During the Neolithic period, the prehistoric societies of Europe start to appear familiar to the modern observer. People ceased to be hunters and gatherers pursuing a way of life completely alien to us. While the earliest European farmers lived under what we would consider primitive conditions, nonetheless their settled existence is more like ours than their precursors. It is indeed possible to trace the roots of European society known from recent milleniums back to the Neolithic in several key aspects:
1. A mixed farming economy based on wheat, barley, pulses, cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs formed the subsistence base for European communities until the introduction of American plants like the potato about 500 years ago;
2. The basic technology and infrastructure of European rural life, including metallurgy, timber architecture, weaving and ceramics, salt and food preservation, roads, and watercraft, either made their initial appearance during the Neolithic or developed into tools of everyday life;
3. The ritual use of important landscape features, such as mountains, springs, and bogs, and the maintenance of ritual structures on the landscape carried through into later prehistoric and historic times; and
4. Patterns of social and economic asymmetry and the acceptance and formalization of these social conditions that were elaborated in the Bronze Age and afterward can be seen to have their roots in the Late Neolithic.
It has now been only four millennia since the end of the Neolithic, not a very long time at all in archaeological terms. Four millennia earlier, most inhabitants of Europe were still hunters and gatherers in a relatively unmodified landscape. Placing the Neolithic period in this perspective dramatically illustrates the extent of the transformation in human society and also in the natural environment that occurred during this time and the need to understand how it happened.
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Paleolithic Raw Material Provenance Studies
Jehanne Fisblot-Augustins, CNRS, Nanterre, France
© 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
See also: Animal Domestication; DMA: Ancient; Modern, and Archaeology; Europe, Central and Eastern; Europe, Northern and Western: Bronze Age; Early Neolithic Cultures; Mesolithic Cultures; Plant Domestication.
World History
