| Between the 10th and 5th millennium Be, agriculturalists encountered, displaced, and/or replaced most indigenous hunter-gatherers across the European continent. This transition is one of the most studied in Old World archaeology, and there is a vast literature that attempts to explain how and why this transition took place. This thesis uses the tools of spatial analysis to quantify the transition in order to build an understanding of the relationships between demography, mobility, and environmental constraints and affordances. The statistical and analytical tools of cost-surface analysis and geographically weighted regression were applied to a dataset consisting of several hundred radiocarbon dates of early agricultural sites which were used to identify the spatial variations and trends influencing the transition at both regional and local scales. It was found that such methods improve the overall correlation between the date of early Neolithic sites and a theoretical origin point from which agriculture may have began.Keywords: Early Neolithic, Spread of Agriculture, Geographically Weighted Regression, Radiocarbon Dating, Regional Trends, Local Trends. |
