Two concerns were emphasized at the beginning of this volume, colonization vs. indigenous adoption and causality. These questions of how and why agriculture spread to Europe are important ones, both in regard to the specific situation on the continent, and for understanding the global process that was the transition to agriculture. A number of insights into these questions have come from the study of the transition to agriculture in prehistoric Europe summarized in this volume. These insights demand fundamental changes in our explanations of how and why that transition took place. The paragraphs below summarize new perspectives on these questions.

Colonization vs. indigenous adoption

It is clear from recent studies that the introduction of farming in Europe involved both colonization by migrant farmers and the adoption of agriculture by indigenous inhabitants. Monolithic or even dichotomous patterns cannot define the processes that resulted in the introduction of agriculture. There was, as Tringham noted in this volume, a mosaic of mechanisms that brought farming into Europe; a range of migration (such as demic diffusion, leapfrog colonization, elite dominance, infiltration, folk migration) and varieties of local adoption (exchange of materials and information, exchange of mates, individual frontier mobility, or independent local adoption) must be considered. These patterns have been discussed in detail in the chapter by Zvelebil and Lillie in this volume.

Was a single process dominant in the spread of agriculture? Beyond the example of the first farmers in the Aegean islands, it is difficult to make an uncontested case for colonization. Certainly the evidence is incomplete and more information is needed in a number of regions.