The origins of farming in South East Europe

The domestication of the landscape, the plants and the animals in South East Europe is considered in a multi-causal model which relates the symbolic and spatial contexts of social action to the longer-term processes of subsistence intensification. The article explores to what extent the spread of farming resources from Anatolia can be modelled through the sole agency of forager exchange networks in southern Greece, Thessaly, the central Balkans, the Tisza valley and the eastern Adriatic littoral. The development of a place-based world view in foraging societies is linked to increasing sedentism, just as in the case of most early farming communities. It is found that there is little need to rely on migrating populations for the introduction of farming in most of the area under study. The agency of incoming social groups is best supported by subsistence data in regions where there is a major disjunction between the spatial ideologies of foraging and farming groups.