Neolithic Avgi is one of several Neolithic sites that have been recently investigated in northern Greece. During the last decades, there has been an outburst of excavations in Western and Central Macedonia, Greece that are changing our knowledge of the Neolithic period, to the point that it has no precedent in the history of research for any other region of Greece. These are intensive, large-scale excavations, with meticulous documentation of the stratigraphic information, and systematic collection of findings of all sorts.2 Many follow internationallystandardised sampling protocols and have a highly interdisciplinary rationale, with an emphasis on the collection of bioarchaeological, geoarchaeological, and micro-environmental proxies. The first visible result is high-quality excavation research, only a fragment of which is unfolded here.

In the Neolithic of Northern Greece the disposal of the deceased is strongly related to the community of the living, and in most cases to the built environment. Burials often occur in close proximity to, or underneath ‘domestic’ structures. The constant association of dead ancestors with the living social environment may indicate a particular desire by Neolithic people to negotiate their past by incorporating it into their own present. This paper addresses such issues, based on new evidence from the Neolithic settlement of Avgi, NW Greece. A group of cremations were recently located inside ten small pots buried in an open space in the Neolithic village. The burials consisted of tiny amounts of heavily burnt human bones and, in two cases, were accompanied by carbonized seeds. This paper will discuss the occurrence of the burial pots and the associated cremations as tokens of memory and of special links to the past represented by the dead ancestors.