The uncertain frontier

Long archaeological debate on the process of Neolithisation across Europe has been resolved at a broad level, thanks to aDNA and other scientific investigations, in favour of significant migrations virtually everywhere. This development has coincided with the establishment of more robust and generally more precise chronologies, and in the long run the historical process of change brought by Neolithic migrants was irreversible. However, the emergent big picture can and should still be examined in much further detail. Some significant implications for the understanding of mobility and migration have been explored, but there is plenty of scope for better integration of archaeological and scientific, especially archaeogenetic, investigations. This can reveal important dimensions of the process of colonisation and the initial establishment of Neolithic settlement, which appears often to have been small-scale at the outset; prone to adjustment, experiment, reversal and even failure; and open to contacts with indigenous people. We support these claims with a series of brief case studies principally from the northern Balkans, the Carpathian basin and northern central Europe to build a simple model of frontier conditions which could have implications for the study of initial Neolithisation across Europe as a whole.