millennium BCon the plateau lists dozens of identified Neolithic sites, at eleven
of which there has been some excavation.^24
Neolithic sites on the plateau were relatively conspicuous to archaeologists, while
sites along the Aegean and Marmara coasts have been difficult to detect because
they are under alluvial deposits. Recent discoveries and excavations, however, have
shown that on Anatolia’s Aegean coast, which receives twice as much precipita -
tion as does the plateau, the Neolithic way of life began ca. 7000 BCand here the
villagers were most definitely food-producers. A line of settlements has been
found here, from Çukuriçi Höyük near Ephesus to the Troad. Most productive
has been the site of Ulucak Höyük, near Izmir, where Turkish archaeologists
have been working since 1995. From the 22,000 bones recovered at the site it is
clear that from the very beginning ca. 7000 BCanimal husbandry—of sheep, goats,
pigs and cattle—was a mainstay for the Ulucak villagers. In the lowest level (Level
VI) all four domesticates are represented.^25
Further north, inland from the Sea of Marmara and the Bosporus, were many
more settlements, most of them sharing in the culture of the type-site, Fikirtepe.
According to Mehmet Özdoğan, recent research has “securely solved the
chronological position of the Fikirtepe culture, placing it between 6450 and 6100
cal BC.”^26 Like their contemporaries to the south, the Fikirtepe villagers depended
for their meat on domesticated ovicaprids, pigs and cattle.
The spread of stock-raising and agriculture was gradual. Unlike the massive
folk migrations visualized 100 years ago, the continuous “wave of advance”
proposed by Renfrew brought a trickle of Neolithic settlers—a few at a time—
further and further into arable land. From the western coast of Anatolia colonists
carried their animals and their crop seeds westward and northward. All of this
movement was obviously seaborne. The fertile and well-watered plain of central
Crete, between Mts. Dikte and Ida, was one of the first places to be colonized:
Level X at Knossos has often been dated as early as 7000 BC, but some specialists
would date it ca. 6600 BC. The colonization was probably carried out by fewer
than 100 people. These pioneers, as Cyprian Broodbank and Thomas Strasser
showed in a careful but imaginative study, knew very well where they were going
and how to get there, and they brought with them across the sea no pottery but
all four domestic animals: sheep, goats, cattle and pigs.^27 Broodbank and Strasser
imagined a flotilla of ten or fifteen paddled hide boats or log boats, each carrying
a ton or two of cargo.^28
The same kind of colonizing brought the Neolithic to Europe (“Europe” in this
book is the Eurasian continent west of the Bosporus, the eastern arc of the
Carpathian mountains, and the Gulf of Finland). First to beckon was the Thessalian
plain. Lying in the lee of the Pindus mountains, and to the south of Mt. Olympos,
the Thessalian plain was the broadest expanse of arable land across the sea
from Anatolia. Argissa on Thessaly’s Peneios river was apparently colonized
somewhat later than central Crete, after the making of pottery had begun, and the
settlers again brought with them on their boats the full roster of domesticates.^29
Other villages along the Peneios—Soufli Magoula downstream and Platia
Magoula Zarkou upstream from Argissa, plus a cluster of other sites—attest to a
Origins and spread of Proto-Indo-European 7