A striking argument for a Neolithic colonization of Greece is the very limited use of wild plants and animals in the seed and bone samples recovered from settlements. The basis of the diet was cereals, together with pulses (beans, peas, vetch, and lentils) (Demoule and Perles 1993, Halstead 1999b, 2006a-b), a combination which catered for humans, and, via stubble grazing and fallow for stock, as well as through a postulated crop rotation, helped the intensively hand-cultivated soils to recover nutrients (Kroll 1981). As for domestic herds, in the lowland sites which dominate our economic remains, sheep and goat are primary, cattle rarer, which suits the climate and the absence till the later Neolithic of the wider value of cattle beyond meat, that is for diary products and the pulling of ploughs and wagons.
Neolithic villagers could not have managed their major domestic animals at the level of the household alone (Halstead 1992). A viable breeding population requires at least 20 cattle, 100 pigs, and several hundred sheep. Inter-household exchange was fundamental, and together with the use of domestic animals as a food buffer against failures in the dominant cereal and pulse economy, could lead to stock becoming a form of capital. Again following Halstead, when in LN and later times households turned to more competitive surplus accumulation, the formation of village elite families could thus have been stimulated. Although all this is plausible, there is an alternative (Perles 2001), the herding and breeding of village stock as a collective, where individuals or a few families take responsibility for moving herds to water and pasture on a daily basis.
The impact of Sherratt’s Secondary Products Revolution (“2PR”) and the diffusion of Plough Traction, which seem to have risen to prominence by the Late to Final Neolithic, would have boosted the Greek Neolithic economy to a very significant extent. Cattle statistics at LN Makriyalos suggest their breeding for secondary products (Collins and Halstead in Halstead 1999a), and faunal analysis from LN Knossos may evidence plough traction and textile production (Isaakidou 2006, Tomkins 2004, Halstead 2006a). Perhaps the clearest evidence is the expansion of settlement out of the favored regions and districts of the earlier Neolithic into more upland areas and onto the dry islands of the Aegean, that marks the Greek later Neolithic. The added value of stock in the Secondary Products economy, and the greater ease of cultivating dry soils with the animal-drawn scratch-plough (ard) allowed population to colonize areas previously neglected. Particularly the Southern Greek Mainland and the Aegean islands, which were less ideal for dense agropastoral settlement under the previous regime of higher rainfall or wetland hand-cultivation, now opened up for permanent settlement.
As already noted, the origins of traditional pastoral (domestic herd) transhumance in Greece have stimulated controversy. The critique of applying ethnographic models to pre-capitalist times highlighted the market orientation of recent transhumance (Halstead 1987, Lewthwaite 1981). The first step to rehabilitate elements of the model came with the recognition that stock-keeping on a much larger scale than the household or village might have been organized in previous complex societies, such as Classical, Imperial Athens (Hodkinson 1990), or in the palace-states of Bronze Age Crete (Halstead 1999c). This has been supported by archival sources and the existence of archaeological sites in the Greek uplands which can only have been seasonally visited (e. g., Final Neolithic sites in the Sfakia Mountains, Western Crete). Halstead, initially critical of the continuity model, has reinstated it for palatial Crete, and now acknowledges the possibility of transhumance developing in LN Neolithic Greece following the introduction of the 2PR, also confirmed by the Grevena Pindos survey (Efstratiou et al. 2006). High levels of cave use in the Greek LN could support a rise in pastoralism, although they are also taken into use now for burial and ritual (Demoule and Perles 1993). But as Halstead demonstrates convincingly (1987, 1996), a village economy based on domestic animals alone, particularly in Greece, is hardly viable (unless grain and other crops were exchanged on a large scale), so that even upland settlements where grazing was especially favorable should be supplemented by complementary farmland there or elsewhere. Indeed locational studies throughout Greek later prehistory and history support this observation, with permanent settlements favoring a mixed economy even in the Greek uplands (Bintliff 1997,Wallace 2003).
Worth emphasizing from the Thessalian Neolithic is the great occupational duration of most tells and their close packing. This shows undeniably that their economy was extremely successful (Perles 2001), further supported by the ability of their occupants to obtain large amounts of external lithic imports, for which agricultural and pastoral surpluses were the most likely product for reciprocal exchange. Since the theory of“bad year economics” (Halstead and O’Shea 1989) for rural societies suggests that regional crises from drought or crop/animal diseases tend to afflict whole districts, extra-regional socio-economic networks beyond Thessaly may have been important to buffer its villages from such occasional disasters, whereby food could be imported from unaffected regions; here the evidence discussed below for exchange systems could offer some support for this resource being tappable.
In addition to transhumance, the role of migratory fishermen deserves some discussion, for which I coined the term “transmerance” (Bintliff 1977). The association between obsidian from the island of Melos and evidence for fish catches, beginning with the final Palaeolithic and running through the Mesolithic and Neolithic in Greece, is patchy but suggestive. Thirty years ago I used ethnographic and historic records to suggest that early marine travel, especially coastal moves and island-hopping, may have been perfected by fishermen traveling from one point to another where regular or seasonal catches of fish (both inshore and open-water) could be encountered. This theory has received extensive criticism (Stratouli 1996) as well as support. Some key sites fit very well, such as the type-site for the Final Neolithic (FN) colonizing culture of Saliagos in the Cyclades, with its massive fish and shellfish remains and a central role for stone points which could be harpoons (Evans and Renfrew 1968). Yet, another site of this culture, also in a prime position to carry out sailing and fishing, Phtelia, reveals no significant fish remains (Sampson 2006). On the other hand, Mesolithic and EN colonization of the Sporades islands does reveal a special interest in fishing and shellfish, including open-water species (Sampson 2006). Even large urban sites such as EBA Phylakopi on Melos, fronting a bay which is one of the finest for fishing on the island, provided no significant fish remains in its faunal finds from excavation, although there are iconographic depictions of fishing from the town.
Critics have apparently misunderstood “transmer-ance.” Saliagos is a full Neolithic economy, where fish and shellfish were accompanied by a range of domestic plants and animals. The ethnohistoric evidence makes clear that fish usually forms a high-quality food supplement to other basic foods, as well as being a resource best caught in the summer months, offseason for foraging or crop-cultivation. Most skeptics of prehistoric fishing in Greece rely on the demonstrable fact that fulltime subsistence is highly unlikely from such a resource. Although fish and shellfish were thus always a minor element in Mesolithic-Neolithic diet, this does not mean that their exploitation might not have been organized and extensive, encouraging seasonal travel beyond normal exploitation territories. A second critique is that fish would not have been a very valuable resource until methods of preservation were perfected. In fact on the Sporades there is evidence that fish were dried and salted in late Mesolithic-Neolithic times (Sampson 2006). Finally, the survival of fish debris may pose problems for the archaeologist, and I am not convinced that “absence of evidence means evidence of absence.”
World History
