7 New radiocarbon dates for the Neolithic period in Bosnia & Herzegovina Marc Vander Linden London Ivana Pandžić Banja Luka David Orton London Godišnjak/Jahrbuch 2014,43:7-34 DOI: 10.5644/Godisnjak.CBI.ANUBiH-43.35 Introduction Nearly a century ago, Gordon Childe coined the expression “Neolithic Revolution” to account for the shit from a foraging to a farming lifestyle. 1 If the social, cultural, economic and demographic implications of this change indeed had a pro- found and inalterable impact upon the fate of humanity 2 , this process was by no means sudden, as the term Revolution would imply. On the con- trary, the process of domestication of plants and animals took several millennia to be completed, from the earliest occurrences of domesticates by c. 8500–8000 cal. BC in the Fertile Crescent, to the general presence of farming practices by 7000 cal. BC across the Levant. 3 Likewise, the very process of crop domestication can take up to several millennia to be fully completed. 4 Wild predecessors for Neolithic plant do- mesticates are absent in Europe, while the con- tribution of the European wild fauna to animal domesticate populations appears to be overall limited. 5 All categories of data thus indicate that farming practices were introduced into Europe from the Near East. Although the precise mech- anisms of this process are a matter of contention, its chronology is well known thanks to the ac- 1 Childe 1925. 2 Barker 2006. 3 Aurenche et al. 2001; Zeder 2008. 4 Fuller 2007. 5 Bollongino / Burger 2007; the situation for pigs is however more complicated: Larson et al. 2007; Ottoni et al. 2013. cumulation of radiocarbon dates across Europe and the application of various statistical tools. 6 It is now established that that the spread of farm- ing practices in Europe lasted three to four thou- sand years, from its earliest occurrences in the Greek peninsula at the turn of the 8th and the 7th millennia cal. BC to its inception in Britain and Ireland during the irst centuries of the 4th millennium cal. BC. Another signiicant recent result is that the difusion of farming practices is not a continuous process, but is rather structured by alternating episodes of dispersion and stasis. 7 Such local delays were previously suspected. 8 he rate of dispersal changes signiicantly from region to region, being much faster for instance in the Mediterranean and comparatively much slower in central and north-western Europe. 9 Several factors account for these chronological diferences, including climate change 10 , ecolog- ical constraints 11 , the nature of early farming practices 12 and, notably, the most diicult vari- able: the density and role of local foraging pop- ulations. 13 6 e. g. Gkiasta et al. 2003; Pinhasi et al. 2004; Bocquet-Appel et al. 2009; 2012; Fort et al. 2012. 7 Bocquet-Appel et al. 2009; 2012; Isern et al. 2012. 8 e. g. Ammerman / Cavalli-Sforza 1971; Zvelebil / Rowley- Conwy 1986; Guilaine 2003. 9 Bocquet-Appel et al. 2012. 10 Weninger et al. 2006; Berger / Guilaine 2009. 11 Bocquet-Appel et al. 2012. 12 Conolly et al. 2008. 13 Isern et al. 2012; see Vander Linden 2011 for a review of these various factors.