This essay is part of a critical analysis of the use of the past in present-day society. Different types of past (e.g. heroic or domesticated pasts) are created in different contexts such as books and films, and in the landscape and in urban settings. History has become the dominant ideology of the present, in the interest of nationalist and other social groupings. The changing way in which the past is constructed through time is illustrated with the case of Denmark.

This paper examines Gotlandic picture stones and their relation to death rituals in Scandinavia from AD 400 to 1100. The stones are shown to mediate, as ‘doors’, between the living and the dead, and their iconography can be related to a specific form of narrative which may also have been relevant to ship burial on the mainland. The interaction between this tradition of burial and Christianity is discussed.

This paper argues that archaeologists should become more critical of the assumptions they work from when studying prehistoric settlements in Europe, stressing that we must learn to recognise the difference of the past. Traditional studies of Later Prehistoric settlements ask a limited range of questions of the data and portray past worlds which are immediately familiar to our own lived experience. The paper argues that such visions run the danger of being ‘modernist fantasies in prehistory', suggesting that it is possible to avoid writing the past as if it were the same as the present. Offering a contrastive archaeology of Later Prehistoric settlements in Southern England, it illustrates a very different past to that of our expectations through considerations of how material entered the archaeological record, the symbolic aspects of settlement layout, and the nature of past subjectivities.

The rise of the Greek city state and political community; art histories of the evolution of archaic and classical Greek style: against a backdrop of such grand narratives is considered the design of a perfume jar belonging to the style known as proto-Korinthian. Lines of thought and connection are drawn which reach into pottery production and pictorial imagery (of a studied sample of some 1930 pots), pointing beyond through the whole economic life-cycle of the artefact, from production to exchange and consumption. In contrast to those processual social archaeologies that set artefacts in a narrow context of social rank, status, and community interaction, reducing style to an expression of ‘society', context is defined pragmatically according to what is suggested in an encounter or interpretation of this particular pot. The result is an attempt to work with the archetypical archaeological relation between the particular and the general in a theoretical framework arising from ‘ post-processual’ discussions of the style and meaning of material culture. Insights are pro-vided into the cultural and ideological milieu of an aristocratic state under pressure and change. It is argued that the changes in pot design known as proto-Korinthian began as creative experiment with the articulation of risk and identity, violence and transgression, through definitions of the body and alterity. The painted images later clarify in their visual ideology of a realm of aristocratic masculinity detached from the domestic. Challenges are set for conventional art histories and processual archaeology, while a wide range of issues is raised concerning the archaeological construction and understanding of culture.

Starting with the recognition that cemeteries are not the only places in which death can be studied, the paper surveys the evidence for ‘burials within settlements’ of the early- and middle-Neolithic period of central Europe and tries to place it within the wider context of the spatial and social organisation of death in Neolithic society. Contrary to earlier hypotheses it can be argued that burials within settlements, although far from being the dominant mode of the disposal of the dead, nevertheless formed an integral part of early-Neolithic burial practices. This becomes especially obvious when we compare the evidence of formal and demographic characteristics available so far with the data from contemporary cemeteries. Some hypotheses are raised concerning the extent of these practices and their possible social and symbolic meaning. Notwithstanding the great number of questions that have to remain unanswered, the available evidence makes unmistakably clear that, in Neolithic times, not only the peoples in the near East or in atlantic Europe but also those living in central Europe held complex and long-lasting burial rituals and funerals, which created a permanent tie between the living and the dead.

In the present paper an attempt is made to use the palaeodemographic variables to explain a particular cultural situation in two Neolithic cultures in central Europe: the Linienbandkeramik culture and the Corded-Ware culture. The ecological-cultural approach has been applied to that study. The demographic situation has been estimated using the coefficient of potential reproduction (Rpot) and the parameter from the death table – the expected life span at the age of twenty. Populations of the Linienbandkeramik culture show very similar but low variables of these indices which correspond with their economic system, highly inefficient in the natural and cultural environment of temperate Europe. On the contrary palaeodemographic variables of the Corded-Ware culture populations present considerable differences – from the highest values among those using a husbandry mode of production (Odra-Vistula region) to the lowest for groups with dominant agricultural occupations (Saxony, Thuringia).

This paper examines pollen evidence for early agriculture in Denmark. After a general introduction to the problems at issue, the specific data from burial mounds of the different TRB phases are considered. Problems of survival and recovery are identified. The early-Neolithic spectra indicate two agricultural methods producing small cleared areas. In the middle Neolithic there was widespread use of secondary woodlands for swidden cultivation and pasture. Pollen analyses from Single-Grave barrows in western Jutland show differring methods of agriculture.

Archaeological research commissioned and funded by third parties is a rapidly expanding activity of archaeologists in many European countries. Cross-frontier contract archaeology, however, is a comparatively new phenomenon. Archaeologists in Amsterdam have a year's experience in this field, through the activities of RAAP (Regional Archeologisch Archiverings Project).