Enriqueta Vento Mir – Pierre Guerin koord.: Early Farmers in Europe - A korai földművelők Európában (1999)
Introduction
Introduction* T he Neolithic was that period in the history of humankind, when the food-producing economy spreaded over vast territories and beside the obvious technological innovations, or partly connected with that, such changes ensued in the habit of settling down, in the fields of social relations as well as in religious conceptions, that altogether, gave birth to a new way of life and to a new ideology. This was the time of the appearance of peasant farming. The causative connections and the historical course of proceedings are not thoroughly understood even today, but the modern archaeology setting out from the changing of the material culture and using the results of several other fields of science is capable of making a more and more clear and complex picture of this era. The name of this epoch - New Stone Age - is rather simplifier, since it refers only to the material culture, or rather one branch of it, nevertheless it expresses that something new was begun from that time on. The humankind entered into a new phase of developement. Stepped upon the way leading directly to our present days. The neolithic man, even it may seem strange, stands near to the farmer of yesterday. The animals kept and the plants cultivated in the Neolithic, apart from some obvious differences, were substancially the same as were in the Middle Age, so as the living-space, the hamlet- or farmstead-like settlements. We can suppose that despite of the simpler tools, the daily duties and the basic tasks of the subsistence were also the same. About the social relations, the religous life and the world conceptions existed that time we know much lesser. Many of them sank into oblivion without traces during the elapsed time. There are occassions when light is shed on even these, but there is some danger, that we may not be able to getting closer to their understanding with our recent analithical and logical approaching methods. So, in this field, lots of things are which we do not know and maybe will never know about this era. The research of the Neolithic is, of course, a manifold and complex task. The main aim is to understand this epoch as comprehensive as possible, it is targeted by several partial research of different levels and by syntheses based upon these. Resulting from our historical approach it is very important for us to know, how the process of neolithisation was unfolded, what caused, motivated and influenced the spread of the neolithic way of life through vast regions. At the same time it is also of importance to understand ourselves better by drawing an authentic picture about those early neolithic changes, which in later histories influenced basically the relation of man and nature and which meant the initial step toward the ever excelerating and sometimes fundamental transformations leading to our present days. Primarily the plant cultivation and the animal keeping made it possible for man to loosen his dependence from nature and to be able to produce the needed foodstuffs for his subsistence. From that time on, the seasonal hunting and foraging played an ever "The English translation was made by the author with the assistance of Simon Gall. 9
