00:02
Thank you very much for having me in this seminar series. I will speak today on past material cultures at the micro scale and the various methods we can use to identify mechanisms at work in the shaping of past archaeological cultures.

00:20
The analogies between biological and cultural evolution have drove the development of phylogenetic methods in archaeology. It has been raised that the processes of biological and cultural evolution differ because cultural evolution is impacted by a much higher rates of horizontal transfer, novelty, equalisation, and borrowing than its genetic counterparts. These differences have stimulated debates on whether methods designed to the study of genetic evolution may be viable to analyse various and complex modes of cultural evolution, and to what extent. It has opened on the new challenge raised by the... raised the past few years by geneticists way must establishing criteria for matcing genetics and material culture. This discussion has stimulated the response from some archaeologists who call into question the traditional archaeological classification and as a result, the relevance of linking it directly to the results of paleogenetic analysis.

01:33
Some cultural traits are more appropriate for such comparisons and others. This is the case with personal ornaments because they are omnipresent in the archaeological record. They are highly diversified in shape, raw material, colour and techniques of suspension. They are found in many different contexts, including occupation sites and burials. We know their social function, many anthropologists have observed that personal decorative items play a central role in the affirmation of ethnic groups. Personal ornaments are considered as a communication technology for transmitting information, about the identity of the wearer to members of the same group or neighbouring groups by means of common symbolic language. These ornaments help to reinforce the feeling of belonging to the group and its cohesion, to establish borders with neighbouring groups, and thus depending on the case, to translate linguistic, ideological, religious and genetic differences. Within the society personal ornaments are often used to mark individual membership to one or more social groups. And beads can also be used in various rites of passage that take place at birth, initiation, marriage, healing or death of the individual.

03:02
I have applied various methods to explore how personal ornaments can inform on the cultural mechanisms that drove the transition to farming in Europe. It represents the process by which human groups switch from hunting and gathering wild resources, to a reliance on systems of food production based on domesticated plants and animals. In Europe, the diffusion of agriculture is linked to the arrival of farming societies from the Near East, where the food production began 11,000 years ago. Then farming technologies spread to Europe 8000 years ago, and on this map, you can see the time periods of the first farming occupations in Europe. The shift to agriculture was a large scale change. It was directional from east to west. It proceeded rapidly but patchily along two main paths: the Mediterranean coast and across the Central European plain. And importantly, it was irreversible. Nowadays, no European farmer has ever reverted to foraging.

04:13
The current debate questions the relationship between indigenous European foragers and the farming societies originating from the Near East. Many models favour the impact of population dynamics to explain economic and cultural changes. Genetic data on modern and past populations confirmed the population input from Anatolia in Europe during the transition to farming and also shows that the diffusion of agriculture has participated in the shaping of the population diversity of present day Europe.

04:48
Archaeological data also identify complex cultural dynamics in every area of Europe, including contact zones between foragers and farmers. And large scale exchange networks. Another important aspect of the transition to farming is the relationship of the farming populations with their natural world. Introducing, diffusing, and adapting domesticated species in Europe to environments outside of the range of their wild ancestors originating from the Near East implies complex cultural environments interactions.

05:29
My work aims at characterising the chronological and spacial patterning of the material production diversity, and the mechanisms responsible for the observed pattern. Evaluating whether particular production-oriented adaptations can be observed in a broad range of ecological conditions, and exploring the relation established between the successive incoming farming populations and the local foraging communities by analysing personal ornaments made by the last European foragers and the first farmers, I expect to identify how individuals and community differentiated from each other with their body ornaments, and to explore the cultural geography of Europe during the transition to follow. Through that, I have recorded all the bead types used by the various communities. These photos represent only a very small part of the diversity of beads made of stones, shells, materials that were used as this period. Because the primary role of personal ornamentation is to be seen—in order to transmit symbolic messages—the most important characteristics of beads are those whose modification will distort their visual impact. The typology of personal ornaments that I have created takes into account cross cultural studies on the classification of beads and criteria used to classify archaeological artefacts including raw material, morphology, system of suspension, size, profile, and color.

07:14
Data were obtained from the literature and the direct analysis of unpublished archaeological collections by myself. You can see on the bottom left of the slide the distribution of the 400 sites included in the database. Empty zones in the map results mostly of the state of the art, presence and real absence of prehistoric communities in Europe. Each site is attributed to one of the 48 archaeological and farming archaeological cultures identified in Europe at this period.

07:52
For archaeologists archaeological culture represents geographical and chronological units characterised by archaeological occupation associated to durable material culture. They are defined as a system of transmission of social information that materialize population level processes. In my study, archaeological cultures are defined on the literature according to stone tool technology, settlement pattern, ceramic productions and level of cultural admixture with local foraging communities. I have used the bead type dataset to perform several multivariate analysis, I have calculated the distance matrix based on pairwise comparison between each archaeological cultures and use diverse statistical tools to explore the database including neighbour net analysis, neighbour joining, spatial interpol.. interpolation and so on.

08:54
These different analyses expressed the degree of similarity and differences calculated between the archaeological cultures based on bead type—present or absent—in the archaeological sites attributed to these cultures. These analyses reveal spatially and chronologically coherent sets of archaeological cultures.

09:20
My results have shown that bead types associations in Scandinavia and Northern Europe drastically differ from the rest of Europe, and do not change during transition to farming, identifying a lasting cultural border between northern Europe and the rest of the continent all along the diffusion of the Neolithic in Europe.

09:42
In Central Europe and Mediterranean area, the transition to farming is associated with the emergence and diffusion from east to west of new bead types, shaped on shells and never documented before within forager societies.

09:59
Toward the west of Europe, bead types association identify in Neolithic sites are characterised by a combination of new typical Neolithic beads, with personal ornaments previously identified within foraging communities. Raw material circulation showed that the networks previously used by foragers are maintained during transition to farming and are adopted by the Neolithic communities.

10:32
In the western regions, where the Neolithic was totally adopted, the combination of foragers and farmers personal ornaments is still visible, but associated with the regional emergence of new bead types never documented before. Radiocarbon dates show that Mesolithic foragers and Neolithic farmers occupied at the same time neighbouring commun... territories in Central and Mediterranean Europe. The surprising fact is that Mesolithic bead types are found within Neolithic contexts, But typical Neolithic beads were never found within clear forager Mesolithic sites. The unidirectional diffusion of the symbolic expressions from the Mesolithic societies to the Neolithic groups suggests a gradual but active integration of the foragers within the Neolithic communities.

11:29
At the end of the Neolithic diffusion, the cultural geography of Europe was completely reshaped by three main cultural mechanisms. The large scale diffusion of Neolithic attires from east to west, the regional emergence of new bead types, and the incorporation of the foragers' aesthetic standards by the Neolithic farmers. The result of the bead types association analysis echoes other proxies. The northern cultural boundary identified by bead types associations was later considered by geneticists who found that in this region of Europe, the local population of foragers did not mix with incoming farming population like everywhere else in Europe. The cultural geography drawn by the bead types association is consistent with the two main roads of Neolithic diffusion identified by other cultural data.

12:33
In addition, the persistence of forager personal ornaments within Mediterranean and Central European farming communities indicate repeated contacts between groups and potentially movements of individuals from one group to another. Circulation of individuals identified by the personal ornaments is also supported by genetic data showing various degree of farmers and foragers genetic admixture in these regions of Europe.

13:08
Those results contribute to characterise how the cultural geography of Europe was reshaped during the transition to farming. But questions persist on whether cultural trajectories occured within specific environmental settings, or if they were largely divorced from ecological factors. On several occasions, archaeologists have shown an interest in exploring the possible links between cultural adaptation of the past and climatic conditions, but rarely, by developing quantitative methods.

13:47
In order to do that, in collaboration with three other colleagues, we have used a method based on the ecological niche modelling. This method is classically used to identify the range of environmental conditions within which species can persist. For data input predictive algorithm used to model the ecological niche of a species requires geographic coordinates where a species has been... has been observed. And data layers summarizing environmental dimensions potentially relevant to shaping the geographic distribution of the species under study. Based on this approach, the concept of eco-cultural niche has been created for the study of past populations. It represents the area of environmental conditions within which an archaeologically, recognisable cultural adaptive system can persist without needing to substantially shift its geographic range.

14:53
To estimate eco-cultural niche for the Mediterranean and Central European farming population, we have used a variety of predictive algorithms. For that input, we used the geographic coordinates where the archaeological culture has been observed, and data layers summarising environmental dimensions relevant to shaping the geographic distribution of the culture under study. These data sets include a high resolution paleoclimatic simulation for Europe during the period of interest and landscape variables, such as the slope, aspect, elevation and topographic index. The eco-cultural niche estimation shows that central European... Europe, European in green and Mediterranean farming archaeological culture in orange, occupied mutually exclusive niche and thus, shows that environmental factors played a role in the distribution of these early farming cultures and their relationship to one another. Geographic extent of the agricultural niche of the Central European farming culture is smaller than the Mediterranean eco-cultural niche, indicating that the former is characterised by a narrow range of environmental conditions may be related to an economy more specialised than the Mediterranean communities.

16:26
This approach showed that the historical processes and the origin of the Neolithicization of Europe were influenced by environmental