Demographic growth, environmental changes and technical adaptations: Responses of an agricultural community from the 32nd to the 30th centuries BC

In comparison with dryland settlements, peri-alpine lake-dwellings of the Neolithic represent an ideal case for the study of population growth and its consequences, owing to the better preservation of organic remains, architectural woods and artefacts. Research has been based on dendrochrono-logical sequences divided into series of ten to twenty years and on the statistical study of hundreds of thousands of archaeological remains, preserved below the level of the water-table. For the two lake basins of Chalain and Clairvaux at the end of the fourth millennium BC, direct correlations are proposed between a period of population growth and successive technical and economical adaptations rapidly adopted by agricultural communities trying to temporarily resolve the problems resulting from demographic growth, due in large part to the coming of immigrant populations.