Hunters and farmers in prehistoric Europe
Thinking in a general way, we may ask what range of situations might have given rise to some perceived degree of continuity from Mesolithic to Neolithic in regions not suspected to have witnessed independent origins of agriculture. Mesolithic adoption of agriculture in isolation is highly unlikely, at least from the perspective taken in this book, unless the agriculture can be shown to have been generated locally, as in Southwest Asia. But there are many intermediate possibilities. One is suggested for formerly Mesolithic populations by Ian Armit and Bill Finlayson (1992): "Whether actual economic practices themselves or whether only material symbols originally associated with agricultural economies were initially adopted, archaeologically these people would become Neolithic." In other words, hunters can adopt outsider artifacts, as have many in the recent ethnographic record, without actually adopting agriculture itself. They can thus appear to be Neolithic without being so in economic reality.
R. E. Donahue and colleagues (1992) give a good example of this from Tuscany, in which a Mesolithic cave-dwelling population acquired Neolithic pottery. Milutin Garasanin and Ivana Radovanovic (2001) give another example, this time of a Neolithic pot in a "Mesolithic" house in Lepenski Vir (Danube Basin). As noted above, the late hunter-gatherers of the North Sea and Baltic coastlines also acquired farmer goods such as polished axes. Some late Mesolithic sites in the Netherlands contain cereal remains, presumed traded in rather than locally cultivated. The archaeological record of the late Mesolithic in Europe must contain many more examples of this type, often difficult to recognize if the transition to agriculture occurred rapidly. Such situations carry no necessary implications for a unilateral Mesolithic adoption of agriculture.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, farmers who inhabit game-rich agricultural frontiers can switch temporarily to hunting and almost lose their agricultural heritage, becoming virtual hunters and gatherers again, as did many early Polynesian populations in the Pacific Islands." Admittedly, the Pacific islands east of the Solomons had no Mesolithic hunters - the first farmers found them pristine and well stocked with wild avifaunas. But clearly it is possible for frontier Neolithic populations to masquerade as Mesolithic hunters, a
circumstance noted for the earliest Neolithic in central Europe by John Alexander (1978). Marek Zvelebil (1989) has also noted that many Neolithic sites in Europe do not appear to have actual evidence for agriculture, perhaps reflecting temporary shifts into foraging (although this could as well reflect poor preservation of organic remains).
Figure 4.6 The genesis of megalithic monuments from interaction between the LBK farming tradition and the Mesolithic "round-structure tradition" in
northwestern Europe, mid-sixth to third millennia ac, according to Andrew Sherratt 1997a.
There can also be side-by-side interdigitated coexistence of hunters and farmers for long periods, a situation not to be confused with the long-term and rather hostile hunter-farmer frontier suggested by Keeley for Belgium during the LBK (above). As in many ethnographic situations, hunters and farmers can exchange and coexist in a mosaic of neighboring territories. Susan Gregg (1988) favors such a scenario for LBK farmers and their presumed Mesolithic contemporaries in southern Germany. As long as there are niches, hunters can of course survive for millennia amongst farmers, but only if the conditions are right.