Barbara Stopp

The origins and spread of stock-keeping: the role of cultural and environmental influences on early Neolithic animal exploitation in Europe

It has long been recognised that the proportions of Neolithic domestic animal species—cattle, pig and sheep/goat—vary from region to region, but it has hitherto been unclear how much this variability is related to cultural practices or to environmental constraints. This study uses hundreds of faunal assemblages from across Neolithic Europe to reveal the distribution of animal use between north and south, east and west. The remarkable results present us with a geography of Neolithic animal society—from the rabbit-loving Mediterranean to the beef-eaters of the north and west. They also demonstrate that the choices made by early Neolithic herders were largely determined by their environments. Cultural links appear to have played only a minor role in the species composition of early Neolithic animal societies.

Miners and mining in the Late Bronze Age: a multidisciplinary study from Austria

The extraction and processing of metal ores, particularly those of copper and tin, are regarded as among the principal motors of Bronze Age society. The skills and risks of mining lie behind the weapons, tools and symbols that drove political and ideological change. But we hear much less about the miners themselves and their position in society. Who were these people? Were they rich and special, or expendable members of a hard-pressed workforce? In this study the spotlight moves from the adits, slags and furnaces to the bones and seeds, providing a sketch of dedicated prehistoric labourers in their habitat. The Mauken miners were largely dependent on imported meat and cereals, and scarcely hunted or foraged the resources of the local forest. They seem to be the servants of a command economy, encouraged to keep their minds on the job.

Zurich-Alpenquai : a multidisciplinary approach to the chronological development of a Late Bronze Age lakeside settlement in the northern Circum-Alpine Region

Abstract The Alpenquai lake-dwelling is located on Lake Zurich, and can be considered as one of the rare Late Bronze Age lake-dwellings with a pronounced organic-rich cultural layer in the northern Circum-Alpine region. Within a larger research project, investigating the final abandonment of the lakeshores in the Circum-Alpine area at the end of the Late Bronze Age, this settlement has been investigated using a multidisciplinary research design. Combining micromorphology, archaeobotany, palynology, archaeozoology and material culture studies, the formation of the site is reconstructed, and the reasons for its final abandonment are sought. A highly dynamic lake system that caused a lake water level rise before 900 BC, a regression in the second half of the 9th century BC, and a later transgression, could be detected. The settlement appears to have been established during the lake regression, and abandoned during the transgression, proving a high degree of environmental adaptation by its inhabitants.