Southeast Europe as bridge and buffer between the Near East and temperate Europe

The transition to agriculture – the so-called “Neolithization process” – in southeast Europe has been a crucial topic of research at an international scale since the 1960s. In the 1920s, V. Gordon Childe referred to the Balkan peninsula as a “bridge” between Europe and the Near East (Childe 1958). He meant that the area acted as a vital route for the diffusion of plants, animals, techniques, ideas, and people themselves from what was at that time regarded as the heartland of domestication and civilization – the Near East – into temperate Europe, which was barely emerging (in Childe's eyes) from the rigors of the Ice Age. For Gordon Childe, Europe was a continent awaiting transformation into a civilized world that would arrive via this bridge (Fig. 2.1). His idea, based on few empirical data, was taken up by both Balkan archaeologists and international synthesizers in the 1930s and 1940s and was supported by the increasing amount of excavated data that emerged in southeast Europe during those years, documenting the wealth of early agricultural settlements in modern Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and former Yugoslavia (e.g., Vinca and Karanovo) (Gaul 1948).

From the mid-1950s onwards, data on the Early Neolithic increased in the east Balkans, as a result of large-scale excavations of impressive tell settlements, funded by the new, centralized, communist-backed regimes (Georgiev 1961). Equally impressive empirical data were being collected at the same time on the process of the domestication of plants and animals in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, and Turkey.