considerable influx into Thessaly during the Early Neolithic period.^30 Sesklo, away
from the Peneios but a short walk inland from the Gulf of Pagasai, became a town
of several hundred people by the end of the seventh millennium BC.^31 Settlements
on the coast of Macedonia and Thrace were planted at Nea Nikomedeia and Hoca
Çeşme, the latter just east of the mouth of the Maritsa/Evros river, which today
forms the border between Turkey and Greece.
From the coast, settlers made their way—evidently in the “wave of advance”
posited by Renfrew—up the rivers of Thrace: the Maritsa/Evros, the Mesta, and
especially the Struma (Strymon). Along the middle of the Struma valley six Early
Neolithic village sites have been located, and at one of them—Ilindentsi—
excavation has begun under the direction of Dr. Malgorzata Grebska-Kulova.^32
Earlier excavations, by a French-Bulgarian team, unearthed an informative Early
Neolithic site at Kovachevo, in south-central Bulgaria. Judging from what they
have found at these sites, archaeologists believe that the original settlers, usually
a small group of twenty or thirty families, came from western Anatolia.^33 From
these small Early Neolithic settlements grew the Karanovo-Gumelnitsa culture,
which in the fifth millennium BCcovered much of Bulgaria and southeastern
Romania and may have included several hundred thousand people. Although many
of these people would have been descendants of immigrants from Anatolia, just
as many may have been descended from the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers of
southeastern Europe. The security provided by food production must have attracted
many hunter-gatherers to the Neolithic way of life. In any case, on the basis
of changes in the material culture Özdoğan concluded that for centuries the
settlements in southeastern Europe kept in touch with their Anatolian roots.^34
The wave of advance that brought agriculture and stock-raising to the Balkans
seems to have continued into eastern Romania, Moldova and western Ukraine.
The Cucuteni-Trypillian (or Tripolye) culture of this region commenced soon after
5000 BC, and is now known from several hundred sites. These were primarily
located in the river valleys, since the steppe itself was not easily cultivated.
Eventually the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture reached as far to the east as the right
bank of the Dnieper.
The flow of Neolithic colonists from northwestern Anatolia into southeastern
Europe and western Ukraine has been the topic of much archaeological discus -
sion and literature in the last 15 years. It was the subject of workshops held in
Istanbul in May of 2004 and in April of 2009. The proceedings of both workshops
have been published.^35 In 2011 Mehmet Özdoğan, who has directed many of
the pertinent excavations, provided a useful survey: “Archaeological Evidence on
the Westward Expansion of Farming Communities from Eastern Anatolia to the
Aegean and the Balkans.” Özdoğan’s article appeared in Current Anthropology
in 2011, in a supplemental fascicle titled, “The Origins of Agriculture: New
Data, New Ideas.” Another survey published that same year in Praehistorische
Zeitschrifttraced the expansion of the Neolithic from the Anatolian plateau to
southeastern Europe: between 6500 and 6000 BCsuccessive periods of colon ization
brought three different “Neolithic packages” from western Anatolia to Greece and
the Balkans.^36
8 Origins and spread of Proto-Indo-European