Session: #534

Theme & Session Format

Theme:
5. (Extreme) Environments – Islands, Coasts, Margins, Centres
Session format:
Regular session

Title & Content

Title:
Diversity in the Spread of Neolithic Lifeways: Exploring Regional Differences Across Eurasia [PaM]
Content:
Across Eurasia, the adoption of farming is associated with major socio-economic, technological, cultural, symbolic and biological transformations. This process is understood as the largely rapid spread of a sedentary economy based on agriculture, herding, and new technologies like pottery and polished stone tools, which originally dispersed from southwest Asia through demic diffusion and local interactions. However, regional differences are evident and there is considerable variability in the tempo of these processes. In some areas, the characteristic hallmarks of the Neolithic are absent or uncorrelated with the appearance of farming communities. In addition, subsistence strategies based on hunting, fishing, and gathering, typically associated with Mesolithic communities, persisted in some locations despite the confirmed presence of domesticates, pointing to encounters between hunter-gatherers and farming communities living in close proximity to one another. This undoubtedly contributed to some of the diversity visible in the archaeological record, however, there is still uncertainty about how and why regional differences arose. For instance, how did different Neolithisation routes affect the timing and spread? Or what role did local environmental factors play? Recent advances in techniques such as aDNA and a combination of isotopic analyses have provided valuable information on the spread and consolidation of Neolithic populations (ancestry) as well as economy (diet), and helped to discern the timing of overlap. Similarly, innovative and nuanced archaeological approaches to material culture have given rise to a number of wide-ranging studies which highlight and address the extent of diversity in the spread of Neolithic lifeways.

In this session, we welcome submissions from different regions across Eurasia with the aim of illustrating how the Neolithic, due to the cultural and environmental diversity in which it developed, manifests in different ways. The session will provide an opportunity to examine and discuss what factors lay behind these regional differences.
Keywords:
Neolithic, Mesolithic, Eurasia, Neolithisation, Regionality, Transition
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
PaM

Organisers

Main organiser:
Rory Connolly (Ireland) 1
Co-organisers:
Sonja Kačar (Ireland) 1
Robert Power (Ireland) 1
Fiona Pichon (Spain) 2
Domingo Salazar-García (Spain) 3,4
Affiliations:
1. School of Archaeology, University College Dublin
2. IMF-CSIC, Barcelona
3. Departament de Prehistòria, Arqueologia i Història Antiga, Universitat de València, València, Spain
4. Department of Geological Sciences, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa