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This paper examines the political, legal and organisational aspects of rescue excavations carried out in advance of motorway construction in Poland during the 20 years that have elapsed since this development-led archaeology programme was first implemented. This analysis, which is deliberately one-sided, tries to determine why this comprehensive and ambitious programme was downgraded ten years after its launch and now bears little resemblance to the original concept. Why, despite the existence of an appropriate legal framework and the supervision of the National Heritage Protection Service, was it possible to breach the basic provisions of the European Convention on the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage (La Valetta, 1992), which states that rescue excavations should be governed by the principles of scientific research? The authors believe that the successful implementation of complex, long-term and costly projects funded by the public purse does not depend solely on having legal and organisational structures in place as well as professionals with the relevant experience to call on. Critical factors, particularly in countries emerging from authoritarian rule, as was the case with Poland at the turn of the century, include the (often changeable) political will of government, a lack of public engagement with archaeology and the absence of widely accepted professional standards in archaeological practice.

The settlement of Racot 18 in the western Polish lowlands is used as a case study in the investigation of continued development and expansion following initial Neolithic beginnings, and in the formal chronological modeling, in a Bayesian framework, of settlement development. The site belongs to the Late Lengyel Culture of the later 5th millennium CAL B.C., and represents the intake of new land following earlier initial colonization. The formally estimated chronology for the settlement suggests individual house biographies spanned from as little as a generation to over a century; distinctive substantial buildings from late in the sequence may have lasted longest. Racot 18 is compared to its formally modeled context of the later 5th millennium CAL B.C.

The repetitive and highly structured domestic architecture of Catalhoyuk is a distinctive feature of this important Neolithic settlement. At the very end of the sequence, however, excavations on the surface of the East Mound reveal changes in household construction and burial chambers. Bayesian analysis of 56 AMS radiocarbon dates from these layers allow the date and pace of these changes to be established in detail. Settlement activity on the East Mound ceased just after 6000 cal BC, and was followed by the cessation of Neolithic burial activity a few decades later.

The aim of this article is to report on the remains of the first permanent Linear Pottery culture (LBK) settlement to be recorded in Eastern Pomerania, at a site in Kościelna Jania. Exceptional aspects of this discovery include the presence of what had very probably been longhouses, the large number of artefacts, the site’s far-northern location in relation to large LBK enclaves and the relatively early date to which it has been attributed – namely, the onset of the Notenkopf phase. The authors discuss the implications of this discovery on interpretations of the Neolithisation process in the southern Baltic coastal region. One of the key issues to resolve is where contact between farming societies and hunter-gatherer communities occurred and whether these encounters were sporadic or reasonably regular resulting, for example, from these groups living in close proximity to one another

In the Editorial for the special edition on Neolithic Housesholds, we introduce the history of house and household studies in European Neolithic Archaeology and outline the papers in this collection.

The Brześć Kujawski culture emerged in the Polish Lowlands in the second half of the 5th millennium BC. It shares many characteristic features with Chalcolithic cultures of the Carpathian Basin indicating that BKK communities belonged to the wider ‘late Lengyel interaction sphere’. However, there are very striking regional distinctions in the material culture of these communities, which appear to reflect a conscious attempt to emphasize local identity, incorporating both innovation and conservatism. This article focuses on one of the most distinctive features of this culture – trapezoidal longhouses, presented here in the context of astonishingly various and hierarchical settlement system of the BKK. In this respect the iconic character of houses expressed by the uniformity of their form and size, seems to be a deliberate decision that stressed local identity in reference to the LBK heritage as well as other contemporary communities inhabiting the Polish Lowlands in the 5th millennium BC.

This article explores the character of social transformations within Late Neolithic and Early Chalcolithic communities of central Anatolia. This comprises the demise of neighbourhood communities that formed the social basis of the Early Neolithic period and the emergence of the household as a well-defined and autonomous entity. These changes are examined by focusing mainly on settlement patterns, the organisation of space and changes in architecture. The transformations are examined on the microscale, using Çatalhöyük as a case study, and on a regional scale focused on three areas of central Anatolia: the Beyşehir-Seydişehir area, the Konya plain and the Cappadocian region.