Sitagroi in 2013. A Fresh evaluation of Wild Resource Exploitation during the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age

Hunting and gathering involves not only the practical aspect of resource procurement but, more significantly, a social and cultural aspect: perceptions of the natural world, decision making, cooperating, sharing, creating material culture. These latter aspects are of additional interest when hunting and gathering is practiced in the context of an agricultural economy wherein there seems to be no primary biological-economic need to pursue these activities. In this paper we discuss prehistoric agriculturalists in the Northern Aegean which, however, were consistently occupied with gathering and hunting as well. We revisit Neolithic Sitagroi, a farming village in the Drama plain of Northeast Greece, where the use of wild resources is variously attested: there are shell ornaments and implements, tools fashioned of wild animal bone, impressions of mat reeds on pot bases, paleobotanical finds of wild fruits, nuts and seeds, faunal remains of wild game, fowl and fish. Sitagroi has been a key site in the map of the prehistoric Aegean and in the history/life of the CIOA. Excavations between 1968 and 1970, co-directed by Marija Gimbutas of UCLA and Colin Renfrew of (then) Sheffield University, stand out as one the early major expeditions of the Institute and an important international collaboration. The project was conceived and carried out in the scientific spirit of New Archaeology (pioneered by Lewis Binford at UCLA during those very years), which indeed it spearheaded in Aegean prehistory. The key research goal to “further the understanding of relationships between material culture and environment in the plain of Drama and more widely in the Balkans”, was materialized in innovative (for the times) methods of fieldwork, recording and analysis, and the ensuing synthesis of the data in two volumes of publication. In this paper we draw further upon the rich body of material and contextual evidence unearthed at Sitagroi to highlight some of the villager’s purposeful strategies of interacting with wild nature, and how these strategies were woven into the larger fabric of life in space and time. Research has been progressing dramatically in the Aegean since Sitagroi was excavated and published, and our re-examination draws upon this wealth of comparanda as well. We are now compelled to reconfigure the Neolithic mode of life; an existence not confined in the traditional archaeological model of sedentary farming and herding, but spreading into a wide network of engagement with both the domesticated and the wild environment. In so doing, we are also spanning two distinct areas of archaeological endeavour, hunter-gatherer studies and the archaeology of productive economies.