ABSTRACT

From the middle of the seventh millennium BC, people across the Balkans started to live in new ways.1 They began to build permanent and semi-permanent structures and they adopted clay firing as the standard technology for making containers. Over the long term, the adoption of permanent architecture and pottery vessels was to have significant consequences in altering people’s lives. Other, similarly significant developments are evident. Most obvious is a general increase in the number and range of objects that people made, used and kept within the new built environments. These objects range from bone, stone and antler tools that were all previously widespread technologies, to non-vessel ceramics such as discs and models of houses and furniture, to new plants and animals and, even, to people themselves, as seen in burials and figurine portraiture. Taken together, these elements and technologies were symptoms of profound material changes in the ways people organized their lives and the relationships within and between their communities.