Mesolithic and Hunter-Gatherers
This area studies the foraging societies of the postglacial world, especially the European Mesolithic, when hunter-gatherers adapted to warming Holocene environments before the spread of farming.
Definition
The branch of prehistoric archaeology concerned with Holocene foraging societies—classically the Mesolithic of Europe and the Near Eastern Epipaleolithic—and with hunter-gatherer lifeways more generally.
Scope
It covers the transitional millennia between the end of the Pleistocene and the arrival of agriculture, examining how mobile and semi-sedentary foragers exploited forests, coasts, rivers, and wetlands. The area treats microlithic technologies, seasonal settlement, diet breadth, mortuary practice, and emerging social complexity, and draws heavily on ethnographic analogy with documented hunter-gatherers to interpret the archaeological record.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- How did foragers adapt to the rapid environmental changes of the early Holocene?
- What conditions allowed some hunter-gatherers to become sedentary and socially complex?
- How can ethnographic data on living foragers inform interpretation of the prehistoric record?
- What do Mesolithic cemeteries reveal about social differentiation and belief?
Key theories
- Broad-spectrum revolution
- Kent Flannery's model that postglacial foragers diversified their diets to include small game, fish, shellfish, and plants, intensifying resource use in ways that set the stage for sedentism and domestication.
- Forager mobility and frames of reference
- Lewis Binford's argument that hunter-gatherer settlement and mobility patterns are systematically conditioned by environmental variables, providing cross-cultural frames of reference for interpreting forager archaeology.
History
The Mesolithic was defined in the late 19th century to fill the gap between Paleolithic and Neolithic, and long treated as a marginal interlude. Grahame Clark's excavations at Star Carr in the 1950s, with their exceptional organic preservation, transformed understanding of forager life, while later processual and ethnoarchaeological work, especially by Binford, reframed hunter-gatherers as a central subject of anthropological archaeology.
Debates
- Mesolithic as transition or as a society in its own right
- Researchers disagree over whether the Mesolithic should be understood mainly as a stepping stone toward farming or as a set of stable, sophisticated foraging societies deserving study on their own terms.
Key figures
- Lewis R. Binford
- Grahame Clark
- Marek Zvelebil
- Geoff Bailey
Related topics
Seminal works
- binford2001
- bailey2008
- renfrewbahn2020
Frequently asked questions
- What is the Mesolithic?
- It is the Middle Stone Age in European terminology, the period of postglacial hunter-gatherers between the end of the Ice Age and the arrival of farming, characterized by microlithic tools and broad-spectrum foraging.
- Why study living hunter-gatherers in archaeology?
- Ethnographic study of documented foragers, or ethnoarchaeology, provides analogies for how mobility, diet, and material culture relate, helping archaeologists interpret incomplete prehistoric remains.