Chronological Perspectives on the Spread of Agriculture in Southeastern Europe

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies I: Stratification and Correlation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Neolithic studies in Europe have recently seen the impact of two very different sets of approaches to building chronological frameworks using radiocarbon dating. On the one hand, archaeologists have used radiocarbon dates as proxies for levels of human activity on past landscapes by employing summed probability distributions of radiocarbon measurements. This approach has tended to show little concern for the “messiness” of specific site and local level regional histories, largely focusing on the statistical robustness of large series of radiocarbon dates. The other approach has been to use a Bayesian statistical probability framework with site stratigraphies and carefully chosen contexts to build both site-specific and wider regional histories. In this paper, we evaluate the merits of these two approaches by dealing with the chronological record of the Early Holocene southeastern Europe. We discuss how the two different approaches to building chronologies stem from different and sometimes conflicting theoretical perspectives. We highlight how foragers and farmers impact landscapes differently, and how the resulting site visibility impacts each of these methodological approaches. Finally, we warn of the danger of conflating different scales of analysis when building a “big picture” by obliterating the small scale.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Constructing Chronologies I: Stratification and Correlation

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33329