Kostas Kotsakis

Early farmers from across Europe directly descended from Neolithic Aegeans

Significance One of the most enduring and widely debated questions in prehistoric archaeology concerns the origins of Europe’s earliest farmers: Were they the descendants of local hunter-gatherers, or did they migrate from southwestern Asia, where farming began? We recover genome-wide DNA sequences from early farmers on both the European and Asian sides of the Aegean to reveal an unbroken chain of ancestry leading from central and southwestern Europe back to Greece and northwestern Anatolia. Our study provides the coup de grâce to the notion that farming spread into and across Europe via the dissemination of ideas but without, or with only a limited, migration of people. Farming and sedentism first appeared in southwestern Asia during the early Holocene and later spread to neighboring regions, including Europe, along multiple dispersal routes. Conspicuous uncertainties remain about the relative roles of migration, cultural diffusion, and admixture with local foragers in the early Neolithization of Europe. Here we present paleogenomic data for five Neolithic individuals from northern Greece and northwestern Turkey spanning the time and region of the earliest spread of farming into Europe. We use a novel approach to recalibrate raw reads and call genotypes from ancient DNA and observe striking genetic similarity both among Aegean early farmers and with those from across Europe. Our study demonstrates a direct genetic link between Mediterranean and Central European early farmers and those of Greece and Anatolia, extending the European Neolithic migratory chain all the way back to southwestern Asia.

Birch-bark tar at Neolithic Makriyalos, Greece

The authors discuss the first evidence for the use of birch-bark tar on Late Neolithic pottery from Greece. This appears to have been used for two different purposes, to seal a fracture and to line the interior walls. The authors also discuss other possible uses.

Widespread exploitation of the honeybee by early neolithic farmers

The pressures on honeybee (Apis mellifera) populations, resulting from threats by modern pesticides, parasites, predators and diseases, have raised awareness of the economic importance and critical role this insect plays in agricultural societies across the globe. However, the association of humans with A. mellifera predates post-industrial-revolution agriculture, as evidenced by the widespread presence of ancient Egyptian bee iconography dating to the Old Kingdom (approximately 2400 bc). There are also indications of Stone Age people harvesting bee products; for example, honey hunting is interpreted from rock art in a prehistoric Holocene context and a beeswax find in a pre-agriculturalist site. However, when and where the regular association of A. mellifera with agriculturalists emerged is unknown. One of the major products of A. mellifera is beeswax, which is composed of a complex suite of lipids including n-alkanes, n-alkanoic acids and fatty acyl wax esters. The composition is highly constant as it is determined genetically through the insect’s biochemistry. Thus, the chemical ‘fingerprint’ of beeswax provides a reliable basis for detecting this commodity in organic residues preserved at archaeological sites, which we now use to trace the exploitation by humans of A. mellifera temporally and spatially. Here we present secure identifications of beeswax in lipid residues preserved in pottery vessels of Neolithic Old World farmers. The geographical range of bee product exploitation is traced in Neolithic Europe, the Near East and North Africa, providing the palaeoecological range of honeybees during prehistory. Temporally, we demonstrate that bee products were exploited continuously, and probably extensively in some regions, at least from the seventh millennium cal bc, likely fulfilling a variety of technological and cultural functions. The close association of A. mellifera with Neolithic farming communities dates to the early onset of agriculture and may provide evidence for the beginnings of a domestication process.

Geovisualization and Archaeology: supporting Excavation Site Research

Archaeology is a science where geographical and spatial factors are of capital importance; in this context Geo-visualization and Archaeology provide interesting challenges for each other and they can both benefit from a combined approach of their interests. Archaeological excavations in particular constitute an excellent field for geo-visualization applications, since they generate large amounts of data with complex structures in 3D space and in time. Consequently, visualization methods and tools can provide support to archaeological excavation analysis. This paper presents a visualization environment created for use by archaeologists in the prehistoric excavation site of Paliambela in Northern Greece. It is currently fully operational and is used on a steady basis in the excavation field. The system enables the archaeologist to create his/her own paths in information querying and synthesis and to save any concluded interpretations. This task is undertaken through the design of custom tools, based on principles arising through archaeological methodology and theory, structuring a useful geo-visualization framework for the assistance of archaeological interpretation. It is this need that the environment presented here attempts to fulfill.

Household Scales: What Cooking Pots Can Tell Us About Households in the Late Neolithic Stavroupoli (Northern Greece)

Abstract Remains of the houses in the Late Neolithic of Northern Greece are as a rule less well preserved than in some other regions of Greece such as Thessaly. The site of Stavroupoli-Thessaloniki is a settlement with a dense habitation pattern, but poorly preserved architecture. Several habitation phases have been distinguished, dating to the Middle and Late Neolithic. Radiocarbon dates place the earlier phase to 5890 B.C. or slightly later. As the domestic unit in Stavroupoli can barely be approached through their architecture, the ceramic wares and particularly the cooking vessels will be used as a proxy to identify households and clarify aspects of their organization. The size of domestic units is approached through capacity of cooking pots, assuming that sharing cooked food on everyday level is a vital element of these units. Also, variability in cooking techniques between houses and possible changes through time will be examined through both the shape and the size of cooking vessels. Finally, Stavroupoli’s cooking pots will be compared with cooking vessels from other contemporaneous sites in order to approach the issue of household on a regional level.

Characterization by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry of diterpenoid resinous materials in Roman-age amphorae from northern Greece.

A combined gas chromatography–mass spectrometry approach has been used for the characterization of two lumps of resin and 17 adsorbed residues on Roman-age vessels, mainly amphorae, from northern Greece. The data show that a diterpenic resin from plants of the Pinacae family is the main component of the tarry material associated with the analyzed archaeological samples. The identification and mass spectrometric fragmentation of several characteristic diterpenoid biomarkers is discussed. The abundance of secondary products identified in the archaeological samples suggests that the oxidative degradation of abietic acid and dehydroabietic acid to aromatic products was the main pathway. Of particular interest is the presence of characteristic saturated abietane hydrocarbons in one sample, which indicate that a reductive process also occurred on a small scale. The overall similarity in the composition of the residues suggests the common use of pine tar as a waterproofing and sealing agent at different sites in northern Greece during the Roman period.