Description: An Ethnography of the Neolithic provides a provocative and novel reconstruction of society in Scandinavia over a period of 3,000 years. Christopher Tilley integrates a wide range of evidence, from prehistoric landscapes to the symbolic significance of axes and pots, to recreate in an accessible way the lives of the final hunter-gatherer-fishers and first farmers in Sweden and Denmark. His skillful fusion of archaeological evidence and new anthropological approaches makes this book an original contribution to a widely debated topic.
Review Quotes: "It remains the virtue of the book that it so consistently and successfully integrates the social and symbolic and demonstrates how social and cosmological changes are related, defining an increasingly competitive and complex order of social reproduction that integrates the past and the present through complex rituals and through a ritualization of landscape....The book is a must for archaeologists and a welcome inspiration for an anthropology of material culture." Kristian Kristiansen, American Anthropologist