The concept of ethnicity has been largely omitted from recent interpretational models in European prehistoric archaeology. However, eagerness to avoid the problems associated with its past uses has left us with difficulties in talking about important aspects of collective identities in the past. This has become particularly clear as increasing attention has turned to understanding processes of migration and their underlying social dynamics. Here, we argue that a concept of ethnicity cast along the lines of Rogers Brubaker’s ‘ethnicity without groups’ provides us with a possibility to avoid the conceptual baggage of essentialist and static views of ethnic identities. Instead, it stresses the dynamic nature of collective identities and the social and political use of ethnicity. This is especially useful, we argue, for the study of prehistory and in periods of profound change, such as situations of migration. We use the historical Migration Period as a foil to discuss the Early Neolithic Linearbandkeramik and the third millennium B.C. Corded Ware and Bell Beaker phenomena to demonstrate how group-making and ethnicity formed and were transformed during migration processes.

Recent palaeogenomic data have expanded the debate concerning the direction of cultural transmission during the European Chalcolithic by suggesting the western movement of people from the Eurasian Steppe. Heyd (2017) considers a simultaneous spread of material culture as supportive of these model. The author addresses Heyd’s suggestions in the light of new archaeological data from the southern Iberian Peninsula. These data strongly suggest both Eastern Mediterranean and endogenous influences and innovation in the spread of culture across Europe during the third millennium BC.

Religion, social identity and social formation processes are topics of great interest to the archaeological community. Regarding the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age monuments of Central Europe, evidence from recent excavations at the Pömmelte enclosure in Central Germany suggests that circular or henge-like enclosures were monumental sanctuaries that served as venues for communal gatherings, ritual activities and performance. We suggest that such enclosures represent complex metaphors, possibly representing cosmological geographies, and that they also played important roles as communal structures in local identity formation and social regulation.

The development of social hierarchy during the European Late Neolithic and Bronze Age is often 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 building of new fluid social networks which allowed better circulation of knowledge and people.