Farmers at the Frontier. A Pan-European Perspective on Neolithisation

Abstract

Early farming is one of the central themes in archaeology, perhaps not so much in itself, as subsistence practice, but because of the many and diverse consequences for humans and environments that it has been attributed. Arguably, at least in European archaeology. In this new volume primacy is put on the earliest farming in order to ‘[...] better understand the individual factors, processes and actors involved in Neolithisation’ (p. 1). How was agriculture spread, what was spread, and what form did it take? Secondary adoption of agriculture, i.e. outside the primary centres of origin, it is stated, allows for active choice and awareness among the individuals involved, immigrants or indigenous to an area. A time ‘zone of variability’ (with reference to Price and Bar-Yosef 2011) or period of negotiation, exploration and audition of the agricultural way of life is suggested to be relevant not only to understand the processes in primary centres, but also in secondary context Europe. This allows for different durations and intensities of the transition into Neolithic communities in various regions. In the Introduction (p. 3) Gron, Sørensen and RowleyConwy suggest that the Early Neolithic is coming to an end when we see a widespread anthropomorphic alteration of the landscape, the final abandonment of foraging sites of Mesolithic character, and the commencement of monumental or communal construction. Throughout the volume, the first elements are emphasized suggesting farming activity, including landscape management. Relatively little can be found on farmer – forager relationships, and monumental or communal constrictions are hardly mentioned. The volume consists of 20 individual chapters in addition to the Introduction and a short Conclusion. The chapters include synthetic regional overviews, local analyses, and site-specific reports. They are ordered in a roughly south to north sequence, with an additional underlying question gradually turning from ‘when’ to ‘was there’ a Neolithisation, the latter explicitly critically discussed for Scandinavia by Prescott (Chapter 18). All chapters lean heavily on new and/or improved scientific methods, in particular stable isotope analyses, and radiocarbon dating and modelling. Several present macrofossil and zooarchaeological studies and some include results from aDNA analyses on animals, plants and/or humans. The many re-evaluations of existing zooarchaeological and macrofossil assemblages, and activation of existing grey literature, is commendable. Traditional archaeological material is given relatively little attention. The ‘scientific turn’ is mirrored in the illustrations, which are mostly distribution maps at different scales and various graphical presentations of metrical characteristics. Object illustrations are almost exclusively of animal bones and teeth. From the book’s subtitle, it becomes clear that the volume aims at providing a pan-European perspective. There are, however, huge geographical gaps (most of central and western Europe) at the same time as some regions – Scandinavia in particular (chapters 14–18) – are well covered. Before I started to read, to me the book title ‘Farmers at the Frontier’ (in singular) suggested a volume of carefully selected examples of geographically extreme and climatic marginal agriculture. The geographical imbalance apparent in the content list, with the lack of high altitude central European examples yet a number of papers on the Mediterranean (chapters 2–8), was surprising. A much more dynamic frontier understanding is, however, presented in the first chapter