This book is ultimately the product of both enthusiasm and frustration. The enthusiasm comes from the enormous amount of new information about the prehistoric transition to agriculture around the globe and particularly in Europe. There has been a remarkable increase in our knowledge of the Mesolithic and the Neolithic there in the last twenty years and dramatic changes in previous views. The frustration comes from the tenacity of more traditional perspectives among archaeologists who continue to see a continent gradually covered from southeast to northwest by waves of immigrants originating in the Near East. This outdated view continues in vogue; several popular and important theories are firmly based on it. The implications of this concept of continuous colonization for the spread of culture, language, and genes are obvious and strong: newcomers bring new things; change comes from outside. This perspective has significant implications for our perspectives on transformation and interaction. New information that has accumulated in recent years, however, has raised serious questions about how the transition to agriculture took place and, in a larger frame, about the very origins of agriculture and why human society changes at all.

The overture for this publication was a scholarly symposium, held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1995, at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This symposium provided an opportunity for the authors of this volume to convene to discuss the ideas and information presented by their colleagues and to collate those facts and views with their own.