Due to their exceptional scientific interest, the Neolithic villages of Clairvaux-les-Lacs (Jura) were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2011.This book presents three of the oldest settlements on Lake Clairvaux, dating from around 3900-3700 BC and attributed to the ‘Middle Neolithic period in Burgundy’. These villages have a remarkable feature: located a few hundred metres apart, they were partly contemporary and shared a history marked by complementary and opposing relationships.Based on extensive stratigraphic studies and thousands of artefacts preserved below the water level, the authors offer a social interpretation of the tools, techniques and lifestyles of these pile-dwelling villages, where people and granaries were kept safe, while the secondary forest was regularly cleared for cereal crops that were quickly abandoned to stump growth.Clairvaux represents a new benchmark for the Middle Neolithic period, on a par with the largest coastal sites in Switzerland and south-western Germany. A comparison between the ceramics of Clairvaux and those of neighbouring regions reveals – in the context of small mobile groups engaged in itinerant agriculture in secondary forests – the complexity of trade relations with the classic Cortaillod culture of western Switzerland, the Middle Neolithic II culture of Burgundy and the ancient Munzingen culture of Upper Alsace.These data call into question the concept of the ‘Middle Burgundian Neolithic’, a theoretical construct from the 1980s that brought together two ceramic traditions whose origins and historical trajectories now appear to be irreconcilable.