Southern and Mediterranean Europe
Cyprus, Turkey, and Greece
Agricultural dispersal into Cyprus occurred during the PPNB, perhaps even in the late PPNA, at about 8500 BC. The settlers presumably crossed the Mediterranean from the Syrian coast, although likely source regions in the northern Levant are now beneath the sea - existing sites such as Ras Shamra and Byblos in the modem coastal region are too young to represent direct sources. As Edgar Peltenberg et al. (2001:60) comment: "The Mediterranean [i.e., Cyprus] evidence, therefore, provides firmer evidence than was previously available from the mainland alone that migration played a significant role in the earliest spread of farming" (see also Colledge et al. 2004).
One of the first tasks of the new settlers in Cyprus seems to have been the hunting to extinction of a native and doubtless naive fauna of pygmy hippos.' They established several villages with a full Levantine PPNB material culture, including Byblos Points, naviform cores, glossed sickle blades, and Anatolian obsidian (Peltenberg et al. 2000, 2001; Knapp and Meskell 1997; Simmons 1998). They brought with them their crops - domesticated einkorn, emmer, and barley. Cattle, sheep, goat, pigs, and fallow deer (the latter presumably wild) also made the sea crossing, and animals were kept in a palisaded enclosure at the site of Shillourokambos. The most famous of the Neolithic villages of Cyprus is Khirokitia (Le Brun 1989) in the southern part of the island, where a village of dozens of stone-walled honeycomb-like circular houses, reminiscent of the Levantine PPNA, was founded about 7000 BC in a steep valley close to the sea. The Khirokitia houses are divided by a wall which probably reflected some kind of social/lineage division in the community.
Current opinion on the western Anatolian sequence also favors population incursion, in this case from central and southeastern Turkey, and somewhat later in time than Cyprus. Western Turkey, on current evidence, appears to have witnessed a cultural trajectory into the Neolithic during the early ceramic period. The site of Ilipinar on the Bosporus (6200-5500 Bc) has an initial phase
of single-roomed houses built of mud slabs, followed by a phase with mud brick multi-roomed two-storied houses of central Anatolian type. The inhabitants had a fully agropastoral economy with pigs, cattle, and caprovines (goats and sheep), and made female figurines and a variety of chaff-tempered pottery. The excavator of Ilipinar, Jacob Roodenberg, derives this population from the Hacilar region of central Turkey, and specifically notes the close relationship between Ilipinar and the early Neolithic of the Balkans (Roodenberg 1999; Ozdogan 1997a, 1997b).
Further to the west, in Thrace, an exotic ceramic Neolithic tradition appeared in the site of Hop Cesme at about 6400 Bc, in association with stone-walled circular houses, a defensive wall, painted and monochrome pottery, and a largeblade tradition which does not descend from the local Epipaleolithic. Mehmet Ozdogan also traces the Hoca Cesme tradition to central Turkey, and notes that its pottery is related to that of some early Neolithic sites in the eastern Balkans, such as Karanovo I in Bulgaria.
The perspective from Greece matches that from western Anatolia quite smoothly, with the introduction of a Neolithic cultural tradition with both Anatolian and deeper "Near Eastern" features, as postulated by Ozdogan. Aceramic Neolithic occupation is attested in Stratum X at Knossos on Crete at about 7000 BC, with a full agropastoral complement of bread wheat, cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats. According to Cyprian Broodbank, this represents a fairly large-scale episode of maritime colonization, from an uncertain origin point, of an island that, like Cyprus, apparently had no prior inhabitants (Broodbank and Strasser 1991; Broodbank 1999). Together with the evidence from Cyprus, Knossos Stratum X suggests that the oldest dispersals westward from the Levant might have been by sea, rather than by the land route through western Turkey. Likewise, the Greek mainland itself has only a shadowy and very late Preceramic Neolithic, represented at Argissa in Thessaly and a few other sites. Otherwise, most mainland Greek Neolithic sites appear to postdate 6500 Bc, and contain pottery (Perles 2001).
Greece, in environmental terms, represents a direct westward extension of the Anatolian landmass. Like much of Turkey, it has limited agricultural land and a fairly scarce record of Mesolithic occupation, circumstances which would allow any incoming Neolithic population to move freely between the best pockets of fertile alluvial soil. This is exactly what we see in the record, if we pool the
observations of several authorities.' Tjeerd van Andel and Curtis Runnels (1995) discuss the distribution of Neolithic sites in Thessaly, mostly on terrace fans next to active flood plains and close to cultivable raised levees. Like Andrew Sherratt (1980), they favor a saltatory movement of pioneer Neolithic societies, moving rapidly from one circumscribed environment to another (Figure 4.2). Thessaly is quite rich in such alluvial environments and during the Early Neolithic supported a remarkable density of sites averaging 2.5 hectares in size, located about 2.7 kilometers apart on average and heavily dependent on agricultural production (Perles 1999).
Figure 4.2 The saltatory Neolithic colonization in Greece, moving from fertile across infertile regions to new farmlands. From van Andel and Runnels 1995.
Jean-Paul Demoule (1993) and Catherine Perles (2001) both see the Greek Neolithic economy as heavily agropastoral from the start, with very little hunting and no lithic continuity from the Mesolithic. Greek Early Neolithic painted pottery is homogeneous (Vitelli 1995), and closely paralleled in the early Hoca Cesme pottery of Thrace, as well as in the Proto-Sesklo, Starcevo, and Karanovo assemblages of the southern Balkans (ca. 6100 ac) (Figure 4.1). Over time it developed greater regional expressions, particularly after 5300 BC.
As far as specific parallels with the Anatolian Neolithic are concerned, we can point to a number of items which appear in the earliest Greek Neolithic sites: female figurines, marble bracelets, painted pottery with no very clear "primitive" phase, earplugs of stone or clay, clay stamp seals, flexed burials under house floors, wattle and daub associated with mud brick and timberframed house construction techniques, and the build-up of tells (Perles 2001:5256). Greek and Balkan Neolithic houses tend to be single-roomed and separate, as we see in some contemporary Neolithic sites in the northern Levant (Tell Ramad and Byblos, for instance).
An important perspective on the introduction of the agricultural economy into Greece is provided by Franchthi Cave in the Argolid. Here, Mesolithic populations utilized wild forms of oats, lentils, pistacchio, almond, and barley. Then, domesticated emmer, barley and lentils, with domesticated sheep, goats, and pigs, appeared fairly suddenly in the sequence at about 6900 BC, after a period of virtual abandonment of the site. Julie Hansen (1991, 1992) sees this appearance as a result of introduction from Anatolia. What role the local Mesolithic people played in all of this is unclear, but a cave situation such as Franchthi is one place where we might expect some degree of continuity. However, in her recent survey of the Greek early Neolithic, Catherine Perles (2001, with Colledge et al. 2004) favors colonization by many groups crossing the Aegean from Anatolia, rather than continuity from a faint preceding Mesolithic phase. She notes (2001:44) that Greece has only 12 recorded Mesolithic sites, as opposed to between 250 and 300 Neolithic sites.
As in the Levant, so too in Greece there was perhaps an ultimate price to pay for the early Neolithic episode of colonization and population growth. Soil erosion became evident about 500-1,000 years after the beginnings of the Greek Neolithic in parts of Thessaly and the Peloponnese (van Andel et al. 1990). Neolithic agriculture impacted heavily on the slopes around the Argive Plain, site of the future Bronze Age citadel of Mycenae:
This expansion of human activity triggered an environmental catastrophe that altered the landscape forever ... It appears that in a very short period massive erosion stripped the soil from the hills above Berbati and Limnes, leaving behind bare rock where the Neolithic farmers [had] grazed their flocks and had their fields. The soil and debris flowed out into the Argive Plain to the south, depositing as much as 20 feet of alluvium over a large
area. (Wells et al. 1993:56)
True, the later civilization of Mycenae might have waxed rich on the agricultural produce of all these anthropogenic alluvial lowlands, as did many island cultures in the Pacific whose ancestors also caused similar soil erosion (Spriggs 1997b). But the fact remains that the immediate impact might have been a little unsettling, at least for a while. According to van Andel and Runnels (1995:497), the settlement history of eastern Thessaly underwent a decline in the late Neolithic, with few new settlements founded and many abandoned. One might legitimately wonder about the consequences of such developments as a trigger for ensuing population dispersal.