Landscapes as Social Spaces and Ritual Meaning: Some New Results on TRB in Northern Germany

Since 2009, a Priority Program of the German Research Foundation (DFG) deals with the Funnel Beaker Period in Northern Germany, focussing, in a holistic approach, on the conjunction of social structures and the erection of monuments. To this end, evidence for subsistence patterns, social organisation, communication and networks are considered in a diachronic perspective. Spatial structures and chronologies are re-evaluated and adjusted in the light of new excavation results, scientific data and statistical analysis, environmental and economic data are presented and discussed. Several new fieldwork projects are introduced, and their results are combined into the frame of an overall picture of Funnel Beaker societies which are to be described as a complex mosaic of regionally diverse patterns, different sequences of temporal change and distinct spheres of social interaction. Finally, a discussion of the role of monuments in social reproduction together with considerations towards demographic trends leads to a model of social change reaching from cooperative actions to collective dictions of individual social roles and a rise of social inequalities.