Gregory's ServerStevens and Fuller note a host of other examples in which societies abandoned agriculture but still mobilized labor and resources for monumental projects:
“…the shift away from settled agriculture towards mobile pastoralism, characterising much of peninsular India from the end of the Chalcolithic (1200–900 BC)…”
“In the Gansu region of north-west China, the Dadiwan Neolithic pursued low-level millet cultivation for five centuries or more during the sixth millennium BC, before apparently fading away, with a hiatus of more than five centuries prior to the influx of more permanent millet-pig agriculture associated with the immigrant Yangshao tradition.”
“A further case is seen in the shift from sedentary agriculturalists to nomadic-pastoralism in Late Bronze Age Mongolia, associated both with the appearance of stone monuments and possible climatic change.”
In other words, this was a phenomenon that happened not just in Britain but all over the world. People sometimes adopted agriculture, and then their descendants abandoned it, only for their descendants to pick it back up again. Some farmers lived alongside foragers for *thousands of years* without swamping the foragers.
6/12
Something ELSE really interesting happened in Britain after the abandonment of farming. About 4,500 years ago, a new community began migrating into ancient Britain, bringing with them the Bell Beaker Phenomenon.
The Bell Beaker Phenomenon was a sort of archeological package—distinct artifacts, like the bell-shaped cups that give this phenomenon its name, as well as new burial practices. Stevens and Fuller also note that the time period of their arrival also coincides with the re-emergence of agriculture in Britain.
Archeologists debated for years as to whether this represented a population movement from continental Europe or merely the adoption of a new material culture by Britain’s Neolithic population. We now know from genetic studies that there was indeed a migration into Britain, and that it resulted in a near-total population turnover—some 90% of the subsequent ancestry in Britain derived from these Bronze Age newcomers, rather than the indigenous Neolithic community.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/neolithization-and-population-replacement-in-britain-an-alternative-view/128FA814D030CAFCDE3D2F8AE6CC45A7
7/12
Something ELSE really interesting happened in Britain after the abandonment of farming. About 4,500 years ago, a new community began migrating into ancient Britain, bringing with them the Bell Beaker Phenomenon.
The Bell Beaker Phenomenon was a sort of archeological package—distinct artifacts, like the bell-shaped cups that give this phenomenon its name, as well as new burial practices. Stevens and Fuller also note that the time period of their arrival also coincides with the re-emergence of agriculture in Britain.