by Chris Fowler
Complex Chalcolithic societies also emerged in the Iberian Peninsula with a concentration of population living in huge settlements, some fortified. They stretched from Zambujal at the Tagus estuary in Portugal to south-east Spain and Los Millares, to name but the best-known. Huge, densely populated settlements and causewayed enclosures were also located in the region, as throughout much of contemporary Europe (Garcia and Morillo-Barroso 2013; Marquez-Romero and Jiménez-Jáimez 2013). These complex centralized societies in Iberia collapsed and transformed into smaller expanding, maritime Bell Beaker groups in the second quarter of the third millennium BC, and they brought with them not only new metallurgical skills, but also skills in boat-building and mining (Case 2004; Laubaune 2013; O’Brien 2004). Their expansion was both toward the western Mediterranean, to north Africa and Sicily (Guillaine et al. 2009), and northward to France and north-western Europe (Prieto-Martinez and Salanova 2009; Prieto-Martinez 2012). From here communities using Bell Beakers moved into central Europe (Heyd 2007), and mixed with Corded Ware groups, creating a Proto-Celtic language in the process. But more importantly they created a new metallurgical economy that was gradually adopted throughout Europe, along with more intensive agriculture (Lechterbeck et al. 2014). They also crossed the channel to the British Isles (Needham 2002, 2005, fig. 3), represented by the famous Amesbury archer and his companions (Fitzpatrick 2011), and in Ireland by the Ross Island mining community (O’Brien 2004). This ‘out of Iberia’ scenario for the origins of Bell Beaker expansion has recently been supported by extensive studies of tooth morphology in 2,000 Bell Beaker burials in several regions of continental Europe (Desideri 2011), among other evidence (Czebreszuk 2004; Nicolis 2001; Fokkens and Nicolis 2012; Prieto Martinez and Salanova 2013).
Bell Beaker groups expanded along the western Mediterranean and along the Atlantic façade before they moved inland (but never further east than Hungary), and they always settled in small pockets. They were travelling artisans that were well received because of their skills (Price et al. 2004; Vander Linden 2007; Heyd 2007), but they were also a demographic force looking for new places to settle (Vander Linden 2012). Through hybridization between the Corded Ware/Single Grave culture and the expanding Bell Beaker culture there emerged a hybrid Beaker culture (Needham 2005, fig. 3). This new culture experienced a rapid expansion that transformed society in much the same way as the Corded Ware and Single Grave culture had transformed temperate Europe 300 years earlier.
THE NEW INSTITUTIONS OF THE BRONZE AGE: THE ORIGIN OF THE FAMILY, PERSONAL PROPERTY AND GENDER DIVISIONS
As I have demonstrated, there is mounting archaeological and scientific evidence that centralized late Neolithic/Copper Age societies were replaced by expansionist, decentralized societies by the third millennium BC. The background to this historical change was in part linked to the rise of proto-state societies and urban life in Mesopotamia and the Near East that marked the beginning of the Bronze Age. Consequently there developed new needs for these proto-states to establish relations with the outer world to get access to a number of essential goods located outside their own territories, such as copper, tin, and—later on—also horses. The so-called Uruk expansion of the mid to later fourth millennium BC (Algaze 1989; Stein 1999; Aubet 2013, chapter 6) created these new links that circulated copper from the Caucasus in exchange for new types of prestige goods and technological knowledge (Courcier 2010; Dolukanov 1994, 326ff.; Sherratt 1997). From this interaction there emerged new ranked chiefdoms in the Caucasus by the mid-to later fourth millennium BC, called the Maikop culture, who buried their chiefly lineages in large kurgans or barrows with rich grave goods (Rezepkin 2000, 2010). But other social institutions were adopted as well.
The early city-states of Mesopotamia had developed new means for trade and exchange that demanded new concepts of property and its transmission. This in turn entailed a new economic and legal definition of family and inheritance (Diakonoff 1982; Postgate 2003; Yoffee 1995). These new concepts were selectively adapted to a different and less complex social and economic environment in Anatolia and the Caucasus, as well as the Aegean (Rahmsdorf 2010). The royal kurgans and Mesopotamian/Iranian imports of the Maikop culture in the Caucasus (Sherratt 1997, chapter 18; Ivanova 2012) represented new institutions based upon a new concept of rank linked to movable, personal property, mainly in the form of prestige goods including metal and herds of animals. This new social organization was ritually manifested in a new type of kurgan with individual burials and rich personal grave goods to symbolize the new standing of personalized property and power. It was quickly transmitted to steppe societies where it caught on and was wedded to a new expansive pastoral economy of mobile wealth of herds of animals (Kohl 2001, 2007; Rothman 2003; Kristiansen 2007).
I thus propose that transmission of a new family structure from the city-states of the south (the Uruk expansion) with new definitions of family, property and inheritance helped to facilitate the social formation of a new mobile agro-pastoral society in the steppe region and beyond, also including an Iranian hinterland (Ivanova 2012). It constituted the monogamous family group as a central social and economic institution based on a patrilineal kinship system. It favoured the accumulation of mobile wealth through expansion and the formation of external alliance systems (Kristiansen and Larsson 2005, chapter 5), and mobile wealth that could be carried along and even transmitted between generations. The new funerary ritual of individual burials furnished with these very same symbols of wealth and covered by barrows represented the ritualized institutionalization of these new principles as they were now also transferred to the land of death, when property had to be transmitted and redistributed.
Another important institution that was introduced from the early city-states to their closer peripheries in Anatolia and the Caucasus was that of organized warfare under royal or chiefly command. In the Eurasian societies of the third millennium BC the male herder-warrior became a new ideal. This can be attributed to the institution of chiefly leadership with low levels of institutionalized or heredity inequality (Vandkilde 2011; Reinhold 2012). It was materialized in the widespread role of the carefully executed war axe in precious stone, copper, silver, or gold, later supplemented with the composite bow. But the contours of a more complex division of social roles and institution were also emerging. Specialists, such as the metal smith, began to appear in burials, and ritualized priestly functions were also demonstrated in grave goods, from the steppe to central Europe. A more complex society of warriors, priests, craft specialists, and herders/farmers was emerging, although yet in embryonic form (Hansen 2002, 2011; Müller 2002; Shislina 2008; Schwarz 2008). The expansion of this kind of society was facilitated by the demographic surplus that emerged when the large Tripolje settlements of tens of thousands of people were dissolved during the mid to late fourth millennium BC and had to find a new way of living in dispersed family groups.
From the new institutionalized roles of leadership linked to warriors, priests, and craftsmen, and the new rules of family and kinship to control property and mobile wealth, there also followed new and stricter definitions of gender roles (Harrisson and Heyd 2007, figs 45–48; see Fig. 56.1).
FIG. 56.1. Model of basic material and institutional components of western Eurasian societies of the third millennium BC.
Figure 56.1 presents a model of this social organization and its basic components. The most important of these was the family barrow or tumulus, which became the ritualized extension of a new kinship system where the transmission of mobile property (herds) played a crucial role through inheritance and partnerships. The barrow thus defined ritually the free man, his family, and his property, and it also defined the male warrior as heading a new institution of chieftainship. Male and female genders were strictly and rigorously demarcated in burial ritual through the orientation of the body, laying on the left or right side. This ritual institution remained stable throughout western Eurasia during several hundred years, and it speaks of a social and ritual commonali
ty of vast geographical proportions, but also of a highly regulated society.
There can be no doubt as to the important role of gender, although male burials always outnumber female burials. Mobile herding societies often exhibit a strongly gendered division of labour, and this we see reproduced in burial rituals throughout the third and second millennia BC in Eurasia. In an agro-pastoral society of herding based upon property of animals and their produce, rules of transmission and of inheritance become important. Therefore there had to be specialists—whether chiefs or other persons—in charge of maintaining and performing a corpus of ritualized rules.
To summarize, during the third millennium BC there emerged a new social and economic order in western Eurasia, supported by major population movements. The change was therefore not only social but also demographic and genetic, as recent evidence, although still sparse, suggests that the haplogroups that were introduced by Tripolje/Yamna/Corded Ware and Bell Beaker groups were transmitted to modern Europeans (Nikitin et al. 2010; Brandt et al. 2013). By the mid to late third millennium BC common ritual and social institutions were employed from the Urals to northern Europe within the temperate lowland zone as part of what Philip Kohl (2003, 21) refers to as ‘an interconnected world’.
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE: NEOLITHIC AND BRONZE AGE TELL SOCIETIES COMPARED
Background to the problem
What are the major qualitative differences—if any—between more complex Neolithic societies, such as tell settlements, and mature Bronze Age tell societies? Whilst a general consensus exists among researchers that Bronze Age societies were differentiated in terms of hierarchy and complexity distinctly from Neolithic societies, recently some have questioned if these differences are simply of degree rather than of kind (Kienlin 2012). Yet despite considerable quantitative continuity between the Neolithic and Bronze Age of Europe, developing prestige goods exchanges and commodity trade, especially in metal, caused significant institutional (qualitative) restructuring. Using a comparative analysis, we can recognize that substantial variation existed both through time and across space in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. Although sometimes creating an impression of similar organizational complexity, the reality was two sets of societies articulated to very different political economies and social formations, not least when taking into account the spatial dimensions of social organization.
Scales of interaction
Neolithic tell societies may provide many points of similarity to Bronze Age tell societies, when they are considered in isolation as a listing of traits. Local populations during the Neolithic could be substantial; however, they were not embedded in regular networks of international metal supplies. It is only by the Bronze Age that population figures rose significantly over Neolithic ones and that settlements and open land became continuous. This difference has been well demonstrated in several recent studies (Müller 2013b; Rassman 2011, abb. 4 and 5). As described by Andrew Sherratt (1997), Neolithic communities were linked by regional exchange in basic commodities such as flint, and periodically interregional connections were established through migrations that might lead to technological transfer. Long-distance connections, however, were often short-lived (Müller 2013a; Chapman 2013). They were typically based on select prestige goods and these could encompass larger regions, following a traditional fall off-curve of exchange (Klassen et al. 2011, Abb. 7, 9, and 18). Thus Neolithic political economies were based almost exclusively upon the exploitation and control of local resources. When more exotic goods were traded over larger regions they show a characteristic fall-off pattern in abundance that contrasts with the Bronze Age trade. Nowhere during the Neolithic and Copper Age do we find permanently organized, long-distance (‘international’) trade networks of the kind that provided all Bronze Age communities with metal and other wealth from a few source areas on a regular basis. This contrast has been most explicitly demonstrated by recent network analysis from Bulgaria (Merkyte and Albek 2012, figs 2 and 3). All Bronze Age communities were dependent on metal for their social identity, warrior weaponry, and basic subsistence economy from the middle Bronze Age onwards. Across Europe and into Asia, copper and tin had to be provided on a regular basis from mines hundreds or even thousand of kilometres away. This international flow must then have been connected with reciprocal flows of exports that apparently included salt, cattle, wool/textiles, amber, and jet, and the list probably goes on to include skins of wild animals, slaves, horses, and other commodities. We therefore propose that the emergent political economy shifted towards a world system of trade, transforming the very institutional nature of society.
Taking a political economy approach to the prehistory of the Carpathian Basin, we start with two reasonable expectations. First, according to the specific location in the Basin, local social groups were articulated differently with the dominant political economy. We therefore expect a fundamental social and economic variability to be manifested during both periods. Second, as international trade in metal and other wealth items picked up, the institutional character of society should be transformed fundamentally, although the specific structure of society will differ from place to place.
The pattern of Bronze Age tells in the Hungarian basin documents this fundamental change from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age (Remenyi 2012; Szeverényi and Kulcar 2012; Uhner 2012). Rather than being concentrated in the lowland agricultural lands along the Tisza, as documented for the Neolithic, the primary distribution of tells sees them line up as beads along the Danube. A recent intensive survey of settlement along the Benta Valley just south of Budapest located very few Neolithic or Copper Age settlements, and no tells; by contrast, in the Bronze Age, a major tell settlement and a secondary tell right above the Danube developed rapidly (Earle and Kolb 2010). Along the Danube, settlements were thus formed in vacant or virtually vacant areas. Why? These locations along the Danube make little sense for agriculture because the river would have truncated access to half the circular catchment area available to a village located centrally within its agricultural land. In fact, the tells and their associated settlements were placed where they could have dominated the movement of wealth along the main river route for international trade in the Bronze Age of central Europe. Likewise, tells are grouped along the foothills of the Carpathians where they controlled the large-scale extraction and possibly trade in salt, and perhaps also horse breeding (Dietrich 2012). Admittedly, tells are found in both the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods and in both periods they almost surely linked groups to specific places that defined property rights. The contrasting locations between the two periods, however, show a distinctive shift in what is owned (or controlled) with a dramatic shift in the nature of the political economy and the structure of society. Ownership of agricultural land for staple finance would have been pre-eminent for the Neolithic in contrast to ownership of passage routes significant for the international trade in metal in the Bronze Age.
The shift from land-based exchange in the Neolithic to high-end international trade with boats along the rivers created clear bottlenecks that local populations controlled to extract metal as it moved through their territories overlooking the river (Earle 2013). The tell locations on the Danube allowed for a regular revenue source in foreign wealth, which would have transformed political structure and identity categories. In the Bronze Age cemeteries, only 5% of the burials included bronze, and it appears to indicate a special class of individuals. In the metal hoards that appear at the same time, the concentrated wealth that they represented took on a critical defining characteristic for society’s institutions. By adding weapons and horses to the cultural inventory, a warrior elite apparently arose as a dominant social segment. It is important to realize that we do not view such warriors as all-powerful; the power of a chief is always contested locally by a heterarchical mix, as seen, for example, by several sizeable, contemporaneous agrarian settlements in the Benta Valley (Earle and Kolb 2010). Whilst recognizing that power would always have been contingent, the position of t
ells and the addition of status-defining metal wealth and weapons demonstrate a fundamental institutional (qualitative) transformation in Bronze Age society from its predecessors in Hungary and beyond.
Further to the implications of regular long-distance trade in metal and other commodities
The Bronze Age became a more mobile world for the simple economic reason that copper and tin, or bronze in finished or semi-finished form, had to be distributed throughout the known world from a few source areas. Systematic commodity trade in copper and tin (Bartelheim and Stäuble 2009; Shennan 1993; Bell 2012) and in woollen textiles and salt (Harding 2011; Harding and Kavruk 2010; Kern et al. 2009; Kowarik et al. 2010; Lassen 2010; Monroe 2009) formed the life blood of an international Bronze Age political economy that overlay and integrated the continuing staple economies of Europe and beyond. The control of copper and salt mines and the subsequent trade in these commodities had the same economic significance as the control of and trade in oil and gas resources has today.
During the Bronze Age such trade was probably couched in political alliances where prestige goods played an important role in forging such relationships—whether in Barbarian Europe or in the Near East, as exemplified in the ‘Amarna diplomacy’ of fourteenth-century BC Egypt (cf. Cohen and Westbrook 2000). One precondition for the operation of this economic and political system that was based on a dialectic between staple and wealth finance (Earle 2002) was the rapid development of new maritime technologies during the late third and early second millennium BC, which for the first time allowed safe sea journeys over longer distances and provided larger ships that carried bulk cargoes across open waters (Kristiansen 2004; Needham 2009). These boats, however, could never have travelled safely without carrying warriors for their protection, much as is illustrated by the analogous trade by the medieval Vikings. Likewise the chariot throughout Eurasia came to symbolize a new speedy transport for warfare that had long-term historical consequences in the breeding of horses for transport (Kelekna 2009).