since the 1980s it has been through the work of people like Marek Zvelebil, that we have come to look at the process of neolithisation more as a gradual, long–term process than as a real revolution. Also, the role of the Mesolithic people has come more and more to our attention. Finally, the last few years both recent discoveries and theoretical orientations have come to undermine many of the associations we have long connected to the Neolithic. The findings of ceramics used by hunter–gather–fishermen communities and dated over 10,000 years BP in Japan, China, the Russian Far East and Eastern Siberia, caused a shock. Ceramics had of course for a long time been considered as a firm characteristic of at least a society–becoming–Neolithic, if not of a Neolithic society. And theoretical debates on what it means to become Neolithic have ranged from more broad–scaled narratives like Hodder’s concept of the domus versus the agrios, to ideas that have focused much more on individual experience. The compilation of articles edited by Bailey, Whittle & Cummings attacks one of the other concepts that immediately comes to mind when we think of a Neolithic society: sedentism, using both field data and new theoretical perspectives. The goal of the editors therefore is “to rupture the simple equations between residence, economy, materials, transitions and origins” (p. 1). However, next to a critique and shots at deconstructing the concept of the Neolithic, most contributors also try to provide a new way of constructing the Neolithic. Therefore the title: both settling and unsettling the Neolithic. Read more...