Beakers instead of monuments. Tradition and Changes in the Society and Cosmology of European Farmers in the 3rd Millennium BC, In: M. Bárta - M. Kovář: Civilisations: Collapse and Regeneration. Addresing the Nature of Change and Transformation in History, Academia, Praha, pp. 55 -89. ISBN 978-80-200-2907-2
Abstract
This chapter takes us to the Neolithic era to observe the phenomenon of building prehistoric monuments as symbols of shared social identity and, by contrast, of their disappearance from human culture and replacement by individualised burials, natural shrines and beaker ideology connected with deepening differentiation of the society and possibly also with a new cult. The gradual collapse of the collective values tradition started around the middle of the fifth millennium BC.
A striking change - maybe even collapse of traditional values - came however at the beginning of the third millennium BC. The changes that took place were not, in my view, brought about by some fundamental shift in the subsistence strategy of European farmers, nor can they be ascribed to any effect of climate or environmental changes.
I believe that the root cause of the changes, which I shall summarise in the following paragraphs, was first of all the development of social relations and the transformation of the cosmology of Late Stone Age farming communities.