This paper will consider the insights provided by integrating isotopic and other bioarchaeological methods, with the archaeological context, on the social organisation and diversity of LBK lifeways. Dietary isotopes speak to more subtle and localised distinctions of variation, against a backdrop of wide-spread similarity. Isotopic analysis of human mobility suggest the presence of distinctly gendered lifeways in the LBK. However, questions remain about how such scales of diversity played out in different regions and how lifeways changed across the five or so centuries for which the LBK persisted. The paper will thus also discuss the emerging results of the project Counter Culture: investigating Neolithic social diversity (Arts and Humanities Research Council UK, grant number: AH/R002622/1, 2018-2020, PI: P. Bickle), which is seeking to integrate existing and new isotope data with the refined radiocarbon chronologies now being produced for the early and middle Neolithic in central Europe (e.g. Denaire et al. 2017).

Denaire, A., Lefranc, P., Wahl, J., Bronk Ramsey, C., Dunbar, E., Goslar, T., Bayliss, A., Beavan, N., Bickle, P. and Whittle, A. 2017. The cultural project: formal chronological modelling of the early and middle Neolithic sequence in Lower Alsace, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 24, 1072–1149.