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.

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.

The Neolithic --a period in which the first sedentary agrarian communities were established across much of Europe--has been a key topic of archaeological research for over a century. However, the variety of evidence across Europe, the range of languages in which research is carried out, and the way research traditions in different countries have developed makes it very difficult for both students and specialists to gain an overview of continent-wide trends. The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe provides the first comprehensive, geographically extensive, thematic overview of the European Neolithic --from Iberia to Russia and from Norway to Malta --offering both a general introduction and a clear exploration of key issues and current debates surrounding evidence and interpretation. Chapters written by leading experts in the field examine topics such as the movement of plants, animals, ideas, and people (including recent trends in the application of genetics and isotope analyses); cultural change (from the first appearance of farming to the first metal artefacts); domestic architecture; subsistence; material culture; monuments; and burial and other treatments of the dead. In doing so, the volume also considers the history of research and sets out agendas and themes for future work in the field.

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.

For more than a century flint daggers have been among the most closely studied and most heavily published later prehistoric lithic tools. It is well established that they are found across Europe and beyond, and that many were widely circulated over many generations. Yet, few researchers have attempted to discuss the entirety of the flint dagger phenomenon. The present volume brings together papers that address questions of the regional variability and socio-technical complexity of flint daggers and their production. It focuses on the typology, chronology, technology, functionality and meaning of flint and other lithic daggers produced primarily in Europe, but also in the Eastern Mediterranean and East Asia, in prehistory. The 14 papers by leading researchers provide a comprehensive overview of the state of knowledge concerning various flint dagger corpora as well as potential avenues for the development of a research agenda across national, regional and disciplinary boundaries. The volume originates from a session held at the 2011 meeting of the European Association of Archaeology but includes additional commissioned contributions.

A collection of forty-six papers papers in honour of Professor Jacek Lech, compiled in recognition of his research and academic career as well as his inquiry into the study of prehistoric flint mining, Neolithic flint tools (and beyond), and the history of archaeology.

This volume brings together a group of peer reviewed papers, most of them presented at a workshop held at University College London, 15-17 October 2011, as part of the European Research Council (ERC) funded project Cultural Evolution of Neolithic Europe (EUROEVOL 2010-2015).