THETIMESOFTHEIRLIVES · The times of their lives: towards precise narratives of change in the European Neolithic through formal chronological modelling

This proposal offers ground-breaking progress towards the construction of much more precise chronologies for the Neolithic period in Europe, through the complementary expertise of the P-I and Co-I in Neolithic archaeology and Bayesian statistical analysis respectively. The proposed project would provide much more precise timings of key features and trends in the European Neolithic sequence than are currently available, and much more precise estimates of the duration of events and phenomena, principally through the application of formal chronological modelling in a Bayesian statistical framework. From these it would open up fundamental new insights into the tempo of change through the detailed study of selected sites and situations across the span of the European Neolithic, especially in the sixth, fifth and fourth millennia cal BC. At stake is our ability to study the lives of Neolithic people everywhere at the scale of generations and even decades, as opposed to the more usual scale of centuries. The proposed project would develop the types of application of Bayesian chronological modelling currently undertaken and would offer the beginnings of a new kind of European prehistory, and the opportunity to rethink wider archaeological approaches to the study of time.The legacy of the project would be a series of case studies published in papers in leading journals, two books, and a series of seminars and conference presentations and sessions designed to reinforce best practice for the future.