Figure 19.1. Map showing the eastern migration of tanged, or shouldered, points, most likely arrowheads, belonging to the Swiderian culture, which emerged ca. 11,000 BC.
To better argue her case, Settegast included in her book a map that shows the trail of Swiderian points across Europe,7 a version of which is included here (see figure 19.1). Her compelling evidence prompted the question of what exactly these Paleolithic hunters were doing crossing Eastern Europe so boldly, with the standard explanation being that they were following the flight of the reindeer herds, but as Settegast herself noted, many of their campsites show very little evidence of the spoils of the chase,8 so clearly something else was going on in their lives. So who exactly were the Swiderians, and how do they fit into the gradually emerging picture painted so far in this book?
THE SWIDERIAN LANDSCAPE
The Swiderians take their name from an occupational “type” site where their unique style of stone tool technology was first recognized. This is Świdry Wielkie in Otwock, near Warsaw in Poland, which now forms one of the thousands of campsites, work stations, and settlement sites that the culture created across a vast territory, stretching from Poland in the west across to Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Moldova, and Ukraine. They make their presence known for the first time at the beginning of the Younger Dryas period, occupying the forests, steppes, and glacial loess of the East European Plain, and settling on major rivers including the Vistula, Oder, and Warta in the west, and the Dnieper, Volga, Oka, and Don in the east.9 In addition to this, they are known to have occupied the northern and eastern foothills of the Carpathian Mountains,10 which embrace Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, and Romania (which is made up of the former kingdoms of Transylvania, Wallachia, and western Moldavia).
The culture’s principal calling cards, so to speak, were their distinctive tanged points, along with their exquisitely finished leaf-shaped points. Prehistorians propose that the Swiderians were an offshoot of one of the preexisting reindeer-hunting traditions of Northern Europe, either the Hamburgian-Ahrenburgian cultures of North Germany or, more likely, the Brommian-Lyngby cultures of Denmark and the Scandinavia Peninsula (together they form what is known as the Tanged Point Technocomplex). Yet as we see next, the Swiderians had ancient roots that mark them out as more successful than their contemporaries. They would seem also to have had a great motivation and drive that has allowed them to be credited with the foundation of various subgroups that were instrumental in the establishment of European culture and language on a number of different levels. It is a long road from Central Europe to Anatolia, but it is one we must now take to create a better picture of why exactly the Swiderians are so crucial to the story of Göbekli Tepe and the rise of civilization in the ancient world.
20
SWIDERIAN DAWN
The effect the Younger Dryas Boundary impact event of 10,900 BC might have had on Europe remains unclear. Yet evidence of its aftermath can be found at sites across the continent as the Usselo horizon, the 8-inch (20-centimeter) charcoal-rich layer lying between soils signifying the termination of the Allerød interstadial and the commencement of the Younger Dryas mini ice age, ca. 10,900 BC.1 Listed among the countries in Europe where this black layer has been found are the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Belgium, as well as known Swiderian territories such as Belarus and, as we shall see now, Poland.
THE WITÓW PEOPLE
At the beginning of the 1960s, archaeologists working on a site at Witów, near Łęczyca, in the Polish province of Łódź, were puzzled to find “a charcoal layer in late-glacial dune, comparable to [the] Usselo-layer.”2 This layer was found to contain flint artifacts “forming a hitherto unknown assemblage,”3 while in the sand immediately above this black mat, archaeologists came across stone implements belonging to the “middle Swiderian industry,”4 showing that the Swiderian reindeer hunters were here at this time.
In addition to the flint implements, archaeologists found at Witów four large ovoid “huts,” all aligned east-west. Each one contained various finds, including a noticeable amount of hematite, which is a highly magnetic, iron-based mineral, usually rust red in color. It is crushed to make a pigment called ochre, used in rock art and human decoration, such as tattoos and body paint.
Radiocarbon analyses for the charcoal layer provided dates in the region of 10,820±160 BP, or 8820 BC. However, when these tests took place it was not realized that recalibration is necessary to bring raw radiocarbon dates in line with the true trend of carbon-14 release from organic materials, so when this is applied the charcoal layer offers dates in the range of 11,000–10,500 BC, well within the proposed time frame of the Younger Dryas Boundary impact event of ca. 10,900 BC.
SWIDERIANS IN CRIMEA
The stone tools found inside the huts at Witów in Poland were initially quite a mystery to archaeologists, leading them to announce the discovery of a previously unknown culture.5 What they did notice, however, were similarities between the assemblage’s curved-back knives and blade segments with examples found over 850 miles (1,400 kilometers) away in the Shan Koba cave in Crimea.6 These are now recognized as belonging to a Crimean Swiderian culture, responsible also for the manufacture of Swiderian points found at other sites in the Crimean Highlands, immediately north of the Black Sea.7
Here in a rock shelter known as Syuren 2, tanged blades have been unearthed “with direct analogies to the Polish Swiderian.”8 In other words, they are more or less identical to those found at the culture’s mostly open air sites in their original heartland of Poland and the Carpathian Mountains. More crucially, the examples found in the Syuren 2 rock shelter are so similar to the real thing that two Russian prehistorians were led to conclude that a “direct migration of a group of Swiderian population in the Crimea is not excluded.”9 In other words, the Swiderian peoples who inhabited these caves might well have been the immediate descendants of reindeer hunters who had arrived in this region from Poland.
If these migrations really did take place, then it is unbelievable evidence of the sheer endurance and willpower of these people, who crossed the entire length of Eastern Europe to end up on the Black Sea. What is more, there is tentative evidence that they did not stop their journey there. In 1959 Russian prehistorian Aleksandr Formozov saw evidence of stone tools of the Swiderian-European style as far east as the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia,10 which stretch between the Black Sea in the west and the Caspian Sea in the east. If correct, then this brings the reindeer hunters within striking distance of the Armenian Highlands, just a couple of hundred miles away from Göbekli Tepe.
TANGED POINTS IN THE NEAR EAST
Supporting the idea that the Swiderians reached even beyond the Caucasus Mountains is, as Mary Settegast realized, the fact that a great many tanged points strikingly similar to those manufactured in Europe have been found at Epipaleolithic and early Neolithic sites across the Near East. Indeed, if they had been found on European soil, archaeologists would have had no qualms in identifying them as belonging to one or another of the North European reindeer-hunting traditions.
Clearly, there are certain differences in style. Sometimes the tang is trapezoid in shape, or with a slight barb. Alternatively, notches are made on either side of the blade, making it easier to haft onto an arrow shaft. Despite these variations, there are enough similarities to suggest that the Swiderian reindeer hunters were somewhere in the background. Indeed, leaf-shaped tanged points that easily compare with those created as part of the Swiderian tradition have been found at Göbekli Tepe (see figure 20.1 on p. 174).11 This opens up the possibility that the European reindeer hunters, or at least their direct descendants, really were present in southeast Anatolia and might well have influenced the development of its earliest Neolithic cultures, something they certainly did in other parts of the ancient world.
POST-SWIDERIAN CULTURES
Having established many hundreds of settlement sites as far east as the Don and Upper Volga rivers of Central Russia, Swiderian groups sprea
d into new territories, where they created post-Swiderian cultures, such as the Kunda and Butovo, which thrived between the middle of the tenth millennium and the end of the seventh millennium BC in Estonia, Belarus, Latvia, and northwest Russia.12 Here they adopted an advanced toolmaking technique known as surface pressure flaking, a process so unique that when discovered at a Mesolithic site in north or northeast Europe it is seen as clear evidence of a Swiderian presence there.
Pressure flaking is a process whereby a bone tool or antler is used to trim a biface (an implement shaped on both faces) by very carefully applying pressure to its edges in order to prize off rows of tiny flakes. This produces equally spaced, concave troughs, each one generally overlapping the next in line, which can reach as far as the center of the implement, giving it a perfect geometric finish.
Figure 20.1. Comparison of tanged points found in the fill at Göbekli Tepe (A and C) against two examples (B and D) from the Swiderian culture.
Although stone tools dating back seventy-five thousand years found at the Blombos Cave in South Africa show evidence of having been finished using pressure flaking, it is a technique not usually associated with European cultures at the end of the Paleolithic age. This said, pressure flaking was being used in eastern Anatolia to process obsidian (see chapter 22) during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period, ca. 8700 BC and 6000 BC, and was present at the Neolithic city of Çatal Höyük by 7000 BC.13
FINNO-UGRIC PEOPLES
There is firm evidence also that post-Swiderian groups entered Finland and established key settlements during the ninth millennium BC. Here their traditions are associated with the country’s Finno-Ugric speaking peoples, including the Sámi, a shamanic-based, reindeer-herding culture that exists to this day.14 Additionally, newly discovered settlement sites in Norway, dating to roughly the same age as those in neighboring Finland, have revealed evidence of a blade technology identified as post-Swiderian in nature.15 Similar tools have been found at a Mesolithic site in Lapland, northern Sweden, dated to ca. 6600 BC.16 What is more, extraordinarily accomplished stone tools finished using pressure flaking techniques were manufactured during the late Neolithic/early Bronze Age, ca. 3000–2500 BC, in parts of Scandinavia (Denmark in particular), and this can be put down to the presence of technologically advanced cultures deriving from the post-Swiderian tradition.
All this implies that some of the earliest influences on Finnish, Scandinavian, and Baltic ethnicity, culture, stone technology, and, very likely, mythology might well have originated with the Swiderian reindeer hunters, whose original homeland was the forests, steppes, and river valleys of Central and Eastern Europe. Yet who exactly were the Swiderians? Where did they come from, and what did they look like?
HUMAN HYBRIDS
Anatomically speaking, the Swiderians have been described as “tall . . . long-headed, [and] thin faced.”17 It is something confirmed by noted Lithuanian anthropologist Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994), who in 1956 detailed the discovery eight years earlier, in 1948, of a partial cranium, minus its lower jaw, at Kebeliai, near Priekulė in Lithuania. Dating to the end of the Paleolithic age, when Swiderian settlements occupied the area, it is said to have been “massive, dolichocephalic [that is, long headed], with strong proclivity [inclination] of the forehead, prominent and massive brow ridges and a narrow forehead.” In her opinion the strange skull “was sapiens, but had Neanderthaloid elements, in other words, [it] was a Neanderthal-sapiens hybrid.”18 Gimbutas spoke also of a “closely related” cranium dating again to the end of the last glacial age, this one discovered on the Skhodnia River, northwest of Moscow,19 where Swiderian groups are known to have existed at this time.
A third skull of interest, attributed to the post-Swiderian Kunda culture and found in a pit paved with stones at Kirsna in the district of Marijampolė in southern Lithuania, Gimbutas describes as “hyperdolichocephic [that is, extremely long headed] . . . narrow faced, high-orbited,” and resembling the “Brünn skull of central Europe.”20
The “Brünn skull” mentioned refers to one of a number of examples, all very similar, unearthed in 1891 at Brünn (modern Brno), the capital of Moravia in what is today the Czech Republic. Here human remains dating back as much as twenty-five thousand years were found that had a slightly different physiognomy to the pre-existing Cro-Magnon population that had entered Europe from Africa around forty-three thousand years ago.21 Whereas the Cro-Magnon were broad-faced, large-headed individuals, the Brünn skulls displayed “extreme elongation and dolichocephaly,”22 that is, their craniums were long and narrow. They also had strong chins, high cheekbones, low, wide-set eye orbits, and, like the Kebeliai example, prominent brow ridges.23
Similar skulls from the same human population were unearthed three years later in 1894 at PÅ™edmost (modernly spelt Predmostí), also in the Czech Republic. Fourteen complete skeletons and the remains of six others had been placed in a tight circle within a pit, their bodies contracted into a squatting position and surrounded by a bank of stones. The size of the limbs of these individuals indicated that they were of “large stature.”24 The finds at PÅ™edmost led anthropologists of the period to start referring to this unknown human type as “Brünn-PÅ™edmost man” and even Homo pÅ™edmostensis.25
Speculation mounted in the early twentieth century that the Brünn population of the Upper Paleolithic age were in fact “Neanderthaloids,” either Neanderthal-human hybrids and/or the remnants of an intermediary stage between the two species,26 ideas that almost certainly influenced the observations made by Marija Gimbutas in 1956 regarding the strange physiognomy of the Kebeliai skull.
It is thus possible that the Swiderians of Central and Eastern Europe were directly related to the Brünn population and that both either evolved from or contained within their communities Neanderthal-human hybrids of quite striking appearance, having elongated heads, long faces, high foreheads, prominent brow ridges (a specific Neanderthal trait), high cheekbones, large jaws (a Cro-Magnon trait), and an increased height. It was a physiognomy inherited by post-Swiderian cultures, such as the Kunda, who are elsewhere described as tall with elongated skulls and narrow faces.27
That the Swiderians might have been related to the Brünn population that appeared in Central Europe sometime around twenty-five thousand years ago is an extraordinary realization. Yet it is a conclusion strengthened in the knowledge that the Swiderians might well have inherited one of the most accomplished and mysterious traditions of the Upper Paleolithic age—that of the Solutrean, a matter we explore next.
Plate 1. The fig-mulberry tree that stands on the summit of Göbekli Tepe in southeast Turkey. This place has long been sacred to the native Kurds of the region, as seen from the presence here of a small cemetery.
Plate 2. View of Göbekli Tepe from the northwest, showing the main group of sanctuaries built more than eleven thousand years ago. The two giant monoliths in the foreground belong to Enclosure D, the most sophisticated structure uncovered to date.
Plate 3. Archaeologists survey the bedrock impression left by the former presence there of the Felsentempel (German for “rock temple”), otherwise known as Enclosure E.
Plate 4. Pillars belonging to Göbekli Tepe’s Enclosure A, the first structure to be uncovered, during the 1995–96 digging seasons. Visible in the center is Pillar 2, showing an auroch, a leaping fox, and a wading bird, most likely a crane.
Plate 5. Göbekli Tepe’s Enclosure B, which lies immediately to the north of Enclosure A. The two T-shaped pillars to the right stand at its center, each one with a leaping fox on its inner face. Do they represent the cosmic trickster?
Plate 6. The leaping fox on the inner face of Enclosure B’s Pillar 10. Note the graffito boar carved immediately beneath it.
Plate 7. Göbekli Tepe’s Enclosure C from the north. Note the remains of its twin central pillars (the eastern one encased in wood), as well as the twin standing stones acting as its southern entranceway.
Plate 8. One arm of the U-shaped portal, dubbed the “
Lion’s Gate,” that marked the entrance into the long corridor, or dromos, that enabled access to Enclosure C. The strange quadruped that caps its termination is thought to be a feline of some sort.
Plate 9. Pillar 37, the western of the two great monoliths that stand at the center of Enclosure C. Like the twin pillars in Enclosure B, it has a leaping fox carved on its inner face. This animal faces south, toward the entrant who walks between the twin monoliths in order to access the sky world.
Plate 10. The author surveys Göbekli Tepe’s unfinished monolith, partly hewn out of the bedrock around a quarter of a mile (400 meters) from the main enclosures. It is as much as 22 feet (6.9 meters) in length and 6.5 feet (2 meters) broad, with an estimated weight of 50 metric tonnes (approximately 55 U.S. tons).
Plate 11. Decoration on the right-hand side of the waist belt on Pillar 18, the eastern central monolith in Enclosure D. It shows a combination of C and H glyphs.
Plate 12. Pillars 31 and 18, the central monoliths of Enclosure D. Note the long arm of the eastern pillar, which seems to be almost holding the fox. See also the way that the T-shaped head is tilted toward those who approach from the south.
Gobekli Tepe Page 17