This article is based on an EAA session in Kiel in 2021, in which thirteen contributors provide their response to Robb and Harris's (2018) overview of studies of gender in the European Neolithic and Bronze Age, with a reply by Robb and Harris. The central premise of their 2018 article was the opposition of ‘contextual Neolithic gender’ to ‘cross-contextual Bronze Age gender’, which created uneasiness among the four co-organizers of the Kiel meeting. Reading Robb and Harris's original article leaves the impression that there is an essentialist ‘Neolithic’ and ‘Bronze Age’ gender, the former being under-theorized, unclear, and unstable, the latter binary, unchangeable, and ideological. While Robb and Harris have clearly advanced the discussion on gender, the perspectives and case studies presented here, while critical of their views, take the debate further, painting a more complex and diverse picture that strives to avoid essentialism.

Recent archaeological research now views the northwest European Neolithic and Early Bronze Age as a period of separation from a resilient complex of traditions of Mesolithic and even Palaeolithic origin. Extending this insight to recent findings in archaeoastronomy, this article treats the sarsen monument at Stonehenge as one among a number of monuments with lunar–solar alignments which privileged night over day, winter over summer, dark moon over full. The aim of the monument builders was to juxtapose, replicate and reverse certain key horizon properties of the sun and the moon, apparently with the intention of investing the sun with the moon's former religious significance. This model is consistent with both current archaeological interpretations of burial practices associated with the monument, and with recent anthropological modelling of hunter-gatherer cultural origins.