Over the last 20 years a vast number of new and important Swedish Mesolithic sites have been excavated and published in different ways as articles, books and site reports. As yet there has been no study that tries to bring the loose ends together and so the main task of this important new work by one of Sweden’s leading prehistorians is to provide an extensive overview of some of the main sites and results. The time span is long: c. 10 000-4000 BC and the amount and choice of data very large so rather than attempt to describe everything in detail Mats Larsson focuses on a series of fundamental research perspectives concerning Mesolithic lifeways and settlement patterns and chooses key sites to illustrate them. The emphasis is on southern and middle Sweden, though the country’s northern regions are in no way forgotten. This companion piece to the author’s recent successful volume Paths Towards a New World: Neolithic in Sweden, written for a general audience is also a must for all those archaeologists interested in the Mesolithic of Northern Europe and would be students of prehistory

Nash investigates the relationship between artistic representation, ideology, and the social relations of production in Mesolithic hunter/fisher/gather societies of Denmark and southern Sweden. From a selective analysis of the literature, he produces a broad structuralist perspective from which to analyse portable art.

Farming and cattle herding were introduced in southern Scandinavia in approximately 4000-3900 cal BC. In a long-term perspective, the introduction of farming and cattle herding is one of the most important changes for humanity. There are still questions to be answered. How did the innovations spread? What were the causes for change and who were the actors involved in the process? In this publication we are able to look inside the black box of transition. The empirical matrial consists of newly excavated Mesolothic and Neolithic sites in the county of Ostergotland in Eastern Middle Sweden. Settlements, artefacts and radiocarbon analysis tell the tale of both continuity and change. The study proves that the process of change from foraging to farming in this area can be regarded as alterations in the Mesolithic local communities and that the introduction of farming and animal husbandry was an apparent rather undramatic event. Traditional living continued but life never became the same again.

Archaeological research in Sweden and Denmark has uncovered a startling array of evidence over the last 150 years, but until now there has been no comprehensive synthesis and interpretation of the material. An Ethnography of the Neolithic bridges this gap, giving an accessible and up-to-date analysis of a wide range of evidence, from landscapes to monumental tombs to portable artifacts. Christopher Tilley also uses this material as a basis for a provocative and novel reconstruction of late Mesolithic and earlier Neolithic societies in southern Scandinavia, over a period of 3,000 years. His skilful integration of archaeological evidence with new anthropological approaches makes this book an original contribution to an important topic, whose significance stretches outside Scandinavia, and beyond the Neolithic.

The theme for the Cambridge Annual Student Archaeology Conference (CASA) 2019 was New Frontiers in Archaeology and this volume presents papers from a wide range of topics such as new geographical areas of research, using museum collections and legacy data, new ways to teach archaeology and new scientific or theoretic paradigms.