Gordon Childe is a suitable name to invoke in responding to the considerable honour of delivering the Inaugural Address at the first meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists. For this is a historic occasion, and in founding such an association we are participating in the heritage left by the fathers of our discipline: such great names as C. J. Thomsen, J. J. A. Worsaae, Heinrich Schliemann, Oscar Montelius, Arthur Evans, the Abbé Breuil, and in our own day perhaps I might add the names of two such very different scholars as Sir Grahame Clark and the late Marija Gimbutas, whose absence we regret today. As Napoleon is reported to have said to his troops before the pyramids at Giza: ‘Soldats, songez que, du haut de ces pyramides, quarante siècles vous contemplent.’ Well, many more centuries of history and of prehistory look down upon us, as well as a century and a half of European archaeological scholarship. This is a notable heritage in two senses: the heritage of our European past, and the heritage of scholarship in the field of archaeology which has revealed and is revealing that past to us. But let us not forget that it is a heritage also in a more troublesome sense. For it is we as archaeologists who reconstruct (or some would say construct) that past. In this we cannot avoid doing so from the standpoint of the present, and we have the responsibility of interpreting that past for our contemporaries in the present.

Such a question would never have bothered an earlier generation of archaeologists and culture historians. In 1929 at University College London, Professor W. M. Dixon gave a series of public lectures on the distinctiveness of the English. In his lectures variously entitled The English Character, the English Soul, Shakespeare the Englishman etc., he described the generic ‘Englishman’ and his ‘genius’ and in his analysis he literally discovered that the talent of English individualism increased with degree of cultural hybridity (Dixon 1938:108):

This paper looks in detail at the evidence for cult practices during the Neolithic in Italy, especially cave sites in southern Italy. The problems of recognising cult activities are highlighted; whether the simple borrowing of ethnographic parallels or the application of ethnographically derived models such as initiation rites, rites of passage, or hunting magic. Careful contextual archaeology is used to isolate phenomena best seen as special rites rather than variation of general practice, for example the rare cremations at Grotta Continenza alongside normal inhumations. The presence of pits or stone circles, imitative creations, art, the use of ochre or clay, human remains, intentional breakage of artefacts, the deposition of animal or vegetable’ offerings’, these are just some of the elements that need special investigation when suggesting cult practices in the Neolithic. The paper argues strongly against drawing hasty conclusions or proposing appealing but speculative interpretations of supposed agricultural fertility rites, child sacrifices, or male initiation rituals, for the truth is we still know much too little about Neolithic cults or even Neolithic society.

An attempt to demonstrate the importance of a contextual approach in the interpretation of prehistoric ritual is made through a critique of Ruth Whitehouse's recent work, Underground Religion. Cult and culture in prehistoric Italy, and through a re-examination of the spatial, material, historical, and social context of the ritual use of caves in south-eastern Italy, with special reference to Grotta di Porto Badisco and other Neolithic and early-Copper-Age sites in the Salento peninsula. Alternative interpretations are offered which focus upon: variations over space and time in the use of caves for different activities; a notion of complementarity and mutuality in Neolithic gender relations; and the existence of a degree of male-bias in the archaeological evidence of the symbolic construction of gender in Grotta di Porto Badisco.

This paper ‘engenders’ the prehistory of south-eastern Europe for the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods. It discusses theoretical aspects of a gender archaeology, including three prehistoric case studies, and applies the ‘theory of mutedness’ and the ‘theory of sexual insult’ - subordinate groups using alternative methods of expression - to the female figurines of the fifth-millennium south-eastern Europe. Archaeology reveals that males were dominant in the public sphere of funerary ritual, expressed in the amount and types of grave-goods; females dominated the domestic sphere, where figurines abound. An engendered tension existed between domestic and mortuary spaces. A third, asexual gender also existed at this time (documented by asexual figurines and cenotaph burials). The third gender transcended the existing bi-gender tension and strategies of spatial restriction. The sexual imagery in the figurines is interpreted as evidence of gender tensions, rather than as evidence of matriarchical societies.

The Mierzanowice culture evolved in the early Bronze Age north of the Carpathians. By looking at settlement geography, it is proposed here that the people of the Mierzanowice culture practised arable agriculture and stock rearing in equal measure, and that they lived in micro-regions, defined by two or three main, peramanent settlements and a number of small short-lived settlements and camps for exploiting local flint resources and pasturage. They had maintained an earlier Corded Ware pastoral tradition but had been pushed into greater reliance on agriculture. The resultant culture was much more egalitarian and highly self-sufficient. A situation that was only finally to change when long-distance bronze trade brought an end to the culture.

This paper investigates two phases (1200–1000 BC and 800–700 BC) of the Bronze-Age settlement at Apalle in central Sweden, concentrating on the symbolism of the interior of houses, cooking stones, and middens. Middens of fire-cracked stones and refuse were similar to tombs in the earlier phase, their contents suggest a notion of death that included the non-human. In the early phase the middens were collectively created and central to the settlement, in the later they were more numerous but smaller, on the edges of the settlement, and more ‘private’. The houses became more open in the later phase, with fewer and less marked interior boundaries. Hearths in the houses became more important, house construction included ‘dead’ material from the middens. The changes are interpreted as reflecting growing separation between households but increasing openness within the household, and an increasing privatisation of the household's external concerns.

The paper also offers some theoretical thoughts on the nature of case studies and their relationship to general understanding.

The study proposed here, based on a representative sample (148 tombs), deals with the patterns of organization and the funerary customs in the necropolis of Pontecagnano, Salerno (over 6000 tombs dated from the ninth to the fourth century BC), during the Orientalizing period with special regard to the period between the last quarter of the eighth and the middle of the VII BC.

Through the analysis of the buried groups and of the spatial distribution it has been possible to highlight certain trends useful for the reconstruction of the social organization in its horizontal and vertical (gender, age, status, rank) and finally to propose an interpretation of certain social dynamics involving the community to which the cemetery belonged.

The resulting image is that of a society where social stratification has become permanent, and where inferior social status possibly implies exclusion from formal burial areas. The community seems to be dominated by strong kinship group loyalties, probably opposing different groups. An especially noteworthy feature is the dialectics, within the domain of funerary ideology, between male and female figures.

A central theoretical and methodological assumption of this study is that the relationship between social organization and its ‘reflection’ in funerary customs is a complex, mediated phenomenon, a perspective that has been especially outlined by certain currents of European Archaeology.

This article deals with one of the most important human needs; it summarises the poor archaeological information about basic types of drinks. Although the data both for the beginning of various types of drink as well as for their frequency are mostly insufficient in archaeology, great quantities of drinking vessels of various forms appear in the late Neolithic/Eneolithic, which allow us to identify certain types of behaviour. In particular it signals (with the aid of ethnological and historical analogies) the existence of communal drinking, a respectable social custom with important consequences: the development of the etiquette of hospitality, regulation of social relations, construction of networks of reciprocal obligations among drinkers, confirmation of the internal coherence of a community, and so on. The study of drinking has significant social, economic, and political aspects.

We always knew we would use this anecdote, but never thought it would actually be relevant to what we were writing. Vencl's paper in this volume, ‘The archaeology of thirst’, has given it real scholastic meaning.

This paper summarises German archaeologists’ interpretation of hillfort occupation and abandonment in south-western Germany from the fifth to ninth centuries AD. It argues against the dominant belief that hillfort occupation ended around AD 500 and that it was related to Merovingian conquest. The archaeological changes enumerated by Konrad Weidemann are shown to be fortuitous, illusionary, or of the wrong date, while the strongest contacts archaeologically documented continued to be with northern (Gothic then Lombardic) Italy. Merovingian hegemony is argued to have had little impact on Alamannic lordship. The lack of coinage, diocesan and monastic church organisation, and royal estates east of the Rhine during the Merovingian period are taken as proof of a less ‘advanced’ form of lordship. Changes in lordship during the Carolingian period are finally suggested to have parallels in Scotland, where hillforts much like the Alamannic Runder Berg were abandoned for ‘manors’ or villae/curtes as they appear in the Carolingian documents.

A civil case is being tried in central Sweden today, centring on disputed reindeer grazing rights between Saamis with rights to use land since time immemorial and Swedish landowners. Expert reports from both sides utilise statements by historians and archaeologists, who are called on to interpret the ‘Swedish’ or ‘Saami’ nature of prehistoric and medieval settlement The paper shows how the ‘old school’ of scholars consistently minimise past Saami presence and depict Saami culture as ‘stagnant’ while the ‘new school’ accepts the implications of medieval texts that Saamis formerly occupied territories much further south than they presently do, that the hunting-gathering tradition that still existed in central Sweden in the Middle Ages was most probably Saami, and that their adoption of Nordic words and material culture for their own use is testimony of a long process of the extention of Swedish/agricultural impact on an alien culture.