The Neolithic was a period of remarkable communal enterprises. Against this backgroun.... ag grave

The British archaeologist Colin Renfrew characterized the change as one from group orientation to individualized chiefdom, and this change was essential for the emerging Early Bronze Age communities. The form of the grave and the character of the funerary ceremonies changed substantially during the Bronze and Iron ages. This suggests that in this type of community there would be leading families, marked by their grave goods, and that wealth and status would tend to be inherited through the male line (since male children had richer grave goods than female children). This differentiation was not directly based on access to power, possessions, or absolute wealth, and, in most areas of temperate Europe, social differentiation until the 1st millennium was likely moderate. Outside the Mediterranean area, there were few differences between the size and plan of most of the structures within individual sites, although the sites within a region often were internally ranked in terms of! size and complexity, which suggests that they had different functions. Such tiered settlement systems came into being in the Early Bronze Age in areas such as southeastern Europe, and they were quite prominent during the Late Bronze Age in the Lusatian Culture of Poland and northeastern Germany as well as in the Urnfield Culture of central Europe. A clear social and political hierarchy was, however, lacking from the Bronze Age settlement pattern. In central Europe the extended farmsteads were in time supplemented by both unenclosed and defended hilltop sites, as was also the case in the area of the Late Bronze Age Lusatian complex in Poland and neighbouring areas. The fortified settlements were usually large planned enterprises, rather than organic village sprawl, and they were often erected over a few years; an example is the Lusatian defended settlement at Biskupin, Pol., where a settlement of 102106 houses estimated to shelter some 1,000 to 1,200 people was built in jus! t one year. The fortified sites and enclosed villages of the E! uropean Bronze Age show centralized decision-making and capacities for planning and constructing grand enterprises. Differences in wealth and status in terms of both individuals and households were reflected in graves as well as settlements. This period saw the building of permanent fences and enclosures around fields and farms; the development of villages and, within these, increasing differentiation of the sizes of individual buildings; and increased stratification between settlements, with proto-urban centres coming into being. In this process, the defended hilltop settlement of the Early Iron Age was increasingly replaced by more complex sites. The site, located at the junction of the Danube and the Paar rivers, was occupied from about 200 and developed rapidly from a small undefended village to a large walled settlement. The beginning of the Iron Age was in many areas marked by change in burial rites. The central grave was robbed in antiquity, but it had been an inhuma! tion grave within a wood-lined chamber, which acted as the display area for the wealth of the deceased. Thereafter inhumation graves became more widespread in central Europe and neighbouring areas, and they were the main burial form until the 2nd century , when formal burial rites disappeared in many regions and cremation was reintroduced in others. In central and eastern Europe a new regional complex had developed northwest of the Black Sea, in which there were both inhumation and cremation graves clustered in large cemeteries. In the area of the lower reaches of the Dnepr, Dnestr, and Don rivers, rich Scythian graves have been excavated in the form of shaft and pit graves; in these, the deceased was accompanied by a number of other humans and by horse burials. In this area the social differentiation present in the settlements and the wealth displayed by a few large hoards were not expressed in the graves, and, while large numbers of the population were given formal burial! s, their social statuses were not explicitly expressed in this ritual. ! The Late Iron Age inhumation graves in Yorkshire are almost identical to wagon graves in northern France, and there must have been very specific and personal contacts between the two areas to account for this. There were odd kinks in the progression from the minimal ranking of the earliest Bronze Age to the proto-urban state of the Late Iron Age. Throughout the Metal Ages in Europe, new social institutions came into being and the relationships between people changed. ag grave