317 Bell Beaker Culture of Southern France For Whom the Bell Tolls: Social Hierarchy vs Social Integration in the Bell Beaker Culture of Southern France (Third Millennium ��) western fringes of the Alps as far as northern Scotland and the Baltic shores of Germany (Cassen & Pétrequin 1997; Pétrequin et al. 1997), a large economic network equalled in prehistory only by the circulation of met- als during the Bronze Age (e.g. Pare 2000). This short list of examples could of course be easily and almost indefinitely extended for other periods and areas of the European Neolithic. Nevertheless, the end of the Neolithic is recurrently quoted as the climax of these tendencies of social structuration, in what appears to be a prelude to the Bronze Age. In this perspective, the Beaker cultures — to use the Continental terminology Corded Ware (German Schnurkeramikkultur) and Bell Beaker cultures (Ger- man Glockenbecherkultur, French culture campaniforme Fig. 1) — that cover most of Europe during the third millennium �� play a significant role in the literature. Both cultures, at least in northern and central Europe, are characterized by the widespread use of individual burial, generally seen as the most salient expression of a new social order centred on the individual rather than the community. This reading only finds its raison d’être in comparison to the preceding periods, during which collective burials were generally favoured: the implication of the single burial might be that the end of the Neolithic saw the emergence of a kind of person ‘just like us’: a self-contained, deci- sion-making entity who exists in a state of recipro- Marc Vander Linden The development of social hierarchy during the European Late Neolithic and Bronze Age is o�en taken for granted in the literature. The Bell Beaker culture has been given a primary role in this picture as it would correspond to the large-scale diffusion of prestige goods and associated individualistic values. On the basis of the French Midi sequence, this article seeks to demonstrate that the prestige model rests upon a simplistic and abstract perception of the data. Rather than the climax of social competition, the Bell Beaker culture marks the build- ing of new fluid social networks which allowed be�er circulation of knowledge and people. Stratified we stand Few, if any, archaeologists would deny that the Bronze Age marks a crucial stage in the evolution of social organization in past European communities. From Childe (1925) to Harding (2000), these transforma- tions are generally understood as a qualitative jump best expressed by the loose but widespread concept of ‘chiefdom’. To put it crudely, the Bronze Age marks the passage from the gentle Neolithic farmer to the grasping ‘Protohistoric prince’ (a�er Ruby 1999). An extensive body of data demonstrates the over-simplified dimension of this last proposition. Neolithic communities did not live in an egalitarian paradise but were from the start embedded in complex strategies of power and competition. For instance, the late stage of the Linearbandkeramik culture in western and central Europe witnesses sharp modifications in the social order, as seen in several facets of the archaeo- logical record, pa�erns of growing inter-village spe- cialization (e.g. Keeley & Cahen 1989; Lüning 1998), frequent inclusion of prestige items such as long adzes in tombs (Jeunesse 1997), direct evidence of violent conflict (e.g. the mass burial at Herxheim, where some 300 human skulls were thrown into two concentric ditches: Lontcho 1998; see also Cauwe 2001, 101–2). Likewise, during the late sixth and early fi�h millen- nium ��, green jadeite axes were distributed from the Cambridge Archaeological Journal 16:3, 317–32 © 2006 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research doi:10.1017/S0959774306000199 Printed in the United Kingdom.