The first farmers of southern Scandinavia

Abstract

Agriculture arrived in prehistoric Europe in the form of plants and animals originally domesticated in Southwest Asia. Until the past ten years or so, this spread was thought to reflect the arrival of foreign colonists bearing ceramic containers and domesticated plants and animals and introducing to Europe permanent villages, pottery, new architecture, storage facilities, long-distance trade and elaborate burial rituals. Indigenous hunter-gatherers were thought to have been largely aceramic, dependent on wild foods, residentially mobile, socially amorphous and eventually overwhelmed. More recently, however, it appears that colonization may well have been the exception, rather than the rule, in the spread of farming into Europe (cf. Halstead, Thomas and Zvelebil in Chs 16, 17 and 18 in this volume, Price 1987, 1991, Runnels & van Andel 1988, Zvelebil & Rowley-Conwy 1984, 1986, Zvelebil & Zvelebil 1988). In this context, the question of why foragers shifted to farming is very intriguing.

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