ABSTRACT
The transition to agriculture is probably one of the most significant stages – arguably the most significant – in the path of human evolution. By continuing the trend to control food supplies rather than depending on their natural availability, there were important changes in the ways human populations exploited and treated the landscapes in which they lived. As populations grew because of the greater stability of food supplies, there came the need to extract food increasingly efficiently from the environment (although some authors argue about which of these came first: see Cohen, 1977). The need to increase efficiency meant that greater areas of the landscape needed to be exploited, and ultimately these areas would need to be exploited increasingly intensively. Thus, the transition to agriculture was not only an important stage in human evolution, but also in landscape evolution. First, the landscape was modified in terms of the vegetation and, second, these vegetation changes led to changes in runoff (and therefore water resources) and erosion. Thus, to understand the different phases of agricultural development and expansion is to understand Mediterranean landscape evolution throughout much of the Holocene period. These developments and their consequences are therefore the focus of this chapter.
