The following two chapters discuss the origins of food production in southern Europe. Our discussion is divided into this chapter on southeastern Europe (Greece, Bulgaria, FYROM, Albania, Serbia and Montenegro, Bosnia & Hercegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine and part of Russia) and Joao Zilhão’s Chapter 3.22 on southwestern Europe (Italy, southern France, the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa). We take the narrative of agricultural origins from the 8th to the mid-6th millennium bce, linking up with Oliver Dickinson’s Chapter 3.24 on Greece. This narrative continues in Chapter 3.23, where Peter Bogucki deals with the early farmers of northern Europe.

Introduction

The origins and dissemination of agro-pastoral ways of life have remained a major focus of debate in prehistory since the early 20th century. Gordon Childe has dominated the debate from the outset through his concept that the “Neolithic Revolution”, a package of innovations – sedentary village life, domesticated plants and animals, pottery and ground and polished stone tools – came together in the Near East and was subsequently diffused to Europe (Childe 1925). For Childe, Europe was always a secondary centre of farming, not least because many of the key foodstuffs in the Package – wheat and barley, sheep and goats, the pulses – were derived from the Orient. Despite enormous cumulative increases in survey, excavation and postexcavation data in Southeast Europe, many archaeologists still centre their debates of Neolithic origins on Childean questions of diffusion versus local development and the (partial) presence or absence of the Package (Lichardus & Lichardus-Itten 1985; Todorova & Vajsov 1993).