Deeply stratified settlements are a distinctive site type featuring prominently in diverse later prehistoric landscapes of the Old World. Their massive materiality has attracted the curiosity of lay people and archaeologists alike. Nowadays a wide variety of archaeological projects are tracking the lifestyles and social practices that led to the building-up of such superimposed artificial hills. However, prehistoric tell-dwelling communities are too often approached from narrow local perspectives or discussed within strict time- and culture-specific debates. There is a great potential to learn from such ubiquitous archaeological manifestations as the physical outcome of cross-cutting dynamics and comparable underlying forces irrespective of time and space. This volume tackles tells and tell-like sites as a transversal phenomenon whose commonalities and divergences are poorly understood yet may benefit from cross-cultural comparison. Thus, the book intends to assemble a representative range of ongoing theory - and science -based fieldwork projects targeting this kind of sites. With the aim of encompassing a variety of social and material dynamics, the volume's scope is diachronic - from the Earliest Neolithic up to the Iron Age-, and covers a very large region, from Iberia in Western Europe to Syria in the Middle East. The core of the volume comprises a selection of the most remarkable contributions to the session with a similar title celebrated in the European Association of Archaeologists Annual Meeting held at Barcelona in 2018. In addition, the book includes invited chapters to round out underrepresented areas and periods in the EAA session with relevant research programmes in the Old World. To accomplish such a cross-cultural course, the book takes a case-based approach, with contributions disparate both in their theoretical foundations - from household archaeology, social agency and formation theory - and their research strategies - including geophysical survey, microarchaeology and high-resolution excavation and dating.

This is an archaeometallurgical study of the early phases of metallurgy in parts of central and southeastern Europe. Metallographic data from a large series of Eneolithic/Copper Age shaft-hole axes and flat axes is first published here in detail. The findings from this examination are discussed and both groups of implements are compared in terms of variation in their production parameters. This variation is related to both the technological change that came about during the Eneolithic/Copper Age and to a shift in emphasis placed on the production of shaft-hole implements and more mundane flat axes respectively.

Practice - The Social, Space, and Materiality forms the second part of Bronze Age Tell Communities in Context: An exploration into culture, society, and the study of European prehistory. It studies Bronze Age tells and our approaches towards an understanding of this fascinating way of life, drawing on the material remains of long-term architectural stability and references back to ancestral place. While the first volume challenged Neo-Diffusionist models of the influence of Mediterranean palatial centres on the development of tell communities in the Carpathians and an attendant focus on social stratification, the second part sets out an alternative theoretical approach, which foregrounds architecture and the social use of space. Unlike the reductionist macro perspective of mainstream social modelling, inspired by aspects of practice theory outlined in this book, the account given seeks to allow for what is truly remarkable about these sites, and what we can infer from them about the way of life they once framed and enabled. The stability seen on tells, and their apparent lack of change on a macro scale, are specific features of the social field, in a given region and for a specific period of time. Both stability and change are contingent upon specific historical contexts, including traditional practices, their material setting and human intentionality. They are not an inherent, given property of this or that 'type' of society or social structure. For our tells, it is argued here, underneath the specific manifestation of sociality maintained, we clearly do see social practices and corresponding material arrangements being negotiated and adjusted. Echoing the argument laid out in the first part of this study, it is suggested that archaeology should take an interest in such processes on the micro scale, rather than succumb to the temptation of neat macro history and great narratives existing aloof from the material remains of past lives.

This study challenges current modelling of Bronze Age tell communities in the Carpathian Basin in terms of the evolution of functionally-differentiated, hierarchical or 'proto-urban' society under the influence of Mediterranean palatial centres. It is argued that the narrative strategies employed in mainstream theorising of the 'Bronze Age' in terms of inevitable social 'progress' sets up an artificial dichotomy with earlier Neolithic groups. The result is a reductionist vision of the Bronze Age past which denies continuity evident in many aspects of life and reduces our understanding of European Bronze Age communities to some weak reflection of foreign-derived social types - be they notorious Hawaiian chiefdoms or Mycenaean palatial rule. In order to justify this view, this study looks broadly in two directions: temporal and spatial. First, it is asked how Late Neolithic tell sites of the Carpathian Basin compare to Bronze Age ones, and if we are entitled to assume structural difference or rather 'progress' between both epochs. Second, it is examined if a Mediterranean 'centre' in any way can contribute to our understanding of Bronze Age tell communities on the 'periphery'. It is argued that current Neo-Diffusionism has us essentialise from much richer and diverse evidence of past social and cultural realities. Instead, archaeology is called on to contribute to an understanding of the historically specific expressions of the human condition and human agency, not to reduce past lives to abstract stages on the teleological ladder of social evolution.