Landscapes in Transition

Understanding Hunter-Gatherer and Farming Landscapes in the Early Holocene of Europe and the Levant

This CBRL workshop was organised by Bill Finlayson (CBRL) and Graeme Warren (School of Archaeology, University College Dublin) in Jordan during March 2007, bringing together a number of invited participants working on this subject in both NW Europe and the Levant.  Its aim was to examine what it is that makes hunter-gatherer and farming landscapes different in the late Pleistocene/early Holocene, taking case studies from the contrasting regions of the Levant, where the transition to farming is indigenous, and the NW of Europe, where the transformation is initiated externally. 

The contrast between the two regions also provides valuable comparisons between archaeological traditions and bodies of evidence.  At present research in both regions often ignores work in the other, yet models of the transition assume some common elements, such as a major divide between hunter-gather and farmer world views, generally based upon an underlying traditional concept of hunter-gatherers being within nature, and farmers being apart from it.  There is often a lack of context in analysis, which treats hunter-gatherer, farmer, and the transition as if they were universal phenomena. It is not clear that such common approaches are necessarily applicable.  Landscape archaeology is here used as a focus for assessing these differences.

The original workshop invitation can be found here.

Sessions
(click on session titles for summaries and abstracts)

Landscapes of Settlement

Eleni Asouti
Farmers, gatherers or horticulturalists? Reconstructing landscapes of practice in the Early Neolithic

Fraser Sturt
From Big Beat to Bebop: Settlement between 6000 - 3000 BC in the Fenland Basin (UK)

Landscapes and Time

Lisa Maher
People And Their Places At The End Of The Pleistocene: Evaluating Perspectives On Physical And Cultural Landscape Change

Duncan Garrow
The temporality of materials: occupation practices in Eastern England during the 5th and 4th millennia BC

Chantal Conneller
Taskscapes and the Transition

Marion Benz
Changing landscapes – changing society? An anthropological perspective

Alison Sheridan
Recreating the magic green mountain: landscapes of the mind in Early Neolithic Britain & Ireland

Gordon Noble
‘Islanding’ the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition: approaches to landscapes of contact and transformation in Northwest Europe

Carole McCartney, Sturt W. Manning, David Sewell and Sarah T. Stewart
New Perspectives on the Early Holocene Landscape in Cyprus

Nigel Goring-Morris and Anna Belfer-Cohen
Different Ways of Being, Different Ways of Seeing - Changing Worldviews in the Near East

Ritual and Routine Landscapes

Vicky Cummings
Formalising the sacred ? The monumental landscapes of Britain and Ireland

Trevor Watkins
Changing people, changing environments -  how Epi-palaeolithic hunter-gatherers in southwest Asia became communities and changed the world

Douglas Baird
Rituals in the Landscape

Scale and Regions

Thomas Kador
The last of the old: a homogeneous later mesolithic Ireland?

Landscape and Climate

Stuart Robinson, Stuart Black, Bruce W. Sellwood, Claire M.C. Rambeau and Paul J. Valdes
A geological perspective on climatic and environmental change in the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean from 25,000 to 5000 years BP

Richard Tipping
The Case For Climatic Stress Forcing Choice In The Adoption Of Agriculture

Landscape Change

Amy Bogaard and Valasia Isaakidou
From Megasites to Farmsteads: community size, ideology and the nature of early farming landscapes in western Asia and Europe

Nicky Milner
Landscape and subsistence change at the Mesolithic Neolithic transition in Britain?

Dana Campbell
tbc