The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe

by Chris Fowler

  Shared material culture is another important dimension of the commonality of Neolithic existence. Much dedicated research over the years has gone into the description, classification, and chronological ordering of this material, often prominently featuring pottery, and it is important that grander and wider interpretive perspectives do not overlook this basic feature. Familiar things must have helped to create and signal affiliation and belonging (cf. Alberti et al. 2011), even if we are uncertain if the changing distributions of pottery styles, for example, always mark bounded and fixed group identities; the scale of the LBK distribution suggests that this cannot always be the case. Not everyone necessarily had access to all desirable things; the LBK adze is strongly associated with males, notably men of local origin (Bentley et al. 2012), and Spondylus varies widely in its occurrence in LBK graves (Bickle and Whittle 2013b). I still think it is an open question whether we should regard gold and copper from modern perspectives, rather than as part of degrees of craft diversity and specialization, but even accepting the value conventionally placed upon these innovations, it remains striking how fragmented and piecemeal their initial uptake was. Graves at Varna with quantities of gold still stand out in the local, regional, and wider context, and if it is true that the copper came from a series of regionally available sources (Chapman 2013, 324–325), it is a puzzle why such a supposedly desirable new material was not more widely and more rapidly copied elsewhere.

  So now I believe that we need to accommodate both sides of the argument, rather than claim either steadily elaborating hierarchies or a persisting absence of differentiation. Tension between different values may have been an important dynamic in the history of the European Neolithic, which I will develop below. My brief has been to reflect on south-east and central Europe, but some cross-fertilization with debates elsewhere in Europe could also be fruitful. Reacting to models of pronounced social differentiation (including the possibility of state formation) in southern Iberia from the third millennium BC onwards, it has been suggested that despite demographic growth, possible agricultural intensification, the appearance of copper metallurgy, and the development of supra-regional exchange networks, no compelling evidence exists for institutions that overcame ‘self-regulation mechanisms that worked against inequality’ (García Sanjuán 2013, 134). Another account of the southern Iberian Copper Age talks of ‘the rise of some kind of corporate groups (maybe lineages), made possible and sustained through the cyclical involvement of different segments of society in collective labor processes’, with a sense of community on the one hand but with lineage competition channelled into the mortuary sphere (Díaz-del-Río 2011, 51). There is no sense in trying to solve the problems of one situation by importing models directly from another, but the language and tone to be used in these debates are crucial.

  KINDS OF HISTORY: WHAT HAPPENED IN THE EUROPEAN NEOLITHIC?

  The four themes which I have discussed are connected. Neither colonization nor acculturation on their own seem to account for the beginnings of the Neolithic in south-east and central Europe, though circumstances may have varied between regions, and there is much more to come from future genetic research. Given that, the varying styles of Neolithic existence probably involved from the start the integration of people of different backgrounds and histories. Much of the story is to do with shared life and death, though there could have been tensions between household and community, between descent groups and community, between locals and outsiders, or between any other range of dimensions, also from an early stage. Settlement regularly expanded in given regional situations, and numbers of people on the ground could increase markedly, but there was no clear, long-term trend to the intensification of agricultural production, even though fourth-millennium innovations like the wheel may have been locally significant; much activity in gardens and with herds and flocks may have remained within what Marshall Sahlins (1974) called ‘the domestic mode of production’. There was tension between the shared values and sanctions of community, and the tendency of particular groupings within communities—be they households, clans, lineages, other descent groups, or other entities altogether such as sodalities—and between communities to seek enhancement of reputation and position variously through control of land, mobilization of labour, and the production and acquisition of fine, desirable things. There is now plenty of evidence for violent, often fatal, inter-personal and on occasion inter-group violence, but there must equally have been embedded means to solve disputes, for life in most places, most of the time, to go on.

  What I see happening, at a big-picture scale, is the playing out of the tensions suggested above between commonality and more individual values. This took place over differing timescales and at different rates. The supposed crisis at or towards the end of parts of the LBK cannot be documented everywhere within the LBK distribution, and probably does not apply at all in south-east Europe at the turn of the sixth millennium BC. After the end of the LBK, the ‘Danubian’ world of longhouse lives went on for centuries more; ‘rondel’ enclosures (Petrasch, this volume) could be seen as a means to regulate the renewed build-up of inter- and intra-community difficulties. There may well have been a cyclical pattern to this tension. It is for future research to date the timings of all these developments with much greater precision (see below), though it is interesting to note that both the ending of tell settlement in south-east Europe and the end of the longhouse tradition in central—and western—Europe (Link 2006; Last 2013) may have begun at more or less the same time in or after the middle of the fifth millennium BC. Perhaps neither system was able any longer to accommodate emerging differences. In a sense, it may have been corporate values which won out, as aggrandizers were unable to transform control of agricultural production or of material desirables into institutions of permanent and embedded inequality. The late fifth- and fourth-millennium big picture is widely one of settlement dispersal, with no clear evidence of universal agricultural intensification, but novel and very varied means of social display. In central and especially western Europe, that involves monuments, but that is another story for another time.

  Another big-picture perspective has emerged over the past two decades, that of climate (e.g. Gronenborn 2010). In some models, climate seems to pull the strings, both enabling and constraining change in human society. It would be foolish to deny the potential effects of climate change on Neolithic communities, and where the evidence is of fine enough resolution, as in parts of the Alpine foreland (e.g. Magny and Haas 2004; Schibler et al. 1997), local effects on both settlement and production can be argued. For the most part, however, climate changes are very coarsely correlated with detailed Neolithic sequences, and the causation seems never to be the same: here a wet phase, there a dry phase. It is as though we were to try to explain the economic collapse of the Great Depression with the fluctuating weather reports of the era of late twentieth-century global warming.

  It is not only the big picture which should be in the frame. We have abundant evidence now to investigate a plethora of particular situations, and the opportunity to combine ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ scales (Robb and Pauketat 2013). Helping to refine chronological precision has been my own recent focus (Bayliss and Whittle 2007; Whittle et al. 2011; http://www.totl.eu), within a Bayesian framework for the interpretation of radiocarbon dates (Bayliss et al. 2007; Bayliss 2009). The general chronological framework for the European Neolithic is probably broadly correct, built up by patient excavation, study of associations, typology, seriation, radiocarbon dating, and some cross-checks with dendrochronology. Inappropriate radiocarbon samples, with age-offsets compared to their context, and visual inspection of results can both, however, lead to getting things wrong; a formal approach leads to much greater precision, and there are encouraging signs that this approach is beginning to be more widely adopted (e.g. Raczky and Siklósi 2013; Stadler et al. 2006). Without this, things can wrongly appear to have begun earlier, lasted longer, and ended later than was the case in reality.

&
nbsp; Why does this matter? The ‘big picture’ which I have sketched here is after all played out over two to three millennia or more, depending on where the focus is within south-east and central Europe. The long term has been our dominant perspective, in which things tend to happen rather slowly. But to espouse only the big picture is to assume that we know all the key answers in advance, and to blur the human scales of lifetimes and generations into much coarser narratives. If we are interested in the ending of tell settlement, for example, we need to exploit the much better sense of timing, duration, and tempo that formal chronological modelling can now provide. Big pictures can ultimately be reformulated with the help of much more precise, smaller-scale sequences. With tell endings, we have the means now (and the importance of archives and publication becomes ever greater) to replace a generalized account with a detailed record of what I believe (cf. Link 2006; Müller, this volume) will prove to be a staggered and regionally varied history, an unexpected turn of events set against conventional predictions of steady evolution.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am very grateful to Penny Bickle and Dani Hofmann for critical comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

  Note

  1.Nearly all the dates given in this chapter should be read as cal BC, following international scientific convention; that for Arbon Bleiche is BC, being based on dendrochronology.

  REFERENCES

  Alberti, B., Fowles, S., Holbraad, M., Marshall, Y. and Witmore, C. 2011. ‘Worlds otherwise’: archaeology, anthropology, and ontological difference. Current Anthropology 52, 896–912.

  Anthony, D.W. 2010a. The rise and fall of Old Europe. In D.W. Anthony with J.Y. Chi (eds), The lost world of Old Europe: the Danube valley, 5000–3500 BC, 28–57. New York and Princeton: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World and Princeton University Press.

  Anthony, D. 2010b. The horse, the wheel and language. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  Bailey, D. 2005. Beyond the meaning of Neolithic houses: specific objects and serial repetition. In D. Bailey, A. Whittle and V. Cummings (eds), (Un)settling the Neolithic, 90–97. Oxford: Oxbow.

  Balaresque, P., Bowden, G.R., Adams, S.M., Leung, H.-Y., King, T.E., Rosser, Z.H., Goodwin, J., Moisan, J.-P., Richard, C., Millward, A., Demaine, A.G., Barbujani, G., Previderè, C., Wilson, I.J., Tyler-Smith, C., and Jobling, M.A. 2010. A predominantly Neolithic origin for European paternal lineages. Public Library of Science Biology 8(1): e1000285. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000285.

  Balasse, M., Obein, G., Ughetto-Monfrin, J., and Mainland, I. 2012. Investigating seasonality and season of birth in the past herds: a reference set of sheep enamel stable oxygen isotope ratios. Archaeometry 54, 349–368.

  Bandy, M.S. and Fox, J.R. (eds) 2010. Becoming villagers: comparing early village societies. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

  Bánffy, E. 2013. On Neolithic frontiers in the Carpathian basin. In A. Anders and G. Kulcsár (eds), Moments in time: papers presented to Pál Raczky on his 60th birthday, 35–45. Budapest: L‘Harmattan.

  Bartosiewicz, L. 2007. Mammalian bone. In A. Whittle (ed.), The Early Neolithic on the Great Hungarian Plain: investigations of the Körös culture site of Ecsegfalva 23, Co. Békés, 287–325. Budapest: Institute of Archaeology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

  Bayliss, A. 2009. Rolling out revolution: using radiocarbon dating in archaeology. Radiocarbon 51, 123–147.

  Bayliss, A., Bronk Ramsey, C., van der Plicht, J., and Whittle, A. 2007. Bradshaw and Bayes: towards a timetable for the Neolithic. Cambridge Journal of Archaeology 17.1, supplement, 1–28.

  Bayliss, A. and Whittle, A. 2007. Histories of the dead: building chronologies for five southern British long barrows. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 17.1, supplement.

  Bentley, R.A., Bickle, P., Fibiger, L., Nowell, G., Dale, C., Hedges, R., Hamilton, J., Wahl, J., Francken, M., Grupe, G., Lenneis, E., Teschler-Nicola, M., Arbogast, R.-M., Hofmann, D., and Whittle, A. 2012. Community differentiation and kinship among Europe’s first farmers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109, 9326–9330.

  Bickle, P. and Whittle, A. 2013a. LBK lifeways: a search for difference. In P. Bickle and A. Whittle (eds), The first farmers of central Europe: diversity in LBK lifeways, 1–27. Oxford: Oxbow.

  Bickle, P. and Whittle, A. (eds) 2013b. The first farmers of central Europe: diversity in LBK lifeways. Oxford: Oxbow.

  Bogaard, A. 2004. Neolithic farming in central Europe: an archaeobotanical study of crop husbandry practices. London: Routledge.

  Bogaard, A. 2012. Plant use and crop husbandry in an early Neolithic village: Vaihingen an der Enz, Baden-Württemberg. Bonn: Habelt.

  Bogaard, A., Bending, J., and Jones, G. 2007. Archaeobotanical evidence for plant husbandry and use. In A. Whittle (ed.), The early Neolithic on the Great Hungarian Plain: investigations of the Körös culture site of Ecsegfalva 23, County Békés, 421–445. Budapest: Institute of Archaeology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

  Bogaard, A., Fraser, R.A., Heaton, T.H.E., Wallace, M., Vaiglova, P., Charles, M., Jones, G., Evershed, R.P., Styring, A.K., Andersen, N.H., Arbogast, R.-M., Bartosiewicz, L., Gardeisen, A., Kanstrup, M., Maier, U., Marinova, E., Ninov, L., Schäfer, M., and Stephan, E. 2013. Crop manuring and intensive land management by Europe’s first farmers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110, 12589–12594.

  Bogaard, A., Krause, R., and Strien, H.-C. 2011. Towards a social geography of cultivation and plant use in an early farming community: Vaihingen an der Enz, south-west Germany. Antiquity 85, 395–416.

  Bollongino, R. and Burger, J. 2010. Phylogeny and population genetics of Neolithic wild and domestic cattle. In D. Gronenborn and J. Petrasch (eds), Die Neolithisierung Mitteleuropas (The spread of the Neolithic to central Europe), 81–85. Mainz: Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum.

  Borić, D. 2005. Deconstructing essentialisms: unsettling frontiers of the Mesolithic-Neolithic Balkans. In D. Bailey, A. Whittle, and V. Cummings (eds), (Un)settling the Neolithic, 16–31. Oxford: Oxbow.

  Boulestin, B., Zeeb-Lanz, A., Jeunesse, C., Haack, F., Arbogast, R.-M., and Denaire, A. 2009. Mass cannibalism in the Linear Pottery culture at Herxheim (Palatinate, Germany). Antiquity 83, 968–982.

  Bramanti, B., Thomas, M.G., Haak, W., Unterlaender, M., Jores, P., Tambets, K., Antanaitis-Jacobs, I., Haidle, M.N., Jankauskas, K., Kind, C.-J., Lueth, F., Terberger, T., Hiller, J., Matsumura, S., Forster, P., and Burger, J. 2009. Genetic discontinuity between local hunter-gatherers and central Europe’s first farmers. Science 326, 137–140.

  Brandt, G., Haak, W., Adler, C.J., Szécsényi-Nagy, A., Karimnia, S., Möller-Rieker, S., Meller, H., Ganslmeier, R., Friederich, S., Dresely, V., Nicklisch, N., Pickrell, J.K., Sirocko, F., Reich, D., Cooper, A., Alt, K.W., and The Genotypic Consortium 2013. Ancient DNA reveals key stages in the formation of central European mitochondrial genetic diversity. Science 342, 257–261.

  Brandt, G., Knipper, C., Nicklisch, N., Siebert, A., Ganslmeier, R., Meller, H., and Alt, K.W. 2014. Interdisciplinary research on the LBK settlement of Karsdorf, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. In A. Whittle and P. Bickle (eds), Early farmers: the view from archaeology and science, 95–114. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Chapman, J. 1997. Places as timemarks: the social construction of prehistoric landscapes in eastern Hungary. In J. Chapman and P. Dolukhanov (eds), Landscapes in flux: central and eastern Europe in antiquity, 209–230. Oxford: Oxbow.

  Chapman, J. 2000. Fragmentation in archaeology: people, places and broken objects in the prehistory of south-eastern Europe. London: Routledge.

  Chapman, J. 2013. From Varna to Brittany via Csőszhalom—was there a ‘Varna’ effect? In A. Anders and G. Kulcsár (eds), Moments in time: papers presented to Pál Raczky on his 60th birthday, 323–335. Budapest: L‘Harmattan.

  Çilingiroğlu, C. 2012. The Neolithic pottery of Ulucak in Aegean Turkey: organization of production, interregional comparisons and rel
ative chronology. Oxford: Archaeopress.

  Craig, O.E., Chapman, J., Heron, C., Willis, L.H., Bartosiewicz, L., Taylor, G., Whittle, A., and Collins, M. 2005. Did the first farmers of central and eastern Europe produce dairy foods? Antiquity 79, 882–894.

  Deguilloux, M.-F., Leahy, R., Pemonge, M.-H., and Rottier, S. 2012. European Neolithization and ancient DNA: an assessment. Evolutionary Anthropology 21, 24–37.

  Díaz-del-Río, P. 2011. Labor in the making of Iberian Copper Age lineages. In K.T. Lillios (ed.), Comparative archaeologies: the American Southwest (AD 900–1600) and the Iberian peninsula (3000–1500 BC), 37–56. Oxford: Oxbow.