What We Do for Food

Social Strategies for Overcoming Food Scarcity in the Neolithic of the Central Balkans

Abstract

Food is essential for survival, but how humans obtain and manage it is regulated socially. The life of Neolithic and other non-industrial communities depended on environmental variations – temperature patterns and precipitation. For farming communities, even minor changes in those patterns could have led to periods of food scarcity. In order to overcome and prepare for periods of scarcity, non-industrial communities applied different social buffering strategies. In this paper, the social buffering strategies Early/Middle Neolithic Starčevo and Late Neolithic Vinča culture communities applied in overcoming the environmental variability are tested and the most plausible ones are considered.