Environmental Change and the Neolithization of Southeast Europe: a Bulgarian perspective

Summary

Any discussion of Neolithization of the part of the Balkan Peninsula that lies within the territory of Bulgaria has to confront two seemingly long-established and incontrovertible ‘facts’ – the abrupt appearance of a fully developed Neolithic ‘package’ c. 6100/6000 cal BC, and the virtual archaeological ‘absence’ of a pre-Neolithic (Mesolithic) substratum. This paper focuses on two inadequately discussed aspects of the ongoing debate surrounding the spread of farming across SE Europe: 1) the environmental potential of the region for pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer settlement against the background of substantial climate and vegetational change during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene, and 2) the appearance of a distinctive raw material (‘Balkan Flint’) and toolkits that are one of the hallmarks of the supra-regional Karanovo I–Starčevo–Criş–Körös cultural complex.

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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