The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe

by Chris Fowler

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  CHAPTER 55

  COMMENTARY


  What Do We Mean by ‘Neolithic Societies’?

  JULIAN THOMAS

  INTRODUCTION

  READING the rich and detailed contributions to this volume, one is struck by the complexity and diversity of the evidence that documents life in the European Neolithic. Faced with this degree of variability, one might question whether the communities that inhabited Europe and western Asia over a period of several millennia really had very much in common with each other. Some while ago, Marek Zvelebil (1989, 382) called for ‘a clear definition of what constitutes a Neolithic society’, but does this category actually have any general analytical validity across space and time? One conventional view is that the core and base of the Neolithic way of life lay in farming. According to this perspective, a relatively invariant subsistence economy had been slowly formulated in south-west Asia, and had then proceeded to expand westwards, whether by demic diffusion, purposive migration, or indigenous adoption. The argument holds that farming has a logical priority over the other innovations of the period, and that the various different elements of the Neolithic were built hierarchically on top of a new subsistence base. Thus agriculture promotes sedentism, increased population, domestic architecture, more elaborate material culture, craft specialization, social differentiation, and complex mortuary practice. It follows that whatever distinguishes a Neolithic society must always and everywhere be the consequence and outcome of a specific economic change.

  But this argument is at variance with the extreme diversity of Neolithic societies across Eurasia that we have noted above. Not all of these practised cultivation and herding, used pottery or polished stone tools, lived in sedentary villages, venerated their dead, or took part in enhanced ritual activity, even if there was a marked tendency for the various elements of the ‘Neolithic package’ to co-occur. In south-west Asia, Trevor Watkins (2010, 622) has demonstrated that the emergence of large, co-resident communities predated the domestication of plants and animals. Where previous interpretations have stressed the causal role of environmental changes in the adoption of agriculture, Watkins implies that economic diversification and intensification was driven by the growth of larger and more complex social groups, manifested in the development of more substantial architectural forms and elaborate treatment of the dead (see also Malone, this volume). As late as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, some communities in south-west Asia who were beginning to construct monumental ceremonial structures were still making intensive use of wild resources rather than morphologically distinct domesticates (Schmidt 2010).