For several decades, the exploitation of domesticated species as potential food resources has been considered a prime – or rather, the prime – factor in the process of Neolithization. This view was recently challenged in the light of archaeological data from the Near East, America and Japan, which suggest that domesticated species were initially too limited in number and scope to have had much dietary importance. In parallel, the relative importance of domesticates in fully developed Neolithic economies has been re-evaluated – and downplayed – in large areas of eastern, central and western Neolithic Europe. Does this mean that the quasiexclusive reliance on domesticated plants and animals, considered a characteristic of Greek Neolithic communities, should also be re-evaluated?

In Greece as elsewhere, taphonomic biases and unequal recovery techniques can lead to widely differing interpretations of the subsistence economy. A debate over the importance of domestic resources in the Early Neolithic of Greece, which were traditionally viewed as predominant, has recently been opened by Björk (1995). Halstead himself, who had defined the economy as typically agro-pastoral in several influential papers which will be largely followed here (Halstead 1977, 1981a, 1984, 1989a), recently argued that the importance of wild resources may have been underestimated due to poor preservation and recovery (Halstead 1989b: 29).

Yet, even if wild resources were locally available, it does not necessarily follow that they were exploited on a large scale. Subsistence economy is culturally based, and must be studied as the expression of social choices within the possibilities offered by the environment and the level of technical development.