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After a century of research, there is still no widely accepted explanation for the spread of farming in Europe. Topdown explanations stress climate change, population increase, or geographic diffusion, but they distort human action reductionistically. Bottom-up explanations stress the local, meaningful choices involved in becoming a farmer, but they do not account for why the Neolithic transition in Europe was so widespread and generally unidirectional. The real problem is theoretical; we need to consider the transformative effects of human-material culture relationships and to relate humans, things, and environments at multiple scales. This article views the Neolithic as a set of new human-material relationships which were experimented with variably but which had unintended consequences resulting in an increasingly coherent, structured, and narrowly based social world. This interplay of local human action and emergent causation made the Neolithic transition difficult to reverse locally; the Neolithic was easy to get into but hard to get out of. On the continental scale, one consequence of this was its slow, patchy, but steady and ultimately almost complete expansion across Europe. As a metamodel, this accommodates current models of the local origin of farming while linking these to emergent large-scale historical patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution responds to some issues raised by the papers in this issue by contrasting approaches to monumentality that emphasise scale and massiveness with those that concentrate on the experiential qualities of structures, and their capacity to engender memory. It is argued that there is no absolute distinction between large monuments and more intimate constructions and that monumentality can be an active force in society, rather than merely reflecting political organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]