Hunters in Transition: Mesolithic Societies of Temperate Eurasia and their Transition to Farming

by Marek Zvelebil

• ISBN13: 9780521109574
• ISBN10: 0521109574
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-07-20
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Hunters in Transition analyses one of the crucial events in human cultural evolution: the emergence of post-glacial hunter-gatherer communities and the development of farming. Traditionally, the advantages of settled agriculture have been assumed and the transition to farming has been viewed in terms of the simple dispersal of early farming communities northwards across Europe. The contributors to this volume adopt a fresh, more subtle approach. Farming is viewed from a hunter-gatherer perspective as offering both advantages and disadvantages, organisational disruption during the period of transition and far-reaching social consequences for the existing way of life. The huntergatherer economy and farming in fact shared a common objective: a guaranteed food supply in a changing natural and social environment. Drawing extensively on research in eastern Europe and temperate Asia, the book argues persuasively for the essential unity of all post-glacial. adaptations whether leading to the dispersal of farming or the retention and elaboration of existing hunter-gatherer strategies.

Table of Contents

Introduction: the scope of the present volume

The Mesolithic Context of the Transition to Farming

Mesolithic prelude and Neolithic revolution

Between cave painters and crop planters: aspects of the temperate European Mesolithic

The Mesolithic sandwich: ecological approaches and the archaeological record of the early post-glacial

The role of hunting-gathering populations in the transition to farming: a Central-European perspective

Regional Studies

The transition to food production: a Mediterranean perspective

Foragers and farmers in Atlantic Europe

Foragers of Central Europe and their acculturation

The late mesolithic and the transition to food production in Eastern

Foragers and farmers in west-Central Asia

The Mesolithic and Neolithic in the southern Urals and Central Asia

Hunter-gatherer adaptations and the transition to food production in Japan

Mesolithic societies and the transition to farming: problems of time, scale and organisation

Index

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