ABSTRACT

Contact between the Mediterranean and Temperate Europe was no new phenomenon. As early as the neolithic in the fifth-fourth millennium spondylus shells, probably from the Aegean, were circulating among the early farming communities of the Danube valley. The diffusion of the techniques of agriculture can be taken as an analogy for later diffusion patterns. Agriculture could not be simply transplanted from the Near East to central Europe-it required modification, new and hardier breeds of animals and plants, new domesticated species, and new methods of farming. In the same way, urbanism had to adapt to central Europe a few millennia later.