Neolithic Europe

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Neolithic Europe

• Ca. 8,000-4,000 B.P.

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Neolithic

• Neolithic Revolution Domestication of Plants and
  Animals in the Old World.
• Defined by the presence of sedentary villages and
  domesticated plants and animals.
• The Neolithic in other parts of the Old World is
  defined by the appearance of these
  characteristics at different times
• some parts of the world were still largely
  "pre-agricultural" early in this century.

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Neolithic expansion from 7-6,000 BP
http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageNeolithic_Expan
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Neolithic economies emerge in Europe ca.
8000-6000 RCYBP

• Origins debated
• Local development?
• Diffusion from SW Asia?
• Neolithic economies spread rapidly
• Generally earlier in southern eastern Europe
• Neolithic communities vary greatly across space
  through time
• By 6000-5000 BP most all of Europe was utilizing
  Neolithic lifeways

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Neolithic Climate

• The origins and history of European Neolithic
  culture are closely connected with the
  postglacial climate and forest development.
• The increasing temperature after the late Dryas
  period during the Pre-Boreal and the Boreal (c.
  8000-5500 BC, determined by radiocarbon dating)
  caused a remarkable change in late glacial flora
  and fauna.

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The zones

• Neolithic farming in Europe developed on its own
  lines in the four different ecological zones.
• These are
• the Mediterranean zone of evergreen forest and
  winter rains
• north of the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Balkans,
  the temperate zone of deciduous forest and evenly
  distributed annual rainfall
• still farther north the circumpolar taiga, or
  coniferous forest (the only zone to remain free
  of agriculture and stock breeding)
• and to the southeast the western end of the
  Eurasian Steppe.

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Three major divisions of the temperate zone

• Divisions
• western Europe, from the Atlantic to the Vosges
  and Alps and including the British Isles
• the loesslands of central Europe, including the
  Ukraine and limited by the Balkans and the Harz
• and the northern province, that portion of the
  Eurasiatic plain lying between the Rhine and the
  Vistula and including Denmark and southern
  Sweden.
• The Neolithic communities that arose by 6000 BC
  must have developed from indigenous Mesolithic
  hunters and fishers.
• European technology and economy also had an
  original ideological superstructure expressed in
  monuments, ceramics, and personal ornaments.

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Cultural elements

• Rural economy
• In each of the above-mentioned provinces, the
  archaeological record begins with the early
  stages of farming, as in Thessaly.
• In the Mediterranean zone
• early farming is connected with cardium pottery
  (decorated by shell impressions of Cardium
  edule),
• cultivation of the land having been proved by
  pollen-analytical methods in France, as elsewhere
  in temperate Europe, while
• northern Germany and southern Scandinavia
  revealed grain prints in potsherds
  (Ertebølle-Ellerbek).

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Houses

• Dwelling houses in Greece, Sicily, and the
  Iberian Peninsula were built, as in the Middle
  East, of pisé, or mud brick, on stone
  foundations.
• But in the Balkans and throughout the temperate
  zone, wood was used for the construction of
  gabled houses, stout posts serving to support the
  ridgepole and the walls of split saplings or
  wattle and daub.

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Example of Wood construction
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Housing Continued

• Around the Alps such two-roomed houses and, less
  often, one-roomed huts were raised on piles above
  the shores of lakes or on platforms laid on peat
  mosses.
• These are the world-famous Swiss "lake-dwellings"
  (Uferrandsiedlungen) that have yielded such
  precious collections of the organic substances
  from wood to bread that are otherwise missing
  from the archaeological record.
• In northern Europe, too, the earliest villages
  consisted of two parallel, long communal houses,
  but these were subdivided by cross walls into 20
  or more apartments, each with a separate door.

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Stone tools

• Carpenters used celts (ax or adz heads) edged by
  grinding and polishing of fine-grained rock or of
  flint where that material was available in large
  nodules.
• In Greece and the Balkans, all over central
  Europe and the Ukraine, and throughout the taiga,
  adzes were used exclusively, as in the earlier
  Baltic Mesolithic in northern and Western Europe
  axes were preferred.
• In the Iberian Peninsula axes and adzes occur in
  equal numbers in early Neolithic graves, but the
  proportion of axes increased later. Often in
  Western Europe, and occasionally in Greece and
  Cyprus, celts were mounted with the aid of antler
  sleeves inserted between the stone head and the
  wooden handle--a device that was already employed
  in the northern European Mesolithic.

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Stone Tools Continued

• In Spain, the British Isles, and northern Europe
  ax heads were simply stuck into or through
  straight wooden shafts, but adz heads must always
  have been mounted on a knee shaft (a crooked
  stick), a method regularly used for ax heads,
  too, by the Bronze Age.
• Ax heads like those in modern use, with a hole
  for the shaft, were rarely used for tools, but
  the Danubian peasants on the loesslands may
  sometimes have mounted adzes in this manner.
• They certainly knew how to perforate stone, using
  a tubular borer (a reed or bone with sand as an
  abrasive). From them the technique was adopted by
  various secondary Neolithic tribes in northern
  Europe for the manufacture of so-called
  battle-axes.

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Ax factories and flint mines

• Celts, or axes, were manufactured in factories
  where specially suitable rock outcrops occurred,
  and they were traded over great distances.
• Products of the factories at Graig Lwyd,
  Penmaenmawr, North Wales, were transported to
  Wiltshire and Anglesey, those of Tievebulliagh on
  the Antrim coast to Limerick, Kent, Aberdeen, and
  the Hebrides.
• Similarly, large nodules of good flint were
  secured by mining in Poland, Denmark, The
  Netherlands, England, Belgium, France, Portugal,
  and Sicily.
• The mine shafts, which were cut through solid
  chalk sometimes to a depth of six meters (20
  feet) with the aid only of antler picks and bone
  shovels, may be simple pits, but often regular
  galleries branching from them follow the seams of
  big nodules.
• Although the miners appreciated the necessity of
  leaving pillars to support the roof, skeletons of
  workers killed by falls have been discovered at
  Cissbury, Spiennes, and elsewhere.
• In the British Isles and Denmark, at least, there
  is evidence that the ax factories and flint mines
  were exploited and the products distributed by
  trade, for example, to the northern parts of
  Sweden. Still, the operators and distributors
  need nowhere be regarded as full-time
  specialists.

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Flint Mine in Spiennes, Belgium
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Pottery and Art

• Neolithic art, except among the hunter-fishers of
  the taiga, was geometric.
• It is best illustrated by the decoration of
  pottery. Pots, which were always handmade, were
  painted in southeastern Europe, southern Italy,
  and Sicily elsewhere they were adorned with
  incised, impressed, or stamped patterns.
• Many designs are skeuomorphic--i.e., they enhance
  the pot's similarity to vessels of basketry,
  skin, or other material.
• But on the loesslands of central Europe and the
  Ukraine and in the Balkans, spirals and meanders
  were favourite motifs.

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Trade

• While Neolithic societies could be completely
  self-sufficient, growing their own food and
  making all essential equipment from local
  materials, luxury objects were transmitted quite
  long distances by some sort of trade.
• Ornaments made of the shells of the Mediterranean
  mussel, Spondylus gaederopus, are found all
  across the Balkans, up the Danube Valley, and
  even on the Saale and the Main.
• Products of factories and flint mines were, as
  stated, traded widely throughout a single
  province, such as the British Isles, and some
  especially valued raw materials--the yellow flint
  of Grand-Pressigny (France), the obsidian of
  Melos and the Lipari Islands--became objects of
  "international trade" as much as shells.
• But the most prized object of commerce was the
  amber of Jutland and Poland.

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Neolithic Defined

• Sedentary Communities
• Ceramics
• Stone Celts and Axes
• Domestic Foods
• Stone and Earthworks

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Structures and Sites

• Long-barrows were common early Neolithic
  elongated earthen tombs with interior timber or
  stone chambers containing multiple cremation
  burials.
• Passage Graves were another kind of early
  Neolithic collective tomb with an internal stone
  passage covered by a circular earthen mound.
• Causewayed Camps were large early Neolithic
  centers evidently used for gathering, feasting
  and ritual.
• They were surrounded by a number of circles of
  discontinuous ditches with gaps (causeways)
  allowing access.
• By the late Neolithic these had evidently been
  replaced as regional centres by henges.
• These were large sites surrounded by circular
  earthen ditches and banks and contained circular
  and other arrangements of standing timber and
  stones.
• By the late Neolithic there was also a change
  from multiple burials to individual burials in
  usually smaller earthen mounds or barrows.
• Important examples of tribal centers of Neolithic
  settlement include Skara Brae in the Orkneys,
  Clava in Eastern Scotland, and Oslonki, Poland .

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Skara Brae-Orkney Islands, Scotland
Informatin from http//www.orkneyjar.com/history/s
karabrae/index.html
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Orkney Map
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Skara Brae

• Buried into the southern shore of Sandwick's Bay
  o' Skaill is the Neolithic village of Skara Brae
  - one of Orkney's most visited sites and rightly
  regarded as one of the most remarkable monuments
  in Europe.
• In the winter of 1850, a great storm battered
  Orkney. Nothing particularly unusual about that,
  but on this occasion the combination of Orkney's
  notorious winds and extremely high tides stripped
  the grass from a large mound known as Skerrabra.
  This revealed the outline of a series of stone
  buildings that intrigued the local laird, William
  Watt of Skaill, who began an excavation of the
  site.
• By 1868, the remains of four ancient houses had
  been unearthed but Skerrabra was abandoned,
  remaining udisturbed until 1925 when another
  storm damaged some of the previously excavated
  structures.

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Skara Brae Housing
Early Houses were circular
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Each house shares the same basic design - a large
square room with a central fireplace, a bed on
either side and a shelved dresser on the wall
opposite the doorway.
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The later houses followed the same design as
their predecessors but on a larger scale. The
shape of the houses changed slightly, becoming
more rectangular with rounded internal corners,
and the beds were no longer built into the wall
but protruded into the main living area.
http//www.stonepages.com/tour/skarabraeqtvr.html
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Passages

• A winding network of passages low, narrow stone
  passage linked the houses of Skara Brae.
• This meant it was possible to travel from one
  house to another without having to step outside -
  not a bad thing in the midst of an Orkney winter!
• Just over one metre high, the low passages were
  roofed with stone slabs before being covered over
  with insulating midden.
• The height of the passages not only helped
  minimise drafts but could have served a symbolic,
  or even defensive, purpose, forcing the person
  entering the village to kneel or stoop.

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Life in Skara Brae

• Life in Skara Brae was probably quite comfortable
  by Neolithic standards. The villagers were
  settled farmers who, cultivating the land and
  raising livestock, were entirely self-sufficient.
  
• Bones found within the midden surrounding the
  houses shows that cattle and sheep formed the
  main part of the Skara Brae diet, with barley and
  wheat grown in the surrounding fields.
• To compliment their farming produce, fish and
  shellfish were harvested in great quantities -
  and perhaps kept fresh within custom-built tanks
  within the houses.
• The island's red deer and boar were also hunted
  for their meat and skins. Seal meat was consumed
  and, on the odd occasions when they found a
  beached whale, its meat would have provided a
  welcome feast.
• They probably also the collected the eggs of
  sea-birds and possibly even the birds themselves
  - a task that took place in the islands until
  fairly recently.

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Religion

• They left no written records of their beliefs and
  religious practices so we are forced to make
  assumptions based on various objects and clues
  found at the sites they visited and used on a
  regular basis.
• Skara Brae's similarity to the architecture of
  the nearby tombs shows that ritual formed a
  considerable part of everyday life and in death.
  Given the effort put into the construction of
  these tombs we can also say with a degree of
  certainty that the dead were very important to
  the Neolithic Orcadians.
• It seems likely, therefore, that some form of
  ancestor worship took place but whether this took
  precedence over the veneration over a pantheon of
  deities is obviously not known.

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• The most enigmatic objects found in Skara Brae
  were four intricately carved stone balls. These
  items served no obvious practical purpose so are
  thought to have a ritual or symbolic purpose.
• Although we really have no clear idea as to the
  purpose of the stone balls a few other examples
  have been found in Orkney, with around 400 found
  across Scotland.
• The most widely accepted theory regarding these
  objects is that they were symbols of status,
  marking the owners as significant within the
  society.
• It has even been suggested that the knobbly
  stones may represent the sun with rays of
  sunlight emanating from the central orb.  

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Why was Skara Brae Abandoned?

• A common misconception is that Skara Brae was
  abandoned in the face of an apocalyptic disaster
  that caused the inhabitants to flee.
• This dramatic idea was proposed by Professor
  Gordon Childe, the archaeologist who excavated
  the village in 1928, and like a Northern Pompeii,
  it immediately caught the public's imagination.
• Instead, it is now thought the fall of Skara Brae
  was simply abandoned because Neolithic society in
  Orkney was changing. This change brought about
  different ideas and a completely different set of
  values and way of life. From the construction of
  the henge monuments at Brodgar and Stenness and
  the construction of Maeshowe, we can see the
  emergence of an elite ruling body who had the
  power to control the labour of a number of
  people.
• With this development, the need for all-enclosed
  village communities disappeared - where once
  families depended on their tight-knit, little
  village communities they now were part of a
  larger, more widespread community, controlled by
  powerful tribal or spiritual leaders.
• Over time families dispersed across the
  landscape, settling once again in single
  individual dwellings. As more and more of these
  younger people drifted from the villages they
  were not replaced.
• It seems more likely that those who remained
  within the ancient village of Skara Brae
  gradually grew older and died.

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Burial chambers of the Neolithic

• Clava cairns, in North East Scotland, near
  Inverness.

The north-east chamber
The south-western cairn
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Plan of Clava

• The two cairns at Clava, with the ring cairn
  between them
• At Clava, two main tombs are laid out, open to
  the visitor, one at each end of the complex. Both
  have their entrance passage pointing in the same
  direction, so that on Mid-winter's day, the rays
  of the setting sun point right down the passage.
• Between the two main cairns is a monument of a
  rather different type known as a ring cairn. Here
  there is no entrance passage, and at the centre,
  instead of a closed chamber there is an open
  unroofed area where ceremonies could take place.

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Map of Clava
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The ring cairn

• The second stone has some 'cupmarks' near the
  bottom, small circular depressions, laboriously
  carved out for some ritual purpose. 
• The recent radiocarbon dates show that the tombs
  were much later than expected instead of  being
  at the very beginning of the Neolithic, they come
  right at the very end, at around 2,000 BC.
• They also confirm that the whole cemetery was
  built at much the same time, in a single
  operation.

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The ring cairn
The ring cairn at Clava under excavation.
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Archaeological Research at Oslonki, Poland

• From 1989 to 1994, six seasons of archaeological
  research took place at the site of Oslonki
  (pronounced ohs-won-key) in north-central Poland.
  
• Oslonki is located about 120 kilometers northwest
  of Warsaw and about 20 kilometers west of the
  city of Wloclawek.
• Archaeological research at Oslonki focuses on the
  study of the earliest farmers of the North
  European Plain, continuing work begun in 1976 at
  the nearby site of Brzesc Kujawski.
• Excavations by a team of Polish and American
  archaeologists have revealed a large village
  occupied just before 4000 B.C. with longhouses
  and graves.
• In order to understand more fully how these early
  farmers lived, it is important to study not only
  their settlement and graves but also how they
  used and changed the local environment.

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Neolithic in Poland

• Between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago, farming
  villages were established in Poland and other
  parts of central Europe.
• The understanding of the earliest European
  farmers is important since they represent the
  first instance of domesticated plants and animals
  being grown outside their native regions in the
  Near East.
• he first agricultural communities in Poland
  probably arrived from south of the Carpathians,
  but they quickly adapted to the new soils and
  landforms of the Polish uplands and plains.
• Excavations at Oslonki have revealed a large
  settlement of these early farmers with
  well-preserved archaeological remains.
• Nearly 30 trapezoidal longhouses and over 80
  graves make it one of the richest such
  settlements in archaeological finds from all of
  central Europe.
• Of particular note is a grave excavated in 1990
  with an extraordinary amount of copper, among the
  earliest metal in central Europe, including a
  copper diadem.
• In 1992, a grave of an archer with five bone
  arrow points in a quiver worn at his back was
  found. A ditched enclosure and palisade, also
  discovered in 1992, fortified the settlement
  (photo above right). Oslonki is among a number of
  fortified Neolithic settlements in north-central
  Europe

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Excavations at Oslonki