Neolithic
Neolithic – “New Stone Age,” a period assigned in Europe to the development of agriculture or the Agricultural Revolution, although hunter-gatherer activity endured well into the period, and it is misleading to characterize a people’s culture based on their economic strategy or tool use alone. Neolithic art, particularly the geometric images of various megalithic monuments in northern France, eastern Ireland, and northern Wales, have been interpreted as entoptics indicative of an origin in an altered state of consciousness by some archaeologists, including Richard Bradley, Jeremy Dronfield, David Lewis-Williams, and Thomas Dowson.
See also European Paleolithic.
SOURCE:
Historical Dictionary of Shamanism by Graham Harvey and Robert J. Wallis 2007