Mobility and migration in the Early Neolithic of the Mediterranean: questions of motivation and mechanism

Abstract

The spread of the Neolithic throughout Mediterranean Europe involved, at least to some degree, the physical movement of farmers westwards. This mobility has often been attributed to demographic or climatic factors, and long-term environmental changes of this type surely provided the backdrop against which subsistence practices and behavioral strategies developed. However, changing environmental parameters, while posing challenges to established Early Neolithic farming regimes, did not in and of themselves establish mobility and migration as self-selecting solutions to increased social pressure; we do not fully understand how these pressures were experienced at the level of the individual, the family or the village. This article suggests that embedded Early Neolithic cultural attitudes to subsistence and surplus – and in particular the tension between incentives to hoard and imperatives to share – rendered Early Neolithic communities fragile, with tendencies to fission. It is further argued that oscillations in drought frequency during the seventh millennium bc may have made mobility an increasingly attractive adaptive strategy in the face of intra-community tensions. Throughout, emphasis is placed on human responses to change as mediated through culturally specific circumstances.

Keywords:

• Early Neolithic
• Aegean
• climate change
• demography
• fissile communities

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank John Robb and John Cherry for their extensive and perceptive comments on an earlier draft of this article, Peter van Dommelen for his editorial supervision and forbearance and Elizabeth Murphy for her support. I would also like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Chantel White for ongoing and stimulating discussions of Neolithic social and subsistence organization. None of the above should be considered responsible for remaining errors of fact, omission, or interpretation.

Notes

1 I am very grateful to John Robb for this phraseology. All dates in this article are bc.

2 Eustatic sea level rise since the early-mid Holocene can thereby be assumed to have obscured an unknown number of Early Neolithic sites.

3 This requires a working definition of egalitarian. Perhaps the most fruitful approach is to understand egalitarianism in this context as a series of value systems and norms which militate against the accumulation of wealth (material or symbolic) in fewer locations as opposed to many, but which certainly does not imply that access to and deployment of goods, allies and knowledge were necessarily equally distributed.

4 This assumes that the missing Early Neolithic farmstead sites are genuinely absent, and not simply an artifact of data recovery.

5 This is the type of mechanism presumably envisaged by Weninger et al. (2006), although they would place the 8.2 kya event prior to the Neolithicization of the Aegean area, driving the appearance of farming communities in the Aegean basin itself. More recent synthetic work on the available radiometric data make this suspect, with the initial Thessalian and Thracian Neolithic sequences beginning ~6,500 (Reingruber and Thissen 2009).

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Notes on contributors

Thomas P. Leppard

Thomas Leppard is a supervisory archaeologist with International Archaeological Research Institute, Inc. His current research addresses human ecodynamics on islands in the Mediterranean (Sardinia) and Caribbean (Montserrat). He has recently published and forthcoming papers in the Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology and the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology on island colonization.