This presentation comes out of two papers (Hofmann et al. in press; Ebersbach et al. submitted) written – with Thomas Doppler, Renate Ebersbach and Daniela Hofmann – as part of an ERC-funded project, The Times of Their Lives (2012–2017; www.totl.eu). The ToTL project has been applying a Bayesian statistical framework to the interpretation of radiocarbon dates, in a series of case studies across Neolithic Europe, from the sixth to the early third millennia cal BC. This is an effort to achieve high-resolution chronologies through formal modelling and to write correspondingly more detailed narratives of Neolithic history. Our selective analysis of settlement and culture in the Neolithic of the Alpine foreland has been a conscious comparison of the Bayesian approach to chronological modelling and dendrochronology, with the aim of reflecting on the difference which having very high-resolution dendrochronology makes to the kind of narratives we have written and may choose to write about Neolithic histories. Our studies are based in concepts of the flow of social life, drawn among others from Harald Garfinkel and Michael Carrithers. Settlements can be characterised thanks to dendro-dating as predominantly short-term, but longer-lasting taskscapes were the frame in which they operated; both timescales have to be considered simultaneously. Material culture patterning – at least as seen in pottery – was broad, with few fixed boundaries; studies of Concise in western Switzerland show long-maintained tradition, despite the repeated appearance of elements of style and production from over the hills to the west. Yet dendrochronology also helps to identify phases of very rapid change, perhaps best seen in the introduction of Corded Ware in the early third millennium. Micro-scale studies – as of Arbon Bleiche 3 or Torwiesen II, where the fine dendro-dating helps to achieve a kind of freeze-frame – present many insights into a perhaps surprising amount of diversity of material culture and practice. This may reinforce the sense of fluidity and flux suggested for settlements within their landscapes. Though we advocate writing detailed culture histories, the ‘culture-history’ filter of successive blocks of time up time up to 200–300 years long is not very helpful. Clearly dendrochronology provides far greater resolution than formal modelling of radiocarbon dates, even when everything works perfectly, but the gap is narrowing, which I illustrate with reference to the ToTL study – made with the help of Anthony Denaire, Philippe Lefranc and Team ToTL, especially Alex Bayliss (Denaire et al. submitted) – of the early and middle Neolithic sequence in Lower Alsace in the upper Rhine valley, not that far away from the Alpine foreland. I end by urging combined and continuing efforts to take the ‘pre’ out of prehistory.