In the Shadow of the Grand Narrative: Revisiting the Early Holocene of the Northern Adriatic

In a 1995 article, ??Reviving the Grand Narrative??, Andrew Sherratt critiqued stadial models based on binary opposition (Sherratt in J Eur Archaeol 3:1?C32, 1995), causing some to question whether the ??post?? of ??post-Pleistocene?? was an appropriate way to understand the period. This paper uses that critique as a starting point and examines the Early Holocene of Mediterranean Europe, not as the backwater of Pleistocene big-game hunters, but rather as a dynamic period of socioeconomic as well as environmental changes, separate from yet related to both the preceding Epipaleolithic and the ensuing Early Neolithic.