Did the Neolithic Revolution Revolutionize the European Landscape? An Analysis of the Relationship between Climate, Vegetation, and the Arrival of Agro-pastoral Subsistence

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists have long recognized the spread and adoption of agro-pastoral subsistence in Europe as a transformative economic and social process. While many studies have tied site-specific changes in vegetation communities to the arrival of the Neolithic, very few attempts have been made at synthesizing these data to examine the Neolithic revolution in Europe as a whole. Our recent research highlighted transitions in vegetation communities associated with the arrival of Neolithic agriculture across much of Europe through a segmented regression analysis of over 400 pollen records. In many cases, the timing of these shifts coincides with the arrival of Neolithic agro-pastoral land use, but not all. In this paper, we extend our analysis to focus on how changing climate associated with the early and middle Holocene may help explain vegetation changes not tied to the arrival of the Neolithic. Moreover, we now explore how intensifying land use related to post-Neolithic population growth may have resulted in delayed vegetation responses beyond the initial Neolithic revolution throughout Europe.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25444