Susan Alling Gregg presents a sophisticated model for the transition
from hunter-gatherer societies tosettled agricultural communities in
prehistoric Europe. She proposes that farmers and foragers must have
encountered each other and interacted in a variety of ways for over a
millennium as farming systems spread throughout the continent. Several
variations of subsistence developed, such as foraging and hunting for
part of the year and farming for the rest, or cooperative exchange
arrangements between hunter-gatherers and farmers throughout the year.
Gregg examines anthropological, ecological, and archaeological
dimensions of prehistoric population interaction. She then examines the
ecological requirements of both crops and livestock and, in order to
identify an optimal farming strategy for Early Neolithic populations,
develops a computer simulation to examine various resource mixes.
Turning to the foragers, she models the effects that interaction with
the farmers would have had on the foragers' subsistence-settlement
system.
Supporting her model with archaeological, ecological, and ethnobotanical
evidence from southwest Germany, Gregg shows that when foragers and
farmers occur contemporaneously, both need to be considered before
either can be understood. Theoretically and methodologically, her work
builds upon earlier studies of optimal diet and foraging strategy,
extending the model to food-producing populations. The applicability of
Gregg's generalized model for both wild and domestic resources reaches
far beyond her case study of Early Neolithic Germany; it will interest
both Old and New World archaeologists.
