There is a relatively large amount of evidence helpful in reconstructing the economies of Neolithic farming communities. Material relating to flint processing is only one kind of evidence among many, but analyses of the exploitation of this raw material may provide particularly valuable information (Balcer 1988: 49–51). The flint economy provides unique insights into the processes of the division of labour and emergence of distinct groups of producers of specific kinds of tools. In this paper we discuss methods of identification and study of the individual elements of extraction and processing of banded flint and of the distribution of artefacts in two successive Neolithic cultures, the Funnel Beaker (FBC), lasting from 3900 to 3100 BC (Kowalczyk 1970: 144–77; Kruk & Milisauskas 1990: 195-228), and the Globular Amphorae (GAC), which existed from 3200 to 2700 BC (Wiślański 1970: 178-231; Czerniak & Szmyt 1990: 78).

Some recent archaeological landscape projects in Czechoslovakia have found a theoretical background within the concept of ’community areas‘. According to this concept prehistoric populations are approached as divided into communities. Each community is supposed to have shared a common territory within which most of its activities were concentrated. The community area consisted of several sub-areas (e.g. habitation areas, specific production areas, funerary areas, etc.) where activities different in function were performed (Neustupny 1986; 1991). The theory of community areas is not, however, limited to the identification of community areas themselves. It is rather a general approach, based on presumption and identification of patterns or structures underlying the archaeological record and reflecting structured human behaviour in the past. Using some concepts of the community area theory, this paper aims at analysing prehistoric habitation areas in the territory of Bohemia and articulating some general hypotheses concerning settlement processes and structures on various levels of complexity.

The west coast of North America encompasses some of the richest and most diverse maritime environments on earth. Even in their presentday impoverished state, they support major commercial fisheries, large whale migrations and dense sea mammal populations. From the earliest days of European exploration, visitors such as the redoubtable Captain James Cook commented on the rich culture of Pacific coast peoples (Beaglehole 1967). ‘Their life may be said to comprise a constant meal,’ remarked Spanish friar Pedro Fages of the Chumash peoples of the Santa Barbara Channel in southern California. At European contact, between the 16th and 18th centuries AD, the shores of the Bering Strait, the Pacific Northwest and parts of the California coast supported elaborate, sophisticated and sedentary huntergatherer peoples. These decimated and muchchanged societies still enjoyed elaborate ceremonials and intricate social relations as late as the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when pioneer anthropologists such as Franz Boas and John Harrington worked among them. From these researches have come classic stereotypes of west coast peoples as ‘complex huntergatherer societies’, some of which were organized in powerful chiefdoms. Peoples like the Tlingit, the Kwakiutl and the Chumash have become the epitome of complex huntergatherers in many archaeologists’ eyes.

The results of extensive investigations in Slovakia have shed considerable light on the problems of the emergence, development and cultural and chronological interconnections of the Neolithic Lengyel culture. This includes the economy and social structure of its bearers.

Typological methods make it easy to demonstrate a local origin for the Lengyel culture, defining clearly its innovative component which was introduced from the south, from the sphere of the Vinča culture (Vinča B2/C1), then in the process of transformation, carried to the territory of the nascent Lengyel culture by the Sopot culture (S. Dimitrijevič 1968; Pavúk 1981a; Kalicz 1988). The Lengyel culture emerged on the base of the Želiezovce cultural group which gave birth to the earliest stage of the former culture – Proto-Lengyel – under impulses from and with participation of the Sopot culture. Such a fusion of local and foreign elements may well be demonstrated in pottery, especially in the development of its shapes and decoration. This process is accompanied by a major paradox: continuous development of pottery is contradicted by the discontinuity in settlement sites. Not a single site excavated either in Slovakia or in Hungary has yielded a settlement with material both from the last stage of the Želiezovce group and from the early stages of the Lengyel culture (the Bíňa-Bicske group, Lužianky, Lengyel I) which could constitute evidence for local evolution.

Three groups of the Funnel Beaker culture in the middle Neolithic have been distinguished in Poland: East, Southeast and Silesian-Moravian (Kowalczyk 1970: Jażdżewski 1984), dated to 5250–4450 b.p. (4095–3245 BC) (Wiślański 1979). The earliest research was carried out on the cemeteries of the East Group, and a variant form, the Kujavian grave type, recognized (FIGURE 1A).

Kujavian graves are usually considered to be megalithic (Midgley 1985; Hoika 1990). They have stone-bordered barrows of triangular or trapezoid shape, being on average 50–100 m long and 3.5–15 m wide (Chmielewski 1952; Jażdżewski 1969). The majority of the Kujavian graves had a central grave usually located near the base of the construction. The number of burials varies between one and four, comprising extended inhumation, with the body lying on its back in a shallow pit which was sometimes had oval settings of stones round them (Chmielewski 1952).

The Carpathian Basin and its chronology

The Carpathian Basin (FIGURE 1), irrespective of its peripheral parts, was divided in the Hallstatt period into two major cultural–geographical units, with the river Danube forming the border line. Significant changes occurred in the whole region at the beginning of the 6th century BC. The development of local groups, reaching a climax about the turn of the 7th and 6th centuries BC, was interrupted. In the broader East Alpine region this break is documented by the desertion of the majority of fortified and open settlements, and is marked by the end of burials under barrows and in flat cemeteries (Romsauer in press; Teržan 1990: 120–21). Approximately in the same period objects of Scythian origin come into use in the Great Hungarian Plain, and the Vekerzug group formed with its specific manifestations in material culture, settlement pattern and burial rite. Its traces are distributed practically all over the Plain and reach southwestern Slovakia. The earliest finds are dated to the mid 6th century BC – about 560 BC (Párducz 1974: 330; Dusek 1974: 405). The independent development of the Vekerzug group was terminated by historical Celtic expansion at the beginning of the La Tène B2 phase, dated, in general, to the mid 4th century BC (Bujna 1982: 377f., 397f.). During its 200 years of existence, the Vekerzug group acted as an important cultural link between the regions within the reach of the expanding Classical world.

The northern Northwest Coast supported some of the most socially complex hunting and gathering societies on the Pacific Coast. The Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian of this region share a rich ethnographic history that reveals hereditary social ranking, sedentary villages, intensive warfare, part-time craft specialization and dense populations. Models developed to explain the origins of social and political complexity among these groups have covered the gamut of theories presented for the rise of complexity in state level societies. As will be demonstrated, not only have archaeologists failed to present a theory that explains the rangeof variability in the data, but on the northern Northwest Coast, the actual timing of the origins of political complexity is suspect.

Between 1967 and 1979 the Institute of History of Material Culture of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the State University of New York at Buffalo carried out a joint programme of archaeological field research on Neolithic and early Bronze Age (EBA) sites in southeastern Poland. As part of this programme in 1967-9 and 1971-3 Professor Jan Machnik conducted archaeological investigations at Iwanowice on a wedge-shaped elevation known as Babia Góra (50 12 14 E, 19 58 30 W, FIGURE 1). The site, some 8 ha in area (520 × 230 m), lies on the borderline between the Cracow-Częstochowa and Miechów Uplands, some 20 km north of Crakow on a hill spur overlooking the Dłubnia river valley. Babia Góra is built of siliceous limestone heavily laced with flint nodules covered by a thick mantle of loess. The entire area of the site is now under cultivation.

The chronological sequence of the latest phases of prehistory in Central Europe is a critical question, concerning the relationship between the Hallstatt and La Téne periods, and their regional variants. My aim in this article is to draw attention to one source of chronological evidence, the pronounced Late Hallstatt pottery form which is represented by the bowl with curved neck and sharply carinateded belly, the ‘Knickwandschale’. The genesis of this form may be looked for in cups of the Middle Hallstatt period (Hallstatt C2–D1), and its final development in the Early La Téne period (La Téne A–Bl). Its long tradition and morphological development, together with its extraordinarily broad geographical distribution, make it one of the leading types for relative chronological periodization of the Late Hallstatt and Early La Téne periods as well as for the synchronization of cultural development in central Europe (FIGURE 1).

The emphasis on temporal and geographic scale of the French Annales school of history (cf. Braudel 1980; Baker 1984; Lewthwaite 1988) is the inspiration for this paper. Braudel (1980) divides time into three durations: short term events (days, weeks, months, a few years), medium length conjunctures (years, decades, even major portions of centuries), and longterm structures (which may last centuries, even millennia). This last duration is the longue durée. Basic to Annales’ thought – and the longue durée – is the idea that to understand historical developments, to explain their causes and dynamics, one must know their temporal and their geographic scale; one must know what happened at their edges and their centre, why they developed and why they passed away; and how they changed during their span. To do this, since we cannot assume we know the scales relevant to the phenomena which interest us (Braudel 1980), we must continually play different temporal and geographic scales off against each other.

To the west of the village of Mikowice (which lies 40 krn southeast of Wrocław) inside a large wooded tract on an extensive kame plateau a dozen or so barrow fields were discovered (FIGURE 1) in the 1920s-30s. The two largest burial grounds (the ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ fields) comprise some 3 to 4 score tumuli (FIGURE 2) .

The ‘western’ burial ground has for many years attracted the attention of archaeologists. Following a meticulous recording and preparation of a contour plan of the site between 1926 and 1934 (Hellmich 1938: 226–28), 11 features were excavated under the supervision of L.F. Zotz, G. Raschke, K. Tackenberg and K. Petersen of Breslau (modern Wroclaw) (Zotz 1930: 81–4; 1934: 108–12). The excavations had a rescue character as intensive extraction in adjacent sand pits was seriously damaging the cemetery, having reduced the surviving number of barrows to 24.

The village of Jakuszowice (Kielce Voivodship, Kazimie za Wielka Commune) lies some 50 km northeast of Cracow on a loess upland situated on the left bank of the river Nidzica, tributary of the Vistula. In 1911, during sand extraction, an extremely rich burial was discovered. It contained the bones of a young man and a horse as well as a long sword and several bronze, silver and gold objects (Åberg 1936; Lászlo 1951; Harmatta 1951; Werner 1956; Nosek 1959). The grave is dated to the first half of the 5th century AD, probably before 430 on the basis of artefacts made in the Soesdala-Untersiebenbrunn style. The grave goods show clear affinities with many other ‘chieftain's graves’ which occur in an area stretching from the western part of the Eurasian steppe to western Europe – most densely in the Carpathian Basin, where they are associated with the period of Hunnic domination (Werner 1956: 82–95, map 8). Most noteworthy in this context is the gold-foil covered model of a Central Asiatic reflex bow, considered by certain scholars to be a symbol of authority (Harmatta 1951; Lászlo 1951).

The problem of identification of the earliest Slavic settlement in central Europe drew researchers’ attention to the archaeological finds of the Late Roman and Migration periods. The simple hand-made pottery of this period in the northern Danube region showed a certain formal resemblance to the vessels of Early Slavic cultures, which provoked the idea of a direct time connection between the first wave of the Slav expansion from the east and the horizon of the preceding Germanic settlement in this territory. A find group from northeast Slovakia, known mainly from the small settlement at Presov (Chropovský 1962; Točík 1965; Chropovský & Ruttkay 1985), the ’Prešov‘ type, seemed to provide the geographical connection of this ethnic shift. However, different opinions were also expressed, pointing to a possible relationship with the Late Przeworsk culture milieu (Budinský-Krička 1963: 36–7), or connecting the genesis of the Prešov finds with the development of local settlement of the Later Roman period (Lamiová-Schmiedlová 1969: 478; Kolník 1980: 202). Investigations in the North Carpathian area has provided new evidence during the last few years enabling a first evaluation of its settlement.

The central portion of the California ‘culture area’ is a microcosm of the larger California province, which is a patchwork of landforms, microclimates and hydraulic régimes. There are large coastal bays, rugged scrubby foothills, broad intermontane valleys with massive river systems and extensive deltaic wetlands (FIGURE 1).