Before the sixth millennium BC, peoples across Europe subsisted as foragers: by hunting wild game, gathering wild foods, and fishing from rivers and oceans. These subsistence strategies changed with the advent of the Neolithic as food producing economies and societies were introduced or arrived in southeast Europe from the Near East. This shift appeared earliest in the regions adjacent to Turkey and the Mediterranean and slowly expanded northward and westward during the late 7th and early 6th millennium BC. As a result of this change, most zooarchaeological and palaeo-economic studies conducted in the Balkans for Neolithic remains focused on domestic livestock and consequences for subsistence and settlement, to the neglect of our understanding of the wild component of Neolithic economies and the information they can provide on subsistence and settlement. In this thesis, I examine the wild component of Neolithic subsistence in order to understand their contribution to diet and overall economic adaptations. In particular, I examine the remains of deer, which are the most common wild mammal exploited during the Neolithic of the region, in order to characterize deer exploitation strategies. The thesis research demonstrates that the hunting of red and roe deer was not necessarily a background activity, but an important part of the Neolithic exploitation strategy, for both food and other kinds of resources. By understanding these processes and their importance to Neolithic society, we are better equipped to understand the overall picture of subsistence strategies and the exploitation of other resources in the central Balkans during the Neolithic.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:MANITOBA/oai:mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca:1993/30356 |
| Date | 08 April 2015 |
| Creators | Brown, Annie |
| Contributors | Greenfield, Haskel (Anthropology), Lawall, Mark (Classics) Roksandic, Mirjana (University of Winnipeg) |
| Source Sets | University of Manitoba Canada |
| Detected Language | English |
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