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In this chapter it is suggested that limestone landscapes can be seen as a connecting theme in parts of the European Neolithic. The evidence for cave burial at the beginning of the Neolithic is reviewed. Cave burial was relatively late in the local sequence in Greece and the Balkans. By contrast, in Italy, southern France and Spain single grave cave burial occurs from the beginning of the period. In these regions there is also a later Neolithic collective burial practice in caves. There is a large concentration of Late Neolithic collective burials in Belgium. Therefore, Early Neolithic cave burial was primarily a western Mediterranean phenomenon. Later Neolithic cave burial throughout Europe may have been connected with providing a fixed point in a seasonal round for mobile populations. There was an apparent upsurge in cave burial throughout the limestone regions of Europe around 4000 BC.

This concluding chapter starts by restating the importance of the intermediary period as a key to understanding funerary practice. The agency of bodies, objects and caves are central to how we understand this intermediary period. The temporality of the intermediary period is shown to be constituted by physical indices of change. This is explored by contrasting the temporality of secondary burial rites with the temporality of successive inhumation in both caves and cairns. The agency of caves is examined through studies of cave orientation and of the way that tufa and pre-existing middens act as both indices and agents of change in burials. The chapter concludes by integrating many of these approaches in two case studies of relational landscapes of Neolithic cave burial in South Wales and North Yorkshire. It is concluded that the material narratives of change around cave burial in the Neolithic led to the development of a specific rite of cave burial after around 3300 BC.

This chapter introduces two important questions for the study. It looks at the possible relationships between Neolithic cave burial and other Neolithic burial practices. It then introduces the important idea that caves and other natural places had agency and were actively incorporated into funerary rites. The chapter also introduces the data set used in the book, 48 cave sites in Britain with Neolithic radiocarbon dates on human remains. The chapter concludes by reviewing problems in interpreting this data and introduces the theoretical themes discussed in the following chapters: temporality; object agency and funerary ritual.

This chapter begins by considering the history of interpretation of multi-stage burial practices in the Neolithic. These interpretations have contrasted secondary burials involving exposure and bone circulation with successive inhumation of bodies in a single location. Chronologies and temporalities of different styles of burial rites are considered. Various ethnographic discussions of collective and multi-stage burials are also introduced, including the important interpretive concept of the intermediary period in funerary rites. The chapter then goes on to discuss evidence which needs to be understood in any archaeological discussion of the intermediary period. This includes: the taphonomy of human decomposition; the differences between different burial environments; cave processes and their possible effects on burials.