Migration, adaptation, innovation: The spread of Neolithic harvesting technologies in the Mediterranean

Abstract

This article explores the changes that occurred in harvesting technology during the dispersal of the Neolithic in the Mediterranean basin. It does so through technological and use-wear analysis of flaked stone tools from archaeological sites dated between ca. 7000 and 5000 cal BCE, from the Aegean Sea to the westernmost coasts of Portugal. The main goal is to analyse the transformations that occurred in the harvesting toolkit. Our study reveals dynamics of continuity and change in sickles at a Mediterranean scale, resulting from adaptations of the migrant groups to the newly occupied territories and from processes of technological innovation. Adaptations in the production system of the inserts and in their usepattern occurred in relation to lithic raw material availability and knappers' skills, but also in relation to the scale of production and farming techniques. A major shift took place in the northwestern Mediterranean arc with the diffusion of parallel-hafted inserts, probably as a result of heterogeneous phenomena including the diffusion of new groups, technical transfers, establishment of new interaction networks and new systems of lithic production.

CREMATION VS. INHUMATION: MODELING CULTURAL CHANGES IN FUNERARY PRACTICES FROM THE MESOLITHIC TO THE MIDDLE AGES IN BELGIUM USING KERNEL DENSITY ANALYSIS ON14C DATA

“…To avoid the noise artefacts characteristic of SCPDs, this study uses kernel density plots (Feeser et al 2019;Loftus et al 2019;McLaughlin 2019;Mazzucco et al 2020) to describe variations in the use of funerary practices in Belgium. The OxCal 4.3 tool KDE_Plot that provides a kernel density distribution for the samples (Bronk Ramsey 2017), is implemented with Belgian data.…”

A Neolithic without dairy? Chemical evidence from the content of ceramics from the Pendimoun rock-shelter (Castellar, France, 5750–5150 BCE)

“…At the heart of understanding of the dispersal of farming is the need to characterise variation in the nature of the earliest Neolithic activity and subsistence practices, as well as interactions, if any, with indigenous hunter-gatherers. Recent analysis of Impresso-Cardial material culture in the Mediterranean reveals great diversity in this respect, for example, in the variety of ceramic decoration (Binder, 2013;Manen et al, 2010), shaping methods (Gomart et al, 2017), in the variability of domestic animal exploitation (Debono Spiteri et al, 2016;Rowley-Conwy et al, 2013) and harvesting technology (Mazzucco et al, 2020). The first Neolithic communities in the North-western Mediterranean settled as pioneer groups across the Liguro-Provencal arc and in Languedoc at the beginning of the 6 th millennium BC (Figure 1).…”

Bayesian 14C-rationality, Heisenberg Uncertainty, and Fourier Transform

“…Many papers have been published with approaches that need either shape correction of archaeological and environmental 14 C-histograms (e.g., Stolk et al 1994), summed calibrated distributions (e.g., Williams et al 2012), or else -more recently -for their Bayesian counterparts in the form of kernel density plots (Bronk Ramsey 2017;Feeser et al 2019;Loftus et al 2019;Capuzzo et al 2020;Mazzucco et al 2020). An idea common to all these approaches is that since we can relate the existence of certain peaks, troughs, or spikes in the diagrams to the calibration curve shape, we expect it should be possible to apply an appropriate correction to the histo- 3b).…”