Not just a Single Story: Conceptualising the Diversity of Neolithic Lifeways in Central Europe

Neolithic developments in central Europe cannot be adequately described through narratives of large-scale sweeping migrations and uniform sociocultural transformations. With such accounts, diversity and hybridisation are commonly relegated to the frontiers, whereas the inner landscapes are portrayed as homogeneously transformed. This paper highlights the biases that sustain this broad-brush image and, drawing on regional case studies, presents the increasing evidence that challenges it. Inhabitants of persistent enclaves maintained distinctive material representations, subsistence strategies, and hypothetically retained specific biological ancestry long after the surrounding regions had adopted the trajectories emphasised in conventional Neolithic schemes. Building on these observations, the paper introduces the concept of inner peripheries: regions situated among the canonical core zones, yet only loosely integrated into their networks. Shaped by specific environmental constraints and social processes, these inner peripheries constituted a structurally important component of broader Neolithic dynamics in central Europe and should not be sidelined. The concept provides a framework for understanding how alternative pathways of development coexisted with more conventional narratives and thus offers a necessary corrective to prevailing interpretative models.