79
7979
Chapter 4
THE SPREAD OF FARMING INTO
CENTRAL EUROPE
As we saw in the previous chapter, after a pause of around 300–400 years
at the northern edge of the Aegean farming spread rapidly through the
Balkans from about 8200 BP, reaching the southern edge of the Carpathian
Basin and southern Transylvania within 200 years. There the farming frontier
stopped again. It was 400–500  years later that the expansion resumed,
with the beginning of what is generally referred to by its German name as
the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) Culture, after the characteristic bands of incised
decoration on the pottery (Fig 4.1). It provides what has become the paradigmatic
example of the archaeology of the first farmers in Europe, and has
been the focus of many debates about the processes that led to the spread of
farming.The main reason for this is its extensive and striking settlement record
of large post-built longhouses (see Fig 4.2), which have been revealed in their
thousands across Central Europe,from Hungary to the Paris Basin,in the postwar
period as a result of large-scale open area rescue excavations in advance
of open-cast mining, road-building and industrial developments. The Early
Neolithic settlements of the southern Balkans, and later of south-east Europe
as a whole, were characterised by the build-up of settlement layers derived
from collapsed mud-brick and wattle-and-daub built houses.In contrast,in the
environmental conditions of Central Europe there was no such accumulation
of sediment as the result of settlement activity. On the contrary, in most places
there has been significant erosion, so that all that have survived are the lower
parts of pits and post-holes; houses with their floors intact, commonplace in
the Balkans, are still virtually unknown despite the thousands that have been
excavated. The lack of stratigraphy has led to the devotion of an enormous
amount of effort to constructing chronologies of the sites by other means,
especially through seriation of the ceramic assemblages preserved in the pits,
so that many sites and regions have finer grained relative typo-chronologies
than virtually any other period in prehistory. Absolute chronologies, on the
other hand, have remained problematic, except in the broadest terms, because
the resolution of radiocarbon dates over the period concerned is relatively
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The Spread of Farming into Central Europe80
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poor and archaeologists in some regions have been correspondingly reluctant
to pay for them.
Recent work (see below) has shown that the LBK originated inTransdanubia,
in present-day western Hungary, and adjacent parts of Austria, from the local
late Starčevo Culture,which had developed as part of the north Balkan expansion
that we saw in the last chapter. Beginning c.7600–7500 BP, by c.7300
BP it had spread westwards as far as the river Rhine, over 1000 km away, and
northwards into north-central Poland, on the edge of the North European
Plain. Less than 300 years later it had reached Normandy in the west, and the
Ukraine, nearing the coast of the Black Sea, in the east (see Fig 4.3a for the
LBK distribution, and Fig 4.3b for sites mentioned in this chapter).Across the
whole area its archaeological record is remarkably uniform, not just in the
architecture of the houses but also in the pottery, the crop-based agriculture
and in soil preferences and settlement locations.The speed of its initial spread
across such a large area of continental Europe has always seemed surprising,
and this,combined with the distinctiveness of the LBK Culture and its marked
difference from the Early Neolithic cultures of the Balkans, has provided the
main basis for a long-standing debate on whether the expansion was the result
of the rapid adoption of crops, animals and a farming way of life by local
hunter-gatherers or the dispersal of immigrant farmers spreading from the
south-east.
THE GENETIC EVIDENCE FOR THE MECHANISM OF LBK
EXPANSION
As we saw in the last chapter, this debate is now being resolved in favour of
the dispersal view as a result of the growing number of analyses of ancient
DNA from human skeletons, initially from mtDNA but now increasingly
using the huge amounts of information available in whole-genome data. In
effect, over a remarkably short time, the ancient DNA evidence has become
strong enough to provide the framework for the archaeology of the spread
Fig 4.1. Examples of earlier and later LBK pottery. Reproduced from plates 6.3
and 29.7 in Die Bandkeramik im Merzbachtal auf der Aldenhovener Platte, Boelicke et al.,
1994, Habelt, Bonn, with permission from the publisher.
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81
Fig 4.2. a) Plan and reconstruction of an LBK house. Reproduced with permission,
from fig 46 in Jahrbuch Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz 35, Lüning, J.,
Frühe Bauern in Mitteleuropa im 6. und 5. Jahrt. v. Chr., pp. 27–93, 1988.
Fig 4.2. b) Plan of the Langweiler 8 LBK settlement in the Merzbach valley.
Reproduced from Die Bandkeramik im Merzbachtal auf der Aldenhovener Platte,
Boelicke et al., 1994, Habelt, Bonn, with permission from the publisher.
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The Spread of Farming into Central Europe82
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of farming in general, and the LBK in particular, rather than vice versa, so
it is here that we need to start. In 2009 a comparison of ancient mtDNA
samples from European Mesolithic human skeletons with samples from LBK
bones (Bramanti et al., 2009) found that the two populations were strongly
differentiated; there was a vanishingly small probability that the LBK farmers
could be descended from the Mesolithic foragers. Subsequent analyses have
only confirmed this.
We saw in the last chapter that the first farmers in the northern Balkans
were overwhelmingly of Aegean–Anatolian ancestry.The LBK farmer genome
data now available (Haak et al.,2015;Lipson et al.,2017) show the same pattern.
In the LBK origin area ofTransdanubia the average hunter-gatherer ancestry is
only around 1%.Further west,in Germany,the corresponding figure is around
4%, with the additional hunter-gatherer admixture being acquired from individuals
with genomes of the ‘Western Hunter Gatherer’ (WHG) group in
Central Europe after c.7500 BP as the farming population expanded rapidly
westwards.
In other words, the expansion of farming into the Carpathian Basin and
then across Central Europe with the LBK was the result of a demographic
expansion from the south-east and ultimately from the Aegean and Anatolia.
THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL RECORD OF FARMER–FORAGER
INTERACTION
The recent genetics results have obvious implications for what we should
expect archaeologically of the farming expansion into Central Europe. If the
evidence points to very low levels of hunter–gatherer admixture then we
Fig 4.3. a) The distribution of the LBK. Reproduced, with permission, from fig 4 of
Jahrbuch Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz 35, Lüning, J., Frühe Bauern in
Mitteleuropa im 6. und 5. Jahrt. v. Chr., pp. 27–93, 1988.
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83
Fig4.3.b)MapofsitesandregionsmentionedinChapter 4.
83
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The Spread of Farming into Central Europe84
84
should expect very little archaeological evidence of farmer–forager interaction,
whether because there were very few foragers present to interact with
or because they kept separate from one another, or some combination of
the two.
Just as in the case of the Balkans discussed in the last chapter, on ecological
grounds we would expect Mesolithic population levels to have been
very low away from riverine areas with rich aquatic resources because the
oak-lime forest cover that had developed in lowland Central Europe in
the course of the Early Holocene would only have supported low densities
of prey animals (e.g. Discamps, 2014). For the more easterly part of the
LBK region a recent review of the evidence (Kaczanowska and Kozłowski,
2014) makes clear that there was very little Mesolithic settlement in the
LBK origin area of western Hungary and the same is true of adjacent
Lower Austria, where only three putatively Late Mesolithic sites are known.
Importantly, the sites around the west Hungarian source of radiolarite, a
high-quality lithic raw material widely exchanged among early LBK sites,
are not Mesolithic, as has been claimed, thus the proposal that early farmer
groups were interacting with local foragers to obtain the material must be
rejected, an argument confirmed by the fact that there is no evidence of
radiolarite use at the Late Mesolithic sites in Lower Austria. North of the
Carpathians, in contrast, traces of Late Mesolithic occupation are extensive
but they occur in areas of sandy soils, avoiding the loess, the fertile
wind-blown sediments laid down during the Ice Age, preferred by the LBK.
Despite the fact that these areas were intermixed, so that settlement was
‘mosaic’ in character, there are no indications of Mesolithic impacts on
LBK lithics, but isolated finds of LBK polished tools such as adzes do occur
in Mesolithic areas, though not in actual Mesolithic assemblages. A similar
situation is found in the Saxony region of Germany: farmers and foragers
co-existed in different soil/ecological zones but with little initial contact,
which only developed later (Stäuble and Wolfram, 2013 and see below).
At the western end of the LBK distribution,a study of trends in Mesolithic
occupation in the Low Countries,on the basis of the chronological and spatial
distribution of microliths, found that those areas of the Low Countries
that subsequently became LBK early farming nuclei had long been devoid
of Mesolithic occupation (Vanmontfort, 2008). It appears that the loess
areas settled by the incoming LBK farmers were marginal to already lowdensity
Mesolithic populations. In general, the evidence for farmer–forager
interaction during the LBK in the west is slight. In the Netherlands and
Belgium, for example, there are no definite occurrences of Mesolithic
artefacts on LBK sites, while at least the great majority of the LBK artefacts
found outside the loess settlement areas do not have Mesolithic associations,
suggesting that they represent special-purpose LBK sites (Amkreutz
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Farmer–Forager Interaction 85
85
andVanmontfort, 2008); recent finds of LBK-associated Limburg pottery at
sites in the marshland of the river Scheldt are equivocal in their significance
though at least one site has produced definite evidence of farmer–forager
contact (Crombé et al., 2015). The earliest LBK settlements in Germany
east of the Rhine and then in the Rhineland itself obtained much of their
flint from the Rijkholt source in the Netherlands, outside the LBK settlement
area at this time, so it is assumed that this implies contact with local
hunter-gatherers, but the evidence in terms of finds in LBK settlements is
slight.As in the eastern part of the LBK area, it is not until much later that
there is stronger evidence of contact.Whether the lithic technologies of the
western LBK were influenced by the local Mesolithic population remains
a matter of debate, with strong arguments made both for and against (e.g.
Löhr, 1994; Robinson et al., 2013).
The strongest evidence for interaction of some sort comes from the
presence of a specific, distinctive type of pottery, the La Hoguette type, found
both on early (but not the earliest) LBK sites in south-west Germany and
also by itself on a number of sites in the Rhône valley and further west, as
far as Normandy. From a detailed analysis of the technology and decoration
of a find of La Hoguette pottery that indicates a very high level of skill and
from a consideration of its regional context, Pétrequin and colleagues (2009)
conclude that it represents the expansion of a group from the south that had
acquired pottery, crops and farming skills from the early colonising farmers
who first settled on the coast of southern France early in the 8th millennium
BP (see Chapter 5).The occurrence of sherds on LBK sites presumably
indicates exchange and there are parallels between the distribution of La
Hoguette pottery and of Columbella shells that were arriving in the Upper
Rhine area during the Mesolithic. The other very distinctive pottery tradition
found on LBK sites in the north-west part of the LBK distribution,
which has also been regarded as indicative of non-LBK pottery traditions
and forager–farmer interaction, is Limburg pottery. However, a recent
detailed technical study sees it as probably a special-purpose variety of LBK
ware (Gomart, 2014), and it has no closed associations with Mesolithic flint
(Amkreutz et al., 2010).
In summary, hunter-gatherer populations in the loess areas of Central
Europe favoured by the LBK farmers existed at very low densities and had
little to do with the expanding farming groups. In fact, as we will see, the
distribution of the first farmers was restricted to certain extremely specific
environments that were very limited in extent. Outside these areas
hunter-gatherers must have continued to exist but are largely archaeologically
invisible. It was only when farming and farmers expanded their distribution
in the late 7th millennium BP that interaction on a larger scale
occurred (see Chapter 6).
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The Spread of Farming into Central Europe86
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LBK ORIGINS
While the Neolithic across the Balkans and the Aegean is generally agreed to
have considerable similarities in terms of material culture, the LBK is different
and represents much more of a break from the material culture of its south-east
European ancestors. In the past that could be ascribed to the impact of local
Mesolithic groups. Now that the genetic evidence has made this argument
untenable it needs to be seen in a different light.
As noted already,the LBK seems to have originated inTransdanubia,western
Hungary, and adjacent areas of Austria.Work in recent years has shown that
Starčevo occupation reached here, the north-west limit of its distribution,
c.7800 BP (Bánffy et al., 2016) and on its northern fringes the sites of Brunn/
Wolfholz on the outskirts of Vienna (Stadler, 2005) and SzentgyörgyvölgyPityerdomb
(Bánffy, 2004) in the Lake Balaton area seem to represent formative
sites of the LBK, overlapping with the local late Starčevo, c.7500 BP.
However, recent formal modelling suggests that the rapid LBK expansion did
not begin until the 74th century BP (Bánffy et al., 2016; Jakucs et al., 2016),
implying that it was even faster than previously thought.The site of Alsónyék
in southernTransdanubia, just outside the formative area, has a Starčevo occupation
beginning just after 7800 BP and continuing until c.7500 BP. It is then
abandoned and a new settlement lasting over 300 years is founded on the same
site c.7300 BP by people using early (but not formative) LBK pottery and
building LBK longhouses.
As with the other standstills in farming expansion, the reasons in the
Starčevo-LBK case remain unclear. One reason might be a need for cereal
crops to adapt genetically to more northerly temperate environments but the
only work carried out so far, on barley, suggests that the spread of a variety
with a mutation that switched off the sensitivity of the plant to increasing day
length was later than the initial spread of farming (Jones et al., 2013).Work on
emmer and einkorn wheat, much the most important LBK crops, remains to
be carried out, but it may be that the standstill is connected to the major cultural
reformulation that the LBK represents, for example the development of
the characteristic LBK longhouse, which may have been associated with new
patterns of kinship and residence.
It is proposed here that the origin of the LBK should be seen as an example
of the cultural equivalent of ‘peripatric speciation’ (Mayr, 1954; Rosenberg,
1994). This occurs when a small population on the edge of a larger one
becomes isolated from it.The formation of new cultural patterns such as that
which characterises the LBK is more likely to occur in small groups physically
separated to some degree from their parent population, for a variety
of reasons; the sanctions that help to maintain the existing pattern may be
weaker, for example, allowing social innovations. Moreover, the new pattern
that emerges is likely to have a considerable chance element to it, especially
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LBK Origins 87
87
founder effects, in that a small peripheral sub-population will not contain all
the elements of the parent population, or even necessarily a representative
sample, while innovations may be idiosyncratic.These founder effects will be
further enhanced by the chance vicissitudes arising from transmission in small
populations. Such patterns may be particularly prevalent in the context of
migration. If we think of this in terms of the tempo and mode of evolution,
the tempo on such occasions is fast, corresponding to punctuated rather than
gradual change, while the mode is the creation of a new branch of the evolutionary
tree,‘phylogenesis’ in the jargon, or evolutionary diversification.This
represents a very significant difference from the spread of farming into the
Balkans;the latter does not represent a cultural‘speciation’but a gradual development
(‘anagenesis’), through innovation, adaptation and no doubt some
drift, from its Aegean and Anatolian ancestors.
What evidence do we have for such a mechanism in this case? If founder
effects and drift are occurring then they should also be visible in the genetics
of the human population. Comparison of the Aegean and Anatolian
Early Neolithic genomes described in the last chapter with those from
Central Europe indeed produced evidence of founder effects in samples from
Hungary and Germany (Hofmanová et al., 2016). Similar evidence of founder
effects is seen in a marked reduction in the mtDNA genetic diversity of cattle
associated with the LBK,especially the more westerly samples,compared with
south-east Europe, and in high levels of genetic distance from regions to
the south-east closer to the location of initial cattle domestication (Scheu
et al., 2015).
A loss of diversity is also seen in the crops found in the archaeobotanical
assemblages from LBK sites compared with south-east Europe.The suggestion
that this might arise as a result of drift and founder effect was explored by Conolly
et al. (2008, following Colledge et al., 2005).They first of all excluded crops that
might have been deliberately dropped through selection owing to the changing
climatic and growing conditions as farming expanded to the north,such as lentil
and chickpea. In fact, even when sensitive crops and a number of rare species
were excluded,there was still a statistically significant loss of diversity in the LBK
compared with the Balkans,which might be accounted for by drift and founder
effect. In the event the actual reduction in diversity with the LBK was much
greater than that produced by the drift models constructed by Conolly et al. so
they rejected the hypothesis, suggesting instead that, in addition to the selective
factors leading to the dropping of environmentally sensitive crops like chickpea,
there was a cultural preference for the glume wheats, emmer and einkorn, the
only two cereals present in a majority of LBK sites. However, Pérez-Losada and
Fort (2011) were able to show that if you introduce a spatial dimension to the
simulation and consider only the small number of pioneering settlements at the
expansion front, then the observed reduction in diversity is indeed achieved, so
it may be that no further process is needed to account for it after all.
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The Spread of Farming into Central Europe88
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The basis for this is the phenomenon known as ‘surfing on the wave of
advance’, a process, like the wave of advance itself, first described for the genetics
of species range expansions (Edmonds et al., 2004; Excoffier and Ray,
2008). It results in a loss of genetic diversity in spatially expanding populations
because the few individuals at the front of the wave are likely to be the most
successful; the same will be true of their offspring. As a result, ‘the pioneer
genotypes are continually transmitted forward and surf along with the wave’
(Lehe et al.,2012: 1).The more likely it is that a mutation close to the wave front
becomes fixed, i.e. becomes the only one present, the more likely it is that it
will then dominate the gene pool when the expansion finishes, and the greater
the loss of genetic diversity.The argument is that the same applies to cultural
innovations: those that occur at the front of the wave are likely to become predominant
and,because the numbers at the wave front are small,chance will play
an important role in determining which ones prevail.This is relevant to the loss
of LBK diversity not just in subsistence and the genetics of the human population
but in other domains as well.The pottery is extremely uniform across
the broad area of the earliest LBK (Cladders, 2001), and far less diverse than its
Balkan ancestors, and it is only in the middle and late LBK that this changes.
But there is more going on here than just drift.The lack of innovation in the
LBK has often been pointed out (e.g. Sommer, 2001) and is at least as apparent
in the longevity of the striking architecture of the longhouses (Coudart, 1998)
and in the choice of site locations (see below) as in the crops and pottery already
mentioned.The close connection now demonstrated between the genetic and
cultural patterns suggests why, because it indicates a pattern of strongly vertical
cultural transmission from parents to children.This is inherently conservative
because it leaves little scope for the adoption of innovations from outside the
local group that challenge existing practices.The result is strong path depend-
ence: once a set of knowledge and practices has become established it defines
the range of options that can be envisaged in the future.
The picture we have then is of a group of communities with a common
origin that as a result of initial innovation and drift, on the borders of the
Balkan Early Neolithic koiné,developed a novel way of life which turned out to
be extremely successful as an adaptation and then became fixed in an extremely
conservative formula for their economic and cultural activities.This combined
with a strongly expansionist ethos that led them in many cases to make the
risky decision to move long distances in search of somewhere suitable to settle.
Promising dispersal opportunities are chances for increased successful fertility
and if others are already taking advantage of them it makes no sense to postpone
reproduction.
THE SPEED OF THE LBK SPREAD
Although the speed of the LBK expansion has always attracted attention, it
should be clear from what we have seen of the spread of farming into western
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The Speed of the LBK Spread 89
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Anatolia, the Aegean and the Balkans that it is not so exceptional. In all these
cases when expansion occurred it was rapid, following the ‘leapfrog’ or Lévy
flight pattern, but was then followed by a pause of several hundred years.The
LBK is one more example. Studies have clearly shown that the earliest LBK
was thinly distributed over a zone from Hungary to western Germany (see e.g.
Lenneis,2008: fig 1),including areas that were much more densely settled later
in the LBK, and the same is true of the LBK expansion further west, in northern
France (Dubouloz, 2012). In other words, here, as in the Aegean and the
Balkans, people were moving on from one area to the next long before those
areas had reached the occupation density that the LBK agricultural system
was later capable of supporting; in all these cases there was an initial phase of
long-distance dispersal, followed by short-distance infilling.This may have had
negative consequences in some cases through ‘Allee effects’, as discussed in
the previous chapter. In fact, this may be the reason that relatively few of the
very earliest LBK sites continue into later phases and that there was to some
degree a ‘recolonisation’ later in the LBK at much greater densities (Cladders
and Stäuble, 2003); the earliest settlements, especially those far away from the
founding zone, were often failures.
In the case of the LBK the speed of the spread would have been increased
by advection – preferential movement in the direction that gave colonisers the
best returns – in this case given by its focus on a spatially rather narrow band of
suitable micro-environments, the loess soil areas already mentioned, together
with a narrow range of temperature and precipitation conditions. The soils
that form on loess are extremely fertile because their high proportion of silt
particles provides both good water availability and aeration as well as easy plant
root penetration and cultivation; they are also rich in potassium and nitrogen.
Field experiments have demonstrated that there is a much smaller yield difference
between unfertilised and well-fertilised fields on deep loess soils than
on soils on other surface geologies, especially in drier conditions (Catt, 2001).
Zimmermann’s (2009b) detailed spatial analysis of the LBK in the Lower
Rhine Basin shows that sites were concentrated in small patches that were
relatively densely occupied at the time of the LBK population peak.Thus, in
this area where soils classified as suitable for early farming made up 11.6% of
the land area, settlement was largely concentrated in 3.8%, only a third of the
suitable area. Most of the difference can be accounted for by the fact that LBK
settlement seems to have been further restricted to areas with annual precipitation
of less than 800 mm, but even so it is clear that there were suitable
areas west of the Rhine where, at the height of LBK occupation, settlement
does not occur. Further east, the same environmental restrictions on the LBK
distribution, in terms of loess soils, annual rainfall between 500–800 mm and
annual mean temperature no lower than 7–80C, have also been demonstrated
for Austria by Lenneis (e.g. 2008), though here too there seem to have been
suitable areas that were never occupied. It is clear then that LBK pioneer
farmers were extremely particular about where they settled.This is illustrated
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The Spread of Farming into Central Europe90
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clearly by Fig 4.4,which shows the spatially limited nature of LBK occupation
at the scale of Germany as a whole. Moreover, those preferences seem to have
changed little over the course of the LBK, again pointing to the conservatism
of the agricultural system.The one exception to this pattern are the LBK communities
found on the non-loess soils of the North European Plain along the
lowerVistula and lower Oder in Poland, which might be argued to have ‘overshot’
the best areas in the long-distance search for new areas to colonise, rather
than filling in the prime habitats to the south (Bogucki et al., 2012).
The rich archaeological record of the LBK and its long history of research
make it possible to explore the processes involved in the expansion in more
detail than the regions examined in Chapter 3.Extensive data is now available on
LBK demography, both at broader and more local scales, and they confirm one
another. On the basis of studies of the number, size, and density of settlements
across a number of different regions, Petrasch (2001, 2010) calculated extremely
high population growth rates, between 0.9% and 2.7% per year, for the LBK.
Zimmermann et al. (2004: fig 15, table 6) estimate that there would have been
about 15,000 LBK households in western Central Europe in the 71st century BP,
Fig 4.4. Map of the distribution of LBK settlement in Germany. Reproduced from
fig 4 in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 75, Zimmermann,A. et al., Landscape
Archaeology in Central Europe, pp. 1–53, 2009, Cambridge University Press.
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LBK Economic and Social Organisation 91
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a population of 100,000 or more on the basis of the usual estimates of the number
of people per house.This implies an annual growth rate of c.2.4% given that
the LBK had started expanding 300 years earlier. Regional population patterns
inferred from summed radiocarbon probabilities (Shennan et al., 2013;Timpson
et al.,2014) (see Fig 4.5) also show significant increases.In all cases the population
grows rapidly before reaching a peak and then declining at the end of the LBK
in three of the four regions shown (see below).
In the LBK case these broad regional patterns are repeated at the microscale
where detailed work has been carried out. In the Lower Rhine Basin,
an area to the west of Cologne in Germany where there has been large-scale
excavation in advance of strip-mining for brown coal,we see population grow
to a peak after 200 years, followed by a dip and then a rise to a slightly higher
peak followed by decline and abandonment 100  years later (Zimmermann
et al., 2009a: fig 6) (see Fig 4.6). A detailed study of all the site records from
a small region of Moravia in the eastern Czech Republic, albeit with less
temporal resolution, shows a very similar picture (Kolář et al., 2016), while
Dubouloz (2012, 2008) comes to the same conclusions about demographic
patterns in the western LBK.
LBK ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL ORGANISATION
In terms of domestic animals the LBK does not differ markedly from its north
Balkan ancestors though cattle and pig tend to be more frequent and caprines
less so, but there are time trends within the LBK variation (Manning et al.,
2013a), for example, a tendency for there to be higher proportions of domestic
pig at the end of the LBK while cattle dominate in the preceding phase. More
striking is the trend in the exploitation of terrestrial wild animals, which is
highest in the earliest LBK and then declines. In the past this would have been
seen in terms of ‘Mesolithic influence’ but in the light of the genetics this is
no longer tenable. In fact, the early sites with high proportions of wild species
are all in southern Germany, where uplands with wild animals are closer to
agricultural areas, and this pattern continues there through the next phases, so
it is probably linked to source-sink ecological dynamics: there was a reservoir
of game populations that continued to fill the vacancies created by hunting.
In contrast, the evidence for the exploitation of terrestrial wild species in the
Polish LBK is negligible (Marciniak,2013).There is relatively little information
on the age-at-death distribution of the faunal assemblages and its relation to
different strategies for animal keeping, though what there is does not support
a specialised dairying pattern (Fraser et al., 2013); however, the occurrence of
specialised ceramic sieve vessels with residues confirming that they were used
for cheese-making is indicative that milking was important, most probably of
cattle (Salque et al.,2013).Moreover,there is every reason to believe from what
we know ethnographically that cattle were slaughtered for community events
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The Spread of Farming into Central Europe92
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such as feasts rather than to provide a daily meat ration,for which milk is likely
to have been much more important. Both cattle and pigs seem to have been
carefully controlled; no doubt the same is true of sheep and goats. In the case
of cattle and pigs this is indicated by the lack of mitochondrial evidence for
introgression of local aurochs genes into the domestic cattle and the evidence
that the domestic pigs from the LBK site of Eilsleben in Germany continued
to be of the Anatolian/Near Eastern mtDNA haplotype, which is not present
in pre-Neolithic wild pigs in Central Europe (Larson et al., 2007; Ottoni
et al., 2012). However, new still unpublished genomic data, which contains
much more information than mtDNA, is now suggesting that some introgression
with local aurochs, even if minimal, did occur and that, despite the
Fig 4.5. Radiocarbon population proxy for four regions in Central Europe:
a) Southern Germany; b) Rhineland and Hesse; c) Central Germany; d) Kuyavia.
a), c) and d) Data from EUROEVOL project; b) Data from EUROEVOL project
updated by Professor A. Bevan.
(a)
(c) (d)
(b)
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LBK Economic and Social Organisation 93
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Eilsleben finding,Anatolian pig lineages were already beginning to be replaced
by European ones during the Balkan earlier Neolithic (Burger, pers. comm.).
In any case, subsequently Near Eastern pig lineages died out completely and
were replaced by European ones.
We have already seen that the LBK crop agriculture system represented
a significant decrease in diversity in comparison with the Balkans, with the
majority of sites including only two cereals:  emmer and einkorn. Peas are
also widely found, as well as flax, while opium poppy occurs on later LBK
sites, though whether as a local domestication in the north-western LBK
or as an import from the west Mediterranean is currently unclear (Salavert,
2011). Now, however, we need to look more closely at how the agricultural
system functioned. Early LBK studies, such as those of Soudsky at the famous
Czech site of Bylany, postulated that its subsistence was based on slash-andburn
farming,with frequent movement of the settlements,one way to account
for the rapid spread. However, on the basis of a functional ecological analysis
of the weed species found in the archaeobotanical assemblages at LBK sites,
indicating a lack of the perennial weeds that would be expected in newly
cleared ground and a dominance of annual species, Bogaard (2004b) argued
that they indicated long-term cultivation of the same sites, resembling smallscale
‘garden’ agriculture, a continuation of the system that we have already
Fig 4.6. LBK population density in the Lower Rhine Basin. Reproduced from fig
6 in Human Biology: The International Journal of Population Genetics and Anthropology
81(2–3), Zimmermann,A. et al., Estimations of Population Density for Selected
Periods Between the Neolithic and AD 1800, pp. 357–380. Copyright © 2009 Wayne
State University Press.With permission from Wayne State University Press.
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The Spread of Farming into Central Europe94
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seen postulated for Anatolia, the Aegean and the Balkans.This argument was
later further supported by stable isotope analyses of carbonised seed remains
from LBK settlements, which showed increased nitrogen isotope values, indicative
of an enhancement of soil nitrogen, implying the addition of manure
to maintain fertility (Bogaard et al., 2013); this would be in keeping with the
evidence just mentioned that cattle and pigs were closely controlled. At the
site ofVaihingen, south-west Germany, for example, the δ15
N nitrogen values
were higher than those inferred for herbivore forage and imply an application
of 10–15 tons/hectare of manure on the basis of comparison with experimental
cereal-growing plots. Manuring at this rate would have been intensive
in terms of labour requirements but also in its land use, in its high inputs to a
small area. In any case, as we have seen, loess soils are capable of maintaining
moderate cereal yields even without the addition of fertiliser (Catt, 2001).The
argument that the cultivated areas were small is strengthened by the remarkably
low impact of the archaeologically highly visible LBK in local pollen
diagrams, where indicators of forest clearance and crop cultivation are generally
slight (see e.g. Bogucki et al., 2012; Lechterbeck et al., 2014), though see
Kreuz (2012: 70) for evidence of clearance in pollen spectra).This does not
mean that the rest of the landscape was unused, however. Isotope studies have
shown that least in some cases cattle were moved seasonally to non-loess areas,
even if those were not very far away (Knipper, 2011).
On the basis of assumptions about daily calorific needs and the yield of a
hectare of land, Kreuz (2012: 124) calculates that for the daily nutrition of a
community of 20 people for a year it would only have been necessary to use
c.10 ha, 3% of the available land within a kilometre radius of the settlement,
for growing crops, so it is clear that even if her yield estimates are considerably
exaggerated large numbers of people could easily be supported. On the basis
of figures calculated by Russell (1988) for the time taken to produce a kilo of
cereal per person per day, from preparing the field by hand to grinding the
grain, it would have taken about 25% of the available annual labour time.
At least as important as the basic framework of subsistence, however, is
how it was organised, both in economic and social terms.The most sustained
attempts to address such topics have been focussed on the site ofVaihingen just
mentioned (Bogaard et al.,2011).This was founded during the earliest LBK and
its occupation continued for c.450 years,through to the late LBK,during which
several phases can be distinguished. It is believed that at its height, in the earlier
LBK Flomborn phase,there were 40–50 longhouses,corresponding to 300–400
people on the most widely used estimate of the average number of people who
would have occupied a house, dropping to 15–18 houses at the transition to
the middle LBK.From an analysis of the characteristics of the archaeobotanical
assemblages and their distribution in relation to the different houses it has been
claimed that in the earlier periods of occupation different house groups had
differential access to specific cultivated areas over generations, and that one
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Population Ecology of the LBK Expansion 95
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group in particular had access to the best plots,those on loess-based soils nearest
to the village. This would certainly fit with the practice of intensive garden
cultivation and the labour investment in plots of land that this implies, but the
specific claims depend on the disputed identification of different parts of the
village as associated with different ‘clans’, while an attempt to find a similar
pattern at Langweiler 8, the dominant settlement in the Merzbachtal cluster in
the Lower Rhine area was unsuccessful (Zimmermann, pers. comm.).
Nevertheless,claims of inequality fit in with inferences that can be made from
strontium isotope studies of teeth from human skeletons to identify patterns
of mobility. They point to a widely occurring pattern of greater variability
among females than males, resulting from the fact that many more females
were non-local, i.e. they did not pass their early lives in the place where they
were buried (Bentley et al., 2012).The authors see this as pointing to patrilocal
residence patterns, where women moved on marriage to the residence
of their husband’s family.The pattern often occurs where there are kin group
property rights, such as land rights, that are inherited through the paternal
line. Males buried with distinctive stone adzes, made of material obtained by
long-distance exchange, also had more uniform isotope signatures than those
without from the same site, with values corresponding to those for loess soils,
pointing to inequality among males.
POPULATION ECOLOGY OF THE LBK EXPANSION
To gain more insight into the processes that produced these patterns we need
to return to the broader scale of the LBK expansion.As we have seen, it was
an overwhelmingly demic one similar in its pattern to that which brought
farming to the northernAegean and then to the Middle Danube;long-distance
movements took place leading to the colonisation of new places long before
existing settlement areas reached densities anywhere near the carrying capacity
of the Early Neolithic farming system. Generic reasons have been suggested
for the pattern, for example that Lévy flights represent an efficient search procedure
in situations of uncertainty,but the detailed data on the history of LBK
settlements makes it possible to look at relevant considerations in more detail.
As outlined by Shennan (2008),the basis for understanding the characteristics
of the LBK expansion is provided by principles derived from natural selection
thinking as they relate to decision-making concerning spatial behaviour
(Sutherland, 1996;Winterhalder and Kennett, 2006: 16).These principles predict
the distribution of individuals in relation to resources on the basis of the
‘ideal-free distribution’. When individuals (of any species) seeking to maximise
their probability of survival and reproductive success move into a new
area they will occupy the resource patch which gives them the best returns.
As more individuals occupy the patch the returns to each individual decline,
to the point that the returns to an individual from the best patch are no better
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The Spread of Farming into Central Europe96
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than those from the next best patch, which at this point has no occupants.
Now the returns from both patches are equal and they will be occupied indiscriminately
until such time as the population grows to the point at which
there is an equal benefit to be gained by occupying a still worse patch, and the
process is repeated, with the relative quality of the patches being reflected in
their different population densities.
When there is territoriality, however, the situation is different. Here the socalled
‘ideal despotic distribution’ applies (Fig 4.7).The first individual occupying
an area is able to select the best territory in the best patch. Subsequent
individuals settling there do not affect the first arrival,but have to take the next
best territory, and so on, until there comes a point where the next settler will
do just as well by taking the best territory in the next best patch. Subsequent
individuals will then take territories in either patch where the territories
are equally suitable. In contrast to the ideal-free distribution, where interference
competition from new settlers decreases the mean return for everybody,
including those who arrived first, in the case of the ideal despotic distribution
the returns depend on the order of settlement, so that the initial settlers of the
best territory in the patch will do best,so long as they can defend the territory
against anyone who might seek to take it from them.
In the case of the spread of farming into Europe, the new households being
formed as population expanded would have been evaluating the costs and
benefits of staying near their parents’ household or finding somewhere else,
following the principles of the ideal despotic distribution. In principle, all that
would have been required for further spatial expansion is a shift in the balance
of costs and benefits between accepting the next best local territory available
and taking the risk of finding and settling a new top quality patch some
distance away, allowing for the fact that to be the very first occupant of a
more distant patch might have disadvantages, as we have already seen. In fact,
Fig 4.7. The ideal despotic distribution. Reproduced from fig 1.5 in Sutherland,W.J.,
From Individual Behaviour to Population Ecology, 1996, Oxford University Press, with
permission from the publisher.
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Population Ecology of the LBK Expansion 97
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we need to qualify this somewhat.While there are settlements in which the
earliest phase consists of a single house (e.g. Strogen, Lenneis, 2008), in the
case where it was the first settlement in a local region it generally consisted of
several houses; for example, at Langweiler 8 in the Rhineland there were four
(Zimmermann, 2002), at Stephansposching in Bavaria it was between two and
six (Pechtl, 2012).This would have mitigated the risks of isolation.
In the light of these population ecology principles,it seems likely that in the
case of the LBK there was a massive advantage in being the founding settlement
in a high-quality area, so that the groups breaking away as settlements
grew and fissioned were always competing for this role. Thus, Kerig (2008)
was able to demonstrate that LBK settlement in Hesse in western Germany
followed the principles of the ideal despotic distribution, with the best territories
occupied first, while in the Aisne valley in northern France, at the
western end of the LBK distribution, long-lasting settlements were located
in places with higher proportions of land suitable for cereal agriculture than
short-lived ones (Dubouloz,2012).On this basis we expect the founding settlement
in a particular area to be the dominant one and this is generally what we
find.Vaihingen, already described, is one example and in fact has no local ‘offspring’settlements.Another
is Langweiler 8,just mentioned,the first settlement
founded in the valley of the Merzbach stream,which was occupied throughout
the c.400 years of the local LBK sequence and was always the largest (Boelicke
et al.,1994).Even if its location was only one of the best available in the region
from the farming point of view, it would have had founder advantage in terms
of control of local territory,and its leading position is also suggested by the fact
that it seems to have acted as a redistribution centre for lithic resources.These
were obtained from the major source of high-quality flint at Rijkholt, some
distance away to the west, either as a result of controlling exchange relations
with local foragers beyond the agricultural frontier or through direct access
to the source (Zimmermann, 2002). Moreover, it was at Langweiler 8 that a
ditched enclosure of possible ritual significance was constructed in the latest
local phases of LBK occupation, a subject to which we will return.
Bell and Winterhalder (2014) have shown that despotic conditions can
slow down rather than increase the rate of migration by increasing the time
required for the despotic habitat to reach carrying capacity, the opposite of
what is argued here, but their model assumes that it is only subordinates, as
opposed to dominants, that would want to move. In the LBK context, with
its patrilocal residence system and probable patrilineal inheritance, there is no
reason why it should not have been younger sons of successful founding lineages
who led fissioning community segments,rather than subordinates whose
wealth and reproduction had been restricted, as in the case of European aristocracies
whose primogeniture rules led to more risky but potentially lucrative
careers for younger sons, often in distant colonies. In studies of known
recent settlement fissioning, disputes and conflicts of various kinds have been
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The Spread of Farming into Central Europe98
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the motive (Walker and Hill, 2014). However, the small number of houses at
the earliest sites in different regions seems to indicate that their populations
were well below the 100–200 associated with significantly increased levels of
scalar stress (Alberti, 2014), though this certainly changed in the course of the
LBK. In the expansionary context described here there may simply have been
a socio-cultural expectation of moving on and establishing founder advantage.
Initially then there was rapid settlement fission associated with founding
new settlement nuclei in new regions, quite possibly involving ‘leapfrog’
migration in the sense described by Sahlins (1961), citing Bohannan (1954)
for the Tiv in Nigeria, with groups from within the already established LBK
area moving out beyond the frontier – this is suggested by the long-distance
connections of some early sites (Schade-Lindig and Schade, 2010).Then there
was local infilling, with founding settlements increasing in size and small,
local daughter settlements being established; this is seen, for example on the
Aldenhovener Platte in the western Rhineland (Zimmermann, 2002) but also
in the Wetterau region north of Frankfurt (Schade, 2004). Relatively rapidly
though, as a result of this infilling, the individual micro-regions began to fill
up and reach a ceiling.The empirical existence of these ceilings is visible in
the demographic proxy data discussed above but what produced the limits on
equilibrium population is unclear.As we have seen earlier, Zimmermann has
argued that, even allowing for the very restrictive soil and climate conditions
required for LBK agriculture, there would still have been more than enough
land available for the small-scale intensive agriculture that was most probably
practised, but ensuring the availability of fodder for cattle would have required
very large territories. Schmidt et al. (2004) have suggested that fluctuations in
the total number of houses once an initial ceiling had been reached, as on the
Aldenhovener Platte, were affected by local climatic patterns, with slight rises
indicating more favourable conditions and declines pointing to downturns.
Such sensitivity would suggest that local populations did indeed near the
carrying capacity sustainable by the LBK subsistence system during the later
LBK when long-distance expansion had ceased.
It is likely that the local growth in population would have led to increased
inequality between different communities if the ‘ideal despotic’ principle
prevailed. Potentially too it would have increased competition between those
communities, although founder settlements would have retained an advantage
in any such competition; in the Rhineland, for example, Langweiler 8 was
always the largest settlement in its area.The evidence for increasing inequality
comes from settlements as well as cemeteries. For the settlement evidence
the case was made by van derVelde (1990), on the basis of sites in the southeastern
Netherlands and the Aldenhovener Platte discussed above.LBK houses
seem to be made up of three modules: a north-west, central and south-eastern
part, each with different functions. Some houses only have the central part,
presumed to be the main living area, some a central and north-west element,
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Population Ecology of the LBK Expansion 99
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and others have all three parts; the south-eastern part, believed to be the front,
is generally argued to have included a granary.Van der Velde proposed that
the distinctions between houses with larger and smaller numbers of elements
relate to the wealth and status of their associated households and cannot be
explained by changing household composition arising from family life-cycles.
At the Dutch sites the houses with all three elements had more room than the
others (the individual house elements were larger) and more stone adzes were
associated with them.At the site of Langweiler 8 cereal-processing waste was
preferentially associated with the large houses (Bogaard, 2004b). On the basis
of a spatial analysis of the settlements he studied, van der Velde also showed
that the units of which the settlements were made up suggest the existence
of long-term social patterns: particular households and groups of households
seem to have persisted through time, with continuing inheritance of status
witnessed by the rebuilding of houses of the same type in the same places.
Coudart’s (1998) analysis of LBK houses led her to conclude that major rank
or wealth differentiation did not exist but she too points to some indications of
status differences. She notes, for example, that granaries were never associated
with small houses and that some buildings were more spacious than others.
Interestingly, she also suggests that perhaps the largest houses were associated
with the groups that had first established the settlement.
ArecentanalysisofthelateLBK(c.7050–6900BP)siteofCuiry-lès-Chaudardes
in theAisne valley of northern France (Gomart et al.,2015) identifies two groups
of houses that existed throughout the duration of the occupation.One group was
characterised by large houses,which showed a dominance of stock-keeping and
cereal-grinding evidence and homogeneous and conservative pottery-making
traditions.The other group was made up of small houses,with more evidence of
hunting and craft activities and a greater diversity of pottery-making techniques.
The first is argued to represent houses showing ‘continuity and strong production
capacity with possible surplus’that were occupied by long-established families
and the second a‘process of integration and economic maturation’(Gomart
et al., 2015: 244 and fig 9), houses occupied by small newly established families,
including some belonging to newcomers.On the basis of what we have seen for
the LBK more generally, it seems probable that the pattern represents a contrast
between founding families with superior wealth and status and late comers with
diminished wealth and property rights.
As far as burials are concerned, it is clear that there were complex patterns of
spatial differentiation involving both burial within settlements and also the existence
of separate cemeteries, mainly of individual inhumations, which are very
rare in the earliest LBK phases. Jeunesse (1997) concludes that the earliest ones
present a picture of relatively egalitarian societies, with indications of achieved
status for older men, while the later ones tend to have a small group of graves,
including child burials, clearly distinguished from the rest by the presence of
markedly richer grave goods and possible symbols of power.This is the case, for
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The Spread of Farming into Central Europe100
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example, with the cemetery of Niedermerz 3 that belonged to the settlements
of the Merzbachtal on the Aldenhovener Platte and was established in the 72nd
century BP.Cemeteries would have come into existence for precisely the reasons
proposed in the long-standing Saxe-Goldstein model (Saxe, 1970; Goldstein,
1981; Morris, 1991): to represent an ancestral claim to territory in the face of
increasing competition as local carrying capacities began to be reached.
Similar processes to those seen in the western LBK can also be seen in
Lower Bavaria, along the Danube, where it is joined by the river Isar and
other tributaries (Pechtl, 2012). The major site of Stephansposching rapidly
grew eight-fold from the founding two to six houses. Here too there are persistent
rebuildings of houses on the same sites showing the importance of
maintaining the continuity of the household and its rights, Pechtl suggests.
Given that the lives of the houses seem to have been much shorter than would
have been necessary from the structural point of view, new houses may have
been built with each new generation, as a new household head replaced his
predecessor.What is particularly interesting in this region though is the evidence
for the settlement pattern (see Fig 4.8). On the edge of the plain here
Fig 4.8. The LBK settlement pattern in Lower Bavaria. Site 2 Aiterhofen; 4
Stephansposching. Reproduced from fig 5 in Pechtl, J., Stephansposching, Lkr.
Deggendorf, und die Linienbandkeramik des Isarmundüngsgebietes. In Wolfram,
S. and Stäuble, H. (Eds.), Siedlungsstruktur und Kulturwandel in der Bandkeramik,
pp. 130–140, 2012, with permission from the author.
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The Decline and Disappearance of the LBK 101
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and in the hillier land behind it there are numerous LBK sites scattered along
small streams at intervals of no greater than 2 km.Most of these are small,with
few houses, an average of six from the excavations that have taken place, and
little evidence of rebuilding,suggesting that they were only occupied for short
periods. On the lower river terraces closer to the main river valleys, however,
the situation is very different.There are fewer sites, at greater distances from
one another, and they are different in character, the majority including earthwork
enclosures.Thus, the site of Stephansposching and its two neighbours
all have enclosures, indicative of prestige competition Pechtl argues. One of
these sites,Aiterhofen-Odmuehle, also has a cemetery with burials containing
rich grave goods. These sites are mainly large, densely occupied settlements
lasting hundreds of years, which deserve the title of villages.While the average
number of houses known from excavation areas at these sites is 44,the number
in a given settlement as a whole was certainly much larger than this.
As local micro-regions became more fully occupied, competition between
lineages would have become increasingly important and members of the senior
line would increasingly have had to assert their position in order to maintain
it.The deposition of rich grave goods as a form of costly signalling (Neiman,
1997; Bliege Bird and Smith, 2005) might have had a role here. In this case, the
number of rich burials would not simply be a reflection of the size or power
of the senior lineage but of the competitive pressure it was under in particular
places and times. Pechtl (2009) sees the construction of exceptionally
large longhouses in a similar light,as associated with inter-lineage competition.
Most of them date to the late LBK when population was at its highest.
THE DECLINE AND DISAPPEARANCE OF THE LBK
The development of local inequality based on priority of access during
the colonisation process is not the only widespread institutional trend
to be observed in the course of the LBK. The appearance of ditched and/
or palisaded enclosures (see Fig 4.2b for the enclosure at Langweiler 8) in
growing numbers in later occupation phases seems to characterise many if not
most LBK settlement micro-regions; the overall picture is well brought out
in Fig 4.9a, which shows a rapid rise to a peak in the number of enclosures
at c.7000 BP, followed by a fall. There has been considerable discussion of
the function of these late enclosures, but some are certainly associated with
violence.The site of Herxheim, for example, has extensive evidence of cannibalism
in the human remains buried in the ditches (Boulestin et al., 2009),
while the idea that defence was often among their roles has been supported
in recent years by the finding of three massacre sites dated to local late LBK
phases in three different regions.
Kerig (2003) has suggested that the enclosures represent the emergence of
a new type of social institution integrating larger numbers of people into a
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The Spread of Farming into Central Europe102
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single social unit, which would presumably have incorporated the patrilineal
land-holding lineage system that has been postulated above.The existence of
institutions capable of bringing large numbers of men together for warfare,
at least on a temporary basis, is suggested by the scale of all three known
massacres. At Talheim in south-west Germany the remains of 34 individuals
were recovered (Wahl et al., 1987); at Asparn-Schletz in eastern Austria at least
67,even though the enclosure ditch into which they had been dumped was only
partially excavated (Teschler-Nicola et al., 1996); at Schöneck-Kilianstädten in
Hesse, western Germany, there were 26 individuals, with evidence of torture
and/or mutilation (Meyer et al., 2015).These figures imply very large numbers
of attackers.A possible analogy comes from Fredrik Barth’s description of the
Faiwolmin group in New Guinea (Barth, 1971, cited in Soltis et al. (1995).
Barth pointed out that the western Faiwolmin communities lived in nucleated
villages centred on cult houses whereas populations in the east were more
dispersed.The centralised communities thus had a military advantage and, as a
result, were able to expand towards the east, where the social system could not
organise as many people for defence.
Whether the LBK enclosures were themselves always defensive constructions
then is not really the point if one accepts that they represent a new kind of
social institution involving larger scale integration and mitigating scalar stress.
In a similar vein Zimmermann (2012) sees them as corresponding to the size
of the largest cooperating social unit at the time, and, on the basis of his spatial
method for population estimation (e.g. Zimmermann et al., 2004), estimates
this to be in the low hundreds.We have already seen it postulated that enclosures
appeared in Lower Bavaria as a result of prestige competition between
Fig 4.9. Chronological distribution of enclosures in Central Europe. a) Number of
enclosures; b) Number of enclosures weighted by their size. Distributions created by
using an aoristic method and repeated sampling from known enclosure date ranges.
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The Decline and Disappearance of the LBK 103
103
long-lasting major settlements. In the light of the evidence for massacres it can
be suggested that once institutions emerged that integrated larger numbers of
people into a cooperating unit that was competitively successful, other groups
had little option but to copy them if they wished to avoid potentially disastrous
consequences.The general context in which to see this is the reaching of local
carrying capacities in many of the areas where LBK farmers had settled;by this
time one group’s gain was another’s loss.
Important further light can be thrown on the whole LBK settlement and
social sequence just described by considering the ‘self-centered decision
model for reproductive decisions’ developed by Read and LeBlanc (2003) and
its implications for understanding the consequences population processes can
have on social behaviour and institutions. Their key point is that, while an
individual/family-centred cost–benefit model of the kind presented earlier in
this book is always central to reproductive decision-making, the institutional
consequences of the aggregated local reproductive decisions vary, depending
on three factors: resource density, resource patchiness and the extent to which
the reproductive decisions of families are decoupled from the fate of the larger
group of which they are a part (see Fig 4.10).The LBK situation was one in
which resource density was high and the degree of patchiness low at the level
of individual settlement catchments, though high at the larger scale. In the
early phases of settlement expansion it seems that small groups of households
were relatively autonomous and settlements could fission at will.As population
grew, intra-group inequality increased, as we have seen. Moreover, since all the
local settlement regions were becoming full at the same time,it would increasingly
have been the case, in Read and LeBlanc’s words (2003: 62), that,‘The
demographic dynamics of one group [would] impact the population dynamics
of neighbouring groups’, thus the fortunes of individual families and their
corporate groups would have been increasingly closely bound together.The
prediction of the model in these circumstances is inter-group conflict.Thus,
the role of the social institutions associated with the enclosures in mitigating
scalar stress, and helping corporate groups act more effectively as entities, as
described above, would have become more important as the dominant social
dynamic shifted from a position on the lower left of the space in Fig 4.10 to
the upper right.
The widespread occurrence of enclosures is not the only indicator of change
in the later LBK. Long-distance lithic exchange also declined. Throughout
most of the LBK period supplies of high-quality flint were obtained from special
sources and exchanged very widely (e.g. Zimmermann, 1995). In the latest
phase, exchanged lithic raw materials declined in frequency at settlement sites
and increasing proportions of the lithic assemblages were made up of material
from local sources of poorer quality. Relations between adjacent groups may
have broken down so completely that long-distance exchanges, with material
passing through many hands, became impossible.
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The Spread of Farming into Central Europe104
104
This process may have been one of the factors that led to a population crash
in many LBK areas just after 7000 BP, including all those with evidence of
massacres. If you look at the aggregate radiocarbon pattern for the four LBK
regions shown in Fig 4.5 you find clear evidence of population decline at the
end of the LBK in southern Germany, the Rhineland and Kuyavia. However,
this is not universal.The exception is central Germany,one of the largest settlement
areas, which does not show a marked decline until the later 7th millennium
BP (Müller, 2001: 424 and fig 261) and where there is also a continuous
cultural development from the LBK to its successor Stichbandkeramik (SBK or
Stroke-Ornamented Pottery),for example at the site of Eythra (Cladders et al.,
2012). Bohemia, another large LBK settlement area to its south-east, shows a
similar pattern of cultural and demographic continuity into the mid-7th millennium
BP, with a population peak c.6800 BP (Demján and Dreslerová, 2016).
These large-scale patterns are confirmed by evidence from specific local
regions.They are seen, for example, in the abandonment of the Aldenhovener
Platte region of western Germany (Zimmermann, 2002) and of the LBK areas
of the Netherlands (Crombé and Vanmontfort, 2007), as well as in pollen and
settlement evidence from Hesse (Eisenhauer, 1994; Schweizer, 2003) showing
a marked decrease in occupation intensity at the end of the LBK.The Hegau
region of south-west Germany shows a similar picture,as does the Upper Rhine
area, with a gap between the end of the LBK and the beginning of the subsequent
Hinkelstein phase (Denaire et al., 2017). Climatic factors may have been
relevant to these collapses though the evidence so far is equivocal (Schmidt et al.,
2004; Gronenborn et al., 2014). Simulations of climatic impacts on the LBK
settlement system (Bocquet-Appel et al., 2015) show that adverse conditions
could have an impact on the size of the population but it is short-lived: population
‘bounces back’ very quickly. Accounting for the longer-term population
decreases or regional abandonments that occurred remains problematical,
Fig 4.10. The three dimensions identified as
affecting the outcomes of Read and LeBlanc’s
decision-making model and the outcomes
predicted for the eight configurations defined by
extreme values on each dimension. H, high; L, low.
Reproduced from fig 1 in Current Anthropology
44, Read, D. and LeBlanc, S., Population
growth, carrying capacity and conflict, pp. 59–
85, University of Chicago Press. Reproduced
with permission. ©_ 2003 by The Wenner-Gren
Foundation for Anthropological Research.All
rights reserved.
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CulturalTransmission, Niche Construction and LBK 105
105
and the same is true of other features of the LBK.What was it about the LBK
farming system that meant that it did not expand beyond the narrow band of
loess soils, which would obviously have solved local pressure problems? Given
the apparent availability in some regions of suitable settlement areas that were
never occupied, as we saw above, were there other limitations that contributed
to the crisis in many regions?These are questions that remain to be addressed.
CULTURAL TRANSMISSION, NICHE CONSTRUCTION AND
THE LBK
We have seen that the LBK was overwhelmingly a demographic expansion,
into which small numbers of hunter-gatherers were absorbed. In such a context,
as we would expect, we see the wholesale transmission of a way of life
from one generation to the next and from one place to the next. Because
of its dependence on annual cereals and mobile domestic animals it was a
very portable way of life that was extremely successful, though only within a
limited range of environmental conditions.That way of life had developed in
the western Carpathian Basin in the mid-8th millennium BP,in the context of
the innovations and drift associated with the cultural equivalent of peripatric
speciation. It included the material resources represented by crops and animals
as well as traditions of social, cultural and economic knowledge and practice.
Some of those practices were the basis for the expansion, for example in the
area of subsistence and perhaps the social relations reflected in the longhouses.
Others, like the pottery decoration for example, would have been simply
the ‘cultural baggage’ associated with the expanding population and largely
governed by fashion and drift. Because people and practices had a recent
common origin, communities in Poland and the Paris Basin, for example,
were similar in many respects to one another, no doubt they had a common
language, though regional differences would gradually have developed. The
vertical transmission implied by the strong correlation between genetic and
cultural patterns would have been inherently conservative. In other words,
once the initial successful formula had been established it would have been
hard to imagine alternatives.
In the next chapter we will see that many of the patterns and processes characteristic
of the LBK can be found in the spread of farming along the north
coast of the Mediterranean.
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