lie in the southeast corner. Th e island of Tasmania lies south
of this area; its mountainous terrain is a continuation of the
Australian Alps. Tasmania is covered with temperate rain
forest. East of the mountains is a narrow coastal plain that
receives regular rainfall.
Because of its extreme isolation, Australia did not see
an infl ux of settlers in the ancient period. Its aboriginal in-
habitants apparently arrived over land bridges attached to
Southeast Asia more than 40,000 years ago; the bridges were
covered by water soon thereaft er, and Australia’s human pop-
ulation evolved by itself. Th e only exception was the region of
the Torres Strait and Queensland, both close to Indonesia and
New Guinea; the people here had more contact with Asia and
were culturally diff erent from the aborigines.
Australia’s climate presented major diffi culties to hu-
man settlers. Aside from the eastern and northern coast-
al areas, most of the land is desert; it receives little or no
rainfall, and there are very few sources of water. Aborigi-
nal people learned techniques for surviving in the desert,
but these required great ingenuity. Agriculture was impos-
sible on most of the continent, owing to the dryness and the
poor soil. Northern Australia has a tropical climate similar
to that of neighboring New Guinea and Indonesia. It has
rain forests, mangroves, and other woodlands; in ancient
times the rain forests on the Cape York Peninsula contained
a huge number of plant species.
New Zealand is an archipelago formed by a pair of large
islands and numerous small ones 1,250 miles to the southeast
of Australia, separated from the Australian continent by the
Tasman Sea. New Zealand extends about 1,000 miles from
northeast to southwest. Both islands are mountainous and
volcanic. Most of the land was covered with forests in ancient
times. New Zealand was home to many unique plants and
animals that evolved in isolation from other species. Th e cli-
mate is temperate; the southern island is wetter and cooler
than the northern island.
EUROPE
BY PETER BOGUCKI
Th e study of ancient European society depends on an under-
standing of the ancient environment. Archaeology, especially
prehistoric archaeology, is very closely related to environmen-
tal science and geography, and archaeologists work closely
with the botanists, climatologists, and geologists who provide
information about the ancient environment. Th e environ-
ment, which includes climate, vegetation, fauna, drainage,
and soils, provided prehistoric peoples with resources for
economic and social development but also placed constraints
on their activities.
MAJOR DIVISIONS OF EUROPE
Th e two environmental zones that have the most relevance
for ancient Europe are the Mediterranean evergreen zone and
the temperate deciduous forest. A third major European envi-
ronmental zone, consisting of the northern boreal coniferous
forest of northern Scandinavia and European Russia and the
treeless zones of northern Scandinavia, did not fi gure promi-
nently in the major developments of European prehistory.
Th e Mediterranean evergreen zone encompasses most of
the regions that are now Greece, Italy, and Spain along with
the southern coast of France and the Adriatic coast of Croatia
and Albania. Th e vegetation is the result of an arid summer
and winter rain. Th e vegetation in this zone must retain foli-
age in the winter in order to grow, and its deep roots and thin
leaves reduce evaporation during the summer drought. To-
day only remnants of this natural vegetation remain, owing
to grazing and agriculture.
Th e temperate deciduous forest encompasses most of
western, central, and eastern Europe, including the British
Isles and southern Scandinavia up to about latitude 60 de-
grees north. Its vegetation consists primarily of broad-leaved
trees, such as oak, elm, linden, alder, and beech, that grow in
the summer and shed their leaves in the winter. In modern
times only small tracts of the primeval European deciduous
forest remain, surrounded by farmland, industry, and towns.KEY REGIONS
Within Mediterranean and temperate Europe are several geo-
graphical zones that had particular signifi cance for ancient
European societies. At many points during the last 10,000
years, these regions had distinct cultural personalities but
were not so separate from their neighbors that connections
could not be perceived as well. Greece, including Crete and
the islands of the Aegean all the way to western Turkey, was
one such area with a distinctive cultural personality during
later prehistoric times. A distinctive sequence of prehistoric
cultures culminated in the civilizations of the Bronze Age
and Classical Greece (480–320 b.c.e.).
Italy, including Sicily, forms another distinct unit of cul-
tural geography when linked with the coastal areas of Croatia
and Albania across the Adriatic Sea, though the Apennine
spine of Italy divides this area even further. A sequence of
prehistoric cultures culminated in the Etruscan and Roman
civilizations.
Th e Iberian Peninsula, cut off from continental Europe
by the Pyrenees Mountains, is the third major subdivision of
Mediterranean Europe. Although the prehistoric societies of
this region did not culminate in urban civilization, their ar-
tifacts and settlements have a very distinctive character that
refl ects their distance from the other societies of both Medi-
terranean and temperate Europe.
Th e mountain systems of central and eastern Europe, the
ranges that make up the Alps and the Carpathians, were of
signifi cance for prehistoric society in temperate Europe inso-
far as they formed barriers that needed to be crossed and that
in turn separated other geographical zones from each other.
“Ötzi,” the famous frozen and mummifi ed man found in the
Alps in 1991, was attempting such a crossing. Later these
ranges were also important as areas for the acquisition of raw252 climate and geography: Europe