Neolithisation of the Western Mediterranean: New debates about an old issue (original) (raw)

Special Issue of Quaternary International: Neolithisation of the Western Mediterranean: New debates about an old issue, 2018

Abstract

From a historical point of view, the Neolithic transition constitutes a fundamental period during which people changed their relationship with the environment, and established – in diverse ways – an economy based on stockbreeding and agriculture. The consequences of this transition have cascaded to the present day, and serve as the foundation of modern rural society. For this reason, the origin and spread of agriculture has long been a topic of significant interest for archaeology and anthropology. In archaeology, the approaches to studying this “Neolithisation” process are extremely varied in order to encompass the vast changes, which occurred within the human-environment system. In Europe, the study of Neolithisation has focused on the vectors of this change (i.e. cultural diffusion via the indigenous hunter-gatherer so- cieties vs. demic diffusion by populations migrating from the Near East, where most of the animals and plant species in question had been do- mesticated). Equally, the study of Neolithisation in Europe involves examining the rhythms of emergence of novel techno-economic traits, whilst considering the greater or lesser favourability of the natural and cultural environments within which such novelties appeared. In the western Mediterranean, recent multidisciplinary research shows that the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition was a complex phenomenon that linear models cannot explain. Dispersal routes and rhythms of diffusion of the agro-pastoral economy, Mesolithic inheritance, regional inter- actions between communities and functional adaptations are all vari- ables that must be explored, in order to understand how Mediterranean societies were reshaped during this period. Within this general framework, this volume aims to contribute to the advances in the investigation by gathering a set of eight papers, previously presented at the XVII UISPP World Congress (Burgos, Spain, September 2014) in the framework of the session “Contexts without definition, definitions without context. Arguments for the character- ization of the (pre)historic realities during the Neolithisation of the western Mediterranean”. Insofar as the pre-historic realities of the Neolithic transition benefit from a holistic approach, we gathered a community of colleagues working on this theme from a large variety of fields: technical production, graphic expression, resources and terri- torial management, economic organization, stratigraphic and tapho- nomic analysis and radiocarbon data, etc. From a geographical view- point, each paper deals with a specific region; the local and regional scales constitute the area of empirical study and ensure proper con- textualization of the data, and the western Mediterranean provides an overall reference point and a broader context for the interpretations ˗ these two scales of analysis being inextricably linked.

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