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PART IV
CONCLUSION: DEBATES IN NEOLITHIC ARCHAEOLOGY
CHAPTER 54
UNEXPECTED HISTORIES? SOUTH-EAST AND CENTRAL EUROPE
ALASDAIR WHITTLE
MY brief here is to take an overview of both south-east and central Europe, and anyone familiar with the wealth of evidence now at our disposal for these areas, established by research traditions going back to the later nineteenth century, may feel that is an impossible task for a short concluding chapter. The rationale of handbooks, after all, is to assemble, as here, an array of experts to provide a detailed sense of the latest specialist knowledge on any given topic. The genre tends, however, to some degree of fragmentation and also compression, so some wider reflections, connections, and predictions may be of value. Since I cannot possibly cover everything, I want to direct those to four connected themes: beginnings; the character of settlement and agricultural economy; the nature of society; and the kinds of Neolithic history that we can now attempt to write. The reader will have to forgive me for using my own previous, solo attempt at a continent-wide synthesis (Whittle 1996a), which I started writing exactly 20 years ago, as a personal point of reference. Some of what I claimed then has not stood the test of time, but other interpretations may remain useful, and new perspectives and possibilities have certainly emerged. Far beyond my own work, this handbook celebrates research on the Neolithic of Europe that continues to be dynamic, innovative, and creative.
BEGINNINGS
The Neolithic process was one of the great transformations in human history. At about 7000 BC,1 there were no farmers in Europe, but by soon after 4000 BC there were very few hunter-gatherers left, mainly in the north. The adoption of more settled existence and of agriculture led in the long run to bigger populations, more differentiated social relations, and very different worldviews compared to those of hunter-gatherers, all in their various ways ultimately laying the basis for much of the modern world. That said, it is easy enough to confuse what things became with how they started, and there has been some tendency to over-emphasize the importance of the perennial debate about beginnings, and to take subsequent developments somewhat for granted. It is valuable therefore to reflect on the state of the debate about beginnings.
The favourite model in research on both south-east and central Europe has long been that of colonization. In my previous survey, I challenged that for both areas, though perhaps more tentatively for south-east than for central Europe. Why could we not envisage indigenous people being much more centrally involved in the processes of transformation, bringing their own demonstrable knowledge of local landscapes and resources, and applying their presumed resourcefulness and adaptability to changing conditions and opportunities (Whittle 1996a)? I was not the first to suggest this kind of view, and one can find it in some of the mid-twentieth century literature on central Europe (surveyed in Bickle and Whittle 2013a). This now seems too extreme a view, and for central Europe at least I would now prefer a fusion or integration model in which both indigenous people and incomers were involved (Whittle 2003; Whittle and Bickle 2013; Zvelebil 2004; Zvelebil et al. 2010). Here and in south-east Europe, the arguments for incomers remain strong, but it is worth stressing that the situation may not be the same everywhere.
In Greece and the Balkans, the apparent scarcity and regional fragmentation of post-glacial hunter-gatherer populations remain powerful arguments in favour of incomers. New research can be successful in filling in some of the gaps in Mesolithic presences, shown for example by new survey and excavation in western Hungary (Eichmann et al. 2010), but the overall distribution of hunter-gatherers remains stubbornly low. That can then be contrasted strongly with the apparent abundance of early Neolithic settlements in both northern Greece (as seen not only in Thessaly, where 120 known settlements by 6200 BC have been quoted (Anthony 2010a, 33), but also in a string of new discoveries in Macedonia and Thrace) and parts of southern and central Bulgaria, and in due course at points north up to the Great Hungarian Plain. The adoption of novel resources in the form of cereal cultivation and animal husbandry, neither with local, European forms, and the whole abundance of the material frame of Neolithic existence, from the architecture of houses to the repertoires of pottery, other fired clay objects including figurines, stone tools, and the rest, further support this interpretation.
Two notes of caution are in order, howeve
r. The first concerns one version of that tendency, already noted above, to elide transition with development. Many of these arguments have been applied in the south to a rather imprecisely defined timespan straddling the middle and later part of the seventh millennium BC (with the Körös culture of eastern Hungary appearing from about 6000 BC: Whittle et al. 2002). Given our ability now to define radiocarbon timescales with much more confidence, which I develop below, I would want to see future research unpicking trajectories of initiation and first development with much more precision. Do many settlements begin all at once, implying large-scale colonization, or do they increase through time, slowly or quickly, implying different kinds of local growth? These are not identical scenarios, and a more gradual rate of increase might let the case for indigenous involvement back in, to some extent. Not for the first time, researchers have been too content with fuzzy chronologies.
Second, if colonization into Greece and the Balkans was the main process, we are still far from understanding it in any detail. That research on western and north-west Anatolia and on European Turkey has improved radically compared to 20 or 30 years ago (Özdoğan 2008, 2010; Çilingiroğlu 2012) has helped, but it also serves to highlight some of the problems. Western Anatolia seems to have a different material tradition compared to what is found in Greece and the southern Balkans, and so does not seem a likely source. North-west Anatolia may suggest now a more gradual series of developments, but the monochrome pottery of the Fikirtepe culture does not appear to be an immediate predecessor for the red-painted wares of Thessaly and southern and central Bulgaria (Özdoğan 2008). In general, it is easy to agree with the claim for an ‘unorganized movement’ or some kind of ‘infiltration’ (Özdoğan 2010, 890), but whether this was by land from central Anatolia or even south-east Anatolia, or even directly by boats from there and points south (Perlès 2001), remains quite unclear. Many of these kinds of narrative are still constructed around pottery, and attention needs to be given to ‘frontier’ conditions on the ground in novel situations (Kotsakis 2005; Borić 2005).
The situation in central Europe is rather different. Roughly from the bend of the Danube northwards, Mesolithic presence is much more visible and much better documented (Mateiciucová 2008), though in turn more abundant still in northern and western Europe. Though not all specialists agree (e.g. Kozłowski and Raczky 2010), there are good arguments for seeing continuities in both lithic technology and lithic distribution patterns through the transition from the late Mesolithic to the emergence of the LBK, in the middle of the sixth millennium BC (Mateiciucová 2008). Whilst it is conventionally understood as ending by c. 5300 BC, the earliest phase of the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) appears to continue into the fifty-third century BC (Pettitt and Hedges 2008), giving plenty of time for more gradual development than often modelled. Many researchers currently prefer Transdanubia or western Hungary as the principal source area for the emergence of the LBK (Bánffy 2013), though there are still far fewer Starčevo settlements in that area, despite the success of recent research, than there are Körös culture settlements on the Great Hungarian Plain. If correct, such a source would also allow a gradualist model of earliest LBK development. Finally, earliest LBK animal husbandry appears to have been quite varied, and although earliest LBK timber longhouses are radically different to anything that came before in the local Mesolithic context, nor are they much like their Starčevo or Körös precedents (Lenneis 1997).
Those are some of the arguments for an at least greater involvement by indigenous populations in the emergence of the LBK in central Europe, compared with the appearance of the early Neolithic in south-east Europe. What is new is the growing number of studies of ancient DNA. Previous inferences from modern DNA patterns had suggested a possible scenario of relatively low numbers of incomers and a much greater input from Palaeolithic and Mesolithic lines of descent (e.g. Richards et al. 1996); a limited aDNA pilot study of the earliest LBK cemetery of Vedrovice, in Moravia, conformed to that pattern, and isotopic studies there also suggested a variety of life histories, with people buried there having been born both locally and further afield (Zvelebil and Pettitt 2008). In the past few years, however, successful extraction and analysis of aDNA not only from animals (e.g. Bollongino and Burger 2010; Larson et al. 2007) but also from humans has suggested marked genetic difference between Mesolithic and early Neolithic populations in central Europe, and the likelihood of strong Near Eastern inputs into both female and male lines of descent (e.g. from a burgeoning literature, Haak et al. 2005, 2010; Bramanti et al. 2009; Balaresque et al. 2010; Brandt et al. 2013, 2014; Szécsényi-Nagy et al. 2014).
This is a highly important development, and it is a pity that this handbook does not report it more fully. Caution is again appropriate at this stage of research. To my knowledge such studies have not yet extended south of the Carpathian basin, and there may be issues of preservation in more southerly contexts; obviously it will be a truncated and partial narrative if south-east Europe cannot ultimately be included. The numbers of analyses remain at this stage very low; we have to take into account later changes; and without finer chronological resolution and a clearer baseline with which to approach central Europe, an absolute distinction between incoming Neolithic and indigenous Mesolithic populations could be positively misleading (Deguilloux et al. 2012). We need to combine both sets of evidence, genetic and archaeological, into insightful new models. One recent critical review proposes ‘lineages brought by the agriculturalists from Anatolia, mixed with lineages from assimilated Balkan foraging populations’, and ‘the migration of pioneer Neolithic groups in central Europe … followed by admixture with indigenous hunter-gatherers combined with hunter-gatherer groups’ acculturation, eventually leading to hunter-gatherers outnumbering the original Neolithic migrants’ (Deguilloux et al. 2012, 32). That kind of general scenario may have been played out with plenty of variation from region to region and phase to phase. The initial apparent uniformity of LBK culture may be in part to do with its role of integrating people of varying descent and history (Robb and Miracle 2007; Whittle and Bickle 2013). The business of getting on together is a key theme from the start.
LIFESTYLES AND PRODUCTION: THE CHARACTER OF SETTLEMENT AND AGRICULTURAL ECONOMY
That Neolithic people built houses, often impressively large and numerous, and that they grew crops of cereals and other plants and kept herds and flocks of cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs, has long been evident. But how did they live, and what were the goals and scales of their agricultural production? The easy assumption, long made in European Neolithic research, was that farming drove everything; people were farmers, so naturally they settled down and led sedentary lives, and since they were not on the move like hunter-gatherer predecessors, they naturally had houses. Research in the Near East shows that people began to settle down before they had domesticated animals and plants (Watkins 2010), so the assumed links between agriculture and sedentism may be more complicated than often envisaged. In my previous synthesis, and drawing on debates in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s, I suggested that many people’s lives in the European Neolithic may have been more mobile than commonly assumed; herding over considerable ranges could have been a recurrent activity, and some agriculture at least short-term and opportunistic; places with houses may often have been special locations for assembly and the creation of communal identity (Whittle 1996a). Quite a lot of that was wrong, and we should emphasize the process of settling down in south-east and central Europe, and acknowledge the powerful ‘garden’ model for intensive, long-term agriculture (Bogaard 2004, 2012; Halstead 2005; Bogaard and Halstead, this volume). The importance of cereal cultivation appears to be further supported by ongoing research into manuring practices (from isotopic analysis of cereal remains themselves: Bogaard et al. 2013), and the case has been well made here (Bogaard and Halstead, this volume) for relatively small-scale animal husbandry in early stages of the Neolithic in Greece and the Balkans. Isotopic analysis of both humans and animals has been develope
d considerably in recent years, and applied mainly to the LBK (e.g. Price et al. 2001; Knipper 2011; Bickle and Whittle 2013b; Schulting, this volume). Results show over and over again, just as at Vedrovice, mentioned above, a mixture of people being buried in the locality where they were probably born and others who had begun their lives elsewhere, but lives lived locally are in the majority. One of the most detailed studies of animals, in the LBK of south-west Germany, suggests a complicated pattern of movement, but in different parts of the landscape around and mainly within easy reach of known settlements (Knipper 2011). That need not exclude some longer-range herding, but as a recurrent strategy, that may often belong to later times.
So different strands of research over the past two decades have served to underpin several traditional assumptions, and to begin to give detailed insight into how lives were led. Yet many questions remain. Take houses first. We must still acknowledge the diversity of regional sequences and architectural practice. In some areas, houses are prominent from the outset, whilst in others they emerge more gradually. Some houses are quite modest one- or two-roomed houses, and in some settings, as in northern Greece, the outdoor spaces between houses seem at least as important as the buildings themselves (Halstead 1999); other structures, as classically in many LBK settlements, can reach striking lengths of 30m and more (Coudart, this volume). In some settings, it was important for the house to be repeated on the same spot, producing what we recognize as tells (Raczky, this volume), whilst in other, ‘flat’ settlements, a different spatial order must have prevailed; larger-scale excavations and geophysical surveys have given several examples of contemporary combinations of vertical tell and surrounding flat settlement, and there is good evidence now for differential layout and activities in these respective zones. It is clear that the house is a powerful symbol, both reflective of social and cultural practice and a means by which that was created (Whittle 1996b; Bailey 2005; Hofmann and Smyth 2013), rather than simply a practical shelter for people who needed a roof over their heads most of the time. The house belonged to particular social settings, rather than universal logic; that can be seen in the horizons in both south-east and central Europe from the later fifth millennium BC onwards, when houses were not built any longer in the same numbers as before (or with the same visibility); I will come back to this below. We do not really know what constituted the Neolithic household, and it may not have been confined to single buildings (Souvatzi 2008). The duration of houses may have varied considerably, but this needs much more research. Surprisingly short use-lives are shown in the Alpine foreland (Ebersbach 2013; Menotti, this volume; Pétrequin 2013); enduring permanence of buildings there was clearly not valued (Hofmann 2013). The conventionally modelled duration for LBK longhouses is around 25 to 30 years, though much longer use-lives have been suggested recently (Rück 2009); if the normal estimate is correct, this cannot be driven by practical logic, since big oak posts would last far longer, but presumably by social conventions (perhaps to do with marriage, the death of household heads, and so on). We do not really know yet in any detail, on a generational timescale, the duration of houses in tells and flat settlements in south-east Europe: another important goal for future research. The occupation of the Körös culture site of Ecsegfalva 23 on the Great Hungarian Plain, estimated in a Bayesian framework (see below) at 70 to 80 years long, must have included more than one building phase (Whittle 2007). In these and other ways, instead of a simplistic dichotomy between permanence and mobility, a much more complex series of questions has emerged about households, community, membership, social logic, and symbolism.