Transition to Farming in the Adriatic: a View from the Eastern Shore

Archaeological evidence suggests that immigration played a major role in the introduction of farming into the eastern Adriatic. This introduction, however, was not a single-sided affair in which indigenous foragers were passive recipients, but a complex process that involved both the actual movement of people and the active participation of the local population. There is no reason to believe that this process unfolded along identical lines throughout the region. The available evidence is patchy and uneven. Numerous cave sites have been explored, some of them recently and with much care, while information from villages is restricted to relatively few sites. Much of the crucial information from old excavations is unreliable or even absent. Drawing on this evidence, Preston Miracle and I presented a two-stage model of the spread of farming along the eastern Adriatic coast based on the first appearance of pottery. According to our model, published five years ago in Antiquity, the initial stage was a rapid dispersal, perhaps by exploratory parties, associated with cave sites in southern Adriatic. The second stage was a slower agropastoral expansion, during which the region may have been colonized by enclave-forming farmers, associated with open-air sites and caves along the northern coast. The mountainous hinterland formed an agricultural frontier zone, where farming was adopted piecemeal by indigenous groups. Recent research has generated new data that support the main line of our argument, while suggesting modification of its details. The corpus of available radiocarbon dates for Late Mesolithic and Early Neolithic has almost doubled and has become more reliable, since most of the new dates are high-resolution AMS determinations from safe contexts. The ovarall gradient of dates for the earliest farming, dropping from c. 6200 Cal.BC in northwestern Greece to c. 5700 Cal.BC in Istria, remains unchanged. Farming arrived to the eastern Adriatic islands shortly before 6000 Cal. BC. The six earliest farming sites are caves, roughly covering a century and a half around year 6000 Cal.BC. Four of those caves are in southern Adriatic, while two are farther up north. During this period pottery is introduced, while sheep and goats replace wild fauna as the main source of animal protein. There is no evidence of crop cultivation, however, nor any trace of farming villages. This is a time of great maritime-based mobility and/or exploration, which apparently is not restricted to southern Adriatic, but reaches far towards its northwestern end. Slightly younger than these caves are three open air sites in middle Adriatic, located in northern Dalmatian lowlands, the best agricultural land on the eastern coast. Established between c. 5900 and 5800 Cal.BC (some 150 years after the first pastoralist cave sites), these farming villages yielded direct evidence of crop cultivation. Another open air site on a remote southern Adriatic island falls within the same time range. These sites seem to be contemporaneous with the earliest agricultral villages on the Tavoliere, on the opposite shore of the Adriatic. Farther to the northwest, the Istrian Peninsula is the next area with substantial agricultural potential. Agricultural villages were established there between c. 5750 and 5650 Cal.BC, roughly a century and a half after those in middle Adriatic. Within another century, farming has spread beyond the northwestern end of Adriatic. Was farming introduced by scouts and pioneers arriving from the southeast, or was it adopted by local foragers that came into contact with their farming neighbors? Both of those processes probably operated together, but their initial phases are very hard to detect. In usual circumstances, archaeological record is a palimpsest of many events taking place over a number of years or even generations. A band of foragers bringing to their home base a few pots or a goat, or a small boatload of adventure-prone farmers, would have left a modest and ambiguous archaeological signature. We might expect to find a concentration of “Neolithic” finds within, or on top of, an otherwise “Mesolithic” context, dated slightly earlier than the earliest clear farming context at the same site. Of course, we must be absolutely sure that we are not looking at a mixed context in which different elements appear together due to post-depositional disturbance. Caves may be a good place to start looking. Apparently, they have temporal priority over villages, and their stratigraphy tends to be less disturbed. Biagi and Voytek reported a possible example at Edera Cave, where level 3a, stratigraphically and chronometrically preceeding the earliest farming levels, contained a few potsherds, Castelnovian lithics, and a mixture of wild and domestic fauna. Another example may be emerging from current work at Vela Cave on the island of Korcula in southern Adriatic.