Neolithic Cultural Hybridity: Social Entanglements and the Development of Hybrid Culture in the Western Mediterranean

Abstract

With the advent and spread of food production technology, Mediterranean populations altered their lifeways, individually adapting to local environments in order to best accommodate the cultigens they would come to rely upon. The subsequent changes in subsistence patterns, domestic architecture, and economic systems characterize the archaeologically recognized transition from Mesolithic to Neolithic culture among indigenous populations. Various explanations accounting for the dispersal and adoption of food production technologies have been posited, including demic diffusion. The purpose of this paper is not to support or negate the demic diffusion model accounting for the spread of agriculture technology, but rather to examine Sicilian and Southern Italian Mesolithic and Neolithic culture via postcolonial theoretical models. Variation in domestic architecture, the adoption of domesticates and the shift to pastoralism all provide evidence supporting the development of Neolithic hybrid cultural entanglements based on elements of Mesolithic lifeways.