by Chris Fowler
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* Received March 2009, updated December 2011.
CHAPTER 9
THE NEOLITHIC IN MEDITERRANEAN EUROPE*
CAROLINE MALONE
INTRODUCTION: THE MEDITERRANEAN AS A MELTING POT
THE Mediterranean provided the primary conduit for the movement of domestic plants and animals from the Near East to other landmasses and islands. The linkage between the pristine zone (Minnis 1985) of south-west Asian domestication and Neolithization in the Levant and Europe was modelled to a large extent on the nature of the Mediterranean ‘lake’ that was bordered by three continents. This juxtaposition of lacustrine-bordered landmasses doubtless influenced the nature of agricultural spread and adoption over a rapidly expanding area between c. 10,000 and 6,000 years ago and the cultures that emerged from this process.
The Mediterranean sea is c. 2,505,000km2 in surface area, measures c. 4,000 km east to west and c. 800km north to south, and is enclosed by an indented coastline of enormous length between Asia, Africa, and Europe. It contains at least 1,000 habitable islands, the largest of which, Sicily and Sardinia, cover some 25,000km2 each, and the island archipelagos provide ‘stepping stones’ for the dispersal of cultural and economic materials, ideas, and settlement. From later Palaeolithic times, larger islands adjacent to landmasses were exploited, enabled by low sea levels or the use of early sea craft. The basin of the Mediterranean is surrounded by upland massifs and rugged mountain chains (Atlas, Taurus, Pindos, Apennines, Alps, Pyrenees), some of which form the distinctive peninsulas dividing the basin into separate zones (Iberia, Italy, Balkans, Anatolia). Little of the region is classified as lowland, and coastal plains are mostly narrow and restricted, offering relatively limited landscape suitable for early Neolithic farming. The upland landscape, drained by river valleys with steep gorges and torrents and short, wide, and shallow ‘wadis’, often causes floods and catastrophic erosion once cleared of vegetation. The climate around the Mediterranean fringes is similar to the Levant, with hot, dry summers and mild but often wet winters. Inland climates differ far more, especially in upland zones, with marked seasonal conditions and cool winters. Even coastal north Africa claims a Mediterranean climate. Whilst the domesticated plants and animals of south-west Asia were adapted to dryer, hotter conditions, the coastal environment of much of the Mediterranean might not have demanded much additional change. The hinterlands with their colder, wetter seasons, salty alluvial zones, and forested landscapes posed a far greater challenge, and the use of barley, sheep/goat, and upland pulses implies local modification and adaptation.
The contemporary Mediterranean landscape is changed beyond all recognition. Forest clearance since the Neolithic, Roman exploitation of hillsides for commercial production of vines, olives, and cereals, historic overexploitation, and overpopulation have all contributed to soil erosion, changed ground water levels, and badlands. The classic Mediterranean landscape of peasant agricultural exploitation, portrayed by Braudel (1972; see also Barker 1995), was probably far less productive by the sixteenth century AD than at the beginning of the Neolithic, but many features, such as unstable soils, floods, and drought, remain unchanged. Such conditions have perpetuated the seasonal use of different parts of the landscape for transhumance and upland stock farming, and lowland cereal production and settlement.
SCHOLARLY BACKGROUND
The Neolithic has been the focus of scholarly study for barely a century in most parts of the Mediterranean, but landscape approaches since World War II, along with aerial photography, survey, soil and environmental study, and a very Mediterranean tradition of culture-sequence research, have revealed most of the regional Neolithic cultures. Some areas (such as the Aegean) have been popular for research, whilst others, such as north Africa, have been largely ignored.
Dating programmes since the 1960s have revolutionized our understanding of the antiquity of the Neolithic, resulting in the ‘Wave of Advance’ model (Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza 1971, 1973, 1984) combining evidence of genetic, linguistic, and cultural movement with an improving chronological framework. Current interests are diverse, including environmental and material approaches, alongside ‘post-processual’ studies exemplified by projects such as Çatal Höyük in central Anatolia (Hodder 1996, 2000) and phenomenological investigations (Skeates 2008; Tilley 2004, 2008). A lack of interpretative syntheses of Neolithic archaeology, however, hinders a detailed understanding of much of the region. It is still rare to find fieldwork programmes addressing the Neolithic as a primary research goal, and few sites are examined within their wider economic landscapes, or subject to soil and seed, isotopic, population, dating, or environmental analyses. To compensate, explanatory models and simulation studies address key issues of how agricultural society spread across the region.
MESOLITHIC BACKGROUND AND NEOLITHIZATION
Despite the often insubstantial evidence for mobile hunter-gatherer groups, the Mediterranean basin and its hinterland provided rich and varied foraging landscapes—and most if not all of the landscapes and at least the larger islands were probably known, exploited, and populated to some degree long before agriculture emerged. Mobility involved terrestrial, maritime, and riverine exploitation by Mesolithic communities capable of navigation and boat-raft building, and with a wide knowledge of their land and seascapes. Given this, the questions to ask are why and how economic strategies changed, and why some communities accepted novelty and innovation whilst others remained conservative.
Changing environmental conditions almost certainly triggered change and innovation across the Near Eastern Levant (defined here as Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel). The early Holocene (c. 10,000–6,000 BC) saw remarkable ecological regeneration after the dry cold of the late Pleistocene in south-west Asian and Mediterranean landscapes (Roberts 1998; Moore 1983; Moore et al. 2000). Subsistence in the particular ecozones of the Levant, physically constrained by sea, mountain, and desert (Sherratt 1996, 2005), resulted in locally dense populations (Natufians) subsisting on intensive plant collecting and selective animal herding/culling. With a sudden downturn in the climate (Younger Dryas, mid-tenth millennium BC), and with nowhere to go and diminishing economic resources, Pre-pottery Neolithic populations survived through the innovation of an entirely new approach to food procurement, processing, storage, and new products and husbandry practices (Moore and Hillman 1992). For early Neolithic populations, the eastern Mediterranean coastline (Anatolia, sou
thern Greece, Cyprus, north Africa) offered similar environments to the Levant, but further west and north climatic seasonality became more marked, with adaptation requiring considerable change and technical innovation. Here the early Holocene climate offered a near-ideal environment for late Mesolithic hunter-gatherer economies (Lewthwaite 1986, 1989; Pluciennik 2004, 2008) able to exploit the rich fauna and flora of the forests, lakes, estuaries, and coasts of the central and western Mediterranean. In consequence, well-established mobile traditional hunter-gatherers seemed reluctant to adopt permanent farming and settled life.
The significantly lower sea levels that persisted until c. 5000 BC promoted the movement of farming across the Mediterranean with large estuaries, large islands, and peninsulae providing extensive and connected landscapes. After c. 5000 BC sea levels rose, drowning these landscapes and reducing the useable territory. Mobile groups might have settled islands large enough to sustain hunting and gathering seasonally or permanently (cf. Dawson 2007; Malone 1999), but some areas (e.g. Cyprus, Crete, south-east Italy) adopted farming rapidly. Many forager groups lingered after farming arrived, as charted by recent surveys in the western Mediterranean uplands, islands, lake basins, coastal caves, and rock shelters (Giannitrapani and Pluciennik 2001; Malone and Stoddart 1994; Binder 2000; Zilhao 2000; Barker 1995; Biagi 1990; Pessina and Tiné 2008). A major problem for archaeologists is the location of sites documenting the transition from foraging to farming, with just a few examples currently known and published. Uzzo cave in Sicily (Costantini 1989; Pluciennik 1994; Cassoli and Taglacozzo 1995; Mannino and Thomas 2007; Tagliacozzo 1993, 1994; Piperno et al. 1980; Tusa 1985) and Franchthi Cave in Greece (Jacobsen 1976, 1981; Hansen 1991; Payne 1975; Perlès 2001) revealed evolving subsistence strategies that included hunted or stranded marine mammals, deep-sea and inshore fish, molluscs, birds, small mammals, and plant foods. Further west, the transition seems far more gradual around, for example, the Tagus estuary in Spain, where Atlantic resources provided very different seasonal opportunities to Mediterranean rivers like the Ebro or the Rhône.
NEOLITHIC ‘ORIGINS’ IN THE NEAR EAST AND ANATOLIA
Origins for domestication and farming lie in the Levant, where the wild progenitor populations of the main European domesticates (cattle, sheep, goat, pig, wheat, barley, lentils, peas, beans, various fruits, nuts, vegetables) (Meadow 1989) were available. Studies of Natufian hunter-gatherers and their successors demonstrate that the necessary pre-adaptations towards food production took place in the twelfth to eleventh millennia BC. Intensive food collecting–processing and herding–hunting strategies at base camps such as Ain Mallaha in Israel (Valla 1995) and Abu Hureyra in Syria (Moore and Hillman 1992; Moore et al. 2000) stimulated complex forager populations. From ‘broad spectrum’ collecting and hunting, the semi-mobile and growing hunter-gatherer groups focused on specific foods (gazelle, wild goat, wild wheat, barley, pulses). Larger sedentary communities (e.g. Jericho, Abu Hureyra, Ain Gazel) developed around increasingly domesticated foods derived from intensive herding and emergent agriculture. These Pre-pottery Neolithic cultures (distinguished locally as PPNA, PPNB, and PPNC) adapted to presumed economic necessity in the tenth to ninth millennia BC (Bar Yosef 1995; Gopher 1995; Moore et al. 2000; Aurenche 2007; Hauptmann and Özdoğan 2007) through a focus on certain predictable, high-calorie/protein farmed foods and emergent technologies. From c. 8700–6500 BC, this economic model consolidated and expanded across the Near East and east Mediterranean coasts. The original ‘Wave of Advance’ model suggested a steady, almost measured expansion north and west from the heartland of the Levant coast. Recent chronologies show a much more haphazard pattern (Guilaine, this volume; 2007) whereby some parts of Europe adopted Neolithic elements more rapidly than others, the economy and settlement funnelled along particular rivers, plains, coasts, and local communities. This pattern is suggested in Fig. 9.1, which combines both ‘waves’ and current dates within the broad cultural attributions of the earlier Neolithic.
FIG. 9.1. Map of a modified ‘wave of advance’ in 200-km arcs, showing the expansion of Neolithic farming and culture into the Mediterranean with additional radiometric dates and broad ceramic groups (after Özdoğan in Hauptmann and Özdoğan 2007; Guilaine 2007).
Two repeating elements contribute to the distinctive pattern of Neolithic spread and acculturation across the Mediterranean: colonization by exotic peoples, foods, technologies, and ideas; and continuity of indigenous foragers and traditional subsistence strategies (Zvelebil and Rowley-Conwy 1986). The former is seen as sophisticated, settled, and agricultural, the latter as mobile, small-scale, and culturally simple. Probably both are extremes of reality. The speed and success of Mediterranean Neolithization is down to well-adapted, opportunistic hunter-gatherers selecting elements from the Neolithic ‘package’ to suit their economic needs, social aspirations, and local environment. Given that the original transformation within the Levantine–east Mediterranean involved internally stimulated economic and cultural change, we can apply a version of this ‘indigenous’ model to the Mediterranean, albeit with the introduction of domesticates and some technologies.
Key elements of the primary Neolithic package transmitted from the Near East into south-east Europe and beyond were domestic species and ideas and technologies of how to live, build, make, eat, and cultivate. Mud-brick and daub houses (Flannery 1969), larger social groups, ground stone implements and vessels, pottery and plastic figurative ‘art’ and imagery, and new materials such as obsidian were some of the attractions to indigenous groups. So was the novelty of cereal foods, and the potential to store them. These prestige foods may have provoked new beliefs, social values, and competition (Mithen 2003, 62–71), resulting in elaborate ritual and building programmes. The impressive ritual site of Göbekli Tepe (Schmidt 2007) in south-east Anatolia, with its artistic focus on wild and hunted creatures, may represent those new values. In essence, cultivated foods were prestigious and part of elaborate ritual and ceremony celebrating both the wild and the cultivated—this underpins the adoption of otherwise arduous farming and land tenure amongst former foragers.
NEOLITHIC EVIDENCE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN
In spite of the momentous changes the transition to agriculture implies, physical evidence of that transformation is far more ephemeral and difficult to assess. At its most basic, Neolithic evidence comprises some four categories: economic (plants, animals, technical innovations); structural (settlements, houses, tombs, burials); material culture (pottery, tools); and, finally, the elusive changes to the wider environment, with soil, pollen, and environmental records documenting clearance and crop regimes (Barker 2006; Van Andel and Runnels 1995). Environmental evidence occurs episodically, and rarely does it provide the full picture of transformation, except when documented over centuries or millennia of activity in deeply stratified sites.
Economic evidence
Some recent research has shown the complexities of the evolving Neolithic economies of the Mediterranean, but there are few sites where routine environmental or dating studies have been conducted. Too often, pottery and stratigraphic lists take the place of a better understanding of the environment, landscape, and chronology of individual sites. Current questions include the role of local plants and animals in the process of domestication (e.g. pigs and cattle), the role of pastoralism, secondary products, dairying, isotope studies and diet, plant and animal genetics, and the role of hunted and collected food within the mixed yet increasingly agricultural economies of the region (Barker 2006). Studies rarely show the rate of change or the persistence of continuing systems, although this remains a fundamental aspect.
Settlement and regional culture
The definition of settlement remains tricky given that so few complete or substantial sites have been excavated across the region. Far more common are fragmentary occupation traces underlying later open sites, comprising pits, post holes, walls, hearths, rubbish, burials, and material culture. Cave and rock shelter occupations often inc
lude layers with Neolithic materials, but are difficult to interpret. Exceptions include the Neolithic tell sites of western Anatolia (Mellaart 1967, 1971; Özdoğan 1999) Bulgaria, and Thessaly, and the Neolithic ditched sites at Makriyalos (Greece) (Halstead 1999; Pappa and Besios 1999), the Tavoliere (south-east Italy), the Catania Plain (Sicily), and Valencia (Spain), but estimates of population density, settlement size, family group size, and so on remain obscure, as do the different functions of such sites. Surveys in the Acconia Plain in Calabria (Ammerman 1985), the Gubbio Valley in Umbria (Malone and Stoddart 1992, 1994), Calabria (Robb 2007), Thessaly (Perlès 1999), or eastern Crete (Tomkins 2008) give important insights into the elusive nature of early and developing Neolithic settlement, but it is easy to over-interpret what at best is flimsy evidence (Halstead 1999, 80–81).
Burials and tombs
Early burials reflect the Near-Eastern emphasis on house association, with burials placed below floors, within ditches, or in storage pits, hearths, and other domestic structures. Formal burial in defined places, such as the ubiquitous rock cut tombs of much of the Mediterranean, developed c. 4500–4000 BC and became frequent in areas of suitable geology across the region, sometimes dominating burial practice until the protohistoric period. Megalithic and other stone-built structures similarly became a feature of many Mediterranean areas from the Levant to Portugal, and there has been much debate as to their origins, dates, and cultures. Until the late Neolithic, burials were sparsely furnished with grave goods (e.g. Çatal Höyük; Mellaart 1967), and pottery, personal ornaments, stone tools, and food were the main offerings. By the end of the fourth millennium BC, some tombs were well furnished, implying emerging social hierarchy, but the trend was for communal grave goods and collective burial. Individual burials dominated in some places, especially where associated with houses or caves, whilst megalithic and rock-cut tombs, given the necessary investment, involved larger numbers of people and collective rites. However, few sites were excavated or recorded properly. Only recently have detailed studies of bones, tomb contents, and locations begun to reveal the complexity of funerary practice.