Final Report Summary - EUROEVOL (Cultural Evolution of Neolithic Europe)
The project’s most important conclusion is that the introduction of farming to Europe did not lead to a steady improvement in living conditions and ongoing population increase, but was characterised by a pattern of ‘boom’ and ‘bust’ in many regions; even in regions without dramatic ‘busts’ there were often longer term population declines. We did not find evidence that these could be accounted for by climate change, suggesting that it was internal factors in these early societies that led to them exceeding the sustainable limits of their socio-economic systems. In keeping with this, we found correlations between the population patterns and changing patterns in the subsistence economy, and also between periods of high local population and investment in conspicuous monument construction, as well as in evidence for the incidence of violence, which appears to be associated with societies exceeding their demographic and economic limits. We also showed that the cultural transmission processes that produce distinctive patterns of similarity and difference in the archaeological record have recognisable signatures that can be identified from the archaeological material. This makes it possible to link them to similar processes in the present, such as those which produce fashion trends. The great majority of the substantive results have been achieved through novel methodological developments that take the application of quantitative methods in archaeology to new levels of sophistication and represent another main achievement of the project. As we hoped, the methods are now being applied by others, while our substantive results are beginning to be cited by geneticists and environmental scientists interested in human population history.
The project has been extremely active in disseminating its results. Four conference sessions/workshops have taken place and 65 further talks given. Eighteen journal articles or book chapters have been published, together with two edited books. Most of these are already open access and the others will be. At the time of writing two more papers are in press and others in preparation. Dissemination has also taken place through the project website (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/euroevol). The database is being placed in a public repository and published in the Journal of Open Archaeological Data. A book synthesising the results of the project is currently being written.