ABSTRACT
It is difficult enough to discuss the character of human creativity in the past, but it is doubly difficult to do so for the Neolithic period. That is because the very concept of ‘Neolithic’ is so difficult to pin down. It is a term that has often changed its meaning (Thomas 1993). Like ‘culture’, the word ‘Neolithic’ means many different things. For nineteenth-century scholars it defined a technology, a New Stone Age, distinguished from the Palaeolithic period by the use of polished stone tools. This is an approach that is no longer followed today. Second, it describes a largely new relationship between people and resources-the social changes that came about through the ownership of plants and animals. That is the sense in which the term Neolithic has been used by most prehistorians working in Europe since the early work of Gordon Childe. Thus archaeologists often write about the ‘Neolithic’ economy. But the term also describes a rather different material world, one in which portable objects seem to have been employed in more precisely regulated ways. Outside southern Scandinavia, it sees the first use of ceramics in Europe, and it provides convincing evidence for the long-distance movement of other kinds of artefacts, including axes. These seem to have been exchanged at a number of specialised monuments, and in many cases these objects appear to have been deposited with some formality once their use-life was over.
