Edited by Pierre Allard, Françoise Bostyn, François Giligny and Jacek Lech This book includes papers from the Flint Mining in Prehistoric Europe session held at European Association of Archaeologists 12th Annual Meeting Cracow, Poland, 19th-24th September 2006.

This volume offers a review of major flint mines dating from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. The 18 articles were contributed by archaeologists from Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Sweden, using the same framework to propose a uniform view of the mining phenomenon.

Grube - Bergbau - Neolithikum.

The social processes involved in acquiring flint and stone in the Neolithic began to be considered over thirty years ago, promoting a more dynamic view of past extraction processes. Whether by quarrying, mining or surface retrieval, the geographic source locations of raw materials and their resultant archaeological sites have been approached from different methodological and theoretical perspectives. In recent years this has included the exploration of previously undiscovered sites, refined radiocarbon dating, comparative ethnographic analysis and novel analytical approaches to stone tool manufacture and provenancing. The aim of this volume in the Neolithic Studies Group Papers is to explore these new findings on extraction sites and their products. How did the acquisition of raw materials fit into other aspects of Neolithic life and social networks? How did these activities merge in creating material items that underpinned cosmology, status and identity? What are the geographic similarities, constraints and variables between the various raw materials, and how does the practise of stone extraction in the UK relate to wider extractive traditions in northwestern Europe? Eight papers address these questions and act as a useful overview of the current state of research on the topic.

This is last in a series of fascicules publishing the British Museum's programme of research excavations at Grimes Graves, Norfolk. Research into flint mines such as Grimes Graves, one of the largest Neolithic flint mine complexes in Europe, offers a fascinating glimpse into the practical knowledge and skills of humans at that time. This fascicule considers the miners' methods as well as their motivation and the uses to which the finished products were put. Ian Longworth was formerly Keeper of Prehistoric and Romano-British Antiquities at the British Museum, Gillian Varndell is a curator of Prehistory and Europe at the British Museum and Jacek Lech has a professorship at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw.

This guidebook provides a tour of Grime's Graves, the first Neolithic flint mines to be recognized as such in England, and explains the history of this extraordinary site from the Neolithic Age to the present day.