RENEW – From Refuse to Resource: Ceramic and Bone Wastescapes in the Early Neolithic of Europe
Project team Freie Universität Berlin
Principal investigator: Prof. Dr. Henny Piezonka
Postdoctoral researcher: Dr. Bruno Vindrola-Padrós
Doctoral researcher: Meghan Bebee
Project team University of York
Principal investigator: Prof. Dr. Penny Bickle
Co-investigator: Prof. Dr. Oliver Craig
Postdoctoral researcher: NN
Technician: Becky Knight
Fig. 0. Institutes and funding institutions
Collaboration partners:
Prof. Dr. Ivan Cheben, Senior researcher, Institute of Archaeology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Nitra (Slovakia).
Prof. Dr. Martin Furholt, Institute for Pre- and Protohistoric Archaeology & Cluster of Excellence ROOTS, Kiel University, Kiel (Germany)
Prof. Dr. Barbara Horejs, Scientific Director and Head Department of Prehistory & WANA-Archaeology, Deputy Executive Director, Austrian Archaeological Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences (Austria).
Prof. Dr. Jacek Kabaciński, Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poznań (Poland).
Dr. Ulrike Sommer, Senior Lecturer, Institute of Archaeology, University College London, London (United Kingdom).
Dr. Cristian Virag, Researcher, Satu Mare Museum, Satu Mare (Romania).
Project start:
01.02.2026
Project funding:
DFG-AHRC, Seventh call (project no. 566596101)
The Project
Fig 1. Project researcher Dr. Bruno Vindrola-Padrós investigating a Neolithic potsherd under a microscope (Photo: Sara Anna Jagiolla, CAU Kiel).
“ReNEW. From refuse to resource: Ceramic and bone wastescapes in the early Neolithic of Europe” is a joint project led by Prof. Henny Piezonka at Freie Universität Berlin (Germany) and Prof. Penny Bickle at the University of York (UK) which is funded by the German Research Council in Germany and the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK. The international research programme involves partner institutions in Austria, Germany, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and the United Kingdom.
Under the current climate of uncertainty about how to manage the monumental amounts of waste poured into our environment each year, our project places this waste crisis into an archaeological perspective: Focusing on the Neolithic period, we investigate the key moment in European prehistory where human groups started producing and living alongside the (at the time) unprecedented amounts of waste.
The Neolithic – a new “thing-heavy” world
Around 8000 years ago, Near Eastern migrants introduced farming, sedentary lifestyles, more populous settlements and various technological innovations, like pottery and grinding stones, in the southern Balkans. Within a few centuries, these populations spread in two strands north-west along the Danube and into the heart of Europe, and westwards along the Adriatic and Mediterranean coastlines towards Iberia.
The pressures of sedentism, intensive farming and population increase brought many immediate consequences, most notably a considerable increase in the production of waste, largely consisting of pottery and animal bone fragments. As populations no longer opted to move their residential areas to contend with waste - a strategy commonly employed by hunter-gatherer populations - Europe started transforming into, in the words of British archaeologist Prof. Dr. John Robb, a ‘thing-heavy world’.
Fig 2. Map of the extension of Early Neolithic settlements in central and south-eastern Europe in the Danube migratory route with boundaries with Mesolithic sites in northern Europe. Four archaeological sites, ranging from the Balkans to the Baltic coast, are examined as examples (Image source: Martin Furholt / CAU Kiel, with modifications).
Our project seeks to develop a more thorough understanding of how these pressures unfolded in different regions of the continent, namely south-eastern, central and northern Europe, and to identify the cultural choices made by Neolithic populations to cope with ceramic and animal bone waste in these regions and what were the consequences of these choices for settled and communal life.
Where will our research be focused?
Seeking to compare different Neolithic trajectories, ReNEW compares three different regions of the continent, including south-eastern, central and northern-central Europe.
At the heart of the Balkan peninsula in south-eastern Europe, Starčevo-Körös-Criș communities built flat settlements with conglomerations of dugout features, such as pit complexes for storage, oven pits and so called 'pit houses’. As communities repeatedly dug into the earth for building, storage, and other activities, they created ready-made spaces that later became places of deposition. Much of their waste, such as broken pottery, animal bones, and other debris, would have ended up in these pits. However, a central question remains: How exactly were these materials dealt with, and what were their affordances and further functions, before entering pits?
In central Europe, communities of the Linearbandkeramik followed a somewhat different path. Although they also dug pits around their houses and settlements, the overall accumulation of waste appears to have been lower. This suggests that new practices may have emerged to limit how much material ultimately ended up discarded. While peripheral pits of the same type as in Starčevo-Körös-Criș existed, houses were now primarily timber-framed structures flanked by longpits, where most waste is found. There is a notable shift compared to the clay-centred world in the Balkans, with diminishing use of clay as a building material, reduced variation of vessel shapes, and reduction of certain artefact types such as figurines. Early studies were optimistic that refuse areas represented specific household activity zones, but whether material was reused or middened before final deposition is debated.
In other areas of Europe, these aforementioned processes and connected pressures took longer to develop. At the turn of the Neolithic, the Baltic coast and south Scandinavia were occupied by hunter-fisher groups of the Ertebølle tradition. They produced their own specific pottery which was disposed of in shell middens and thick refuse layers. From around 4200 cal BC onwards, farming lifeways began to be adopted slowly by the local population, albeit with a small influx of new people. Neolithic Funnel Beaker pottery gradually replaced the older hunter-fishing traditions at coastal sites that were often continuously occupied, with middens and discard zones persisting. Thus, comparative studies of use and disposal practices are needed to understand how and why these strategies to deal with waste continued, and how they were affected by the introduction of farming.
Fig 3. A Neolithic pit fill of a Starčevo-Körös-Criș site in northwest Romania (Photo: Ulrike Sommer / UCL London).
How will the ‘strategies’ to contend with waste be identified?
Our research focuses on reconstructing the lifecycle of use, reuse and discard of ceramic vessels and animal bones, and determining and comparing the spatial patterns where ceramic and bone waste were discarded. Over 35,000 ceramic fragments of vessels and clay objects, as well as several thousands of animal bones, will be examined from four case studies in the aforementioned regions: Svinjarička Čuka (Serbia), Tășnad Sere (Romania), Vráble (Slovakia) and Dąbki (Poland). The former three correspond to Early Neolithic farming settlements and the later a Mesolithic-Neolithic transitional site.
Cutting-edge organic residue analyses are conducted to find out how pottery vessels were used before being discarded, if these vessels were treated differently according to their previous functions when being discarded, and what might have gone in along with vessels in waste deposits. Modern laboratory techniques using Transmission Electron Microscopy inform the researchers whether animal bones were cooked before being discarded.
The microscopic analysis of patterns of wear in ceramic and animal bone fragments will also allow the team to determine how waste was repurposed in settlements. Some common secondary uses of sherds in the Early Neolithic include scrapers and smoothers for pottery manufacture, spindle whorls, vessel supports, and heat-retainers (Figure 3), while bone tools are often reshaped into sharp points and polishers.
A newly developed automated digital method for analysing the extent of erosion of fragments can help determine how long material was left exposed to the elements and to what extent were these materials dumped in a systematic way or sporadically scattered across settlements (Figure 4). Histological analysis is also incorporated as a technique for allowing us to answer similar questions about bone degradation.
Fig. 4. Automated computational imaging techniques for quantitative analysis of ceramic degradation (Image source: Bruno Vindrola-Padrós / CAU Kiel & FU Berlin).
ReNEW will be the largest study on prehistoric waste management practices known to date, involving archaeological sites from four different countries and spanning over one thousand years of prehistory.
A central contribution is to question the assumption that waste accumulation is an unavoidable result of human behaviour. Instead, the findings will show how so-called ‘waste crises’ are produced by particular historical and social contexts, that can be managed, influenced and possibly even turned into something useful?
Project publications
Vindrola-Padros, B., Bickle, P., Craig, O., Piezonka, H. 2026 (in press). Immer mehr Dinge – wie die Neolithisierung das Leben mit Müll veränderte. Archäologie in Deutschland 3/2026, 26-27.
Related publications from the team
Bickle, P., 2020. The structure of chaos: decay and deposition in the Early Neolithic, in: Hofmann, D. (Ed.), Magical, Mundane or Marginal? Deposition Practices in the Early Neolithic Linearbandkeramik Culture. Sidestone Press, Leiden, pp. 181–204.
Bickle, P., Whittle, A., 2013. The First Farmers of Central Europe. Diversity in LBK Lifeway. Oxbow Books, Oxford.
Bickle, P., Denis, S., Souvatzi, S., 2024. Death and the settlement: integrated approaches to domestic and funerary archaeologies. World Archaeology 56, 475–483. https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2024.2632475
Carretero, L.G., Lucquin, A., Robson, H.K., McLaughlin, T.R., Dolbunova, E., Lundy, J., Moretti, G., Courel, B., Bondetti, M., Berihuete-Azorín, M., Groß, D., Kabaciński, J., Kittel, P., Kostyleva, E., Lozovskaya, O., Mazurkevich, A., Philippsen, B., Skorobogatov, A., Smolyaninov, R.V., Meadows, J., Heron, C., Craig, O.E., 2026. Selective culinary uses of plant foods by Northern and Eastern European hunter-gatherer-fishers. PLOS ONE 21, e0342740. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0342740
Craig, O.E., Saul, H., Lucquin, A., Nishida, Y., Taché, K., Clarke, L., Thompson, A., Altoft, D.T., Uchiyama, J., Ajimoto, M., Gibbs, K., Isaksson, S., Heron, C.P., Jordan, P. 2013. Earliest evidence for the use of pottery. Nature 496, 351–354. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12109
Craig, O.E., Steele, V.J., Fischer, A., Hartz, S., Andersen, S.H., Donohoe, P., Glykou, A., Saul, H., Jones, D.M., Koch, E., Heron, C.P., 2011. Ancient lipids reveal continuity in culinary practices across the transition to agriculture in Northern Europe. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, 17910–17915. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1107202108
Piezonka, H. 2015. Older than the farmers’ pots? Hunter-gatherer ceramics east of the Baltic Sea. In: J. Kabacinski, S. Hartz, D. Raemaekers, T. Terberger (eds), The Dąbki site in Pomerania and the Neolithisation of the North European Lowlands (c. 5000-3000 cal BC). Archäologie und Geschichte im Ostseeraum 8, Rahden/Westf, 307–320.
Piezonka, H. et al. 2024. Household and Settlement Organization of Mobile Hunter-Fisher-Reindeer Herders in Western Siberia: An Ethnoarchaeological Study. In: Houle, J.-L. (ed.), Mobile Pastoralist Households. Archaeological and Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives (New York: Berghahn 2024), 120-160. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805396697
Piezonka, H., 2023. A View from the Northern Forests: Container Technologies of Boreal Hunter-Gatherers. In: Nieuwenhuyse, O., Bernbeck, R., Berghuijs, K. (eds.), Containers of Change. Ancient Container Technologies from Eastern to Western Asia. Leiden: Sidestone, 155-176.
Vindrola-Padrós, B., 2025. An Early Neolithic “broken world”: The study of pottery breakage in oldest Linearbandkeramik settlements 74, 53–88.
Vindrola-Padrós, B., 2019. Working with broken agents: Exploring computational 2D morphometrics for studying the (post)depositional history of potsherds. Journal of Archaeological Science, 104, 19-33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2019.01.008
Vindrola-Padrós, B. & Vilde, V. 2024. Unravelling ancient drilling techniques: A case of pottery repair in the Early European Neolithic. Journal of Archaeological Science,162, 105915. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2023.105915
Press releases and news articles
- https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2025/research/ancient-rubbish-early-farmers/
