Introduction

The transition to agriculture in the western Mediterranean is associated with the first appearance of ovicaprids (Geddes 1985) and domesticated wheat and barley (Hopf 1991), species of which originated in the Near East and spread rapidly from Italy to Portugal. This period of prehistory, the Early Neolithic, is primarily identified in the archaeological record by the presence of stylistically uniform wares, such as Cardial or Impressa pottery, domesticated plants and animals, and the use of obsidian and ground stone (Guilaine 1976). Studies of these materials indicate that significant transformations in economy and society began to take shape at this time. Many of these changes do not, however, appear to manifest themselves in terms of dependence on agro-pastoral products or larger village settlements until the Middle Neolithic around a thousand years later (Guilaine 1976). The nature of the agricultural transition in the western Mediterranean has proved, therefore, an interpretative challenge as it represents the rapid appearance but slow assimilation of production-based economies among emergent agricultural societies (cf. Zvelebil 1986c).

By the 1960s, investigations of the first European agricultural societies had shifted in focus from culture historical studies of artifacts to economic and ecological studies based on environmental and subsistence data. Models constructed to interpret these data have been concerned with the relationships between humans and their non-human physical environment, that is to say “nature.” This is a logical connection as Neolithic farming represented new subsistence relationships with plants and animals. Sedentary agriculture implied new types of interactions between man and the physical landscape that had not existed in previous foraging societies.