Iberian Neolithic Networks: The Rise and Fall of the Cardial World

Recent approaches have described the evolutionary dynamics of the first Neolithic societies as a cycle of rise and fall. Several authors, using mainly c14 dates as a demographic proxy, identified a general pattern of a boom in population coincident with the arrival of food production economies followed by a rapid decline some centuries afterwards in multiple European regions. Concerning Iberia, we also noted that this phenomenon correlates with an initial development of archaeological entities (i.e., ‘cultures’) over large areas (e.g. the Impresso-Cardial in West Mediterranean), followed by a phase of ‘cultural fragmentation’ by the end of Early Neolithic. These results in a picture of high…