The TRB and the Baltic

The TRB, a derivation from the earlier LBK, spread across the northern coastal plain of Europe starting about 4500 Bc and replaced or incorporated the Mesolithic Ertebelle culture. It reflects both a high level of early homogeneity and a fairly clear derivation from the Lengyel variant of the later LBK. As with the LBK, this early homogeneity hints strongly at dispersal from a source region, rather than piecemeal origin amongst native Mesolithic groups. Of course, there are sometimes traces of Mesolithic continuity within the TRB trajectory, emphasized by many authors." Bergljot Solberg (1989), however, favors a sharp replacement of the Ertebelle by the TRB in Denmark, with only a faint degree of continuity (see also Skak-Nielson 2003; Raemakers 2003). Peter Rowley-Conwy (1999) also comments on the sharpness of the change in dietary terms, despite middle Neolithic switches in some regions to hunting and gathering (such switches are common in agricultural boundary zones - see chapter 2). It is clear that the process of becoming Neolithic in northern Europe was essentially driven by an LBK-TRB cultural phylogeny rather than by a native Mesolithic one, regardless of how many "native" hunter-gatherers there might have been around who were willing or allowed to join the farmer villages.

Another interesting region of long-term agricultural availability, here more clearly associated with actual substitution (i.e., eventual agricultural adoption by Mesolithic communities), was located around the eastern shoreline of the Baltic (Zvelebil 1998). Rimute Rimantiene (1992) proposes a long "Early Neolithic" phase between 5500 and 3400 Bc, associated with the use of pottery but no agriculture,9 followed by a Middle Neolithic between 3400 and 2800 BC, when agriculture, with foxtail and broomcorn millet, emmer, and domesticated animals, was finally adopted. The resulting Mesolithicderived economic amalgam was, in turn, overtaken by incoming Corded Ware farmers during the late Neolithic (2800 to 2000 BC).

Both the Ertebelle and the Baltic examples raise an interesting question. We see, on the agricultural fringes, with some examples carrying more conviction than others, situations whereby native Mesolithic populations adopted aspects

of a Neolithic lifestyle, with or without agriculture, and eventually blended, or simply disappeared, into the "full Neolithic" and Bronze Age cultural records which ensued. So, we may ask if the full Neolithic cultures of northern Europe beyond the LBK heartland existed entirely because Mesolithic populations adopted agriculture, or did the real impetus behind the process lie with expanding and land-hungry farmers moving mainly from the south and east? This is one of those everlasting questions that seem to torment archaeologists all over Europe. Just observing that some Mesolithic populations probably became incorporated into a Neolithic cultural landscape tells us nothing very useful at all. What we want to know is what really drove the Neolithic expansion, a question for which the activities of those Mesolithic hunters who happened to be somewhere in the vicinity of the action may not have been terribly relevant.

The British Isles

A similar debate exists for the British Isles. Lowland Britain ("England") is a fertile region with a warm maritime climate which would have been attractive to agriculturalists from the start, just as were the lowlands of Europe, apart from the sandy and rather infertile North European Plain. Mesolithic adoption of agriculture is more likely in the fastnesses of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, where Iron Age inhabitants 4,000 years later were much more successful in resisting the Roman and the later Anglo-Saxon onslaughts than their lowland eastern contemporaries. Nevertheless, most archaeologists today favor a purely Mesolithic adoption of a continental agricultural economy into the British Isles. Douglas Price (1987:282) has suggested that "the `Neolithic revolution' in Britain was an inside job," thus relegating any arrival of a farmer population from the continent as of minimal significance.

However, the transition from Mesolithic to Neolithic in Britain and Ireland was quite sharp and decisive, just as on the continent. No British Mesolithic sites have ever been reported to have evolved Neolithic economies or material cultures entirely from internal resources. New data on large LBK-like timber houses, field systems, and some fairly impressive cereal inventories in British Neolithic sites indicate that many of the inhabitants were serious farmers with continental cultural traditions." Indeed, given the negative perspective on adopting agriculture at a distance given in chapter 2, even if the English Channel is only 33 kilometers wide, a totally Mesolithic engine of adoption seems most unlikely.

The debate over Mesolithic adoption of farming often extends to considerations of the earthen burial mounds and megalithic monuments characteristic of many western European Early Neolithic cultures from about 4600 BC onward. These are seen by many as reflectors in part of a Mesolithic ideological input into a Neolithic landscape, even though there seems no unequivocal evidence to trace them precisely to a Mesolithic source. Chris Scarre (1992) and Andrew Sherratt (1997a) adopt a middle course, regarding the early long burial mounds with timber chambers as reflecting a central European Neolithic, perhaps LBK, ultimate origin, with the very frequent

expressions of megalithicism and circularity in monument design (especially passage graves) as being of native Mesolithic origin (Figure 4.6). As Sherratt (1997a:336-367) has recently expressed the situation, clearly wishing to maintain the best of both worlds: "The Neolithic cultures of western and northern Europe ... created a unique synthesis of an ultimately Near Eastern form of social organization ... and an indigenous population with its own forms of culture and subsistence base."