NEOLITHISATION AND SUBSISTENCE CHANGE IN PREHISTORIC ITALY

The appearance of ceramics, obsidian artifacts, and domesticated plants and animals define the neolithic period in Italy. Whether or not their adoption was facilitated by the emigration of some people from the eastern Mediterranean, the transition from mesolithic to neolithic signalled a major change in indigenous lifeways. Reliance on a "broad spectrum" subsistence strategy of seasonal plant collection and perhaps cultivation, the hunting of wild game, and the exploitation of marine resources in coastal zones, was eventually shifted to sheep and goat pastoralism, cattle raising, and intensive agriculture. In the western Mediterranean, this "neolithic package" did not suddenly replace the mesolithic way of life, as there is little evidence for intensive agriculture until the later neolithic, at least a millennium after the appearance of domesticated animals, ceramics, and obsidian. Stable isotope analysis of human skeletal remains from several Italian mesolithic, early and late neolithic sites support the hypothesis that mesolithic hunter-gatherers, even those in coastal environments, were primarily adapted to a forest economy, and selectively adopted some neolithic resources and technology over a long period of time. Domesticated animals became a reliable protein supply of meat and, later, secondary products; domesticated cereals and legumes gradually replaced wild plant foods in the neolithic diet; differences in the amount of meat and marine foods consumed may be attributed to local ecological circumstances. The exchange of obsidian and similarly decorated ceramic vessels may then have helped maintain long-distance cultural or ethnic ties between increasingly sedentary groups.