How the West Was Lost

Abstract

Post-processual views of the transition to agriculture in Northwestern Europe have sought to decouple ideology and subsistence economy as a means of protecting the status of ideology as the sole cause of change. Ideology ( as reflected in material culture and monument building) changed abruptly. To achieve the required decoupling, subsistence is therefore portrayed as having changed slowly. This implies three things: (1) Mesolithic foragers were gradually intensifying their subsistence economy. (2) Neolithic people subsisted mainly on wild animals and plants and were nomadic. ( 3) Subsistence change across the ideological transition was slow, continuous, and seamless. Many other scholars, although not post-processualists, have come to accept these three points. But as the post-processual view has become the consensus, the data from Britain, Ireland, and southern Scandinavia have all been leading in the opposite direction: ( 1) There is no reason to think that Mesolithic foragers were intensifying economically. ( 2) Neolithic people subsisted mainly on cultivated plants and domestic animals and were fully sedentary. ( 3) The transition to agriculture was rapid and probably traumatic. The current consensus has yet to incorporate these data into its explanatory framework.