Abstract
The final chapter of the book provides an overview that draws upon the many years that I have worked in this field of study. Presented in four sections, attention is paid in particular to the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) in central Europe and the west Mediterranean world. The first section, Introduction, begins with a review of our initial research on the question of the spread of early farming in Europe as a diffusionary process and then turns to the simulation study of the Linearbandkeramik that we carried out at Stanford University in the early 1970s. The second section, which is called Transitioning in Space and Time, focuses on the dynamics and processes that are involved in the transition to agriculture, where emphasis is placed on the roles of the household and the relocation of settlements in understanding how change takes place. In the third section, Returning to the LBK takes up first the question of human mobility on the landscape and then moves forward to the important simulation study recently done by the French team working on the Obresco Project, which explores the multi-agent approach to modelling the spread of the LBK Neolithic in Europe. In the final section, Discussion, an attempt is made to bring together and evaluate some of the diverse lines of thinking on transitions to agriculture developed in other chapters of the book and to look forward briefly to future research in this field of research, including the need to balance emic and etic perspectives when it comes to the matter of human agency.
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Ammerman, A.J. (2021). The Transition to Early Farming in Europe. In: Pardo-Gordó, S., Bergin, S. (eds) Simulating Transitions to Agriculture in Prehistory . Computational Social Sciences(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83643-6_11
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