Early Holocene aridity and the first farmers of Europe

Summary

The spread of agriculture into Europe from its Near Eastern heartland was an important cultural event, the causes of which have been debated for many decades. DNA analyses are increasingly providing insights into the genetic inheritance of Europe's first farmers, yet the triggers for their initial migration remain elusive. The earliest agricultural sites in Europe appear to be those situated in coastal Greece, while more fertile inland areas, such as the Thracian Plain, were settled centuries to millennia later. In this presentation we interrogate the paleoenvironmental record from Thrace to elucidate the environmental factors that may have affected the timing and distribution of the earliest European agricultural settlements.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Human adaptations to environmental change during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene - Part 1   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage