Human societies face challenges in transitioning towards low-carbon economies and sustainable management of land use and natural resources. Documenting and learning from past transitions helps policy-makers cope with such challenges. The agricultural revolution in Cantabrian Spain (ca. 7000 cal a BP) was one major adaptation of hunter-gatherers to a changing environment that started with the Last Glacial Maximum (ca. 24 000 cal a BP) and lasted until the Mid-Holocene (ca. 5300 cal a BP). Classic approaches to documenting prehistoric cultural timelines are based on manufacturing and technology, thus limited in their ability to describe the sustainability of past societies. Energy regimes, a functional societal approach independent from time, investigate and consider patterns of resource and energy use in various cohabiting and cooperating cultural phases. To examine past energy regimes, a database of archaeological remains was compiled to document four indicators: mobility, economy, overexploitation and societal complexity. Statistical analyses were conducted to elucidate trends, changes and continuity in subsistence strategies by hunter-gatherers and sedentary societies. Results show that energy regimes act as a complement to cultural phases, adding novel functional analyses of past societies to cultural stratigraphy units common in archaeology, shedding light on the sustainability of past societal transitions.

The Holocene is defined by the impact of agricultural societies on their natural environments and resources, a paradigmatic shift triggered by the Agricultural Revolution. In Cantabrian Spain, the adoption of a sedentary economy (ca. 7000 cal yr BP) remains misunderstood, with contemporary Mesolithic and Neolithic sites apparently random dispersed. Energy Regimes, a time-independent and functional analysis of past societies, considers two cultures that cohabit and/or cooperate, based on their differential pattern of use of energy and resources, as well as on the variation in land-use strategies. We test and implement the framework of Energy Regimes through a targeted review, to examine the hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies in Cantabrian Spain. Archeological proxies such as demography, mobility, complexity of society, economy, and overexploitation of resources identified in 95 articles and books, allow us to apply Energy Regimes to reexamine transitions in hunter-gatherer societies. Neolithization in Cantabrian Spain is the result of a long process that started with the Solutrean cultural phase ca. 24,000 cal yr BP, during the Last Glacial Maximum. Hunter-gatherers developed onward novel subsistence strategies with subtle changes in energy use until the transition toward a sedentary economy. Energy Regimes provide new insights for other regional contexts where time-bounded analyses conceal the complexity of energy transition processes in Europe and beyond.