Counter Culture: investigating Neolithic social diversity

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The aim of this project is to reveal the forms and extent of social diversity amongst the earliest farmers of central Europe, in order to provide new avenues to investigate the history of social inequality. The first farmers appeared in central Europe in the Neolithic, a period around 7500 years ago. This so-called 'agricultural revolution' was the crucible of many present day inequalities, such as unequal access to food and good health. Despite the apparent importance of the agricultural revolution to the history of social inequality, we know remarkably little about how and why it developed across the course of the Neolithic. It has long been assumed that beyond the initial transition to farming, the Neolithic could be characterised as a steady, stable and unbroken growth of population and hierarchy, supported by a gradually intensifying agriculture. Two recent developments in research demand that we think again about how social diversity, and by implication inequalities, rose, fell and persisted across the Neolithic. First, statistical modelling of radiocarbon dates have produced a chronology refined to human generations, allowing for a fine-grained understanding of social change to be developed. This research has overturned the perception of steady growth. Periods of rapid expansion, collapse, contraction, and breaks in the sequence must now be accounted for and, above all, explained. Second, a suite of new bioarchaeological methods allow archaeologists to capture diversity in human lifeways, by analysing how mobility, diet, daily activities and kinship varied between the sexes, ages and different sections of Neolithic society. By interpreting these two data streams in context with the funerary rites, diversity across the population can be revealed. The project will take as its focus the Early and Middle Neolithic in Alsace (c.5300-4300 cal BC). Forming a well-defined and coherent geographical area, this region now has a high resolution and precise chronology for the period under study. Neolithic lifeways in Alsace will be captured through integrating the results from high resolution strontium isotope, stable isotope analysis and dental calculus analysis, with the existing osteological information and evidence from burial rites. Strontium isotope analysis will reveal human mobility patterns in adolescence and whether individuals moved between childhood and their place of burial. Stable isotope analysis will provide insights into diversity in diet between the ages and sexes. The investigation of dental calculus will permit the investigation of daily activities and reveal further details about diet, by analysing the mircofossils preserved in dental plaque. These new analyses will then be interpreted in context with information drawn from the human skeleton and burial practices. The project will thus characterise social diversity across a millennia in the Neolithic of central Europe, analysing how diet, mobility and health, as proxies for lifeways, varied in time and between different individual, cemeteries, settlements and cultural groups. It will then build on these data to ask what are the principal characteristics of Neolithic social diversity (age, sex, social group, or culture), and what was the history of Neolithic social inequality, does it increase, decrease or persist through time? Our results will be disseminated via open access journal articles, conference presentations, a website with blog, associated social media, and downloadable resources and events for the public and interest groups. The project will benefit the scholarly study of the Neolithic, and of the history of social inequality more broadly. Its application in events and resources for children and local communities will aid the effort to improve understanding of the complex experience of social diversity in today's world of growing social inequality, global mobility and culture contact.