NEOTECH: NEOLITHIC TECHNOLOGICAL TRAJECTORIES IN THE BALKANS

The Neolithic represents a crucial time of immense social, cultural, economic and environmental change in human history as people move from Mesolithic hunter-gathers to Neolithic settled agricultural communities.The development of the first house societies establishing the Neolithic village is one important key marker in this Neolithisation process starting in the core zones of the Levant, central Anatolia, Upper Mesopotamia and the Zagros region around 11,000 years ago. NEOTECH focuses on the spreading of early farming societies into southeast Europe about 8,000 years ago by combining archaeological excavations with state of the art interdisciplinary analyses. Based on local populations of former Mesolithic traditions, the potential transfer, integration and adoption of the early village concept shows a great variety in settlement systems and structures as well as the adoption of technological innovations. NEOTECH will analyse different technologies in early domestic contexts of the first Neolithic generations in the European key zone on the Balkans. The concept of potential new social entities and their technological skills promises new insights into the first farming and herding societies in the region of focus in South Serbia. NEOTECH therefore plans to examine the social impact of human-material relations with special focus on technologies and house-societies. It will place the data from this work within the wider context of the Neolithisation process in the Balkans, with the aim to investigate how the trends identified fit within wider discussion of the nature and spread of the key elements associated with the introduction of the Neolithic way of life. The integration of the transfer and adoption of new technologies (pottery production, lithic technology) into this approach will offer a new basis for potential inter-regional contacts. NEOTECH is based on already excavated and available data in the Aegean and west Anatolia as well as on new archaeological fieldwork in the central Balkans, focussing on the Pusta Reka region. Geoarchaeological surveys as well as excavations will produce new data for south Serbia. NEOTECH aims to integrate for the first time the early Neolithic of the Balkans into the Aegean and west Anatolia and will thus create new insights into European early history.

NEOTECH: NEOLITHIC TECHNOLOGICAL TRAJECTORIES IN THE BALKANS The Neolithic represents a crucial time of immense social, cultural, economic and environmental change in human history as people move from Mesolithic hunter-gathers to Neolithic settled agricultural communities.The development of the first house societies establishing the Neolithic village is one important key marker in this Neolithisation process starting in the core zones of the Levant, central Anatolia, Upper Mesopotamia and the Zagros region around 11,000 years ago. NEOTECH focused on the spreading of early farming societies into southeast Europe about 8,000 years ago by combining archaeological excavations with state-of-the-art interdisciplinary analyses. Based on local populations of former Mesolithic traditions, the potential transfer, integration and adoption of the early village concept showed a great variety in settlement systems and structures as well as the adoption of technological innovations. NEOTECH analysed different technologies in early domestic contexts of the first Neolithic generations in the European key zone on the Balkans. The concept of potential new social entities and their technological skills created new insights into the first farming and herding societies in the region of focus in South Serbia. NEOTECH therefore examined the social impact of human-material relations with special focus on technologies and house-societies. It placed the data from this work within the wider context of the Neolithisation process in the Balkans, with the aim to investigate how the trends identified fit within the wider discussion of the nature and spread of the key elements associated with the introduction of the Neolithic way of life. The integration of the transfer and adoption of new technologies (pottery production, lithic technology) into this approach offered a new basis for potential inter-regional contacts. NEOTECH is based on already excavated and available data in the Aegean and west Anatolia as well as on new archaeological fieldwork in the central Balkans, focussing on the Pusta Reka region, with first excavations in Svinjarička Čuka . Geoarchaeological surveys as well as excavations produced new data for south Serbia. NEOTECH integrated for the first time the early Neolithic of the Balkans into the Aegean and west Anatolia and thus created new insights into European early history.