This volume explores processes of colonisation and cultural integration from the end of the last Ice Age to the present from a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspective.All kinds of human mobility, short-distance as well as long-distance movements, short-term and long-term interactions are potential triggers for change and also cultural integration. The colonisation of an area most clearly brings into focus what kind of social fabric encompassed the actual historical processes. Recent perspectives on the social and cultural embeddedness of exchange, and how objects facilitate constructions of identities and political legitimacy, serve to frame and explicate the role of material culture in such processes.The contributions to this volume shed light on various social aspects of movement, migration and colonisation among hunter-gatherers and Neolithic groups as well as in chiefdoms and state societies. Geographically, an area spanning from the Mediterranean to Central Europe and the North Sea Region, Greenland and Siberia is covered.Three social and historical processes - the social aspects of colonisation, cultural integration and maritime interaction - are particularly discussed as interrelated phenomena.

This volume explores technology and communication of the early settlements of Northern Europe. The articles will discuss case studies and present overviews from the early and middle Mesolithic of Northern Europe. Special emphasis will be put on the spatial and temporal transmission of knowledge and culture. This subject addresses themes such as the transmission of specialised knowledge, the generative transmission of knowledge, the understanding of technology as somatic or incorporated culture in human society and the role of pedagogies and teaching in cultural sustainment and transformation. Other papers will discuss the relation between demography and technological developments, as well as the natural and cultural context for the transmission of culture. The understanding of the transmission of technology is, again, closely interrelated to the nature and efficiency of social networks of contact and their social and physical framework. Ultimately these question addresses one of the fundamental issues of our time - how to understand and cope with radical changes. This book provides new and different answers to this great problem of our time.