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This is the first book-length treatment of Neolithic burial in Britain to focus primarily on cave evidence. It interprets human remains from forty-eight caves and compares them to what we know of Neolithic collective burial elsewhere in Britain and Europe. It reviews the archaeology of these cave burials and treats them as important evidence for the study of mortuary practice. Drawing on evidence from archaeology, anthropology, osteology and cave science, the book demonstrates that cave burial was one of the earliest elements of the British Neolithic. It also shows that Early Neolithic cave-burial practice was highly varied, with many similarities to other burial rites. However, by the Middle Neolithic, a funerary practice which was specific to caves had developed.

Airborne LiDAR technology is widely used in archaeology and over the past decade has emerged as an accurate tool to describe anthropomorphic landforms. Archaeological features are traditionally emphasised on a LiDAR-derived Digital Terrain Model (DTM) using multiple Visualisation Techniques (VTs), and occasionally aided by automated feature detection or classification techniques. Such an approach offers limited results when applied to heterogeneous structures (different sizes, morphologies), which is often the case for archaeological remains that have been altered throughout the ages. This study proposes to overcome these limitations by developing a multi-scale analysis of topographic position combined with supervised machine learning algorithms (Random Forest). Rather than highlighting individual topographic anomalies, the multi-scalar approach allows archaeological features to be examined not only as individual objects, but within their broader spatial context. This innovative and straightforward method provides two levels of results: a composite image of topographic surface structure and a probability map of the presence of archaeological structures. The method was developed to detect and characterise megalithic funeral structures in the region of Carnac, the Bay of Quiberon, and the Gulf of Morbihan (France), which is currently considered for inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage List. As a result, known archaeological sites have successfully been geo-referenced with a greater accuracy than before (even when located under dense vegetation) and a ground-check confirmed the identification of a previously unknown Neolithic burial mound in the commune of Carnac.

Previous research on the Neolithic cist graves of the Western Alpine region—also known under the term Chamblandes type graves—mostly focused on sites located in western Switzerland and eastern France. For the adjacent Aosta Valley (Italy), only a little information is available. Within the framework of our research project, it was possible to identify about 120 stone cist graves from 10 sites in the Aosta Valley. Due to the lack of distinctive grave goods and missing absolute dating, however, their chronological position has been unclear until now. Here we present the first extensive series of radiocarbon dates from Neolithic stone cist graves of the Aosta Valley. We analyzed 31 human bone samples from four sites, and most dates indicate an unexpected early chronological position around the first half of the 5th millennium BCE, in particular, the site of Villeneuve, dating to 4800–4550 cal BCE. This identifies these burials from the Aosta Valley as belonging to the oldest known Neolithic cist graves of the Western Alpine region discovered so far. Altogether, our study provides new evidence allowing the first time to clarify the chronology of these sites and trace the evolution of this burial practice in the Western Alps.

Undisturbed megalithic burials are extremely rare because in addition to human activities, natural disturbances due to water influence and erosion or faunal activity are likely to occur over time. The dolmen of Oberbipp discovered in 2011 provides a unique opportunity for multidisciplinary research since anthropogenic and natural disturbances are minor. Morphological analysis indicates that approximately 42 individuals were buried in the grave chamber. Using archaeological methods alone, it would not have been possible to determine different occupation periods within the inhumations. Neolithic communities often reused dolmen over centuries. Therefore, radiocarbon ( 14 C) dating is the only method that can solve the question of temporal resolution. Fragments of the same bone element (right femora) were analyzed by two (in some cases three) different laboratories to date all inhumations individually. The aim of this study was threefold: (1) to determine the total occupation time of the dolmen (2) to evaluate the sequence of the burials, and (3) to compare the results of the same skeletal element from different laboratories. In total, 79 radiocarbon dating results from three different laboratories of the right femora (n = 32) were obtained. The total time span of the occupation of the dolmen was between 3350 and 2650 BC. The broad application of radiocarbon dating allowed the determination of two occupation periods within the burial.

This paper reports on the principal archaeological results of a renewed program of fieldwork in the Niah Caves (Sarawak) by an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists and environmental scientists. The paper focuses on two main themes: (1) the evidence for the changing nature of the human use of the cave and the implications of this evidence for wider debates in Southeast Asia regarding the foraging behaviors of the modern human populations who colonized the region in the later Pleistocene, and (2) the character of the later transition from foraging to farming. The first foragers visiting the caves ca. 45,000 years ago encountered much more varied landscapes than the present-day equatorial evergreen rainforest around Niah, though they were ones in which rainforest probably remained a component. A remarkable array of organic evidence indicates that the Pleistocene foragers using the caves exploited such landscapes with a combination of hunting, fishing, mollusk collection, and plant gathering, the latter including tuberous forest plants such as aroids, taro, yam, and sago palm. In the mid Holocene, when the landscape surrounding the cave was more similar to that of today, the primary use of the caves was for burials: the West Mouth of the Great Cave in particular was the location for an elaborate Neolithic cemetery that was characterized by a considerable degree of formal planning through its ca. 2500-year life. However, Neolithic people may also have used the West Mouth for habitation, as they certainly used other entrances of the cave complex. Based on present evidence, their subsistence base appears to have been forest foraging, though they were in contact with rice farmers. The remarkable antiquity and longevity of rainforest foraging knowledge and technologies at Niah appear to be among the most important conclusions emerging from the project, findings that may provide further support for arguments against the foragerfarmer dichotomy that underpins the currently dominant model of agricultural origins in Southeast Asia.

In 2007, Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology conducted survey and trial excavation to the Xiaowu Site in Lingbao City. The trial excavation recovered two tombs of early Yangshao Culture. Both of the tombs were rectangular earthen pit tombs of multiple secondary burials. The M1 of them yielded 79 individuals of human skeletons, and M2 yielded 17 individuals. The M1 was one of the large-scale multiple secondary burial tombs of the Yangshao Culture yielding the most individuals of human skeletons found to date. In the Sanmenxia area, the secondary burials of the Yangshao Culture are rare; these two secondary burial tombs found in Xiaowu Site are the first discovery of this type of burials of early Yangshao Culture in this area, and also the second collective discovery of multiple secondary burial tombs of early Yangshao Culture at the joint area of Shaanxi, Shanxi and Henan Provinces in the recent several decades, so they have significant academic values.

This concluding chapter starts by restating the importance of the intermediary period as a key to understanding funerary practice. The agency of bodies, objects and caves are central to how we understand this intermediary period. The temporality of the intermediary period is shown to be constituted by physical indices of change. This is explored by contrasting the temporality of secondary burial rites with the temporality of successive inhumation in both caves and cairns. The agency of caves is examined through studies of cave orientation and of the way that tufa and pre-existing middens act as both indices and agents of change in burials. The chapter concludes by integrating many of these approaches in two case studies of relational landscapes of Neolithic cave burial in South Wales and North Yorkshire. It is concluded that the material narratives of change around cave burial in the Neolithic led to the development of a specific rite of cave burial after around 3300 BC.

This chapter introduces two important questions for the study. It looks at the possible relationships between Neolithic cave burial and other Neolithic burial practices. It then introduces the important idea that caves and other natural places had agency and were actively incorporated into funerary rites. The chapter also introduces the data set used in the book, 48 cave sites in Britain with Neolithic radiocarbon dates on human remains. The chapter concludes by reviewing problems in interpreting this data and introduces the theoretical themes discussed in the following chapters: temporality; object agency and funerary ritual.

This chapter contains sections titled: Abstract What is Megalithic Art? The Interplay of Art and Architecture Origins and Establishing a Grammar Origins and Distribution of Painted Motifs Establishing a Very Northern Eurocentric Grammar The Irish Sea Province Connection and Beyond Defining a Northern Boundary Discussion: Variations of a Theme Acknowledgments References

Detailed taphonomic and skeletal analyses document the diverse and often unusual burial practices employed by European Neolithic populations. In the Upper Chamber at Scaloria Cave in southern Italy, the remains of some two dozen individuals had been subjected to careful and systematic defleshing and disarticulation involving cutting and scraping with stone tools, which had left their marks on the bones. In some cases these were not complete bodies but parts of bodies that had been brought to the cave from the surrounding area. The fragmented and commingled burial layer that resulted from these activities indicates complex secondary burial rites effecting the transition from entirely living to entirely dead individuals.