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Andrew Sherratt

14. Settling the Neolithic: a digestif

Andrew Sherratt

Introduction
The principle of the Rorschach test is simple. Provide a suggestive-looking but ambiguous shape classically an inkblot and see how a human mind reads meaning into the blobs. The results say more about the person who is the subject of the experiment than about the inkblot itself. (Even if the experiment evokes a discussion of the fluid dynamics of ink rather than suggested identifications of breasts and buttocks, it at least serves to characterise a typical nerd.)1 The design for this conference was the semantic equivalent of the inkblot test: a suggestive but ambiguous title, put in front of a fairly tightly-knit research community, to see how its constituent individuals reacted. Maybe Im the nerd, to take it seriously and interpret the title literally. The Rorschach psychologist, however, would espouse a nave reflectionist position if he or she assumed that the choice of interpretation adopted by those who presented papers at the meeting served to mirror deeply-held, even unconscious beliefs held by their presenters about the Neolithic. Far more plausible to suggest that archaeologists are knowledgeable actors, possessed of a theory of mind, and carefully calculate the results of their assertions on individuals and groups, and on the geometrically expanding interactions between them. On this model, the readings are carefully crafted for their desired effects. (Not necessarily to maximise agreement, of course, but at least to be condemned by the right people; Am I shocking you? as one speaker hopefully inquired, after using the Latin term for the female sex organ but the audience remained resolutely unaroused.) The collection of papers presented here is thus not so much a photographic record of the beliefs of a community at a particular point in time, as the outcome of a series of exercises in selfpresentation, calculated to elicit appropriate responses both within the lecture-theatre and beyond, and on several timescales. Since it would be impossible for me now to discuss individual papers, either from the nave position

that they simply mean what they say (which would be intellectually dishonest of me) or from the sophisticated interpretative position of competitive intertextuality (which would be social suicide, since they are all I hope my friends), I had better be satisfied, at least initially, with making some nerdy remarks about what the title means to me.

Settling down: the fluid and the fixed

Settling is a big theme in Neolithic studies. Settle down is the teachers injunction to the class at the beginning of a lesson, so that serious study can begin.2 It implies a moral quality, as opposed to restlessness and rootlessness, which are what empires are designed to bring under control in native populations. The static chair is a symbol of authority, cathedral stability, unchanging orthodoxy; the mobile peripatetics, by contrast, can only be a passing phase of protest. Settlement is a good thing, and there should be more of it. Such are the overtones which the term brings with it. There is thus a sense of evolutionary progress, towards a more settled condition. I used to be puzzled, as an undergraduate searching for useful concepts in accounts of early history, to find that chapters with titles like The settlement of Europe in works like the Cambridge Medieval History referred not as I would have expected to the Neolithic, but to the early Medieval period. Historians, I discovered, generally believed that ancient populations were not quite nailed down, so to speak, until medieval kings had instilled order, and real history could begin. Even when the Germans were properly settled, the Slavs were still somehow restive, and in the absence of any spontaneous inclination to do so had to be forcibly settled down or even just settled by the Germans. At an earlier time, Tacitus had noted that it was the Germans themselves who were unsettled, and in need of Roman discipline.3 Fluidity and chaos was the primaeval condition, to be opposed and repressed, as in the classroom.

Settling the Neolithic: a digestif On top of this Lvi-Straussian opposition between the fluid and the fixed, moreover, was a further moral judgement: the settlers rightly took possession of the territories within which they settled. The migration period (Vlkerwanderungszeit) had left the peoples of Europe in the places where they would build their future states, and this nationhood arose from the episodes of early medieval land-taking. This process of Besiedlung (settlement as a process of occupation in a region, as opposed to settlement meaning an individual settlement-site, Ansiedlung4) was what Gustav Kossinnas settlement archaeology was all about, and why it would appear in the English-speaking world in the form of Gordon Childes notion of cultures and their migrations a Romantic notion quite at odds with the sorts of things which would come to be described as settlement archaeology in the 1960s. It evoked a mystic union between the blood of the settlers and the soil of the territory, a kind of Blut und Boden, out of which arose nationhood. These were the common concerns of historians and prehistorians in the 1920s and 1930s, a European orthodoxy in the twilight of empire, which was a global expression of these principles. After World War II, however, another theme appeared. It was not people(s) who needed to be settled, but nature and natural areas. Occupation, appropriation and exploitation however distasteful as words applied to human populations were approved terms when applied to natural resources, in the context of technological progress. Gordon Childe contributed to a new genre of archaeological publication, in the Oxford history of technology, progress and archaeology, and The story of tools. The eponymous denominator of the Neolithic, the polished stone axe, became a symbol of tree-felling and land-taking for which, indeed, the Scandinavian word Landnam came to be the technical term. Some element of primitive mobility was retained, however, in the vision of Neolithic farming as a form of shifting cultivation, Wanderbauerntum, in which a slash-and-burn system (fiery extirpation of the forest as it was to be evocatively translated in the English summary of a classic Polish work on Neolithic settlement archaeology by Janusz Kruk, criticising this notion of constant settlement-shift) necessitated continuous re-location. Nevertheless the domestication of plants and animals, in a terminology reaching back to Engels, represented food-production, as opposed to the formerly almost parasitic model of foodgetting by hunting or collecting. In a third phase, beginning in the 1960s which is why at the time I found those historians so odd, in their Victorian and early-twentieth century attitudes the emphasis on economic growth and development continued from the 1950s, but with a more extended and gradualist treatment,5 together with an emphasis on ecology rather than economy (though confusingly labelled the economic prehistory school of thought). This allowed an ecologically more sophisticated formulation

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in terms of diverting food-chains to human needs, instead of the economists notion of producing something from otherwise wasted (unexploited) raw materials, and eroded the contrast between food-gathering and food production. The first extensive excavations of Neolithic settlement-complexes also contradicted the vision of shifting settlement, at least in central Europe: LBK settlements in the Netherlands, Germany and in Poland proved to be long-lived establishments, perhaps only relatively small but long-occupied and with the remains of many generations of houses. In this case the Neolithic still appeared as a line firmly drawn across the timechart, with the introduction of farming as a clearly advantageous calorific boost, giving rise to village life: Wanderwirtschaft was pushed back to the Mesolithic. This phase of interpretation might truly be described as Settling the Neolithic. It is possible, perhaps, to define a fourth phase which has seen a shift of interest and emphasis. Attempts to apply the village farming model in western and northern Europe proved difficult, when domestic structures seemed less obvious than megalithic tombs and other forms of monument. Moreover, many of the Neolithic concentrations in Atlantic Europe showed evident continuity from earlier foci of settlement, and the distinguishing features of the Neolithic seemed to take the form of innovations in portable or built items of material culture, indicative of ideological transformations, rather than the spread of new populations, or even an important new source of calories. Models based on changes in social behaviour rather than economicecological factors began to appear in the literature: rather than simply finding new sources of food, Neolithic farmers were involved in a drama of domesticating the wild. In this conception, settlement was not so much a passive sedentism as an active marking (inscription) of the landscape, recording the foci of activities which might still be relatively mobile in the sense of the classification used by the economic prehistorians of an earlier generation. Since this marking of places might mean the creation of fixity within what was still a relatively fluid series of movements (the elaboration perhaps even in proportion to the mobility of the population or the distances travelled to participate in rituals there), the calorific input of cereals might have been quite modest, and its significance primarily ideological or emotional. So were those longhouses strictly necessary, simply as shelter? Maybe they were really just monuments for living in (monuments habiter, as Le Corbusier might have put it), in the same way as megaliths were monuments to be dead in. Doubts crowded in, to erode the clear categories defined earlier: the superficial uniformity of LBK villages might be masking a great diversity of practices, and Mesolithic predecessor-populations seem to be appearing all over the place, in Germany, Hungary and northern Greece, adjacent to the classic Neolithic settlement-areas, so maybe there was more cultural continuity even in these

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Andrew Sherratt investigations reveal the full complexity of local situations. Tells turn out to be only the most prominent components of the Neolithic settlement pattern, even in areas where they dominate the archaeological record of this period; indigenous populations turn out to be more pervasive than was hitherto supposed. Thus while each area and regional tradition of investigation has given rise to a particular image of the Neolithic way of life in its part of Europe and the Near East, and emphasised a specific aspect of the total pattern, the progress of investigation (and the increasingly international character of research) has revealed significant similarities and analogies. In the same way, the simple spatial succession from south-east to north-west of tells, longhouse-villages and megaliths respectively has recently been complicated by discoveries in south-east Turkey and north-west Syria. While Ian Hodders perceptive (1990) survey of Neolithic Europe sought a unity of metaphor (the domus) behind different phenomenological expressions of this principle in an ultimately Enlightenment exercise in finding a common structure behind diverse expressions the archaeological record itself has now blurred the boundaries between domestic tells and ceremonial megalithic constructions.7 Large stone ritual structures and cult centres are the big news stories from sites like Jerf el-Ahmar (Syria), and Neval ori or Gbekli Tepe (Turkey), and place megalithic monuments at the heart of the Neolithic Revolution. It is the early Neolithic sites of the Anatolian plateau, like Akl Hyk and Can Hasan III, which look reassuringly domestic (with atal as a hypertrophied, anxiety-ridden, over-populated, house-obsessed community in an exceptional ecological situation).8 The more complex architectural plans of later PPNB houses in Syria and south-east Turkey (as Mehmet zdoan has pointed out) can be seen as the beginning of a succession of enlargement and elaboration of these structures leading through the domestic compounds of Tell al-Sawwan 9 to the temple-structures of Mesopotamian Ubaid and Uruk times. Here, as in other cultural characteristics (such as the contrast between vertical and horizontal loom weaving traditions pointed out by Elizabeth Barber), Europe as a prehistoric cultural entity begins at the Taurus, with the Fertile Crescent having a distinctive trajectory from the beginning of the Neolithic (zdoan 1999). Thus the initial stereotypes of regional settlementpatterns, as Kotsakis notes, begin to break down into more complex mixtures of phenomena initially recognised in other areas; but at the same time some contrasts are becoming clearer, and serve to confirm earlier perceptions of culture-areas within the Neolithic continuum. The phenomenon of tell-settlement (Rosenstock in press), like the later manifestation of lake villages in central Europe (Sherratt 2004b), is at the same time both environmentally conditioned and culturally constructed, and has distinct boundaries. On

continental heartlands than we have hitherto recognised. At the same time as the earlier confidence in classic archaeological arguments and assumptions about architecture and economy is diminishing, however, a new (and in my view misplaced) confidence is increasingly being put in genetic arguments based on the characteristics of modern inhabitant populations. In a new Romanticism, the old Enlightenment questions about the essential character of farming as a way of life have given way to questions of genealogy and identity: in many ways, it is back to Blut und Boden. These lands were our lands, for longer than anyone suspected, as Colin Renfrew (1987) wrote in the introduction to his Archaeology and language, reflecting the new temper of the times (whilst retaining an explicitly scientific mode of analysis); and DNA is now applied to identify the ancestors. A relativist archaeology combines uneasily with a positivist biology to set the contemporary agenda for Neolithic studies. It is this present-day uncertainty which is captured in the phrase, Unsettling the Neolithic.

Settling up: different contributions

Settling up is a quite different process: it describes the chaotic scenes which take place when archaeologists have been out to a post-conference meal, and are presented with the bill.6 I use it in the present context to denote an assessment of the relative contributions of different areas and schools to our overall view of the Neolithic, and how each of them has emphasised a complementary aspect of this complex phenomenon. There is no space to pursue this theme in the detail it deserves, but to some extent the phases defined in the preceding section track the shifting loci of paradigmatic studies of Neolithic life. The striking evidence from classic tell excavations in the Balkans dominated the accounts of Gordon Childe; the impact of large-scale excavations in central Europe impressed accounts of the spread of farming in the period in the decades after World War II; the large numbers of university students and teachers working in the UK within a broadly anthropological tradition in landscapes rich in surviving stone structures in recent years has informed accounts which give a more nuanced interpretation of the complex relationships between incomers and natives in environments rich in natural resources. A fascinating microcosm of these last arguments is presented by the evidence from the Iron Gates, reviewed here by Duan Bori (and also reflected, in a less clear-cut way, in discussions of the way of life of Krs populations on islands in the Great Hungarian Plain by Alasdair Whittle and Lszl Bartosiewicz, or by Laurens Thissen in southern Romania). Indeed, this intimate nesting of contact-situations between farming and indigenous foraging populations has recently tempted me (Sherratt 2004a) to use the term fractal to describe the way in which large-scale patterns of Neolithic spread are repeated on smaller scales when intensive archaeological

Settling the Neolithic: a digestif the north-west border, the site of Polgr-Cs szhalom which Pl Raczky described to the conference, combines a classic (if relatively small, by Balkan and Near Eastern standards) tell plus a flat settlement plus a series of concentric circular ditches around the tell of the kind recognised as a separate ritual monument called a Kreisgrabenanlage or more simply a Rondell or roundel common in western Hungary, Austria and adjacent areas of Germany and the Czech and Slovak republics. Many years ago I hazarded the speculation that these sites were ersatz tells, in the same way that earthen longbarrows were ersatz longhouses (an idea of Gordon Childe revived by Ian Hodder in his pursuit of the domus, fruitfully pursued by Magdalena Midgley, and also taken up by me in discussing the origins of Neolithic monumentality in the north and west). They would thus preserve in monumental but token form the communal aspirations of tell-dwellers, in the area adjacent to the zone of tell-building but in circumstances where techniques of building-construction did not lead to the accumulation of prominent mounds. The nodal site of Polgr-Cs szhalom, on the principal route linking tellusing eastern Hungary with non-tell-using western Hungary, would thus combine both the canonical and the derived structures in composite form. As if to confirm our classifications, it nicely expresses (in an obviously self-conscious way) its frontier position between cultural regions. These continuities serve to confirm the existence of a syntagmatic chain of relationships linking different expressions of the complex and polythetic entity which we label the Neolithic. It is these genealogical connections, as much as any single essential element, which define a process distinct in time and space. It is well called Neolithic, since polished stone tools are arguably the only material item common both to the pre-pottery Neolithic of the Levant and the (sub-)Neolithic cultures of northern and eastern Europe such as the pit-and-combware cultures of the Baltic. Yet these groupings are all historically related in a skein of relationships which reaches from the nuclear areas of origin to the outer edges. Over the whole expanse from eastern Hungary (and arguably even from Holland) to north-west India they do, indeed, have so many characteristics in common that it would be perverse not to recognise the existence of a Neolithic package.10

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Settling affairs: the Neolithic and the Mesolithic

Increasing sedentism was a characteristic of the early Holocene. It reflected increased temperatures and precipitation, and rising CO2 levels, after the cold and dry conditions of high-latitude glaciation and low-latitude aridity in the late Pleistocene, and these conditions gave rise to a burst of biological productivity, travelling (in the northern hemisphere) from south to north in Europe

from south-west to north-east, with the increasing penetration of Atlantic cyclones. This northward-moving wave of primary productivity was accompanied by the rebound of species previously confined to well-watered southern refuges, including oak trees, red deer and also human populations. Constrained both by the migrationrates of the species concerned and the slow wasting of the northern ice-masses, the wave travelled slowly and speciescomposition only achieved equilibrium with prevailing climatic conditions in the Atlantic phase of the Holocene; before that time there were unusual opportunities for fastmoving human populations to make a living in the light birch- and pine-woods and in the extensive plains of the continental shelf. Then the oak trees arrived, and rising sea-levels drowned the coastal plains (catastrophically in the case of the Black Sea and the Baltic), and human life toughened up. There were still opportunities for relatively dense populations to build up, however, especially on coasts and in lake-strewn areas, and these groups tended to aggregate around critical resources. There is thus a Mesolithic story of settling down, classically expressed in the shell-mounds preserved along with their shorelines in areas of isostatic uplift. The Neolithic story is different. Whilst the Mesolithic story is appropriately described as a series of innovative human responses to increasing ecological opportunity and constraint, the Neolithic made its own history and followed its own internal dynamic the moving front of a demographic transition. While part of its origin lay in the ecological opportunities afforded by the spread of harvestable wild cereals (which may have supported the earliest monumentalism, as at Gbekli Tepe), its instability arose from attempts to extend the calorific base in areas where wild cereals were less abundant, and especially in the chain of oases along the Levantine corridor. The artificial cultivation of such crops in the southern Levant led to entanglement in a feedback-loop of altered nutrition and reproductive patterns, with demographically explosive consequences. The initial populations were small, however, and marginally situated; and moreover they were constrained by coastal forests on the Mediterranean shore and coastal hills with their own inhabitants whose wider range of resources may well have supported a higher overall density of human population.11 Their expansion was thus directed towards under-occupied areas where abundant watersources permitted a primitive floodwater farming, around the inner perimeter of the Fertile Crescent and around the endorheic basins of the southern Anatolian plateau. Unable to compete with indigenous populations in the forested areas of northern Anatolia, they expanded westwards after 7000 cal. BC and again after 6500 cal. BC absorbing some of the indigenous inhabitants of their chosen habitats, and continuing to spread west across the Aegean to Greece and the Balkans. There the pattern was repeated: interstitial penetration between the denser Mesolithic blocs, and local absorption of the less dense

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Andrew Sherratt for transport, so there was a growth in basket-making; water needed to be distributed, so one can imagine a comparable proliferation of leather containers, some of which might have been used for cooking, with heated stones. Mud could be used for making hearths and ovens, which became baked in the heat. Specific types of stone were required for axes and cutting tools for harvesting, and both could be used for display (especially obsidian). Domestic or communal ritual employed stone bowls (probably, in my opinion, used for the burning of narcotics), and other stones were worked into personal ornaments or employed architecturally, along with wood. These items did not exist in isolation, but influenced each other: architecture and containers hybridised the baked clay and plaster crossed with baskets and buckets to produce containers of pottery and white-ware (vaiselles blanches ), derived from ovens and plasterwork respectively, with the clay-based containers proving the more successful in the long run. Creation of these materials involved the closer control of fire and the beginnings of pyrotechnology. Their shapes and decoration reflect their multiple origins and functions basketry and leather shapes, stone-container shapes, basket-like decorative patterns, decoration derived from wall-paintings (the Haclar fantastic style). Large pottery containers made possible slow cooking over a direct fire, as Laurens Thissen has pointed out, creating new possibilities for cuisine and diet; milk products could be heated and stored, and so on. Neolithic technologies constantly produced innovation by crossover and their products became increasingly attractive to neighbouring groups. The external contacts needed to acquire raw materials for such items, and the quarrying and trading expeditions they involved, gave Neolithic communities an outward orientation, if only because of the volume of these substances they required. This in itself involved knowledge of sources, and directed migration-patterns when the time came to move or fission. Information- and mating-networks disseminated knowledge of suitable places to which to move, and opportunities to fill new niches or spaces abandoned by native groups because of local ecological or epidemiological catastrophes. Carrying their crops and livestock with them, to replicate the conditions of their previous homes, Neolithic populations were in this sense more mobile than their Mesolithic neighbours, tied to the static resources of hunted or foraged food, and this gave farmers an opportunistic edge. Together with their inherently unstable demography, this resulted in a constant probing for opportunities to expand. Relations with indigenous groups must have included a whole spectrum of possibilities: avoidance, complementarity, absorption, replacement depending on their relative demographic strengths. Typically there would have been a sequence, from interstitial penetration to takeover (or local extinction). As populations practising a Neolithic way of life became the majority inhabitants of the continent, so the nature of the interaction would have

indigenous populations in desirable areas. In some places this native element was probably as substantial as that of the migrant element, producing cultural patterns like that of Krs; in other places there was a more straightforward transplantation of population (as in the islands of Cyprus and Crete, and perhaps in areas such as Balkan poljes where the native populations were restrained by disease factors, which the higher reproductive rate of farmers could tolerate). This cycle of penetration and absorption was repeated, on a growing scale, across Europe. The above description deliberately singles out demography as the single essential element in the spread of the Neolithic package, since this is the key to its longterm growth. This behaviour is inseparable from the use of cereals, which both created the feedback loop and gave rise to a series of cultural characteristics. This does not imply an essentialist association between cerealcultivation and the cultural features which we describe as Neolithic, since they have their own dynamic of desirability, and could in places be sustained without the use of cereals (and could thus be adopted independently of the subsistence base by neighbouring groups a common precursor to their absorption in the Neolithic network, which alone could ensure a continual supply of these desirables). Nevertheless there is a persistent association, down to the present day, between farming and material abundance (increasingly unfairly distributed), which explains the continuity and acceleration of the changes associated with a farming way of life. The Neolithic was indeed a total package, in that cereal-cultivation was associated with a coherent set of social and material practices (and their mental correlates), of which housebuilding (along with its correlate, pit-digging) and the acquisition of portable items from long distances were essential aspects. These practices arose from the relative sedentism and population concentration created by the specific form of floodwater farming which characterised early cultivation, and its associated need for permanent physical barriers between constituent (co-resident) social groups (both to constrain social interaction, and to separate storage and food-preparation areas the end of the tradition of open-handed sharing characteristic of hunter-gatherers), and media for the display both of individual and communal group membership. All of these had material outcomes. The tendency of farming populations to multiply (over the long term) was thus only one aspect of the Neolithic dynamic; another was the elaboration of material culture both in static and portable form, and in the interaction between them. This last aspect is what may be termed cultural crossover or the hybridisation of technologies that is so characteristic of the Neolithic. An early consequence of floodwater sedentism, with its continuing commitment to highly specific patches of the landscape, was the domestication of animals. So, too, was the development of a series of mud-based construction techniques, and plastered walls. Cereals required baskets

Settling the Neolithic: a digestif shifted, and the conversion of whole areas became increasingly possible, as indigenous groups were exposed to the new lifestyle and modes of consumption (as in the areas beyond the loess frontier). With a higher component of conversion than replacement, south-eastern elements would have been increasingly diluted in the face of new Neolithic groups with their own strong Mesolithic inheritance, whose cultural patterns could spread back into areas previously more purely Neolithic in character, as with the spread of TRB to central Europe. Dialectical interaction thus came to take place on an increasing scale, beginning with areas the size of the Konya basin and ending with that of half of Europe.
6

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In conclusion: unsettling the consensus

What remains unsettled is not the Neolithic (as Halstead convincingly argues) but opinions on what parts of this enormously complicated set of processes were taking place where. We can agree on a possible range of scenarios, but disagree on which one was actually happening in a particular area. The archaeological record, as usual, is often unhelpful in enabling us to choose between them. In such a situation, competing interpretations are vital; the emergence of consensus would signal a failure of imagination and almost certainly the espousal of a partial or even completely false reconstruction. Let the debate continue: the one thing we must never allow to settle is the dust.

Notes
1 The term is surely now international, and in most European languages is used to indicate a person whose over-literal interpretation is the result of reading too much computercode. To be settled is a desirable condition: hence the old joke about the housemaster in an English boarding school at which pupils height was measured at the beginning and end of each term, and entered in the school reports. Because of experimental error (and the lack of appropriate uncertainty terms in such an exercise), one boy was recorded as being slightly shorter at the end of term than at the beginning. Seems to be settling down nicely, his housemaster remarked in summing up the report. And the Celts! A people notorious for their furious onrush and complete lack of forward planning, as one recent archaeological commentator summarised Caesars view, apparently believing him in this judgement though the description could with more justice be applied at the present day to government initiatives towards universities, and to certain aspects of the universities own internal management. The very term settlement itself, in reference to a site, implies some earlier mobility of the part of the sites inhabitants. The Neolithic Revolution was neither Neolithic nor a revolution: discuss, as I remember from a Cambridge exam paper some time around 1968.

I vividly remember one such occasion during the EAA meetings at Bournemouth in 1999, which was only resolved when Erzsbet Jrem used the calculator on her mobile phone to work out the relative contributions of the distinguished company to the total cost. 7 The contrast between an archaeological record dominated by domestic structures and one dominated by funerary or ceremonial ones is certainly misleading in its use of contemporary cultural categories, but useful as a shorthand description of different forms of material evidence. 8 I find it hard to believe the ideas currently being discussed about atal being an aggregation of population at some distance from where the cereal crops were grown: the aramba ay creates a linear oasis of exceptional size, which has ever since attracted dense concentrations of farmers; and the model of floodwater farming which I set out in the 1970s would fit perfectly with such a location. 9 The circular structures of the Halaf culture (misleadingly called tholoi, as if they were tombs), on the other hand, reflect a different tradition; are they perhaps like western roundhouses, derived ultimately from tents, and thus reflecting a further input of Mesolithic traditions as highland groups were incorporated? 10 This notion has recently (Thomas 2003) been singled out for deconstruction, at least in so far as it applies to Britain, in an article advocating its replacement by the LviStraussian concept of bricolage. Ah well, it had a good innings of two decades: the phrase was first used, so far as I know, in a Cambridge undergraduate essay written for me (then a research-student Cambridge espoused a downthe-line model of teaching) by Chris Chippindale, and thereafter quoted with attribution by Paul Halstead in his own essay, after which it escaped to general use. It would be premature to mourn its passing, though like all good catch-phrases it is all the better for a cold douche (and may indeed by misleading when applied in an oversimple way to the British Isles). There is a natural sequence of construction and deconstruction seeing unity in diversity and then diversity in unity and the ultimate test is whether it survives the cycle. 11 While the term Mesolithic has fallen out of use in the Near East since the days of Dorothy Garrod, there is a crying need for it to be re-instated to describe what is essentially the European pattern in miniature: see Sherratt 2004a.

Bibliography
Hodder, I. 1990. The domestication of Europe: structure and contingency in Neolithic societies. Oxford: Blackwell. zdoan, M. 1999. Concluding remarks. In M. zdoan and N. Ba gelen (eds), Neolithic in Turkey. The cradle of civilization, new discoveries, 22536. Istanbul: Arkeoloji ve Sanat Yayinar. Renfrew, C. 1987. Archaeology and language: the puzzle of Indo-European origins. London: Jonathan Cape. Rosenstock, E. in press. Early Neolithic tell settlements of southeast Europe in their natural setting: a study in distribution and architecture. In I. Gatsov and H. Schwarzberg (eds), Aegean-Marmara-Black Sea present state of research of early Neolithic. Langenweibach: Beier and Beran.

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Sherratt, A. 2004b. The importance of lake-dwellings in European prehistory. In F. Menotti (ed.), Living on the lake in prehistoric Europe, 26778. London: Routledge. Thomas, J. 2003. Thoughts on the re-packed Neolithic Revolution. Antiquity 77, 6774.

Sherratt, A. 2004a. Fractal farmers: patterns of Neolithic origins and dispersal. In J. Cherry, C. Scarre and S. Shennan (eds), Explaining social change: studies in honour of Colin Renfrew , 5363. Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monographs.