Results

The first results of the ToTL have already been published. One of them is a paper written by  L. Czerniak et al. that was published in Journal of Field Archaeology. In this research, the settlement of Racot 18 in the western Polish lowlands was used as a case study in the investigation of continued development and expansion following initial Neolithic beginnings, and in the formal chronological modeling, in a Bayesian framework, of settlement development.

Another result of the project is a paper prepared by N. Tasić et al. published in Antiquity. The authors used as a case study the Neolithic tell of Vinča-Belo Brdo in order to answer long-standing questions about the timing and circumstances of its demise. Bayesian statistical frameworks were applied to calculate explicit, quantified estimates for site chronologies, and have been especially useful for resolving the complex probability distributions of calibrated radiocarbon dates to the level of individual prehistoric lifetimes and generations.

Chronological modelling of radiocarbon dates within a Bayesian statistical framework was also applied and discussed by A. Denaire et al. in a paper published in Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. The modelling was used to interrogate the Neolithic cultural sequence in Lower Alsace, in the upper Rhine valley, in broad terms from the later sixth to the end of the fifth millennium cal BC.

Also the theme of the life and times of the house with regards to multi-scalar perspectives on settlement from the Neolithic of the Northern Alpine Foreland was part of the ToTL results. A paper by D. Hormann et al.  in European Journal of Archaeology addressed the question of what difference having high-resolution chronology — in this case principally provided by dendrochronology — makes to the kinds of narrative we seek to write about the Neolithic. It is argued that argue that the particular history of the northern Alpine foreland is best understood by interweaving multiple temporal scales, an approach that will need to be extended to other case studies.