Perspectives on Socio-environmental Transformations in Ancient Europe

Johannes Müller (PhD, University of Freiburg, 1990) is a Professor and Director of the Institute for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology at Kiel University, Germany. He is the founding director of the Johanna Mestorf Academy, Speaker of the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Scales of Transformation: Human-environmental Interaction in Prehistoric and Archaic Societies’ and of the Excellence Cluster ‘ROOTS – Social, Environmental, and Cultural Connectivity in Past Societies’. He conducts research on Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe, including the challenge of interlinking natural, social, life sciences, and the humanities within an anthropological approach to archaeology. He has carried out intensive fieldwork in international teams, e.g., on Trypillia mega-sites in Eastern Europa, the Late Neolithic tell site of Okolište in Bosnia-Hercegovina, different Neolithic domestic and burial sites in Northern Germany, and Early Bronze Age sites in Greater Poland. He has also conducted ethnoarchaeological fieldwork, e.g., in India. Within the Kiel Graduate School ‘Human Development in Landscapes’, now the Young Academy of ROOTS, and the Scandinavian Graduate School ‘Dialogues of the Past’, Johannes Müller also supports international PhD projects.Wiebke Kirleis is Professor of Environmental Archaeology/Archaeobotany at the Institute for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology at Kiel University, Germany. She is deputy speaker of the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Scales of Transformation: Human-Environmental Interaction in Prehistoric and Archaic Societies’ and member of the Cluster of Excellence ‘ROOTS’. As an archaeobotanist, she is interested in all kinds of plant-related human activities, be they subsistence strategies or food processing, with their socio-cultural implications, as well as the reconstruction of human-environment interactions in the past. Geographically, her research areas span from northern Europe all way to Indonesia.Nicole Taylor is one of the Scientific Coordinators of the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 1266 “Scales of Transformation”. An archaeologist by training, she received her doctorate as a Marie Curie Fellow in the EU project “Forging Identities: The Mobility of Culture in Bronze Age Europe”. Her research has focused on the European Bronze Age, primarily in Central Europe, with foci on settlement archaeology and questions on prehistoric identities through the combination of social and isotopic analyses.

• Chapter 1. New Perspectives on Socio-environmental Transformations in Past Societies (Kirleis and Müller).- Part 1. Identification of Anatomies of Socio-environmental Transformation.- Chapter 2. Scales of Abstraction: The Kiel Conceptual Approach from Heterogeneous Data to Interpretations (Taylor et al).- Chapter 3. Conceptualising an Anatomy of Transformations: DPSIR, Theorisation, Semiotics and Emergence (Ribeiro et al).-  Chapter 4. Indicators of Transformation Processes: Change Profiles as a Method for Identifying Indicators (Engelbogen et al).- Part 2.-  Expressions of Socio-environmental Transformations: From Climate Preconditions to Decision-making.- Chapter 5. Patterns of Socio-economic Cultural Transformations in Neolithic and Bronze Age Societies on the Central Northern European Plain. (Brozio et al).-  Chapter 6. Cereal Agriculture in Prehistoric North-Central Europe and South-East Iberia: Changes and Continuities as Potential Adaptations to Climate (Schirrmacher et al).- Part 3. Perspectives on Decision-making Processes in Socio-environmental Transformations.-  Chapter 7. Creation of Cultural Landscapes: Decision-making and Perception within Specific Ecological Settings (Dörfler et al).- Chapter 8. Depicting Trypillia: Emergence and Transformation of the Realistic Style (Shatilo and Hofmann).- Chapter 9. Scales of Political Practice and Patterns of Power Relations in Prehistory (Maida et al).- Part 4. Conclusions: Ancient Change in Europe.- Chapter 10. Overarching Patterns of Ancient Transformation in Europe (Müller et al)