The position of the mesolithic and neolithic has evolved over time. A neolithic culture being one with refined stone tools, sedentary and agricultural practices, etc. The classic neolithic culture of europe is the LBK, which has the complete 'package' and there should be know arguement about whether this was a culture or not.
The problem is that during the late mesolithic across a much larger area of europe the transitional process was not so abrupt, and as the archaeological reports indicate you have situations where archaeologist argue
1. Abrupt neolithization, or sudden neolithic occupation.
2. A transition or replacement of a site where a definite
point is reached where neolithization is evident and largely
incontroverable.
3. A mesolithic/neolithic transition that the crossover point is not
definable with confidence
As it turns out improvements in archaeological sampling are seeing more of the 2nd and 3rd catagories. This should not be surprising since the Mesolithic was brought into archaeology as a sought after transtion between paleolithic and neolithic peoples and then the late paleolithic has been carved into epipaleolithic and
earlier periods. As soon as you see the mesolithic catagory widely accepted archaeologist start focusing more on this transitional period. Now we see a focus toward the middle and late transitions in the mesolithic to the neolithic. As a result you have authors tiptoeing around defining neolithic sites as they do not
have all the classical elements that are seen in other sites.
Problem with the boundary definition is proximity. Apriori proximity should not have to play, but human culture is not static, and a neolithic culture has its preferences, so that it might move into a place K and develope it, or it might move into an occupation region L and admix or displace, or move into a region M adjacent to L and over time spread and diffuse into L. One has to look at the various strategies over time. Some examples for example in Portugal and Iberia neolithization looks to me to be opportunistic. There is a neolithization process going on that is taking time some places are evolving faster than others, at the same time
there is the sudden appearance or transition at some sites to a neolithic people, and the reasoning by archaeologist is often to explain the opportunity as it presented itself. For example in the north of Spain, it is rationalized that the neolithizing peoples did not see much opportunity on the steep slopes of the mountains that are just off the coast, so that the focus stopped short of northern spain moved inland.
Whereas a slow process of overland trade brought neolithization to northern Spain with a protracted boundary. This example was chosen to get into an area of discussion where the genetic impact and classical neolithization argument is avoided and whose impact on the larger europe is not deemed, by me, to be important. When we talk about Southeast Europe, in this case east Adriatic coast, neolithic package appears suddenn with the element that were unknown to mesolithic populations of the area. Other problem is the lack of quality data and archaeological sites of the entire mesolithic period.
The other issue of proximity is technology and obstructions (or surmounting obstructions). The definition of cultural capability for transportation is hard to define, evidence is spurious, and implicit evidence is almost as common in primative peoples or more so than in neolithic peoples. Barriers can appear and disappear, opening of barriers is not neccesarily and exact science, interpretation of plausibility is a combination of assumptions of technology and assumptions of geological and oceanography. Who has proximity to do what is of concern and what seems likely genetically may seem impossible by other concerns or vice versa.
The critical issue of previous threads needs to be addressed in an open frame work of question answering. Namely who or what cultures neolithicized other cultures and by what processes?
The other issue is whether all mesolithic cultures were neccesarily transitional, or whether the transition resulted from unidirectional, by and large, cultural flow. Those that have read the literature pretty much know the answer, those that haven't should read the literature. There is too much information for me to post on
the matter and so the next thread will deal with information that supports my current points of view, there is alot more information that support other areas of concern and there is simply no means for me to deal with these, my concern as plainly stated has been the food, food storage, and genetics. Therefore the discussion will only be productive if questions are answered via a pre-reading of the literature.
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