The long-term decline in terms of trade and the neolithisation of Northern Europe

Serge Svizzero ()
Additional contact information
Serge Svizzero: CEMOI - Centre d'Économie et de Management de l'Océan Indien - UR - Université de La Réunion

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: While agriculture spread quite rapidly from the Levant to most parts of Europe during the sixth millennium, its adoption was delayed to the fourth millennium in Northern Europe, an area inhabited by complex hunter-gatherers (HGs)-mainly the Ertebølle culture. This hiatus leads us to reject diffusion by migration or acculturation. It favours integrationist models of contact between foragers and farmers and attributes the shift to agriculture to social competition between HGs. We provide an alternative explanation of this shift, based on an economic mechanism related to trade between foragers and farmers. We demonstrate that the terms of trade of raw materials extracted and sold by foragers have a tendency to decline in the long term in relation to the food resources produced and sold by farmers. Neolithisation of Northern Europe can therefore be viewed as the outcome of a long-term process based on trade in which HGs voluntarily get involved without forecasting that it will, in the end, constrain most of them to give up their way of life. Such an explanation is consistent with the long period of contact between foragers and farmers provided by archaeological records and recent palaeogenetic studies.

Keywords: Neolithic diffusion; complex hunter-gatherer; terms of trade; extractive economy; Prebisch-Singer Thesis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-11-04
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.univ-reunion.fr/hal-02150104
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in Scandinavian Economic History Review, 2015, 63 (3), pp.260-279. ⟨10.1080/03585522.2015.1008566⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.univ-reunion.fr/hal-02150104/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02150104

DOI: 10.1080/03585522.2015.1008566

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().