The Neolithic period in the British Isles lasted from c. 4100 to c. 2,500 BC. Constituting the final stage of the Stone Age in the region, it was preceded by the Mesolithic and followed by the Bronze Age.

During the Mesolithic period, the inhabitants of the British Isles had been hunter-gatherers. Around 4000 BC, migrants began arriving from Central Europe. These migrants brought new ideas, leading to a radical transformation of society and landscape that has been called the Neolithic Revolution. The Neolithic period in the British Isles was characterised by the adoption of agriculture and sedentary living. To make room for the new farmland, the early agricultural communities undertook mass deforestation across the islands, which dramatically and permanently transformed the landscape. At the same time, new types of stone tools requiring more skill began to be produced, and new technologies included polishing. Although the earliest indisputably-acknowledged languages spoken in the British Isles belonged to the Celtic branch of the Indo-European family, it is not known what language the early farming people spoke.

The Neolithic also saw the construction of a wide variety of monuments in the landscape, many of which were megalithic in nature. The earliest of them are the chambered tombs of the Early Neolithic, but in the Late Neolithic, this form of monumentalization was replaced by the construction of stone circles, a trend that would continue into the following Bronze Age. Those constructions are taken to reflect ideological changes, with new ideas about religion, ritual and social hierarchy.

The Neolithic people in Europe were not literate and so they left behind no written record that modern historians can study. All that is known about this time period in Europe comes from archaeological investigations. These were begun by the antiquarians of the 18th century and intensified in the 19th century during which John Lubbock coined the term "Neolithic". In the 20th and the 21st centuries, further excavation and synthesis went ahead, dominated by figures like V. Gordon Childe, Stuart Piggott, Julian Thomas and Richard Bradley.

The period that preceded the Neolithic in the British Isles is known by archaeologists as the Mesolithic. During the early part of that period, Britain was still attached by the landmass of Doggerland to the rest of Continental Europe. The archaeologist and prehistorian Caroline Malone noted that during the Late Mesolithic, the British Isles were something of a "technological backwater" in European terms and were still living as a hunter-gatherer society though most of Southern Europe had already taken up agriculture and sedentary living.

"The Neolithic period is one of remarkable changes in landscapes, societies and technologies, which changed a wild, forested world, to one of orderly agricultural production and settled communities on the brink of socially complex 'civilization'. It was a period that saw the arrival of new ideas and domesticated plants and animals, perhaps new communities, and the transformation of the native peoples of Britain. The Neolithic opened an entirely new episode in human history. It took place in Britain over a relatively short space of time, lasting in total only about 2000 years – in human terms little more than 80–100 generations."

— Archaeologist and prehistorian Caroline Malone on the Neolithic in Britain (2001)

Between 10,000 BC to 8,000 BC the Neolithic Revolution in the Near East gradually transformed hunter-gathering societies into settled agricultural societies. Similar developments later occurred independently in Mesoamerica, Southeast Asia, Africa, China and India. It was in the Near East that the "most important developments in early farming" occurred in the Levant and the Fertile Crescent, which stretched through what are now parts of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Iran and Iraq, areas that already had rich ecological variation, which was being exploited by hunter-gatherers in the Late Palaeolithic and the Mesolithic periods.