Causalities, time-scales and processes of environmental and cultural change in Italy between the Final Upper Palaeolithic and Early Neolithic

Summary

This paper reconsiders the significance of a generally warmer and wetter climate, expanded plant ranges and sea level rise to human groups in mainland and island Italy between the Final Upper Palaeolithic and Early Neolithic. Fundamental cultural changes in demography, subsistence strategies and social organization certainly coincided broadly with these environmental changes, and do suggest a degree of human adaptation, although the cultural resilience of hunter-gatherer lifestyles should not be under-estimated. But do the available data allow us to be more precise about possible causalities, time-scales and processes in Italy? And, more specifically, do they enable us to identify the impact on human groups of Berger and Guilaine’s (2009) claimed abrupt climatic deterioration event around 8200 years ago?

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

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Human adaptations to environmental change during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene - Part 2

Keywords

Spatial Coverage