Lecture by Peter Tomkins, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Wiener Laboratory

How did farming first reach Europe? This has been one of the most vital questions posed of the European past and one that prehistorians have devoted considerable resources to addressing. Far more than a dry, neutral discourse about the diffusion of a particular (‘Neolithic’) way of living during the Early Holocene, this enquiry goes to the heart of how Europeans see themselves, their identity and their social, cultural and genetic origins. Inevitably the Aegean interface between Europe and Asia has been an important theatre for the investigation of ‘neolithisation’. However, while Aegean sites dating to the early Holocene abound, some predating farming, many, many more postdating its arrival, those dating to the crucial millennium or so of initial neolithisation, between the late eighth and the late seventh millennium, remain very scarce and there has been a tendency to write accounts of initial neolithisation that also draw on data that are many centuries or more later than the initial transfer of farming to a region. Although hopes that the late twentieth century would see a new dawn of understanding were raised by a flurry of discoveries in the 1950s–1960s of seemingly early, pre-pottery Aegean farming cultures at sites such as Hacilar, Knossos and Franchthi, the flood of data quickly dried and in time even these data have come to be deconstructed and deemed, by some at least, unreliable or equivocal. However, with recent new discoveries (e.g. Ulucak) now reopening the debate, the time is right to revisit these earlier discoveries, re-establish what is actually known and explore what old and new data might have to tell us about social life and the practice of farming in the earliest farming communities in Europe.

As a contribution to this, this lecture will provide a new overview of the Pre-pottery and Early Neolithic (c.7000–6000 BC) community at Knossos in Crete and its wider context, drawing on the results of an ongoing project, led by the author with Dr Valasia Isaakidou and involving a team of specialists, that is comprehensively restudying the excavations of John Evans at Knossos (1957–60; 1969–70). For many decades Knossos and Crete was the poster-child of European neolithisation by demic diffusion, being regularly cited as a seemingly water-tight example of a migratory, marine transfer of farming, from the Asian heartland of early farming into an apparently pristine (and European) insular environment. However, more recently, with the belated (but predictable) discovery of pre-Neolithic occupation on the island, and with all that we now know about the Knossos community in its first millennium of existence, the efficacy of this model in a Cretan context needs to be reviewed, and either re-established or rejected.