Session: #1151

Regular session

After the first agro-pastoralist societies spread throughout Europe, persistent features—such as agriculture, husbandry, and village life, among others—entered the landscape and became a main element of European prehistoric trajectories. These communities, first part of wider cultural entities, as the Linearbandkeramic or Impressa circles, developed into more regionalized groups, where, however, big trends as Megalithism reflect how deeply connected those societies were.

By the end of the 4th millennium and during the 3rd millennium BC, a Great Acceleration—similar, but at a different scale, to the one that characterizes the 3rd millennium AD—took place in diverse areas of Europe.

The archaeological record reflects an unprecedented demographic growth and complexification of economic, technological, pottery production, social, and symbolic aspects of life and death, strongly related to inter-regional and long-distance contacts.

This session welcomes all who want to debate the ways and scenarios in which the 4th and 3rd millennia BC Big Changes took place, from demographic growth to settlement patterns, exotic consumption, and social changes also paying attention to enduring features that, side by side with change, shaped prehistoric societies.

Great Acceleration, 4th millenium BC, 3rd millenium BC, Europe, Social complexity, Cultural change

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Mariana Diniz (Portugal) ^1,2,3

Enrique Cerrillo (Spain) ^4,5,6
Corina Gottardi (Switzerland) ⁷
Delphine Schiess (Switzerland) ⁷
Kerkko Nordqvist (Finland) ⁸