After the establishment of Neolithic farming villages in central and southeastern Europe at the end of the seventh millennium BC, the agricultural communities in these regions adapted to their changing environments for thousands of years before eventually establishing hereditary systems of institutionalized inequality in the Bronze Age. During these millennia, the size and distribution of villages fluctuated on the landscape, sometimes resulting in large, »proto-urban« centers, likely with some degree of social hierarchy. Drawing on long-term, collaborative, research projects in the Carpathian Basin and the Aegean, Parkinson discusses the trajectories of change exhibited in prehistoric villages in these regions.