The introduction of dairying was a critical step in early agriculture, with milk products being rapidly adopted as a major component of the diets of prehistoric farmers and pottery-using late hunter-gatherers. The processing of milk, particularly the production of cheese, would have been a critical development because it not only allowed the preservation of milk products in a non-perishable and transportable form, but also it made milk a more digestible commodity for early prehistoric farmers. The finding of abundant milk residues in pottery vessels from seventh millennium sites from north-western Anatolia provided the earliest evidence of milk processing, although the exact practice could not be explicitly defined. Notably, the discovery of potsherds pierced with small holes appear at early Neolithic sites in temperate Europe in the sixth millennium BC and have been interpreted typologically as 'cheese-strainers', although a direct association with milk processing has not yet been demonstrated. Organic residues preserved in pottery vessels have provided direct evidence for early milk use in the Neolithic period in the Near East and south-eastern Europe, north Africa, Denmark and the British Isles, based on the δ(13)C and Δ(13)C values of the major fatty acids in milk. Here we apply the same approach to investigate the function of sieves/strainer vessels, providing direct chemical evidence for their use in milk processing. The presence of abundant milk fat in these specialized vessels, comparable in form to modern cheese strainers, provides compelling evidence for the vessels having being used to separate fat-rich milk curds from the lactose-containing whey. This new evidence emphasizes the importance of pottery vessels in processing dairy products, particularly in the manufacture of reduced-lactose milk products among lactose-intolerant prehistoric farming communities.

In European and many African, Middle Eastern and Southern Asian populations lactase persistence (LP) is the most strongly selected monogenic trait to have evolved over the last 10,000 years 1 . While LP selection and prehistoric milk consumption must be linked, considerable uncertainty remains concerning their spatiotemporal configuration and specific interactions 2,3 . We provide detailed distributions of milk exploitation across Europe over the last 9k years using c. 7,000 pottery fat residues from >550 archaeological sites. European milk use was widespread from the Neolithic period onwards but varied spatially and temporally in intensity. Surprisingly, comparison of model likelihoods indicates that LP selection varying with levels of prehistoric milk exploitation provides no better explanation of LP allele frequency trajectories than uniform selection since the Neolithic. In the UK Biobank 4,5 cohort of ~500K contemporary Europeans, LP genotype was only weakly associated with milk consumption and did not show consistent associations with improved fitness or health indicators. This suggests other hypotheses on the beneficial effects of LP should be considered for its rapid frequency increase. We propose that lactase non-persistent individuals consumed milk when it became available, but that under particular conditions and microbiological milieux this was disadvantageous, driving LP selection in prehistoric Europe. Comparison of model likelihoods indicates that population fluctuations, settlement density and wild animal exploitationproxies for these driversprovide better explanations of LP selection than the extent of milk exploitation. These findings offer new perspectives on prehistoric milk exploitation and LP evolution.

Fragments of ceramic sieves constitute a widespread, but littleknown element in the ceramic inventories of Linear Pottery sites in temperate Europe. These sieves appear to have functioned as strainers for separating cur& from whey in cheese production, on the basis of parallels with later archaeological cultures and ethnographic examples. A rchaeozoological data support the hypothesis that dairy production has a greater antiquity than has been hitherto accepted. The sieves played an important role in early dairy production, for the manufacture of cheese was an essential step in the exploitation of milk by populations who possibly had a high level of lactose intolerance.

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Migration in Archeology: The Baby and the BathwaterMigration has been largely ignored by archeologistsfor the last two decades. Yet prehistoric de-mography and population studies are accepted as central concern, and neither of these can be studied projtabb without an understanding of migration. Recent books by Rouse and Renfrew have resurrected migration as a subject of serious analysis. It is proposed here thal systems-oriented archeologists, in rejecting migration, have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Traditional archeological approaches to migration fall short because a methodology for examining prehistoric migration must be dependent upon an understanding of the general structure of migration as a patterned human behavior. Aspects of such a structure are suggested and an application to a particular caw in Eastern Europe is described.IGRATION IS A STRUCTURED AND WELL-STUDIED aspect of human behavior. Ar-M cheologists, however, generally treat migration as chaotic and poorly understood.The historical and philosophical basis for this insistent mystification is a subject perhaps best treated by critical theorists (Leone, Potter, and Shackel 1987), but a new look at migration is clearly needed. In a review of archeological explanations for the Classic Maya collapse, Renfrew ( 1982: 16) explicitly grouped theories of migrationhnvasion with theories of epidemic disease, and placed both of these in the category of externally determined everlts that are inherently not explicable through general principles. It is suggested here that migration can and should be approached through the application of general principles.Most archeologists would agree that although migrations might well affect cultural evolution, their apparent unpredictability and the difficulty of identifying them archeologically combine to make migration an explanatory construct of limited utility. In other words, misration has been avoided because archeologists lack the theory and methods that might allow them to incorporate migration into the explanation of culture change, not because migration is regarded as unimportant. Instead of developing the needed tools, archeologists have avoided the subject. Many of the needed tools already exist in the form af models developed by geographers, biological anthropologists, applied anthropologi$ts, and sociologists. It is only recently, and apparently only in the field of paleobiology, that such sophisticated models of migration have been applied to the archeological record (Konigsberg 1988).This article advocates a new but by no means original approach to migration. The historic linkage between migration and normative culture history is not logically necessary, and can easily be broken. Recent formulations ofmigration as a structured behavior should permit archeologists to consider the role of migration in culture change from fresh perspectives. From a constructivist perspective, viewing the actions of individuals within specific historical contexts, migration can be understood as a behavior that is typi...