The origins of Europe’s first farmers: The role of Hacilar and Western Anatolia, fifty years on
Maxime Brami & Heyd Volker Praehistorische Zeitschrift 86:2 (October 2011): 165-206.
Περίληψη (στα Αγγλικά)
Recent discoveries in Western Anatolia have shed new light on the origins of Europe’s first farmers. Fifty years ago, James Mellaart suggested that Early Neolithic communities in Greece and the Balkans shared a common ancestry in Western Anatolia at the site of Hacilar. Current excavations conducted along the Aegean coast of Turkey and in the broader Marmara region, halfway between Hacilar and Europe, confirm this link and provide a more complex and accurate picture of the spread of farming to Southeast Europe. The re-evaluation of the absolute and relative chronologies proposed in this paper identifies three chrono-geographical horizons (two definite, one tentative), each characterised by a different Neolithic ‘package’. Repeated migrations from the Central Anatolian plateau, and further on from the Levant, probably spread farming to Europe in the second half of the 7th millennium BC. The evidence for earlier Neolithic dispersals remains ambiguous.