https://www.offa-journal.org/index.php/jna <p>The Journal of Neolithic Archaeology provides a scientific information platform on the archaeology of the Neolithic period. The articles are mainly in German and English, and for all articles English summaries and figure captions are available.</p> <p>The Journal was originally founded in 1999 as a pioneering web-based open access online journal. Since 2003, the Journal has been edited by an international team of archaeologists.</p> <p>This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. There is no publication fee charged.</p> Institute of Pre- and Protohistoric Archaeology, CAU Kiel en-US Journal of Neolithic Archaeology 2364-3676 <p>Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:<br><br></p> <p>– Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a&nbsp;<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" target="_new">Creative Commons Attribution License</a> that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.</p> <p>– Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.</p> <p>– Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See&nbsp;<a href="http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html" target="_new">The Effect of Open Access</a>).</p> https://www.offa-journal.org/index.php/jna/article/view/1576 <p>At the start of the Middle Neolithic (5000 BCE), as the central-European Linear Pottery culture (LBK) dissolved into smaller cultural groups, the traditional making of figurative representations was either transformed or radically abandoned. For thousands of years, these clay figurines and vessels representing humans and animals had been a hallmark of Early Neolithic lifestyle. They were found in hundreds in Southeastern Europe during the 6th millennium BCE and continued to be produced as the Neolithic reached Central Europe, although in smaller numbers. By the start of the Middle Neolithic, however, figurative representations seem to have disappeared from the western LBK, or turned into highly stylised motifs. This dissolution of a thousand-year-old figurative tradition may have been the outcome of increasing collective activities and contacts with local hunter-gatherers since the start of the LBK.</p> Rebecca Bristow Copyright (c) 2025 Rebecca Bristow https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 2025-01-28 2025-01-28 1–21 1–21 10.12766/jna.2025.1 https://www.offa-journal.org/index.php/jna/article/view/1665 <p>Death is a timeless, inevitable fact of human biology and the only explanation for the absence of burials from a distinct archaeological time period is therefore most likely caused by a low visibility due to the burial mode in combination with taphonomic processes. In respect of the favourable soils and the archaeological record piled up by decades of research, the absence of burials from the second half of the 4^th millennium BC in the Nördlinger Ries area is remarkable but in line with the general scarce burial evidence from this time period in Southern Germany. Here we present a group of trapezoid structures discovered in the alluvial plain of the Eger valley near Nördlingen. Based on cremated human bones found in one of these structures we suggest the structures to have been collective burial chambers. Both the function and layout strongly resemble comparable grave chambers in Southwest Germany and may indicate that the Ries area was part of a wider tradition of non-megalithic burial structures.</p> Johann Friedrich Tolksdorf Manfred Woidich Joachim Wahl Christoph Herbig Copyright (c) 2025 Johann Friedrich Tolksdorf, Manfred Woidich, Joachim Wahl, Christoph Herbig https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 2025-06-12 2025-06-12 23–36 23–36 10.12766/jna.2025.2