Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 1 (2005), p. 118

People have argued a lot, and often not in friendly terms, over why European foragers became farmers between 7000 and 4000 bc. Albert Ammerman and Paolo Biagi have provided one of the latest in a series of edited volumes to tackle this question. The principal question they and their contributors address is whether the Neolithic spread through Europe through the movement of people or through the exchange of ideas and domesticated plants and animals. The volume presents work from a conference in Venice marking the twenty-fifth year since Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza published their ‘wave-of-advance’ model for the spread of theNeolithic. It is a volume with many excellent contributions by leading students of the Neolithic transition.

The widening harvest included an explicit brief for contributors to comment on how research has unfolded. As someone fascinated by the debate, I enjoyed the historical retrospectives by many of the important figures in the field, even if it occasionally felt as if some of the contributors are a bit too close to the ongoing polemics to be writing their own history and it might have been useful to include voices from the eminent British group represented by Alasdair Whittle, Ian Hodder, Richard Bradley, Julian Thomas, and Nick Thorpe. Substantively, there is much here for the reader new to the literature or interested in up-to-date summaries rather than historical retrospective. Peter Rowley-Conwy trenchantly refutes the idea that pigs and cattle may have been domesticated indigenously in Europe. Gordon Hillman’s and David Harris’s chapters on how palaeobotanical and ecological research on the Neolithic grew and changed are wonderfully incisive. While some may not agree with Paolo Biagi’s argument that there were actually very few terminal Mesolithic foragers in Southern Europe to acculturate into farmers, his critique that archaeologists have generally regarded Mesolithic people as ‘generic foragers’ certainly provides a much-needed tonic for this sometimes tired debate. Both Peter Bogucki and Douglas Price provide well-rounded autobiographical accounts of their research combined with authoritative summaries of present knowledge. Jean Guilaine’s chapter, inexplicably the only one in French, is well worth reading, with a broad and thoughtful analysis comparing Cyprus, southern Italy and southern France. If anything, Guilaine’s work illustrates the variety of Neolithic transitions even under a single broad rubric such as migration, and the difficulty of finding just one story about it – a theme echoed by Kaczanowska and Kozlowski for central Europe.

Two papers at the conclusion of the volume discuss recent attempts to support or refute a demographic expansion explanation for the Neolithic using the human genetics of modern Europeans. Somewhat confusingly, Luca Luigi Cavalli-Sforza argues that a Neolithic contribution of twenty to thirty per cent to the European gene pool underlines the importance of Neolithic movements of people into Europe, while Bryan Sykes argues that precisely the same figure shows that modern European genes are mostly inherited from pre-Neolithic peoples. Let the reader decide whether the glass is half-empty or half-full.

As for the grand theme of the retrospective, many perceptive moments in the book illustrate that the last twenty-five years have seen important rethinkings of the question. Ammerman is more careful than many of his contributors to note the distinction between the demic diffusion model for agricultural expansion (that farming spread to Europe through the actual movement of people) and the wave-of-advance hypothesis (that what drove this was a wave of population growth that saturated available space and forced farmers out beyond the frontier). As Zilhão and Bogucki demonstrate eloquently, in many areas of Europe, a movement of peoples is quite likely, but there is little evidence for one driven by population pressure on a filled-up landscape. Hence, Ammerman rightly notes that the last quarter century of research has vindicated, at least partially, a movement-of-people model for the spread of farming in Europe, but that the wave-of-advance hypothesis per se has largely been relegated to the status of a useful hermeneutic. Demic diffusion is vindicated at least partially, as many of the areas of Europe which are widely considered zones of forager acculturation are not covered in this volume – Britain and Scandinavia are obvious examples. But given the patchy nature of Neolithization in areas such as the northern European plain, simply looking atthe first farmers within a macro-region such as a modern nation-state does not really account for the whole landscape. As the summary of the final discussion notes, much more detailed studies of farmer-forager interactions within micro-regions are needed.

On another level, as both several contributors and the final discussion argue, saying that agriculture spread through demic diffusion really is describing the ‘how’ of the event, rather than the ‘why’. For the latter, explanatory hypotheses are needed, and as Zilhão and Price note, these may include social scenarios as well as purely ecological or economic ones. Indeed, polarizing the question into simple categories of ‘movement of peoples’ versus ‘movement of things’ is undoubtedly too simple. As Colin Renfrew’s discussion of linguistic dispersals implies, movement of people can occur in many ways. Some of these, indeed, would appear, both archaeologically and socially, to have much more in common with acculturation than with the traditional idea of folk migration.