The First Farmers of Europe

Stephen Shennan is Professor of Theoretical Archaeology at the University College London Institute of Archaeology, where he was Director 2005-2014. His main interest is explaining stability and change in prehistory in the light of evolutionary ideas. He has published over 120 papers and books, including Quantifying Archaeology (2nd edition, 1997), Genes, Memes and Human History (2002), and Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution (edited, 2009). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a member of the Academia Europaea. He received the Rivers Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2010 and a Shanghai Archaeological Forum Research Award for his EUROEVOL project in 2015.

'Shennan's book is likely to become an important text for scholars concerned with the archeology of Europe and the Neolithic generally, as well as a wider readership interested in a key transition in human history. A grand narrative indeed.' Evolutionary Anthropology

• 1. Introduction: population, resources and life histories; 2. The origins of agriculture in Southwest Asia; 3. The first westward expansion of farming; 4. The spread of farming into Central Europe; 5. Maritime expansion in the Central and West Mediterranean; 6. Continental temperate Europe 7000–5500 BP: internal expansion and adaptation; 7. First farmers in southern Scandinavia; 8. The farming colonisation of Britain and Ireland; 9. Conclusion: evolutionary patterns and processes.