The early Neolithic of Northern Europe

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. Vicki Cummings is Professor of Neolithic Archaeology at Cardiff University. Her research has focused on the start and spread of the Neolithic in Britain, Ireland and north-west Europe. She has a particular research interest in Early Neolithic monumentality, especially chambered tombs, and has excavated sites in Wales, Scotland and Ireland. More recently her work has focused on the Early Neolithic of Orkney as well as Early Neolithic kinship. She is the author of The Neolithic of Britain and Ireland and Monuments in the making: raising the great dolmens in early Neolithic northern Europe (with Colin Richards). Mathias Bjornevad-Ahlqvist is a researcher specialising in ritualised practices of the Mesolithic and Neolithic. He has particularly focused on interdisciplinary and biographical approaches to hoarding. Furthermore, he has published on heritage-related issues with Native American and First Nation objects in Danish museums, and he has worked as Research Assistant on the DFF-funded Deep Histories of Migration project, which assessed the connectivity across Northern Europe in the Early Neolithic based on the statistical analyses of ritual practices. Rune Iversen is Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on the European Neolithic, including migrations, cultural interactions, art and iconography. He is currently PI of two research projects, one of them (Deep histories of migration: the early Neolithic around the North Sea) financed by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (IRFD, Grant 0132-00022B) and co-led with Daniela Hofmann and Vicki Cummings. He is also principal editor of the Danish Journal of Archaeology.