eve of destruction?

Daniela Hofmann is Professor of Archaeology at Bergen University, where she teaches and researches mainly on the Neolithic of Europe. Her current interests include migration, kinship, ritual, social inequality and resistance to it, as well as social contacts and change (see the forthcoming co-authored volume Negotiating migrations. The archaeology and politics of mobility, 2024, and the co-edited outreach publication Migration narratives in archaeology, 2023). In her projects, she tries to combine theoretical considerations with a variety of methods, including bioarchaeological information, in an effort to write narratives that take into account different perspectives. She hopes that knowing about diversity in the past could help us create a fairer society today, but has doubts on whether this is actually working. Doris Mischka is Professor for Prehistoric Archaeology at the Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Previously, she worked at the Universities of Göttingen, Kiel, Bologna and Cologne. Her publications are devoted mainly to the Linear Pottery culture, the Funnel Beaker culture and Cucuteni-Tripyllia. She is also interested in landscape archaeology and has worked on lithics and pottery. Her most recent publications include an exhaustive study of the Neolithic burials in Flintbek (Das Neolithikum in Flintbek, Kr. Rendsburg-Eckernförde, Schleswig-Holstein. Eine feinchronologische Studie zur Besiedlungsgeschichte anhand von Gräbern, 2022), and co-editorship of a landmark introductory work on the Neolithic of Bavaria (Steinzeit in Bayern. Das Handbuch in 2 Bänden, 2023, with T. Uthmeier). Currently she conducts fieldwork in Romania. Silviane Scharl is Professor for Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Cologne. One focus of her research is on the central European Neolithic, where she has published extensively on networks of innovation and on human mobility (see e.g. Human mobility and the spread of innovations – case studies from Neolithic Central and Southeast Europe. Open Archaeology 9/1, 2023). She has also written an introductory volume on the Neolithic in central Europe (Jungsteinzeit – Wie die Menschen sesshaft wurden, 2021). In her current project, she explores the Late Neolithic in the Rhineland in western Germany.

• The pre-Corded Ware horizon in central Europe and why it matters – an introduction to the volumeDaniela Hofmann, Doris Mischka and Silviane ScharlThe times they are a-changin’. The Final Copper Age between the eastern Carpathians and the Don riverElke KaiserThe arrival of the Corded Ware in eastern Switzerland. A settlement archaeological viewNiels BleicherPots without plots? Danubian and other non-local finds in Horgen cultural contexts of the thirty-second century BC and beyond at Lake Constance and in Upper SwabiaJoachim KöningerThe time of the cord rollers. Textile-roughened pottery of the early third millennium BC and cultural transmission networks from a south-western German perspectivePhilipp GleichDecades of drought in the twenty-eighth century BC and its effects on settlement and cultureJoachim Pechtl and Alexander LandIn the middle of nowhere – Burgerroth and the Early Final Neolithic in FranconiaThomas LinkNetworks at the turn of the millennium — the situation in northern BavariaMartin NadlerLong barrows, causewayed enclosures and the long term spiritual continuity in ritual landscape around Mount Říp in Bohemia (Czech Republic)Jan Turek, Petr Krištuf and Ondřej ŠvejcarThe third millennium BC in the German lower mountain ranges: Are social ties falling apart?Clara DrummerLithics, Lousberg axes and no settlements. In search of the late fourth millennium BC in the Lower Rhine areaSilviane Scharl and Ingrid KochIn varietate concordia — united in diversity. Battle axes, coarse ware pottery and burial rituals during the Late Neolithic of western and central Europe and their meaning for the deconstruction of Final Neolithic narrativesSebastian SchultrichContinuation and change in settlement of the Polish Lowland in the period 3300–2700 BCMarzena SzmytSocietal rise, dissolution and diversity: from Funnel Beaker (TRB) societies to Single Grave groups on the North European Plain (c. 3300–2700 BC)Jan Piet BrozioGlobal transformation? Globular Amphora sedentary pastoralists 3200–2700 BCJohannes MüllerParallel societies: evidence for the co-existence of Late Funnel Beaker West and Early Corded Ware communitiesQuentin P.J. Bourgeois, Erik J. Kroon and S. Louise OlerudSame old, same old? Fisher-hunter-gatherer graves, burials and mortuary practices in the late fourth and early third millennium BC northern and eastern Baltic Sea regionMarja Ahola