Marc Vander Linden

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Verified

Marc verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Bournemouth University

The Adriatic Sea has played a fundamental role in human history as a corridor for communication and mobility. The distinctiveness of this region lies in its geographical position and the high sensitivity of its basin to climatic variations and sea-level changes. During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, c.y 19,000 cal BP), sea levels reached their lowe...

Most research on long-term human ecodynamics examines changes in the size and structure of human populations, often in relation to climate change. Here we offer an alternative perspective that draws on recent progress in conservation science, examining the causes and consequences of ecosystem collapse. We identify human actions that can cause abrup...

Changes in tree cover influence many aspects of the Earth System. Recent regional changes in tree cover, as documented by remote-sensed observations, are insufficient to capture the response to large climate changes or to differentiate the impacts of human activities from natural drivers. Pollen records provide an opportunity to examine the causes...

Archaeological data provide a potential to investigate the diffusion of technological and cultural traits. However, much of this research agenda currently needs more formal quantitative methods to address small sample sizes and chronological uncertainty. This paper introduces a novel Bayesian framework for inferring the shape of diffusion curves us...

Šandalja II has been a reference site for numerous decades for the definition and study of the Eastern Adriatic Upper Palaeolithic and corresponding techno-complexes. This is due both to its extensive material record, and the purported presence of some otherwise elusive techno-complexes in the area, such as the Aurignacian and the Early Epigravetti...

Covering vast swathes of Europe, the Bell Beaker Phenomenon has enjoyed a privileged status in the history of archaeology and is often referred to as a key period in the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age partly due to the emergence of social élites. After a brief presentation of the historiography of the Bell Beaker phenomenon, this E...

In a 2019 Internet Archaeology article, Elizabeth Pearson posed the question 'are we back in the Dark Ages?'. This question was made in reference to a developer-funded archaeology sector that was generating vast quantities of evidence and, particularly, in recent years, specialist environmental data, but was failing to mobilise this in a theoretica...

The strategic geographical position of the Balkan Peninsula, at the crossroads between southwest Asia and central and western Europe, make of this territory a key area for understanding the different human migrations into Europe during the Pleistocene. This long-time neglected area for the Palaeolithic research, last years has experienced a ‘blosso...

In a 2019 Internet Archaeology article, Elizabeth Pearson posed the question 'are we back in the Dark Ages?'. This question was made in reference to a developer-funded archaeology sector that was generating vast quantities of evidence and, particularly, in recent years, specialist environmental data, but was failing to mobilise this in a theoretica...

The early Holocene in the Balkans is synonymous with extensive transformations of both environments and human societies. The new climatic conditions indeed led to a spatial expansion of thermophilous (warmth-loving) plant and animal species that were previously confined to refugial areas, eventually reshaping the local biomes, while glacial species...

Recent work at Vinča-Belo Brdo has combined a total of more than 200 radiocarbon dates with an array of other information to construct much more precise narratives for the structural history of the site and the cultural materials recovered from it. In this paper, we present the results of a recent attempt to construct formal models for the chronolo...

Human beings are an active component of every terrestrial ecosystem on Earth. Although our local impact on the evolution of these ecosystems has been undeniable and extensively documented, it remains unclear precisely how our activities are altering them, in part because ecosystems are dynamic systems structured by complex, non-linear feedback proc...

The relative importance of climate change and human activities in influencing regional fire regimes during the Holocene is still a matter of debate. The introduction of agriculture during the Neolithic provides an opportunity to examine the impact of human activities on fire regimes. Here, we examine changes in fire regimes across Iberia between 10...

The last few years have seen the return of dispersal at the forefront of the archaeological agenda, largely under the impetus of new technological advances. Yet, archaeology still lags behind other disciplines in terms of adequate methodological and theoretical frameworks. Archaeology should shift away from identifying dispersal events towards thei...

Archaeologists increasingly use large radiocarbon databases to model prehistoric human demography (also termed paleo-demography). Numerous independent projects, funded over the past decade, have assembled such databases from multiple regions of the world. These data provide unprecedented potential for comparative research on human population ecolog...

This paper presents the first attempt to establish a Mid and Late Upper Palaeolithic absolute chronology of the Adriatic basin, including both eastern and western Adriatic coasts and their hinterlands. The proposed chronology for Gravettian, Early and Late Epigravettian techno-complexes is based on statistical analysis of 278 ¹⁴C dates from 66 arch...

Agriculture is a complex and dynamic socio-ecological system shaped by environmental, economic, and social factors. The crop resource pool is its key component and one that best reflects environmental limitations and socio-economic concerns of the farmers. This pertains in particular to small-scale subsistence production, as was practised by Neolit...

This paper reviews the introduction of early farming in the Western Balkans through a comparison of the radiocarbon, zooarchaeological, and archaeobotanical records, both inland and in the Adriatic Basin. Summed calibrated date probability distributions, alongside data on settlement patterns, suggest an overall low Mesolithic presence across the ar...

The impact of deteriorating climatic conditions on variability in the archaeological record towards the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) remains uncertain. Partly as a result of poor-quality data, previous studies on Upper Palaeolithic (UP) societies of North-Western Europe prior to the LGM have focused on techno-typological traditions and diversificatio...

In the 12,000 years preceding the Industrial Revolution, human activities led to significant changes in land cover, plant and animal distributions, surface hydrology, and biochemical cycles. Earth system models suggest that this anthropogenic land cover change influenced regional and global climate. However, the representation of past land use in e...

Paleolithic art offers unique perspectives on prehistoric societies and cultures. It is also considered a key component of modern human behavior. Until recently, Paleolithic artworks were thought to be geographically restricted to a very few areas, especially southwestern Europe. Discoveries of art in other parts of Europe and other parts of the gl...

Although population history and dispersal are back at the forefront of the archaeological agenda, they are often studied in relative isolation. This contribution aims at combining both dimensions, as population dispersal is, by definition, a demographic process. Using a case study drawn from the Early Neolithic of South-Eastern Europe, we use radio...

The ERCA task force was set up in November 2019 with a view to make early-career researchers feel heard, empowered and supported (Brami et al. 2020). Here we explore and present personal experiences of recently-tenured archaeologists. In this first batch of interviews dedicated to Northern Europe - including Britain, Scandinavia and Northern German...

Long-standing archaeological narratives suggest that the 3rd millennium cal BC is a key period in Mediterranean and European prehistory, characterized by the development of extensive interaction networks. In the Balkans for instance, the identification of such interactions relies solely upon typological arguments associated with conflicting local t...

The European continent was subject to two major migrations of peoples during the Holocene: the northwestward movement of Anatolian farmer populations during the Neolithic and the westward movement of Yamnaya steppe peoples during the Bronze Age. These movements changed the genetic composition of the continent’s inhabitants. The Holocene was also ch...

Anthropogenic changes in land use and land cover (LULC) during the pre-industrial Holocene could have affected regional and global climate. Existing scenarios of LULC changes during the Holocene are based on relatively simple assumptions and highly uncertain estimates of population changes through time. Archaeological and palaeoenvironmental recons...

In the field of human history, ancient DNA has provided answers to long-standing debates about major movements of people and has begun to inform on other important facets of the human experience. The field is now moving from mostly large-scale supraregional studies to a more local perspective, shedding light on socioeconomic processes, inheritance...

This paper explores the first maritime westward expansion of crops across the Adriatic and the northern coast of the western Mediterranean. Starting in Greece at c.6500 cal BC and following the coastline to the Andalusian region of Spain to c.4500 cal BC, the presence of the main cereal, pulse, oil and fibre crops are recorded from 122 sites. Patte...

The European continent was subject to two major migrations of peoples during the Holocene: the northwestward movement of Anatolian farmer populations during the Neolithic and the westward movement of Yamnaya steppe peoples during the Bronze Age. These movements changed the genetic composition of the continent's inhabitants, via admixture and popula...

Part of the session: Upscaling palaeoecological, archaeological and historical records of land-use and land-cover change 1. Chair Marie-Jose Gaillard. Presentation abstact :The PAGES LandCover6K group is concerned with whether prehistoric human impacts on land cover were sufficiently large to have had a major impact on regional and global climate...

Anthropogenic changes in land use and land cover (LULC) during the pre-industrial Holocene could have affected regional and global climate. Current LULC scenarios are based on relatively simple assumptions and highly uncertain estimates of population changes through time. Archaeological and palaeoenvironmental reconstructions have the potential to...

This conclusive text deals with the challenges of interdisciplinarity: although conceptual and formal thresholds are well-known within the scientific community, one may encounter difficulties for answering such related requirements: among them, the tension between the inherent holistic pretence of modelling and data-related prosaicism is important...

Despite having been a pedigree stretching for several decades, computational approaches remain highly debated in archaeology, hailed by some as the future of the discipline and discarded by some as a poor, arrogant and overgeneralizing attempt at mimicking the past. This introductory chapter argues that traditional criticisms made at computational...

Archaeozoological assemblages are important sources of information on past management strategies, which are influenced by cultural practices as well as the physical geography and climate. Sheep, goat and cattle arrived in Europe with early Neolithic migrants. Their distribution is believed to have been mainly influenced by the geography of European...

An ancient DNA study highlights ancient population patterns on the Iberian Peninsula

Animals and plants, both farmed and hunted/collected, were an integrated part of the Neolithic food economy. When jointly analysed these can provide a holistic view of early food production systems which goes beyond individual descriptions of herd management and crop cultivation. Exhaustive surveys of both Neolithic zooarchaeological and archaeobot...

In this study we present new absolute dates for the Early Eneolithic in Serbia. Four of them confirm the recently obtained dates from that period (Bubanj-Hum I culture) but two samples (from Mokranjske stene and Bubanj) provide somewhat later dates for this period, although their stratigraphic context makes their interpretation difficult. Pottery f...

The use and relevance of computational models in archaeology has exponentially grown over the past couple of decades. This approach allows to articulate in a formal way numerous and various factors and, especially in the case of agent-based models, to explore in a non-deterministic way their complex interactions. As a result of their versatility, t...

This paper aims at investigating the status of lithic technology during the spread and local development of early farming practices across the western Balkans. This is achieved through an assessment of the variability in lithic technologies, studying variation in raw materials, debitage products and tools. This enables identification of regional te...

The study of the exploitation of animals for traction in prehistoric Europe has been linked to the ‘secondary products revolution’. Such an approach, however, leaves little scope for identification of the less specialised exploitation of animals for traction during the European Neolithic. This study presents zooarchaeological evidence—in the form o...

The interpretation of spatial and temporal patterns in the archaeological record remains a long-standing issue in the discipline. Amongst many methods and interpretations, modelling of ‘biased transmission’ has proved a successful strategy to tackle this problem. Here, we investigate a type of biased transmission, homophily, that is the tendency of...

The LandCover6K group is concerned with whether prehistoric human impacts on land cover were sufficiently large to have had a major impact on regional climates. Climate model simulations have shown that land use data sets can have large regional impacts on climate in the recent past and may have also done so during prehistory. However, there are ma...

The LandCover6K Working group is concerned with the question of whether prehistoric human impacts on land cover (i.e. anthropogenic land cover change due to land use) were sufficiently large to have had a major impact on regional climates. Climate model simulations have shown that land use data sets can have large regional impacts on climate in the...

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has not been fixed in the paper.

The possible role of climatic and environmental factors upon the spread and subsequent development of early farming techniques across Europe has long been discussed. We explore the spatial and temporal changes in both animal domestic management techniques and hunting strategies using a meta-analysis of zooarchaeological data from the Neolithic peri...

The paper presents three Late Bronze Age absolute dates from contexts located in the territory of western Serbia and northern Republic of Macedonia, and discusses them together with further absolute dates from the same period, which will be published shortly by one of the authors and other colleagues. On the basis of these dates the Late Bronze Age...

Large radiocarbon datasets have been analysed statistically to identify, on the one hand, the dynamics and tempo of dispersal processes and, on the other, demographic change. This is particularly true for the spread of farming practices in Neolithic Europe. Here we combine the two approaches and apply them to a new, extensive dataset of 14,535 radi...

Over the past decade, the ability to recover whole genomes from ancient remains has emerged as a powerful tool for understanding the human past. From a strictly biological perspective, the sequencing of ancient genomes has resolved the dispute over our evolutionary relationship with Neandertals, revealed the extent of gene flow within and between m...

Maria Pilar Prieto Martínez and Laure Salanova , eds. The Bell Beaker Transition in Europe: Mobility and Local Evolution during the 3rd Millennium bc (Oxford & Philadelphia: Oxbow Books, 2015, 214pp., 16 colour and 100 b/w figs, 6 tables, hbk, ISBN 978-1-78297-927-2) - Volume 20 Issue 2 - Marc Vander Linden

This paper reports the first radiocarbon ( ¹⁴ C) dates obtained for the Eneolithic/Bronze Age site of Bubanj, Serbia. Despite featuring prominently in the existing typo-chronological schemes for southeastern Europe, the history of research and recent large-scale destruction of the site had prevented so far the acquisition of samples from secure arc...

The eastern Adriatic and western Balkans are key areas for assessing the environmental and population history of Europe during the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene. It has been argued that the Balkan region served as a Late Glacial refugium for humans, animals, and plants, much like Iberia and the Italian Peninsula and in contrast to the harsh c...

The study of demography has been of long interest to prehistorians, who have been concerned with whether there were any demographic transitions associated with climatic events, the introduction of new technologies and subsistence strategies or, more generally, with cultural change. However, no element of the archaeological record is directly associ...

Recent work at Vinča-Belo Brdo has combined a total of more than 200 radiocarbon dates with an array of other information to construct much more precise narratives for the structural history of the site and the cultural materials recovered from it. In this paper, we present the results of a recent attempt to construct formal models for the chronolo...

The first spread of farming practices into Europe in the Neolithic period involves two distinct 'streams', respectively around the Mediterranean littoral and along the Danube corridor to central Europe. In this paper we explore variation in Neolithic animal use practices within and between these streams, focusing on the first region in which they a...

Several recent high-profile aDNA studies have claimed to have identified major migrations during the third millennium BC in Europe. This contribution offers a brief review of these studies, and especially their role in understanding the genetic make-up of modern European populations. Although the technical sophistication of aDNA studies is beyond d...

Recent work at Vin≠a-Belo Brdo has combined a total of more than 200 radiocarbon dates with an array of other information to construct much more precise narratives for the structural history of the site and the cultural materials recovered from it. In this paper, we present the results of a recent attempt to construct formal models for the chronolo...

Hofmann Daniela & Smyth Jessica (ed.). Tracking the Neolithic house in Europe (One World Archaeology). viii+406 pages, numerous colour and b&w illustrations. 2013. New York: Springer; 978-1-4614-5288-1 hardback $129. - Volume 87 Issue 338 - Marc Vander Linden

The Later Prehistory of North-West Europe provides a unique, up-to-date, and easily accessible synthesis of the later prehistoric archaeology of north-west Europe, transcending political and language barriers that can hinder understanding. By surveying changes in social forms, landscape organization, monument types, and ritual practices over six mi...

In 2008, the Danish prehistorian Kristian Kristiansen considered the need for an ‘archaeology of Europe’. The article was one of a series in which he discussed intellectual developments in the discipline. His argument is directly relevant to our project. Kristiansen (2008) identified a series of changes in the practice of archaeology and, in partic...

It was easy to choose the title of this chapter. Over a span of almost a thousand years, which embraces the late Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and early Bronze Age periods in local chronologies, the archaeological record of northwest Europe takes a distinctive form. Round barrows are widely distributed and are found on both sides of the English Channel...

By about 3700 BC every region of the study area had been settled by farmers (Fig. 3.1), although there must have been local differences between the areas that were colonized by immigrants and those where the indigenous population had changed its way of life. The expansion of agriculture would extend little further and, when it did so, it would be m...

The previous chapter addressed an important period of change, but this would not have been apparent to the scholars who devised the Three Age Model. The most important developments between 1600 and 1100 BC were most clearly evidenced in the ancient landscape and registered to a smaller extent by the metalwork finds on which the traditional scheme d...

This chapter spans an important period division. It considers both the ‘Mesolithic’ hunter-gatherers of the study area, and the first ‘Neolithic’ farmers. The relationship between them is one of the most important issues to be investigated by prehistoric archaeology, but it is also one of the most contentious. The period between 8000 and 3700 BC sa...

In some respects this project was the successor to the research published in 2007 as The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland, but there are significant contrasts between the books. The results of development-led archaeology have played a central role in both, but they have influenced their contents in different ways. When the earlier book was publish...

The Three Age Model has outlived its usefulness, but even now it is difficult to see how it can be replaced. The beginning of the Bronze Age is sometimes termed the Chalcolithic, and the transition to the Iron Age has also been treated as distinct phase, but a still greater problem is how to acknowledge the changes that came about during the later...

By the late first century BC, most of north-west Europe had been incorporated into the Roman Empire or had fallen under its shadow. This has profoundly affected how the late Iron Age is perceived and studied. Being able to view peoples and places through written sources and coin inscriptions means that the archaeology of the period is often approac...

In this important new review the author shows that neither trade nor migration can account for the distribution of Bell Beakers and the associated artefacts and burial practices in Europe. The materials were generally local and rooted in local know-how. However recent stable isotope results show small-scale population changes associated with the ar...

A modelling approach is presented in which archaeological data on the first farmers in central and western Europe, called the Linearbandkeramik (LBK; 5600–4900 cal BC), are cross-analysed with the corresponding environmental data. The purpose of this approach is to reconstruct the geographical expansion and subsequent dissolution of the LBK culture...

The expansion of large-scale excavation in Britain and parts of Continental Europe, funded by major development projects, has generated extensive new datasets. But what might we be losing when surfaces are routinely stripped by machines? Investigation by hand of ploughsoils and buried soils in the Fenlands of eastern England reveals high densities...

The Bronze Age in Europe has been the subject for some books over the years, including Coles and Harding’s The Bronze Age in Europe and Jacques Briard’s The Bronze Age in Barbarian Europe. This handbook aims to add relevant information about the Bronze Age, and covers Bronze Age Europe outside the Aegean area. It is split into two main parts, which...

Space competition effects are well-known in many microbiological and ecological systems. Here we analyze such an effect in human populations. The Neolithic transition (change from foraging to farming) was mainly the outcome of a demographic process that spread gradually throughout Europe from the Near East. In Northern Europe, archaeological data s...

Front speeds estimated from the archaeological data interpolated with a natural neighbor method and using (squares, as in Figs. 2b, 3a–b) and (triangles) intervals for a corridor (see Fig. 1) wide, and (stars) and (crosses) intervals for a corridor wide. The solid line corresponds to the delayed model with space competition (Eq. (1)), i.e., it is t...

Chronology of the Neolithic expansion calculated with a kringing interpolation method with a spheric semivariogram. The circles correspond to the 902 datings used for this interpolation. The delimited corridor defines the region studied here, where the Neolithic expansion took place mainly in the direction . The origin of the coordinate is also def...

Front speeds estimated from the archaeological data interpolated with a kringing method and using (squares) and (triangles) intervals for a corridor wide (see Fig. 1). The solid line corresponds to the delayed model with space competition (Eq. (1)), i.e., it is the same as the solid line in Figs. 2b and 3a. (TIF)

Information about 902 Early Neolithic sites: latitude/longitude, radiocarbon date, calibrated date, and additional archaeological information [39]. (XLS)

For the Neolithic transition in the Near East and Europe, this paper compares the isochrones predicted by computational models to those obtained by interpolating the archaeological data. This comparison reveals that there is a major inconsistency between the predictions of the models and the archaeological data: according to the models, the Neolith...