Mobility and migration in the Early Neolithic of the Mediterranean

Questions of Motivation and Mechanism

Bibliographic Data

ID3919903
AuthorsThomas P Leppard (0000-0002-4803-4061, International Archaeological Research Institute, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume46
Issue4
Pages484-501
Publication date2014-08-08
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueWorld Archaeology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0043-8243 • E-ISSN: 1470-1375
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00438243.2014.931245
OpenAlexW2016606296
LanguageEN
Citations received20
References cited49

The spread of the Neolithic throughout Mediterranean Europe involved, at least to some degree, the physical movement of farmers westwards. This mobility has often been attributed to demographic or climatic factors, and long-term environmental changes of this type surely provided the backdrop against which subsistence practices and behavioral strategies developed. However, changing environmental parameters, while posing challenges to established Early Neolithic farming regimes, did not in and of themselves establish mobility and migration as self-selecting solutions to increased social pressure; we do not fully understand how these pressures were experienced at the level of the individual, the family or the village. This article suggests that embedded Early Neolithic cultural attitudes to subsistence and surplus – and in particular the tension between incentives to hoard and imperatives to share – rendered Early Neolithic communities fragile, with tendencies to fission. It is further argued that oscillations in drought frequency during the seventh millennium bc may have made mobility an increasingly attractive adaptive strategy in the face of intra-community tensions. Throughout, emphasis is placed on human responses to change as mediated through culturally specific circumstances

Agriculture · Archaeology · Climate change · Economic geography · Economics · Face (sociological concept · Geography · Incentive · Mediterranean climate · Social science · Sociology · Subsistence agriculture · Ecology