The transition to farming in Eastern and Northern Europe

Abstract

This paper presents a general survey of the transition to farming in Eastern and Northern Europe, approached within the framework of the availability model and treated from the perspective of local (Mesolithic) hunting and gathering communities. We argue that in Eastern and Northern Europe, the transition to farming was a slow process, which occurred through the adoption of exogenous cultigens and domesticates by the local hunter-gatherer populations, who may have been already engaged in some form of husbandry of the local resources. Contact and exchange with the Neolithic and later Bronze Age of Central Europe had a profound and prolonged influence on the process of the adoption of farming in Eastern and Northern Europe. During the slow process of transition, mixed hunting-farming societies emerged, which could be regarded as having a characteristic social and economic organization of their own (i.e., neither “Mesolithic” nor “Neolithic”). In conclusion, we argue for continuity in population and in social and economic traditions from the hunter-gatherer past until recent antiquity and, in some areas, into the historical period.