Temperate and Northern Europe

After 5400 BC, at roughly the same time that farming was spreading westward along the Mediterranean coastline, pioneer farming populations spread quite rapidly, following a 600-year standstill on the western edge of the Hungarian Plain, up the Danube Valley, and through Europe north of the Alps to as far as the Rhineland and the Paris Basin. The approaches to the northern European coastline brought another marked slowing of the rate of spread, and a marked increase in the potential evidence for Mesolithic population incorporation into the farming communities. Agriculture probably did not spread into Latvia and much of Scandinavia until after 3500 BC, or into Finland until well into the Bronze Age.

An interesting economic perspective on the two-pronged spread of Neolithic societies through Europe is given by archaeobotanist Ursula Maier (1996). The economy which spread initially through the Balkans, up the Danube and into temperate Europe north of the Alps, was dominated by hulled emmer and einkorn wheats. However, the wheats which spread along the northern Mediterranean were all of the naked variety, probably tetraploids. The technicalities here suggest that the agricultural colonization of Europe involved not only two axes of movement, but also two different cereal complexes, both eventually meeting west and north of the Alps.'

The Danubians and the northern Mesolithic

The northerly and westerly expansion of pioneer farmer communities from the Hungarian Plain through the former Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, Germany, and the Low Countries, but stopping short of extension on to the alluvial coastal plain of northern Europe, belongs to one of the most dramatic episodes of cultural replacement in European prehistory. After 5400 BC, Linear Pottery Culture (otherwise termed Danubian, Linear Bandkeramik, or simply LBK) populations with their characteristic timber longhouse settlements and incised pottery spread through the fertile loesslands, favoring floodplain-edge situations for their permanent villages, with an economy focused on small clearings in the forest where they raised hulled emmer and einkorn wheat, broomcorn millet, cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs.' LBK origins can be located at the southeastern end of the distribution (Figure 4.1), and the spread was very rapid - perhaps 200 years from Slovenia and Poland to the Paris Basin. There is very little evidence for interaction with Mesolithic communities, except in the peripheral westerly and northerly parts of the region. Large-blade tools, including sickles, replaced the bladelets and burins of the local Mesolithic, although Gronenborn (1999) suggests that there was some lithic continuity in blade manufacture.

The LBK reflects remarkable homogeneity in pottery decoration and longhouse construction, a homogeneity soon to break up with the settling-down process and the inevitable decay of long-distance colonizer networks. LBK settlements reveal high densities in some areas, with villages (Figure 4.4) located as little as one kilometer apart, but with few sites in other areas, suggesting as in Greece and Iberia that early farmers were quite selective in their choice of territory and prepared to move long distances if necessary. The longhouses, as in parts of ethnographic Borneo, might have reflected nonlineage societies in which early landownership patterns were fluid - a pattern within which people could move frequently from one village or longhouse to another, as with the remarkably expansive Than of western Borneo in the 19th century. Such a society can be characterized as oriented toward the acquisition of labor rather than land, at least in the initial phase of territorial expansion into previously unfarmed terrain. Longhouses thus correlate from this perspective with a society in pioneer mode, where individual families need mobility. Such

mobility has recently been demonstrated from a study of strontium isotopes in the teeth and bones of Rhineland LBK people, indicating that many people spent their childhoods in places with different environmental chemistries from those where their bones were finally laid to rest (Price et al. 2001).

North of the LBK distribution, however, the pattern of agricultural spread differed markedly. Entrenched Mesolithic populations located on the North European alluvial plain and around the Baltic and North Sea coastlines, together with the less favorable soil and climatic conditions, held up the spread of agriculture in a major way. The details are complex and differ from place to place; this lack of homogeneity of course being a sure sign in itself that Neolithic settlers did not just spread in a vacuum. But before we look at some aspects of this complexity, let us consider a quotation about this interesting situation of hunter-farmer "confrontation":

it seems to me important, first to realize that we have here a situation that has no good modem analogy. We are studying the confrontation of stonetechnology hoe cultivators, and colonist-settlers, with broad spectrum

hunter-gatherers with presumably restricted mobility, all this in an unspoiled temperate environment with full opportunities for all communities involved to select optimal site locations in their perception. Both populations, the colonists and the natives, had widely different cultural roots. Those of the Bandkeramik are to be traced to southeastern Europe and ultimately to the Near East ... The "natives", in contrast, had their roots far back in the Late Palaeolithic of northern Europe ... My point is that differences in mentality can explain the lack of adoption of Neolithic elements [by the Mesolithic populations] in the early centuries of contact. Fundamentally different attitudes had to be bridged. This implies that both culture complexes gradually had to transform in the other's direction. (Kooijmans 1993:137)

It is possible to make further observations on the nature of this MesolithicNeolithic interface in northern Europe. The edges of the LBK distribution in the Low Countries were marked by the construction of numerous longhouse settlements fortified by deep ditches and timber palisades, possibly reflecting defense against Mesolithic communities, although other kinds of within-LBK instability due to population growth (Sherman 2002:247-251) clearly cannot be ruled out. Lawrence Keeley refers to a no-man's-land along the frontier between Mesolithic and LBK sites in Belgium (Figure 4.5) and to a massacre of 34 members of an LBK population at Talheim in Germany. He also suggests that many of the LBK stone axes found in Mesolithic sites were used as weapons of war and points out (Keeley 1997:309) that "whatever interactions there were between these two groups, they were at best chilly and at worst violent."

Relevant here for the rather long and drawn-out episodes of hunter-farmer interaction on the northern fringes of Europe is the idea that domesticated crops and animals will be adopted by hunter-gatherers by means of passing through three successive phases, termed by Marek Zvelebil and Peter Rowley-Conwy (1986; Zvelebil 1998) the availability, substitution, and consolidation phases. The availability phase could have been quite long. For instance, the Ertebelle hunter-fishers of the coastlines of Denmark and northern Germany maintained a frontier with farmers to the south between about 4800 and 4000 BC, after which agriculture finally spread rapidly into the region in the form of the TRB (Funnel Beaker) culture.' Ertebelle sites have no clear signs of any agricultural products, apart from occasional goat bones, indicating that they probably did not trade

regularly for produce from farmers (unlike many recent "niche" huntergatherers - see chapter 2). They did adopt pottery-making at about 4500 Bc, and imported some LBK antler and stone adzes. So in this case we witness longterm contact without agricultural adoption, prior to the ultimate entry of Ertebolle descendants into the agricultural TRB lifestyle.

Figure 4.5 The non-overlapping distributions of Mesolithic and LBK sites in a section of the Meuse Valley in Belgium, in the vicinity of Liege and Maastricht. After Keeley and Cahen 1989. The LBK sites are restricted to loess soils and are ringed by Mesolithic sites. Note the separation to the north between the nearest Mesolithic and Neolithic settlements; such settlements are only in proximity where the Meuse River intervenes.