ABSTRACT
In the Balkans from about 6500 BC people started living their lives in new ways. This included very substantial changes in people’s relationships to each other, both within and between groups, and especially in the ways individuals thought it appropriate to identify themselves and their places of residence and activity. The changes included important alterations in people’s conceptions of the landscapes they lived in and the appropriate ways of inhabiting these landscapes. Significant changes also occurred in the particular components of the natural world that people chose to exploit, the way they exploited them and the things they did with the resources exploited. Equally importantly, daily life came to be increasingly full of a widening variety of new objects. The post-6500 BC Balkans was very much about the combination of this new materiality and the new ways in which people built social environments. Any attempt at understanding the significance of the long-term changes in the region from 6500 through 2500 BC must take account of these two developments.
