We have few insights into how people dressed or decorated themselves during the Neolithic period, because materials like leather or cloth rarely survive. However, some objects do survive that can tell us that people did decorate themselves or their clothes with various ornaments.

Burials are the most common source of evidence. There is very little from the early Neolithic period because people were buried without individual grave-goods. However, by about 3000 BC some people were being buried with prestige grave-goods, probably their own possessions. Not everyone was buried this way – these were probably the graves of high-status people. Among these grave-goods we find personal objects such as jet costume-fittings, bone pins and toggles, and sometimes beads.

Around this time we can see a cultural shift with emphasis moving away from the collective towards the individual. The same change in emphasis can be seen even more clearly in graves from around 2500 BC onwards that contain Beaker grave-goods. Beaker artefacts include the first objects made from beaten copper and gold such as dress pins and other simple ornaments. The picture we get from these artefacts is a society which was growing increasingly interested in expressing and displaying the status and wealth of the individual rather than the group.