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79-711: The Mount Pleasant Period is a phase of the later Neolithic in Britain dating to between c. 2750 BC and 2000 BC. It was so named by Colin Burgess in the 1970s using Mount Pleasant henge as its typesite . The period is divided into three phases, the Frankford industries, the Migdale-Marnoch industries and then the Ballyvalley-Aylesford industries. During this period, Beaker pottery appears in

158-685: A Turkish state originating in Anatolia , encroached steadily on former Byzantine lands, culminating in the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Beginning roughly in the 12th century in Florence , and later spreading through Europe with the development of the printing press , a Renaissance of knowledge challenged traditional doctrines in science and theology , with the Arabic texts and thought bringing about rediscovery of classical Greek and Roman knowledge. The Catholic reconquest of Portugal and Spain led to

237-598: A US-led military alliance ( NATO ) and formed the European Economic Community amongst themselves. The countries in the Soviet sphere of influence joined the military alliance known as the Warsaw Pact and the economic bloc called Comecon . Yugoslavia was neutral. The common attribute of the eastern countries is that all of them have experiences with socialism , but nevertheless, the beginning of

316-480: A hunter-gatherer society though most of Southern Europe had already taken up agriculture and sedentary living. "The Neolithic period is one of remarkable changes in landscapes, societies and technologies, which changed a wild, forested world, to one of orderly agricultural production and settled communities on the brink of socially complex 'civilization'. It was a period that saw the arrival of new ideas and domesticated plants and animals, perhaps new communities, and

395-720: A major and direct transport axis between Northern and southern Europe, was completed in 2016 with the Gotthard Base Tunnel . The Gotthard inscribes itself in a long history of transit across the Alps , which saw them progressively changing from an obstacle to a corridor between the North Sea and the Mediterranean Sea . The most widely spoken family of languages in southern Europe are the Romance languages ,

474-407: A number of options. Groups of pioneers could have set off from the continent in one-off small-scale invasions. Or people might have arrived after a long-term and eclectic mixture of contacts down the continental coast from Denmark to France. Or gatherer-hunters might have traveled by boat to the continent and brought back the animals and plants as the result of slowly developing exchange contacts. There

553-647: A related movement, worked to reconquer Iberia for Christendom . The late Middle Ages represented a period of upheaval in Europe. The epidemic known as the Black Death and an associated famine caused demographic catastrophe in Europe as the population plummeted. Dynastic struggles and wars of conquest kept many of the states of Europe at war for much of the period. In the Balkans , the Ottoman Empire ,

632-731: A series of oceanic explorations resulting in the Age of Discovery that established direct links with Africa, the Americas, and Asia. During this period, Iberian forces engaged in a worldwide struggle with Islamic societies; the battlefronts in this Ibero-Islamic World War stretched from the Mediterranean into the Indian Ocean , finally involving the islands of Southeast Asia . Eventually this ecumenical conflict ended when new players—England, Holland and France—replaced Spain and Portugal as

711-540: Is a much more labour-intensive way of life than that of hunter-gatherers. It would have involved deforesting an area, digging and tilling the soil, storing seeds, and then guarding the growing crops from other animal species before eventually harvesting them. In the cases of grains, the crop produced then has to be processed to make it edible, including grinding, milling and cooking. All of that involves far more preparation and work than either hunting or gathering. The Neolithic agriculturalists deforested areas of woodland in

790-1043: Is focused on the three peninsulas located in the extreme south of the European continent. These are the Iberian Peninsula , the Apennine Peninsula , and the Balkan Peninsula . These three peninsulas are separated from the rest of Europe by towering mountain ranges, respectively by the Pyrenees , the Alps and the Balkan Mountains . The location of these peninsulas in the heart of the Mediterranean Sea, as well as their mountainous reliefs, provide them with very different types of climates (mainly subtropical Mediterranean ) from

869-448: Is known about this time period in Europe comes from archaeological investigations. These were begun by the antiquarians of the 18th century and intensified in the 19th century during which John Lubbock coined the term "Neolithic". In the 20th and the 21st centuries, further excavation and synthesis went ahead, dominated by figures like V. Gordon Childe , Stuart Piggott , Julian Thomas and Richard Bradley . The period that preceded

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948-555: Is no answer to this puzzle, which is all the more intriguing since the earliest evidence for farming in the British Isles comes from Ireland and probably the Isle of Man, and not from southern Britain. The reason for switching from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural lifestyle has been widely debated by archaeologists and anthropologists. Ethnographic studies of farming societies who use basic stone tools and crops have shown that it

1027-852: Is spoken in Italy, particularly in South Tyrol . The predominant religion in southern Europe is Christianity . Christianity spread throughout southern Europe during the Roman Empire, and Christianity was adopted as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the year 380 AD. Due to the historical break of the Church into the western half based in Rome and the eastern half based in Constantinople , different denominations of Christianity are prominent in different parts of Europe. Christians in

1106-577: Is still debated, with some evidence placing the development of agriculture as early as 12,500 BC. The idea of agriculture subsequently spread from the Levant into Europe and was adopted by hunter-gathering societies in what is now Turkey, Greece, the Balkans and across the Mediterranean and eventually reached north-western Europe and the British Isles. Until recently, archaeologists debated whether

1185-544: Is the southern region of Europe . It is also known as Mediterranean Europe , as its geography is marked by the Mediterranean Sea . Definitions of southern Europe include some or all of these countries and regions: Albania , Andorra , Bosnia and Herzegovina , Bulgaria , Croatia , Cyprus , Gibraltar , Greece , Italy , Malta , Monaco , Montenegro , North Macedonia , Portugal , San Marino , Serbia , Slovenia , southern France , Spain , Turkey ( East Thrace ), and Vatican City . Southern Europe

1264-600: Is used as a second language in parts of southern Europe. As a primary language, however, English has only a small presence in southern Europe, only in Gibraltar (alongside Spanish) and Malta (secondary to Maltese). English is also widely spoken in Cyprus. There are other language groupings in southern Europe. Albanian is spoken in Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Greece, Serbia, Croatia and Italy (particularly by

1343-588: The Adriatic Sea in cities such as Venice and Trieste , but also further north, near the Alpine foothills, in cities such as Como and Lugano . Southern Europe's flora is mainly characterized by Mediterranean forests, woodlands, and scrub , but also temperate broadleaf and mixed forests . The Mediterranean and Submediterranean climate regions in Europe are found in much of southern Europe, mainly Portugal, Spain, Italy, Malta, Albania, Greece, Cyprus and all

1422-748: The Aosta Valley in Italy), Catalan (spoken in eastern Spain, Andorra, Southwestern France, and the Sardinian town of Alghero in Italy), Galician (spoken in northwestern Spain), Mirandese (spoken in northeast Portugal), and Occitan , which is spoken in the Val d'Aran in Catalonia, in the Occitan Valleys in Italy and in southern France. Slavic Languages are spoken in several countries on

1501-678: The Arbëreshë people in southern Italy ). Maltese is a Semitic language that is the official language of Malta, descended from Siculo-Arabic , but written in the Latin script with heavy Latin and Italian influences. The Basque language is spoken in the Basque Country , a region in northern Spain and southwestern France. Turkish is a Turkic language that is spoken in Turkey, Cyprus, Kosovo, Greece, North Macedonia and Bosnia, and German

1580-628: The Balearic Islands , Corsica , Crete , Cyprus , Sardinia , and Sicily , as well as the island country of Malta . Southern Europe's most emblematic climate is the Mediterranean climate , influenced by the large subtropical semi-permanent centre of high atmospheric pressure found, not in the Mediterranean itself, but in the Atlantic Ocean, the Azores High . The Mediterranean climate covers Portugal , Spain , Italy ,

1659-1026: The Balkans . Bulgarian language ( Български език ) is spoken in Bulgaria ( България ). Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian is spoken in Kosovo, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Italy (in Molise ). Slovenian is spoken in Slovenia, Italy (in Friuli-Venezia Giulia ) and Croatia (in Istria ) and Macedonian is spoken in North Macedonia. The Hellenic languages or Greek language are widely spoken in Greece and Cyprus. Additionally, other varieties of Greek are spoken in small communities in parts of other European countries. English

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1738-813: The Mediterranean by the 8th century BC. Carthage was founded in 814 BC, and the Carthaginians by 700 BC had firmly established strongholds in Sicily and Sardinia (both regions in present day Italy ), which created conflicts of interest with Etruria . Its colonies later reached the Western Mediterranean , such as Cádiz in Spain and most notably Carthage in North Africa, and even the Atlantic Ocean . The civilisation spread across

1817-717: The Middle East . Until then, during the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods, the island's inhabitants had been hunter-gatherers , and the transition from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural one did not occur all at once. There is also some evidence of different agricultural and hunter-gatherer groups within the British Isles meeting and trading with one another in the early part of the Neolithic, with some hunter-gatherer sites showing evidence of more complex, Neolithic technologies. Archaeologists disagree about whether

1896-795: The Ottoman Empire . Italy unified into a nation state. The capture of Rome in 1870 ended the Papal temporal power . The outbreak of World War I in 1914 was precipitated by the rise of nationalism in Southeastern Europe as the Great Powers took up sides. The Allies defeated the Central Powers in 1918. During the Paris Peace Conference the Big Four imposed their terms in a series of treaties, especially

1975-587: The Polden Hills with Westhay Mears, a length which ran for over a kilometre. Being agriculturalists, the Neolithic peoples of the British Isles grew cereal grains such as wheat and barley , which therefore played a part in their diet. Nonetheless, they were supplemented at times with wild undomesticated plant foods such as hazelnuts . There is also evidence that grapes had been consumed in Neolithic Wessex, based upon charred pips found at

2054-601: The Tramontane . When the Mistral and the Tramontane are blowing, this provokes an "upwelling" phenomenon on the French coast. They push the surface waters out to sea and bring deeper, cooler waters up to the seaside. Consequently, the temperature of the waters of the French coasts are therefore very cool even in summer, and not representative of the rest of the Mediterranean. This same kind of phenomenon takes place between

2133-874: The Treaty of Versailles . The Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, and along with Mussolini's Italy sought to gain control of the continent by the Second World War . Following the Allied victory in the Second World War, Europe was divided by the Iron Curtain . The countries in Eastern and Southeastern Europe were dominated by the Soviet Union and became communist states . The major non-communist southern European countries joined

2212-525: The 1990s was just roughly the same. For some of them becoming independent was the major challenge, while others needed to face with poverty and deep dictatorship also Economically, parallel with the political changes, and the democratic transition, – as a rule of law states – the previous command economies were transformed via the legislation into market economies, and set up or renewed the major macroeconomic factors: budgetary rules, national audit, national currency, central bank. Generally, they shortly encountered

2291-495: The Balkans along the Mediterranean coast. The arrival of farming populations led to the almost-complete replacement of the native Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of the British Isles, who did not experience a genetic resurgence in the succeeding centuries. The 2003 discovery of the Ness of Brodgar site has presented an example of a highly-sophisticated and possibly-religious complex in the British Isles dating from around 3500 BC, before

2370-688: The Bosporus) are described as located in "Southeastern Europe". EuroVoc is a multilingual thesaurus maintained by the Publications Office of the European Union , giving definitions of terms for official use. In the definition of "southern Europe", the following countries are included: The United Nations geoscheme is a system devised by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) which divides

2449-484: The British Isles along with or roughly concurrent to the introduction of farming. A widely-held theory amongst archaeologists is that those megalithic tombs were intentionally made to resemble the long timber houses, which had been constructed by Neolithic farming peoples in the Danube basin from circa 4800 BC. As the historian Ronald Hutton related, "There is no doubt that these great tombs, far more impressive than would be required of mere repositories for bones, were

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2528-413: The British Isles appear to have been built between 4000 and 3200 BC, a time period that the archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson notes means that tomb building was "a relatively short-lived fashion in archaeological terms". Amongst the most notable of these chambered tombs are those clustered around the Brú na Bóinne complex in County Meath , eastern Ireland: they include Newgrange , Knowth and Dowth ,

2607-399: The British Isles to use the cleared land for farming. Notable examples of forest clearance occurred around 5000 BCE in Broome Heath in East Anglia , on the North Yorkshire Moors and also on Dartmoor . Such clearances were performed not only with the use of stone axes but also through ring barking and burning, with the last two likely having been more effective. Nonetheless, in many areas,

2686-411: The British Isles was characterised by the adoption of agriculture and sedentary living . To make room for the new farmland, the early agricultural communities undertook mass deforestation across the islands, which dramatically and permanently transformed the landscape. At the same time, new types of stone tools requiring more skill began to be produced, and new technologies included polishing. Although

2765-449: The British Neolithic, the term "Neolithic" had been broadened to "include sedentary village life, cereal agriculture, stock rearing, and ceramics, all assumed characteristic of immigrant agriculturalists". In the 1960s, a number of British and American archaeologists began taking a new approach to their discipline by emphasising their belief that through the rigorous use of the scientific method , they could obtain objective knowledge about

2844-403: The Byzantine Empire. In Western Europe, Germanic peoples moved into positions of power in the remnants of the former Western Roman Empire and established kingdoms and empires of their own. The period known as the Crusades , a series of religiously motivated military expeditions originally intended to bring the Levant back into Christian rule, began. Several Crusader states were founded in

2923-422: The Late Neolithic, this form of monumentalization was replaced by the construction of stone circles , a trend that would continue into the following Bronze Age . Those constructions are taken to reflect ideological changes, with new ideas about religion, ritual and social hierarchy. The Neolithic people in Europe were not literate and so they left behind no written record that modern historians can study. All that

3002-444: The Lower Rhine area. Beakers arrived in Britain around 2500 BC, with migrations of Yamnaya -related people, resulting in a nearly-total turnover of the British population. The study argues that more than 90% of Britain's Neolithic gene pool was replaced with the coming of the Beaker people. The Neolithic is largely categorised by the introduction of farming to Britain from Continental Europe from where it had originally come from

3081-454: The Mediterranean between 1500 BC and 300 BC. The period known as classical antiquity began with the rise of the city-states of Ancient Greece . Greek influence reached its zenith under the expansive empire of Alexander the Great , spreading throughout Asia . The Roman Empire came to dominate the entire Mediterranean Basin in a vast empire based on Roman law and Roman legions . It promoted trade, tolerance, and Greek culture. By 300 AD

3160-406: The Mesolithic Natufian culture of the Levant, which showed signs that would later lead to the actual domestication and farming of crops. Archaeologists believe that the Levantine peoples subsequently developed agriculture in response to a rise in their population levels that could not be fed by the finite food resources that hunting and gathering could provide. The time period in which this happened

3239-432: The Neolithic Revolution was brought to the British Isles through adoption by natives or by migrating groups of Continental Europeans who settled there. A 2019 study found that the Neolithic farmers of the British Isles had entered the region through a mass migration c. 4100 BC. They were closely related to Neolithic peoples of Iberia, which implies that they were descended from agriculturalists who had moved westwards from

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3318-412: The Neolithic in the British Isles is known by archaeologists as the Mesolithic . During the early part of that period, Britain was still attached by the landmass of Doggerland to the rest of Continental Europe. The archaeologist and prehistorian Caroline Malone noted that during the Late Mesolithic, the British Isles were something of a "technological backwater" in European terms and were still living as

3397-423: The Roman Empire was divided into the Western Roman Empire based in Rome, and the Eastern Roman Empire based in Constantinople. The attacks of the Goths led to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD, a date which traditionally marks the end of the classical period and the start of the Middle Ages . During the Middle Ages, the Eastern Roman Empire survived, though modern historians refer to this state as

3476-433: The United Kingdom is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Neolithic British Isles During the Mesolithic period, the inhabitants of the British Isles had been hunter-gatherers. Around 4000 BC, migrants began arriving from Central Europe . These migrants brought new ideas, leading to a radical transformation of society and landscape that has been called the Neolithic Revolution . The Neolithic period in

3555-613: The archaeological record although they are rare and have usually been uncovered only when they were in the vicinity of the more substantial Neolithic stone monuments. The Early and the Middle Neolithic also saw the construction of large megalithic tombs across the British Isles. Because they housed the bodies of the dead, those tombs have typically been considered by archaeologists to be a possible indication of ancestor veneration by those who constructed them. Such Neolithic tombs are common across much of Western Europe , from Iberia to Scandinavia , and they were therefore likely brought to

3634-450: The archaeological record and metalworking, initially using copper and gold but with bronze working appearing at the end. It followed the Meldon Bridge Period and was superseded by the Overton Period . There are parallels with the Unetice culture of continental Europe. Burgess, Colin (1980). The Age of Stonehenge (1st ed.). London: Dent. ISBN   0-460-04254-8 . This article relating to archaeology in

3713-419: The centres of ritual activity in the early Neolithic: they were shrines as well as mausoleums. For some reason, the success of farming and the veneration of ancestral and more recent bones had become bound up together in the minds of the people". Although there are disputed radiocarbon dates indicating that the chambered tomb at Carrowmore in Ireland dates to circa 5000 BCE, the majority of such monuments in

3792-422: The countries of the world into regional and subregional groups, based on the M49 coding classification . The partition is for statistical convenience and does not imply any assumption regarding political or other affiliation of countries or territories. In the UN geoscheme, the following countries are classified as southern Europe: as well as the dependent territory : European Travel Commission divides

3871-411: The earliest indisputably-acknowledged languages spoken in the British Isles belonged to the Celtic branch of the Indo-European family, it is not known what language the early farming people spoke. The Neolithic also saw the construction of a wide variety of monuments in the landscape, many of which were megalithic in nature. The earliest of them are the chambered tombs of the Early Neolithic, but in

3950-493: The eastern Mediterranean. These were all short-lived. The Crusaders would have a profound impact on many parts of Europe. Their sack of Constantinople in 1204 brought an abrupt end to the Byzantine Empire. Though it would later be re-established, it would never recover its former glory. The Crusaders would establish trade routes that would develop into the Silk Road and open the way for the merchant republics of Genoa and Venice to become major economic powers. The Reconquista ,

4029-403: The elm leaves to use as animal fodder during the winter and that the trees died after being debarked by domesticated cattle . Nonetheless, as Pearson highlighted, the decline in elm might be due to the elm bark beetle , a parasitic insect that carries with it Dutch elm disease , and evidence for which has been found at West Heath Spa in Hampshire . It is possible that the spread of those beetles

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4108-407: The expression of a single, underlying cultural idea". It was in the 17th century AD that scholarly investigation into the surviving Neolithic monuments first began in the British Isles, but at the time, these antiquarian scholars had relatively little understanding of prehistory and were Biblical literalists , who believed that the Earth itself was only around 5000 years old. The first to do so

4187-428: The final stage of the Stone Age and defined this period purely on the technology of the time, when humans had begun using polished stone tools but not yet started making metal tools. Lubbock's terminology was adopted by other archaeologists, but as they gained a greater understanding of later prehistory, it came to cover a wider set of characteristics. By the 20th century, when figures like V. Gordon Childe were working on

4266-555: The first pyramids and contemporary with the city of Uruk . The site is still in early stages of excavation but is expected to yield major contributions to knowledge of the period. "After over a thousand years of early farming, a way of life based on ancestral tombs, forest clearance and settlement expansion came to an end. This was a time of important social changes." From the Beaker culture period onwards, all British individuals had high proportions of Steppe ancestry and were genetically more similar to Beaker-associated people from

4345-628: The first of which was built between 3100 and 2900 BCE. The Late Neolithic also saw the construction of megalithic stone circles. The stone or "lithic" technology of the British Neolithic differed from that of Mesolithic and Palaeolithic Britain. Whereas Mesolithic hunter-gatherer tools were microliths (small, sharp shards of flint), Neolithic agriculturalists used larger lithic tools. Typically, they included axes , made out of either flint or hard igneous rock hafted on to wooden handles. While some of them were evidently used for chopping wood and other practical purposes, there are some axe heads from

4424-459: The following problems: high inflation, high unemployment, low economic growth and high government debt. By 2000 these economies were stabilized, and sooner or later between 2004 and 2013 some of them joined the European Union, and Slovenia introduced the euro. Italy became a major industrialized country again, due to its post-war economic miracle . The European Union (EU) involved the division of powers, with tax, health, and education handled by

4503-454: The forests had regrown within a few centuries, including at Ballysculion, Ballynagilly, Beaghmore and the Somerset Levels . Between 4300 and 3250 BCE, there was a widespread decline in the number of elm trees across Britain, with millions of them disappearing from the archaeological record, and archaeologists have in some cases attributed that to the arrival of Neolithic farmers. For instance, it has been suggested that farmers collected all

4582-527: The heirs of Latin, which have spread from the Italian peninsula, and are emblematic of Southwestern Europe (See the Latin Arch .) . By far the most common Romance languages in southern Europe are Italian (spoken by over 50 million people in Italy, southern Switzerland, Malta, San Marino, and Vatican City) and Spanish , which is spoken by over 40 million people in Spain, Andorra and Gibraltar. Other common Romance languages include Portuguese (spoken in Portugal and Andorra), French (spoken in France, Monaco, and

4661-441: The human past. In doing so, they forged the theoretical school of processual archaeology . The processual archaeologists took a particular interest in the ecological impact on human society, and in doing so, the definition of "Neolithic" was "narrowed again to refer just to the agricultural mode of subsistence". In the late 1980s, processualism began to come under increasing criticism by a new wave of archaeologists, who believed in

4740-570: The innate subjectivity of the discipline. The figures forged the new theoretical school of post-processual archaeology , and a number of post-processualists turned their attention to the Neolithic British Isles. They interpreted the Neolithic as an ideological phenomenon that was adopted by British, Irish and Manx society and led to them creating new forms of material-culture, such as the megalithic funerary and ceremonial monuments. [REDACTED] Media related to Neolithic British Isles at Wikimedia Commons Southern Europe Southern Europe

4819-509: The main agents of European imperialism in the mid-17th century. European overseas expansion led to the rise of colonial empires , producing the Columbian Exchange . The combination of resource inflows from the New World and the Industrial Revolution of Great Britain, allowed a new economy based on manufacturing instead of subsistence agriculture. The period between 1815 and 1871 saw a large number of revolutionary attempts and independence wars . Balkan nations began to regain independence from

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4898-407: The mediterranean islands, but also in southeast France, the Balkan Mediterranean coast and part of Macedonia. In the Mediterranean coastal areas, olive groves , maquis shrubland , and steppes are very common. At higher elevations, or latitudes, they are replaced by chestnut and (often coppiced) mixed forests. The Phoenicians originally expanded from Canaan ports , dominating trade in

4977-495: The most productive areas, where the soils were more fertile, namely around the Boyne , Orkney , eastern Scotland, Anglesey , the upper Thames , Wessex , Essex , Yorkshire and the river valleys of The Wash . Those areas saw an intensification of agricultural production and larger settlements. The Neolithic houses of the British Isles were typically rectangular and made out of wood and so none had survived to this day. Nonetheless, foundations of such buildings have been found in

5056-406: The mountain ranges of Spain and Italy. Additionally, the north coast of Spain experiences a wetter Atlantic climate. In the highest regions of the Alps, which border southern Europe, even ice cap climate can be found. Some parts of southern Europe have humid subtropical climates with warm and wet summers, unlike typical Mediterranean climates. This climate is mainly found in Italy and Croatia around

5135-459: The nation states, while the EU had charge of market rules, competition, legal standards and environmentalism. The Soviet economic and political system collapsed, leading to the end of communism in the satellite countries in 1989, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself in 1991. European Union expanded to subsequently include many of the formerly communist European countries – Romania and Bulgaria (2007) and Croatia (2013). The Gotthard ,

5214-410: The period that appear never to have been used, some being too fragile to have been used in any case. The latter axes most likely had a decorative or ceremonial function. Neolithic Britons were capable of building a variety of different wooden constructions. For instance, in the marshland of the Somerset Levels in south-western Britain, a wooden trackway was built in the winter of 3807 BC and connected

5293-409: The rest of the continent. So, the Sirocco hot wind that originates in the heart of the Sahara blows over Italy , going up to the interior of the Alpine arc ( Po Valley ). The Alps prevent the Sirocco from spreading to the rest of Europe. And, conversely, the Alps and the Pyrenees protect the Italian and Iberian Peninsulas from the rains and icy winds from the south of France such as the Mistral and

5372-418: The site of Hambledon Hill. They may have been imported from Continental Europe , or they might have been grown on British soil, as the climate was warmer than that of the early 21st century. As the archaeologist John C. Barrett noted, "There never was a single body of beliefs which characterise 'neolithic religion'... The variety of practices attested by [the various Neolithic] monuments cannot be explained as

5451-483: The southern European countries form the EU Med Group . Southern Europe also loosely corresponds to the European part of the Mediterranean Basin . Geographically, southern Europe is the southern portion of the European continent. This definition is relative, although largely based on history, culture, climate , and flora, which is shared across the region. Southern Europe can be subdivided into three subregions : The major islands in southern Europe generally include

5530-442: The southern coast of France , coastal Croatia , coastal Slovenia , southern Bosnia and Herzegovina , Montenegro , Albania , and Greece , as well as the Mediterranean islands. Those areas of Mediterranean climate present similar vegetations and landscapes throughout, including dry hills, small plains, pine forests and olive trees. Cooler climates can be found in certain parts of southern European countries, for example within

5609-555: The transformation of the native peoples of Britain. The Neolithic opened an entirely new episode in human history. It took place in Britain over a relatively short space of time, lasting in total only about 2000 years – in human terms little more than 80–100 generations." Between 10,000 BC to 8,000 BC the Neolithic Revolution in the Near East gradually transformed hunter-gathering societies into settled agricultural societies. Similar developments later occurred independently in Mesoamerica , Southeast Asia , Africa , China and India . It

5688-425: The transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural society was gradual, over a period of centuries, or rapid, accomplished within a century or two. The process of the introduction of agriculture is still not fully understood, and as the archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson noted: There is no doubt that domesticated animals and plants had to be carried by boat from the continent of Europe to the British Isles. There are

5767-560: The two slopes of the Balkan mountain range. These mountains have, moreover, been a serious handicap to population displacement, focusing southern Europe mainly on the Mediterranean world . The climate and cultures are therefore very specific. Different methods can be used to define southern Europe, including its political , economic , historical , and cultural attributes. Southern Europe can also be defined by its natural features — its geography , climate , and flora . Politically, nine of

5846-432: The western half of southern Europe — e.g., Portugal, Spain, Italy — are generally Roman Catholic . Christians in the eastern half of southern Europe — e.g., Greece, Serbia and North Macedonia — are generally Eastern Orthodox . Islam is widely practiced in Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo and Turkey and Northern Cyprus . Muslims are a significant minority in several countries of southern Europe- e.g., Greece, Italy, Spain. Judaism

5925-490: Was coincidental although the hypothesis has also been suggested that farmers intentionally spread the beetles so that they destroyed the elm forests to provide more deforested land for farming. Meanwhile, from around 3500 to 3300 BCE, many of those deforested areas began to see reforestation and mass tree regrowth, indicating that human activity had retreated from those areas. Around the period between 3500 and 3300 BC, agricultural communities had begun centring themselves upon

6004-825: Was in the Near East that the "most important developments in early farming" occurred in the Levant and the Fertile Crescent , which stretched through what are now parts of Syria , Lebanon , Israel , Jordan , Turkey , Iran and Iraq , areas that already had rich ecological variation, which was being exploited by hunter-gatherers in the Late Palaeolithic and the Mesolithic periods. Early signs of these hunter-gatherers beginning to harvest, manipulate and grow various food plants have been identified in

6083-429: Was picked up by another antiquarian in the following century, William Stukeley (1687–1765), who had studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge before he became a professional doctor. The term "Neolithic" was first coined by the archaeologist John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury , in his 1865 book Pre-historic times, as illustrated by ancient remains, and the manners and customs of modern savages . He used it to refer to

6162-682: Was practiced widely throughout the European continent within the Roman Empire from the 2nd century. In the CIA World Factbook , the description of each country includes information about "Location" under the heading "Geography", where the country is classified into a region. The following countries are included in their classification "southern Europe": In addition, Andorra , Gibraltar , Portugal and Spain are classified as "Southwestern Europe", while Albania , Bosnia and Herzegovina , Bulgaria , Croatia , Montenegro , North Macedonia , Romania , Serbia and Turkey (the part west of

6241-570: Was the antiquary and writer John Aubrey (1626–1697), who had been born into a wealthy gentry family before he went on to study at Trinity College, Oxford , until his education was disrupted by the outbreak of the English Civil War between Royalist and Parliamentarian forces. He recorded his accounts of the megalithic monuments in a book, the Monumenta Britannica , but it remained unpublished. Nonetheless, Aubrey's work

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