The Balkans

The answer to this question was probably two-pronged. In the first direction, moving northward, early Balkan Neolithic cultures closely related to those of Anatolia and northern Greece are represented by the Proto-Sesklo culture of Macedonia, the Starcevo culture of parts of the former Yugoslavia, the Karanovo I of Bulgaria and Thrace, and the Koros of Hungary. Perles (2001:304) believes that the earliest Balkan Neolithic populations arrived from Anatolia via Thrace, rather than from Greece itself. Whatever the exact origins, the full agropastoral economy with domesticated cattle traveled too, with the addition of broomcorn millet, a cereal not native to Southwest Asia which must, presumably, have been introduced from the steppes of the Ukraine or central Asia (Dennell 1992; Zohary and Hopf 2000). The Balkan Neolithic cultures continued the same general PPNB/Anatolian-related elements as those in Greece, including, in the southern Balkans, tell-like settlements of wattle and daub houses, a form of wall construction better suited to wetter climates than mud brick.

The local Mesolithic populations were not entirely unaffected by all of this (see the range of views in Kertesz and Makkay 2001), and chronological overlap with them appears to be documented (albeit with controversy) at the site of Lepenski Vir in the Iron Gates region of the middle Danube, where acculturated descendants of a Mesolithic population are claimed to have continued in occupation until possibly 4400 BC. A rather piecemeal impact of the Neolithic in the Balkans is suggested by palynological evidence, indicating that forest clearance only registered on a large scale at about 4000 BC (Willis and Bennett 1994).

The northwestward spread of the Balkan style of Neolithic, in form of the Koros culture of Hungary, evidently ran out of steam for about a millennium toward the western limits of the Great Hungarian Plain, owing perhaps to variations in soil conditions, climate, and topography (Sumegi and Kertesz 2001). But by about 5400 BC, after a likely episode of cultural and perhaps biological reformulation, there emerged the temperate climate phenomenon of remarkable colonizing power known to archaeologists as the Linear Pottery

Culture, or Danubian, to which we return below.

The Mediterranean

In the second direction of expansion into Europe, agricultural populations had also begun to move along the northern Mediterranean coastline by at least 6000 Bc; the earliest pottery in Albania and Italy is related to that of the Starcevo culture in the southern Balkans. On the Tavoliere Plain in southeastern Italy, commencing about 6200 BC, there is a remarkable concentration in an area of 70 by 50 kilometers of about 500 ditched settlement enclosures up to 30 hectares in size, some with multiple outer ditches and internal compounds (Malone 2003). Ruth Whitehouse (1987) notes that there is no evidence for Mesolithic continuity here, but neither are there obvious signs of direct origin in the tell settlements of Greece or the Levant. What we appear to have is an adaptation to continuously unfolding new landscapes as the agricultural complex and its associated material culture spread westward. Tells were replaced by more ephemeral villages as people moved to regions of more widespread agricultural potential than obtained in the Levant, Anatolia, or Greece,' allowing timber to replace mud bricks for construction and a more frequent foundation of new settlements, instead of continuous occupation of single localities.

Beyond Italy we see the continuing spread of Neolithic cultures, characterized by so-called Cardial (shell-impressed) pottery, along the northern coastline of the Mediterranean to reach southern France, Iberia, Malta, and the nearby coast of North Africa between 5800 and 5400 BC (Rowley-Conwy 1995; Zilhao 1993, 2001). According to Joao Zilhao, the complex traveled via maritime colonization focusing on regions not densely settled by Mesolithic hunters, forming a sharp break with the preceding Mesolithic in most regions, despite some hints of overlap in certain marginally located limestone caves. But of course, Mesolithic populations were not all absent-mindedly looking the other way while farming blossomed behind their backs. In Portugal, the end of the line for this particular episode of Neolithic dispersal and also a good location for maritime hunter-gatherers, Mesolithic populations appear to have overlapped for at least 1,000 years with Neolithic farmers (Figure 4.3). In such a circumstance it is not surprising that some fairly strong debate has emerged

recently on the question of Mesolithic continuity into the Neolithic in Iberia, with skeletal evidence from Portugal taking centre stage.'