Islands of Difference: An Ecologically Explicit Model of Central European Neolithisation

ABSTRACT This paper explores the relationship between Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, Neolithic farmers and prehistoric herders using a regional-scale analysis of two agriculturally peripheral areas in Bohemia (Czech Republic). Both regions represent ecologically diverse islands used by hunter-gatherer communities for their rich natural resources and set within uniform loess basins colonised by the first LBK farmers. Based on settlement dynamics, radiocarbon dating, artefactual and rich palaeoecological evidence, this thematic review attempts to illustrate how the use of well-defined spatiotemporal scales can affect our perception of the Mesolithic/Neolithic interface. This approach shows that hunter-gathering traditions persisted in the two model areas long enough to allow interaction with incoming farmers and thus that in particular landscapes the transition might have been a slow and gradual process during which the subsistence categories of hunter-gatherers, herders, and farmers overlapped and interacted. Such interactions could have included shared distribution networks of some raw materials and the contemporaneous exploitation by herders and hunter-gatherers of diverse territories rich in natural resources.