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On the relevance of the European Neolithic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2015

R. Alexander Bentley
Affiliation:
Department of Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Houston, 233 McElhinney Hall, Houston, TX 77204, USA (Email: [email protected])
Michael J. O’Brien
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA
Katie Manning
Affiliation:
Institute of Archaeology, University College London, London WC1H 0PY, UK
Stephen Shennan
Affiliation:
Institute of Archaeology, University College London, London WC1H 0PY, UK

Extract

Sustainability, culture change, inequality and global health are among the much-discussed challenges of our time, and rightly so, given the drastic effects such variables can have on modern populations. Yet with many populations today living in tightly connected geographic communities—cities, for example—or in highly networked electronic communities, can we still learn anything about societal challenges by studying simple farming communities from many thousands of years ago? We think there is much to learn, be it Malthusian pressures and ancient societal collapse, the devastating effects of European diseases on indigenous New World populations or endemic violence in pre-state societies (e.g. Pinker 2012). By affording a simpler, ‘slow motion’ view of processes that are greatly accelerated in this century, the detailed, long-term record of the European Neolithic can offer insight into many of these fundamental issues. These include: human adaptations to environmental change (Palmer & Smith 2014), agro-pastoral innovation, human population dynamics, biological and cultural development, hereditary inequality, specialised occupations and private ownership.

Type
Debate
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2015 

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