Pages: 315-324

Appearing in the early – although probably not the earliest – phases of southeast European neolithization, jar burial developed in several territorially and chronologically restricted “waves”: Neolithic core area in the Struma and Vardar river valleys and the west Rhodope Mountains in the beginning of the VI millennium BC, and later, late/final Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and/or early Bronze Age – depending on local terminology – examples scattered from Argolis in Greece to the Great Hungarian Plain and dating from the second half of the 6th to the III millennium BC, with huge chronological gaps within. However, their central Anatolian and Levantine parallels give a solid base for the expanding of our understanding of this obviously cross-cultural phenomenon.