Conclusions
The body of recognised evidence for Neolithic violence across Europe has increased markedly over the last few decades. This increased appreciation of the presence of violence has in turn led to much greater attention being accorded to this aspect when analysing human skeletal remains both from recent and older excavations, leading to further discoveries.
In some cases, a clear context for violence is discernible, most notably with the massacre sites of the late LBK. In other cases, however, the contexts for violence are ambiguous, and could reflect within-group conflict, up to and including homicide, as well as conflict between groups. While this certainly presents great challenges in understanding particular instances of conflict, it is possible to suggest some plausible scenarios for the broader setting. The scale of community cooperation required for the construction of large enclosures in the Neolithic was a novel development of the period, but could be co-opted for less peaceful ends. The increasing evidence for the targeting of males in lethal violence suggests a pattern in which women (and possibly children) may sometimes have been taken as captives. Cattle were likely also a prime target for raids, as they invariably represent a major source of wealth and status in those societies keeping them in any numbers, a situation which certainly describes the Neolithic across much of central and northern Europe. For much of the period there is an absence of material culture overtly glorifying warriorhood or at least none that is recognisable archaeologically. It would appear, therefore, that most men acted in this capacity when it was deemed necessary (or desirable), using weapons that were not too dissimilar from the tools used for quotidian tasks. A powerful motivation would have been revenge for real or imagined past injustices. Since such impulses are not always acted upon, and other avenues to their resolution are always possible (e.g. through compensation payments), it is possible that leaders (e.g. family or clan heads) drew upon and manipulated past events to their own ends, a well-trodden pathway to power. Thus, it seems probable that the increased scale of conflict seen in the Neolithic went hand in hand with increased socio-conomic and sociopolitical inequality, though this need not imply any unidirectional progression. As has been outlined, a great many of the insights described remain relatively novel. A major task now facing researchers in this aspect of the Neolithic is to obtain a more developed sense of the spatio-temporal variability in inequality in the European Neolithic and how this impacted on the scale and expression of violence. We would argue that the importance of the Neolithic in the development of organised violence in particular among human societies is hard to overestimate, and understanding this variation may shed more light on the conditions that promote peace as well as those that result in outbreaks of conflict.
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