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The Dawn of European Civilization By V. GORDON CHILDE 1923
« on: March 24, 2018, 08:53:06 PM »
0


The Dawn of

European Civilization

By

V. GORDON CHILDE

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.461431

1923

By

V. GORDON CHILDE

D.Litt., D.Sc.

Professor of Prehistoric European Archeology, University of London

LONDON

ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL LTD

BROADWAY HOUSE: 6S-74 CARTER LANE. E.C.4
 First Edition 1925
Second Edition 1927



 CONTENTS


Chapter  I.   SURVIVALS OF FOOD-GATHERERS ....         i
II.   The Orient and Crete .....         15
III.   Anatolia the Royal Road to the Aegean         35
IV.   Maritime Civilization in the Cyclades .         48
V.   From Village to City in Greece         57
VI.   Farming Villages in the Balkans .         84
VII.   Danubian Civilization .....         105
VIII.   The Peasants of the Black Earth         136
IX.   Culture Transmission over the Eurasian Plain?         148
X.   The Northern Cultures .....         175
XI.   Survivals of the Forest Culture .         203
XII.   Megalith Builders and Beaker-folk         213
XIII.   Farmers and Traders in Italy and Sicily         229
XIV.   Island Civilizations in the Western Mediterranean         252
XV.   The Iberian Peninsula . . . .         265
XVI.   Western Culture in the Alpine Zone .         287
XVII.   Megalith Builders in Atlantic Europe .         303
XVIII.   The British Isles ......         322
XIX.   Retrospect: The Prehistory of European Society         341
   Notes on Terminology .....         353
   Abbreviations .......      •   354
   Books ........      •   358
   
 
 FIG.


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

SWIDERIAN FLINT IMPLEMENTS, POLAND {after KoztOWSki)

Magdalenian harpoon from Cantabria and Azilian harpoons

AND PAINTED PEBBLES FROM ArI^GE .....

Geometric microliths and microgravers from Franconia

{after Gumpert) .........

Microliths from Muge, Portugal, and transverse arrow-
head SHAFTED FROM DENMARK ..............

"Lyngby axe” of reindeer antler, Holstein

Maglemosian types from Zealand ......

ERTEB0LLE POT, ANTLER AXES AND BONE COMBS, DENMARK .

Neolithic figurines from Crete and their relatives {after
Evans) ..........

Early Minoan III "teapots” and button seal {after Evans) .

The Minoan "Mother Goddess” and {left) Horns of Consecra-
tion, from a sealing {after Evans) .....

Minoan axes, axe-adzes and double axe, and seal impressions

{after Evans and Mon. Ant.) .......

(1) Early Minoan daggers, (2) Stone beads {after Evans) .

Middle Minoan I-II daggers {after Evans) ....

M.M.III RAPIERS (MyCENJE) AND L.M.I. HORNED HILT (CRETE)
{after Evans) .   ........

(1) Late Mycenzean short sword, (2) Middle Minoan spear-
head   ..........

Egyptian representations of Vapheio cups ....

Pottery from Thermi I-II(A) and III-IY(B) {after Lamb, BSA.,
XXX)....................................

"Megaron” palace, Troy II .   ............

Pottery from Troy II .......

Knife and daggers and gold vessels, Troy II {Museum f.
Vorgeschichte, Berlin) ........

Battle-axe, gold-capped bead, and crystal pommel from
Treasure L, and stray axe-adze {Museum f. Vorgeschichte,
Berlin) ..........

Gold earring and pendant from Treasure A, pin from
Treasure D, bracelet from Treasure F, and knot-headed
pins {Museum f. Vorgeschichte, Berlin)

Tomb-group. Amorgos ......

Cycladic "frying-pan” and sherd showing boat .

Tombs on Syros and Eubcea ,

page

3

4

6

7

8
10
12

18

20

25

28

29

30

31

32

33

39

40
42

42

43

45

49

50
52

vii
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIG.   PAGE

26.   Slotted spear-head (showing method of mounting), halberd

AND TWEEZERS. AMORGOS .......   53

27.   Early Cycladic ornaments: Paros; Syros ....   54

28.   Cycladic pottery: (i) Pelos; (2) Phylakopi I; (3) Phylakopi

II (L.C.).................................................55

29.   Thessalian stone axes and adzes (after Tsountas) ...   59

30.   Pottery of Sesklo style, white on red and red on white

(after Wace and Thompson) .......   59

31.   Neolithic figurines, Thessaly (after Wace and Thompson)   .   61

32.   Miniature altar or throne (after Wace and Thompson)   .   .   62

33.   Plan of fortified village of Dimini (after Tsountas)   .   .   63

34.   Dimini bowl and gold-ring pendant (after Tsountas)   .   .   64

35.   Axe and battle-axes from H. Mamas (after Heurtley, BSA.,

XXIX).....................................................68

36.   Early Helladic sauce-boat, askos, tankard, and jar   .   .   70

37.   Early Macednic pot-forms (after Heurtley, B.S.A., XXVIII) .   71

38.   Anchor Ornament, Kritsana...................................  71

39.   Spear-head, knives, and dagger from M.H. graves in

Thessaly (after Tsountas) .......   73

40.   Minyan pottery from Thessaly, and imitations from Thermon,

JJtolia ..........   74

41.   Matt-painted bowl and pithos from J£gina; and M.C. jugs

from Marseilles harbour and Phylakopi ....   75

42.   Matt-painted jar, Lianokladhi III (after Wace and Thompson).   76

43.   Terminal and pattern-bored spacer-bead from amber neck-

lace: Shaft Grave at Mycenze ......   79

44.   Mycenzean tholos tomb on Eubcea (after Papavasileiou) .   .   81

45.   Clay loom-weights and bone spatula of Kor6s culture .   86

46.   Cruciform-footed bowl in fine Starcevo ware, and jar of

rusticated Koros style .   .   .   .   .   .   .   87

47.   Bone combs and ring-pendant, Tordos, and ‘‘harpoon’’, Vinca   89

48.   "Face urn” lid from Vinca (after Vassits)   ....   go

49.   Mug, tripod bowl, and “altar” decorated by excision,

Banyata II .........   95

50.   Peg-footed vase from Denev ......   97

51.   Copper axe and adze from Gaborevo .....   99

52.   Gumelnija pottery: (i) Czernavoda; (2) Tel Metchkur;

(3-4) Tel Ratchev; (5-6) Kodja Berman ....   100

53.   Painted clay head, Vin£a .   .   .   .   .   .   .101

54.   Squatting figure, bone figurines and clay phallus, Bul-

garia ...........   102

55.   Models of houses, Denev .   .   .   .   .   .   .102

56.   Small Danubian I house from Saxony; the walls are marked

by a double row of posts (after Sangmeister) .   .   .107

viii
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIG.

57-

58.

59-

60.

61.

62.

63-

64.

65.

66.

67.

68.
69.

7°.

7i-

72.

73-

74.

75-

76.

77-

78.

79.

80.

81.

82.

83.

84.
85-
86.

87.

88.

PAGE

“Shoe-last celts” (after Seger) ......   107

DANUBIAN I POTTERY .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   108

Clay block vase, Moravia .   .   .   .   .   .   .114

Copper trinkets and triangular axe, Jordanova (after Seger) 114
DANUBIAN II POTTERY, LENGYEL   .   .   .   .   .   . II5

Stroke-ornamented vases, Bohemia; Rossen vases, Central

Germany ..........   117

Copper battle-axes, Hungary   .   .   .   .   .   .120

Copper axe-adzes and axes, Hungary   .   .   .   .   .121

Knobbed mace-head, Maros Decse   .   .   .   .   .122

Bodrogkeresztur pyxis and milk-jug (after Tompa) .   .   122

Pins and earrings from Unetician graves (after Schrdnil) .   129

Daggers from Unetician graves (after Schrdnil)   .   .   . 131

Hoard of Sobochleby (after Schrdnil)   .   .   .   .   .131

Bronze-hilted dagger (after Schrdnil)   .   .   .   .   .131

Bulb, disc, trilobate, and crutch-headed pins from later

Unetician graves (after Schrdnil) .....   133

Marschwitz and early Unetician pottery, Silesia and Bohemia

(after Stockf) .........   134

Model hut from Popudnia .   .   .   .   .   .   .138

Potters’ oven and model, Ariu^d (after Laszlo)   .   .   .   140

Tripolye types (after Passeh) .....................141

Stone sceptre-head, Fedele$eni, and clay stamp, Ariu^d .   143

Usatova types (after Passek) .   ...................146

Copper battle-axe, Vozdvizhenskaya, copper beads, copper

spear-head, copper and bone hammer-pins .   .   .   .151

Vases: (i) from Catacomb grave, Donetz; (2-3) from pit-graves,
Yatskovice, near Kiev; (4) from Yamno grave, Donetz;

(5) B FUNNEL BEAKER, DENMARK.....................I52

Transverse axe, axe-adze, knife, and gold and silver vases,

CARNELIAN BEAD AND FLINT ARROW-HEADS, FROM MAIKOP

barrow ..........   133

(1) Megalithic cist, Novosvobodnaya; (2) Catacomb grave,

Donetz ..........   153

Pottery, weapons, tools, and pins from tomb at Novosvo-
bodnaya ..........   155

Pottery and battle-axes from the Single Graves of Jutland
and Sweden (after Fv, 1922)   .   .   .   .   .   .161

Saxo-Thuringian corded ware .......................163

Thuringian faceted battle-axe and Silesian battle-axe .   164

Zlota pottery (after Kozlowski)   .   .   .   .   .   .166

Fatyanovo battle-axe and Finnish boat-axe .   .   .   169

Fatyanovo pottery of the Moscow, Yaroslav, and CuvaS groups i 70

ix
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIG.   PAGE

89. The Gali£ hoard .   ........   171

90.   Northern flint axes arranged according to Montelius’

typology {by permission of Trustees of British Museum) .   .   175

91.   A-type funnel-beakers, amphora, “baking plate” {after Becker)   178

92.   Tongued club-head, Denmark; polygonal battle-axe, Jordan-

ova; and flint axe of Eastern type   .   .   .   .   .179

93. Pottery from Danish dysser ......   181

94.   Grave 28 at Jordanova {after Seger)   .   .   .   .   .182

95.   Danish Passage Grave pottery of phases B and C; battle-axe

AND ARROW-HEAD   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   184

96.   Furniture of a grave at Zastow; and collared flask from

GRAVE AT NaLENCZOW   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   188

97.   Kuyavish grave, Swierczyn {after Kozlowski) .   189

98.   Walternienburg vases, Latdorf drum, and Baalburg jug .   193

99.   Globular amphorae from Saxo-Thuringia and Podolia, and

BONE GIRDLE-CLASP FROM PODOLIA   .....   I94

100.   Flint daggers and Swedish cists of Montelius'   IV   .   .197

101.   Section of the Leubingen barrow............................  200

102.   Bronze-shafted halberd and halberd-blade from Leubingen

barrow ..........   201

103.   (1) Pit-comb ware from Karelia; (2) vase of East Swedish

style from Aland Islands; (3) flint sculptures from
Volosovo ..........   204

104.   No ST vet and Suomusjarvi celts, and polished chisel and

adze .       205

105.   Maglemosian types which survive: (1-4) Esthonia {after Clark)',

(5) Ukraine; (6) leister from Ural peat bog   .   .   .   206

106.   Slate knives and dart-head, Sweden, stone mace-heads,

Finland, and slate pendant ......   207

107.   Knives and axe from Seim a hoard   .   .   .   .   .211

108.   Rock-cut tomb, Castelluccio, and corbelled tomb, Los

Millares ...................................................214

109.   Rock-cut tomb and naveta, Balearic Islands   .   .   .216

no.   Segmented cist, North Ireland, and Giants’ Tomb, Sardinia   217

in. Beakers: (1-2) Palmella, Portugal; (3) La Halliade, South

France; (4) Villafrati, Sicily .   .   .   .   .   .222

112.   Beaker, wrist-guard, and associated vases, Silesia {after

Seger) ...........   225

113.   West European dagger (Bohemia) and flint copy (Silesia);

arrow-straightener (Wiltshire); gold-leaf from wrist-
guard AND COPPER AWL, BOHEMIA .....   225

114.   South Italian painted pottery: (i) and (2) black on buff,

Serra d’Alto ware; (3) red and black on buff, Middle
Neolithic I, Megara Hyblzea ......   232

x
 FIG.

ii5-

116.

117.

118.

119.

120.

121.

122.

123.

124.

125.

126.

127.

128.

129.

13°.

I3I*

132-

133-
134*

135-

136.

137-

138.

139-

140.

141.

142.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Bossed bone plaque, Castelluccio (after Evans)

Copper and Early Bronze Age pottery: (1-2) pit-cave, Otranto;

(3) KEELED VASE WITH AXE HANDLE, “DOLMEN” OF BlSCEGLIE;

(4-5) Castelluccio ware .......

View into chamber tomb, Castelluccio .....

Knife and razor, Pantalica .......

ApENNINE VASE-HANDLES AND WINGED AXE, RAZOR, PESCHIERA
DAGGER, ANGLED SICKLE FROM PUNTO DEL TONNO

(1) Vase of North Italian Polada type; (2) square-mouthed
NEOLITHIC POT FROM ArENE CaNDIDE .....
Copper daggers and flint copies, Remedello

Peschiera safety-pin (fibula)................

Plan of “temples” at Mnaidra, Malta .....

Tripod bowl, San Bartolomeo, and vase-handle of nose-
bridge TYPE, ANGHELU B.UJU ......

Plan and elevation of tomb XXbis at Anghelu Ruju .
Necklace from Anghelu Ruju ......

(1) Gouge, El Garcel; (2) schist adze, Portugal; (3) jar, El
Garcel ..........

page

235

236

237

240

243

245

246
250
253

258

259

261

268

Stages in conventionalization of parietal art in Spain {after
Obermaier)) A, Maimon; B, Figuras; C, La Pileta .   .   .   269

Flint arrow-heads: (i) Alcala; (5) Los Millares. Halberd
blades; (3) Casa da Moura; (4) Los Millares; (2) Palmella
points ..........   271

“Late Neolithic” vase from Tres Cabezos, and symbol vases
from Los Millares .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .272

Ritual objects: (i) Almeria; (2 and 4) Portugal; (3) Granada 273
Copper daggers and adze, AlcalA, and bone pin, Cabeqo da
Ministra. ..........   275

Plan of “neolithic” passage grave and part of the furniture,

S.E. Portugal [after Leisner) ......   277

Argaric burial-jar showing diadem, funerary vases, halberd,
dagger-blades, and sword {by permission of Trustees of British
Museum) ..........   283

Antler harpoon and bone arrow-head, Switzerland .   .   289

Cortaillod pottery {after ‘Antiquity’) .....   290

Plan of a house at Aichbuhl ......   292

Michelsberg pottery ........   294

Types of antler sleeves for axes: A-B, Lower; C, first in
Middle; D, first in Upper Neolithic; Lake NeuchAtel .   296

Bone copies of Unetician pins ......   297

Mondsee pottery .........   300

Vase-supports in Chassey style: (i) Le Moustoir, Carnac;

(2) Motte de la Garde, Charente........304

xi
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIG.   PAGE

143.   Late Chalcolithic types from Cevennian cists: (a-e) Liquisse;

(f~i) Grotte d’en Quisse, Gard; (j-o) “dolmens” of Aveyron 308

144.   Polypod bowl, La Halliade .......   310

145.   Statue-menhirs from Gard and sculptured tomb, Petit

Morin (Marne) .........   312

146.   Horgen pot from Paris cist, and channelled pot from

Conguel, Morbihan .     *313

147.   Arc-pendant of stone .       313

148.   Passage grave, Kercado, Morbihan .....   316

149.   Breton Bronze Age vase .......   320

150.   Lop-sided, tanged-and-barbed and leaf-shaped arrow-heads   323

151.   Windmill Hill pot-forms (after Piggott) .....   324

152.   Passage grave in horned cairn, 240 ft. long, Yarrows,

Caithness .............................................  327

153.   Long stalled cairn, Midhowe, Rousay .....   327

154.   Gold earring .........   330

135.   Peterborough bowl from Thames, and sherds from West

Kennet Long Barrow (by permission of Trustees of British
Museum) ..........   333

156.   Evolution of a socketed spear-head in Britain (after Green-

well): (1) Hintlesham, Suffolk; (2) Snowshill, Glos.; (3)
Arreton Down, Isle of Wight .   .   .   .   .   -335

157.   Segmented Fayence beads, Wilts (by permission of Trustees of

British Museum) .........   336

158. Food Vessels from Argyll and East Lothian   .   .   .   337

159. Gold lunula, Ireland {by permission of Trustees of British Museum)   338

Map I—Europe in Period I ......   348

Map II—Europe in Period II ......   349

Map Ilia—Period III: Megalithic Tombs ....   350

Map III6—Period III: Beakers and Battle-axes .   .   .   351

Map IV—Period IV : Early Bronze Age Cultures and Trade

Routes.................................................  352

Xll
 PREFACE TO THE SIXTH EDITION

When the First Edition was written as a pioneer attempt at a com-
prehensive survey of European prehistory, the archaeological record
was so fragmentary that a pattern could only he extracted by filling
up the gaps with undemonstrable guesses. A spate of excavations,
investigations and publications in the next twenty years rendered
obsolete some of those speculations, enriched the record with a wealth
of often quite unexpected facts, but actually complicated the picture.
Since 1945 still more intense activity has doubled the available data,
but in some points has simplified the scene; several formerly discrete
assemblages now appear as aspects of a very few widespread cultures.
Moreover, the new technique of radio-carbon dating, though still very
much in the experimental stage, offers at least the hope of an inde-
pendent time-scale against which archaeological events in several
regions can be compared chronologically. These advances allow and
demand drastic revision and re-arrangement of my text. At the same
time the fresh data, as much as Mongait’s pertinent criticisms in his
Introduction to the Russian translation, have induced a less dog-
matically “Orientalist” attitude than I adopted in 1925. In particular
the discovery that not all farmers were potters has entailed a complete
revaluation of the ceramic evidence! Radio-carbon dating has indeed
vindicated the Orient’s priority over Europe in farming and metallurgy.
But the speed and originality of Europe’s adaptation of Oriental
traditions can now be better appreciated; it should be clear why, as
well as that, a distinctively European culture had dawned by our
Bronze Age! Two more points should be noted. The radio-carbon dates
here given, many of them unofficial, axe all subject to a margin of error
of several centuries and must be regarded as tentative and provisional!
Secondly, to me the Near East still means what it meant in English
before 1940 and still means in American, Dutch, French and Russian.

For opportunities of studying at first hand the latest finds from
Eastern Europe I wish to thank the Academies of Sciences of Bulgaria,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Roumania, the U.S.S.R. and Yugoslavia,
and to colleagues in those countries as well as in Austria, Belgium, the
British Isles, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Holland, Italy, Poland,
Sweden, Turkey and the U.S.A. I am grateful for information on un-
published finds, for reprints, drawings and photographs. Dr. Isobel
Smith has very kindly read the proofs.

March 1957.   .   V. G. C.

xiii

Offline PrometheusTopic starter

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Re: The Dawn of European Civilization By V. GORDON CHILDE 1923
« Reply #1 on: March 24, 2018, 08:55:51 PM »
0
 
 CHAPTER I

SURVIVALS OF FOOD-GATHERERS

Despite a startling refinement of industrial equipment and a masterly
graphic art, Pleistocene Europe altogether lacked civilization in the
economic sense. During the last Ice Age collective hunts on open
steppes and tundras in South Russia, Moravia, and France yielded
such plenteous and reliable supplies of mammoth, reindeer, bison, and
horse flesh, that the hunters could establish relatively permanent
camps and enjoy leisure to cultivate art. But they remained, none the
less, pure food-gatherers, dependent on what the environment offered
them. With the passing of glacial conditions, the old herds vanished;
forest, invading the open lands, rendered obsolete the familiar tech-
nique of communal hunting, and so the culture based thereon shrivelled
and decayed. Indeed, last century it appeared that Europe, abandoned
by reindeer- and mammoth-hunters, was left an empty wilderness for
neolithic immigrants to subdue to pasturage and tillage.

Forty years’ researches have erased the last outlines of that picture.
Archaeologists have discovered the remains left by various communities
occupying Europe continuously since the close of the Ice Age, but still
lacking the hall-marks of neolithic civilization. Their remains consti-
tute cultures that are termed mesolithic, because in time—but only in
time—they occupy a place between the latest palaeolithic and the oldest
neolithic cultures. At the same time botanists and geologists have
defined more precisely the changes in environment to which the meso-
lithic cultures were adaptations. Modern vegetation was only slowly
established in the glacial landscape; a temperate climate did not
abruptly replace an arctic one.

In Northern Europe phases in the colonization of the once frozen
plains by forest trees have been determined with great precision by
pollen-analysis (i.e. a quantitative study of the pollen grains preserved
principally in peat mosses).1 The first immigrants were birches and
willows, then come pines, later the hazel, soon followed by elms, limes,
and oaks—the mixed oak woods—lastly, in Denmark, the beech. But
of course the composition of a forest is profoundly affected by topo-
graphical and geological as well as climatic factors so that even on the
North European plain itself the local variations are large and significant.

1   Zeuner, F. E., Dating the Past (London, 1954), summarizes the evidence conveniently.

A   I
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Stages in the gradual amelioration of climate can also be distinguished,
largely on the basis of the same botanical evidence. In North Europe
the long late glacial phase passed over eventually into a cold conti-
nental “Pre-Boreal phase” when birches and a few pines began to
colonize the tundra. This in turn gave place to a Boreal period, still
continental but characterized by summers longer and warmer than
to-day, but severe snowy winters. Next a relatively abrupt increase
of rainfall and westerly winds affected North-Western Europe without
reducing the average annual temperature, so that the climate of
Denmark was really Atlantic, and mixed oak woods attained a maxi-
mum extension at the cost of pine woods. In Britain, on the contrary,
excessive rain and wind caused deforestation in exposed areas. Gradu-
ally the course of the Atlantic storms shifted again, allowing a second
period of forest growth in England but inducing some contraction on
the Continent. This phase, still warmer than to-day, is termed the
Sub-Boreal. It ultimately ended with the onset of modem cold wet
weather in an exaggerated form in the so-called Sub-Atlantic phase.
Of course, the terms Boreal, Atlantic and so on are not strictly applic-
able to Switzerland or South Germany and are meaningless in Mediter-
ranean lands: they were devised in Denmark and Sweden, where alone
they are accurately descriptive.

In the meanwhile the distribution of land and water was also
changing. The release of the vast volumes of water locked up in glaciers
during the Ice Age produced a general, if gradual, rise in sea-level or
marine transgression, but this was offset in the north, where the
accumulations of ice had been deepest and heaviest, by an “isostatic”
re-elevation of the earth’s crust that had been depressed by their
weight. While much of the North Sea basin was still dry land, or at
least fen (Northsealand!), uniting England to the Continent, Scotland
and Scandinavia were thus depressed by the weight of the Ice masses.
The Baltic depression was occupied by a frozen sea, communicating
with the Arctic Ocean and termed the Yoldia Sea. The rebound of the
earth's crust on the melting of the superincumbent ice raised strips
of the Scottish coast above their present relative level and isolated
the Baltic depression; it was occupied by the Ancylus Lake, rendered
slightly brackish by a small inflow of salt water across Central Sweden.
At the end of Boreal times the continued rise of sea-level flooded the
North Sea basin and salt water poured into the Baltic depression,
forming the Litorina Sea, larger and salter than the modem Baltic.
England was completely separated from the Continent, while in Scot-
land whales could swim up the enlarged Forth estuary to above
Stirling. The resultant extension of the area occupied by warm salt
 SURVIVALS OF FOOD-GATHERERS

water was perhaps the cause of the shift in storm tracks that brought
about the Atlantic phase of climate in the North. But north of a line
that runs through Southern Zealand and County Durham the isostatic
re-elevation of the land has continued so that the shore line of Atlantic
times is now represented by the “25 ft. raised beach” in North Britain
and corresponding raised strands round the Baltic. Nevertheless some
time elapsed before this local re-elevation of the land overtook the
general rise in sea-level, so that in marginal areas like Denmark and
East Anglia several local transgressions can be distinguished. In
Denmark and Southern Sweden, in fact, four have to be admitted—
the first at the beginning of the Atlantic phase, the last, and sometimes
the greatest, during early Sub-Boreal times,1 coinciding with Northern
Neolithic III a and b (p. 176).

This changing environment constitutes for the archaeologist a pro-
visional chronological framework, but contemporary men had to
adjust their cultures to it. To small groups of food-gatherers the
temperate forests offered greater facilities for picking up a bare liveli-
hood without intensive social co-operation or a highly specialized
kit-bag than had the bleak hunting-grounds of the Ice Age. Mesolithic
groups appear in general isolated and poorly equipped in contrast to
Magdalenians or Pfedmostians. But all had acquired, or themselves
domesticated, dogs whose co-operation would be of greatest assistance
to man precisely in the pursuit of the smaller, less gregarious game of
the new woodland. Everywhere the collection of nuts, snails, and
shell-fish played a conspicuous part in the new economy. Several of
the mesolithic cultures are clearly just the responses of palaeolithic
survivors to the new environment.

The Swiderian culture,2 represented by assemblages of small flint
tools collected from sand-dunes in Russia and Poland, sometimes under
fossil turf-lines of Atlantic age, is characterized by small asymmetrically

Fig. i. Swiderian flint implements, Poland. After Kozlowski (£).

1   “Aamosen” (1943), 162; Arsberattelse (1937-38), 36-96; cf. New Phytologist, XL1V
(1944), 64.

2   Confined effectively to the woodland zone; KS., XXXI (1950), 96-110; LIX, 7-9;
cf. Clark (1936), 62.

3
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

tanged-points (Fig. i) used presumably as arrow-heads, but morpho-
logically descended from the large dart-heads used by the South
Russian mammoth-hunters. Such was their ultimate response to the
extinction of the mammoth.

Descendants of the Franco-Cantabrian Magdalenians, who combined
with hunting and collecting fishing with the harpoon in the ancestral
manner, created the Azilian culture.1 The Azilians, like their ancestors,
lived by preference in caves where they buried their dead too.2 The
famous cave of Ofnet in Bavaria contained a nest of twenty-one skulls,
buried without the trunks, but not belonging certainly to Azilians.
Because eight of the skulls were brachycranial, anthropologists used
to think that the burial indicated the immigration of a new race into
Europe, but now admit that at least a tendency to round-headedness
existed among Upper Palaeolithic Europeans.3 The Azilians’ equipment
seems poor. The type fossil is the harpoon of red-deer’s antler (Fig. 2),
flat and clumsy in comparison with the ancestral Magdalenian instru-
ment of reindeer antler. Flint blades and gravers persist, but tend to
be diminutive. The cores could be used for wood-working, but were not
specialized into axes. However, some heavy wedge-like tools from the

Fig. 2. Magdalenian harpoon from Cantabria and Azilian harpoons and
painted pebbles from Ari&ge (f).

cave of Bize (Aude) may denote responses to the needs of primitive
carpentry. And in the Falkenstein cave, Hohenzollem, a ground stone
celt was found mounted in an antler sleeve with seemingly typical
Azilian harpoons.4 But now similar harpoons5 have turned up with
geometric microliths in a Tardenoisian layer in the Birsmatten cave
in the Swiss Jura so that all the Alpine-Jura “Azilian” may really be
Tardenoisian and so at best “late mesolithic”. The only reminiscences

1   Obermaier, Fossil Man in Spain (1925), 340!; PPS., XX (1954), 193-210.

2   E.g. in Axtege, L’Anfhr., XXXVIII (1928), 235.

3   See C. S. Coon, Races of Europe (1939), 35-6, 67-8.

4   Germania, XVIII (1934), 81-8.

5   Jb. Bernischen Hist. Mus., XXXIV (1954), 197-8.

4
 SURVIVALS OF FOOD-GATHERERS

of Magdalenian art are highly conventionalized figures painted on
pebbles.

The cave deposits suggest that the Azilians lived in very small and
generally isolated communities; their isolation was not, however,
complete, since shells of Columbella rusticana, imported from the Medi-
terranean, reached the Falkenstein cave. Some sort of boat must have
been available, since Azilians encamped on small islands. Azilian
encampments are found on the slopes of the Cantabrian mountains
and the Pyrenees, of the Massif Central, the Jura, Vosges, Black
Forest, and Alpine foothills, and finally on the south-west coast of
Scotland. But the industry here is distinctive enough to be regarded
as a new culture, "the Obanian",1 not certainly descended from the
French Azilian. In South France the Azilian succeeds the Magdalenian
almost immediately, presumably in Boreal times; the Scottish sites are
situated above the 25-ft. beach and must be Atlantic in age. The
discrepancy might indicate the slow rate of migration by short stages
presumably along tracts of coast now submerged.

Descendants of the local Aurignacians created a very similar culture
in early post-glacial times in the Crimea1 2 and Transcaucasia. They too
lived in caves and buried the dead therein either in the contracted
position or extended. They had tamed a local wolf or jackal to help
them in the chase. In the Crimea harpoons of bone, but of Azilian form,
and slotted points armed with flints as in the Forest cultures, appear
late. Geometric microliths, at first triangles and lunates, later also
trapezes, were made and that even in layers that contain pottery and
polished celts and so look formally neolithic.3

The Tardenoisian culture survives in the archaeological record almost
entirely in the form of pigmy flints or microliths, ingeniously worked
into regular geometrical shapes—triangles, rhombs, trapezes, and
crescents—or into microgravers (Fig. 3) that may be a by-product in
their manufacture.4 These do not really define a single culture, but
represent several disparate industries.5 As the latter can only be dis-
tinguished statistically, all will here be grouped together under the rather
misleading term Tardenoisian. All microliths were presumably parts
of composite tools of wood or bone, but no one knows why the little
blades should be so carefully trimmed. Their makers camped exclusively
on sandy soils6 that would be lightly wooded, and sheltered at first

1   Movius, H., The Irish Stone Age (Cambridge, 1942), 180 ft.

2   HanSar, Kaukasiens, 116-26, 148-50, 194-206; SA., I, 195-212; V, 160-75, 299; for
the fauna MIA., XXXIX (1953). 460-2.

8 SA., V, 97-100; KS., IV (1940), 29.

4   Clark, Meso. Britain, 97-103.

5   PPS., XXI (1955). 14-19.   8 Clark (1936), 190-4.

5
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

often in caves, but also in flimsy huts1 partly sunk into the sandy soil.
At Muge1 2 on the Tagus and on Teviec and Hoedic, two tiny islets off
the coast of Morbihan,3 Tardenoisians settled on the open shore,
hunting and collecting shell-fish and leaving mounds composed of the

Fig. 3. Geometric microliths (2-5) and microgravers (1) from Franconia.
After Gumpert (f).

debris of their repasts. Skeletons, some brachycranial, were buried
in these midden heaps in the contracted attitude. On Teviec and
Hoedic a little cairn was heaped over each of the corpses, which were
sprinkled with ochre; some were covered with a sort of crown of stags’
antlers. In the Ligurian cave of Arene Candide,4 too, was a mesolithic
—perhaps more Azilian than Tardenoisian—cemetery of ten graves,
each containing an extended adult, twice accompanied by an infant,
lying on a bed of ochre.

A tendency to reduce the size of flint blades was common to most
Upper Palaeolithic industries. It led to the production of geometric
forms already in the Gravettian of France and Italy,5 while at Parpallo
in Eastern Spain6 even microburins occur from the Solutrian layers
upward. This tendency was perhaps more marked in the Mediterranean
environment than on the steppes and tundras of periglacial Europe
and strongest in North Africa. There a profusion of geometric micro-

1   Clark (1936), 198; Antiquity, XI (1937), 477; Gumpert, Frank. Mesolithikum
(Mannus Bibliothek, 40), 14-27.

2   Obermaier, op. cit., p. 324; Breuil and Zbyszewski, "Revision des industries de
Muge”, Communicagoes dos Servicios geologicos, XXVIII (Lisbon, 1947); Roche, J.,
L'lndustrie du Cabego d'Amoreira {Muge) (Porto, 1951).

3   Pequart, Boule and Vallois, Teviec, IPH., Mem. 18 (1937), with important section
on mesolithic races; Pequart, M. and St. J., Hoedic (Anvers, 1954).

4   Riv. St. Lig., XII (1946), 36-7.

6   L’Anthr., XLIX (1939-40), 702; Riv. St. Lig. XIV (1948). 16-19.

* Pericot, La Cueva del Parpalld (Madrid, 1942), 67, 92.

6
 SURVIVALS OF FOOD-GATHERERS

liths characterizes the middens and other deposits of the later Capsian
culture. Moreover, these Capsians buried their dead in the middens.
Some Tardenoisians may then be immigrants, driven north by the
incipient desiccation of the Sahara at the close of the European Ice

Fig. 4. Microliths from Muge, Portugal, and transverse arrow-head shafted
from Denmark (f).

Age. The flints from such sites as the cave of La Cocina in Eastern
Spain are indeed virtually identical with the late Capsian.1 The top-
most layers of this cave yielded “Almerian” pottery which we shall
see (p. 268) represents a neolithic of Capsian tradition. It does not
follow that all makers of “Tardenoisian microliths” were recent
immigrants from Africa. Such microliths are found in most parts of
France, Britain, Belgium, South Germany, Poland, and the Pontic
Steppes; most are derivatives of local Upper Palaeolithic industries,
and had emerged in Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany by Boreal
times.2 But in both Britain3 and France,4 and probably too in south-
west Germany5 and Portugal,6 Tardenoisians still survived, retaining
their primitive economy and microlithic traditions in industry, when
a neolithic or even a Bronze Age economy had already been established
among neighbouring groups. And certain Tardenoisian types—trapezes
and lunates—used by later communities in the Peninsula, France,
and South Russia, may denote the absorption of Tardenoisian hunters
by food-producing peoples. Microlithic must not be mistaken for
mesolithic. On the other hand, isolated bones of sheep, reported
exceptionally from pure Tardenoisian layers, otherwise pre-neolithic,7
suggest the possibility that the term Tardenoisian may include some

1   Vaufrey, L’Afrique, 413.

2   Clark (1936), 211-13.

3   Ibid., 217; 1932, 51.

4   E.g. at Sauveterre (Lot-et-Garonne) Tardenoisian microliths were associated with
finger-tipped cordoned pottery and tanged and barbed arrowheads, Conlanges, IPH.
Mem. 14 (1935), 26.

6 Chile, Danube, 18.

6   Sherds of decorated “cave” pottery were found at least in the upper levels of the
midden.

7   Lacam, et al., Le Gisement misolithique du Cuzoul, IPH .Mem. 21 (1944), 11; Pequart,
et al., Teviec, IPH .Mem. 18 (1937), 101 • At Mas d’Azil even un tas de bU was once
mentioned.

7
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

early immigrant sheep-breeders who made no pots nor ground stone
celts.

Asturian1 is the term applied to the culture of strandloopers who
succeeded the Azilians on the coasts of North Spain and appear in
Portugal too. They lived very largely on shell-fish during a period of
greater rainfall than the present and are characterized in the archaeo-
logical record by a pick-like tool formed by chipping a beach pebble
to a rough point.

Though inhabiting wooded countries, none of the communities so
far described give any sign of a sustained effort to master this element
in their environment by the elaboration of specialized carpenter’s tools.
Peoples occupying the forested plain of North Europe, on the contrary,
did develop adzes and axes for dealing with timber. To emphasize this
adaptation to their environment they may be grouped together as the
Forest folk. Their ancestors had advanced as far north as Jutland
before the end of Pre-Boreal times. The pioneers in the colonization
were known down till 1936 only by stray discoveries of “ Lyngby
axes”—reindeer antlers on which the brow tine has been trimmed to
form an adze or an axe edge, or the socket for a flint blade (Fig. 5),

Fig. 5. "Lyngby axe” of reindeer antler, Holstein (£).

which, however, are ill-adapted for chopping and were doubtless used
as clubs. In 1936 a camp of reindeer-hunters who used them was
located on the banks of a shallow mere at Stellmoor near Hamburg
and revealed the content of the Ahrensburg culture.2 The reindeer
were killed with wooden arrows smoothed on grooved stone straighteners
(like Fig. 113) and tipped with asymmetrically tanged flint points;
game or fish were speared with barbed harpoons made on strips roughly
wrenched from reindeers’ antlers.

A reindeer’s skull, mounted on a post, was planted on the shore like
a totem pole.

1   Obermaier, op. tit., 349-58; Pericot, Hist. Espaiia.

z Rust, A., Die alt- and miUtlsteinzeitliche Funde von Stellmoor (Neumunster, 1943).

8

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Re: The Dawn of European Civilization By V. GORDON CHILDE 1923
« Reply #2 on: March 24, 2018, 08:57:01 PM »
0

 SURVIVALS OF FOOD-GATHERERS

Stellmoor was just a temporary camp where the Ahrensburg hunters
spent summer and autumn, retreating presumably farther south to
winter. Their ancestors should doubtless be sought among the Eastern
Gravettians; "Lyngby axes" had in fact been used in late pleistocene
times in Moravia,1 Hungary, and Romania.1 2 At the same time flint
axes were already being used in South Russia.3

The Ahrensburg folk were, however, not the direct or sole ancestors
of the Forest tribes who did develop an effective wood-working equip-
ment. These can most clearly be recognized at Star Carr in Yorkshire
near Scarborough.4 There in Pre-Boreal times about 7500 b.c. (accord-
ing to a radio-carbon estimate) used to winter a band of four "house-
holds” of hunter-fishers on the banks of an extinct lake. They fished
from a rough platform of birch trunks sloping down into the mere.
They had felled the trees with chipped flint celts, edged by a tranchet
blow—i.e. a blow at right angles to the main axis of the flint; both the
celts and the flakes detached in resharpening them were found lying
between the logs.

Game—elk, red deer, and wild ox—and the birds were slain with
arrows or darts tipped with geometric microliths; fish speared with
leisters. The barbed prongs of the latter, usually called harpoons, were
fashioned on strips neatly carved from stags’ antlers by the groove-
and-splinter technique inherited from the Aurignacian,5 but in form
foreshadow the classical Maglemosian bone points of the Boreal period.
To aid them in the chase as disguises or to ensure an ampler supply of
game in magic ceremonies the hunters wore frontlets carrying the
antlers cut from stags’ skulls. Similar Forest folk must have been
spread all over Northsealand and perhaps farther east, but are directly
attested only in Denmark by distinctive flints.

Certainly by Boreal times the Forest folk had spread all over the
still unbroken North European plain from Southern England to Fin-
land, and had achieved a very nice adjustment to their environment
of pine woods, interrupted only by lakes and rivers. While hunting
expeditions brought the widely scattered groups into contact from
time to time, fishing beside streams and meres encouraged more per-
manent encampment so that equipment was already being differen-
tiated locally to meet divergent conditions. Within the larger con-
tinuum local facies or cultures can be distinguished in England,

1   In the Magdalenian levels of the Pekarna cave and in the contemporary camp of
Pavlovce near Dolni VSstonice.

2   Dacia, V-VI (1934-35), 12, pi. Ill; cf., Antiquity, XVI (1942), 259.

3   At Kostienki I; KS , XXXI (1950), 168.

4   Clark, G., Star Carr (Cambridge, 1954).

3 APL., IV (1955), 195 f-

9
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Denmark, North Germany,1 the East Baltic2 (Kunda), and perhaps
the Norwegian coast. But the Maglemose near Mullerup and other
classic sites in Zealand supply material for an adequate picture, applic-
able with modifications to the rest.

These were summer-camps, submerged each winter, whither men
repaired for hunting, fowling, fishing, and nut-gathering. To secure

I   5   6   8

Fig. 6. Maglemosian types from Zealand. 1-3, 7-8 (£); 4 (§); 5-6 ($).

food they had devised or perfected a highly efficient equipment—
for hunting, bows3 of elm wood reinforced with sinews from which
were shot wooden arrows armed with geometric microliths inserted
into grooves on the shaft or merely gummed on with birch-pitch,4
slotted bone points, also armed with small flints (Fig. 6, 3), and clubs
with spheroid or spiked stone heads perforated by percussion. Their
still more specialized fishing tackle5: leisters with several kinds of
barbed bone prongs (Fig. 6, 1-2; cf. Fig. 105, 6), bone fish-hooks, nets

1   Clark, Northern Europe (1936); cf. Childe, PCBL, 26-8.

2   Indreko, "Die mittlere Steinzeit in Estland”, K. V. H. A. Akademiens, Handlingar,
LXVI (Stockholm, 1948); SMYA., LVII (1956) (the Askola culture).

3   FNA. (1945), 63-5.

1 Arsberattelse (1951), 123-36.   8 Clark, Preh. Eur., 42-8.

10
 SURVIVALS OF FOOD-GATHERERS

of lime bast with pine bark floats and ingenious wicker weels (traps).
For killing fur-bearing animals with minimum damage to the pelts
they employed conical wooden arrow-heads which east of the Baltic
were translated into bone (Fig. 105); there an antler pick had been
specialized for breaking the ice. Bone needles were made for netting,
flint gravers for cutting bone, small disc scrapers (Fig. 6, 4) for dressing
skins, and split boars’ tusks for knives. The wood-worker was now
provided with chisels of antler, socketed chisels made from marrow
bones of large game (Fig. 6, 8), perforated antler adzes, and flint core-
axes (Fig. 6, 5) or exceptionally flake-axes (Fig. 6, 6) mounted as
adze-blades in perforated antler sleeves (Fig. 6, 7). East of the Baltic,
where flint was scarce, the adze-blades were pebbles sharpened, like
the antler tools, by grinding. In England the flake-axe was still un-
known.

Communications were maintained most easily by water in boats,
presumably of skins, which have not survived, though the paddles that
propelled them are extant. For land transport over the winter snows
sledges were available east of the Baltic.1 Dogs of a wolfish type were
everywhere domesticated and may be the ancestors of modem sledge-
dog breeds. The electrical properties of amber had already been recog-
nized as a magic virtue so that the substance was collected in Den-
mark. .Esthetic satisfaction was obtained by decorating bone imple-
ments with geometric patterns, generally outlined by a series of points
in the so-called drill-technique.

Remarkably exact replicas of the Maglemosian bone equipment
have been recovered from undated levels of peat bogs in the Urals,
but these can hardly be used to document an eastern origin for the
Maglemosians; Briusov2 suggests that a common southern origin for
both the Baltic and Uralian groups would adequately explain the
agreements. An eastward spread would seem more likely; for the Magle-
mosian is a natural development of the Pre-Boreal cultures of North-
sealand. So too the Komsa and Fosna cultures, represented by assem-
blages of stone tools (including tranchet celts) from high strands on
the Norwegian coasts,3 must be due to a simultaneous coastwise
spread from the same region.4

The marine transgression that ushered in the Atlantic phase broke
up the unity of the Forest cultures and offered new opportunities to

1   A runner was recovered from a Boreal peat in Finland, SM., XXXVTII-XXXIX
(1931-2), 60; XLI, 121; XLII, 22.

2   OUerM, 146-8, 168-9; he would derive the Kunda culture from the east but not the
west Baltic Maglemosian.

8   Bee and Nummedal, Le FinnmarMen (Oslo, 1936).

4   Freundt, “Komsa, Fosna, Sandarna”, Acta Arch., XIX (1948), 4-55, but cf. SMYA.,
LVII.

II
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

certain groups. Rich oyster banks combined with sealing and sea-
fishing allowed communities to settle down at sheltered spots along
the Danish and South Swedish coasts. The Ertebslle culture represents
an appropriate adjustment.1 The sites are marked by huge shell-heaps
(that may be 100 yards long and 30 yards wide), the refuse of a more
sedentary population. The exposure of new deposits of superior flint
resulted in an increasing substitution of flint for bone in making heavy
tools. Flake-axes were preferred to picks, plump green-stone axes were
sometimes made by grinding, as earlier in the East Baltic, but perfor-
ated antler axes2—no longer adzes—and sleeves for axes were still

Fig. 7. Ertebolle pot, antler axes and bone combs, Denmark (£).

made. The only microliths manufactured were transverse arrow-heads.
Fish were not speared with harpoons but caught with hook and line.
The sedentary life permitted the manufacture of pottery in the form
of large jars with pointed bases and troughs that may have been used
as blubber lamps. A taste for personal adornment is indicated by bone
combs and armlets. The dead were buried extended in the middens,3
generally without grave goods, occasionally wrapped in a birch-bark
shroud4 and laid upon a bier, or once apparently cremated.5 On the
other hand, human bones, broken up just like those of game, afford
good evidence for cannibalism.6

1   Clark, Northern Europe, 138-56, but cf. now Acta Arch., VIII (1937), 278-94;
Mathiassen, “Bopladsen Dyrholmen”, K. Dansk. Videns. Selskabs, Ark.-Kunsthist.
Skrifter, I, 1 (1942); Bagge and Kjellmark, Siretorp.; "Aamose”, 136-44; and Althin,
Scania.

2   These “axes” and the earlier "adzes” would not be much good for chopping, since
the shafts actually preserved are hazel stems not over 2 cm. thick though as much as
50 cm. long; Mathiassen, “Dyrholmen”, 24.

a Brondsted, Danmarks, i, 115; round heads exceeded long heads in the ratio of 3 to 2,
ibid., 123.

4   FNA. (1945), 6.

5   Sellerod Bogen (1946), 33.   Degerbol, in Mathiassen, "Dyrholmen”, 118-20.

12
 SURVIVALS OF FOOD-GATHERERS

Now a local invention of pottery cannot be a priori ruled out and
ground stone adzes had been made in Boreal times (p. n). So the
Erteb0lle culture as just described could be regarded as an auto-
chthonous adjustment of the native culture of the Boreal phase—if
not of the classical Maglemosian as illustrated in the lakeside camps,
at least of its hypothetical counterpart as developed on the now sub-
merged coasts of Northsealand. However, in 1953 Troels-Smith1 showed
that bones of domestic cattle and sheep or goats, and sherds bearing
imprints of naked barley and of emmer and hexaploid wheats, do occur
in several Ertebplle middens in Denmark that are dated by pollen-
analysis to the Atlantic phase, while weeds of cultivation were already
growing in their vicinity. Accordingly some Ertebplle folk were not
mere food-gatherers, but farmers cultivating the soil and keeping
domestic animals, tethered and stalled and not allowed to graze freely.
Moreover, the earliest “neolithic” pots—Becker's A funnel-beakers—
were made by the same technique and found on the same sites as the
coarse “mesolithic” jars and troughs.

As there were no wild sheep or goats to tame in Denmark nor wild
cereals to cultivate, an actual infiltration of neolithic farmers must be
admitted in Denmark already. Their stock and grains point unam-
biguously to the south-east, their diffusion forms a major theme in
subsequent chapters. Meanwhile a pure continuation of the old gather-
ing economy can be traced round the North Sea and the Baltic.

While the coastal populations thus took advantage of a new environ-
ment, the communities inhabiting Norway, Central Sweden, the East
Baltic lands and even the interior of Jutland and Schleswig-Holstein
remained true to the Boreal way of life and preserved much of the old
equipment—particularly harpoons or, as in the Gudenaa culture of
Jutland,1 2 geometric microliths—throughout the greater part of the
Atlantic phase. Similar survivals to the south and east maybe inferred
from geometric microliths collected in Southern Sweden3 and Poland.4
To the West the culture of Lower Halstow on the Thames estuary,5
dated botanically to Atlantic times, with its flake-axes provides a
good parallel to Danish Erteb0lle in its mesolithic aspect. The Horsham
culture of Southern England6 characterized by core-axes and many
microliths should be partly contemporary though the absence of flake-
axes and the archaism of the microliths might suggest an earlier date.

1   Aarbsger (1953)- 5-62.

2   Mathiassen, Aarbeger (1937).

8 Althin, Scania, 159; Fv. (1944). 257-79-

4   WA., XX (1954), 23-66; at Janislavice (Skierniewice Dist.) a sitting skeleton showing
Lapponoid features is assigned to this phase.

5   Clark, Northern Europe, 158.   8 Childe, PCBI., 28.

13
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

In Scotland an antler axe found with a stranded whale in the Atlantic
estuary of the Forth above Stirling1 and similar implements from
Obanian sites farther west are in good Erteb0lle traditions. How far
to the south-west the Forest culture had spread in Atlantic times before
it was overlaid or transformed by immigrant neolithic farmers cannot
yet be determined. The famous site of Le Campigny, Seine Inferieure,
once the patent station for a mesolithic culture, now proves to be the
hilltop settlement of fully neolithic Western farmers (p. 305).1 2

The mesolithic cultures just described prove the continued occupation
of large tracts of Europe from the glorious days of mammoth-hunting
and the existence there of sparse but vigorous populations that could
expand when the introduction of cereals and domestic stock offered
an enlarged food supply. They may, moreover, be credited with positive
contributions to later cultures that must be adapted to a like environ-
ment. Most conspicuously had the Forest folk perfected an apparatus
for exploiting the natural resources of their habitat, items of which
survive to the present day where the environment has persisted.
Fish-traps and leisters, structurally identical with those devised in
Boreal times, are still used by fishermen round the Baltic—a striking
example of a craft tradition persisting locally for some eight thousand
years. So they had discovered the process of making birch-pitch, an
artificial material still used by the peasants of the region.3 Forest folk
had perfected an efficient kit of wood-working tools and in particular
the ingenious tranchet technique for edging flint chopping-tools. That
is not to say that this technique was diffused from Northern Europe
to Italy, Egypt, Palestine, and the Solomon Islands, where it was
certainly applied. It had in fact been anticipated in the late Acheulian
cleavers of the Lower Palaeolithic and in the rare Moustierian coupons
of the last Ice Age.4 The positive contributions made by Swiderians,
Azilians, Asturians, and the diverse groups here termed Tardenoisian
are less well documented, but surely not altogether negligible. But by
themselves none of the food-gatherers of temperate Europe could turn
into food-producers. Is it not significant that mesolithic cultures are
most richly represented in regions remote from the oldest historical
centres of civilization and the native habitat of wild cereals and wild
sheep? Whatever part mesolithic folk may have formed in neolithic
populations, the flocks of sheep and the seeds of grain on which the
new economy was based were not carried by wind or intertribal barter,
but brought by actual immigrant shepherds and cultivators.

1   Clark, Preh. Eur., 65.

2   But cf. Nougier, Les Civilisations campigniennes (Paris, 1950).

3   Clark, Preh. Eur., 208-9.   4 Peyrony, Prehist., Ill, 17.

14
 CHAPTER II

THE ORIENT AND CRETE

The now desiccated zone of North Africa and Hither Asia had been
grassy prairie when Northern Europe was tundra or ice-sheet. On the
upland steppes of South-West Asia grew wild grasses which under
cultivation became barleys and wheats—the ancestor of one-corn
wheat (Triticum monococcum) from the southern Balkans to Armenia
and wild emmer (Triticum dicoccoides) from Palestine to Iran.1 Sheep
and cattle fit for domestication were roving there too. In such an
environment human societies could successfully adopt an aggressive
attitude to surrounding nature and proceed to the active exploitation
of the organic world.

At Jarmo in Kurdistan2 the inhabitants of a little hilltop village
were cultivating emmer and barley that already exhibit some effects
of domestication as early as 4750 B.c. In Palestine where the meso-
lithic Natufians had been reaping annual grasses,3 farming may have
started before 6000 b.c. at Jericho.4 But neither at Jarmo nor at
Jericho did the first farmers make pottery.

Stock-breeding and the cultivation of cereals were revolutionary
steps in man’s emancipation from dependence on the external environ-
ment. They put man in control of his own food-supply so far that
population could—and did—expand beyond the narrow limits imposed
by the naturally available supply of wild fruits and game. But the
expansion of population led by its very conditions to the expansion
of the revolutionaries themselves—the primitive half-sedentary farmers
—or their transmutation by a second revolution into a settled peasantry
producing surplus food-stuffs for its own surplus offspring who had
become artisans and traders, priests and kings, officials and soldiers in
an urban population.

The second revolution was accomplished first in the valleys of the
Nile, the Euphrates, and the Indus. There irrigation cultivation had
produced a surplus vast enough to support the whole superstructure
of literate civilization. By 3000 b.c. archaeology and written history
reveal Mesopotamians and Egyptians already grouped in vast cities

1   On the cereals see Helbaek, Inst. Arch. All., IX (1953), 44-52.
a Braidwood, R. Antiquity, XXIV (1950), 190-6.

3   Childe, NLMAE., 28-30.
i Antiquity, XXX (1956), 196.

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Re: The Dawn of European Civilization By V. GORDON CHILDE 1923
« Reply #3 on: March 24, 2018, 08:57:41 PM »
0

 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

any one of which might, like Erech, measure two square miles in area,
and in which secondary industry and trade offered an outlet for the
surplus rural population.

In New Light on the Most Ancient East I have tried to sketch in some
details in that prehistoric background of Oriental history. And I have
tried to show too how the first revolution that precedes it had to spread,
and how the growing demands of the new urban centres of population
and wealth must involve the propagation both of the arts and crafts
on which the second revolution rested and of the economy that sus-
tained it. To find food for rising generations, the simplest step was to
bring fresh land under cultivation and annex new pastures. That
meant a continuous expansion of colonization and the progressive
multiplication of farming villages. But the surplus accumulated in
Egyptian and Mesopotamian cities could serve as capital for the
promotion of trading expeditions through which the villages thus
founded could share in the surplus and use it in their turn for the
development of secondary industries. To obtain this share by supplying
the effective demands of civilized societies, the Anatolian or Syrian
villages must turn themselves into towns producing a surplus of farm-
produce to support industrial workers and traders. And villages, thus
urbanized, must become secondary centres of demand and for diffusion;
they must in turn repeat the process of propagation, generating thereby
tertiary centres to carry on the work. We should thus expect a hier-
archy of urban or semi-urban communities, zoned, not only in space
but also in time and in cultural level around the metropoles of Egypt,
Mesopotamia, and India. How far does prehistoric Europe confirm such
anticipation?

Farming must of course have started in South-West Asia. But in
tracing its primary expansion thence, it must now be remembered
that the first farmers were not necessarily also potters; the first peasant
colonists to reach Europe may not have left a trail of potsherds to mark
their tracks! And those tracks were not necessarily on land. Fishing
communities along the Levant coasts could perfectly well have learned
to supplement the produce of food-gathering by cultivating cereals
and breeding stock. Such incipient food-producers, forced to colonize
fresh territories, might perfectly well have taken to their boats and
paddled or sailed on the alluring waters of the Mediterranean to the
next landfall—and then the next.

By its spatial position and by special favours of the winds and
currents the great island of Crete is easily accessible from the Nile,
from Syria, from Anatolia, and from peninsular Greece. Its fertile

16
 THE ORIENT AND CRETE

lowlands guarantee a living to farmers and orchardists; its resources
in timber, copper, and other raw materials can supply the needs of
secondary industry; its natural harbours are not only bases for fisher-
men but havens for merchants who can transport Cretan produce to
urban centres and bring back in return the manufactures and also the
science of older cities.

The ruins of neolithic villages have formed a tell, 6-5 m. high,
beneath the oldest Minoan levels at Knossos in Central Crete, where
the Minoan civilization was first identified. But trial pits have revealed
but little of the neolithic culture.1 It was formally neolithic in that
pebbles were ground and polished to make plump celts (axes and chisels).
But obsidian was imported from Melos and from Yali so that the
farmers were hardly self-sufficing. For the later levels indeed the term
neolithic is not even formally correct, since a copper flat axe was found
on a house floor with stone celts. Stone was also drilled to make spheroid
and pear-shaped mace-heads and worked into studs and even vases.
The latest houses consisted of agglomerations of small chambers with
fixed hearths and stone foundations for their walls.

Pottery,1 2 though hand made, was of fine quality, self-coloured grey-
black or red-brown according as to whether it were fired in a reducing
or an oxidizing atmosphere; the surface was often burnished, sometimes
so as to produce a decorative rippled effect. The forms cannot be
called primitive: the vases may be provided with genuine handles
(including wish-bone, nose-bridge, and flanged ribbon handles) as well
as simple and trumpet lugs; some vases have short spouts, most flat
bases. Goblets on tall half-hollow pedestals and fruit-stands with
hollow feet appear before the period ends. Ladles are common, as in
neolithic Egypt and Western Europe. Some middle neolithic vessels
have club rims, as in Portugal and Britain. The potter decorated her
products with incised patterns, including triangles and ribbons filled
with punctuations. In the transitional pottery of the Trapeza cave3 in
the mountainous interior a schematized human face was modelled on
the vase rim.

For their fertility rituals the farmers modelled in clay or carved in
soft stone highly conventionalized figurines of the "Mother Goddess’*,
seated or squatting (Fig. 8). As amulets they wore miniature stone
axes pierced for suspension (axe-amulets). Caves were used for burials
but for individual interments, not as ossuaries.4

Since palaeolithic food-gatherers have left no relics on the island, we

1   Pendlebury, Archeology of Crete (London, 1939), 35-41.

2   BSA., XLVIII (1953). 94-134-

8 BSA., XXXVI, 30.

BSA., XXXVIII, 15.

B

17
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

may assume that the earliest Cretan farmers were immigrants who
brought their neolithic equipment with them. “Neolithic Crete”, writes
Evans, “may be regarded as an insular offshoot of an extensive Ana-

tolian province.” His table (Fig. 8) shows many Asiatic relatives to
the squatting figurines. The self-coloured pots, with handles and spouts,
have a general Anatolian aspect, the fine grey wares can be paralleled
in the “Chalcolithic levels” of Megiddo1 and in the deepest layers of

Engberg and Shipton, "The Chalcolithic Pottery of Megiddo” (O.I.C. Studies, xo), 6x.

18


 THE ORIENT AND CRETE

many Asiatic tells.1 The mace-heads too belong to an Asiatic family
but recur, like the axe-amulet, in the neolithic village of Merimde2 in
Lower Egypt, which also yielded plump axes and clay ladles. But
punctured ribbon decoration and pedestalled goblets have analogies
also in the Balkans (p. 91), and the wish-bone handle is typical of the
Macedonian Bronze Age, while Trapeza ware is still more reminiscent
of Balkan and Apennine fabrics.

The “neolithic" phase was ended by a “quickening impulse from the
Nile, which permeated the rude island culture and transformed it”
into the Minoan civilization. Evans suspects an actual immigration
of predynastic Egyptians, perhaps refugees from the Delta fleeing
from Menes’ conquest. At least on the Mesara, the great plain of
Southern Crete facing Africa, Minoan Crete’s indebtedness to the Nile
is disclosed in the most intimate aspects of its culture. Not only do the
forms of Early Minoan stone vases, the precision of the lapidaries’
technique and the aesthetic selection of variegated stones as his materials
carry on the predynastic tradition: but also Nilotic religious customs
such as the use of the sistrum, the wearing of amulets in the forms of legs,
mummies and monkeys, and statuettes plainly derived from Gerzean
"block figures”,3 and personal habits revealed by depilatory tweezers
of Egyptian shape, and stone unguent palettes from the early tombs
and, later, details of costume such as the penis-sheath and the loin-
cloth betoken something deeper than the external relations of
commerce.

At the same time even more explicitly Asiatic traits can be detected
among the innovations distinguishing the "Metal Age” from the
“Neolithic” civilization. Some might indeed have been transmitted
via Egypt: block-vases—paint-pots consisting of two or more com-
partments hollowed out of a stone parallelepiped with perforated
corners—which were especially favoured in the Mesara, are common
to Sumer and Egypt in Early Dynastic times.4 But Minoan metallurgy
is based entirely on Asiatic traditions; the coppersmith cast axe-heads
with a hole through the head for shafting in the Mesopotamian manner,
the artists treated rosettes and similar figures in the Asiatic, not the
Egyptian style.5 The most striking Minoan pot-forms—the pyxis with
cylindrical neck and string-hole lid, the jug with cut-away neck and
the side-spouted jar have parallels on the Anatolian, not on the African
side; the so-called teapot with curious spout (Fig. 9) recurs without

1   Childe, NLMAE., 218.

2   Childe, NLMAE., 39.

3   Childe. NLMAE., fig. 36.

4   Evans, P. of M., II, fig. 20; cf. Childe, NLMAE., 94, 142, 163.

5   Matz, Friihhretische Siegel, 88.

T9
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

the handle—as far away as Tepe Hissar near Damghan1 and even
Anau in Turkestan. The technique of glaze paint that distinguishes
Minoan pottery had been earlier employed by the Tel Halaf potters
of North Syria. So in religion the cult of the Double-Axe is foreshadowed
by Tel Halaf amulets.1 2 The use of engraved bead and button seals as
contrasted with carved amulets is a very ancient North Syrian-Iranian
practice later adopted in Egypt as in Crete.

Fig. 9. Early Minoan III ‘‘teapots ” and button seal. After Evans.

How far fresh Anatolian or Syrian colonists—merchants or artisans
—joined with Egyptian refugees in founding the Minoan cities is for
us a secondary question. Minoan civilization was not brought ready
made from Asia nor from Africa, but was an original native creation
wherein Sumerian and Egyptian techniques and ideas were blended
to form a novel and essentially European whole. The admittedly Nilotic
and Oriental elements that we see superadded to the Cretan neolithic
culture may be treated as concrete expressions of the transformation
of the island’s economy with the support of capital accumulated in the
great consuming centres that arose, round about 3000 b.c., on the Nile

1   Schmidt, Excavations at Tipi Hissar (1931-3), and MusJ., XXIII, p. CXVI; cf.
Frankfort, "Archaeology and the Sumerian Problem” (O.I.C. Studies, 4), 57-64. In
Anatolia ldndred forms were popular under the Hittite Empires (1950-1200 B.c.);
MDOG., 75 (1937), 38- Cf. Gordon, Iraq, XIII (1951), 40-46.

2   Childe, NLMAE., fig. 105, 3.

20
 THE ORIENT AND CRETE

and the Euphrates. In supplying their needs the Cretan farmer’s sons
might find a livelihood in trade and industry; their self-sufficing villages
would become commercial cities.

On the basis of the stratigraphies! sequence, best preserved at
Knossos, Sir Arthur Evans divided the Cretan Bronze Age into the
famous "nine Minoan periods” to which he attributed absolute dates
on the strength of contacts with the literate centres of civilization.
His scheme, columns I and II below, needs some revision after fifty-
five years. Firstly, the chronologies of Egypt and Mesopotamia1 have
been deflated since then. Secondly, Evans’ division was based mainly
on the sequence of ceramic styles observed at Knossos. This turns out
to be applicable to other parts of the island only with drastic modi-
fications. The ceramic art, defining Evans’ L.M.II, was a “ palace style”,
in vogue only at Knossos. The same thing had happened before. Once
it looked as if East Crete had been deserted in M.M.II, since the eggshell-
fine polychrone pottery defining that phase was lacking. In reality this
style too was confined to the palaces of Knossos and Phaestos in Central
Crete.1 2 Even in the Mesara, a fortiori in East Crete, the M.M.I style
was still in fashion as late as 1790 b.c.3 Moreover, at Knossos the Early
Minoan period is poorly represented owing to the levelling carried out
by later builders; Evans’ account had to be filled out by large drafts
on material from East Crete and the Mesara. But during E.M. Minoan
culture was by no means uniform so that there is a real danger of inflat-
ing the sequence by using local styles to represent chronological periods.
Thirdly, the first reliable synchronisms based on an actual and dated
interchange of products are afforded by M.M.II vases in Middle King-
dom Egypt securely dated about 1850 b.c. We have no Early Minoan
imports in dated contexts in Egypt or Hither Asia, and, though actual
Egyptian manufactures of Old Kingdom and even predynastic type
were imported into the island, hardly any come from closed finds.
One Egyptian jar from a Late Neolithic deposit is considered by
Reisner to be no earlier than Dynasty I. If he be right, E.M.I must
begin after 2830 or 3188 b.c. whichever date for that dynasty’s begin-
ning be accepted. Another imported vase from an E.M.I context,
however, cannot be later than Dynasty III, some four centuries later.
Further Egyptian imports imply an overlap between E.M.III—in the
Mesara and East Crete—and the rise of Dynasty XII about 2000 b.c.4
We thus have the following scheme:

1   E.g. by Sidney Smith, Alalakh and Chronology (London, 1940).

2   Aberg, Chron., IV, 201 ff.; Pendlebury, Crete, XXXI, 300-2; Demargne, Fouilles &
Mallia: Nicropoles (Etudes Cretoises, VII, Paris, 1945), 65-9.

2 Smith, AJA., XLIX (1945). 23-4.

4   Hutchinson, Antiquity, XXII (1948), 61-3.

21
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Period   Abbreviation and Subdivision   Absolute Date

   Knossos   East Crete   B.C.
Early Minoan   E.M.I      
   E.M.II      
   E.M.III   E.M.III ?   ? 2000
Middle Minoan   M.M.I      I85O
   M.M.II   M.M.I   
   M.M.III   M.M.III   I7OO
Late Minoan   L.M.I      1550
      L.M.I.   
   L.M.II1      1450
   L.M.III(A)   L.M.III(A)   I4OO
   L.H.III(B)      1300
   L.H.III(C)      1200

No attempt can be made here to evoke in a few pages an adequate
picture of Minoan civilization. We must content ourselves with a brief
outline of the economic development and some reference to the indus-
trial products that are relevant for comparative purposes.

As in neolithic times the foundations of Minoan economy were
fishing, the breeding of cattle, goats, and pigs (sheep are not osteologic-
ally attested till Late Minoan times)2 and the cultivation of unidentified
cereals together with olives and other fruits. But now specialized
craftsmen—jewellers, coppersmiths, lapidaries—must have been sup-
ported by the surplus produce of the peasantry. And so in addition
to rural hamlets, larger agglomerations of population must be assumed
though no Early Minoan township has been fully excavated. Soundings
at Vasilild3 in East Crete and beneath the palace of Knossos give hints
of the existence of complexes of rectangular houses of brick and timber
on stone foundations, like the contemporary towns of Anatolia and
Mainland Greece. But even as late as M.M.I we find the rural population
living in isolated house-complexes more reminiscent of a big farm than
even a village. A dwelling of that period at Chamaizi4 was an oval
walled enclosure, measuring 20 m. by 12 m. and divided by radial
walls into eleven compartments—exactly like the Iron Age courtyard
houses and wheel dwellings of Western Britain!

Similar conclusions might be drawn from the graves. The standard

1   A diorite amphora, bearing the cartouche of Thothmes III (1500-1447) from a
L.M.II tomb near Herakleion, gives new precision to this dating; Kretika Chronika,
VI (i953)* ii-

3   Hazzadakis, Tylissc• .$? /’' ^ - r:--: r-'lroenne (1921), 77.

3   Described in Boyd :. v. >. =, :..: ?   ;.

4   Evans, P. of M., I, 147.

22

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Re: The Dawn of European Civilization By V. GORDON CHILDE 1923
« Reply #4 on: March 24, 2018, 08:58:25 PM »
0

 THE ORIENT AND CRETE

Minoan burial practice at all periods was collective interment in a
family or communal ossuary used for many generations. This practice,
foreign to Egypt, Sumer, and the Anatolian plateau, was current all
round the Mediterranean, going back to "Mesolithic” times among
the troglodyte Natufians of Palestine.1 In the Minoan ossuaries the
bones are generally lying in the utmost disorder. The dislocated con-
dition of the skeletons, which has been observed in collective tombs
farther west too, has been taken as evidence of secondary burial; the
remains would have been deposited in a temporary resting-place until
the flesh had decayed. Xanthudides’1 2 careful studies of the Mesara
burials have, however, shown that the disordered condition of the
bones was due in the main to disturbances by those undertaking later
interments who showed little respect to the former occupants of the
tomb in making room for a fresh interment. The bodies had generally
been placed on the floor of the tomb in the contracted attitude. Simi-
larly traces of fire, sometimes noted on the bones, are due to ritual or
purificatory fires kindled within the ossuary rather than to cremation.

The ossuaries themselves may be natural caves (E.M.I to M.M.I),
rectangular stone chambers, imitating two-roomed houses, or circular
enclosures commonly termed tholoi. In the Mesara the tholoi vary
in internal diameter from 4-10 to 13 m., and are entered through a low
doorway, formed of two megalithic uprights supporting a massive
lintel and often entered from a small walled enclosure. The walls are
from i*8 to 2-5 m. thick and the inner courses oversail one another as if
the whole had been roofed with a corbelled vault on the principle
employed in the Cycladic tomb illustrated in Fig. 25, 1. While it is
hard to believe that a space 30 or 40 feet across could really have been
spanned by a false dome, the smaller chambers certainly do deserve
the name of tholoi, or “vaulted tombs”. In an early example at Krazi3
in East Crete, 4*2 m. in diameter, the corpses must, as in the Cyclades
and Attica (pp. 51, 72), have been introduced through the roof, since
the door, only 0-5 m. high, was completely blocked by an accumulation
of bones and offerings; the “door” would in fact be purely symbolic
as in Egyptian mastabas and some British long barrows.

Evans has compared the Cretan tholoi to Libyan and Nubian closed
tombs of later date, but Mallowan, followed by Peake, would find the
prototypes of the Minoan tholoi in circular brick constructions of
unknown, but certainly non-sepulchral, use which he had discovered
in the chalcolithic Tel Halaf township at Arpachiya in Assyria that

1   Garrod, The Stone Age of Mount Carmel, I, 14.

2   Xanthudides and Droop, Vaulted Tombs of the Mesard.

3   AA (1929), 103.

23
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

goes back at least far into the fourth millennium b.c.1 By that date the
device of corbelling was certainly well understood in Hither Asia, but
it is not attested in Egypt before the Second or Third Dynasty. In fact,
the Minoan tholoi, like the contemporary rectangular ossuaries, may
be just imitations in permanent material of dwellings for the living,
since round houses are attested by a model from Phaestos. As the tholos
tomb was current also in the Cyclades, pottery and ornaments of
Cycladic character were abundant in the early tholos at Krazi, and
Cycladic idols occur even in the Mesara tombs, Marinatos seems
inclined to think that the type of sepulchre may have been introduced
by families from the small islands.

In East Crete (for instance at Mochlos) the house-tombs may be
grouped to form small cemeteries such as' should correspond to a
township where several lineages lived together. Tholoi are more often
isolated as if the territorial unit corresponded to a single clan or lineage.
But in the Mesara small cemeteries are known—three tholoi and a
rectangular ossuary at Koumasa, three tholoi at Platanos, etc. Such
aggregations imply the association of several kinship groups in a single
village, but no actual settlements anterior to Middle Minoan have been
yet identified in the vicinity. Both in the Mesara and at Krasi, when
the tholoi had become congested, accessory chambers were built on
to the original mausoleum to receive subsequent interments, mostly
of Middle Minoan date. And by M.M.II there developed the practice
of excavating in the soft rock sepulchres designed for a single small
family—irregular chambers entered by a short passage or antechamber
—as attested by the Mavro Speleo cemetery near Knossos.2 Cases of
cremation occur among the latest interments in an adjacent cemetery.3
A small tholos seems to have been built in an excavation in a hillside
in the same period. Subterranean chambers became the standard form
of tomb in Late Minoan times in Crete as in Mycenaean Greece. But
even before the end of Early Minoan, individual burial in small stone
cists, in clay coffins (lamakes), and in jars (pithoi) grouped in cemeteries
as contrasted with ossuaries was beginning to compete with ossuary
practice, and steadily increased in popularity during later periods.
The clay coffins4 have early parallels both in Mesopotamia and Egypt,
whereas jar burial is a specifically Anatolian-Syrian rite.

The variety of burial practices coexistent in Early Minoan times,
like the variety of ceramic traditions, suggests that the island had been
colonized by distinct communities which had not yet fused to form a

1 Iraq, II, 20, figs. 13-14.

a BSA., XXVIII (1926-27), 263-96.

3   “Archaeology in Greece”, Supplement to JHS. (1955).

4   Man, XXIX (1929), 18.

24
 THE ORIENT AND CRETE

single people with an homogeneous culture. But they seem to have
lived together peaceably, as no fortifications have been found, and as
members of a single economic system in view of the uniformities in
types of metal tools, stone vases, jewellery, and seals. This system
secured and distributed foreign materials, gold, silver, lead, obsidian,
marble, and perhaps amber (from the tholos of Porti), Egyptian and
Asiatic manufactures such as fayence beads and stone vases that were
copied locally, and perhaps Cycladic figurines. Individual artisans
needed seals (buttons, beads, and prisms) that might bear scenes
symbolic of their craft; merchants stamped therewith bales of goods
exported to Asine and other mainland ports. But no regular system
of writing and ciphering was yet needed nor publicly sanctioned for
correspondence or accounts. Though sepulchral furniture discloses
considerable personal wealth, neither monumental private tombs,
palaces, nor temples indicate concentration of wealth in the hands of
capitalists human or divine. Cult was conducted in rustic sanctuaries
and grottoes. Its symbols—stone figurines imported from the Cyclades
or imitating predynastic Egyptian block figures, phalli1 and model

Fig. io. The Minoan “Mother Goddess” and (left) Homs of Consecration,
from a sealing. After Evans.

horns of consecration2 as in Anatolia, dove-pendants3 as in the Cyclades
and Assyria, and votive double-axes4 of copper and lead—while fore-
shadowing the distinctive apparatus of later Minoan ritual, still appear
in forms appropriate to domestic worship.

1   Koumisa, tholos X.

2   Mochlos, E.M.I. (P. of M., I, 57).

3   Mochlos (ibid., 102); cf. Iraq, II, fig. 51, 7.

25

Mochlos (P. of M., I, 101).
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

In Middle Minoan times power and wealth began to be concentrated
in the hands of dynasts residing in Central Crete and combining political
and religious authority. Palaces that were also temples, factories, and
warehouses were erected at Mallia, Knossos, and other sites. Special-
ization invades the domain of domestic industry. The potters’ wheel,
symbolizing the industrialization of the ceramic art, is attested from
M.M.I. The wheel itself was a large clay disc which itinerant potters
could carry about with them as they do to-day.1 Wheeled vehicles
are first represented at the same period by a model four-wheeled cart
from Palaikastro.2 They could hardly be serviceable without roads
maintained by some authority with more than local jurisdiction. And
in fact during Middle Minoan times the divergent local traditions
that had persisted throughout the preceding period were gradually
fused until Crete came to enjoy a single civilization. But the dis-
tinction between province and metropolis becomes prominent. The
provincial potters of Eastern Crete could not compete with the experts
employed in the palaces of Knossos or Phaestos in turning out poly-
chrome ware of eggshell thinness.

The priest-kings organized more effectively trade with Egypt, Melos,
peninsular Greece, and other foreign lands where even the eggshell
pottery has been discovered—in Egypt in a Twelfth Dynasty tomb
sealed some time after 1850 b.c. And this commerce must have sub-
stantially augmented their real wealth. For its administration a civil
service would be required. And the perpetual corporation thus insti-
tuted needed a socially sanctioned system of keeping records and
accounts. In fact a conventional script of an ideographic type was
developed during M.M.I and used for accountancy. The idea was
presumably borrowed from the Minoans’ correspondents in Egypt or
Syria, where writing had been in use for a thousand years. The actual
conventions were local, though several signs have Egyptian analogues
and the numeral forms are reminiscent of early Sumerian, while the
use of a clay tablet as a vehicle of writing is an Asiatic habit.

Increase of wealth is usually accompanied by increase of population.
The palace of Knossos was surrounded with an extensive town of two-
storeyed houses, known not from actual excavation so much as from
a mosaic attributed to M.M.IIb. The native population would be
swelled by the immigration of craftsmen attracted by the wealth of
Minoan courts and towns. So professional potters from Asia may have
introduced the potters’ wheel and trained native apprentices in its
use. And other specialists such as fresco-painters may have arrived to

1   Essays in Mgean Archeology, presented to Sir Arthur Evans (Oxford, 1927), 111-2S.

2   BSA., Supplementary Volume, Palaikastro (1923), 17.

26
 THE ORIENT AND CRETE

minister to courtly desires for refinement. But if new arts were intro-
duced by immigrants, the Minoan schools these founded were original
and creative both in devising fresh techniques and in creating a new
naturalistic style that owed little to Oriental models. In beholding the
charming scenes of games and processions, animals and fishes, flowers,
and trees that adorned the Middle Minoan II and III palaces and
houses we breathe already a European atmosphere.

The development of Minoan civilization was interrupted by catas-
trophes which may be taken to mark the end of the phases termed
M.M.II, M.M.III, and L.M.I. The disasters are usually attributed to
earthquakes and were followed by reconstructions of the ruined palaces
without any break in the continuity of architectural, artistic, and
technical traditions. But after the last a new and simplified script—
Linear B—was introduced at Knossos, and with it apparently a new
language; for while the older, Linear A writings still defy decipherment
in 1956, Ventris and Chadwick have read the L.M.II tablets as docu-
ments in an early Greek dialect identical with that current in Mycen-
aean Greece. Thus it looks as if Knossos had become the capital of a
conquering dynast from the Mainland who established over the whole
island a regular empire of the Oriental pattern. His empire did not last.
About 1400 b.c. hostile forces razed the palace of Minos to the ground.
The hegemony in the iEgean had passed to Mycenae on the Mainland
(p. 81). But urban civilization still flourished in Crete for two centuries.
Goumia, for instance, in East Crete, now covered six acres and com-
prised some sixty houses. And the richly furnished Late Minoan
cemeteries comprising corbelled tombs (partially subterranean), rock-
hewn chamber tombs, pit-caves, and shaft graves as well as larnax
burials, remained in use in places even into the Iron Age.1

This inadequate sketch must be supplemented by a brief reference
to certain industrial products that will be cited in later chapters dealing
with less progressive parts of Europe. Tools and weapons are particu-
larly relevant in this context. Obsidian was used for knives, sickle-
teeth, and arrow-heads (including the transverse type). Fine hollow-
based specimens are found even in Late Minoan tombs. At least in
Early Minoan times stone was used even for axe-heads; notable is a
“jadeite” celt from the tholos of Kalathiana in the Mesara. But copper
was being used for celts even in the latest ‘'neolithic” phase1 2 and soon
ousted stone. Copper ore exists in East Crete3 and may have been
exploited in Early Minoan times. The addition of tin to copper to

1   Arch., LIX, and LXV, 1-94; Pendlebury, Crete, 195, 242, 306.

2   P. of M., II, 14.

3   Mosso, Dawn of Mediterranean Civilization (1910), 290.

27
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

facilitate casting is attested as early as M.M.I, though the standard
alloy containing 10 per cent of tin was not firmly established till
M.M.III. Bronze was known to the Sumerians before 2500 b.c. and
knowledge of its qualities was probably transmitted thence to the
iEgean via Anatolia (p. 38). But the Minoans’ demand for tin may
ultimately have been supplied from lodes in Etruria, Cornwall, or
Bohemia, since in each country we shall encounter ambiguous hints
of contact with the iEgean world (pp. 128, 241,336). Iron is represented
by a ring from a Middle Minoan tomb in the Mavro Speleo cemetery,
but was not used industrially before 1200 b.c.

Fig. 11. Minoan axes, axe-adzes and double axe ($), and seal impressions (|).
After Evans and M. A.

For axes the flat celt of the copper age did not lead, as in Cis-alpine
Europe, to flanged and socketed forms, but was superseded by the
shaft-hole axe (Fig. 11,1) that had been current from prehistoric times
in Mesopotamia. After Middle Minoan III the single-bladed axe was
ousted in Crete by the two-edged variety—the Double Axe—known
also to the Sumerians and elevated to become a fetish or symbol of
divine power by E.M.II. Double adzes too were used by the Knossian
workmen by the beginning of L.M.I.1 Finally, the axe-adze that may
be regarded as a combination of two types of axe used by the Sumerians
is represented by a gold model attributed to E.M.II2 and actual
specimens from the farmhouse at Chamaizi (Fig. 11, 3) attributed to
M.M.I and then the standard Minoan form (Fig. 11,4) from M.M.II on.

1 P. of M., II, 619, fig. 392.   2 P. of M., I, 193, n. 3.

28
 THE ORIENT AND CRETE

Heavy perforated hammers of metal rectangular in cross-section are
reported as early as M.M.II1 and carpenters’ saws are attested as early
as wheeled vehicles, by M.M.I.1 2 But elongated flat celts served as
chisels and no sickles older than L.M.III3 survive.

Early Minoan daggers are triangular or provided with a very short
wide tang (Fig. 12, 1), and sometimes given longitudinal rigidity by
means of a midrib cast on both faces. They were attached with small
rivets, sometimes of silver, to their bone or wooden hilts that were
surmounted by globular or hemispherical pommels4 of stone or ivory,

Fig, 12. 1, Early Minoan daggers (J); 2, Stone beads (f). After Evans.

laterally perforated for transverse rivets to hold them in position.
During Middle Minoan times the blades, still either flat or strengthened
with a midrib, were elongated and assume an ogival form (Fig. 13).
Some have a flat tang, like Asiatic daggers, and the rivets are large.
But the palace of Mallia has yielded a genuine rapier, attributed to
M.M.I,5 which is shown by its elongated pommel and its attachment
to the hilt to be a development of the Sumerian series illustrated in
the Royal Tombs of Ur. And in M.M.III the great rapiers from the
Shaft Graves of Mycenae (Fig. 14, 1-3) are clearly elongations, to the

1   From Hagia Triada and Prisos.

2   P. of M., IV, 2, 797.

3   BSA, Palaikastro, pi. XXV; JRAI., LXXIV, 17.

* Xanthudides and Droop, pis. XXIII, LIV.

8 P. of M., II, 272; cf. Childe, NLMAE., pi. XXVIa.

29
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

surprising length of 93 cm., of the native types of Fig. 13. The pommels
are improvements on the Early Minoan form approximating to Fig. 21,3,
while the hilt-plate of type 1 preserves a reminiscence of the distinc-

Fig. 13. Middle Minoan I—II daggers (£). After Evans.

tively Egyptian crescentic gap. In L.M.Ib type 2 develops into the
rapier with horned guards (Fig. 14, 4), and then in L.M.III into a
short sword with flanges carried right round the hilt (Fig. 15, i).1 But
towards the close of the period a new type, adapted for cutting as well
as thrusting and apparently evolved beyond the Balkans, appears to
herald the collapse of jEgean civilization.

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Re: The Dawn of European Civilization By V. GORDON CHILDE 1923
« Reply #5 on: March 24, 2018, 08:59:42 PM »
0

Some Early Minoan dagger-blades might really have been mounted
as spear-heads—that must be the case with a two-pronged weapon2
from Mochlos. But the classical Minoan spear-head, going back to
M.M.III, was provided with a socket, once formed by folding a wide,
flat tang into a tube (Fig. 15). This device had been employed by the
Sumerians from the middle of the third millennium, but was replaced
by a cast socket, sometimes split to reproduce the effect of the fold,
even in M.M.III.

Minoan warriors carried armour too. Helmets,3 consisting of rows
of boars’ tushes sewn round a leather cap as described in Homer,
were worn from M.M.III on. In L.M.II a bronze bell helmet, sur-
mounted by a knob carrying a plume, was in use.4 The type was
popular in Central Europe from the Unetician phase on throughout
the Bronze Age; it may have originated there or been inspired from
Crete.

1   Arch., LIX, 105 ff.

2   P. of M., I, fig. 72.

3   Evans, P. of M., IV, 867 ff.; cf. Lorimer, Homer and the Monuments (1950), 211 ff.;
BCH. (1953). 57-

4   Hood, BSA., XLVII (1952), 256-61; infra, p. 132.

30
 THE ORIENT AND CRETE

31
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

For removing facial hair Minoans used, in addition to tweezers,
razors, generally leaf-shaped in Late Minoan times.1

Minoan pottery is too rich and varied to be described here in detail.
During Early Minoan times self-coloured burnished wares like the
local neolithic and Early Anatolian and. Cycladic fabrics were current.
They might be decorated by stroke-burnishing1 2 or with channelled
lines that may compose concentric semicircles.3 In E.M.II the potters
of Vasiliki in East Crete covered their vessels with a red ferruginous
wash which they relieved with dark blotches deliberately produced
by the reducing agency of a glowing piece of charcoal.4 But from the
first the Minoan potter could produce a clear buff ware, probably

Fig. 15. Late Mycenaean short sword (Mycenae) and Middle Minoan spear-head (£).

fired in a kiln. By coating the vessel with a lustrous glaze paint he
obtained a surface resembling that of the self-coloured burnished
fabrics upon which patterns were drawn in white paint. Alternatively
the paint was used as medium for producing dark patterns on a light
ground. During Middle Minoan times red and yellow were combined
with white, but the light on dark system was predominant. In Late
Minoan on the contrary this style was abandoned altogether in favour
of dark on light. Spiral patterns appear first in E.M.III under Cycladic
influence (cf. p. 54). Some main forms of Early Minoan pottery have
already been mentioned on p. 19.

Throughout the Minoan epoch vessels of stone, metal, and wood
competed with the potters’ products and reacted upon their forms
and decorations. Indeed, from its inception a wealth of stone vases
distinguishes the Minoan civilization from contemporary Helladic and
Anatolian cultures. Though the Egyptians excelled in transforming
hard stones into vessels, stone vases had been used in Mesopotamia
and Syria too since the fourth millennium and were made in Cyprus

1   Evans, Arch., LIX, 117; Hood, loc. cit., 262.

2   Evans, P. of M., I, 59.

3   Ibid., fig. 22.   4 Frankfort, Studies, II, 90.

32
 THE ORIENT AND CRETE

before the oldest pots.1 Of importance for comparison are the block-
vases already mentioned that may have been copied in clay in the
Danube valley and the birds’-nest vases that might be the prototypes
for certain Almerian pots; both forms are Early Minoan.

Metal vessels may have been in use even in Early Minoan times and
were undoubtedly quite common in later periods. But the competition
of plate on the tables of the rich did not involve any degradation of
the ceramic art in Crete as it did in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Two
shapes are noteworthy—a two-handled tankard or cantharos with
quatrefoil lip (represented by a silver specimen from Mochlos allegedly
M.M.I)2 which is known in pottery from Hittite times in Anatolia

Fig. 16. Egyptian representations of Vapheio cups.

and the Middle Bronze Age of Hungary and in alabaster from Shaft
Grave IV at Mycenae, and the so-called Vapheio cup of M.M.III to
L.M.II (Fig. 16),3 the curious handle of which may after all be inspired
by a wooden model; a clay cup with a rather similar handle turned up
at Nienhagen in Saxo-Thuringia apparently in an Early Bronze Age
cemetery.

Minoan costume, like the Egyptian, did not require fastening with
pins, so that, apart from a few hairpins, these toilet accessories, so
common in Mesopotamian, Anatolian, and Central European graves,
are missing in Bronze Age Crete. On the other hand, the Minoans, like
the Egyptians, Sumerians, and Indians, were skilled at shaping and
perforating hard stones for beads. Rock crystal and carnelian were
used from Early Minoan times as well as ivory and fayence. Two
amorphous lumps from the tholos of Porti have been identified as
amber, but Evans has questioned this diagnosis.4 By L.M.I amber
was certainly reaching Crete regularly from the Baltic, and a gold-
bound amber disc from the cemetery of Knossos (L.M.II)5 is almost

1   Dikaios, Khirokitia (London, 1953); so also at Jarmo, Kurdistan.

2   P. of M., I, fig. 139a; cf. van der Osten, The Alishar Hiiyiih (1928-29), Chicago
O.I.C. Publication XIX), pi. XI.

2 P. of M., II, 175.

4   Xanthudides and Droop, 69.   8 Arch., LXY, 42.

C

33
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

identical with six found in Early Bronze Age II graves in Wiltshire.
Segmented beads of fayence, copying stone beads that go back to
E.M.II1 (Fig. 12, 2 (top)), were being manufactured in Crete from
M.M.III. Similar beads have turned up as imports in the Danube valley,
Spain, Poland, and England (p. 336, below). Stone hammer-beads occur
even in the E.M. ossuaries of the Mesara.2

1   U. of Penns., Anthrop. Pubis,, III, 3, 184.

2   Xanthudides and Droop, pi. XXXII, 548.

34
 CHAPTER III

ANATOLIA THE ROYAL ROAD TO THE AEGEAN

In the fifth century the Royal Road from Mesopotamia to the Aegean
led not to the Levantine coasts alone but on across the plateau of
Anatolia—a promontory of Asia thrust out towards Europe. Here ran
the route along which Persian armies marched to impose Oriental
culture on Greece, along which diplomatists, scientists, and merchants
travelled to transmit more peacefully and successfully Babylonian
ideas to the young Ionian states. More than a millennium earlier the
plateau was a bridge along which merchant caravans could travel to
transport westward a share of Mesopotamian capital. Between 2000
and 1800 b.c. the region’s wealth in ores had induced a colony1 of
Assyrian merchants to settle at Kanes (Kultepe) in Cappadocia; they
maintained continuous intercourse with the cities on the Tigris and
Euphrates, illustrated by their business archives, the so-called Cappa-
docian tablets. They may have had earlier precursors. In any case they
found, if not a literate civilization, at least some degree of urbanization
and an incipient state organization. Rich “royal tombs” at Alaca
Huyiik2 illustrate the wealth amassed by local princes, several special-
ized crafts, and trade that secured a variety of raw materials. Un-
fortunately these tombs contain no undoubted imports nor even types
that can be dated by reference to Mesopotamian literature. The culture
of the princes’ subjects is reduplicated in many little huyuks (tells),
too small to represent anything but modest villages. In them, copper
was already competing with stone and bone as an industrial material
but without in the least replacing them. This “Copper Age” culture,
as Turkish archaeologists label it, is fairly uniform all over the plateau;
judged by its pottery—self-coloured dark-faced wares, jugs and cups
with true handles and side spouts, corrugated ornament—its prefer-
ence for the sling, the multiplicity of female figurines—it is allied to
the Early Troadic to be described below. It differs sharply from the
latter in burial practice; the dead were regularly interred under the
house floors as in Syria, Assyria, and Iran, and not in distinct cemeteries.

Many of these peculiarities seem to have been inherited from a

1   Tahsim Ozgii?, Kultepe Hafriyati (Ankara), 19; id., Belleten, passim.

2   Remzi Ogiz Arik, Lesfouilles d'Alaca Hoytih (Istanbul, 1937); H. Z. Kosay, Ausgra-
bungen von A. H. (Ankara, 1944); id. Alaca Hoyiih Kazisi (Ankara, 1951).

35
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

previous phase, termed by Turkish archaeologists Chalcolithic because
copper was already in use if mainly for ornaments. It is very imper-
fectly known from the deeper levels of Alisar in the Halys1 basin, and
perhaps from Buyiik Gulliicek2 and Maltepe near Sivas3 farther north.

As compared to the Early iEgean Bronze Age, the Anatolian Copper
Age does not seem early, though the discrepancy may be due to the
more modest guesses of its investigators.4 A seal of Jemdet Nasr type
from the Copper Age strata and a radio carbon date of 2500^250 b.c.5
for layer 14 at Alisar might justify more generous estimates. It does not
seem an apt vehicle for the transmission westward of the cultural
achievements of the Tigris-Euphrates at an early date. Nor does the
so-called Chalcolithic disclose earlier Oriental advances on their way
westward. There are indeed stamp seals and figurines, but painted
sherds are exceptional, the pottery being mostly self-coloured though
comprising fruitstands. Nothing approaching the precocious neolithic
of Kurdistan and Palestine nor yet mesolithic remains have been
found on the plateau so far, but though unrepresented in the tells,
they may still come to light on other sites. Until they do, no recogniz-
able archaeological milestones mark an ancient route across Anatolia
from the Orient to Europe. Nor do the available data disclose there
an ancient cultural centre nor yet a human reservoir from which the
J£gean coastlands could have been populated.

On the other hand, at least in the north-western extremity of Asia
Minor, a vigorous and original culture is documented quite early. The
first settlement in the area is represented by pottery found in the
lowest levels of Rum Tepe, a tell in the Troad.6 Notable are fruitstands
with profiled pedestals, as in Fig. 86, and stroke-burnished ware
which recurs on Samos as well as in Europe.

In the sequel develops a culture which may conveniently be called
Early Troadic, though it is not strictly confined to the Troad. The same
culture is represented at Poliochni on Lemnos,7 Thermi on Lesbos,8 at
Yortan in Mysia and elsewhere. But the classic site remains Hissarlik,
the ancient Troy, a key position on the Hellespont commanding at
once sea-traffic up the straits and a land route’s crossing to Europe.
There Heinrich Schliemann last century distinguished seven super-

1   van der Osten, Alishar Httyiik (1930-3), OIP, XXIX. Chicago.

2   Belleten, XII (1948), 475-6.

3   Belleten, XI (1947), 659 ff.

* Gotze, Proc. Amer. Phil. Soc., XCVII (1953), 215-20.

6 Libby, Radio Carbon Dating (Chicago, 1950), 71.

6   AJA., XXXIX, 33.

7   Jahrb. d. Inst., LII; Arch. Anz. (1937), 167-70; Bemabo Brea, PPS. XXI (1955),
144-55-

8   Lamb, W., Excavations at Thermi (Cambridge, 1936).

36
 ANATOLIA THE ROYAL ROAD TO THE AEGEAN

imposed prehistoric cities, but left a multitude of crucial issues. Re-
excavation of the site by an expedition under C. W. Blegen,1 supple-
mented by the stratigraphy of Thermi and Poliochni, has yielded the
following scheme as the standard for the culture sequence in North-
Western Anatolia:

Troad      Greece   Lesbos   Lemnos   Absolute Dates
Troy Vila      L.H.IIIb   Thermi   Poliochni   1275-1200
   fLate   L.H.IIIa and b   —   —   1400-1300
Troy VI   1 Middle   L.H.I and II   = )   VII   f1550-1400
   (Early   M.M.III, M.H.         l ? -1550
Troy V Troy IV      E.H.III      VI   
               
Troy III      E.H.   — [   V   
Troy Ilg to      E.H.   — J      
a   'Late   E.H.]   Thermi V \ f Thermi /   IV   
Troy I -   Middle   E.H.V   i 1 to |   II-III   
   Early   “ J   l iv /      
All "   cities"   can be dated in   terms of Aegean chronology by sherds      

of actually imported TEgean vases found in the several levels at Troy.

Troy I and the contemporary settlements on Lesbos and Lemnos
consisted of clusters of two-roomed houses (often of the long rectangular
plan), closely juxtaposed along well-defined but crooked and narrow
streets. The mud-brick walls rested on foundations of stones, some-
times (in Thermi I and IV and Troy I) laid not horizontally but
obliquely in herring-bone formation, an arrangement often employed
in the brick architecture of Early Dynastic Sumer. And as in Meso-
potamia the doors were pivoted on stone sockets. Some houses in
Thermi were provided with low domed ovens of clay only 3 ft. high.
Especially in Thermi III pits (bothroi) were often dug in the house
floors and carefully lined with clay.2

But Troy I comprised also a "palace"—a rectangular hall 12*8 m.
long by 5*4 m. wide, entered through a porch at the west end. So Troy
was already ruled by a chief, an institution not yet attested in other
Early Troadic settlements. Moreover, Troy I, at least by the Middle
phase, was girt with a massive stone rampart enclosing some i| acres;
Poliochni was probably fortified at the same time.

Anatolian economy rested on the cultivation of wheats,3 barley,
millet, and presumably vegetables, perhaps also of vines and fruit-trees,
the breeding of cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs, and fishing with hook
and line or with nets. Axes and rare adzes were made from pebbles

1   Blegen, Caskey, etc., Troy, I (1950); II (1951); III (1953), Princeton.

2   On bothroi in general, see JHS., LV (1935), 1-19,

s One-corn is attested, though perhaps later at Troy and Kusura (Arch., LXXXVT,
10), emmer only at Thermi, where there are some traces of vines.

37
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

ground and polished and also from stags' antlers pierced for a shaft-
hole, knives, and sickle-teeth from flint blades simply trimmed. But
stone battle-axes with drooping blade, precursors of ceremonial
weapons like Fig. 21,1, must immediately be copies of metal weapons.
In fact, copper battle-axes of the same pattern have been found at
Yortan as at Polatli on the plateau and in the Royal Tombs of Alaca.1
Bone splinters, pointed at both ends, served as arrow-heads, while the
armoury comprised also sling-stones and maces with spheroid stone
heads.

But trade already brought metal even to Lesbos, and at Thermi I
and Troy I there were specialized smiths available to work it. A
crucible was found on virgin soil at Thermi, and small metal pins and
trinkets were comparatively common at all levels. Most were made
from unalloyed copper, but a pin from Thermi II contained as much
as 13 per cent of tin, and a bracelet of this rare metal was found in
town IV. Indeed, by the time of Thermi II and III metal was common
enough for large implements to be left lying about for modern ex-
vators to find, while at Troy lead rivets were employed for repairing
pots. The smiths produced flat chisels with rounded butts, as in Egypt
and protoliterate Sumer, flat axes and axes with the sides hammered
up to produce low flanges2—implying that celts were mounted as axes
in knee-shafts as in Central Europe—and as weapons flat-tanged
daggers like Fig. 20, 2-4, cast in two-piece valve moulds of stone.

The types of metal daggers and pins suffice to show that Troadic
metal-workers followed Asiatic rather than Egyptian traditions.
Though shaft-hole axes of the normal Mesopotamian pattern were not
manufactured, the earliest dated battle-axes are represented by clay
models from al’Ubaid levels in Babylonia.3

But the most distinctive types and actual imports point explicitly
to intercourse with Greece, the Cyclades, and the Levant coasts.
Emery and marble vases were imported from the Cyclades; bird-headed
pins are common to Thermi I and Syros; polished bone tubes like Fig.
27, 1, from Thermi III-IV and Troy I recur not only on the iEgean
islands but also in Syria and Palestine—in the last-named area in an
E.B.III context (after 2500 B.c.).4

Despite the specialization of the metallurgical industry and the
ramifications of commerce, pot-making was not sufficiently industrial-
ized for the use of the wheel. The self-coloured, burnished vases, vary-

1 Prausnitz, Inst. Arch. AR., XI (1955), 20

8   The same device is seen in the Copper Age township of Ahlatlibel near Ankara,
Turk Tarih Arkeologya ve Etnografya Dergisi, II (Ankara), 1934.

3   Childe, NLMAE., fig. 60.

* Prausnitz, Inst. Arch. AR., XI (1955), 23 and 28; cf. Childe, NLMAE., 231-7.

38

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Re: The Dawn of European Civilization By V. GORDON CHILDE 1923
« Reply #6 on: March 24, 2018, 09:00:25 PM »
0

 ANATOLIA THE ROYAL ROAD TO THE AEGEAN

ing in hue from deep black to brick red and often copying gourd or
leather vessels, are representative of a tradition common to the whole
of Anatolia. A conspicuous peculiarity throughout the province is the
popularity of genuine handles in addition to simple lugs. The handles
are often of the “thrust” type—the lower ends being inserted into a hole
at the side of the vessels1—a trick popular in later periods too and in
other parts of Anatolia. Forms distinctive of West Anatolia are bowls with
lugs growing from the inverted rims (Fig. 17, column 1), jugs with cut-

Fig. 17. Pottery from Thermi I-II (A) and III-IV (B). After W. Lamb, BSA., XXX.

away necks (Fig. 17, columns 2-3), tripod vessels, and collared pyxides
with string-hole lugs and lids (Fig. 17, column 4). Significant changes in
form, documented by the stratigraphy of Thermi, are the expansion of
the ends of the tubular lugs on the bowls to “trumpet lugs” in town III
and the contemporary transformation of tripod legs into model human
feet. At Troy the trumpet lugs grew into regular handles, flanged and
angled, quite reminiscent of Cretan neolithic types. Decoration was
effected by bosses, ribs, corrugations, and incisions forming rectilinear
patterns. White paint on the dark ground, quite exceptional at Thermi
and Troy, was very popular at Yortan. The patterns were always recti-
linear.

Spinning and weaving would be domestic arts too. Their importance
is attested by the numbers of spindle-whorls, and clay spools. The

1 Blegen, Troy, I, 65; cf. Frankfort, Studies, ii. 86, n. x.

39
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

weaver may have used, perforated arcs of clay up to 9 cm. in length,
represented in Thermi III, that seem to be forerunners of the narrower
crescentic loom-weights so common in the Hittite levels of Kusura and
Alisar.1

The domestic fertility cults of a superstitious peasantry may be
illustrated by numerous female figurines of stone and clay, the former

Fig. 18. "Megaron” palace, Troy II.

always highly conventionalized in the manner of Fig. 8, 13-162; clay
figurines begin later at Thermi and sometimes indicate the division
between the legs. But at Troy itself the “Mother Goddess” (if such she
be) was represented on a more monumental scale: an owl-like visage
had been carved in low relief on a stone slab, 1*27 m. high, that was
found standing just outside the city gate. But to domestic cult again

1   Arch., LXXXVI, 35, fig. 15; Alishar, fig. 30.

2   Very similar figurines turn up sporadically as if imported in Mesopotamia about
2750 b.c.; Speiser, Tepe Gawra, pi. LIII, b. Frankfort, “Iraq Excavations”, OIC.
Communication, 19, fig. 24.

40
 ANATOLIA THE ROYAL ROAD TO THE AEGEAN

belong clay phalli from Thermi and perhaps a homed clay spit-support
(? altar) rather like Cretan horns of consecration. The dead were
apparently buried, if adults, outside the town in regular cemeteries—
enclosed in jars, judging by the case of Yortan.

After the long period of relatively peaceful development repre-
sented by the 4 metres of “Troy I” and the four successive townships
at Thermi, unrest led to a concentration of power and wealth. Though
its population was already dwindling, Thermi V was fortified with a
stout stone wall supplemented by complicated outworks. Even so, the
site was soon deserted; it has yielded vases imported from Troy Ila,
but none of those proper to the later phases of that city. Poliochni in
Lemnos likewise declined. But at Troy potent chieftains had arisen
who exploited to the full the strategic advantages of their site and
concentrated in the city West Anatolian trade to the ruin of their rivals.
Troy II was now encircled with a new stone wall, surmounted with a
parapet of mud-brick. But, though larger than Troy I, the circuit of
Troy II still enclosed only some 7850 sq. metres, or less than two
acres. Its ruler built himself a palace of the f< megaron” plan—a hall
with central hearth, 66 feet long by 33 feet, preceded by a porch 33 feet
long and wide (Fig. 18). The citadel had reached the apex of its glory
in phase lie, but underwent four further reconstructions before it was
taken by hostile assault and burnt. But before the final catastrophe
the defenders had hidden many of their valuables. Our knowledge of
Trojan metal-work and jewellery is mainly derived from these hoards
that the plunderers had missed.

Ere its destruction Troy II had become economically, if not physic-
ally, a city. Through its monopoly of Hellespontine trade, its citizens
amassed wealth to support an industrial population and pay for
imported goods. Tin was obtainable in such abundance that bronze
containing the standard proportion of 10 per cent tin and 90 per cent
copper was in general use. Gold, silver, lead, obsidian were also im-
ported; lapis lazuli from Iran and amber from the Baltic are also
represented in hoard L, the date of which is not, however, quite certain.
Specialist jewellers, potters, and other craftsmen, trained in Asiatic
schools, settled in the rich city. The jewellers introduced solder, filagree
work, and the trick of making beads from two discs of gold
soldered together or from two folded tubes each ending in spirals—
all devices employed by Mesopotamian goldsmiths in the third
millennium.1

The potters’ wheel, indicating a further advance in urbanization,
was introduced in the time of Troy lie, but the products, turned out
1 Childe, NLMAE,, 162; cf. Iraq, IX (1947), 171-6.

41
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

3   4

Fig. 19. Pottery from Troy IX (i)-
 ANATOLIA THE ROYAL ROAD TO THE AEGEAN

en masse by the new specialist craftsmen, carry on the native traditions
in form and surface treatment and did not replace hand-made vessels.
Shapes easily recognized as emerging during the lifetime of Troy II
are anthropomorphic lids and jars (“face-urns”, Fig. 19, 2 and 6),
jugs with flaring mouths (Fig. 19, 4), and curious two-handled depas
(Fig. 19, 5). But these appear already hand-made in phase lie and are
merely exaggerated expressions of tendencies inherent in the earlier

Fig. 21. Battle-axe (£), gold-capped bead (J), and crystal pommel (£)_from
Treasure L, and stray axe-adze (£). Museum f. Vorgeschichte, Berlin.

and more generalized Anatolian tradition. The representation of the
“Mother Goddess” on the face-urns is significantly like that on the
handles of early Sumerian funerary jars1; but the convention is already
foreshadowed in the stele from Troy I. Side-spouted jugs, multiple
vessels, jugs with double necks, zoomorphic vases are essentially
Anatolian and not confined to Troy II. Improvements in the prepara-
tion of the clay and firing, probably introduced at the same time as
the wheel, allowed the potter to produce harder, paler, and less porous
vessels. But to preserve the effect of the old-self-coloured vases, their

1 Childe, NLMAE., fig. 98.

43
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

surfaces were normally covered with a ferruginous wash that turns
red on firing (red wash ware)—a device popular at Alisar and farther
east, and employed even in the Middle Danube basin.

Despite the abundance of metal, stone, flint, obsidian, bone, and
antler were still freely and almost predominantly employed for axes,
battle-axes, agricultural implements, knives, awls, pins, and combs.
The battle-axes carry on the tradition of Troy I, but include some
superbly polished weapons of semi-precious stones (Fig. 21, 1) (from
Treasure L) that must be ceremonial.

The jewellery from the hoards not only demonstrates the wealth of
Troy but the divergent ramifications of its commerce. Many items are
specifically Eastern; the earrings and lock-rings with flattened ends,
the spiral filagree work (Fig. 22, 3), the gold disc beads, etc., may be
regarded as Sumerian and the technique of the knot-headed pin1 was
known there as in predynastic Egypt. Pins with double spiral heads
(of which Fig. 22, 3, is a glorified version) are found all across Anatolia
and Iran to India and Anau.2 A "spear-head” identical with the
Cycladic specimen of Fig. 23, 1, from Treasure A, belongs to a family
represented also in Central Anatolia, Cyprus, and Iran.3 Earrings like
Fig. 22,1, are worn by foreign dancing girls depicted in an Eighteenth
Dynasty tomb-painting.4 A gold hammer pin from 2g5 is ultimately
a South Russian type, but was familiar also at Alaca. At the same time,
so many types common at Troy recur in Central Europe as to prompt
the suspicion that Trojan tin came from Bohemia, copper from Tran-
sylvania or the Balkans. On the other hand, bossed bone plaques,
like Fig. 115, indicate connections westward as far as Sicily and Malta,
but their stratigraphical position at Hissarlik is a little doubtful and
they have gold analogues to the east at Alaca.6 Ring pendants of stone,
paralleled in gold in Wallachia and Transylvania, might disclose one
source of Trojan gold while copies in Sweden and Sammland may be
counterparts of the amber beads from Treasure L. If Troadic trade
were founded on Oriental demand for metal, Troy II was itself a centre
of accumulated wealth, providing capital for development of industry
and trade in our Continent.

Yet Trojan merchants seem to have managed without writing. They
did not even, like the Minoans, engrave stone seals. Two cylinders were
found at Troy,7 but their attribution is uncertain. But the Trojans did

1   Childe, NLMAE., 63, 196.

2   Ibid., 196; LAAA., XXIII, 119; Alaca (1951), pi. CXII.

3   Alaca (1937), pl* CCLXXV; Schaeffer, Stratigraphie, 38.

4   Aberg, Chron., IV, 11.

s Blegen, Troy, I, 376, and fig. 357, 37.528.

9 Antiquity, XXX, 80-93.

7 Schliemann, IHon, figs. 500-3; cf. PPS., XXI, pl. XVII.

44
 ANATOLIA THE ROYAL ROAD TO THE iEGEAN

Fig. 22. 1-2, Gold earring and   T: ?, ? sure A, 3, pin from Treasure jD,

4 bracelet from Treasure F, :   \   ; .. pins (f). Museum f. Vorge-

schichte, Berlin.

45
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

copy Asiatic seals in clay while an imported sherd from lib bears the
imprint of an Early Minoan seal.

The old native fertility cult continued without any notable changes,
but the figurines, now predominantly of stone, are all highly conven-
tionalized (Fig. 8, 15), and the phalli are made of stone.

After the sack of Troy II a reoccupation of Hissarlik on a smaller
scale is represented by the ruins of towns III, IV, and V,1 each fortified
and each reconstructed several times. All were urban in the sense that
they comprised specialized potters and smiths and relied upon trade,
though a marked increase in the proportion of game bones in the food
refuse from town III may denote a temporary decline in farming.
Throughout the pottery attests unbroken continuity of tradition.
But face-urns are commoner in Troy III than in II. Pots found on
Euboea and at Orchomenos look like exports from Troy III, while a
copper pin from that town is taken for a Cycladic manufacture.2
Domed ovens,3 taller than those from Thermi, appear at Troy for the
first time in IV. In town V iEgean imports are rare. But bowls adorned
with a red cross in the interior that are characteristic of Troy V have
close parallels on E.H.III sites in Greece, while analogous vessels are
found at Gozlii Kale, Tarsus, together with Cappadocian tablets.4

With the sixth settlement5 Troy approximates more closely than
ever before to the dignity of a city. It was girt with a new and more
formidable stone rampart enclosing an area of over five acres. But
revival seems due to the advent of a new people who introduced pottery
foreign to the native tradition, novel domestic architecture, the practice
of cremation and probably the horse, whose presence is osteologically
attested first in Troy VI. The new pottery is termed Minyan ware—
a fine grey ware, owing its colour to the reduction of the iron oxides
in well-selected clay by controlled firing in a kiln—and accompanied
by a red oxidized variant. These are the characteristic native wares
of Troy VII too. The houses no longer conform to the megaron plan,
but are entered through doors in their long sides. No cemeteries of
Troy I to V, nor even of Early and Middle VI, have been located, but
that of Late VI was an umfield in which the cremated bones were
enclosed in cinerary urns. The first Indo-European Hittites at Bogaz
K5y had likewise laid out an umfield and deposited remains of horses
with the urns, while burial in umfields was characteristic of Period VI
in Central Europe and began in Hungary even in Period IV.

Under the new rulers trade and industry flourished luxuriantly once
more. Middle III, Late Helladic I, II, and Ilia—but hardly any Illb—

1 Blegen et al., Troy, II.   2 Ibid., 9.   3 Ibid., 107.

* Ibid., 229.   ’ 5 Blegen et al., Troy, III.

46
 ANATOLIA THE ROYAL ROAD TO THE AEGEAN

vases were imported from the JEgean, white-slipped ware from
Cyprus, ivory from Syria or Egypt through the iEgean, but not a
single Hittite manufacture. Bronze sickles, of Asiatic looped type,1
show that metal was now cheap enough for use in rough agricultural
work. Smiths produced a chisel provided with a socket formed not
by casting but by hammering a projecting tang of metal round a
mandril as in Hittite cities.2

Judged by the imported iEgean vases, Troy VI should have lasted
from about 1700 to 1300 b.c. Then it fell, overthrown perhaps by an
earthquake, perhaps by the Homeric Achseans under Agamemnon.
In any case the site was reoccupied and Troy Vila—a rather poorer
city—survived for another century, only to be destroyed with obvious
violence. For the last twenty years it has been held that Troy Vila
was Homer’s Ilion, but that view was plausibly challenged in 1955.
In any case, after its destruction barbarians settled at Hissarlik and
introduced a coarse wart-omamented pottery without, however,
exterminating the older population or suppressing the old ceramic
tradition; for grey wares, like Minyan, were still manufactured in
Troy Vllb. On the other hand, socketed bronze celts cast on the spot
by the usual Central European method leave no doubt as to the origin
of these invaders.

1   Childe, “The Balanced Sickle”, in Aspects of Archeology (ed. Grimes; London, 1951),
145-6.

8 OJP., XXIX, fig. 289; this was, of course, the method used for providing spear-heads
with sockets in Crete earlier (p. 30) and in Sumer in the third millennium.

47
 CHAPTER IV

MARITIME CIVILIZATION IN THE CYCLADES

The Cyclades are scattered across the iEgean, remnants of a land-bridge
between Anatolia and Greece affording a passage for cultural ideas
from Asia to Europe. To mere food-gatherers or self-sufficing peasants,
the islands, often small and barren, offered no attractions. But to
mariners crossing from Asia to Europe they offer convenient halting
places and lairs to any pirates who might wish to prey on more peaceful
voyagers. Moreover, they contain raw materials of the sort needed by
urban civilizations—copper (Paros and Siphnos), obsidian (Melos),
marble (Paros and others), emery (Naxos). Accordingly, while larger
islands like Chios and Samos seem to have been settled by neolithic
peasants, the little Cyclades were at first passed by, but early colonized
by communities that could find a livelihood in commerce and perhaps
in piracy too. Such communities must have lived near the shore and
presumably in townships. But only at Phylakopi in Melos1 has a
Cycladic settlement been fully explored. There, three consecutive town-
ships could be distinguished, preceded by some earlier occupation
represented by sherds collected beneath the oldest house-floors. The
city has been partially engulfed by the sea, but must have extended
well over four acres. The first town was apparently unfortified, the
second and third girt with strong stone walls, 20 feet thick in the
latest phase. Fortified settlements are also known at Chalandriani2
on Syros, on Paros,3 and elsewhere. But these fortifications seem
relatively late. Soon after the foundation of Phylakopi II, M.M.Ib
polychrome vases were imported from Crete; the city is accordingly
hardly older than the twentieth century b.c.; it is frankly Middle Cycladic.

For the remaining islands and for earlier periods we are reduced
to estimating the size and stability of the settlements from the ceme-
teries. Few have been fully explored, but they were admittedly
extensive. Three on Despotikon comprised 50 to 60 graves each; on
Syros one cemetery at Chalandriani was composed of nearly 500 graves,
a second of more than 50; on Paros, Tsountas mentions nine cemeteries

1   For Phylakopi see Excavations at Phylakopi in Melos (Society for Promotion of
Hellenic Studies, Supplementary Volume, IV, 1904)

2   For tombs on Amorgos and Paros, see Tsountas, KvaXaStKa, in ’E<f>. ’Apx-, 1898;
for Syros and Siphnos, ibid., 1899.

» AM., XLIII (1917), 10 ff.

48
 MARITIME CIVILIZATION IN THE CYCLADES

of from xo to 60 graves. Of course, all these burials are not contempor-
ary. While it has been customary to assign most cemeteries to the
Early Cycladic period (before 2000 b.c.), Aberg1 has shown that some
graves must be Middle or even Late Cycladic. Fortunately Cycladic

Fig. 23. Tomb-group. Amorgos (|).

imports in Egypt, in Crete, at Thermi and Troy, and on Mainland
Greece suffice to show that the islands’ culture reached its zenith in
the third millennium. Marble idols like Fig. 23, 2, were imported into
Crete chiefly during E.M.III, a blade like 23, 1, from the same tomb
on Amorgos, was included in Treasure A of Troy II; Cycladic marble

1 Chronologie, IV, 71, 84.

49

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 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

vases were used in Thermi I-III, and the bird pins of Thermi I recur
on Syros; a pin with double spiral wire head like Fig. 27, 9, was found
in an Early Helladic tomb at Zygouries; “frying-pans” with spiral
decoration like Fig. 24 were found in the oldest Early Helladic town-
ship at H. Kosmas in Attica, and in the E.H.III level at Asine; duck

vases (like Fig. 28, 2) were imported into iEgina in Early Helladic
times though they continued to reach Eutresis in Boeotia during Middle
Helladic I (pp. 70 ff.).

Finally, a zoomorphic vase of Parian marble was recovered from a
predynastic grave in Egypt1 while a cylinder seal of Jemdet Nasr
style2 had been buried in a tomb of the Pelos group on Amorgos.

The inference that the density of population on the islands was

1   Frankfort, Studies, II, 103.

2   Frankfort, Cylinder Seals (London, 1939), 232, 301; the tomb group is in the
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

50
 MARITIME CIVILIZATION IN THE CYCLADES

made possible by trade and manufacture is confirmed by the list of
exports just given. And of course that list is by no means exhaustive.
Obsidian was quarried on Melos and exported as nuclei or blades to
Crete, Mainland Greece, and the other islands. The Cycladic grave
goods comprise the products of specialized craftsmen—smiths, jewellers,
lapidaries—and prove the use of copper, tin,1 lead, silver, and other
materials which in some cases must have been imported. The role of
maritime intercourse is further emphasized by the frequent repre-
sentation of boats on the vases (Fig. 24) .1 2 But the islanders do not seem
to have needed writing for their business transactions and did not even
make regular use of seals like the Minoans. The prominence of weapons
in the tombs (especially of Amorgos) and the fortification of the settle-
ments may indicate that piracy was already combined with legitimate
trade. In any case, being dependent on overseas trade, the prosperity
of the islands might be expected to decline when that trade was
“cornered” by monopolistic princes in Crete and the Troad. A real
contraction of population during Middle Minoan II-III and Late
Minoan I-II would be perfectly comprehensible. In that case the bulk
of our material would really be Early Cycladic.

But this Early Cycladic culture was by no means homogeneous.
Culturally the islands fall into a southern and a northern group over-
lapping only on Naxos.3 To the former belong Melos, Amorgos, Des-
potikon, Paros, and Antiparos; to the northern Syros, Siphnos, Andros,
and also Euboea. The contrast is revealed in burial practices as well as
in grave goods. In the southern group, though shaft graves and chamber
tombs of uncertain age are plentiful near Phylakopi,4 the early graves
were normally trapezoid cists. In the oldest cemeteries5 (the Pelos
group), definitely antedating Phylakopi I, the cists served as ossuaries
and contain several skeletons together with vases like Fig. 28, 1, and
“fiddle idols” like Fig. 8, 10-12. The later tombs were individual
graves; they contain idols like Fig. 23, 2, marble vases and weapons.
On Syros6 in the northern group rectangular or oval tombs were built
in excavations in the hillside and roofed by corbelling (Fig. 25). But
these too served as individual graves, and the single body was intro-
duced through the roof. As at Krazi in Crete, the door (only *50 m.
square) was merely a ritual element. In Euboea7 the tomb was a pit-

1   One dagger from Amorgos was of unalloyed copper, but a ring contained I3'5
per cent tin.

2   On iEgean ships see Marinatos in BCH., LVII (1933), 170 ff.

3   Aberg, Chronologie, IV, 59 f.

4   Phylakopi, 234-8.

8 Pelos in Melos, BSA., Ill, 40; Antiparos, JHS., V, 48.

6   ’E0. 'Apx. (1899); cf. p. 23, above.

7   Papavasileiou, TleplrQ/v ev WijSolq. ipxtuwv ratpQv (Athens, 1910).

51
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

cave, excavated in the ground and containing only a single corpse
(Fig. 25). The earliest vases of the Pelos group are mud-coloured, imitat-
ing the shape of marble vessels and are decorated with simple basketry
patterns (Fig. 28, 1). Late pottery from the northern isles includes
dark-faced fabrics often decorated with running spirals and excised
triangles (Fig. 24). Technically it corresponds to the Early Helladic I
of the Mainland, though Cycladic imports at Eutresis1 prove that on

Fig. 25. Tombs on Syros and Euboea.

the islands this fabric remained current in Middle Helladic times.
Favourite forms are the so-called frying-pans and globular or cylindrical
pyxides with lids. In some graves on Syros pottery of this class is
associated with marble idols like Fig. 23, 2, which are common to both
groups of islands.2 Other graves on Syros and Naxos3 contain sauce-
boats, jugs with cut-away necks and other vessels decorated in lustrous
glaze paint in the style of Early Helladic III (p. 69). Finally, Anatolian
forms are common in the northern isles, and one tomb group on Euboea
contained exclusively Troadic vases (like Fig. 19, 3-4) and daggers
(like Fig. 20, 2).

The fish emblem carried by (Northern) Cycladic boats had been the
standard of a predynastic parish in the Delta that did not survive into
historic times in Egypt.4 So Fish-folk from the Nile may have fled to

1 Goldman, Eutresis, 182.

3   Aberg, Chron., IV, 102, nos. 13, 15; in both graves the "frying-pans" were decorated
with concentric circles so that those with running spirals may be earlier.

3   Aberg, Chron., IV, 86; Congris Int. Arch. Athens (1905), 221.

* Evans, P. of M.t II, 26.

52
 MARITIME CIVILIZATION IN THE CYCLADES

the Cyclades when Menes conquered the Delta. Other Cycladic traits
—the tweezers (Fig. 26, 2), the popularity of stone amulets and par-
ticularly the type represented in Fig. 27, 4; the use of palettes (though
the Cycladic specimens are generally more trough-like than the
Egyptian and Minoan1) and the preference for stone vases may also
be Nilotic traits.

Metal-work, pottery, and dress, on the contrary, are rather Asiatic

Fig. 26. Slotted spear-head (showing method of mounting), halberd and
tweezers. Amorgos (?§?).

than African. Broad flat celts were used as axe-heads. Shaft-hole axes
are represented only by an axe-hammer and an axe-adze from a hoard
on Cythnos.1 2 Daggers with a stout midrib and rivets, sometimes of
silver as in Crete, are common chiefly on Amorgos. Spear-heads were
slotted for mounting as shown in Fig. 26; the type with hooked-tang,
shown in Fig. 23, 1, has already been connected with Asiatic models
on p. 44.

At least in the northern islands clothing had to be fastened with pins,
as in Anatolia, and the types with double-spiral and bird heads have
already been encountered in that area. Rings, bracelets, and diadems
of copper or silver were also worn as in Asia. The silver diadems
resemble gold ornaments from an E.M.II tomb at Mochlos in Crete

1   These palettes, perforated at the four comers, resemble, but only superficially, the
wrist-guards of the Beaker complex; cf. BSA., Ill, 67.

2   B.M., Bronze, fig. 174.

53
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

and from the Royal Tombs of Ur.1 Some of the beads and amulets
may be Asiatic, notably the dove-pendants that are found even in
the early tombs of the Pelos class.2 The so-called phallic (or winged)
beads (Fig. 27, 3) might be compared with the fly-amulets of Egypt
and Mesopotamia,3 but probably derive from a form fashioned of
deers’ teeth by the mesolithic Natufians of Palestine.4 A speciality
of the northern isles was the decorated bone tube designed to contain
pigments (Fig. 27, 1). But similar tubes have been found in Troy IV
and Va, and at Byblos in Syria5 as well as on Levkas in Western Greece.

Fig. 27. Early Cycladic ornaments: 2-8 Paros; 1, 9, Syros (f).

The self-coloured sepulchral pottery belongs in a general way to
the same Anatolian tradition as the early Cretan, and some vase forms
such as the pyxides are in the same vague way Anatolian. Even the
curious frying-pan form so common in the northern graves recurs, in
copper, in a “royal tomb” at Alaca Hoyiik in Central Anatolia.6 (The
excised decoration and the form of the handles show that these odd
utensils are copied from wooden originals.) On the other hand, the
running spiral design on North Cycladic pottery has generally been
considered a Danubian motive. Weinberg,7 however, suspects inspira-

1   Evans, P. of M., I, 97; Woolley, Ur Excavations: The Royal Tombs, p. 139.

2   Aberg, Ckron., IV, 62-3.

3   Cf. Childe, NLMAE., fig. 36 (Gerzean).

1 Garrod, Stone Age of Mt. Carmel, I, p. XV, 2.

5   Aberg, Chron., IV, 13, 87; AJA., XXXVIII (1934), 229, 231.

6   Hfimit Ziibeyr Kosay, Ausgrabungen von Alaca Hdytik (Ankara, 1944). pi. LXXXIII,
60.

7   In Ehrich, Relative Chronologies in Old World Archceology (1954), 95*

54
 MARITIME CIVILIZATION IN THE CYCLADES

tion from the disconnected impressions of spiral shells such as appear
on the early Ghassulian pottery of the Jordan valley while Kaschnitz-

Fig. 28. Cycladic pottery: i, Pelos; 2, Phylakopi I; 3, Phylakopi II (L.C.).

Weinberg1 considers that the incised spirals on the pots copy the wire
spirals of early Sumerian and Anatolian gold-work.

As already indicated, Cycladic culture declined when Minoan palaces
indicate a Cretan grip on maritime trade and the warlike “Minyans'’

1 pz., xxxiv (1950), 196.

55
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

occupied the Helladic townships. On most islands only a few graves
are dated by long rapiers or imported Minyan vases to Middle or Late
Cycladic I—II. The “halberd" of Fig. 26, 3, comes from a M.C. shaft
grave at Akesine on Amorgos.1 Its interpretation as a halberd, imported
or copied from the West, is indeed uncertain, but M.C. pottery like
that from the tomb, turning up in the Western Mediterranean (Fig. 41),
does at least suggest Cycladic enterprise in that direction. But her
resources in obsidian secured to Melos a share in Minoan commerce,
and Thera2 too benefited from her neighbours’ wealth until a volcanic
convulsion overwhelmed her inhabitants. Phylakopi II was a fenced
city with regular streets. Imported M.M.I-II polychrome pottery and
Minyan vases from Greece found together on the earliest house floors
show how close was the island’s connection both with Crete and with
the Mainland. Conversely, the matt-painted Middle Cycladic I pottery
of Melos is significantly like the Early Bronze Age or Cappadocian
ware of Alisar, in Central Anatolia, as if the island had also connections
with the East. At a later stage in Phylakopi II a large building equipped
with pillar-rooms like a Cretan palace and decorated with a frescoe of
flying fishes in M.M.III technique might be the residence of a Minoan
governor or consul. The potters’ craft was industrialized, but the wheel-
made vases were decorated with lovely naturalistic patterns in matt
paint imitating the Minoan style of M.M.III-L.M.I (Fig. 28, 3). But
though ceramic technique and style changed, there is no break in the
tradition; matt paint had replaced the glaze medium at the beginning
of Phylakopi II or even earlier though the patterns at first were
geometric, as in Early Cycladic. In Late Mycensean-L.M.III times
the fortifications of Phylakopi were strengthened; the walls were now
20 feet thick, and near the gate a staircase led up to a tower or rampart-
walk. Most of the other islands have yielded traces of occupation at
this time, but their culture now was just a variant of the Mycenaean
“koine” described on p. 81.

1   Festschrift P. Goessler (Stuttgart, 1954), 26-34.

2   See Aberg, Chron., IV, 127-37.

56
 CHAPTER V

FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE

The southern extremity of the Balkan peninsula, though intersected
by jagged mountain ranges, chasms, and gulfs, yet displayed as much
cultural unity during the prehistoric Bronze Age as it did during the
historical Iron Age. In the Stone Age, though peninsular Greece fell
for a time into two divisions, Macedonia and even Southern Thrace
belonged to the same cultural province. Hence the stratigraphy,
observed at citadels, continuously occupied, and in rural tells, provides
a chronological frame applicable to the whole region with certain
reservations. In Classical times Thessaly, Arcadia, and the mountainous
country of North-West Greece and still more Macedonia were cultur-
ally backward as compared with Bceotia, Attica, and Laconia, while
Thrace was frankly barbarian. A similar retardation can be observed
in the Bronze Age. Then from the beginning of the Bronze Age Mace-
donian culture diverged so far from that of peninsular Greece as to
deserve a different name—Macednic—that may be applied to Thessaly
too.

Subject to these limitations, the Mainland Bronze Age has been
divided into three main periods termed, on the analogy of the Cretan,
"Early”, "Middle”, and “Late Helladic”, and each subdivided. The
preceding Neolithic is similarly subdivided; but Early Neolithic is still
very shadowy, and Middle corresponds to the first or “A” phase in the
old sequence. Absolute dates can confidently be assigned to the Late
Helladic or Mycenaean period by interchanges of goods with Crete and
the literate countries of the East Mediterranean: L.H.I began no later
than 1500 b.c., L.H.IIIb ended just after 1200. The beginning of
Middle Helladic about 1800 b.c. is deduced from the association of
M.H. and M.M.II pottery at Phylakopi on Melos (p. 48). Finally, Minoan
seals and sealings from E.H.III layers demonstrate a parallelism with
E.M.III Crete and Egypt between Dynasties VI-XI. For estimating
the antiquity of earlier periods the relative depths of deposits are at
least suggestive: at Eutresis 4 m. out of 6*5 are composed of E.H.
ruins, at Korakou 2 m. out of 4-5 m. But in the Thessalian tell at
Tsangli, occupied in Early and perhaps Middle TEgean times, 5 m. out
of a total height of 10 m. is attributable to Middle Neolithic debris.
In conclusion, it must be recalled that the Helladic and Neolithic

57
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

periods are generally defined by pottery styles and are in fact usually
treated as the period when pottery of the distinctive style was being
manufactured at a particular site. Now on Levkas, in the backward
north-west, rapiers of L.H. or at least M.M.III type were apparently
associated with good E.H. pottery.1 Hence the absolute dates for Early
and Middle Helladic given above are valid only for the ZBgean coasts
and their immediate hinterland. In peripheral regions a retardation
of several centuries must be allowed for! Moreover, the distinction
between Late Neolithic and Early Helladic I is nowhere very sharp.
In fact, a substantial overlap between some Late Neolithic and E.H.I
is generally admitted. Weinberg2 equates Late Neolithic in Thessaly
with E.H.I in the Peloponnese.

Early and Middle Neolithic

While palaeolithic food-gatherers had reached peninsular Greece, no
remains have yet been found of any mesolithic successors, perhaps
merely because no systematic search for such remains has been made.
In 1956 the archaeological record begins with mature neolithic cultures
characterized by well-made pottery and little else. From Corinthia to
Thessaly “variegated ware”, part pink, part grey,3 seems to character-
ize the earliest levels. But from the next level at Otzaki magoula4
in Thessaly as from the cave of Khirospilia on Levkas5 come sherds
ornamented with the edge of a Cardium shell or by rustication that
we shall find are the symbols of the earliest neolithic farmer-colonists
throughout the Balkans and round the Western Mediterranean too.
With them are associated distinctive female figurines. From the
figurines and from the incipient tell formation it may be inferred that
the rural economy and ideology of these early colonists coincided with
those of still earlier cultivators in South-Western Asia, some of whom
did decorate their pottery with Cardium impressions,6 as of their
better-known kinsmen farther north (p. 86) and of their successors
in the Middle Neolithic phase.7

By the latter a rich culture already ruled throughout the mountain-
ridged peninsula from Servia in Western Macedonia to Asea in Arcadia
and from Levkas on the west to the coasts of Attica. It is best illus-
trated in the fertile valleys of Thessaly and Central Greece and is

1   Dorpfeld, Alt-Ithaka, R. 7 and R. 24.

2   AJA., LI (1947), 172; Miloj&c, Chron., 39.

3   Hesperia, VI (1937). 487-97*

4   Jhb. d. Inst., LXIX. (AA„ 1954), n-23*   5 Dorpfeld, Alt-Ithaka, 335.

8 Childe, NLMAE., 218; Godman, Tarsus, II (1956), 66.

7   Mylonas, 'H veokiducy ’Ettoxv tv 'EM dSi (Athens, 1928). Cf. Weinberg, A JA., LI
(1947), 167-85, and Schacherxneyr, Die altesten Kulturen Griechenlands (1955).

58

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Re: The Dawn of European Civilization By V. GORDON CHILDE 1923
« Reply #8 on: March 24, 2018, 09:01:42 PM »
0

 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE

Fig. 30. Pottery of Sesklo style, white on red and red on white. After Wace
and Thompson (£).

59
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

usually named after the Thessalian site of Sesklo on the Gulf of Volo.
In Thessaly and Central Greece the peasants found an environment
that they could exploit from self-sufficing hamlets, continuously
occupied. They lived in modest round or rectangular huts of wattle
and daub or of mud-brick on stone foundations. A model from Sesklo
shows a house with gabled roof. The repeated reconstruction of such
dwellings has converted the settlements into little tells (toumba or
magoula). Such mounds are very numerous but generally small: ioo
by 75 m. is an average area for a Thessalian tell, but at Hagia Marina
in Phocis the mound covered 300 by 200 m.

Now tell formation implies a rural economy advanced enough to
maintain the fertility of the fields, if not orchard husbandry that ties
the farmer to his fruit-trees. In phase A the villagers lived by culti-
vating cereals, probably also vegetables and fruit-trees1 and breeding
cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs.2

Unspecialized potters built up by hand delicate vessels, imitating
baskets or perhaps even metal vessels3 in an extremely fine burnished
ware, generally red, in the Peloponnese sometimes black or mottled.4
The pots might be decorated with simple rectilinear patterns formed
by wedge-shaped or round punctuations or by lines in white paint.
In Northern Greece the vase surface was more often covered with a
white slip on which designs were painted in red; in Central Greece and
the Peloponnese the white slip is often omitted. The patterns, often
very elaborate, are clearly derived from basketry originals, but each
hamlet developed its own distinctive style of painting. Ring bases
and genuine handles betoken an unusual degree of sophistication,
while an imitation of a leather bottle from Nemea approximates to the
Early Helladic askos (like Fig. 36, 2).

Simple stone vases too were found at Sesklo, but a bone spatula like
Fig. 45 must come from an unrecognized Early Neolithic settlement.

Though self-sufficing communities, the neolithic hamlets were not
mutually isolated; they exchanged pots5 and doubtless other com-
modities. War is not attested; the only definite weapons found were
sling-stones, probably used by hunters. Peaceful commerce outside the
province is disclosed by the general use of obsidian. At Tsani a stone
button seal bearing a cruciform design was found, and clay models of

1   Barley is attested for period A at Tsani, wheat, barley, figs, pears, and peas for
period B at Sesklo and Dimini, vulgare wheat from Rakhmani IV (D). Triticum dwum
from Servia I in Macedonia.

2   BRGK., 36 (1955), 1-50.

3   Forsdyke, British Museum, Catalogue of Greek and Etruscan Vases, I, pp. xvi and 23.

* The surface colour is determined by the firing, an oxidizing atmosphere yielding

red, a reducing black. See Blegen, Prosymna, 368-9; Hesperia, VI, 491-6.

5 Wace and Thompson, 241.

60
 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE

seals are reported from Sesklo, Hagia Marina, and from Nemea in the
Peloponnese. The type is certainly at home in Hither Asia1 and there
generally occurs in a “chalcolithic” milieu, and copper may well have
been known to the “neolithic” Greeks. Some of their pots seem to
imitate the shape and even the rivets of metal vases, and at Hagia
Marina Soteriadhes1 2 claims to have found riveted copper daggers on
virgin soil in a Sesklo settlement. Still, no sustained effort was made
to secure regular supplies of metal.

Surplus energies were devoted rather to domestic fertility cults.

i   24

3

Fig. 31. Neolithic figurines, Thessaly. After Wace and Thompson. (1, f;

3-4-   2, i-.)

For these figurines (Fig. 31) were modelled in clay, depicting, often
with considerable verisimilitude, a female personage, standing or
seated, or, in one example from Chaeroneia, nursing an infant (the
“kourotrophos”). Model thrones or altars (Fig. 32) were also manu-
factured. As ornaments and charms the peasants wore bracelets of
stone or Spondylus shells (as on the Danube), and stone nose-plugs as
in the al’Ubaid culture of Sumer.

In its rural economy and ideology and in more specific items of
equipment—mud-brick architecture, use of the sling instead of the
bow as well as the shape of the clay missiles, familiarity with stamp

1   Childe. NLMAE., 112, 120, 139, 195, 219, but at Byblos clay stamps are neolithic.

2   Mylonas, op. cit., fig. 64.

6l
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

seals, the decoration of kiln-fired pots with basketry designs in dark
paint—the Sesklo culture reveals just the westernmost outpost of the
South-West Asiatic province, extending from the Mediterranean coasts
to Iran and Turkmenia. Peculiarities of the pottery alone connect it

Fig. 32. Miniature altar or throne. After Wace and Thompson (£).

more specifically with Syria than with the Anatolian plateau. Technic-
ally the chalcolithic pottery of Cyprus1 is very like the red-on-white
ware described above and may constitute a link with the Hassuna-
Halaf complex farther east. At the same time connections with the
cultures of the Lower and Middle Danube valley are already discernible;
significant common elements are shoe-last adzes, triangular altars,
and shell bracelets.1 2

The Sesklo culture endured for a long time: at Tsangli five out of
ten metres of settlement debris are attributed to it, and four out of
eight occupational levels at Zerelia. But eventually the continuity
of tradition was interrupted. Changes in ceramic technique, in art,
in architecture, and even in economy not only define a new period, the
Late Neolithic, but also may betoken an infiltration of new colonists.
Among these two groups at least may be distinguished—Dimini folk
in Eastern Thessaly and Corinthia, and Larisa people in Western
Macedonia and Thessaly, Central Greece, and Corinthia. But the break
is nowhere complete. Thus female figurines were still modelled in clay;
in Eastern Thessaly the kourotrophos survived, painted in Dimini
style, and later a very schematized type emerged in which the head
is a stumpy cylinder of stone or clay, fitted into a legless torso

1   Dikaios, Khirokitia (London, 1953), 314-24; Schaeffer, Missions en Chypre, no.
The chalcolithic and proto-chalcolithic of Mersin in Cilicia provide even better analogies,
Garstang, Prehistoric Mersin (Oxford, 1953), 54-124.

2   AM., LVII (1932).

62
 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE

Fig. 31, 4)—a type that recurs beyond the Danube in the Gumelnita
culture.1 Hence it may be assumed that the old population absorbed,
or was subjugated by, the new settlers. The latter’s cultural affinities
seem to lie in the Balkans, but the manifestations of their advent
differ in different regions.

Late Neolithic

At Dimini near the Gulf of Volo a completely new settlement was
founded. In contrast to the earlier open hamlets it was defended by a
complex of stone walls (Fig. 33). Sesklo was probably fortified at the

®   1 i«   10 M

Fig. 33. Plan of fortified village of Dimini. After Tsountas.

same time.2 In both citadels houses of the megaron type with porch
and central hearth were erected. At Dimini and Sesklo the bevelled

1   Dacia, VTI-VIII (1940). 97-

2   It is possible that the fortifications and megara at both sites are Middle Helladic
and so unconnected with the Dimini culture.

63
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

adze (D) went out of use, and axes (Fig. 29, C) were employed for the
first time. Adzes were hafted at Dimini with the aid of perforated
antler sleeves. Copper and gold were now imported; they are repre-
sented respectively by two flat celts and a ring-pendant (Fig. 34, 2),

all from Dimini. In East Thessaly the vases were now decorated with
spirals and mseanders normally combined with the older basketry
patterns; the designs may be incised or painted in white or warm black
on a buff, red, or brown ground, and may then be outlined with a
second colour—black or white; the fruitstand—a dish on a high
pedestal—is an important innovation. Similar pottery turns up in
Corinthia and the Argolid, again in a Late Neolithic context.1

Technically Dimini pottery is inferior to that of Sesklo; ring-bases
were abandoned, true handles give place to pierced lugs, though some
of these are horned or elaborated into animal heads. So Dimini ware
cannot be treated as an autochthonous development of the native
Middle Neolithic tradition. It was surely introduced by a new people,
come most probably from the Danube valley; for there spiral and
mseander patterns were always popular and antler was extensively
used in industry. Technically Dimini ware is identical with the painted
ware of the Balkan Starcevo culture, where, however, it is associated
with rusticated ware such as we have already met in Early Neolithic
Greece. The patterns, however, whether painted or incised, can best
be matched in the Tisza-Maros region.2

1   At Gonia and the Argive Heraeum.

2   Cf. Schachermeyr, MAGW., LXXXI-LXXXIII (1953-4). i-39.* below, p. ira.

64
 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE

In Thessaly the Dimini culture is confined to the east. To the west
its place is taken by the Larisa culture, found also in Central Greece
and Western Macedonia. In the latter region the Late Neolithic phase
began with the violent destruction of the Sesklo village of Servia. The
site was reoccupied by a new people whose Larisa culture is as different
from that of Sesklo as is Dimini, at least judged by its pottery. The
commonest ware is self-coloured, generally black and highly burnished,
but sometimes at least in Macedonia parti-coloured—black inside and
round the rim, elsewhere red like the grey and pink variegated pottery
of the Early Neolithic. Vessels no longer stand on ring bases, handles
are replaced by lugs that may be homed.1 Decoration is effected by
stroke-burnishing, shallow fluting or channelling, incisions, or rarely
by thin fines of white paint. (Crusted ware occurs in Eastern Thessaly,
but in a later horizon.) The patterns are generally rectilinear, but
include occasional spirals. Besides self-coloured wares a light fabric
was made and covered all over with shiny brown or black paint. This
ware, termed ” neolithic urfirnis”, looks like an attempt to reproduce
the appearance of black burnished ware in kiln-fired vases, but is said
to begin in Middle Neolithic times in Corinthia.1 2

As at Dimini, adzes were mounted in perforated antler sleeves, the
sling was still preferred to the bow, but an arrow-head was found at
Servia. Personal ornaments include bracelets of Spondylus shell and
of marble and bone combs rather like those of the Danubian Vinca
culture (Fig. 47).

Larisan ideology was still expressed in the production of female
figurines, now very conventional, but one burial was found in the
settlement at Servia.

All the new ceramic fabrics and shapes found at Servia (except
white painted ware) recur in the Vinca culture on the Danube and Tisza,
as do bone combs, shell bracelets, and other traits. Hence Frankfort,3
Grundmann,4 and Heurtley5 have deduced an invasion from beyond
the Balkans. On the other hand, many of the ceramic innovations can
be paralleled equally in Crete and in Hither Asia. Agreements between
Cretan neolithic and Mainland Greek black-polished wares have already
been noted. Stroke-burnishing decorated one E.M.I fabric (p. 32) but
was also applied in the chalcolithic of Kum Tepe in the Troad (p. 36).
White painting on polished black ware was also later popular at Yortan

1   True handles are attached to jugs at Olynthus and a few other Macedonian sites,
but Heurtley believes they are influenced by Early JEgean models and not truly
"neolithic”.

2   Hesperia, VI, b, c.; AJA., LI, 174.

3   Studies, II, 40-5.

4   AM., LVII (1932), X02 ft, LXII, 56-69.

E   65

6 PM., 115-20.
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

and in South-Western Asia Minor,1 while parti-coloured wares are
characteristic of central Anatolia and Cyprus, but not before the time
of Troy I. Finally, black polished wares, sometimes decorated by
stroke-burnishing, in North Syria2 precede the painted fabric with
which Sesklo pottery has been compared. If the inference drawn from
this comparison be correct, it would be chronologically impossible to
attribute this Syrian neolithic to any Danubian inspiration. Hence,
as Milojcic has argued most cogently, the Larisa culture should mark
not a transplantation of the Vinca culture from north of the Balkans
but a stage in the spread of an Asiatic-JEgean culture thither or at
least a parallel emanation of the latter. That would further accord
with Weinberg’s3 equation of the Late Neolithic of Thessaly and
Macedonia with Troy I and E.H.I. Nevertheless, these archaeological
arguments are not so conclusive as to exclude absolutely the idea of
an invasion from the Danube valley, should other, e.g. philological,
considerations make that imperative.

The Early AEgean Bronze Age

The influx of new settlers in Late Neolithic times had not involved
an immediate transformation of the economic structure of Hellas;
despite its copper axes, the Dimini culture can be termed neolithic
as legitimately as its Sesklo precursor. The succeeding period witnessed
a real advance towards the Urban Revolution and the nuclei of the
classical City States were founded in peninsular Greece.

Not only there, but also in Macedonia and even in Thrace (at least
at Mikhalic4 on the Maritsa close to its junction with the Tundja), the
Mainland Bronze Age is marked by innovations in domestic architec-
ture and in pottery that find precise parallels on the eastern coast of
the iEgean. Architectural tricks such as herring-bone masonry (in
Boeotia and Attica, cf. p. 37) and bothroi in house floors (in Macedonia
and, by E.H.III, in peninsular Greece) and ceramic novelties—“thrust
handles”, pyxides, jugs with cut-away necks, bowls with tubular or
trumpet lugs growing from the inverted rims—suggest a transfer of
Anatolian culture across the .ZEgean and the Dardanelles. A closer
study of the pottery, however, shows that no one known Anatolian
culture was reproduced on the European shores. If a migration from
Asia Minor be assumed, it will be necessary to postulate several streams

1   Anatolian Studies, IV. (1954), 202-5.

2   Childe, BSA., XXXVII (1936-37), 31-5.

3   AJA., LI (1947). *70-4-

4   Razkopki i Prou&vaniya, I, Naroden Arkh. Muzei (Sofia, 1948), 8-20; cf., Anatolian

tudies, VI (1956), 45-8.

66
 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE

with different starting-points. Only the Early Aegean pottery from
Thrace and Macedonia is explicitly Troadic, while the local post-
neolithic Thessalian pottery seems derived from the Early Macednic.
In Macedonia and Thrace stone battle-axes occur at the same time,
but they are not distinctively Troadic. In the Peloponnese and Attica
Cycladic features in pottery and burial rites are prominent, as if the
islands had been at least stepping-stones on the way from Asia. At
Asine the best analogy to one of the earliest E.H. pots is to be found
in the Copper Age of Ali$ar in Central Anatolia.1 On the West Coast
Ithaka seems to have been colonized from Corinthia.1 2 Even in Thrace
and Macedonia horses’ bones occur on Early Aegean sites, while on the
Troad that animal appears first in Troy VI.

Perhaps, then, the striking agreements could be explained as parallel
adjustments of related cultures when visiting merchants and prospectors
from the Levant and the Nile introduced metallurgical and other
techniques and opened up opportunities for securing a share in the
surplus accumulated in Sumerian and Egyptian cities.

All Early Helladic, Macednic, and Thracic societies of course still
lived mainly by farming, though viticulture is now deducible from
grape seeds at H. Kosmas in Attica, while in Thrace and Macedonia
horses’ bones occur. The early ABgean settlements in Thrace and
Macedonia indeed remained simple villages, as did those at most inland
sites in Central Greece and the Peloponnese (e.g. Asea in Arcadia).
Many had already been occupied by neolithic peasants. Both in Mace-
donia and peninsular Greece Late Neolithic sherds are found on the
oldest Bronze Age floors. But at least in peninsular Greece new settle-
ments were established on sites chosen with a view to trade or piracy
rather than agriculture. These, though often of no larger size physically,
approximate to fenced cities in their location on naturally defencible
sites and their protection by ramparts of stones, combined on iEgina
with timber beams as at Troy.

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Re: The Dawn of European Civilization By V. GORDON CHILDE 1923
« Reply #9 on: March 24, 2018, 09:02:36 PM »
0

The townsmen lived in long two-roomed houses, closely grouped
along narrow lanes, as at Troy and Thermi. But in the more rustic
villages houses were oval or apsidal and more scattered. At Tiryns
and Orchomenos monumental circular structures were built, probably
to serve as granaries.3 By E.H.III tiles were already used for roofing.
Finally, by that phase the town of Lema4 at least comprised a regular
palace of several rooms grouped about a spacious court or hall and
roofed with tiles and slates. So in at least one Mainland centre the

1   Fr6din and Persson, Asine, 204.

2   Heurtley, BSA., XXXV (1934-35), 39-

8 Marinatos, BCH., LXX (1946), 337 fi.

67

Hesperia, XXIII (1954), 21-4-
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

social surplus was being concentrated and communal activity directed
by a chief as at Troy.

Stone was still employed for axes, adzes, and knives even in the
Peloponnese, and so extensively farther north that Thessalian and
Thracian villages look positively neolithic. Obsidian was used for
knives, sickle teeth, and hollow-based arrow-heads; for the bow is
now attested for the first time, without, however, ousting the sling.
In Thrace and Macedonia, but not in pensinsular Greece, stone battle-
axes were now being made as in the Troad; one from H. Mamas in
Macedonia (Fig. 35), though in course of local manufacture, repro-

Fig. 35. Axe and battle-axes from H. Mamas. After Heurtley, BSA., XXIX (§).

duces a South Russian type. At Mikhalic in Thrace miniature battle-
axes were modelled in clay as toys or votives.

But copper, tin, lead, silver, and gold were everywhere imported
or distributed and worked. Close to the shore at Rafina in Attica,
a convenient port for Cycladic or Cypriote ores, were found two large
furnaces for smelting copper surrounded by quantities of slag and
broken moulds. At Cirrha on the Gulf of Corinth, Davies1 reported a
crucible with tin oxide adhering to it in an open working from which
all ore had been extracted, but tin ore in this context is almost incon-
ceivable. Even in Macedonia2 gold slag and a crucible have been described.

At least south of Thessaly the distribution of metal was so well
organized that copper could be freely used for craftsmen’s tools.
Though most have been melted down in prehistoric times, an axe-
adze and a flame-shaped knife like Fig. 20, 1, survived in the E.H.II
level at Eutresis.3

1 JHS., XLIX (1929), 93-4.   8 Vardaroftsa and Saratse, Heurtley, PM,

3   Two copper battle-axes found stray in peninsular Greece and now at the British
School in Athens may well be Early Helladic.

68
 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE

Whether or no the techniques of metallurgy were implanted by
immigrant prospectors or itinerant artificers from Asia, the capital
for industrial development was secured in the last resort by supplying
the demand of cities on the Nile and the Euphrates. As in Crete and
the Cyclades, the coastal populations of peninsular Greece had now
turned to trading. Perhaps they colonized the Ionian Islands and the
west coasts to extend their commerce as the Dorians colonized Corfu
in historical times.

The importance and wide ramifications of Early Helladic commerce
are illustrated not only by the materials used but by actual foreign
manufactures imported or copied locally: leg amulets as in Crete and
Egypt (Zygouries,1 Hagios Kosmas2), Cycladic bone tubes (Hagios
Kosmas and Levkas), frying-pans (Hagios Kosmas, Eutresis,8 Asine),
marble idols and palettes (Hagios Kosmas), and a double-spiral pin
like Fig. 27, 9 (Zygouries). From Asia came an arm-cylinder of twisted
silver wire (like a gold one from Troy II) found in a grave on Levkas.
In the E.H.III level at Asine lumps of clay stamped with E.M.III-
M.M.I seal-impressions must have sealed bales of merchandise or jars
of oil brought from Crete. And the Early Helladic merchants themselves
felt the need of seals; seals, probably imported, have been found at
Hagios Kosmas, Asine, and other sites. One from Asine is almost
identical with a Sixth Dynasty Egyptian seal. The counterbalancing
exports may possibly have included tin from Cirrha. Early Helladic
vases were certainly exported to Troy from peninsular Greece (p. 37).
A depas found near Mikhalic in Thrace, and another from Orchomenos
as well as some other vases from that site and Eutresis may well be
Troadic imports.

The ceramic industry was not industrialized, since Early Helladic
vases are all hand-made. The fabrics that appear first (from E.H.I
onwards) are dark and self-coloured, burnished and decorated with
incised and excised patterns. In a later phase (E.H.II) begins in penin-
sular Greece a buff ware which is covered with a dark glaze paint to
reproduce the effects of the old burnished fabric. It is generally known
as Urftrnis and probably denotes Cretan influence4 though red wares
had been coated with a rather similar “glaze” in Late Neolithic times.
In E.H.III the glaze paint is used as the medium for producing dark
geometric patterns on a light ground—chiefly in the Peloponnese—or
as a ground on which similar patterns are drawn in white—in
Central Greece. The rectilinear light-on-dark designs recall Cretan

1 Blegen, Zygouries (Cambridge, Mass., 1928).

* AJA., XXXVIII (1934). 259 ff-

3   Goldman, Excavations at Eutresis in Bceotia (1931).

4   Frodin and Persson, Asine, 433.

69
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

E.M.II-III patterns, but are also foreshadowed on the black neolithic B
vases of the Mainland. Distinctive Early Helladic II-III shapes are
sauce-boats (also manufactured in gold1), hour-glass tankards, askoi and
globular water-jars, at first with ring-handles,2 later with flat vertically
pierced lugs, on the belly (Fig. 36).

North of Othrys in Thessaly, Macedonia, and Thrace, Early iEgean

3   4

Fig. 36. Early Helladic sauce-boat (1), askos (2), tankard (3), and jar (4) (£).

potters did not use a kiln that would produce clear ware and so did
not manufacture Urfirnis ware. Its place was taken by self-coloured
wares as in Early Helladic I and Early Troadic. Save for "sauce-boats’',
most of the forms popular in peninsular Greece were reproduced in
local variations looking rather more Troadic than the latter (Fig. 37,
1, 2, 6). Even horned handles had been current at Troy, but in Mace-
donia a distinctive development was the wish-bone handle (Fig. 37,

1   JHS., XLIV (1924), 163.

2   This form resembles the Corded Ware amphora, Fig. 84 (cf. Fuchs, Die griechische
Fundgruppen der friihen Bronzezeit, 1937), but also good Anatolian forms (Germania,
XXIII, 62).

70
 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE

3, 5), analogies to which have met us in neolithic Crete. In Thrace the
vases from Mikhalic, where askoi are missing, look more Troadic still.
But here, as in Chalcidice, trumpet lugs grow out of the inverted rims of
bowls. Now in Lesbos this type of lug appeared first in Thermi III,
having grown up out of the simpler tubular lugs of Thermi I (Fig. 17).
For once pottery discloses an irreversible relation. Finally, a few sherds

Fig. 37. Early Macednic pot-forms. After Heurtley, BSA., XXVIII.

from Mikhalic in Thrace, from H. Mamas in Macedonia, and from
E.H.III levels at Eutresis and H. Marina in Central Greece are decor-
ated with cord imprints. This “corded ware” has usually been con-
nected with the battle-axes and horses’ bones from the Thracic and
Macednic sites as evidence for an invasion from Saxo-Thuringia1 or
at least from somewhere north of the Balkans. The forms of most vases
have however nothing in common with Saxo-Thuringian corded ware,2
while the similarities of the amphorae are due at most to a common
pre-ceramic prototype (p. 173).

Imported marble figurines of Cycladic type may have been used in
domestic fertility rites, but clay figurines do not seem to have been
manufactured unless the “anchor ornaments” (Fig.

38) be really ultra-conventionalized versions of such.

They constitute one of the most distinctive type
fossils of the Early Aegean Bronze Age, being
found—in E.H.II-III layers—from Asea in Arcadia
to Servia in Macedonia and Mikhalic in Thrace,
and from Rafina and Asine on the east to Levkas
and Ithaka on the west.3 Really they are no more
likely to be ritual than the clay hooks common to
Early Thracic, Macednic, and Troadic. Clay horns
of consecration from Asine on the other hand
point to rites like the Minoan and Anatolian. But the principal super-
stitious impulse to accumulation of wealth was supplied by the desire
for a good burial. In the Peloponnese and Attica the dead were buried

1 So Fuchs, Die griechische Fundgntppender friihen Bronzezeit (1937).

3   MilojCid, Germania, XXXIII (1955), 151-4.

3 Listed by Weinberg, A JA., LI, p. 168, n. 26; add Mikhalic and Rafina,

7*

Fig. 38. E. H. An-
chor Ornament,
Kritsana (£).
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

in family vaults outside the settlements. At Zygouries the tombs were
pit-caves or shafts cut in the rock, one of which contained fourteen
skeletons. At Hagios Kosmas in Attica, the earlier ossuaries were cists
with a false door facing the township. The cists were later replaced
by built ossuaries like Fig. 25, 1, but still used as collective tombs;
in each case the bodies, in the contracted attitude, had been introduced
through the roof. Such cemeteries of family vaults show that in
peninsular Greece quite a number of lineages or clans lived together
in a single township. Out of six skulls measured from H. Kosmas three
were long-headed, but two round-headed.1

In the north-west quite different burial practices prevailed. On
Levkas Dorpfeld described a so-called royal cemetery of thirty-three
round tombs. Each "tomb” was a circular platform of stones defined
by a built wall and suggesting a denuded cairn, in or on which were
burial pithoi, cists, or shaft-graves—each containing a single corpse
(allegedly roasted)—and the ashes of a "pyre”. Among these lay burnt
human and animal bones and remains of metal ornaments and weapons.
The pottery from the graves is typically Early Helladic, but the metal
gear from the "pyres” includes besides good Early iEgean types a
couple of rapiers and gold hilt mounts2 that elsewhere would be
Mycenaean or at least M.M.III. The cemetery must be a whole period,
perhaps four centuries, later than that of H. Kosmas in Attica. The
burial rites are equally abnormal. Cremation in situ must have taken
place on the pyres, a rite otherwise unknown in Bronze Age Greece.
The platforms sound like cairns, and in 1955 a cairn with pithos burials
very like our round tombs was found in Messenia, but was M.H. in
date. So the warriors and rich women buried on Levkas did not possess
the standard Early Helladic culture though they used Early Helladic
pots and Early J2gean weapons and ornaments.

The standard Early Helladic burial practices are in sharp contrast
to the Troadic, but conform rather to Cycladic, Minoan, Cypriote and
Levantine traditions. They cannot have been introduced from the
Troad. But no Early iEgean burials have been recognized where
Troadic parallels are clearest—north of Attica and Euboea or in Mace-
donia and Thrace.

In peninsular Greece, Early Helladic societies had created a polity
and an economy under which some at least of the peasant’s younger
sons might find a livelihood in industry or commerce, but only in
reliance on Oriental markets opened up by maritime transport. Remote
from access thereto, the contemporary inhabitants of Macedonia had

1   Coon, Races, 144.

2   Dorpfeld, Alt-Ithaka, 229 (R. 7), 237 (R. 17), 241 (R. 24).

72
 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE

no alternative but to occupy fresh land. So they filtered southward
into Thessaly. The culture that used to be attributed to Neolithic III
and IV there was in fact basically Early Macednic.1 But local Late
Neolithic traditions were blended with the Anatolian. So clay figurines
were still manufactured, but now male as well as female. At Rakhmani
in Eastern Thessaly spiral patterns were applied in crusted technique.

Middle Helladic

The Middle Helladic period is ushered in by the violent destruction
of Orchomenos and other sites. Many were reoccupied. But abrupt
changes in architecture, pottery, burial rites, and general economy
indicate the dominance of new and warlike settlers. The latter can be
most easily recognized by their pottery—the reduced grey ware

Fig. 39. Spear-head, knives, and dagger from M.H. graves in Thessaly.

After Tsountas ($).

described on p. 46 and unhappily termed Minyan by archaeologists—
and by the practice of burying the dead contracted in small cists or in
jars among the houses. The martial character of the invaders is dis-
closed by the deposition in the graves of metal weapons (Fig. 39)—
knives, ogival daggers, and spear-heads with a socket, cast like a shoe
on one or both faces of the blade (Sesklo, Levkas, Mycenae). Hollow-
1 BSA., XXVIII (1926-27), 180-94.

73
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

based obsidian arrow-heads were still used, but now the archer used
also grooved stone arrow-straighteners like Fig. 113 (Asine, Levkas,
Mycenae). Perforated stone axes appear for the first time at Eutresis
and Asine and antler axes and sleeves at Asine. On the other hand, such
craft tools as saws and gouges are first found in a Middle Helladic
grave (on Levkas).

The Minyan invaders did not exterminate the older inhabitants or

Fig. 40. Minyan pottery from Thessaly (£), and imitations from Thermon,

iEtolia (TV).

destroy their economy, but added to the population and accelerated
the accumulation of wealth. Malthi now attained its maximum popu-
lation; the walls comprised, within an area of 3f acres, 305 rooms, while
the citadel was supplied with spring water by an aqueduct. The houses
are more often agglomerations of rooms than long rectangular halls.1
Tin-bronze was now worked by the smiths, and stone moulds for
casting spear-heads like Fig. 39,1, and Minoan double-axes were found
even at Dimini in Thessaly.

The potters’ craft was soon industrialized. The grey-ware vases were
fired in a closed kiln and either formed in a mould or thrown on the

2

4

1 AJA., XLVIII (1944), 342.

74
 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE

wheel. A family of Minoan potters settled on TEgina, bringing with
them their clay wheel as used in Crete.1 Perhaps such immigrant
craftsmen were responsible for introducing the wheel from Crete every-
where, but there is nothing Minoan about their products. The favourite
“Minyan" forms are ring-stemmed goblets, high-handled cups (Fig. 40),
craters, and amphorae. Both in hue and form such Minyan vases imitate
silver models. Indeed, in one Late Helladic grave the silver originals

Fig. 41. Matt-painted bowl and pithos, iEgina (TV); and Middle Cycladic jugs from
Marseilles harbour and Phylakopi (A).

were actually found together with the clay skeuomorphs.2 On the other
hand, the influence of woodwork is patent—notably in the homed
handles from JEtolia (Fig. 40, 3), which are repeated in good Minyan
ware at Troy but have a long Balkan ancestry. But grey Minyan
vases had to compete with hand-made vessels of the same shapes in
polished brown or black and vitreous red wares.

Perhaps later, pithoi, bowls, and other shapes were built up by hand
in clear wares and decorated with geometric patterns in matt paint (Fig.
41). In form and decoration these matt-painted vessels agree precisely

1   Jhb. d. Inst., LII, A A. (1937). 20-5.

2   Persson, New Tombs at Dendra (Lund, 1942), 87.

75
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

with Middle Cycladic pots from Melos and show the same Central
Anatolian affinities (p. 56). A M.H.III beaked jug from Asine1 looks like
an imported “Early Hittite” manufacture. On the other hand, at Liano-
kladhi in the Spercheios valley the Macedonians, who had occupied the
site in Early iEgean times, now learned to make in matt-painted ware
jars, tankards, and bowls with wish-bone handles of good Macednic or
Early Helladic shape, and decorate them with Macednic patterns,
including pot-hook spirals, in Middle Helladic technique (Fig. 42). A

Fig. 42. Matt-painted jar, Lianokladhi III. After Wace and Thompson (£).

similar fabric appears at Thermon in iEtolia together with “imitation
Minyan’’ vases, but not before L.H.II (fifteenth century) and also in
Levkas. This Lianokladhi painted ware thus illustrates people of
Macednic-Middle Helladic traditions surviving into Late Helladic times
whom Heurtley plausibly identifies with the Dorians’ ancestors.2

In peninsular Greece trade with Crete was at first interrupted by
the invasion, but obsidian was still secured from Melos and the metal
trade was unimpaired. Soon Middle Minoan II polychrome pottery
was being imported into iEgina and imitated at Eutresis. A bossed

1   Frodin and Persson, Asine, 286; cf. van der Osten, AHshar, 1928-Q, OIP., XIX,
pi. IV, b 1671.

2   BSA„ XXVIII (1926-27), 179 ff.

76
 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE

bone plaque like Fig. 115 and a hammer pin,1 from M.H. layers at
Lerna, illustrate connections at once with Anatolia and with Sicily.

The dead were generally interred in cists or jars under or between
the houses within the settlements. But on Levkas ten or twelve such
burials might be grouped together in rectangular or circular "platforms”
(cf. p. 72). In Messenia2 Middle Helladic pithos burials lay on the
periphery of a regular cairn 14 m. in diameter.

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Re: The Dawn of European Civilization By V. GORDON CHILDE 1923
« Reply #10 on: March 24, 2018, 09:03:06 PM »
0

The intrusive culture typified by grey Minyan ware is found all over
Greece to the Ionian Islands, Levkas, Thessaly, and even Chalcidice.
Only in inland Macedonia did the native culture persist quite unaffected
by it. Now most authorities agree that the Minyan invaders were the
first Greek speakers in the peninsula. From them should have sprung
the new dynasty that began to write Indo-European Greek at Knossos
in L.M.II (p. 27). If so, the origin of the invaders becomes a major
issue for European prehistory. In 1914 Forsdyke suggested a Troadic
origin for the invaders.3 But, though Minyan ware was the normal
pottery of Troy VI, it did not begin demonstrably earlier there than
in Greece. Burial among the houses contrasts as much with Troadic
as with Minoan and Early Helladic practice, but was normal in Central
Anatolia and farther east. Now grey vases, technically allied to
Minyan and including pedestalled goblets, are characteristic of Hissar II
in North-Eastern Iran and allied sites in Turkmenia,4 where again
the dead were buried among the houses. On the other hand, Persson
insists on Northern features in the intrusive culture.5 None is really
convincing, and the most significant can already be found south of
the Balkans in Thrace and Macedonia in Early iEgean times. If fresh
"Northern” elements entered peninsular Greece and the Troad at the
beginning of Middle Helladic there is no evidence for bringing them
from beyond the Balkans.

Mycenaean Civilization

The martial prowess of the Minyan invaders eventually allowed them
to win by force of arms a share in the wealth accumulated in Minoan
and Oriental cities while their war-chiefs, becoming kings, concen-
trated some of it for use as capital in the development of a Mainland
civilization. The Icings attracted or compelled Minoan craftsmen to
settle at their courts while merchants brought regular supplies of raw
materials and luxury goods. By Late Helladic times the Middle Helladic
townships had grown into little cities.

1 Hesperia, XXIII (1954), 21; xxv, 160.   3 JHS. (1955), Suppl., p. 11.

3 JHS., XXXIV, 126.   4 Arne, Excavations at Shah-Upe; cf.

8 Frodin and Persson, Asine, 433.   p. 20, n. x.

77
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

The urban revolution was apparently first consummated at Mycenae,
a citadel that commands a main artery of communications between
the south-east and the north-west. The old settlement, founded in
Early Helladic times, became the capital of a potent dynasty. The
kings with their families were buried with regal wealth in two Shaft
Grave cemeteries, each enclosed by a circle of upright slabs. Schliemann
discovered a circle of six tombs, numbered I to VI, that had subse-
quently been incorporated in the walls of the Late Mycenaean citadel.
A second circle comprising 14 shaft graves (designated by Greek
letters) farther out and disturbed by the erection of the “Treasury of
Clytemnsestra", came to light in 1951.1 In both, the shafts, cut 10 to
15 feet into the rock and provided with a ledge 4 or 3 feet above the
floor to support a wooden roof, normally contained several skeletons
lying on their backs with the legs extended or drawn up; one skull
had been trepanned. These may have been buried in wooden coffins,
but at the bottom of the latest and largest shaft in the new circle
had been built a stone mortuary house, divided into chamber and ante-
chamber and roofed with a corbelled barrel vault. Stelae, carved in
low relief with spiral patterns framing scenes of war and of the chase,
once marked each grave. Now they provide the earliest evidence for
the use of horse-drawn war-chariots in the iEgean. A little imported
M.M.IIIb pottery together with native matt-painted and Minyan
vases suggest that the earliest interments in some graves go back into
the sixteenth century; the latest dateable sherds from any shaft grave
are L.M.II. The Shaft Grave period covered roughly the century 1600
to 1450 B.C.

The equipment acquired by the Shaft Grave kings is largely of
Minoan inspiration. Their palace was equipped with a light-well, like
those of Knossos, and decorated with frescoes in Minoan technique.
Most vessels and ornaments are evidently products of Minoan crafts-
men. On figured documents men wear the Minoan drawers and women
the flounced skirt of the island. Minoan signets were adopted for official
business. The cult of the Mother Goddess, associated, as in Crete, with
the symbols of the dove, the double-axe, the sacred pillar and horns
of consecration, was practised with Minoan rites at Mycenae, and
draughts were played as in Crete. No one denies that craftsmen trained
in Cretan schools produced the objects in question though many must
have been executed at Mycenae itself to the order of the local king.
An immigration of Cretan potters seems to have initiated the local
manufacture of Mycenaean vases, decorated with shiny paint in the
best Minoan tradition. It no longer seems likely, as it did thirty years

1   G. Mylonas, Ancient Mycence, the Capital of Agamemnon (Princeton, 1956).

78
 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE

ago, that Mycenaean civilization was founded by Minoan princes
carving out for themselves kingdoms on the Greek Mainland. The
martial character of Early Mycenaean culture, as revealed in the forti-
fication of the citadel, the abundance of weapons, and the popularity
of battle scenes in art, is quite foreign to the Minoan spirit. The kings
of Mycenae wore beards; the Minoans generally shaved their faces.
In their tombs native Minyan and matt-painted vases are juxtaposed
to vessels painted in Cretan style and technique. An arrow-shaft-
straightener in Shaft Grave VI and a Mainland spear-head like Fig. 39,1
(Grave IV), occur side by side with arms in Minoan tradition. Though
the terrible rapiers, nearly a metre long, like Fig. 14,1, may be Middle
Minoan types, the flange-hilted variant of Fig. 14, 2, is Mainland rather
than Cretan. A round-heeled dagger from Shaft Grave VI would seem
more at home in Central and Western Europe1 than round the iEgean.
Mycenaean warriors wore helmets plated with boars’ tusk laminae, but
so did Minoans (p. 30). Amber for beads found in several shaft graves
must have been imported from the Baltic, a newly
found crescentic necklace with pattern-bored
spacers2 (Fig. 43) of that material is likely to be
of English manufacture.

Finally, the horse-drawn war-chariots, at once
the symbols and the decisive instruments of
Mycenaean kingship, are certainly not Minoan.

The horses that drew them point north of the
TEgean basin. That is not to say that Minyan
invaders had brought chariots and horses with
them into Greece in the eighteenth century. A
small group of charioteers could easily seize
power and maintain authority with this new and
potent weapon. Structurally the Mycenaean shaft
graves agree closely with the ‘ ‘yamno” graves of the Pontic steppes, which
do contain wheeled ox-carts and hammer pins (p. 151). Whatever the
ancestry of the Shaft Grave rulers, by concentrating wealth, won by
pillage, mercenary service in Egypt3 or more peaceful trade, and so
attracting or compelling expert craftsmen to settle on the Mainland,
they prepared the way for an urban civilization.

Between 1500 and 1400 b.c. the same process of acculturation was
accomplished at other sites which had remained rural townships during

1 The identification of another blade from this grave as a halberd is incorrect, Blegen,
in 'E7HrtinBiap X. Tcrowras (Athens, 1951), 423 ff; cf. PPS., XIX, 231.

8 Germania, XXXIII (1955), 316-18.

* Schachermeyr, Archiv Orientalni, XVII (Praha, 1949), 331-50, suggests that the
Mycenseans learned to build and use chariots while helping Ahmose to expel the Hyksos!

79

n

Fig. 43. Terminal and
pattern-bored spacer-
bead from amber neck-
lace. Shaft Grave at
Mycenae (£).
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

the Early Mycenaean Shaft Grave epoch. Here again the change coin-
cided with the rise in the townships of chieftains, concentrating the
local wealth for expenditure on the products of secondary industry and
trade. These celebrated their elevation by erecting stately beehive
tombs or tholoi. Such tombs are significantly located near the heads
of southward-facing gulfs and along natural trade-routes by sea or land.
On the east coast these Middle Mycenaean tholoi extend as far north as
the Gulf of Volo, on the west to Cakovatos in Elis. At Mycenae itself,
rulers, perhaps of a new dynasty, erected a series of tholoi in which
Wace traced the typological development from earlier and ruder vaults
to the celebrated “Treasuries” of “Clytemnaestra” and “Atreus”,
built in ashlar masonry and provided with richly sculptured portals.1

The oldest dated tholos, one at Navarino,2 contained only matt-
painted and (a minority of) Cretanizing L.H.I vases, so should have been
built in the sixteenth century. Kakovatos3 and a few other tholoi
yielded good L.H.I pottery pointing to a foundation before 1450 b.c., a
larger number are L.H.II, the rest, including the finest “treasuries” at
Mycenae, were Late Mycenaean. A very rich tholos, found intact at
Dendra,4 contained no pottery earlier than L.H.III, but the gold and
silver vessels are L.M.I in style and illustrate a survival of heirlooms
for half a century at least!

Mycenaean tholoi are corbelled chambers entered by a long unroofed
passage or dromos. Many were erected in an excavation in a natural
hillside, but others stood on level ground or on a hilltop and were
covered by an artificial mound or cairn5 (Fig. 44).

Much of the grave goods from the Middle Mycenaean tholoi are
either imports from Crete or products of craftsmen trained in the
Minoan schools. So too the contemporary palaces at Tiryns and
Thebes, neither a megaron, were decorated with frescoes in Minoan
technique.

But the idea of the tholos tomb can hardly have been introduced
from Crete; in that island no tholoi are known to bridge the five
centuries between the building of the Early Minoan ossuaries and the
erection of the Mainland vaults. On the other hand, the architectural
similarities between the Mycenaean tholoi and the corbelled passage
graves of Southern Spain and Portugal are familiar, and there typo-
logical series can be produced to illustrate the development of the

1   Wace, BSA., XXV, 387; the contrary theory of Evans, making “Atreus” the oldest
tholos {PM., IV, 236 f.), has been refuted by the discovery of the new grave circle.

2   Hesperia, XXIII (1954), 158-62.

2   AM., XXXIV, 255; Fiiriimark, Chronology of the Mycencean Pottery (1941), 4.

4   Persson, The Royal Tombs at Dendra (Lund, 1931).

5   So at Kakovatos, Bodia (Messenia), etc.; Corolla Archceologica Gustavo Adolpho
dedicata (Lund, 1932), 217 if.

80
 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE

tholos from simpler forms.1 So if the idea of the tholos were introduced
into Greece, it may have come from the Iberian Peninsula.

In any case connections with the West are conspicuous in Mycenaean
culture. L.M.I (or L.H.I) pots were exported to the iEolian islands,
L.H.I metal-types were copied in Sicily (p. 238). The colonization of
Kakovatos and the wealth of its ruler must be connected with the
amber trade. His treasures included a crescentic amber necklace with
pattern-bored spacer plates (Fig. 43), reputedly made in England.

Burial in a tholos must have been the prerogative of kings and their
families. But even in the fifteenth century some of their urban subjects
began to prepare for themselves family vaults. Villagers, however,

Fig. 44. Mycenaean tholos tomb on Euboea. After Papavasileiou.

were still buried singly in cists or pithoi. Similarly throughout L.H.II
native potters continued to turn out Minyan and hand-made matt-
painted vases.

But by 1400 b.c. the Mainland had thoroughly mastered Minoan
techniques and assimilated the Cretan industrial system. Native
workers, having been apprenticed to Minoan craftsmen, could turn
out en masse rather shoddy articles that satisfied the less refined tastes
of the Mainlanders and gradually ousted the products of household
industry. Thus equipped, the Mainland took over from Crete the political
and economic hegemony in the iEgean. Knossos was sacked; the Conti-
nental megaron replaced the iEgean palaces at Phsestos and Phylakopi.
The Mycenaean cities were more numerous and perhaps more populous
than the Cretan; the acropolis of Mycenae alone, not to mention un-
walled suburbs, covered about ix acres, that of Asine nearly 9, Gla
1 Cf. Piggott in Antiquity, XXVII (1953), I4I“3*

8l

F
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

in L. Copa'is no less than 24 acres. The immense cemeteries of rock-
cut chamber tombs adjacent to each city are even more convincing
than the areas. Each tomb, an irregular chamber entered by a narrow
passage or dromos, was a family vault. Some contain as many as twenty-
seven corpses. Though carefully sealed up after each interment, such
tombs were in fact reopened periodically and used over several genera-
tions; vases of L.H.II, L.H.IIIa, and L.H.IIIb styles were found in
one and the same tomb at Mycenae, showing its use for burial for at
least two centuries (1450-1250 b.c.).1 And a family likeness could be
detected on the skeletons from the same tomb. This collective burial
practice, though deeply rooted in the Aegean and still current in Crete
in Middle Minoan times, is in sharp contrast to the "Minyan” usage
and looks like a reversion to Early Helladic customs or an imitation of
the royal practice.

The populous cities sought an outlet for their goods and overflowing
population in trade and colonization. Mycenaean pottery and other
products were exported in quantities to Troy, Palestine, Syria, Egypt,
and Sicily, rapiers to Bulgaria and perhaps the Caucasus. The Aegean
and Ionian islands and even the coastal tracts of Macedonia received
contingents of Mycenaean traders, potters, and metal-workers and were
incorporated in the Mycenaean economic system. Mycenaean colonies
denoted by tholos tombs were planted even on the coasts of Asia Minor
and Syria.1 2 In the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries a complete
cultural uniformity prevailed over the whole iEgean world—a uni-
formity that embraced the political diversity reflected in the Iliad.

The zenith of Late Mycenaean civilization, as fixed by Mycenaean
imports in Egypt and Syria and Egyptian imports in Greece, was
reached in the fourteenth century. After 1300 b.c. trade with Egypt
declined, wealth diminished, art decayed as piracy and militarism
took the place of peaceful commerce. Only the armament industry
expanded; commerce with the barbarous West alone was intensified.

The fortifications of Mycenas, Tiryns, and Athens were extended.3
Greaves4 and probably corselets were worn as well as helmets. A new
type of flange-hilted sword was introduced in which the flange is
carried right round the pommel5 (Fig. 15). Swordsmen were mounted
on horseback to become the first cavalrymen of antiquity.6 The sup-

1   Arch., LXXXII (1932).

2   AJA., LII (1948), 145 fL; Schaeffer, Stratigraphie, 9-12; Stubbings, Mycentsan
Pottery from the Levant (Cambridge, 1951).

3   AJA., LII (1948), X09-14.

4 Found in a tomb near Patras, A JA., LVIII (1954), 2351 cf. Lorimer, Homer and

fhfi Ji/fP'Yitx

6   Evans, Arch., LIX (1905), 501; cf. Benton, PPS., XVIII (1952), 237.

* Hood, BSA., XLVIII (1953), 85.

82
 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE

plies of amber, copper, and tin from the north and west were main-
tained. As a consequence, a flange-hilted sword of the new type was
exported to Cornwall,1 there to be buried with the chief of a tribe that
controlled access to the tin lodes (p. 336). Relations with the West were
more intimate than a mere interchange of goods. An Italian smith
came to the court of Mycenae and there cast in a stone mould2
Continental winged axes like Fig. 119, 2. Peschiera daggers (like Fig.
119, 4), cut-and-thrust swords,3 and fibulae (both like Fig. 122, and
with flattened leaf-shaped bow)4 appear in such numbers as to imply
changes in ways of fighting and in fashions of dress, if not in population.
They herald the cataclysm that submerged the Mycenaean civilization
—the “Dorian Invasion” dated by Classical tradition about 1100 b.c.

1   Childe, PPS., XIV (1948), 185 f.

3   BSA., XLVIII, 15; the actual mould was found.

3 Schaeffer, Enhomi-Alasia, I (Paris, 1952), 237-42.

1 Blinkenberg, Fibules grecques et myceniennes (Lindiaha V), (Copenhagen, 1926).

83
 CHAPTER VI

FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS

The rugged peninsula between the Black Sea and the Adriatic, despite
the severity of the winters and the retardation of spring, enjoys, owing
to its latitude and the prolongation of autumnal warmth, a climate
intermediate between the Mediterranean and the Temperate. So the
adaptation of an Asiatic rural economy would be less difficult there
than in the rest of the European woodland zone. And incidentally the
ancestors of one-corn wheat (Triticum monococcum) and several fruit-
trees grew wild there. So the fertile valleys intersecting the Balkan
ranges are, like Thessaly and South-West Asia, studded with tells
representing the sites of permanent, though formally neolithic, villages.
Their stratification should provide a reliable record of the process of
adaptation. But in Bulgaria the latest accounts of the culture-sequence
at Banyata1 and Karanovo2 are in flat contradiction with earlier
accounts of the succession at Kyrollovo,3 Veselinovo,4 and Karanovo
itself.5 So too at Vinca on the Middle Danube the divisions of the
material excavated by Vassits6 from the 10 m. deep deposit proposed
respectively by Holste,7 Milojcic,8and Garasanin9are equally discrepant.

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Re: The Dawn of European Civilization By V. GORDON CHILDE 1923
« Reply #11 on: March 24, 2018, 09:03:41 PM »
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In the peninsula and along the Lower Danube a mesolithic popula-
tion, allied to the Northern Forest-folk, might be postulated to explain
peculiarities in the local neolithic culture, but is not documented by
any certified finds. In the caves so far explored no occupation layers
intervene between strata containing Upper Palaeolithic (Aurignacian)
implements and a pleistocene fauna and those yielding remains of
developed neolithic cultures. The continuous record recommences
with farmers whose cultures in general for all their local divergences
are not only based on the same cereals and domestic stock as those
of peninsular Greece and Hither Asia, but also reproduce the latters’
rural economy and ideology expressed in female figurines and even
their preferences for adzes and slings.

1   Godolnik Plovdiv, II (1950), 4-20.

2   SA., XXIV. (1955). 125; cf. IzbBAI., XVII (1950). 210-12.

3   Jhrb. d. Inst., LVIII, A A. (1943), 74-92.

4   IzbBAI., XIII (1939), 195-227.

5   Antiquity, XIII (1939), 345-9; Gaul, BASPR., XVI {1948), 43-5.

6   Preistorijskaya Vinca (Belgrad, 1930-36), 4 volumes, cited P.F.

7   WPZ., XXVI (1939), 1 ff.

8   Chronologie, 71-81; BSA., XLIV (1949), 258-82.

9   Hronologija Vinlanshe Gruppe (Ljubliana, 1951).

84
 FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS

The Starcevo-Koros Culture1

Throughout the Balkan peninsula and on both sides of the Carpathians,
north of the Danube, the continuous record of food-production begins
in settlements of the Starcevo culture. This assemblage, only in the
last ten years clearly distinguished from its successors, extends from
the iEgean coasts in Thessaly and Gallipoli across the main Balkan
range and the Danube to the Koros and the headwaters of the Pruth
(Map I, crosses). In such a vast and diversified region the material
remains of the culture are surprisingly uniform, though local divergences
are of course recognizable, especially in pottery; we could easily
distinguish a Maritza or Thracian, a Drave-Morava, and a Maros-Koros
aspect.

Though occurring at the base of several tells both in Bulgaria and
in Yugoslavia, the Starcevo layers seem to represent rather temporary
settlements, and similar material has been collected from caves and
from unstratified camp sites along streams and lake shores. On the
Maros and Koros the latter consisted of groups of trapeze-shaped huts
of wattle-and-daub with lean-to walls that formed also the roof,1 2 but
on the Maritza more commodious houses were built in the later phase
of the culture. In the economy, hunting played a prominent role;
bones of game animals are common in all settlements. But the hunters
did not use flint-tipped arrows, but relied on traps and slings.3 Fishing
may be deduced from the location of the encampments along the banks
of streams and lakes and from clay net-sinkers which in the Koros
aspect assume the ornate form of Fig. 45. But Starcevo folk were
always farmers even though their rural economy may have been
incompatible with durable settlement in one place.

Actual cereals—so far only one-corn wheat in Bulgaria; millet in
Yugoslavia!—have been identified; they were stored in clay-lined pits;
sickle flints were found mounted in a curved horn-handle at Karanovo4;
saddle querns and rubbers are found everywhere. Beside the querns in
Bulgaria are regularly found bone spatulse (Fig. 45) that must have
been used to scoop up the flour. Such spatulse recur on practically every
Starcevo site throughout the province, but in no other context, so that
they can be used as a diagnostic type of the culture as confidently as
pots. Bread was probably already baked in low clay ovens. Finally,
cattle, goats, sheep, and pigs were bred for food. But in general the

1   Kutzian, I., The Koros Culture (Dissertationes Pannoniccs, s. II, no. 23) (Buda-Pest,

1944-47); Garasanin, Arandeljovic-, Starceva6ka Kultura (Univerz v. Ljubljani, 1954);
Gaul, “West Bulgarian Painted”, ASPRB., XVI (1948); “Banyata”, God. Plov., II
(1950), 4-12; St. s. Qerc., II (1951), 57-64.   2 Banner, TMK., 17; Dolg., IX-X, 75.

3 Gara§anin, StarcevaL Kult., 134.   4 Antiquity, XIII, 345.

85
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

rural economy must have been one of shifting agriculture and pastoral-
ism combined with hunting and collecting. That will account for the
relatively rapid spread of such a homogeneous culture over so vast a
province.

In industry carpenters used exclusively adzes (like Fig. 29, B and D)
and chisels mounted in antler sleeves. In the Koros aspect at least
celts were sometimes drilled with a hollow-borer and antler beams
were perforated—and sometimes armed with stone blades—to serve
as adzes or mattocks. Textiles may be inferred from spindle-whorls,
spools, and loom-weights of baked clay.

Fig. 45. Clay loom-weights or net-sinkers (£) and bone spatula of Stardevo
Koros culture, (?£).

The potters, though not full-time specialists, had complete mastery
over their material. The universal and perhaps earliest Starcevo ware
is indeed coarse and chaff-tempered. But the shapes are highly sophisti-
cated. The vases, some 21 inches high, are all provided with flat bases
or even stand-rings though not with true handles. North of the Balkan
range the stand-rings may be quatrefoil or cruciform (Fig. 46) or
replaced by four nipples that farther south have grown into four solid
legs. These vessels were elaborately decorated by rustication (often
called barbotine), which in the Koros aspect is combined with con-
ventional figures of goats, stags, or men in relief. This coarse ware,
save perhaps in the Koros aspect, was generally accompanied by finer
fabrics, also chaff-tempered, with a well-smoothed or even burnished
surface, grey, buff, or red in colour. The fine grey wares may be decor-
ated with narrow flutings or channellings that both at Starcevo and
on the Maritza may form spiraliform patterns. Finally, small vases,
especially goblets on a low foot, may be painted in white or black on a
red ground or—in Yugoslavia—in dark brown on buff, in fact just like

86
 FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS

Dimini ware (p. 64). The lines of paint form simple designs among
which spirals occur only rarely and, according to Milojcic, late. Neither
the rusticated nor the painted designs were blended into harmonious
compositions as in Thessaly. At Karanovo fluted ware seems to appear
later than painted; both appear later than rusticated ware at Starcevo
according to Fewkes,1 Milojcic,1 2 and Mrs Garasanin,3 but Ehrich4 denies

Fig. 46. Cruciform-footed bowl in fine Starcevo ware and jar of rusticated Koros

style (XV).

this. Both Milojcic and Mrs Garasanin agree that the rusticated Koros
ware represents a still later phase of the culture.

Trade brought obsidian to the encampments on the Pruth and along
the Tisza and Koros, and Spondylus shells to the latter region from the
Mediterranean.

Clay stamps, as in neolithic Byblos, are common on the Koros
sites, at Starcevo itself and along the Pruth, but have not yet been
reported south of the Balkans. Similarly figurines, well-modelled and
markedly steatopygous, are common in the Kor5s group but rare and
rude at Starcevo and on the Maritza. Burials were unceremonious, being
represented by skeletons without grave goods, interred contracted in pits
in the encampments. The expansion of the Starcevo culture must have
occupied a considerable time, and in each area, though not at any
single site, its life may well have been long. Earlier and later phases

1   Fewkes, ASPRB., IX (1933), 44-6.

2   BSA., XLIV (1949), 261-6.

3   Starcevadka Kultura (Ljubljana, 1954), 62-80, 134.

4   Relative Chronologies in Old World Archceology (Chicago, 1954), 112.

87
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

should then be distinguishable. Now in Thessaly Starcevo rusticated
ware is Early Neolithic, being stratified below Sesklo wares (p. 58).
In Macedonia, on the contrary, the painted pottery of Olynthus is
indistinguishable from painted Starcevo ware.1 but is Late Neolithic.
On the Pruth in Northern Romania Starcevo wares (painted and rusti-
cated) are stratified below Danubian I. At Vinca too Starcevo culture
appears pure in the deepest level, though Koros sherds at least are
mixed in the immediately overlying deposit of the Vinca culture. But
north of the Danube the Koros culture is said, sometimes at least,
to be later than the Vinca culture.2 So the clay stamps that are com-
monest on Koros sites are Danubian II on the Middle and Upper
Danube. Hence the Koros aspect is probably a late phase of the
Starcevo culture as Garasanin and Milojcic contend, and painting may
be a secondary feature in the pottery.

If this be correct, antler sleeves and mattocks and the spiral motive
may be accretions developed or borrowed by Starcevo farmers from
hypothetical hunter-fishers of Forest traditions along the Danube.
Similarly vase painting, the manufacture of the more realistic figurines
and of the stamps, that look most like Asiatic seals, and perhaps the
improvement in rural economy, suggested by the more permanent
settlements on the Maritsa, may be additions to the original culture
inspired by fresh immigrants from Hither Asia. The hypothetical “pure
Starcevo culture”, left by the abstraction of the foregoing accretions,
could quite well have arisen in the Balkans, since the only directly
attested cereals cultivated and animals3 bred may be native there. It
may, on the other hand, be due to immigrants from South-Western
Asia related to the farmers who made unpainted pots in North Syria
and Cilicia, or, if rusticated Starcevo ware seems too unlike the recog-
nized incised fabrics of the area, to farmers who made no pots at all.4

The relatively homogeneous Starcevo culture was in the sequel
replaced by—or by divergent adjustments to the environment grew
into—distinct local cultures in the several natural subdivisions of the
province. Divergent development would be quite natural if a sparse
population of herdsmen and shifting cultivators that had maintained
communication between dispersed bands as a consequence of trans-
humance, hunting expeditions, and the search for fresh soil to till,
settled down in permanent villages; for owing to their neolithic self-
sufficiency these could remain isolated.

1   Heurtley, PM., 116.

2   AE. (n.s.), VII-IX (1946-48), 19-41.

3   But probably no sheep or goats, BRGK., XXXVI (1955), 21-5.

4   The "unfired pottery” reported by Grbic from Subotica is really the clay lining
to bottle-shaped silos on a sandy site. Normal StarSevo pottery was found in the silos.
 FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS

The Vardar-Morava or Vinca Culture

In Western Macedonia, along the Vardar and Morava, on the Danube
above the Iron Gates, and thence across the Banat and up the Maros,
permanent villages growing into tells begin with the Vinca culture.

In the great tell of Vinca itself above the Starcevo levels appear
fabrics and ceramic forms that are not found in pure sites of the
Starcevo culture but do occur at sites where Starcevo types are totally
absent. These ceramic features Milojcic1 and Garasanin2 have isolated
from the Starcevo assemblage and used to define a distinct Vinca
culture to which other traits may be attributed by association. As thus
defined, the culture is represented at a series of sites from the Vardar-
Morava watershed down the latter river, along the Save3 and the
Danube, and then beyond that river4 as far as Tordos on the Maros5 in
Transylvania. The stratification at Vinca allows of the definition of
phases in the development of those data susceptible of statistical
treatment, but not of the determination of the relative age of isolated
objects. Milojcic distinguishes five main phases, but Garasanin can
recognize only two. He will be followed here.

The basis of life was still mixed farming combined with hunting,
fishing, and collecting. But the rural economy had been adjusted to

Fig. 47. Bone combs and ring-pendant, Tordos, and "harpoon”, Vinca (f).

maintain permanent villages on one site. To catch the large fish of the
Danube, the Tisza, and the Maros, antler harpoons or leister-prongs
(Fig. 47) were employed as well as nets and hoolc-and-line (by Vinca II
the hooks were barbed). Flint arrow-heads were only exceptionally
used, but no clay sling-bolts have been found either. The houses of
wattle and daub were rectilinear but rather irregular in plan, divided
into two or three rooms and furnished with low-vaulted ovens. Adzes

1   BSA., XLIV (1949), 258-306.

2   Hronologia Vincanska Gruppe (1951).

3   Starinar (n.s.), III-IV (1953), 107-26.

4   AE., VII-IX, 19-41.

6 Roska, M., Die Sammlung Zsofia Torma (Cluj-Koloszvar, 1941).

89
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

were still preferred to axes. Perforated stone hammer-axes appeared
first in Vinca II, but antlers were perforated for mattocks as in the
Starcevo culture.

The pottery was of high quality. The commonest fabric at all levels
and sites was black burnished ware. A red-surfaced version (erroneously
termed "red-slipped”) was also made. Black and red part-coloured
vases, as described on p. 65, are confined to the first phase. To the
same phase belongs what Milojcid calls urfirms and compares to the
Late Neolithic ware of Greece (p. 65). Vases were flat-based. Handles
were foreign to the pure Vinca tradition, but at Plocnik1 and other late
sites in the Morava valley appear handled tankards and mugs resembling

0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   t   9   10

1   --1---1____L.__1____L__J____I____L___L___1 cm.

Fig. 48. "Face urn" lid from Vinca. After Vassits.

the Early Macednic. Instead, vases were provided with lugs that even
in phase I may be hornlike and are provided with button-like pro-
jections in phase II. Tubular spouts may go back to phase I, but are
commoner in II. Carinated bowls and dishes with flaring or vertical
rims were popular throughout. Chalices on tall solid feet occur already
in the first phase, tripod vases only in the second. Curious bottles,
designed for carrying on the back, flat on one side and provided with
looped lugs on the other, are assigned to Vinca I. The same type occurs
in the Koros and Romanian variants of the Starcevo culture, but in
Bulgaria is also post-Starcevo. Distinctive of both phases of the Vinca
culture and found equally on the Save, the Morava, and the Maros are
anthropomorphic lids (Fig. 48), traditionally compared to Trojan

1 Grbic, Plocnik (Beograd, Narodni Muzeum, 1929).

90
 FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS

face-urns and really like some from Troy III. Anthropomorphic and
zoomorphic vases were likewise manufactured, presumably for ritual use.

Decoration was effected by stroke-burnishing, narrow flutings or
corrugations, and incisions combined with punctuations; rouletting was
introduced in phase II. White, red, or yellow colours were applied after
firing to decorate altars and figurines in phase I, but crusted on the
vase surface mainly in phase II. The motives in phase I include triangles,
filled with punctuations, and punctured ribbons or corrugations, form-
ing simple rectilinear patterns. Mseanders, spirals, and repetition
patterns, derived therefrom, are reputedly confined to phase II.

In addition to pots, white limestone dishes were used at VinSa.
Toilet articles include a comb from Tordos (Fig. 47), resembling that
from Late Neolithic Macedonia, and ring pendants.

Ritual equipment was as rich in the Vinca culture as in other Balkan,
Greek, and South-West Asiatic cultures and implies a similar ideology.
The earliest figurines are more schematic than those from Koros sites,
but some were already seated on thrones. Later details of the visage
were more carefully modelled; the face became pentagonal instead of
triangular, the hands rest on the stomach, clasp the breasts or carry a
suckling, but the legs fuse into pedestals. Mortuary ceremonial, on the
other hand, is not well attested and must have played a minor part in
ideological activity. Some dubious cases of cremation have indeed been
mentioned, and at Vinca1 nine skeletons were buried in a “pit cave”
cut in the loss, but at Vucedol similar “chamber tombs” contained
Slavonian pottery.

The site of Vinca, close to the junction of the Morava with the
Danube above the perilous rapids of the Iron Gates, was well-adapted
for trade. Indeed, Vassits attributed the settlement to a colony
of iEgean merchants whom he eventually identified as Ionians of
the seventh century. Actually the adjacent cinnabar deposits of
Suplja Stena were exploited by Vinca people. Unambiguous imports
are Spondylus bracelets, found at all levels, and obsidian commonest
in Milojcid, phase B. The volcanic glass presumably came from North-
East Hungary down the Tisza. With it came pots such as were being
made along that river, first Koros types of Starcevo pottery, then
numerous complete Tisza vases. Small scraps of copper are reported
from all levels at Vinca, but the abundance of stone adzes and other
tools at all levels and all sites implies that no regular supplies were
organized. But at Plocnik in phase II was found a hoard of thirteen
copper adzes and a hammer-axe like Fig. 64,1, together with five stone
adzes. Many similar Hungarian-Transylvanian types are scattered

1 Vassits, PV., II, 9, pis. 8-17.

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Re: The Dawn of European Civilization By V. GORDON CHILDE 1923
« Reply #12 on: March 24, 2018, 09:04:17 PM »
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91
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

about throughout the Vinca province, all presumably imports from
beyond the Danube. At Kladova on the Save1 a typical Hungarian
axe-adze was found with thirty-nine long flint blades such as are proper
to the Bodrogkeresztur culture of Danubian III.

Such imports establish good synchronisms with the Danubian
sequence: Vinca I overlaps with the Koros phase of Starcevo, but its
later subdivisions (Milojcid’ B and C) are frankly contemporary with
the Tisza culture. The latter should be Danubian II though direct links
with the Lengyel culture, typical of that period, are lacking at Vinca.1 2
The succeeding Vinca II phase is in turn contemporary with, or replaced
locally by, the Baden and Bodrogkeresztur cultures of Danubian III.
Correlations with the East Balkan sequence are equally explicit. On
the Romanian bank of the Lower Danube, Vinca I remains at Verbi-
coara are stratified below those of the Salcuta culture while Boian
pottery is found at Tordos,3 presumably with the Vinca I material
from the site. Conversely the Vinca II relics from the upper Morava
valley are hardly distinguishable from those proper to the Salcuta
culture. In other words, Vin£a I and II are respectively homotaxial
with Boian and Salcuta.4

Chronological relations with the iEgean are much harder to deter-
mine. Relations are plain enough, but not in the form of direct imports
across the Balkans or local reproductions of ephemeral types. The
Vinca I culture on the Danube is so nearly identical with that of Late
Neolithic Servia in Macedonia that we may say that this culture, like
that of Starcevo, crossed the frontier between the Mediterranean and
the Temperate zones intact. Most Vinca I pot-fabrics and forms recur
also in Late Neolithic Central Greece, some even at Kum Tepe in the
Troad. All that does not prove contemporaneity. Indeed, the priority
of one region over the other would decide several crucial issues in Euro-
pean and Indo-European prehistory. Now Milojcid5 has indeed claimed
a pedestalled pyxis from his Vinca B2 as an Early Cycladic import,
and it might well be a copy of an imported marble vase. An unstratified
fragment from Vinca may again imitate an Early Helladic askoid
jug,6 while a vase from Bubanj II (i.e. Vinca II) may imitate a meta

1   Arh. Vest., Ljubljana, V (1954), 229-32.

2   The few sherds of crusted ware reported from Vin£a (Vassits, PV., II, p. 134)
come mostly from late Vin£a II levels.

3   Roska, Torma-Sammlung, pi. CXV, 12-21; cf. St. s. Qerc., V (1954), 61, pi. V.

4   Milojfiid, Chron., p. 64, writing before the Romanian data were available, equated
Gumelnija as well as Boian with Vinfca I.

5   Chron., 77.

8 Fragmentary “Minyan” and "Early Helladic” vases from Humska Cuka, quoted
by Garaganin (Arch. Iugoslav., I (1954), 19 f.) and Miloj£i<5 (Chron., 55-6), are not really
much help. Their .Egean provenance is not at all likely and their relation to the Vinda
sequence debated.

92
 FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS

sauce-boat like those from Troy and the Peloponnese. The Vinca II
handled jugs and tankards from the Morava sites must be related to
the corresponding Early iEgean forms, but might be earlier as well as
later.

Yugoslavian prehistorians are agreed that the Vinca culture did
not develop out of the local Starcevo culture, but must be attributed
to fresh colonists from the south-east. It would be these, then, who
introduced into temperate Europe the form of sedentary village life,
the rural economy that supported it, and the ideology that held society
together as they had been developed in South-Western Asia. On the
other hand, as pointed out on p. 66, there may be archaeological and
other grounds for believing that the Late Neolithic culture of Western
Macedonia and Central Greece, now identified as the Vinca I culture,
was introduced by an incursion from beyond the Balkans. If no
development of the Starcevo culture in that direction can be observed
on the Morava, it may conceivably be traceable on the Maritza when
the varied material from Karanovo I and Banyata I have been
exhaustively studied and published.

During phase I, the Vinca culture exhibited remarkable uniformity
from Servia on the Haliakmon, or at least from Pavlovce on the Vardar-
Morava divide, to Tordos on the Maros, from Ostrul Corbului below
the Iron Gates westward to Sarvas on the Drave. In phase II this
unity dissolved, as had that of the Starcevo.

North of the Danube the permanent villages of Vinca type give
place to more temporary hamlets, probably based on shifting culti-
vation. In the Balkans, however, many tells were still occupied and the
ideology appropriate to settled agriculture everywhere continued to
find expression in the production of female figurines. But in the Nis
basin on the upper Morava the culture of Bubanj II is a sort of hybrid
between Vinca and Salcuta. About the same time arose on the Bosna
the remarkable Butmir1 culture. At the eponymous site, a low tell,
adzes, figurines, and much of the pottery carry on the Vinca tradition.
But the exuberant development of spiral ribbons and mouldings,
sometimes forming a net pattern as on Early Cycladic vases, and the
multiplication of tanged flint arrow-heads is quite novel. Finally, at
Vinca itself the old culture persists. But in the levels between 4-5 and
2-5 below Vassits’ datum obsidian is rare, and Milojcic sees Baden
influence in the pottery. Between the last two occupation levels were
found vases belonging to the Middle Bronze Age of the Lower Maros,
assignable to period V of the Danubian sequence. So unless an inter-

1 Benac, A., Prehistorijsko naselje Nebo i problem Butmirske Kulture (Univerzav
Ljubljana), 1952.

93
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

ruption of habitation has produced an hiatus, Danubian III, IV, and V
should be contemporary with later phases of the Vinca culture!

It seems as if, having established a workable adjustment to the
local environment, the self-sufficing Balkan villagers made no effort—
or at least failed—to obtain regular supplies of metal. The widespread
bronze types that define periods IV and V in the Danubian province
are missing in the Balkans; a formally neolithic culture persisted.

The Veselinovo Culture of Southern Thrace

According to the latest reports of Mikov and Detev, the Starcevo
culture at Karanovo,1 Banyata,2 and Ginova mogila near Celopec3
in the Maritza valley was immediately succeeded by one of very
different aspect that may be named after another tell, Veselinovo.4

The permanent villages were composed of spacious houses comprising
several rooms. The frame was constructed of upright wooden posts,
but the walls consisted of clay mixed with straw. Their inhabitants
were settled farmers who now cultivated emmer in addition to one-
corn wheat. Perhaps, too, they bred, or at least hunted, horses whose
bones are reported from Veselinovo.5 Huntsmen still relied mainly on
slings, but stone battle-axes may have been made for war. The pottery,
even more than the architecture, reveals a thorough mastery of wood-
work. For this adzes were still preferred, but axe-heads were made and
perforated for mounting. The pottery marks a complete break with the
Starcevo traditions. The normal ware is self-coloured, usually black
and sometimes burnished. Ornament, employed so profusely before,
has been abandoned save for applied strips that may terminate in
spirals. During building some pots were stood on rush mats, the impres-
sions of which are common on bases. Pithoi, over 50 cm. high, were
manufactured, but the most distinctive form is a straight-sided or
pear-shaped mug (Fig. 49) provided with a stout handle prolonged
upwards to a little pillar. The form is obviously inspired by a wooden
model. So are bowls or lamps on four stout round legs and triangular
ones on short flat legs. The latter are often decorated with excised
chequer patterns, inspired by chip-carving (Fig. 49), and recur,
similarly decorated, in the homotaxial Boian culture farther north
and in the Chalcolithic of Alisar in Central Anatolia. Lop-sided bottles

1   Information from the excavator.

2   Godtinik Plovdiv, II (1950), 4-30.

3   God. Plovdiv, I (1948), 160-4; RazkopM i Proucvaniya (Sofia, Naroden Muzei,
1948). 75-8i.

4   IzbBAI., XIII (1939).

s The stratigraphical position of the horses' bones—and of the battle-axes—is still
uncertain. Neither have been yet found in situ at Karanovo.

94
 FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS

for carrying on the back were made in the Veselinovo level at Banyata
as at Vinca (p. 90).

A few very conventional figurines come from Karanovo II, but in
general the Veselinovo levels are conspicuously poor in those ritual
objects of clay that illustrate the ideology of the Sesklo culture in
Greece and of later Balkan cultures. Indeed, the Veselinovo culture
seems to interrupt the Balkan tradition and can hardly be regarded
as an autochthonous development of the Starcevo complex. Its plain

Fig. 49. Mug, tripod bowl, and “altar" decorated by excision, Banyata II.

self-coloured pots with thrust handles in particular look Anatolian.
If Mikhalic (p. 66) really be parallel to Macedonian Late Neolithic and
belong to Balkan period II, the Veselinovo culture could be regarded
as a result of the same movement, more closely adapted to the Balkan
environment. But none of the distinctive Troadic forms, so conspicuous
at Mikhalic, has yet been found in situ in a Veselinovo layer. There are
indeed analogies to Veselinovo handles and to the “chip-carved" lamps
in Anatolia, but these are confined to Alaca Hoyuk, Biiyiik Giillucek,1
and Ali^ar,2 all on the plateau. Moreover, these are imitations of wooden
models such as are common all along the southern slopes of the Balkans
and the Alps, even to Italy and South France.

Now, at the eponymous site Mikov traced the development of the
Veselinovo culture into one of Bronze Age type characterized by a
copper shaft-hole axe, stone battle-axes, bowls with short trumpet
lugs growing from the inturned rims, side-spouted bowls and jugs,
and even something like a Minoan teapot. Similar material comes from
Razkopanitsa,8 Ezero, and Yunatsite,4 where it certainly overlies
Gumelnij:a deposits and so belongs to Balkan IV. Of course, the strati-
fication at Banyata and Karanovo may have been misinterpreted, and

1   Betteten, XII (1948), 475 ff.

2   von der Osten, Alishar Hiiyiik, 1930-32, OIP., XXIX, fig. 93, 2393.

3   IsvBAI., XVII (1950), 171 ft.

4   Godi&nik Plovdiv, 1927-9 (1940), 55 ff.

95
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Veselinovo there may have followed Gumelnita, as Mikov reported in
1939. Alternatively it could be assumed that the Veselinovo culture,
like the Macednic Bronze Age cultures, developed at some sites parallel
to, but unaffected by, the intrusive Gumelnita settlements, and that
then in Balkan IV the Veselinovo tradition triumphed over the intru-
sions from the north. In either case some ceramic forms of the
developed Veselinovo culture from Ezero—trumpet lugs and cord-
ornament, though belonging to Balkan IV—are more reminiscent of
Mikhahc than anything yet observed in Karanovo II!

The Boian Culture

North of the main Balkan range, on both sides of the Lower Danube
and in Transylvania on the Upper Olt, Balkan period II is occupied
by an assemblage termed, after an island in the Danube, the Boian
culture.1 Comsa2 has recently claimed to distinguish two preparatory
phases during which settlements were not yet quite stable villages,
when only one-corn wheat and millet were cultivated, when arrows
were armed with trapezes and lunates, and when pottery was tempered
with chaff and decorated only with channelled or incised lines that
might form spirals and mseanders. His stages, if reliable, would give
hints at the acculturation of mesolithic survivors, already postulated
(p. 88), or at their absorption by immigrant farmers.

But, as found at the base of the tells of Vidra3 and Tangaru,4 and at
the eponymous site, Boian denotes a regular village culture based on
the cultivation of one-corn and emmer wheats and millet combined
with stock-breeding, hunting, and fishing. The villages were made up of
substantial rectangular houses, walled with split tree-trunks and wattle
and daub and equipped with central fire-places and a very shallow
porch, thus approximating to the megaron plan.5 These are said to
have been preceded by less substantial huts at Tangaru. Weaving is
attested by clay loom-weights and cruciform whorls, like those used
on the Koros. The carpenter used adzes of shoe-last form or bevelled
as in the Sesklo culture of Thessaly. But they might be mounted in
perforated antler sleeves as at Maglemose.

The home-made pots are obviously influenced both in form and
decoration by wooden models. Characteristic are cylindrical peg-footed
boxes (Fig. 50), big biconical jars, two-storeyed urns, ladles with solid

1   Gaul. ASPRB., XVI (1948). s.v.

2   St. s. Qerc., V (1954). 395 #?

3   Rosetti, Publicat. Muzeului Munirip. Bucuresti, I (1934).

4   Berciu, Bui. Muzeului Judet. Vlasca T. Antonescu, I (Bucurest, 1935).

5   Bui. Muzeu, Jud. Vlasca T. Antonescu, II (1937), fig. 3.

96
 FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS

handles, and tiny vases with pointed bases that stood in pairs on
cubical supports. Exceptional are pedestailed bowls of Danubian II
form and others on human feet. For decorating these products the
potter employed the wood-carver’s technique of excision, but also
incision, fluting, rustication, and, exceptionally, negative painting in
graphite, and crusting with colours after the firing; spirals, mseanders,

=“=a==as==:^
^ ==:=======aa=^

Fig. 50. Peg-footed vase. Denev (£).

and cognate repetition patterns form the basis for a rich all-over
decoration.

The Boian farmers were acquainted with copper, but used it only
for small ornaments and made no attempt to organize regular supplies
for industrial use. The only other indication of rudimentary trade is
provided by bracelets of Spondylus shell which were as popular on the
Lower Danube as in Thessaly and Central Europe. And as there,
triangular and quadrangular altars were made for domestic cult, but
figurines, later so common, were very rarely modelled in clay.

The Boian culture, as thus defined, eventually spread south across
the Balkans to the Maritsa valley, but has not been isolated sharply
enough there to be attributed to Balkan II rather than Balkan III.
Northward, characteristic pottery is found as far as the mouth of the
Danube and the upper valley of the Oltu, while unmistakable sherds
are included in the collection from Tordos on the Maros. Here its
position in the Balkan sequence is well established. Boian underlies
Gumelnita in the tells of Tangaru and Vidra. Near Le|i, on the Upper
Oltu, early Boian pottery is stratified above Starcevo ware but below
Tripolye Bj pottery of the Ariusd style, while the Boian sherds from
Tordos should denote a synchronism with Vinca I.

The neolithic elements, save perhaps the emmer wheat, can simply
G   97
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

be derived from the antecedent Starcevo culture. The antler work
and the carpentry might be a legacy from surviving mesolithic hunter-
fishers, represented by geometric microliths collected on some Romanian
sites. These too might have transmitted the overall system of decora-
tion using the maeander as a repetition pattern; for it was so used in
late pleistocene times by the mammoth-hunters of Mezin on the loss
lands of South Russia.

The Gumelnija and Salcuja Cultures

The Boian culture seems to have developed, though not without
enrichment from Anatolia, the Aegean, and the Middle Danube, into
what Romanian prehistorians term the Gumelnita culture.1 This is
represented at a larger number of sites in Wallachia and Bulgaria
than the Boian culture owing to the foundation of new villages by an
expanding population. And it endured a long time; at least three phases
can be distinguished stratigraphically at Vidra and Tangaru, but the
Wallachian divisions are inapplicable in Bulgaria.

The basis of life remained unchanged save that antler harpoons, like
those of the Vinca and Tisza sites, were now employed for spearing
fish. But from the first a tendency to industrial specialization was
manifested; in several settlements hoards of flint blades and bone
tools, all fresh as if designed for barter, were uncovered. Later, in
phase III, metal must have been worked by craftsmen in some sites.

Trade was also organized to some extent. In phase I at Vidra the
material for stone implements was brought from Bulgaria and the
Dobrudja, later from Transylvania and the Banat. Commerce brought
actual manufactures, new ideas and eventually new technical processes.
A binocular vase of the Tripolye A style from Moldavia or farther
north and a vessel ornamented with punctured ribbons, as at Tordos
and Vinca, were brought to Vidra in phase I. From the same horizon
and from several Bulgarian sites come clay stamps2 imitating Asiatic
seals though decorated always with spirals. By phase II, ring-pendants,
as at Troy, Dimini, and Tordos, were being manufactured in bone, and
bone copies of double-spiral headed pins. Actual pins, like Fig. 27,
save that the spirals are ribbons, not wiry, were found in level III at
Vidra, as at many sites and Gaborevo in Bulgaria.3 Finally, even the
Macedonian-Helladic askoi were copied locally in Vidra III and other
Wallachian and Thracian sites.

1   Gaul, BASPR., XVI (1948).

2   One from Qunesti, Moldavia, Dacia, V-VI (1938), 117.

3   BRGK., XXII, Taf. 7. Maps in Gaul, loc. cit.

? 98

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Re: The Dawn of European Civilization By V. GORDON CHILDE 1923
« Reply #13 on: March 24, 2018, 09:04:49 PM »
0

 FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS

By this time metallurgists, attracted perhaps by the copper lodes
of Eastern Bulgaria,1 were actually working in Bulgaria and Wallachia.
The double-spiral pins they made show the Anatolian models that
inspired these artisans, but they seem to have relied on hammering,
presumably through ignorance of casting,2 and not all their products
were direct copies of Asiatic forms. A shaft-hole axe and a shaft-hole
adze were found together at Gaborevo (Fig. 51). Combined in a single

casting, they would yield an axe-adze, and an actual specimen was
found at Vidra. It may mark the starting-point of the Hungarian series
of period III.

Nevertheless, the Gumelnrfa economy was never transformed so
that metal could take the place of stone. Throughout the period tools
were normally made of stone or bone. But in addition to adzes of Boian
style, flint adzes were now used; the later specimens have splayed
blades or polished faces in imitation of the rare copper adzes. Hammer-
axes and even simple battle-axes, all hollow-bored as on the Middle
Danube, came into fashion, and antler-axes with square-cut shaft-
holes. Arrows were tipped with double-ended bone points, more rarely
with triangular flint heads. Even a bowman’s wrist-guard was found
at Vidra III. Spheroid mace-heads occur sporadically, but the culture
never assumes a bellicose aspect.

The pottery carries on the old traditions. The peg-footed box went
out of fashion and was replaced by the foot-base type (Fig. 52, 6), in

1   O. Davis, Man., XXXVI (1936), 119, describes prehistoric mines near Burgas;
cf. Gaul, AJA., LXVI, 400.

* PZ., XIX (1928), 131.

Fig. 51. Copper axe and adze from Gaborevo ($).

99
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

which the foot is open to the body but closed below, and a socketed
ladle of Danubian II type was introduced by phase I at Vinca. Excised
decoration became less popular, but rusticated designs remained
current, and graphite painting, now positive, became the prevalent
method of decoration. It was rarely supplemented by the use of white

Fig. 52. Gumelni^a pottery: 1, Czernavoda (£); 2, TelMetchkur (J);
3-4, Tel Ratchev (£); 5-6, Kodja Derman ($, £).

paint applied before firing. The impression of a split reed producing
the so-called bracket ornament (Fig. 52, 2) was popular south of the
Danube.

The relative stagnation in industry is counterbalanced or explained
by an extravagant elaboration of magico-religious equipment. From
phase I on, female figurines of clay were as carefully modelled as those
from the middle strata at Vin&a (Fig. 53). One from Vinfia has shell

100
 FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS

inlays for the eyes, like Early Sumerian statuettes. A vase from
Vidra III is a grotesque female figure 42 cm. high; a smaller vase from
Gaborevo represents a male personage. Both products belong to the
same circle of ideas as the anthropomorphic vases from Vinca. Sitting
figures, male or female (Fig. 54, 1), were also made. Flat bone figurines

Fig. 53. Painted clay head, VinSa (•$).

are distinctive in all phases (Fig. 54, 3) (especially II) in Wallachia,
and also in Bulgaria, where the form was also reproduced in gold leaf.1
A much more conventional type is a simple bone prism (Fig. 54, 2);
at Balbunar in Bulgaria prism figures were found in strata deeper than
those containing flat figurines, but at Vidra the order of occurrence was
reversed.2 Stone idols rather like the Cycladic, were made of local
Bulgarian marbles,3 while a torso from Gumelni^a itself replicates the
Thessalian type of Fig. 31, 4, save that the inserted head is of clay,
not stone.4 In addition to female personages, males were being modelled
in clay from phase II (as in Thessaly C-D), and clay phalli, like the
Anatolian and Minoan, were used as fertility symbols (Fig. 54, 4).
Other ritual objects are horns of consecration (phase II), model altars
and thrones, and by phase III models of houses (Fig. 55), as well as
models of animals and doves.

The dead were not objects of any elaborate cult or even tendence.
At the base of the tell of Balbunar twenty-two contracted skeletons

1   Izv. Bulg. Arch. Inst., VIII (1934). 2°9-

2   But cf. Milojfiid, Chron., 61-2.

3   Izv. Bulg. Inst., Ill (1925), 91-101; XIX, 1-13.   4 Dacia, VII-VIII, 97.

101
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

(accompanied in two or three cases only by flint adzes) and two trunk-
less skulls had been buried under the house floors; four contracted
burials more richly furnished were found at Ruse. But unburied skulls
and ribs hacked about have been reported from other stations as

Fig. 54. Clay and bone figurines (?£) and clay phallus (i), Bulgaria.

Fig. 55. Models of houses, Denev

evidences of cannibalism. The skulls from Romania were dolichocranial
and allegedly Mediterranean, but two from Ruse1 are round.

In addition to the pins already mentioned and bracelets of Sfiondylus
shell, ring-pendants of bone or gold (Vidra II) and conventional bulls’
heads of gold leaf adorned with punctuations (Vidra III) were worn
as ornaments or charms.

The label "Salcu^a” is applied to the version of the Gumelnij:a culture
found in Oltenia (i.e. on the north bank of the Lower Danube between
the confluence with the Oltu and the Iron Gates)1 2 and found also in the

1   IzbBAl., II (1924), 187 £f. In IzbBAI., XIX (1952), 182-9, thirty-six further burials
—at relatively high levels—are reported.

2   Berciu, Arheologia preistorica a OUeniei (Craiova, 1939, 50-68).

102
 FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS

Sofia basin—above Veselinovo remains1—and in Bubanj II on the
Upper Morava.1 2 It is distinguished chiefly by ceramic peculiarities:
graphite painting and bracket ornament are relatively rare, narrow
flutings and crusting with colours after firing commoner. Among shapes,
askoi and handled cups or mugs were particularly popular. The two-
handled tankards are reminiscent of the Early Macednic, but some are
ridiculously like the Silesian Jordanova type of Fig. 94.3 A distinctive
Bulgarian form is a lamp in the shape of a goat.4 Most of the Gumelnita
ritual objects, including even prismatic bone figurines, recur in a
Salcuta context. Finally, a stone “sceptre head” carved to represent
an animal’s snout (Fig. 76)5 6 from Salcuta may be an import from the
steppes as another came from an ochre grave (cf. p. 158). So no very
sharp frontiers can be drawn between Gumelnita and Salcuta. Even
on the slopes of Rhodope, Banyata III might be classed as Salcuta
rather than Gumelnita. The Salcuta culture presumably developed
on the same Boian basis as Gumelnita, but was more strongly influenced
by the Vinca culture and the Early Macednic.

It should be easy to fit Balkan III into the Danubian sequence and
assign it an absolute date in virtue of the Danubian and iEgean
parallels in Gumelnita and Salcuta assemblages. Clay stamps are
proper to Danubian II, but battle-axes and axe-adzes belong there to
period III. The double-spiral pins, the askoi, and the Salcuta mugs
are Early JSgean types, but of course none are actual imports. If taken
as denoting synchronisms, they should date the third phase of Gumel-
nija and Salcuta not later than 2000 b.c.

In that case we should have painfully little archaeological material
to fill the next thousand years. The Lower Danube and Eastern Thrace
were incorporated, no more than the Western Balkans, in either the
Danubian or the iEgean commercial system. The bronze types defining
Danubian IV and V are, if possible, even worse represented here than
on the Morava and the Bosna. Half a dozen local copies of Late
Minoan I homed rapiers have turned up in Bulgaria, but all are strays.
Apart from urnfields of period VI along the Lower Danube, Bronze
Age graves are lacking in Bulgaria. The funerary record begins, richly,
with the Early Iron Age. Material from domestic sites is scarce and
poor, compared with the rich deposits of Gumelnita and earlier cultures
from so many sites, and it still looks “neolithic”.

1 E.g. at Krivodol, Raz. i Pro. (1948), 26-57.

a MPK. (1940), IV B, 1-2.

3   Raz. i Pro. (1948), fig. 43.

4   At Yasatepe, Plovdiv (God. Plovdiv, I (1948), 4-11, fig. 12), and Banyata III (ibid.,

II (1950), fig. 30).

6 Dacia, VII-VIII, go ff.; St. s. Qerc., V (1954), 540-8.

103
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Above the Gumelnita levels at Vidra is a thin deposit of the Glina
culture, the product of a less sedentary, more pastoral and warlike
society. Though copper or bronze was worked, metal did not replace
stone in industry or armament. Painted pottery and female figurines
have alike disappeared. Homotaxial assemblages are rather more
substantial in Bulgaria. At Yunatsite,1 in the middle (II) levels above
a Gumelnita layer (I), Vesilnovo handled vases with pillar handles are
said to be associated with askoi that would have been expected in
the lower, Gumelnita, level. Higher up in Yunatsite III, immediately
below a Thracian settlement of the seventh century B.C., occur cups
and tankards with pointed bases. These are found also in late houses at
Razkopanitsa2 on the Struma, in Karanovo V, Veselinovo and a few
other Bulgarian sites, and in Oltenia3 and in the Nis basin of the
Morava.4 Jugs and cups with oblique mouths, presumably descended
from Anatolian beaked jugs, are found in Karanovo V, Banyata IV,
the earlier houses at Razkopanitsa, the highest levels at Ruse.5 All
this pottery, self-coloured and rarely decorated, looks at least as
Anatolian as the Veselinovo ware from Karanovo II. It might be
derived therefrom if a long Gumelnita occupation did not intervene
(cf. p. 95).

Hence if we placed even the first two phases of Gumelnita in the
third millennium, we should get the impression that the large sedentary
population, attested by the numerous Gumelnita tells, was either
decimated or relapsed into shifting cultivation. Be that as it may, one
conclusion can be drawn. Neolithic societies in the Balkans quite
quickly adapted the South-West Asiatic rural economy to their inter-
mediate environment and elaborated or adopted a similar ideology
appropriate to settled village life. They did not take the next step
towards civilization—to adjust their economy to support a bronze
industry—nor, as far as our evidence goes, did they help to transmit
northward the technical skills of their neighbours round the iEgean.
The Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages of the Lower Danube and the
Balkans were based entirely on Central European traditions to which
Greek contributions were superadded only subsequently.

1   GodiSnih Plovdiv (1940), 55-70; Miloj£ic, Chvon., 50-2.

2   IzvBAJ, XVII (1950), 171-87, with list of other sites on 187.

8 Bercin, Arheol. preistoricd a Olteniei, figs. 136-8.

4 MilojSid, Chron., 55, and fig. 2.   fi IzvBAI., XIX (1952), 121-8.

IO4
 CHAPTER VII

DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION
PERIOD I

Immediately north of the Serbian Danube and the Save begin loss-
clad plains and slopes which extend, not without formidable interrup-
tions, right up to the edge of the moraines in Poland, Germany, and
Belgium. These Central European loss lands had been frequented in
Aurignacian and Solutrean times by mammoth- and reindeer-hunters,
but mesolithic successors of such food-gatherers survived only on
isolated patches of sandy soil and among the post-glacial forests on
the northern and western fringes. To food-producers, the loss lands,
naturally drained, not too heavily wooded and easy to till, offered a
domain where they could practise the simplest conceivable sort of
farming. With unstinted water supplies and seemingly boundless
territories the peasant was free to shift his hut and break fresh ground
as soon as his former fields showed signs of exhaustion. And in fact we
find prevailing throughout Central Europe a system of nomadic culti-
vation that does look really primitive—such as the earliest food-
producers, undisciplined by environmental limitations, might be
expected to invent.

The cultures1 based upon this economy exhibit considerable uni-
formity throughout the loss lands. Though the temporary nature of
the settlements excludes tell formation and the stratigraphical chron-
ology derived therefrom, the cultural sequence is well established.
Throughout the area three main periods can be recognized before the
Early Bronze Age, which coincides with period IV. In period I we can
distinguish three main groups: the Koros culture, already described
under Starcevo in Chapter VI, the Biikk culture in North-Eastern
Hungary and Slovakia, and the Danubian I extending from Western
Hungary to the northern confines of the loss.

Danubian I Culture

The loss lands west and north of the Danube were first occupied by a
neolithic population whose whole culture down to the finest details

For points not otherwise documented see Childe, Danube.

105
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

remains identical from the Drave to the Baltic and from the Dniester
to the Meuse.1 This is the best known culture in Central Europe and
perhaps the most classically neolithic in the ancient world. Hence the
term Danubian I may be legitimately applied to it in preference to the
clumsy and inaccurate terms “linear pottery" or “spiral-maeander”
culture.

The Danubian I economy was based on the cultivation of barley,
one-corn, and perhaps also emmer1 2 wheats, beans, peas, lentils, and
flax, in small plots tilled with stone hoes. Only small herds of stock
were kept; bones of sheep, Bezoar goats, oxen, and pigs turn up in settle-
ments, but animal dung was never incorporated in hut walls, as is
usual where the farmyards are well stocked. To hunting the Danubians
made no resort. Danubian I settlement sites are dotted very densely
all over the loss lands, but none shows evidence of prolonged occupa-
tion. That is a result of the Danubians’ crude agricultural technique,
one still illustrated by some hoe-cultivators in Africa to-day. They
cultivated a plot till it would bear no more and then another, and so on
until they had used up all the land round the hamlet; thereupon they
shifted bag and baggage to a new site on fresh virgin soil.

Yet these shifting cultivators lived in commodious and substantial
rectangular houses3 from io to 40 m. in length and 6 to 7*5 m. wide;
five rows of posts supported a gabled roof and walls of wattle and daub
or split saplings (Fig. 56). Four hearths in a row were identified on
the floor of a house, 33*5 m. long, at Postoloprty in Bohemia,4 but at
other sites remains of fireplaces or ovens are curiously missing. Outside
the long houses irregular pits, once termed pit-dwellings, had been
dug to get clay and subsequently used as rubbish-pits, silos, pig-sties,
or working-places. Intersections of house plans at many sites prove
intermittent return to settlements that, nevertheless, did not grow
into stratified tells. On the assumption that all contemporary houses
were exactly parallel, Sangmeister infers5 that Koln-Lindental,® the
best explored Danubian village, had been occupied seven times and
at its largest comprised twenty-one households. But of course the

1   For the distribution in Hungary, BRGK., XXIV-XXV, 30-2; AE.t XLIV, 30 ft.;
in Poland and East Germany, Przeg A., VIII (1949), 315-17; for the rest of Germany,
Buttler, Donau; for Bohemia, Stocky, Boh. Prdh.; for Belgium, Marien, Oud-Belgie,
13-47; for Austria, Pittioni, Osterreich, 125-40.

2   Emmer is reported only from the Rhineland and Belgium, bread wheat from
Poland alone; both might have been borrowed from other populations. Cf. BRGK.,
XX (1930), 30.

3   BRGK., XXXIII (1943-50). 66-82; AR., II (1950), 208; VII (1955), 5-10.

*   PA., XLV (1954). 81-5.

8 BRGK., XXXIII, 90-109.

*   Buttler and Habery, Das bandkeramische Dorf Koln-Lindenthal (Romisch-Germani-
sche Forschungen 11) (Berlin, 1936).

I06
 DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION

“household” must have been more like a clan than a pairing family.
In its latest phase Koln-Lindental was surrounded with a trench and
palisade. Sangmeister suggests that each occupation might last ten

« • H

§

9



*

Fig. 56. Small Danubian I house from Saxony; the walls marked by a double row of

posts, After Sangmeister.

years and postulates abandonment for regeneration of scrub for fifty
years.

The rest of the Danubians’ equipment was equally home-made.

I   V* I

Fig. 57. "Shoe-last celts.” After Seger (J).

Shoe-last celts of stone (Fig. 57) served, if mounted on knee-shafts, as
hoe-blades and adzes, or, if perforated, as axes and hammers. Knives,
sickles, and scrapers were made on flint blades. No whorls nor loom-

107

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Re: The Dawn of European Civilization By V. GORDON CHILDE 1923
« Reply #14 on: March 24, 2018, 09:05:28 PM »
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 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

weights attest a textile industry; the flax found at Koln-Lindental
may have been grown for oil. At Statenice in Bohemia,1 a bone imple-
ment like the spatulae of the Koros was found.

Two sorts of pots (Fig. 58) were manufactured—hemispherical bowls
and globular bottles (some flattened for carrying on the back)—pro-

vided with 3, 6, or 9 lugs and clearly derived from gourd models. The
resemblance is often enhanced by zig-zag incised lines reproducing the
slings in which gourds are carried. But instead of skeuomorphic patterns
the peasants often incised on their vases the continuous spiral and
mseander designs that are regarded as distinctively Danubian. Some
designs, perhaps late, suggest human figures, double-axes, and other
objects. And some coarse vases were just rusticated as on the Koros.
Lugs may be modelled to resemble animals' heads as on the Vardar
and the Morava, while .the incised double-axe patterns may be inspired
from Crete or North Syria,1 2 but probably belong to Danubian II.

In principle this economy was essentially self-sufficing. But in
practice materials had to be carefully selected and often transported
over long distances. The green schist, used for adzes at Koln-Lindental,
must have been brought 60 or 70 miles from the Hunsriick or the
Taunus; Niedermendig lava from near Mayen was used for querns
in Belgium.3 Such partiality for selected materials, without destroying
self-sufficiency, encouraged intercourse between distinct communities.
In fact, a few vases, made from local clays in the Main valley, were
transported to Koln-Lindental, 50 miles away. Moreover, in Moravia,
Bohemia, Thuringia, and even the Rhine valley ornaments made from

1   Stocky, Boh. Pr6h., 62.

2   IPEK., XI (1936-37), 16 f.; PA., XL (1934-35). 3-

108

3 Buttler, Donau., 32.
 DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION

the Mediterranean Sfiondylus shell were worn as in Thessaly and on
the Middle Danube; they must have been handed on by some sort of
inter-tribal exchange from the iEgean or the Adriatic! So too African
ivory reached Flamborn near Worms.1 The interchange of goods, thus
disclosed, developed into something like regular trade. Particularly on
the borders of the Danubian province in Brandenburg, Holstein, and
West Poland, hoards2 of shoe-last adzes turn up. Like the later hoards
of bronzes, these must be the stocks of specialized travelling merchants.
Individuals must already have been at least supplementing their
livelihood by satisfying the Danubians’ prejudices in favour of selected
materials and extending their activities to other still mesolithic tribes.
Such were surely the forerunners of the bronze-merchants described
on p. 128. And workshop debris in villages may indicate even industrial
specialization within a community.

The Danubians were a peaceful folk. The only weapons found in
their settlements are disc-shaped mace-heads, such as had been used
by the predynastic Egyptians, and occasional flint arrow-heads. They
were democratic and perhaps even communistic; there are no hints of
chiefs concentrating the communities’ wealth. Nor did deities fulfil
that function. As expressions of ideology clay figurines or schematic
representations of the human form are rare, confined to peripheral
areas, and probably late enough to be attributed to the south-eastern
influence that is conspicuous in Danubian II. Nothing like the ritual
paraphernalia, distinctive of South-West Asian and Balkan cultures,
has survived. Nor is an elaborate ancestor cult illustrated by many
ceremonial burials.3 Cemeteries are practically confined to the Rhine
valley. There the dead were generally interred in the contracted posi-
tion, more rarely cremated. The few skulls examined are all dolicho-
cranial and in a general way Mediterranean. One from an Alsatian
cemetery4 had been trephined.

The culture just described had reached Germany by 4000 b.c.5 and
lasted a long time; on Sangmeister’s estimate the seven settlements at
Koln-Lindental occupy between them 430 years. It can hardly have
appeared simultaneously at all points within the vast area eventually
colonized. But save in ceramic decoration, no development can be
recognized. In the Rhineland and Belgium, styles in which the spirals
and maeanders have disintegrated and simple lines are combined with
punctuations, comb-imprints, and cord-impressions have been shown
stratigraphicallv to be late. So too the “music note” style in which

1   Buttler, Donau., 36; Marburger Studien, I, 27-9.

2   JST., XXIII (1935), 73; Bl.f. d. Vorg., VII, 51; Buttler, Donau., 21.

2 Listed in AR., VIII, 697 ff.   * Germania, XXVI (1942), 177-81.

5 Radio-carbon date, Schachermeyr, Die alt. Kulturen Griechenlands, 98.

IO9
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

lines are supplemented by pits, like breves, is often regarded as late,
but Spudsky1 has challenged this assumption. The densest concentra-
tion of sites with simple linear decoration still seems to lie on the
Upper Elbe and the Upper Rhine, but these just happen to be the best
explored parts of the loss lands. Only since 1950 has Danubian I
pottery—of the music-note style—been identified on the Dniestr and
the Sereth,1 2 but that is no proof that these outposts were really planted
in the last areas to be colonized!

But it is significant that the main concentrations do lie north of the
Bakony and the Carpathians, i.e. north of the ecological limit beyond
which gourds will not harden. If First Danubian pots be really substi-
tutes for gourd vessels, they may have been made by preceramic
farmers, spreading from the southern cradle of cereals, when they had
reached the areas where their traditional receptacles were no longer
available. Such immigrants, bringing the materials and technique
of farming, would then have reached the Danube basin before the
emergence there of the Starcevo culture. Alternatively, Danubian I
might be a secondary neolithic culture, created by autochthonous
hunter-fishers who would have learned farming and pot-making from
the Starcevo immigrants. As there are at present no evidence for a
mesolithic population on the Danubian loss lands and mesolithic sur-
vivals appear only late in Danubian industry,3 the former hypothesis
is the more plausible. The Danubian penchant for Spondylus shells is a
positive argument for a southern origin, but the bone spatula from
Statenice is strong evidence for some sort of connection with Starcevo.

The Bukk: Culture

In Eastern Slovakia and North-East Hungary the Bukk culture4 may
be regarded as a parallel to Danubian I in the latter part of period I,
though it is more nearly contemporary with Vinca I than with Starcevo.
In the Bukk economy, in contrast to the First Danubian, hunting and
fishing (with hook-and-line as well as with nets) were as important as
farming. No houses have been identified, but caves were used for
habitations—according to Hillebrandt5 mainly as winter shelters.
Hollow-bored stone axes and perforated antler mattocks were used as
well as the usual Danubian adzes. The Bukkians controlled the obsidian

1   PA., XLV. (1954). 81 ff.

2   SA., XX, 100; KSU., IV (1955), 142-5 (Nezviska, stratified below Tripolye Bi);
St. s. gerc., II (1951), 54*

8 Anthropozdikum, III (Praha, 1953), 207-222.

4   Tompa, Arch. Hung., V-VI (1929), 9-38; BRGK., XXIV-XXV, 32-9; Stov. Dej., 58.

5   AE., XLIV (1930), 301; cf«, AE. (1943), 22.

IIO
 DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION

deposits of the Hegyalya near Tokaj and made from the volcanic glass
knives and scrapers, but no bifacially worked arrow-heads.

The pottery which defines the culture is of high quality, usually
grey. The commonest form is a hemispherical bowl, like the First
Danubian, and decorated, like the latter, with spirals and mseanders
in an all-over style but enriched with fine embroideries. Besides such
Danubian forms, bowls with tubular spouts and fruit stands were
made. Besides grey ware, a kiln-fired buff fabric was manufactured
and decorated with thin lines of warm black paint forming patterns
in the Bfikk style. In both fabrics the designs include human
figures,1 and some fruitstands have human legs as at Thermi. Otherwise
figurines are missing as in Danubian I.

The inclusion of the Bfikk culture in period I may be justified by
a grave at Nagyteteny (Pest) furnished with early Bfikk and late
Danubian I vases and by observations at sites where Bfikk pottery
lay in the same stratum as Danubian I or below that yielding Tisza
sherds of period II.2 But elsewhere Bfikk and Tisza remains are con-
temporary3 and the culture must largely belong to period II. The ritual
anthropomorphic vases and clay copies of cylinder seals4 attributed
to the Bfikkian may be due to Vinca I-Tisza influence. The technique
of painting could, however, be derived from Starcevo, though fruit-
stands are normally Danubian II.

PERIOD II

The Tisza Culture

On the loss lands east of the Tisza, occupied in period I by the Koros
and Vinca or Bfikk cultures, the Tisza culture of period II had developed
a rural economy better suited to regular agriculture and directed par-
ticularly to exploiting the fish abounding in the rivers and the game
haunting their banks. The settlements do not form tells, but the houses
were superior to those of the Koros folk. At the village of Kokeny-
domb,5 the dwellings—rectangular houses measuring up to 7-2 m. by
3-4 m., entered through the long side and decorated with painted clay
models of bulls’ heads—were strung out in a single row along the river
bank. The fisherman now employed harpoons of antler (Fig. 47) (as at
Vin£a) and double or triple rings of bone in addition to nets.6 Stock-

1   Arch. Hung., V-VI, pis. XVIII, 5, XXIV, 13.

2   AR., VIII, 637; AE., XLIX, 86 and 70.

3   Folya Arch., Ill (1941), 1-27; VII (1955), 42-4.

* Ibid., pi. V, 1-3.

6   Banner, MTK., 31-8; Dolg., VI (1930), 50-150; AE. (1943), 22.

3 Dolg., VI, pis. Ill, VI; BRGK., XXIV-XXV, 43.

Ill
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

breeding and agriculture still provided the basis of life. Grain was
stored in large clay jars or rectangular vessels, 70 cm. by 50 cm. by
65 cm. in volume and exactly like the wooden bins used locally to-day.1

The general economy remained neolithic. The materials for axes
were drawn from the Banat, Transylvania, and Northern Hungary,
but obsidian was no longer imported. Shells were still imported from
southern seas and typical vases were exported to Vinca and Silesia
(p. 91), but clay “stamp seals” were no longer used.

Pots, including cylindrical jars and large oval bowls, suitable for
cooking fish in, may be provided with indented lugs like the Early
Macednic, or short, tubular spouts, sometimes fitted with strainers.
They are decorated with coarse incisions in a thick slip, sometimes
supplemented by crusting with red or yellow colours after firing. The
designs are grouped in vertical panels in contrast to the Danubian
all-over style and are often derived from basketry.2 The motives include
concentric circles and maeanders, conventionalized faces and hut
roofs.

Clay figurines were no longer manufactured, but a cognate ideology
may be implied by large vases in human form,3 as at Vinca, Vidra, and
Tsani. Clay rattles in animal form may have been used in ritual. The
dead were ceremonially buried flexed in small cemeteries. Shell or
marble buttons with shanks were worn as brow-ornaments.

In the Tisza culture elements from Biikk and Vinca have perhaps
been blended. The rural economy could be derived from that of Vinca,
although less sedentary. The ideology expressed in anthropomorphic
vases and metopic composition, could likewise be derived from the
south-east. Now Schachermeyr4 has enumerated thirty-five motives,
some of them significantly improbable, common to Tisza and Dimini
ceramic decoration, and a Late Neolithic vase from Olynthus5 might
pass for an actual Tisza product. If the Dimini culture must be brought
from north of the Balkans into Greece, the Tisza culture has the best
claim to its parentage. But then the relative ages of the Tisza and
VinCa cultures in terms of the .ZEgean sequence would need revision.

The Lengyel Cultures

On the loss lands, colonized in period I by First Danubian peasants,
the remarkable cultural uniformity thus created dissolved in period II

1   AE., XLV (1931). 253.

2   Csalog, FA., III-IV (1941), x VII (1955), 37-41.

3   FA„ VII, 27-36; Germania, XXIII (1939), 145 ff.; Dalg., XIX, 130.

* MAGW., LXXXIII (1953-54), 21-34.

6 Mylonas, Excavations at Olynthos (Johns Hopkins University, Studies in Archceology,
6) (1929), fig. 59.

112
 DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION

to give place to a multiplicity of distinct regional cultures as a result
of extraneous influences as well as mere divergent development. From
the Drave to the Upper Danube, in Austria, the Upper Elbe in
Bohemia, and the Upper Vistula,1 the period witnessed the spread of
the South-West Asian-Balkan ideology reflected in female figurines,
model houses, clay stamps, and a taste for coloured vases, and of a
rural economy in which cultivation was better balanced by stock-
breeding though it did not yet allow settlement in one spot long enough
for tell formation. The result was not a single culture even in this
Hmited region, but several related cultural facies. As none exhibits a
well-defined spatial distribution, all may still be grouped together and
designated by the name given to the first one recognized, the Lengyel
culture.1 2

Some settlements at least were fortified. At Hluboke Masovky in
Southern Moravia an area of some 15 acres (60,000 sq. m.) was enclosed
by a flat-bottomed fosse supplemented by a stockade, the gate being
flanked by stout projecting walls as at Troy.3 So near Zlota on the
Vistula4 two adjacent settlements, possibly of a later stage, were
surrounded by entrenchments. Small rectangular houses, probably
divided into two rooms that are best known outside the Lengyel
province at Ariusd in Transylvania and in Rossen and Michelsberg
settlements round the Alps, replaced the earlier long communal houses.
From within our area we have only clay models.

Commerce, as in Danubian I, is most clearly attested by the importa-
tion from the south of Spondylus and Tridacna shells. North Hun-
garian obsidian was distributed all over the Middle Danube basin and
northward to Moravia, Western Galicia, Silesia, and Bohemia, but in
the northern districts it is found only in the earliest settlements, as
if stocks had been brought by the colonists but not subsequently
replenished by trade. Cubical blocks of clay, perforated at the corners,
in which one, or exceptionally two, cups have been hollowed out5
(Fig. 59) have been claimed as copies of Early Minoan block vases
of stone. Clay imitations of stamp seals are attributed to the later
phase of the period in Moravia, and by that time copper trinkets began
to be distributed in Moravia and Silesia (Fig. 60).

1   Buttler, Donau., 38-43; Arch. Hung., XXIII (1939); Slovensko Dejiny, 58-61;
Ohzor, VIII {1929), 1-53; XIV (1950), 163-72; Przeg.A., VIII (1949), 318-21; B6hm,
Kronika, 136-49; Pittioni, Osterreich, 143-67.

2   Tompa’s extension to this of the name "Tisza” (BRGK., XXIV-XXV, 70) has
cansed confusion with the quite different assemblage just described; cf., Milojfiid,
Chron., 8o, and Csalog, FA., VII, 24-6.

3   AR., II (195°). 52-6; HI* 136-9.

4   WA., XIX (1953), 7-53*

6 Schranil, Bdhmen, 50; cf. p. 19 here.

H   113
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Besides shoe-last adzes, triangular greenstone axes (Fig. 60),
hollow-bored axe-hammers and antler axes were employed. A few
spheroid mace-heads and flint arrow-heads and, in Bohemia, stone

Fig. 59. Clay block vase, Streli£e I, Moravia (§).

arrow-straighteners,1 may point to warlike behaviour. Whorls and
loom-weights attest a textile industry.

Characteristic pot forms are hollow-pedestalled bowls (Fig. 61, 1),
ladles with socketed handles (Fig. 61, 2), biconical jars (Fig. 61, 3),
and variants on the older bottles. Bowls are flat-bottomed and often

Fig. 60. Copper trinkets (£), and triangular axe (f), Jordanova. After Seger.

carinated, but inturned rims do not occur till the end of the period.
Handles remain unknown. The most characteristic and nearly universal
ware is black-polished, as in the Vinca and Larisa cultures. It may
be decorated with crusted patterns in red, white, and yellow colours
applied after firing, that may be supplemented by incised lines or low
round bosses (Fig. 61, 3, 4). Buff and red wares also occur, and in
Moravia2 characterize a second phase of the culture. There the red

1   PA., XXXIX (1933), 50-3.   2 Vildomec in Obzor, VIII, 1-43.

114