Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The land and its resources: the geographic context
- 2 The Mesolithic background
- 3 The introduction of farming: local processes, diffusion or colonization?
- 4 Foreign colonists: where from?
- 5 The earliest Neolithic deposits: ‘aceramic’, ‘pre-pottery’ or ‘ceramic’?
- 6 The spread of the Early Neolithic in Greece: chronological and geographical aspects
- 7 A case study in Early Neolithic settlement patterns: eastern Thessaly
- 8 Early Neolithic subsistence economy: the domestic and the wild
- 9 The Early Neolithic village
- 10 Craft specialization: the contrasting cases of chipped-stone tools, pottery and ornaments
- 11 A variety of daily crafts
- 12 Ritual interaction? The miniature world of ‘dolls or deities’
- 13 Interacting with the dead: from the disposal of the body to funerary rituals
- 14 Interactions among the living
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The land and its resources: the geographic context
- 2 The Mesolithic background
- 3 The introduction of farming: local processes, diffusion or colonization?
- 4 Foreign colonists: where from?
- 5 The earliest Neolithic deposits: ‘aceramic’, ‘pre-pottery’ or ‘ceramic’?
- 6 The spread of the Early Neolithic in Greece: chronological and geographical aspects
- 7 A case study in Early Neolithic settlement patterns: eastern Thessaly
- 8 Early Neolithic subsistence economy: the domestic and the wild
- 9 The Early Neolithic village
- 10 Craft specialization: the contrasting cases of chipped-stone tools, pottery and ornaments
- 11 A variety of daily crafts
- 12 Ritual interaction? The miniature world of ‘dolls or deities’
- 13 Interacting with the dead: from the disposal of the body to funerary rituals
- 14 Interactions among the living
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘How to deal with others’, when, due to sedentism, ‘others’ had become more numerous and could no longer be chosen or changed at will, was, I have suggested, one of the most fundamental problems facing Neolithic societies. Obviously, the first farmers in Greece were not the first folk anywhere to face this problem. Several solutions had already been implemented, in particular in the Near East during the several millennia that witnessed the development of sedentary life.
Nevertheless, our first farmers in Greece may have had, or wanted, to implement new solutions and develop new mechanisms of social regulation. After a farming economy was introduced in continental Greece, the first villagers created, in the most favourable areas, a dense network of closely spaced settlements that had little or no equivalent in the Near East. They had to experiment with sedentary life in small or medium-sized, but densely distributed, communities. Compared with life in some of the largest PPNB or Early Pottery Neolithic agglomerations of the Near East, such as those that reached 12 hectares of densely packed houses at Abu Hureyra or Çatal Hüyük, this necessarily entailed a different socioeconomic organization.
The size of the largest Near Eastern prehistoric agglomerations precludes, according to decision-making theories (Johnson G. 1978, 1982; Reynolds 1984), an egalitarian organization, or a purely horizontal mode of integration. Successive levels of decision would have been necessary in communities grouping hundreds, perhaps thousands of people.
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- Information
- The Early Neolithic in GreeceThe First Farming Communities in Europe, pp. 299 - 305Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001