THE EAST — WEST RELATIONS IN THE LATE MESOLITHIC AND NEOLITHIC IN THE BALTIC REGION

This volume contains the majority of the papers presented during a conference that took place on 16th-21st May, 1997 in Łódź, Poland. The conference was organized by the Institute of Archaeology, University of Łódź and Département d'anthropologie, Université de Montreal (Canada). The conference was funded by the University of Łódź and by IREX (International Research & Exchanges Board), which also supported this publication. The publication was partly founded by the University of Łódź and by the Foundation of Adam Mickiewicz University, too. The major questions of the conference were, 1) what is the current evidence for eastern or southern influences in the development of eastern European Mesolithic and Neolithic populations, and 2) to what extent are current political trends, especially the reassertion or, in some cases, the creation of ethnic and national identities, influencing our interpretations of the prehistoric data. The idea for such a conference came into being through the co-organizers' long-term studies of the development of those prehistoric human populations which inhabited the vast region stretching north and east from the Oder river and Carpathian Mountains to the foothills of the Urals. In a tradition established in modern times by Gordon Childe, virtually all of the transformations of Eastern Europe's Neolithic Age human landscape have been assumed to be responses to prior developments in the Balkan peninsula and Danube basin. We think that a body of new evidence requires a renewed analysis of the distributions of cultural products, peoples, and ideas across Eastern Europe during the Mesolithic through the Early Metal Age within a much wider geographic context than previously has been the case. This includes giving adequate attention to the far-ranging interactions of communities between the Pontic and Baltic area with those located in both the Caucasus and the Aralo-Caspian regions. We hope that this volume will contribute to such a redirection of future analyses