A pan-European overview of the archaeology of hunter-gatherer societies, written by experts in each region.

This book focuses on the archaeology of the hunter-gatherer societies that inhabited Europe in the millennia between the Last Ice Age and the spread of agriculture, between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago. Traditionally viewed as a period of cultural stagnation, new data now demonstrate that this was a period of radical change and innovation. This was the period that witnessed the colonization of extensive new territory at high latitudes and high altitudes following postglacial climatic change, the development of seafaring, and the synthesis of the technological, economic, and social capabilities that underpinned the later development of agricultural and urban societies.

This book, first published in 1936, studies the cultural development of the food-gathering peoples of the western end of the plain of Northern Europe.

Bernstein.

What do we know about the Mesolithic? What distinguishes the Mesolithic from earlier and later periods of human history? What do the Mesolithic cultures of Europe have in common, and what differentiates them from one another? This comprehensive volume contains 89 papers which attempt to answer the questions of the Mesolithic; the papers were presented at the Sixth International Conference on the Mesolithic in Europe held in Stockholm, 2000.

Since its development in 1949, radiocarbon dating has increasingly been used in prehistoric research in order to get a better grip on the chronology of sites, cultures and environmental changes. Refinement of the dating, sampling and calibration methods has continuously created new and challenging perspectives for absolute dating. In these proceedings the focus lies on the contribution of carbon-14 dates in current Mesolithic research in North-West Europe. Altogether 40 papers dealing with radiocarbon dates from 15 different countries are presented. Major themes are the typo-technological evolution of lithic and bone industries, changes in settlement patterns, burial practices, demography and subsistence, human impact on the Mesolithic environment and the neolithisation process. Some papers also deal with more methodological aspects of carbon-14 dating (e.g. calculation of various reservoir effects, the use of cumulative calibrated probability distributions), and related techniques (e.g. stable isotope analysis for palaeodiet reconstruction).