The Spread of the Neolithic Economy through Europe
Because of its broad latitudinal extent and because it extended well beyond the northern limits of Neolithic agriculture, Europe (Figure 4.1) has become one of the major regions of debate in world prehistory with respect to the question of how agriculture spread. Was it mainly by hunter-gatherer adoption? Or, following the terminology used by Albert Ammerman and Luca Cavalli-Sforza (1984), was it mainly by a "wave of advance" of farmers? Evidence suggests that it probably spread by a mixture of both processes, with rapid farmer dispersals in some regions such as Greece, the Mediterranean coastline, the Danube Valley, and onward into Germany and the Low Countries, but much slower spreads with substantial Mesolithic population involvement or resistance in western Europe and around the rugged and/or colder Atlantic and Baltic coastlines.
A recent analysis of European earliest Neolithic radiocarbon dates by Gkiasta et al. (2003) shows quite clearly how Mesolithic cultures existed side by side with Neolithic cultures for several centuries in some parts of western Europe, especially southern and central France, Portugal, the British Isles and Ireland (see also Zilhao 2000; Perrin 2003) (Figure 4.3). This is no more than one would expect given understanding of climatic factors and Mesolithic huntergatherer population densities at the time, the latter being most concentrated in maritime regions, but the details are nevertheless important to tease out since tempo of spread is an essential element in any overall and balanced interpretation of the whole situation.
Before moving into the details, six points require preliminary emphasis:
1. The Neolithic spread into Europe occurred, in the main, from western Anatolia. Connections across the Mediterranean with northwestern Africa and through the steppes north of the Black Sea were only of minor significance, the latter reflecting mainly expansion out of Europe rather than in during this time period (Telegin 1987; Yanushevich 1989).
2.With the marked exception of the Preceramic Neolithic of Cyprus, geographically closer to Asia than to Europe, and apart from a faint aceramic echo in Crete and mainland Greece, the Neolithic period in Europe was entirely ceramic, with a full complement of Southwest Asian cereals, legumes, and domestic animals. Genetic data indicate that European cattle descend from Western Asian rather than European wild stock (Troy et al. 2001), and the wild ancestors of sheep and goats were not native to Europe.
3.The spread of agriculture through Mediterranean and temperate Europe south of the Baltic, from the Aegean to the British Isles, spanned about 2,500 years, from 6500 to 4000 BC. Along the east-west axis there was a standstill of perhaps a millennium near the western edge of the Great Hungarian Plain (Sumegi and Kertesz 2001). Along the south-north axis, initial agricultural settlements in the Baltic region and Scandinavia occurred only after 3500 Bc, and in colder Boreal regions only as recently as AD 500 (Zvelebil 1996a, 1998; Taavitsainen et al. 1998).
4.Evidence for the spread of agriculture around the coastlines of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic is bedeviled by the fact that the sea surface only reached its present level at about 4000 BC, having risen from a level of minus 35 meters at about 8000 Be. Although postglacial isostatic uplift of the North Sea and Baltic regions has lessened the problem in the north, further south a large quantity of early Neolithic coastal archaeology is presumably drowned, to the detriment of detailed understanding. Barnett (1995), for instance, refers to an early Neolithic site off the coastline of Languedoc, now 5-6 meters below sea level.
5.Some of the debate about the transition from Mesolithic to Neolithic has been focused on caves and rock shelters, especially in the Mediterranean zone. A comparative perspective suggests that caves were far more likely to harbor surviving hunter-gatherers, users no doubt of gifted, borrowed, or looted farmer goods, than they were to harbor successful farmers. Many caves are far from good agricultural land by virtue of their karst geology, but often in prime hunting terrain. There can be no overall generalization here, but we would be wise to take care with caves and to examine their records bearing such factors in mind.
6. Virtually all authors who have written about the European Neolithic, whatever their interpretative persuasions, seem to agree that patterns of cultural diversity start off in low profile, in situations of widespread homogeneity, but become sharper and more localized as time goes by. In the words of Gordon Childe (1956:86):
If one studies in detail several closely allied Neolithic groups - on the Central European foss, for example - one notices a continual divergence, the multiplication of individual groups each differing from one another ever more pronouncedly ...
Cultural diversity across much of Europe in the Early Neolithic was considerably less than it was in either the later part of the preceding Mesolithic, or in the subsequent Late Neolithic.