The complexity of Neolithic population movements and their interpretation through material culture have been the subject of archaeological research for decades. One of the dominant narratives proposes that groups from the Starčevo-Körös-Criş complex spread from the central towards the northern Balkans in the Early Neolithic and eventually brought the Neolithic lifestyle into present-day Hungary. Broad geographical migrations were considered to shape the continuous expansion of Neolithic groups and individuals. However, recent archaeological research, aDNA, and isotope analyses challenged the synchronous appearance of specific material culture distributions and human movement dynamics through emphasizing communication networks and socio-cultural transformation processes. This paper seeks to retrace the complexity of Neolithic mobility patterns across Hungary by means of strontium and oxygen stable isotope analyses, which were performed on a total of 718 human dental enamel samples from 55 Neolithic sites spanning the period from the Starčevo to the Balaton-Lasinja culture in Transdanubia and from the Körös to the Tiszapolgár cultural groups on the Great Hungarian Plain (Alföld). This study presents the largest strontium and oxygen isotope sample size for the Neolithic Carpathian Basin and discusses human mobility patterns on various geographical scales and throughout archaeological cultures, chronological periods, and sex and gender categories in a multiproxy analysis. Based on our results, we discuss the main stages of the Neolithisation processes and particularly trace individual movement behaviour such as exogamy patterns within extensive social networks. Furthermore, this paper presents an innovative differentiation between mobility patterns on small, micro-regional, and supra-regional scales, which provides new insights into the complex organisation of Neolithic communities.

Early Mediaeval Archaeology was long influenced by traditional narratives related to so-calledVölkerwanderungen. Based on the interpretation of ancient written sources, the “Migration Period” was traditionally perceived as a time of catastrophic changes triggered by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and massive migration waves of “barbarian” groups across Europe. In the last decades, isotope analyses have been increasingly used to test these traditional narratives by exploring past mobility patterns, shifts in dietary habits, and changes in subsistence strategies or in socio-economic structures among early medieval societies. To evaluate the achievements of isotope studies in understanding the complexity of the so-called Migration Period, this paper presents a review of 50 recent publications. Instead of re-analysing the data per se, this review first explores the potentials and limitations of the various approaches introduced in the last decades. In a second step, an analysis of the interpretations presented in the reviewed studies questions to what extend traditional expectations are supported by isotope data from the Migration Period. Beside revising the concept of massive migrations, isotope data reveal so-far underestimated mobility patterns and open new perspectives in the investigation of early medieval world.

Extreme flooding and prolonged, intensifying droughts have played a critical role in the rise and collapse of preindustrial states and empires worldwide, triggering cascading impacts such as crop failure, famine, and migration that undermined socio-political stability and economic resilience. We present a multicomponent hydroclimatic vulnerability model for crop supply networks to estimate the contribution of climatic stressors as one of several factors contributing to the decline of the late Tang Dynasty in northern China between 800 and 907 CE. We demonstrate that recurrent flooding and prolonged droughts, combined with an unsustainable shift in crop production from drought-tolerant millet to less resilient wheat and rice, led to harvest failures and food shortages during the cooler and drier climatic conditions of the late 9th and early 10th centuries CE. Intensifying raiding from competing polities and climatic extremes further affected grain supplies for the late Tang’s northern military frontier and partly contributed to the sudden decline of the dynasty. Our results emphasize the importance of multicomponent environmental response models to understand historical transformations and provide new aspects of China’s socio-political development during medieval times.

Detecting C ₄ plants consumption is central to investigating animal ecology, agriculture, dietary transitions, and socio-environmental adaptations, and can be done using carbon isotope analysis. The conventional δ ¹³C threshold used to identify C ₄ plant intake does not consider substantial ecological variability across Europe. By analyzing over 4,000 δ ¹³ C values from archaeological C ₃ and C ₄ grains, we present a European-wide C ₃ grain δ ¹³ C baseline and establish adjusted δ ¹³ C threshold estimations for C ₄ consumption from the site to the ecozone scale using multicomponent environmental models and ecozone cluster analysis. We show that a fixed threshold lead to under- or overestimation of C ₄ plant consumption, particularly in northern/humid and southern/arid regions, where the threshold needs to be revised downwards or upwards by up to 2‰. This refined framework offers a more accurate baseline for interpreting human and animal diet and enhances our understanding of the spread, adoption and consumption of C ₄ crops across Europe.

This study explores how major climatic shifts, together with socioeconomic factors over the past two millennia, influenced buffer crop selection, focusing on five crops: rye, millet, buckwheat, oat, and hemp. For this study, we analyzed archaeobotanical data from 135 archaeological contexts and historical data from 242 manor inventories across the northeastern Baltic region, spanning the period from 100 to 1800 AD. Our findings revealed that rye remained a main staple crop throughout the studied periods reflecting environmental adaptation to northern latitudes. The drought-tolerant and thermophilic millet crop exhibited resilience during the adverse dry climatic conditions of the Medieval Climatic Anomaly while showing a significant decline during the Little Ice Age. During the period of post-1500 AD, a significant shift towards cold-resilient summer crops such as buckwheat and hemp is recorded. This study enhances our understanding of how historical agricultural systems responded to both socioeconomic factors and climatic change in northern latitudes, offering notable potential solutions for modern agricultural practices in the face of future climate variability trends.