Socialising the Landscape in the Early Neolithic of Thessaly, Greece

Abstract

This article attempts to draw attention to the social choices of the earliest farming societies, evaluating new and old settlement data from the Early Neolithic of Thessaly in Greece. We examine the inhabitation of landscapes, the organisation of the inhabited spaces and the human–landscape interaction as a framework for the creation of a socialised environment. Taking into account aspects such as settlement location, duration, architecture and intra- and intersite arrangements, this study shows that the observed diversity in space and time reflects alternative modes of settlement and land use, variations in notions of permanence and continuity and different modalities of the adoption and meaning of new socioeconomic practices. This evidence challenges traditional interpretations of simplicity, homogeneity and change as being induced from outside and calls for a new reading of the Early Neolithic. We argue that the model of a single and uniform development, deriving from concepts of diffusionism and evolutionism, does not hold in Neolithic Thessaly (or in Greece). Instead, Neolithisation was a contextual process that involved human awareness and different choices, and that the social landscape created by the pioneering farming societies set the stage for all kinds of different developments that occurred in later phases.