In Chapters 3.21 and 3.22, we discuss the origins of food production in southern Europe. We divide our discussion into a southeastern part (Greece, Bulgaria, FYROM, Albania, Serbia and Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine and part of Russia), covered in Chapter 3.21; and a southwest part (Italy, southern France, the Iberian Peninsula and the Western Mediterranean islands), discussed in this chapter. We take the narrative of agricultural origins from the 8th to the mid-6th millennium bce. This narrative continues in Chapter 3.23, where Peter Bogucki deals with the early farmers of northern Europe.

Issues of Tempo and Mode

The identification of the wild variety in modern cultivated fields of wheat from the southern Balkans (Harlan 1976) underpinned postwar speculations that the original geographical distribution of the main domesticates extended into Europe and, therefore, contra Childean ex oriente lux views of the origins of food production, that the neolithisation of the continent could have been a largely independent process (Higgs & Jarman 1969; Dennell 1983). In the Western Mediterranean, where wild cereals remained (and remain) unknown, such speculations rested upon the notion that the ancestors of sheep, goats, cattle and pigs were, respectively, the Corsican mouflon, the ibex and the indigenous populations of aurochs and wild boar.