 Thank you very, very much. You're going to have to forgive me for sitting down, because not only as I am as old as Mike Parker Pearson, my funny British plug will only work in that socket there. It's a kind of a metaphor for Brexit. So, dear Dr Houghner, dear delegates, dear friends, I'd like to thank the EAA for giving me the very great honour and privilege of presenting a keynote address to you. And I am duly terrified. My chosen topic concerns something that we all do in our many and varied ways, and that is to create narratives about our past. It lies at the heart of all archaeological endeavour. Whether we're dealing with big picture issues such as human evolution, or with tracing what happened to a settlement over the course of a single day, as here at the late Bronze Age site in the last farm in Cambridgeshire, we are all using evidence to try and understand what happened, why it happened, and how people lived and made sense of the world in the past. And by doing that, we give voice to our distant ancestors. We might like to think that narrative construction should be a fairly straightforward matter of marshalling, analysing and interpreting all the data to establish plausible accounts that best fit the evidence. But of course it's not as easy as that. As is clear, for example, from the last few decades of theoretical wrangling over ontology and epistemology, over the nature of evidence and the nature of interpretation. In today's pluralistic world, with contesting discourses, we find ourselves having to consider what kinds of narrative we are trying to create, how we do this, why we do this, and for whom we create these narratives. And it's good and proper that we should be discussing such things and what better place could there be to consider these weighty matters than the 25th conference of the European Association of Archaeologists, a gigantic smorgasbawr that brings together huge numbers of archaeologists from all over Europe with their different intellectual traditions and approaches to the subject. While I cannot claim any particular expertise in the subject, I can at least offer some insights and reflections on the opportunities and challenges that we face as we create those narratives of the past, based on my 32 years of experience as a curator of prehistory in Scotland's National Museum in Edinburgh. My job requires me to create several kinds of narrative, ranging from the detailed biography of an individual artefact, such as this early Bronze Age spacerplate necklace of jet and jet-like materials, to an artefact-based thematic account for the general public of the whole Scotland's prehistoric past, as presented in our museum displays, and to national and regional narratives in the form of research frameworks that examine what we know, what we don't know, and what we need to find out. I'm currently working on producing a research framework and strategy for understanding the first two millennia of gold use in those parts of Britain where gold occurs naturally. Of course, I also try to contribute to key archaeological debates, including the neilifisation of Britain and Ireland, and the appearance and development of the beaker phenomenon. I've been privileged to have participated in a number of national and international research initiatives over the years, including Mike Parker Pearson's Beaker People project, Pierre Petricin's Projet Jard in Jard II, and Woodward and John Hunter's Ritual in Early Bronze Age Gravegoods, and several major DNA projects. All this has exposed me to a wide range of specialist disciplines and has underlined the absolute necessity of two things. First, informed critical interdisciplinary dialogue so that the non-archaeology specialists can understand what the archaeological issues are, and the archaeologists can understand what particular analytical techniques can and cannot deliver. And secondly, international collaboration. This remains essential, especially in these crazy Brexit times, because we simply cannot understand the prehistory of Britain and Ireland without understanding their broader continental context and vice versa to some extent. I shall try to illustrate these points this evening by taking you through our current, hotly debated narratives about neilifisation and about the appearance of the so-called beaker people in Britain. But first, before doing that, let's consider our current situation for a moment, broadening out our perspective to that of European archaeology in general. We are both blessed and cursed to be living in interesting times. On the positive side, we have at our disposal the fruits of well over 150 years of archaeological and antiquarian excavation, collection and research. Our museums house vast collections of artefacts and ecofacts, and more are constantly coming to light through developer-funded excavation, research-based fieldwork, and activities such as metal detecting. Spectacular discoveries such as this ceremonial complex at Nesofbrodga in the heart of Neolithic Orkney cause us to rethink what we thought we knew about a particular period or area. There have been countless research projects and analyses in every field of archaeology and associated disciplines producing huge amounts of data, as is clear from the programme of this conference. And thanks to the generosity of national and international funding bodies, we have seen over the last few decades a number of major interdisciplinary research initiatives that have targeted many of archaeology's big issues and transformed our knowledge base, such as Christian Christiansen's brilliant The Rise Project, exploring social and cultural interactions and mobility in third and second millennium northern Europe, and his even bigger follow-up project, The Rise 2, exploring mobility and migration at three key points in European prehistory. As well as The Rise, we have Barry Malloy's The Fall Project, examining the collapse of Europe's first urban civilisation in the Mediterranean. And we've had Johannes Müller's superb early monumentality and social differentiation project, exploring the origins of monumentality in north-central Europe. And of course, we've had Pierre-Pétericain's Jade and Jade II, which has revolutionised our understanding of the exploitation, circulation and significance of jadotite and other alpine rocks in Neolithic Europe. And I hasten to add that not all major research initiatives are led by men. For example, we have Esther Banffy to thank for clarifying the transformation of early farming societies as this way of life spread from southeast Europe to central Europe during the sixth millennium BC. In short then, we are not lacking in material or in information or in exciting and inspirational projects. And our methods and approaches have improved immeasurably over the last few decades to cite just a few examples. The advent of systematic programmes of radiocarbon dating and the rigorous application of Bayesian modelling as championed in Alistair Whittle's ERC-funded The Times of their Lives project and before that his Gathering Time project means that where we have the dates our chronological resolution can be so fine grained that we can talk now about developments at a generational and subgenerational scale as well as over the long durée. And we can really get to grips with the tempo and rhythm of change. Advances in various kind of imaging mean that we can interrogate and also present to the public artefacts, eco-facts and built structures in hitherto unprecedented detail. Here for example, the CT scanning allows us to see individual chunks of animal bone in a nearly 5,000-year-old dog coprolite from Scarabray. And thanks to the specialist field of coprolite research we can even tell where this segment had belonged in the original stream of turdage. Yes! Yes! 3D photogrammetry and laser scanning allow us to consider artefacts such as this carved stone ball in the round. And they also enable us to take a virtual tour of this passage tomb at Cwine in Orkney, for example. And this model was made by Hugo Andersen Wymark, my colleague for Historic Environment Scotland. And also innovative projects borrowing from the games industry are using immersive VR technology to reconstruct past environments and structures. Our skills in putting flesh on the bones of the long dead have improved, helped greatly by the use of information gleaned by DNA analysis, as in the case of this hyperbrachysophallic young woman buried with a beaker at Achevanich in Cathnes. And also the recent unveiling of the dark-skinned cheddar man, mesolithic man from Cheddar Cave in southwest England caused quite a stir. And it's not just humans who are getting the facial reconstruction treatment. Yeah, in what may well be a world first, forensic techniques have been used to reconstruct a neolithic dog's head from the passage to McQueen that we just saw a couple of slides back. Again, this was done for Historic Environment Scotland for their new visitor panel. Among the innumerable advances in analytical techniques, many of which you would have heard about today, of particular significance are the suite of biomolecular techniques that are now applied to human and faunal remains and to a range of artefacts, principle among which are isotope analysis, with an increasing range of isotopes being analyzed to explore diet and mobility, and with calcined bone as well as unburnt bone now being susceptible to analysis. Lipid analysis revealing the former contents of pots and of other absorbent vessels. Amino acid, protein and peptide analysis of both bone and enamel, allowing species identification and, in the case of enamel, sex identification. Of course, total genome ancient DNA analysis which allows the entire genetic ancestry of a single individual to be revealed. Professor Christian Christiansen is quite right to hail these developments in biomolecular archaeology as the third great revolution in archaeology after its emergence as a discipline during the mid-19th century and the advent of radiocarbon dating during the mid-20th century. These are truly powerful techniques which are having a major influence on the way we build our narratives of the past, not least in so far as human migration has, albeit controversially, been put firmly back on the table as a key aspect of some prehistoric socioeconomic change. And all of these developments are occurring as archaeology broadens its horizons to become a more inclusive discipline cognisant of its social responsibilities to the people who help fund it. Hence, the rise in community co-production initiatives with Scotland leading the way in this. For example, in Tersha Barnett's current project to reassess and systematically document Scotland's prehistoric rock art by training local communities in recording and in creating 3D structure in motion models. So, so far, so terrific! But there are also some pretty significant challenges that face us as we piece together our narratives of the past. Firstly, we are in danger of drowning in a sea of data. 50 years ago, it was possible for an individual researcher to maintain an authoritative grasp on all of the particular period or area. Now, with so much new information being produced and being published in such a diversity of outlets across several specialist disciplines, it's far harder to remain Oklahoma. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We should applaud all the current efforts to synthesise large bodies of data, as Richard Bradley has done in trawling through the masses of grey literature from developer-funded excavations to produce his latest updated account of British and Irish prehistory. And we also applaud all the initiatives designed to make information more accessible, such as the Ariadne Plus project, Canmore in Scotland, and the Archaeology data service in the UK. I've tried to do my bit by producing a round-up list of the 267 individuals in Scotland who have been subjected to DNA analysis so far. And of course, we salute the EAA for having created this great annual forum to exchange information and debate issues right across European archaeology and its disciplines. Allied to this issue of the superabundance of data, our increasing reliance on big data initiatives brings with it the obligation to apply rigorous quality checks on all the data that we're using. While this is certainly the case with all the big projects I've mentioned earlier, there have been one or two examples that shall remain nameless where greater quality assurance is required, as in one large-scale project on early metallurgy that showed a map indicating that tin bronze production in Britain and Ireland dated as early as 2800 BC, some 600 years earlier than its actual date, and know this wasn't a typo. Clearly we need an army of data-checking nerds to keep our databases reliable. The second challenge concerns the need to understand the very powerful analytical techniques that are at our disposal and to appreciate what they can and cannot do for us. I'll start a Bayesian date modelling, for example. As Alastair Whittle and his colleagues have been at pains to point out, the process is only as good as the prior information and parameters that have been fed into it. To take just one small example, a few years ago, modelling of all the then-available dates for beaker pottery in Britain concluded that this ceramic tradition started to be used in Scotland later than in England. But when the same data were remodelled separately on a country-by-country basis, the conclusion was that it appeared in Scotland just as early as in England. It's a minor point, but it's important to the broader narrative of beaker arrival. Likewise, the various constraints on interpreting isotopic data always need to be kept in mind, especially when discussing claims for long-distance movement. A large part of the text of this splendid beaker people project volume, which I urge you all to buy, is rightly taken up with explaining all the various factors that can produce a particular isotopic result and that need to be taken into account when creating interpretive models. As regards movement, while it's relatively easy to show that a person or animal had not been raised locally, it's far harder to pinpoint where she, he or it had originated. There's usually a range of possibilities, which means, for example, that the recent claim that late Neolithic pigs had been driven from as far away as Scotland down to the Stonehenge area arguably has to be treated with a degree of caution, even though the basic thesis of animals coming from far and wide to these late Neolithic feasting sites is persuasive. We also need to apply rigor and honesty in our inferential reasoning. To give you just one example, a recent and influential study of the genetics and micro-morphology of the Orkney vole, a species that today is unique to Orkney and which must have been introduced by sea from the continent around 3200 BC, concluded that this species was brought to Orkney by immigrant farmers from Belgium. I found this claim particularly surprising since all the evidence that we have for long-distance voyaging around that time in this part of Europe points to Atlantic connections between Orkney, Ireland, Atlantic, France and Iberia. Archaeologically, there is not a shred of evidence for Belgian farming presence in Orkney. When I looked into the evidential basis for this claim, I discovered that the team had had great difficulty in obtaining ancient samples of vole remains from Atlantic Europe. And the Belgian samples actually came from a medieval nunnery. So, among all of the reference material used by the project, the DNA of these medieval Belgian voles was the least dissimilar to that of Orkney voles. Now, I'm sorry folks, but this just has to be called out as bad science. And it's symptomatic of the need for the critical interdisciplinary dialogue that I mentioned at the start of my talk. That faunal study was undertaken without any meaningful consultation with archaeologists, and I'm afraid it shows. We also have to guard against the current pressure which is brought on by the demands of academic and commercial publication, by university research reviews and by the cruel mistresses that are social media, television and newspapers to come up with the biggest, the oldest, the most spectacular of results all the time. Getting a paper in one of the big scientific journals, such as Nature, for example, requires headline news, and the brevity of the main text means that the nuances of argument that can be drawn out from the vast array of supplementary data information don't get an airing. This is a particular issue with the interpretation of genetic data where there is no space to explore alternative interpretations and where some really quite interesting discoveries have gone unnoticed among the headline claims for large-scale migrations. One such finding, as pointed out in a brilliant recent article by Tom Booth, who has been a member of several big genetic projects, is that while several close familial relationships have been identified among people buried with beaker pottery in Britain, as in the case of these probable cousins buried together in Cambridgeshire, or others separated by quite a distance, this does not seem to be the case so far with the co-mingled remains of multiple individuals found in Neolithic chamber tombs who seem to be unrelated to each other, surprisingly. Moreover, our own motivations and methodologies need to be interrogated as we construct our narratives. If our aim is to distance ourselves from the interpretations of past generations, we need to be quite certain alternative models hold water. In Britain, we are still dealing with the consequences of the rejection decades ago of the old culture historical paradigm that explained all culture change in terms of invasion by new people, and which viewed the coming of farming as a major step on the way to civilisation. That rejection was indeed justified. But what's not justifiable, as we shall see in a moment, is to caricature new interpretations that feature population movement as a revisionist throwback to the bad old days of culture history and diffusionism. Intangled within the current and long-standing debate about the Mesolithic Neolithic transition in Britain and Ireland are the related bogeymen of world as wished for thinking, where data are shoehorned into a preformed model. Straw men arguments. And as anyone who's read my book reviews will know, I just love the smell of burning straw men in the morning. The use of contentious proxies such as those used to assess population size and density, and I realise that this statement in itself may be controversial. And also privileging one or two strands of evidence above all the others. And if that was not enough to contend with, we find ourselves in a world of political madness where in a few short weeks, thanks to Brexit, the UK will probably, or maybe I should say possibly, don't know what's happening today, cut itself off from the delights of access to European funding with not very much to replace it with. At a time when we need much more international collaboration to address our archaeological questions, this is a catastrophe, as is the flight of many brilliant continental scholars who are leaving our shores because of uncertainty about their future. Thanks a bundle, Bojo. Geographically and chronologically, Britain and Ireland lie at the end of the long and complex process of the spread of agro-pastralism across Europe from its origins in the Near East. It has long been recognised that the domesticated animals and plants that form the basis of this way of life are not native to or not domesticated in these islands and will have to have been transported from the continent by boat. It has also been realised that there was a significant time interval between the appearance of these domesticates on the near continent and their appearance in Britain and Ireland, possibly a millennium. The traditional explanation for the appearance of farming and its associated practices, technology and material culture as set out in 1954 by Stuart Piggott is that it was introduced by migrating farmers from the continent with some following an Atlantic route and others coming from the east end of the channel. Today, this is Jin, today most of us feel that he was basically right, albeit not in every detail and not for the right reasons. But after several decades of theoretical shifts during which Piggott's model was berated as symptomatic of the cultural historical paradigm, it was inevitable that an alternative model would eventually emerge that championed the indigenous Mesolithic communities as the prime movers in introducing the farming way of life to these islands. We see this most clearly and persistently in the contributions by Julian Thomas. According to this model, there had been regular contact between the indigenous Mesolithic people of Britain and Ireland and the farming communities all along the coast of continental Europe from Amorica to Scania during the fifth millennium. This seaborn coming and going created the conditions for an internal social transformation among the hunter-fisher communities. They gained the desire to accumulate collective property to be more like the continental farmers. Accordingly, they acquired the domesticated animals and plants from the continent. They sent their young people across the channel to work experience to learn how to make pots, to become cowboys and to cook with cereals. But as I have frequently pointed out in detail in many publications, unfortunately for this lovely club 1830 scenario, not only is there no supporting evidence whatsoever for any of these points, I'm happy to go through them one by one, but we all want to go to the party, but also genes don't lie. So I'm afraid it's time to bury this particular hypothesis. Among the deadly sins of narrative construction that I mentioned a few moments ago, the indigenous argument is guilty of world as wished for argumentation, claiming well there must have been regular contact even though there's not a shred of convincing evidence to prove this was the case on either side of the channel. It also uses straw man arguments, caricaturing the migration of farmers idea as a veritable tsunami of invaders, I quote. And it also fails to take account of developments on the continent that could have given rise to the desire or need among some farming communities to relocate to the other side of the channel. By the way, that's something that's not going to be permitted after the 31st of October or whenever this year. The indigenous model is however only one of at least five models that have been proposed within the last few years. The others all feature migration by farmers followed by variable reactions from the indigenous communities. To cut a very long story short, in 2010 Mark Collard and colleagues modelled the distribution of all radiocarbon dates relating to neolithic things and practices using the dates as a big data information set and as a proxy for population size and density. They concluded that by at least as early as 4000 BC farmers had settled in western and central Scotland and parts of southern England and their populations grew and expanded from there over the next few centuries. Among the many flaws in this model is the unsubstantiated assumption that the amount and density of radiocarbon dates accurately reflects the size and density of population. What the dates actually reflect in all probability is the amount of research and commercial excavation work that has resulted in the production of radiocarbon dates in the areas in question with Wessex being a particular hotspot for both kinds of work. Similarly, this model took no account of the variability across Britain in neolithic material culture, monuments, etc. In my list of deadly sins, this one ticks the boxes marked dodgy proxies and relying on one strand of evidence at the expense of all else. Another model that relies on radiocarbon dates albeit used in a more rigorous way is that of Alistair Whittle et al in their 2011 book Gathering Time. They noted that the earliest dates for neolithic things and practices occur in southeast England and so they argued that continental farmers landed there and spread out northwards and westwards mixing with the local indigenous mezzolithic communities on the way with most of the expansion happening in the 38th BC. Where you see faint dragons on their map this means that there aren't many dates available. Intrigingly they also offered a different and slightly more complex version that allows for other cross-channel contacts to have added to the cultural mix. They also pointed out that the different elements of neolithic package appeared at different times with cause-wed enclosures not appearing till several generations after the earliest appearance of other neolithic features. But as I've argued in detail elsewhere their model still fails to get to grips with the very clear variability that we see in material culture and monuments. And here I've tried to convey the variability in the earliest neolithic pottery in different areas for example with the blue line encompassing the carinated bowl neolithic distribution area. And indeed this variability is echoed in the technical aspects of its manufacture as Elen Piofe's technical research has highlighted. And there are also increasing number of sites here in purple that have produced many pre-3800 dates that don't fit with the model. My own model of the neolithicisation of Britain and Ireland places more emphasis on this variability in material culture and monuments and seeks to understand this within the broader setting of social and demographic processes of change across the channel. It also takes into account the radiocarbon evidence acknowledging that there are crucial gaps in our dating record. My model is also enriched and strengthened by the DNA data that have recently been obtained. Essentially I see neolithicisation as a multi-strand process that was largely contingent on socio-economic processes of change within northwest and northern France. It featured multiple small scale movements from different parts of France to different parts of Britain and Ireland at different times between 4350 and 380 BC with people coming for different reasons and with different consequences. And I don't regard the indigenous mezzalithic population as passive stoogers or as haplers victims. They made their own decisions with some accepting and others rejecting the new way of life. As for what caused their drastic decline in the genetic history of our islands which is what the DNA data is suggesting that's something which we really need to bottom out with future research. The first strand of neolithicisation top left seems actually to have been a false start when a few people probably from northwest France sailed over to southwest Ireland with their cattle around 4350 BC but then numbers were not sufficient to form a critical mass and unfortunately for them the locals seem to have regarded their cattle as great near resource to hunt and eat and they probably didn't like the immigrant farmers either so it looks like a case of thank you and good night for the neolithic there and then. The second strand top right appears to have featured a movement of small numbers of people northwards along the Atlantic façade from the Morfian area of Brittany up as far as the west coast of Scotland and around the northern half of Ireland's coast but for some reason not touching southwest England. To judge from dated Comparanda in the Morfian and by atoms of evidence available to us in Britain and Ireland this will have happened sometime between 4300-3900 probably around 4000. These people used Breton late-castellic pottery and built megalithic closed chambers and simple passage tombs and it's actually this strand that has attracted most interest recently in the light of the DNA results that show a so-called Iberian Atlantic element in the genetic makeup of our early farmers but that, as I hope to show, this isn't the only strand of immigration that could have brought that element. The third strand, what I call the carinated bowl neolithic seemed to have involved the largest and most extensive movement of people this time from the Nord-Bardicallais region of northern France but I'd argue that we are still not talking about thousands of immigrants. A few hundred, each creating large families of their own could have produced the observed pattern of evidence and unlike Alistair Whittle, I don't believe that they all landed in southeast England and spread out from there. Instead, there's no reason why over a period of several generations from 4100, some people from Nord-Bardicallais shouldn't have undertaken longer-distance sea journeys further up the North Sea coast and it looks as though having arrived in Scotland they spread rapidly into Ireland and northwest Britain. These people used a kind of pottery represents one of a number of regional variations of Chasseuil-Michelsberg type pottery and they mostly used non-megalithic timber mortuary structures to deal with their dead covering some of them with long barrows and it was these people who brought most of the jadotite and other alpine ax heads with them to Britain and Ireland as precious community heirlooms and as good luck talismans. The fourth and final strand of neolithicisation featured movements to southwest and southern England from adjacent parts of the French coast, my transmarge west strand. This phase of immigration seems to have occurred around 3900 BC. The pottery has elements of Middle Neolithic II pottery of Normandy and the dry stone or composite closed chambers and simple passage tombs of southwest England echo those of 5th and early 4th millennium Normandy. All these hypothetical episodes of migration can be understood in terms of the social and demographic pressures affecting parts of northern France from the 5th millennium onwards so that in Brittany the collapse of this theocratic big man style power system that had flourished around the middle of the 5th millennium expressed in these gigantic Carnac mounds and the ostentatious use of precious exotica will have led to social change. Seen here at Loch Marriacare in the re-use of part of an enormous fallen standing stone to cap the chamber in the new style passage tomb of the table des marchants. Serch Cazenn's research has shown that or at least argued that some people headed south from the Morbion to Iberia building Breton style passage tomb with Breton inspired pottery at Dombarte in Galicia. Such long distance voyaging by sea can also arguably explain a similar phenomenon here on the west coast of Scotland. It's a kind of mirror image of the situation at Dombarte. As I said, I've put 4,300, 3,900 as a bracket that is the date range within Brittany for the late Castellic phenomenon but it's likely to be closer to the 40th century. And while this particular monument could not be radiocarbon dated it's hoped that keyhole excavation I hope in the near future, HES will actually produce datable material. As for the carinated bowl and trans-mange west strands of neolithicisation these can be related to the late 5th millennium population pressure in the Paris basin that seems to have led to movements north eastwards and north westwards that are now documented in the DNA evidence. It appears that the process of perceived or actual overpopulation continued in Normandy where around the same time as we see the neolithic appearing in south west England around the 39th century we also see an emptying out of parts of the Norman countryside. The models of the Mesolithic Neolithic transition which two teams of geneticists have just produced a few months ago lend unambiguous support to the argument that the farming way of life was brought to Britain and Ireland farmers from the continent. The farmers have a significantly different genetic signature from the western hunter-gatherer group to which our Mesolithic people belong. Both studies were able to discriminate between a genetic signature that essentially related to the ancient Nubian route of Neolithic expansion and one that related to the Mediterranean Atlantic route. Surprisingly they both found that most of the British and Irish individuals seemed to show a strong affinity with Iberian individuals but here the two genetic studies differ in their interpretation of the data. Selina Brace's team note that this does not mean that the farmers came to Britain and Ireland from Iberia while the Sanchez-Ginto's team argue that they did. They can't both be right. Here is a classic case of where informed interdisciplinary discourse is required in interpreting genetic data. I was on team Brace and was able to point out that there is no archaeological evidence whatsoever to support a direct movement from Iberia to Britain and Ireland. Instead, we know that the seafaring inhabitants of the Morbion had enjoyed long-standing connections across the Bay of Biscay with Iberia as we've just seen. We also know that in Brittany the elements of a Neolithic lifestyle had previously been adopted by local Mesolithic communities thanks to links with their farming neighbours both at the north-east and to the south. Therefore, it's likely that our hypothetical Breton migrants had an Iberian genetic signature. Sadly, the acidic soils of Brittany destroy burn so there's very little available for DNA analysis and so we can't prove that their genome included an Iberian element but I put my money on it does. There's more that we can usefully say about this Iberian genetic signature however. Even though very little whole genome DNA analysis has yet been done in France, the work that has been done has shown that farmers in the Paris Basin also show an Iberian element in their genetic make-up. And if we look for an archaeological reason for this, we might well find it in the northern expansion of the Chasse culture during the 5th millennium from southern France. Another area on the Mediterranean to Atlantic route of Neolithicisation. In theory, the Iberian signature could have arrived in Britain and Ireland via all the various strands of migration that I've proposed. This suggestion can and should be tested by undertaking a lot more DNA analysis in France. As for what happened to the indigenous population of Britain and Ireland, the studies argue the genetic studies suggest a near total genetic turnover with the hunter-gatherer signature virtually disappearing unlike on the continent where we see a subsequent resurgence in the Mesolithic signature in Britain and Ireland never seems to recover. But it wasn't necessarily a matter of population wipe out. The Brace team have been able to identify intermixing between local hunter-gatherers and incoming farmers at Raskoli Cave on the west coast of Scotland. This can be distinguished from the interbreeding that had previously taken place between farmers and indigenous communities on the continent. This West Scottish intermixing fits with my hypothesis that we are dealing with a situation where there was low population density both of the indigenous Mesolithic groups and of the incoming farmers. People with radically different lifestyles could have coexisted in an area without being aware of each other's existence for several generations. But when they did meet, clearly love was in the air for some of them, and the local indigenous hunter-gatherer fishers may well have chosen to acculturate into the farming way of life, perceiving it rightly or wrongly as offering a more secure supply of food. And since farming populations generally have more children than hunter-fisher forager groups, it's easy to imagine how the indigenous genetic signature could have got drowned out among all of the rapidly growing immigrant stock. What's needed now is for geneticists to try out acrologically-informed multiple working hypotheses to refine our narrative about this observed genetic transformation. We also need to establish ballpark figures based on the genetic data of just how many people came across. I do not believe for a moment that we're dealing with massive migrations, but evidently it's hard for the geneticists to come up with an accurate quantification, and indeed the whole question of assessing population size in prehistory is fraught with difficulty. Let's move on very rapidly to the second of my case studies, which relates to the appearance of the beaker phenomenon in Britain, a topic already touched upon in this morning's session about mobility and migration. Here we see a whole package of continental novelties as exemplified in the grave goods of the Ainsbury archery. We have metal and metalworking. We have fancy archery gear. We have individual inhumation. And this truly was the shock of the new, and it's different from the situation in the Netherlands because late Neolithic Britain had generally been inward looking. It hadn't been towing and throwing to the continent, except in the case of the Atlantic, where we have the shared tradition of Atlantic complex rock arts, linking us with Iberia and Ireland. And the addition of Alalde et al's ancient DNA study to our information mix has certainly reignited the debate about the nature of the so-called beaker people in Britain. And they're finding that, yes, indeed, people had migrated from the continent, has led to some predictable hyperbole in the press. And I can confirm that the answer to this question is no. The genetic results for beaker people across Europe show that Britain stands out from the rest of Europe in that there seems to be no genetic continuity with the preceding Neolithic population there in contrast to the situation in Iberia and in Central Europe where there is continuity. It appears that people migrated from different parts of Europe to different parts of Britain, with some going from the Netherlands to Southern England and Scotland, others from the Middle Rhine to Northern England and Scotland, some from North Central Europe to Northern England, and some with an Iberian genetic signature ended up as the Boscan bowman in Wiltshire. As in the Neolithic, it's very likely that this Iberian signature was present in Brittany, but the paucity of analysable bone there hampers our DNA analysis. And archaeologically, the communal Boscan bowman grave with one beaker stacked inside another is wholly typical of Breton beaker practice. You could lose that tomb anywhere in Brittany. This genetic patterning offers a fairly good match for the variability in Britain's earliest beakers and their associated funerary practices. But interestingly, as discussed earlier today, very few long-distance beaker using immigrants were picked up in the beaker people project's isotopic analysis of over 300 individuals dating to be in 2500 and 1500 BC, and here is a very rare case. In fact, it's one that Mike didn't mention this morning. What we have is what seems to be a first-generation immigrant as demonstrated by the DNA, probably from the Middle Rhineland. She is a young woman, isotopically not local, and DNA-wise, she's an immigrant. And this paucity of long-distance movers is partly a matter of chance because, as we know, isotopic information only relates to a single generation. But it nevertheless raises questions about the geneticists' claims that there had been a sizeable migration from the continent, leading to near total population replacement. The argument used by the geneticists to support this idea of large-scale migration is that a 92% genetic turnover can be seen in Britain over the next few generations. Although the exact speed of this turnover, how many generations are we talking about, seems a little fuzzy, and the accounts differ. The geneticists' claims have naturally sparked off a vigorous debate among archaeologists, with some arguing that the analysed individuals are unrepresentative of the population at large, and that indigenous late Neolithic people were disposing of their dead in ways that leave no traces. They cremated and scattered the remains, which indeed they were. But as Tom Booth has pointed out, however, the representativity argument is weakened by the fact that each total genome result provides an individual's entire ancestry. Although it's true that the DNA database includes only a few very late Neolithic individuals to compare with the Beaker individuals, so most of our Neolithic genetic data are several centuries older than the Beaker data. The most pressing issue, however, is that the size of this migration has not been quantified. When I asked David Reich how many promiscuous Dutch Casanovas it would take to bonk their way around Britain, 50, 500, 5000, he said he didn't know. And archaeologically, there is no evidence for any massive migration for the emptying out of the Netherlands, all you handsome Dutch guys who we love so much, or emptying out of anywhere else for that matter, or of an obvious crisis on the continent that would occasion a large-scale migration. My belief is that other models could offer a better fit with the observed archaeological data. It may be, for example, that there had been successive small-scale movements followed each time by a preferential marriage into the Beaker using groups by Indigenous women. That scenario would tie in with the successive appearance in Britain of certain continental Beaker designs, design features, and of other novel aspects of material culture such as battle accents, including the barbed wire beakers that you see here. I realise I might be sailing very close to the pots as people argument in suggesting this, and clearly we need to work with our handsome Dutch chums to bottom this out. But what's needed now to refine our narrative of the Beaker phenomenon in Britain and Ireland is we should work with the geneticists to model alternative scenarios to establish the best fit with the genetic and archaeological evidence. We need to revisit our archaeological proxies for movement of people as opposed to movement of things and ideas, as Joss Klein's work has shown. We need to revisit the possible reasons for the arrival in Britain and Ireland of Beaker users, as discussed in this book, which is becoming cheaper for you foreigners by the day. We need to keep searching for late Neolithic unburnt human remains to enrich our DNA database. There are some in Scotland. We need to compare and contrast our model of late Neolithic developments in Britain with that on the continent. We have no evidence in Britain for any late Neolithic population collapse or plague. People were happily building Stonehenge and feasting at Durrington Walls. Lots of people, they didn't all die. We also need to examine the areas in-between the Beaker using areas. What were folks doing there? We really, really don't know. And also, are we missing any other immigrants, non-Beaker users? And here, intriguingly, Stuart Needham's Atlantic Helboard users in the west, whose distribution is complementary to that of Beakers, is quite intriguing. So, to conclude, our move into the new paradigm of mobility and migration clearly requires a great deal more work if we are to move beyond the current slanging match between those who advocate migration and those who brand it as culture historical revisionism. As with all paradigm changes, it needs to get its rough edges knocked off and it needs much more international collaborative research. As for the future of British archaeology in these debates, well, I don't know why, but something brings to mind the scarabray coprolite as a metaphor. And it reminds me of an old British saying, which is you can't polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter. Thanks for listening. Let's go party.