The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe Read online

  The section on Sequences of cultural interaction and cultural change complements many of these themes by exploring in greater detail the issues of cultural interaction, stability, and transformation. The transition in European Russia and parts of the Baltic was long and drawn out. Here ceramics were used for centuries by those practising hunting, gathering, and fishing, and persisted as agricultural practices spread in the region. These northern ceramic traditions developed independently from those of south-east and central Europe, where the initial spread of the Neolithic was more rapid. Even when ceramics derived from central European farming traditions appeared in parts of southern Scandinavia they were not always used for agricultural products: analysis of lipids and charred remains in early Neolithic TRB (Funnel Beaker) vessels from Denmark reveal dairy products for some vessels and freshwater fish for others, for instance (Craig et al. 2011). In central and south-east Europe dramatic but patchy expansion over a large area was often followed by processes of geographical infilling and a variety of other locally varied processes such as increasing levels of sedentism, settlement nucleation, and/or cultural fragmentation (Chapman, Chapter 8). When new areas were again settled, this was often accompanied by a marked change in material culture and practices. Thus when a broadly Balkan-style Neolithic spread into central Europe, complex tell settlement and elaborate clay artefacts (pottery, figurines) gave way and a central-European-style Neolithic dominated by longhouses developed (Gronenborn and Dolukhanov, Chapter 10; cf. Last, Chapter 14; Coudart, Chapter 16). Equally, the subsequent and more divergent trajectories across north-western Europe developed their own character, often drawing on distinctive features of landscapes, environments, climates—and even indigenous communities—in that region (Thorpe, Chapter 11; cf. Brophy, Chapter 17, Larsson, Chapter 18). This section also outlines patterns of cultural change beyond Neolithic beginnings, particularly the widespread social changes of the late Neolithic or Copper Age. During this period there was, for example, significant regionalization in all aspects of cultural identity with often staggering levels of material diversity, whilst at the same time far-flung regions became connected in new ways as new sets of material became desirable.

  Chapters in both sections bring home the significance of environmental factors and demography, for too long either presented as ‘deterministic’ or shunned because of that perception by many accounts of the past 40 years (see, e.g., Gronenborn 2005; Bocquet-Appel 2009; Vander Linden 2011). These issues require reappraisal in our accounts of Neolithization and subsequent developments. As a number of contributors demonstrate, to continue to ignore them is to deny that early farming societies were susceptible to climatic fluctuations, the productivity of their crops and herds, and the ebb and flow of population numbers. This is forcefully expressed by Dolukhanov and Gronenborn (Chapter 10), who emphasize the significance of crises, directly or indirectly relating to major climatic events, in shaping the course of the Neolithic of central and eastern Europe. Yet even areas such as the Alpine lakes, where changes in climate could have marked impacts, were not settled or abandoned exclusively in response to environmental parameters (Menotti, Chapter 15), and the most satisfying explanations invoke multiple causes for social transformations (e.g. Guilaine, Chapter 4, Malone, Chapter 9). Thus, contributors emphasize the importance of exploring the varied reactions of different communities to environmental events. Brown et al. (Chapter 2) outline how regionally differentiated, locally mediated, changing human–environment relations have an important part to play in our accounts, whilst Shennan (Chapter 7) stresses the potential of supplementing our meta-narratives of the Neolithic with local demographic histories. Müller (Chapter 3) goes one step further by modelling demographic developments and land use patterns around the tell of Okolište in Bosnia. These are offered as starting points for interpretation: it is essential to ask how different communities (consisting not just of human beings, but animals, plants, buildings, and artefacts—even materials and supernatural entities; see below) reacted to changes in environmental affordances, and how, in turn, their actions shaped their surroundings and altered their environments.

  These sections of the volume also highlight how interpretations differ across Europe. One of the most apparent schisms in debate concerns the processes behind the spread of the Neolithic, and most notably the roles played by ‘indigenous’ communities and ‘migrating’ farmers. All the chapters in these initial sections deal with this to varying degrees. Especially in Britain, migration was rejected by large parts of the research community from the 1980s until recently, partly because the focus had shifted to regional and local analyses, partly because migration as the large-scale movement of people from one area to another was understood in simplistic terms, and partly because it was associated with culture-historical and processual approaches. In common with certain areas of northern Europe and the Baltic (Dolukhanov and Gronenborn, Chapter 10), the origins of the British Neolithic were seen in the adoption of farming by native hunters and gatherers. Some of these ideas were also applied to continental Europe (e.g. Whittle 1996; Kind 1998; cf. Scharl 2004), where they now have to contend with mounting evidence for large-scale migration, at least in the case of the early Neolithic of central Europe (Brandt et al. 2013). Migration has even made a much-needed, if occasionally polemical, comeback for Britain and other parts of north-western Europe (e.g., Sheridan 2010, inter alia; Rowley-Conwy 2011), supported by recent scientific advances which demonstrate that most domesticated animal and plant species were introduced from elsewhere (Tresset, Chapter 6), most likely by migrants. Elsewhere, migration was never so wholeheartedly rejected, and its relevance to the Neolithization of south-eastern, central, and Mediterranean Europe is explored in this volume (Guilaine, Chapter 4; Müller, Chapter 3; Schier, Chapter 5; Malone, Chapter 9), with considerable emphasis on the relative role of newcomers and indigenes. Researchers now see this as a complex process with differing kinds of constituent events, and are considering exactly when and how different overlapping processes of change occurred, as well as focusing on the historical events by which new media first appeared in any region (e.g. Garrow and Sturt 2011; Gronenborn and Petrasch 2010; Whittle et al. 2011). Monolithic and mono-causal explanations are giving way to nuanced local narratives in which specific episodes of activity are enmeshed with unfolding and cumulative processes of change at a wider scale.

  The next step is to identify different scales and kinds of migration and other mechanisms of diffusion, from inter-marriage over several generations to, say, the movement of entire communities in one season. Processes of ‘internal colonization’—in which environments close to currently occupied ones, but different in character (such as wetlands or higher altitudes), are settled—can coincide with new material culture boundaries expressed as a proliferation of regional cultural groupings, for instance in the case of the later Neolithic of central Europe. These are interspersed with periods in which certain aspects of material culture—and perhaps identities—are shared over wide areas, and occasionally connected with an expansion event, for instance in the case of the third-millennium Yamnaya culture (Schier, Chapter 5). At other times, for instance with the Bell Beaker phenomenon (Vander Linden, Chapter 31) or Corded Ware groups (Schier, Chapter 5), migration may have involved few people but wide geographical areas and a substantial cultural impact, often in spheres of activity particularly visible to archaeologists, such as metalwork, pottery, and burial practice. In either case, neither migration nor adoption should be seen as easy answers: they are the beginnings of interpretation rather than its end point, with their scale, reasons, modalities, and local impacts still to be determined. The dynamics between migration, individual mobility, colonization, and cultural trajectories are hence once again among the more exciting research questions to pose.

  As contributors to this first section make clear, essential to such a debate is the importance of unpacking ‘Neolithization’ as complex and multi-stage across any one region. More specifically, it is evident
that the ‘Wave of Advance’ model, and the following period of stability amongst agricultural communities, is a misleading oversimplification, as demonstrated by Müller (Chapter 3) and Guilaine (Chapter 4), who envisage a sequence of rapid expansion, stagnation, and renewed expansion following a period of cultural change for the arrival of the Neolithic in the Balkans and Mediterranean respectively. Similarly, Schier (Chapter 5) sees alternate episodes of very fast spread and stagnation across central and eastern Europe. In this way, the Neolithic unfolded in varied ways, with the consequence that demography, environment, and various socio-cultural factors will have been of varied significance in different scenarios.

  Further work is still needed on how and why Neolithic practices and products spread, as well as on why they did not at other times, and new approaches are now emerging. For instance, the idea that Neolithic goods were ‘prestigious’ to neighbouring Mesolithic communities has long been popular. It may be that some forager or fisher communities were attracted to exchange with farming communities for various reasons, even travelling long distances for this purpose (Thomas 2013, chapter 8). Yet, as (Rowley-Conwy 2014; Layton and Rowley-Conwy 2013) has pointed out, the understanding of Neolithic goods as prestigious to others relies on analogies with seventeenth to twentieth-century AD colonial contact with its material asymmetries that do not fit the slighter differences between European Neolithic and Mesolithic communities. For instance, interactions between Ertebølle and Linearbandkeramik (LBK) or Rössen communities during the millennium or more when they co-existed have been rethought recently (Layton and Rowley-Conwy 2013; Bogucki 2008; Gronenborn 2009, 2010). LBK and Rössen Neolithic communities acquired, adopted, or copied more elements of Mesolithic material culture than has been conventionally realized, including T-shaped antler axeheads, bone chisels, decorated bone ornaments, bows and arrows, microlithic tools, and in one case even a pointed-base pot. Whilst Neolithic communities may have treated some of these objects as prestigious (e.g. placing antler axeheads or decorated bone ornaments in burials at Brześć Kujawski—Bogucki 2008, 55–58), there is less evidence that Mesolithic communities understood Neolithic artefacts in this way, putting Danubian shafthole axes to the same uses as traditional local designs (Rowley-Conwy, 2014) and showing little interest in LBK or Rössen ceramics, whilst adopting pottery derived from hunter-fisher-gatherers to the north-east around 4600 BC. By and large these Mesolithic communities did not readily adopt agriculture, nor seemingly treat the artefacts of Neolithic communities as special, forcing us to question the seductive idea that a desire for prestigious goods was the thin end of a wedge that led to the adoption of agriculture.

  A further area of contention lies in how archaeologists identify prehistoric communities from material remains. The concept of archaeological cultures has been central to classifying the diversity of material culture and architecture, ways of living with and subsisting on plants and animals, ways of treating the dead, and so on, since the early twentieth century—and continues to be seen as significant in many parts of central, southern, and eastern Europe, as shown by many contributions to this volume. Elsewhere, the concept has been widely dismissed or at least strongly critiqued (e.g. Winter 2009; Gramsch and Sommer 2011). The emerging consensus is that simplistic and universalizing equations of ‘archaeological culture’ with ethnic group are inappropriate, but that the coherence of some archaeological traits and assemblages nonetheless demands explanation—as does any strong coincidence of genetic markers with such archaeological cultures. Ethnicity is complex, and ideas about group identity may be framed in varying ways. In some cases, European Neolithic communities may have identified themselves with reference to biological, social, and/or mythic forms of ancestry. Generating traditions of artefacts and buildings that replicated ancestral things and structures might have been another important factor alongside or alternative to these forms of ancestry and identity. Group or ethnic identities might be more important at some times than others, more or less fluid, more or less shared and expansive, subject to sudden or gradual change—contextual analyses are needed to resolve these issues in each case.

  Interpretations of cultures or societies are intimately connected with how we understand the constitution of past communities. People sharing material culture traits would not necessarily see themselves as forming a distinct community, and we must consider carefully how the production, use, circulation, and transmission of objects and practices can bring about various identities. In addition, traditional archaeological understandings of ‘culture’, ‘society’, and ‘community’ have been questioned, and the point made that such entities are composed of animals, plants, places, substances, and things, as well as human beings (e.g. Fowler 2004, 95; Harris 2014; Webmoor 2007). Hence, there is opportunity for revitalizing the study of the distributions of specific media, practices, and people, and the concept of ‘archaeological cultures’ may be a useful way to explore the emergence, effect, spread, mutation, and dissipation of inter-related and changing traditions of practice (cf. Robb 2008). For instance, Müller (Chapter 3) illustrates how economic, social, and ritual spheres reacted quite differently during the late Neolithic of different areas, implying there was not ‘one’ social or cultural trajectory across south-east Europe, but a mosaic of development in which it is hard to draw clear boundaries. Equally significant here are the relations between different sections of society, such as the young or old, male or female, and those born into versus those marrying into a community. ‘Society’ is often tacitly envisaged as unitary and pulling in the same direction, yet this is merely an assumption, and multiple inter-woven societies—some denser than others, some larger-scale than others, some more rigid than others—based on various categories of identity and kinds of practices may have co-existed without forming a singular coherent whole. Social differences developed during the Neolithic, as is perhaps best illustrated in the late Neolithic or Copper Age, when there is an increasing emphasis on strictly demarcating gender in burial rites throughout the Balkans (Borić, Chapter 49), in the Corded Ware and Bell Beaker horizons (Schier, Chapter 5; Vander Linden, Chapter 31), and in some Mediterranean traditions (Robb, Chapter 50); but the ways in which this was manifested and the degree to which it related to daily routines and differences in autonomy or efficacy in inter-personal relations may have varied. Social differentiation was probably widespread during the Neolithic, but it took many different forms and rarely coalesced into a single hierarchical arrangement.

  NEOLITHIC WORLDS, NEOLITHIC LIVES (AND DEATHS)

  One intention of the present volume was to grasp the breadth and diversity of evidence and interpretation by inviting as wide a range of scholars as possible to comment on major types of archaeological evidence for Neolithic daily life and worldviews. There are sections on Houses, habitation, and community; Subsistence and social routine; Materiality and social relations; Monuments, rock art, and cosmology; and Death, bodies, and persons. The aim of each is to demonstrate the spatial and chronological variability of the evidence and to explore its implications.

  This part begins with a consideration of domestic space in Houses, habitation, and community. Sedentism, or settling down, has long been regarded as a defining feature of an agricultural way of life, although the two aspects did not necessarily always emerge together (Guilaine, Chapter 4; Papaconstantinou, Chapter 13). Both between and within regions, there was great diversity in the extent to which permanent, long-lived buildings or settlements were created. Long-running research traditions in many areas have amassed a wealth of data on domestic architecture, which suggest that Neolithic people regularly chose to live in larger, more permanent settlement agglomerations than ever before, their individual dwellings often impressive buildings. Elsewhere the evidence can often be less rich, reflecting the ephemeral nature of architecture as well as possibly more mobile inhabitation strategies, perhaps with a greater role for herding. This has long been argued for the Neolithic sequence in much of Britain (Brophy, Chapter 17), the b
eginning of the Neolithic in Spain (Papaconstantinou, Chapter 13), and in later phases of the Neolithic for parts of southern Scandinavia (Larsson, Chapter 18) and the Balkans (Raczky, Chapter 12). This distinction between house-rich and house-poor areas and phases is intriguing and remains a key focus of research (e.g. Hofmann and Smyth 2013). We still need to explain why houses (Last, Chapter 14; Coudart, Chapter 16) and even settlements (e.g. in south-eastern Europe: Raczky, Chapter 12) were sometimes monumental but at other times slighter and less elaborate—and the extent to which these changes relate to other spheres of life, such as the creation and use of enclosures or other monuments, subsistence routines, or burial.

  Houses were not only architecturally varied, but may have also been built for different reasons. In Britain (Brophy, Chapter 17; Garrow, Chapter 38), the relative paucity of houses has often been cited in support of the uptake of the Neolithic by indigenous foragers, who remained more mobile. Substantial houses were perhaps too quickly labelled as having only ritual, ceremonial, or symbolic functions, such as the ‘halls’ current for a short period during the beginning of the Neolithic in southern Scotland (Thomas 1996). Restricting interpretation in this way risks under-appreciating diversity in Neolithic ways of life and inhabitation. Furthermore, dwellings may have left little or no subsoil traces, even if communities occupied the same locale for decades or repeatedly returned to the same place for generations. Both Brophy and Garrow paint a picture of diversity, from the ‘broad spectrum exploitation’ of wild and domestic foodstuffs evident in East Anglian pits to the caches of burnt cereals at Scottish timber halls. There was significant variability in occupation sites in the British Neolithic and in the scale and nature of mobility, and regional and chronological patterns are coming into ever-sharper focus.