Understanding the introduction of farming and the adoption of Neolithic culture continues to be a major research objective in Europe. The authors make use of a new database of radiocarbon dates from Mesolithic and Neolithic sites to map the transition. While the overall effect is still a diffusion into Europe from the south-east, detailed spatial analysis reveals fascinating local variations: in some places change was rapid, and one population replaced another, in others it was gradual and owed to incoming ideas rather than people.
We thank Crombé and Van Strydonck for their comments on our earlier paper (Gkiasta et al. 2003). They kindly draw attention to recent surveys of radiocarbon data from Belgium, most of which were published subsequent to our own work, which was carried out in 1999. Even at the time we were under no illusion that our compilation was complete: “It became clear in the course of the project that, despite the large sums of money which have been spent over the years on radiocarbon dating in Europe, the state of public availability of the dates, their context and associations and details which enable users to judge the reliability of dates is in general very poor. Thus, no claim is made that the database is in any sense complete” (Gkiasta et al. 2003: 48). It would probably also be as well to correct the impression that the dates we used were mainly derived from Gob (1990). Over half those finally included were extracted from the University of Lyon Banadora database; the remainder came from a wide range of other sources. The new dates from Belgium may well shed new light on the chronology of the transition in that region. New discoveries frequently do cause old interpretations to be modified or revised; we look forward to their analysis and demonstration of the implications of the new data to which they refer.
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