PATTERNS OF ANIMAL EXPLOITATION IN THE LATE MESOLITHIC AND EARLY NEOLITHIC IN THE AUDE VALLEY (SOUTHERN FRANCE)

The Mesolithic and Neolithic periods in Europe span the adaptation by gathering-hunting societies to postglacial conditions, the diffusion of plant and animal domesticates from southwest Asian nuclear zones, and the full adoption of food production. The slender data base for early European agriculture has been routinely interpreted to conform with various diffusion-migration hypotheses deriving their momentum from southwest Asia. Southwest Asian evidence shows that considerable independence existed at the beginning among elements of the "Neolithic complex" of sedentism, domestication, and pottery. New evidence from the western Mediterranean, plus changes in theoretical orientations to food production, give reason to think that domestication, sedentism, and pottery also developed with substantial independence in this nonnocuear area. First, rock shelters distributed in identical coastal and inland environments were continuously occupied from the Upper Paleolithic through the Neolithic in Yugoslavia, Italy, France, and Spain. Second, a continuity in the evolution of stone tools has been argued to exist from the Upper Paleolithic through the Neolithic in Yugoslavia, Italy, France, and Spain. Finally, the regional diversity of the first impressed pottery is incompatible with models of a unified diffusion or migration.; On the basis of the settlement, lithic, and ceramic evidence, a model is advanced which argues that food production in the western Mediterranean emerged slowly as indigenous gathering-hunting communities responded to the availability of the novel domesticates within the context of their local environments. The availability of the animal domesticates did not provoke drastic modifications of indigenous animal exploitation. Rather, domestic animals were gradually accepted as they were compatible with the existing subsistence system. Major modifications occurred only at the onset of the Middle Neolithic, when animal husbandry and plant cultivation were fully adapted to the natural and social contexts of the western Mediterranean. Only then were they associated with changes in population, economy, and society. The fauna from four sites, fixed in a detailed chronological, environmental and cultural context by a multidisciplinary research program, is utilized to evaluate this model of the "replacement" of Mesolithic hunting by Neolithic herding.; The faunal evidence from the Aude Valley largely supports the model proposed for the western Mediterranean, where indigenous gathering-hunting societies played a formative role in the development of food production. Domestic animals appear sequentially over about 1000 years (c. 6000-c. 4700 B.C.), but the full implications of the new domesticates and novel techniques of husbandry require an additional millennium for their full impact. If the appearance of domestic ovicaprids in Mesolithic levels and their dominance of the animal exploitation is the first development, the equilibration of ovicaprid and swine husbandry is the major process of the second part of the early Neolithic. Only in the middle Neolithic do domestic cattle join sheep, goat, and pig as part of a mixed farming economy.