Stephen Shennan

Very valuable overview of how agriculture gradually spread across Europe 9,000 years ago. Archaeologist Stephen Shennan (University College London) offers a rather dense approach and delves deeply into models and theories from the social sciences, which may make this book unsuitable for the general public. Shennan also benefited from the first wave of research on ancient DNA extracted from prehistoric skeletons. As a result, it is now clear that the spread across Europe was mainly a matter of migration, in a 'boom and bust' model: rapid expansion, followed by a demographic explosion, then stagnation and decline and then another wave of expansion, and so on. At the same time, we must remain cautious, because not all the fog in the prehistoric debate has been cleared up. More about that in my History account on Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6315700974… (altro)