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« on: March 24, 2018, 09:19:22 PM »
MEGALITH BUILDERS AND BEAKER-FOLK
mon throughout the East Mediterranean area, in Sicily, Sardinia, Southern Spain, Portugal, Brittany, Central Ireland, Northern Scot- land, Denmark, South Sweden, and Holland. Cellular annexes open off the main chamber in the rock-hewn tombs of the East Mediter- ranean, Sardinia, and the Balearic Islands and in some corbelled tombs in Southern Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and Scotland, in a few orthostatic tombs in Brittany and Denmark. Roughly circular chambers characterize the corbelled tombs of Crete and the Cyclades, the earlier rock-hewn tombs of Sicily, and many South Spanish, Portuguese, Breton, Irish, and Scottish sepultures and the oldest Danish ones. A corbelled passage grave of circular plan is often called a tholos (Figs. 44 and 108).
In rock-cut tombs the passage is often a descending ramp. Where the ground surface is nearly level it may be reduced to a stepped shaft, producing the pit-cave (Fig. 25, 2) already encountered in Greece and South Russia and to meet us again in Sicily. If the chamber is cut in the face of a cliff, the passage may be abbreviated to a mere doorway as often in Sicily (Fig. 108). A well-marked variety of passage grave, built with large orthostats, has been termed an undifferentiated passage grave because the passage gradually expands towards the chamber which is generally bottle-shaped. Near Arles and in the Balearic Isles the rock-hewn chambers are themselves long and narrow and not preceded by any length of passage though cellular annexes sometimes open off the chamber (Fig. 109). In Menorca the same type is repro- duced above ground in dry-stone masonry in so-called navetas.
The long stone cist or gallery reproduces this Balearic plan in ortho- static masonry. In Sardinia the orthostats support dry-stone walling corbelled in to a barrel vault. But in the classic form represented in the Paris basin, Brittany and Jersey, Belgium, Western and Central Germany, and Sweden the uprights support the lintels, and the long narrow rectangular chamber is preceded by a short porch as wide as the chamber. Most cists of the Paris type are subterranean, being built in an excavated trench. Variants on the long cist occur in South Italy, Sardinia, Northern Spain, France, Britain, Denmark, and Holland. On the slopes of the Pyrenees, in Northern Ireland, and South-West Scotland gallery graves are divided into a series of intercommunicating compartments by low, transverse slabs, termed septal stones, sometimes combined with upright portals; such tombs are known as segmented cists (Fig. no).
Dolmen is a term applied sometimes to any megalithic tomb, but generally only to small rectangular or polygonal chambers without entrance passage, formed of three to six megalithic uprights. Even
215 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
when thus restricted, the name obscures the genetic and functional variety of the monuments to which it is applied. Some “dolmens", for
instance in Sardinia1 and in the Cotswolds,2 appear to be just the most stubborn remains of more complex monuments destroyed by culti-
1 Antiquity, XIII, 376.
2 Crawford, Long Barrows of the Cotswolds, 21; Daniel, Antiquity, XI (1937), 183-200.
2l6 MEGALITH BUILDERS AND BEAKER-FOLK
vators or road-builders. Some are closed chambers, not collective tombs. Others are obviously just abbreviated gallery graves.1 To avoid confusion we have used the Danish name dyss (plural dysser) for dolmens which are marked by furniture as well as structure as a distinct type. But even the classical dyss, as defined on p. 181, might be regarded as a segmented cist abbreviated to one compartment only.
The portal of the tomb was treated with special care, and one form —termed the porthole slab—must be mentioned here. A round or sub- rectangular aperture, 45 to 80 cm. (1 ft. 6 in. to 2 ft. 8 in.) across is
Fig. 110. Segmented cist in horned cairn, North Ireland, and Giants’ Tomb, Sardinia.
cut out in a slab—or in the proximal edges of two juxtaposed slabs— which closes the entrance to chamber or passage (Figs. 81 and 100). Porthole slabs were a regular feature in Caucasian '‘dolmens” and occur even in the Indian ones. They form the portals to megalithic cists and rock-cut tombs in Sicily, to the gallery graves of Sardinia, to corbelled and other passage graves in Southern Spain,2 to long cists of the Paris type not only in the Seine valley, but also in Brittany, Jersey, Central Germany, and Sweden; they were even incorporated in the megalithic temples of Malta.3 A porthole stone often enhances the resemblance of a built tomb's doorway to the entry into a natural
1 For instance Adam’s Grave near Dunoon is just a segmented cist reduced to a single segment.
2 Marburger Studien, I (1938), 147-55.
3 Arch., LXVIII, 266. DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
or artificial cave. The desire to emphasize the similarity has in fact been suggested as an explanation for the porthole stone’s origin.1 But a porthole slab was employed to form the portal of a tomb cut in friable rock at Monte Salia,1 2 and the device does not always simulate a cave mouth at all realistically.
Built chamber tombs, when not erected in an artificial excavation, were probably always put underground artificially by burial in a mound or cairn. The latter was always carefully constructed and was often, if not always, supported by a built masonry revetment wall, or by a peristalith of large uprights. Masonry revetments are well illustrated in the Balearic navetas, in some Almerian round cairns, and in the long cairns of the Cotswolds and Northern Scotland. But it is doubtful whether these finely built walls were intended to be seen in Britain, since the faces were masked deliberately by an “extra revetment”3 of slabs piled obliquely.
The passage or portal of a chamber tomb often gives on to a fore- court so carefully planned that it must have played an essential part in funerary ritual. Semicircular forecourts cut in the rock precede some Siculan tombs, and are delimited by built walls in front of Sar- dinian gallery graves and North Scottish passage graves and by ortho- stats in front of tholoi at Los Millares in Almeria and Barro in Portugal and of North Irish and South-West Scottish segmented cists4 (Figs. 108 and no). In England the forecourts are more often cuspidal in plan, as are those connected with one or two Mycenaean, Danish, Swedish, and Armorican passage graves.5 More careful examinations of the environs of chamber tombs or of the barrows covering them will certainly reveal the presence of forecourts in other regions. Despite their careful construction, the forecourts in Great Britain are generally found filled up with earth and rubble. This filling may be deliberate. In any case the entrances to tombs have usually been intentionally blocked up and hidden. That need not mean, as Hemp6 has inferred, that the numerous skeletons found in such tombs had all been laid to rest simultaneously, after which the vault was finally sealed up. The initiated could always rediscover the entrance and remove the blocking, as happened at Mycenae (p. 82). Irrefutable evidence of the
1 Kendrick, Axe Age, 48.
2 BP., XLIII, 17, fig. 6.
3 Arch., LXXXVI, 132; PPS., IV (1938), 201.
* BP., XVIII, 75; Ausonia, I, 7; Not. Sc. (1920), 304; Correia, “Pavia”, 72; Childe, Prehistory of Scotland, 26, 33. Vestiges of such a forecourt can be seen in Balearic navetas (CIPMO,, 26), and with timber revetmentin English unchambered long-barrows (p. 325, below).
5 Nordmann, Megalithic, figs. 36-9.
6 Arch. Camb. (1927), 13, 17.
218 MEGALITH BUILDERS AND BEAKER-FOLK
use of tombs for successive interments is forthcoming from one or two graves in Scotland, Brittany, and Denmark,1 as at Mycenae.
The distribution of chamber tombs is presumably due to the spread of some religious idea expressed in funerary ritual. Save in Egypt, they seem everywhere to have served as collective sepulchres or family vaults. A family likeness between the skeletons buried in the same tomb has been reported in England and Denmark2 as at Mycenae, and the features noted in Crete (p. 23: fires kindled in the chamber, con- fusion of bones) are repeated almost universally. Collective burial alone can hardly represent the unifying idea, since collective burial in natural caves was practised even in mesolithic Palestine (p. 23). It has indeed been suggested that the tombs were just copies of cave ossuaries,3 and Wheeler4 describes the erection of megalithic tombs as “the mass production of artificial caves” by populations accustomed to collective burial in natural ones. But in Scotland and elsewhere perfectly good natural caves were neglected; collective burial comes in simultaneously with megalithic sepulchral architecture. But mega- lithic tombs were not always used as communal ossuaries. The finest tholoi, the Mycenaean, were designed for a single chieftain and perhaps his spouse. The most elaborate rock-cut tombs of the Marne contain only a few skeletons, the rest a hundred or so. Moreover, burial practices were far from uniform. While inhumation, generally in the contracted attitude, was everywhere the normal practice, cases of cremation have been reported from many South Spanish, South French, Armorican, and British tombs and are conclusively attested in Northern Ireland.
It is in fact only detailed agreements in seemingly arbitrary peculi- arities of plan and in accessories, such as porthole slabs and forecourts, that justify the interpretation of megalithic tombs as evidences of the diffusion of ideas. The grave goods afford little support for this inter- pretation. They are characterized at first by purely local idiosyncrasies and would suggest to the typologist differences in date. In Egypt, Cyprus, and the Aegean even the earliest tombs contain a relative abundance of metal objects, and such are not uncommon even in the first Siculan and Sardinian vaults. Moreover, in all these regions chamber tombs continued to be built and used even in the Iron Age. In Portugal, as in Malta, some megalithic tombs seem to be genuinely pre-metallic, but in most tombs in the Iberian Peninsula and South France, too, despite numerous stone tools, the grave goods are explicitly Copper Age, while during the Bronze Age collective burial in chamber
3 Childe, Scotland, 43; Nordmann, Megalithic, 28.
2 PPS., TV, 147; Aarboger (1915), 3x9; Nordmann, Megalithic, 30.
8 Hemp, in PPS., I (1935), no.
4 In Eyre, European Civilization, II, 182.
219 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
tombs went out of fashion. In Brittany metal is exceptional in chamber tombs. In Great Britain and the rest of North-Western Europe such tombs contain an exclusively neolithic furniture and in general went out of use as bronze became available.
This disparity has been used to support the thesis that megalithic tombs, invented in the extreme north or in Portugal in a fabulously ancient Stone Age, were carried thence to reach South Spain in the Copper Age and the iEgean in a still later Bronze Age. In reality the quantity of metal from the tombs is no criterion of their absolute age. In North Europe we have proved conclusively that at least the later “Stone Age” passage graves and long cists were in use during the full Bronze Age or Danubian period IV in Central Europe and that none of the dysser even need be appreciably older than period III. On the short chronology outlined on p. 339 megalith building in Denmark should begin about 2500 b.c., or several centuries later than the Early Minoan and Cycladic tombs, to say nothing of the Egyptian.
The extreme rarity of metal and indeed of other imported objects in the megalithic tombs of Northern and North-Western Europe seems an almost fatal objection to the theory that the idea of building such tombs was diffused by “prospectors" or “Children of the Sun”1 setting out from Egypt or some other East Mediterranean centre to settle in regions where ores or precious stones, valued for magical qualities as givers of life, were to be found. There is a general, but far from exact, correlation between the distribution of such substances (for instance, copper in the Iberian Peninsula, the Pyrenees, Sardinia, Ireland, Galloway, and the Crinan district, tin in Galicia and Cornwall, gold in Brittany, Ireland, and the Strath of Kildonan, pearls in Orkney, amber in Jutland, etc.) and foci of megalithic architecture. The tomb furnitures afford surprisingly little evidence for the exploitation of these resources (no Scottish copper, gold, or pearls have been found in a local megalith) and none whatever of Egyptian or JEgean imports obtained in exchange for their exportation. Yet such products would be expected in the graves of merchant princes enjoying such prestige that they could persuade local savages laboriously, if rather barbar- ously, to copy for them the sepultures appropriate to their rank at home, and inspired also with the desire for securing their own immor- tality by necklaces of pearls and gold beads.
The rarity or complete absence of imports from megalithic tombs is furthermore a serious obstacle to their correlation with any inde- pendent sequence of cultures by which their relative or absolute age might be determined. Once in Sicily, very frequently in Sardinia, the
1 Perry, The Growth of Civilization,
220 MEGALITH BUILDERS AND BEAKER-FOLK
Iberian Peninsula, South France, and Brittany, occasionally in Scot- land and even Denmark, Bell-beakers or their derivatives are found in megalithic tombs of almost every form. From individual tombs in Brittany, Spain, Scotland, and Denmark1 it has been proved con- clusively that the Beakers were associated only with the later inter- ments in the tombs concerned. The Beaker-folk cannot therefore have been the vehicles in the original diffusion of the “megalithic idea”, nor can their expansion, which reached the Danube basin late in period III, fix the relative age of the earlier chamber tombs.
Gallery graves in Central France, Brittany, and Jersey and even in the Balearic Islands and Southern Sweden regularly contain relics of the Horgen culture (p. 198). Indeed, it may be said that Horgen folk diffused the Paris type of long cist to Brittany and across Germany to Sweden. In Central Europe the Horgen culture too seems to belong to a late phase of period III, and lasts into IV. But megalithic tombs are not attached to the best-dated Horgen settlements, and the long cist may be a secondary accretion in their culture.
In default of better founded chronologies, a resort to typology is tempting. In Scandinavia the sequence, dyss (dolmen), passage grave, long stone cist really seems to hold good, though it is no longer regarded, as it was by Montelius, as a self-contained process of evolution and degeneration. Similar sequences have been applied by Leeds, Ober- maier, and Bosch-Gimpera1 2 to the Iberian Peninsula, and by Mackenzie to Sardinia.3 Bosch-Gimpera, by labelling some ruinous tombs in Northern Portugal “dolmens”, traces their development into ortho- static passage graves, rock-cut tombs, and lastly tholoi. But of the Iberian Peninsula Forde could write4 quite justly, “small passage dolmens have a poorer, but not earlier furniture and represent a pro- vincial degradation typical of peripheral areas”. In the sequel, however, it has been established that some orthostatic passage graves are really earlier than any tholoi in Portugal, while the still unpublished furniture is said to confirm the yet higher antiquity of “small dolmens”, con- taining it would seem only a single burial. Mackenzie’s "dolmens” in Sardinia prove on closer examination to be just badly ruined Giants’ Grave.5 Only in Denmark is the priority in time of the simplest types proved by grave goods. But even in Denmark out of hundreds of dysser only 57 are dated by their contents to Northern II; a very large
1 L’Anthr., XLIII (1933), 248; Childe, Scotland, 43; Nordmann, “Megalithic", 122; Leisner, Megalithgrdber, 554.
2 Arch., LXX, 215 £f.; "El Dolmen de Matarxibilla’’ (CIPP., 26); Real., X, 358; Rev. Anthr., XL (1930), 244 ff.; Prehistoire, II (1933), 189 f.
3 BSR., V (1910), 87-137; VI, 127-70.
4 Am. Anthr., XXXII, 16. s Antiquity, XIII (1939), 376-7.
221 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
proportion must have been built, like the passage graves, during period III.1
No new typology need be attempted here. The architectural agree- ments cited reveal the megalithic province as a cultural continuum. Within that continuum culture grows in every aspect poorer as we pass westward and northward from the East Mediterranean to Scotland and Denmark. We see the same sort of cultural zoning that has been disclosed in the Danubian corridor and on the Eurasiatic plain.
Beaker Traders
The Beaker-folk was a principal agency in opening up communications, establishing commercial relations, and diffusing the practice of metal-
4
Fig. iii. Beaker pottery: i, (i) and 2 ($), Palmella, Portugal; 3, La Halliade, South France (•£); 4, Villafrati, Sicily (?£).
lurgy. We have already mentioned their activities in Central Europe, and they will meet us so frequently in the West that a brief characteriza- tion becomes convenient at this point.
1 Brendsted, Danmarks, 198, 345.
222
722
« on: March 24, 2018, 09:18:46 PM »
DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
heads like Fig. 106, 4, current from Norway to the Urals and the Lower Volga,1 may be descended from Maglemosian spiked weapons.
For woodworking, antler wedges2 and socketed bone chisels remained in use in Norway as in North Central Russia, but in the north were supplemented by more efficient adzes, gouges, and chisels of polished stone (Fig. 104, 3); in Central Russia such tools of polished stone are not apparently found before the rise of the Fatyanovo culture. So too the Maglemosian boars’ tusk knife survived in Norway, Sweden, and Central Russia,3 but was translated into slate in the north, giving rise to forms like Fig. 106,1.
For land transport the man-pulled sleighs of Boreal age were supple- mented by dog sleighs, represented by runners found from Sweden to the Urals and dated in Finland as early as F.II.4 A still heavier sledge, suited for reindeer traction, is attributed to “the transition from the Stone to the Bronze Age” in Finland. Skis too are attested in Finland and Sweden.5 For use on water, the skin boats, inferred for the Maglemosian, are actually depicted in a Norwegian rock engrav- ing,6 while paddles of the Maglemosian type have been dug up from Ural peat.
Each little group of hunter-fishers could be self-sufficing, but this economic independence did not exclude interchanges of goods and materials. Indeed, the seasonal hunting trips, imposed by their pre- datory mode of subsistance, might well be combined with inter- communal barter and easily grow into trading expeditions. So Russian flint was largely imported into Finland during F.II, but was ousted by Scandinavian flint in F.III.7 Chisels like Fig. 104, 3, were manu- factured east of the Baltic, but were imported into Sweden.8 Forest folk had discovered the amber deposits of Sammland and carved it in their own naturalistic style, but exported it to Norway, Central Germany, Finland, and Central Russia.9 Becker10 has convincingly attributed to Forest hunter-fishers the surprisingly wide distribution of South Swedish or Danish flint attested by regular hoards of celts from Northern Scandinavia while Clark11 has envisaged an export of dried cod from Norway in return.
1 Ailio, Wohnplatzfunde, 29, 33; SGAIMK. (1931), No. 6, 7, found with, contracted skeleton in an “ochre grave”.
2 Veretye and Kubenino, MIA., XXIX; Lyalovo, near Moscow, RAZ., XIV (1925), 37.
3 Fv. (1924), 298; RAZ., XIV, loc. cit.
4 SM., LVI (1949), 1-26.
6 SM., XLI, 1-10.
6 Clark, Preh. Europe, 283, pi. IV, b.
7 Acta Arch., I, 210.
8 Real., VI, 222.
9 Brogger, Den arktiske Stenalder, 185; Real., 1, 436; IGAIMK., 106, 132.
10 Aarboger (1950), 155-245. 11 Preh. Europe, 88, 256.
208 SURVIVALS OF THE FOREST CULTURE
The ideology, as far as it is expressed in the archaeological record, was as uniform as the economy on which it reposed, So the dead were always buried extended, often accompanied by lumps of red ochre or sprinkled with that colouring matter, either on camp sites or in distinct cemeteries.1 The latter are usually very small, 8 to 22 inter- ments, but those at Vasterbjers on Gotland comprised 49 graves, on Deer Island in Lake Onega over 150.2 In the latter cemetery five bodies had been interred standing erect in deep pits and accompanied by an exceptional profusion of hunting weapons of flint and bone (all of types appropriate to F.O.!) and personal ornaments. They must belong to chiefs and reveal distinctions in rank within hunter-fisher societies.
At least east of the Baltic human figures, some explicitly male, were carved in bone or wood and later modelled in clay.1 2 3 The ideological purpose they doubtless served was probably not the same as that fulfilled by the familiar female statuettes made by neolithic peasants, and the style is quite different. In Norway elks and reindeer were engraved on rocks in a style as realistic as the Magdalenian.4 In Sweden and North Russia5 figures of animals, birds and men and even ritual scenes were pecked out on ice-smoothed surfaces in a far more con- ventional manner. Beasts and birds were carved realistically in bone, stone, and wood by all the Forest hunter-fisher tribes, but curious little flint sculptures6 are concentrated rather in Eastern Russia from the Oka to the White Sea.
The authors of these relatively uniform cultures did not constitute a racially homogeneous population. Most of the skulls from sites in North and Central Russia are described as Lapponoid, some as Euro- peoid, Mongoloid or hybrid,7 and even on Gotland one skull has been diagnosed as Mongoloid.
The most economical account of the hunter-fisher cultures just surveyed would be to treat them all as derived by divergent adaptation from the North Sea—West Baltic Maglemosian of the Boreal phase.
1 North Russian burials are described and listed by Gerasimov, Vostanovlenie litsa po Herepu (Trudy Inst. Etnografiya, XXVIII), Moscow, 1955, 328-65. Stenberger, Das Grabfeld . . the cemetery should be Northern III, D, or F.III.
2 SA., VI (1940), 46-62; Ravdonikas dates the cemetery to F.III or IV, but Briusov (Oberki, 108) to the Atlantic phase, i.e. F.O.! See also Gerasimov, op. cit.
3 Foss, MIA., XXIX, 35 ff.; Ayrapaa, SM., XLVIII (1941), 82-119. Save perhaps for the bone figurine from Deer I., all seem late.
4 Boe, Felsenzeichnungen in westlichen Norwegen (Bergen, 1932).
s Ravdonikas, Les Gravures rupestres des bords du lac Onega et de la Mer Blanche Trudy Inst. Etnografiya), Moscow, 1936, 1938.
6 Zamiatnin, “Miniatiurnye kremnevye skulptury", SA., X (1948); Hausler, IFiss. Zts. d. Martin-Luther Universitat, HaUe-Wittenberg, III (1954), 767-82.
7 Briusov, Oberki, 35-6; KS. Inst. Etnografiya, XVIII (1953), 55-65; Gerasimov, Vostanovlenie litsa (1955), 296-395.
O
209 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
The anthropological data would suffice to exclude such an over- simplification. Becker1, without of course denying its Maglemosian constituents, regards the culture symbolized by the pit-comb ware of Scandinavia as introduced there immediately from beyond the Baltic. Russian prehistorians deny vehemently all dependence of the Central Russian, Uralian, and Siberian aspects on the Baltic cultures. Accord- ing to Briusov,1 2 the Urals would have been colonized in early post- glacial times from the Aral-Caspian basin, Central Russia and the East Baltic from the Pontic region; the classical cultures distinguished by pit-comb ware would have crystalized in the Oka-Upper Volga and Upper Dniepr basins. His account involves rather heavy draughts on ignorance. The early cultures of the North Pontic zone and Trans- caspia are still very ill-defined. The chronological relations of assem- blages from the Ural peat bogs, from sand-dune sites in the Oka-Volga basin, and even from the White Sea-Onega-Ladoga belt to those collected round the Baltic are quite ambiguous. Few pollen-diagrams3 have been published, and their interpretation in terms of the West Baltic zonation remains disputable.
Types proper to the Boreal phase round the Baltic do indeed occur in the Ural bogs, but their context is unknown. They might theoretic- ally have spread westward rather than eastward, but without inde- pendent evidence of date no final decision is justified. So, too, ovoid pots, similar in technique to the Swedish and Finnish, are found both in Siberia4 and across the Pontic steppes to the Caucasus.5 The coarse ware, associated with Tripolye pottery at all stages, is technically akin to pit-comb ware. Whipped-cord patterns that might have inspired Finnish styles I and II6 were at some time very popular in the Ukraine and Dniepr basin. But the relative antiquity of all these phenomena is uncertain. The apparent brevity of culture sequences round the Urals, in Central Russia, and in the Ukraine gives the West Baltic a semblance of priority. But that brevity is partly due to de- ficiencies of exploration and of publication and, in so far as archaeo- logical events are occasioned by climatic changes or land movements, to the greater stability of the continental environment.
The archaeological data here summarized do prove that the hunter- fisher populations of the taiga zone, however sparse, constituted a continuum for cultural transmissions all through the circumpolar zone
1 Aarb0ger (1950), 251.
2 Oierki, 30-40, 164-74, 147-49; Ayrapaa, too, seems to favour a south-east origin
for pit-comb ware, FM., LXII, 32. 3 TGIM., XXIX (1956), 70.
4 E.g. MIA., XVIII, 169 if.; but some pots in addition to pits bear net impressions.
6 HanCar, Kaukasiens, pi. XXIX.
6 A. Rosenberg, Kulturstromungen in Europa zur Steinzeit (Copenhagen, 1931).
210 SURVIVALS OF THE FOREST CULTURE
of Eurasia and between it and the parklands and steppes to the south. They prove too that this was not a one-way traffic, but they give no measure of the relative importance of contributions from the east, the south, and the west respectively. The technique of bifacial retouch on flint flakes and blades is more likely to have reached the north from the south-east than from the south-west; the contemporary apprecia- tion of amber must have been diffused in the opposite direction. The heavier bow introduced into Denmark by the pit-comb traders may have been of the composite type attested in Siberia by the Serovo stage1 and ancestral to the Turko-Mongolian type, but even the Maglemosian bows had been re-inforced with sinews. The transmission through the food-gathering cultures of the taiga of Asiatic contributions to European civilization is in fact better attested in Sub-Boreal than in Boreal times, but still eludes precise evaluation.
The cultural continuum thus constituted was disrupted by the arrival of warlike farmers and herdsmen of the Boat Axe and Fat- yanovo cultures. The former occupied the East Baltic coastlands, but beyond a frontier, sharply defined in Finland,2 left undisturbed the old hunter-fishers. These preserved intact the old ceramic tradition of pit-comb ware, though they sometimes used asbestos as temper for the pots, and continued to rely on stone implements and weapons
Fig. 107. Knives and axe from Seima hoard: 1, (•£); 2, ($); 3 (detail of 2), (J); 4-5, (?£).
with the addition of local imitations of boat axes even when a few imported socketed axes of Swedish Malar and East Russian Ananino types3 proclaim that the Final Bronze Age had already been reached in Denmark and Southern Sweden. So too in Central Russia the Fat- yanovo warriors did not replace the older population of the Volga valley. Camp sites, yielding pottery made in conformity with the old
1 Okladnikov, MIA., XVIII (1950), 220.
2 SM., LIX (1952), 6-24. 3 ESA., XI (1937), 16-30; MIA., XX (1951), 133.
211 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
prescriptions, though now sometimes decorated with textile impressions, illustrate the survival of a predominantly neolithic hunter-fisher population when socketed celts and other metal types represented in the hoard from Seima (on the Oka west of Gorki)1 were filtering in from the Late Bronze Age cultures of the srubno phase to the south and east. The realistic elk’s head of the Seima knife-handle (Fig. 107, 2-3) has indeed analogues in Siberian and Chinese bronze-work,2 but springs from the naturalistic art of the Eurasiatic hunter-fishers and can be closely matched not only on stone battle-axes that have turned up from Norway to the Urals3 but also on the bone dagger from the Deer Island cemetery on Lake Onega. But such belated survivals of the Stone Age lie outside the scope of this book.
1 Tallgren, “Ett viktigt fornfynd", FM. (1915), 73 ff., and ESA., II (1926), 137, remains the best publication of this “hoard”.
2 Childe, Inst. Arch., AR., X (1954), II_25-
3 Clark, Northern Europe, 186; SM., XXXV (1928), 36-43.
For further details consult in additions to works mentioned in the footnotes:
on Norway: “Vistefundet”, Stavanger Museums Arsheft, 1907; Gjessing, Norges Sten&lder (Oslo, 1945).
on Latvia: Balodis, Det aldsta Lettland (Uppsala, 1940). on Estonia: Moora, Die Vorzeit Estlands (Tartu, 1932). on Finland: Ailio, Steinzeitliche Wohnplatzfunde in Finland (Helsinki, 1909). on the whole region: Gjessing, “The Circum-Polar Stone Age”, ActaArctica, II (Copen- hagen, 1944).
212 CHAPTER XII
MEGALITH BUILDERS AND BEAKER-FOLK Megalithic Tombs
The diffusion of Oriental culture in Western Europe must have been effected in part by maritime intercourse. And evidence of such inter- course is supposedly afforded by the architecture of groups of tombs spread significantly along the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic and along terrestrial routes joining these coasts. Judged by their contents, the tombs in question do not belong to a single culture and were not therefore erected and used by a single people. But archi- tectural details recur with such regularity at so many distinct places that a general survey of the main types at this stage will save repetition.
The most intriguing tombs of the series, which consequently received the first attention from archaeologists, are built of extravagantly large stones. They are therefore termed “megalithic”. But as the same plans are followed in tombs built in dry masonry with small stones and in others excavated in the ground (;rock-cut tombs) the application of the term to the whole series is misleading. In Portugal,1 for instance, beehive chambers entered through a low, narrow passage were exca- vated in hillsides where the soft limestone facilitated digging. Where the subsoil was shallow and the rock hard, the same plan was repro- duced above ground in dry-stone masonry roofed by corbelling if the local sandstone or schists broke naturally into convenient slabs. Where the rock is more refractory, like granite, large blocks set on end, orthostats, supporting large capstones or lintels form the framework for chamber and passage. And tombs constructed by all three methods often contain the same furniture.
Many authorities2 therefore contend that in such regions the method of construction is conditioned by local geology alone. That thesis will be adopted in the sequel with the reservation that it is not universally applicable. “Rock-cut” tombs could easily have been excavated in the chalk of the English Downs, but in fact the burial chambers here
1 V. Correia, "El Neolitico de Pavia”, Mem. CIPP., XXVII (1921). 63 f.; cf. Forde, Am. Anthr., XXXII (1930), 41.
2 Elliot Smith, "The Evolution of the Rock-cut Tomb and Dolmen”, in Essays and Studies presented to Sir William Ridgeway (Cambridge, 1913), was a pioneer in this interpretation.
213 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
were always built above ground. At Antequera and other cemeteries in Southern Spain (p. 274), orthostatic and corbelled tombs—of differ- ent plans'—stand side by side. In such instances the method of con- struction must have been dictated exclusively by the traditional prejudices of the tombs' builders. In a preliminary survey, however, it is community of plan that is most significant.
Among a bewildering variety of local deviations it is convenient to distinguish two main types—Passage Graves consisting of a chamber entered by a distinct passage, lower and narrower than the chamber
Fig. 108. Rock-cut tomb, Castelluccio, and corbelled tomb, Los Millares.
proper; and Long Cists (Gallery Graves) in which the chamber itself is long and narrow and entered directly through a portal without any preceding passage. But if this conventional distinction be rigidly main- tained, it leads to quite arbitrary classifications. A tomb like Fig. 153 is on plan as much a Gallery Grave as Fig. 109, but by its furniture and method of construction it belongs to the same group as Fig. 152. Long Cists may be covered by long or round barrows and so may Passage Graves. No complex of relics is peculiar to one type rather than the other save that the SOM culture (p. 312) is regularly associated with Long Cists of the Paris type. Hence even in Western Europe the facts do not authorize us to postulate the diffusion of two distinct versions of the “megalithic idea”.1
The Passage Grave is the most widely distributed type, being com-
1 Of. Daniel, PPS., VII (1941), 1-49.
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Round the salt deposits and ore lodes of the Saale and Elbe, and along the trade-route leading thence to the East Baltic amber coast, a peculiar version of the Unetician culture had arisen by the beginning of Northern period IV. Metal had been brought thither in the time of the Jordanova culture and weapons already by the Beaker-folk in Danubian III. These or some other unidentified prospectors may have begun the exploitation of the ores of Vogtland and exported their winnings as ingots in the form of the sacred double-axe.4 For double-axes with a shaft-hole too small to take a real shaft are concentrated in that region and strung out thence across Switzerland to Central France. At the same time, connections with the Pontic zone to the east are attested by the hammer-pins mentioned on p. 165. In the sequel Unetician farmers had spread down the Elbe and the Oder to the Saale and Warta.5 Their poor graves contain a few Unetician ornaments—but not the oldest forms such as knot-headed pins—but their pots with provincial conservatism preserved the pouched form that had gone out of fashion in Czechoslovakia after the earliest phase of Danubian IV.
The local bronze industry was based on the same Unetician tradition, but it was fertilized by the importation of Britannico-Hibernian manu- factures6 and very likely by the immigration of Irish craftsmen. Its products were exported to the still neolithic North and raw amber
1 Kersten, Zur alteren nordischen Bronzezeit, 65.
2 Broholm, Danmarks Bronzealder, 1, 224; M81.
3 Acta Arch., XXV, 241.
4 Hawkes, BSA., XXXVII, 144-51.
3 PZ., XX (1929), 128 ff.
6 E.g. Irish axes from Dieskau and Leubingen, Arch., LXXXVI, 303; PPS., IV, 272 ff. Note that the Irish axe from Dieskau is rich in tin, the other "bronzes" frotn the board contain none! JMV., XXXIV (1950), 90 ff.
199 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
obtained in exchange. Some of this was re-exported in the raw state to England, there to be worked up into amber cups and crescentic necklaces. Local chieftains succeeded in concentrating the profits derived from this commerce and thus accumulated capital for the industry’s further development. Their rich burials under imposing barrows present a striking contrast to the flat graves of Unetician
Fig. ioi. Section of Leubingen barrow.
farmers and confer a distinctive character upon the Bronze Age of the province quite reminiscent of the Kuban.
At Leubingen,1 for instance, an old man and a young girl had been interred in a lean-to chamber of stone slabs and oak beams (Fig. ioi) enclosed by a circular fosse 20 m. in diameter, and furnished with bronze rounded-heeled daggers, gold pins and lock-rings of Unetician types, a halberd derived from the Irish series, a massive gold bracelet, and a perforated stone axe (or ploughshare).
Even richer burials were discovered in a barrow cemetery at Leki
1 JST., V, 1-59; Arch., LXXXVI (1936), 205; cf. also JST., VI (Helmsdorf); I (Baalberg), and perhaps Kuttlau, Silesia [Gotze-Fest., 84-9), and Anderlingen, Hanover, Jb. ProvMus. Hannover, 1907-08, 242-4, and Arch., LXXXVI, 225.
200 THE NORTHERN CULTURES
Male in Poznania during 1953.1 A wooden chamber built in a shaft grave at the centre of a barrow, 30 m. in diameter, had contained the remains of a man and a woman. The former was accompanied by a bronze-shafted halberd like Fig. 102, 1, a flat knife-dagger, a flat Unetician axe, a knot-headed pin of poor bronze, and two gold lock- rings, the woman by only two bronze bracelets. A secondary grave on
Fig. 102. 1, Bronze-shafted halberd (}), 2, halberd-blade from Leubingen barrow (J).
the periphery contained a bronze-hilted dagger of Elbe-Oder type, an axe, a Bohemian eyelet pin and three gold lock-rings. Horses, oxen, pigs, and sheep were represented, in that order of frequency, among the remains of funerary feasts under the barrow.
Such richly furnished barrow burials must belong to chieftains who had won economic power as well as authority by taking toll on the trade that traversed their territories. They established no kingdoms guaranteeing order and security beyond the narrow limits of tribal
1 Kowianska-Piaszykowa and Kurnatowski, “Kurhan Kultury Unietyckiej”, Forties Archesol. Posnanienses, TV (Poznan, 3954), I-34 (with analyses of bronzes, and English rdsum^).
201 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
domains. A large number of merchants’ hoards of bronzes and amber beads vividly illustrate the dangers to which traders and perambulating metal-workers were exposed between these local realms.
These hoards, together with the grave goods just mentioned, show how by blending varied foreign traditions in producing for their warlike patrons local craftsmen had created a variety of original types1— halberds, modelled on late Irish types, but decorated with grooves and triangles and ultimately mounted on bronze shafts (Fig. 102, 1), curious narrow “double-axes”, daggers with bronze hilts, cast in one piece with the blades either oval in imitation of daggers like Fig. 70, or flat like the gold-studded Anglo-Armorican weapons,1 2 and what may be clumsy imitations of the elegant crescentic axes of the Kings of Ur.3 Their products were exported to North Germany and across Poland to Sammland.4 Thence and from Denmark came in exchange amber beads to be used in turn for barter with England, Bohemia, Hungary, and Italy.
Though definitely Early Bronze Age, the graves and hoards contain- ing these products need not be early within Danubian IV. As compared with Britain, the actual imports establish synchronisms only with phase II of our Early Bronze Age. In Central European terminology graves and hoards containing true Middle Bronze Age—Reinecke B-C —types are practically non-existent in just those parts of Central Germany and Poland where the chieftains’ graves occur5; there the archaeological record seems to recommence with the Lusacian culture generally attributed to Danubian VI! That might suggest that the Saale-Warta culture occupies part of Danubian V too.6 On the other hand, in Southern England and in Brittany we shall witness the abrupt emergence of richly furnished barrow graves whose furniture, though still Early Bronze age, exhibits specially close affinities with, if not derivation from, that of the Saale-Warta chieftains’ tombs,7 and the English graves at least seem fairly well dated by ASgean connections between 1600 and 1400 b.c.
1 Childe, Danube, 242-4.
2 Gotze-Fest., 93, and PZ., XVI, 205; cf. p. 335 below.
3 PZ., XXXIV (1949-50), 238, Taf. 15, 1; cf. Childe, NLMAE., fig. 91; Jahn in JMV., XXXV (1951), 65-70.
1 See for halberds O’Riordain’s map, Arch., LXXXVI, 277, and for narrow double- axes, Sturm's jDie Bronzezeit im Ostbaltikum (Berlin, 1936), 32.
5 Cf. Childe, Danube, 3x3.
6 One bronze-shafted halberd of Saale-Warta type is said to have been found with a socketed celt, Mannus, XIII (1923), 42-55.
7 So the characteristic Wessex and Armorican daggers seem to be derived from the Elbe-Oder type, the Anglo-Armorican gold-studded hilts were copied in the Saale region, Wessex amber pendants copy bronze-hilted halberds.
202 CHAPTER XI
SURVIVALS OF THE FOREST CULTURE
The circumpolar zone of Eurasia, extending from the Norwegian coasts across the Baltic and the North European plain far into Siberia, offered no propitious soil to neolithic cultivators, but was rich in game, wild fowl, fish, nuts and berries such as mesolithic Forest-folk had pursued or collected round the North Sea and the western Baltic in Boreal times. By then the Forest-folk had perfected an efficient equipment for the exploitation of these natural resources. They continued to use a similar equipment long after farmers had colonized Denmark and Southern Sweden; for the coniferous forests or taiga to the north con- stituted a botanical environment very similar to that of Britain and Denmark in the Boreal phase. In it much of the Maglemose culture survived. Now, the survival of equipment implies also continuity of tradition prescribing its manufacture and uses. And continuity of tradition means in turn some continuity of population too. However much immigration or invasion have modified its genetic constitution, cultural traditions have been preserved locally for eight or nine thousand years (cf. p. 14).
But continuity of culture is not equivalent to immutability. In fact, the environment was neither static nor uniform. Cultures were modified to take advantage of new opportunities, were differentiated to exploit local resources, and were enriched by inventions and borrowings. Nor was the population of the European taiga zone homogeneous; by Sub- Boreal times Mongoloid, Lapponoid, Europeoid and hybrid types are represented in the graves.
Throughout the period here considered the Forest-folk remained food-gatherers. All indeed possessed domestic dogs which were some- times fed on fish,1 but nowhere were animals bred for food save in Eastern Sweden, where the hunter-fishers, perhaps inspired by the example of the B group herders (p. 178), kept pigs of native stock. On the Norwegian coasts, round the Baltic and along the shores of the White Sea the pursuit of aquatic mammals provided an important element in the food supply and evoked a specialized equipment of harpoons, ice-picks, and blubber-axes, while fishing was universally a major economic activity. Hence the most permanent settlements were 1 E.g. at PanfLlovo in Central Russia, JGAIMK., 106 (1935), 125.
203 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
close to the coast or along the shores of lakes and rivers. Even these— the so-called Dwelling-places (Bopladser)—seem mere encampments where not more than ten households congregated temporarily. Large cemeteries of 49 graves on Gotland1 and of 150 on Deer Island in Lake Onega2 do not necessarily imply large and permanent villages.
But despite their comparatively nomadic mode of life, all the hunter- fishers save those in Northern Norway made pots from Sub-Boreal times on, and these help to define local and chronological groups. From Sweden to Siberia indeed all pots were manufactured by the same technique of ring-building,3 all taper downward to a rounded base and all may be decorated with horizontal rows of pits, frequently combined with zones of comb-impressions.4 The whole ceramic family is therefore termed “pit-comb ware”. But west of the Baltic most
Fig. 103. 1, F.II pit-comb vase from Karelia (£); 2, vase of East Swedish style from Aland Islands (|); 3, flint figures from Volosovo (fa).
vases have a concave neck separated from the conical body by a shoulder, while farther east neckless ovoid vessels predominate. Within these branches variations in the technique and arrangement of the decoration demarcate stylistic groups and phases. In Sweden5 and Finland6 four consecutive styles can be arranged in chronological order by the relations of the coastal dwelling-places on which typical sherds occur to the receding shore of the Litorina Sea; for the land here was still rising, so that the higher a camp is above the present strand the older it should be. The Swedish scheme can be correlated with the
1 M. Stenberger, Das Grabfeld von Vdsterbjers auf Gotland (Stockholm, 1943).
a SA., VI (1940), 46-62; cf. Gerasimov, Litsa, 296-320; physically the population was mixed Europeoid and Mongoloid.
3 The techniques have been admirably described by Voyevodskii, SA., I (1935), 51-78.
4 Made at first with the curved and notched edge of a flat pebble, later with short- toothed bone combs figured by Voyevodskii, loc. cit.
6 Bagge, Acta Arch., XXII (1951), 56-88.
6 Ayrapaa, Acta Arch., I, 165-90, 205 ff.; he discusses correlations with Sweden in FM., LXII (1955), 26-50.
204 SURVIVALS OF THE FOREST CULTURE
subdivisions of the Northern Neolithic indicated in the last chapter and less precisely with the Finnish. An extension of the latter to North and Central Russia has been attempted by Finnish prehistorians, while Gurina1 has outlined a roughly parallel sequence based on observa- tions round Lake Onega and the White Sea. But other Russian authorities2 reject such generalizations and deny the extension of
pit-comb ware to the Urals altogether.3 Nevertheless, we shall apply the Finnish scheme to the whole region, using the expressions F.I, F.II, F.III, and F.IV to denote similar styles and to indicate relative positions in local sequences rather than contemporaneity throughout the zone, and assigning to F.O assemblages not associated with pottery that are probably pre-ceramic.
1 MIA., XX (1951), 77-140. 2 E.g. Foss, MIA., XXIX (1952); Briusov, Olerki.
3 Wrongly since good comb-ware is cited in SM., LVII (1950), 5-22.
205 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
F.O then denotes the Suomusjarvi culture, characterized by rough stone adzes (Fig. 104, 2) and slate points1 that in Finland appear in Atlantic contexts and do recur in the Urals, and assemblages of Magle- mosian types in North-West Russia similarly dated by Russian pollen- analysts.2 F.I pots, decorated with broad zones, sometimes of whipped- cord impressions, are reported from the Baltic coasts to Lake Onega and the White Sea and from one site in the Upper Dniepr basin.3 F.II would be well represented also in Central Russia and up to the Urals
2345 6
Fig. 105. Eastern Maglemosian types (£); 1-4, Esthonia, after Clark; 5, Ukraine;
6, leister from Ural peat bogs (£).
if it include stylized representations of aquatic birds.4 (Fig. 103, 1.) Subsequently local divergences are too great to allow of correlations presumably owing to the rise of Battle-axe cultures on the Baltic coasts and in Central Russia. But pit-comb ware of F.IV styles was still being made by hunter-fishers when a few socketed celts of Late Bronze Age types and even iron were reaching Finland and Northern Russia.
For fishing, leisters with bone prongs (Fig. 105, 6) more or less like the Maglemosian, were in use throughout our period from Norway
1 Also transverse arrow heads; SM., LIV (1947-48), 1-18; LVII (1950), 9.
2 Lower Veretye (Foss, MIA., XXIX), Pogostis£e, 1 (ibid., XX, 46); cf. Briusov, Ocerki, 28-31.
3 Mapped by Gurina, MIA., XX, 95.
4 MIA., XX (1951), iro, Gurina’s group 3; SM., LX (1953), 33-44—F.III!
206 SURVIVALS OF THE FOREST CULTURE
to Siberia. Fish-hooks of the Boreal Pemau type (Fig. 105, 5) survived too in North Russia and even on the Desna, but by the Sub-Boreal were supplemented throughout the zone by composite implements with a notched shank of stone or bone and a separate barb.1 But net- fishing was at least equally important.2
Of the Maglemosian hunting-equipment, slotted bone points survived everywhere, conical bone arrow-heads3 and the type of Fig. 105, 3 as far as the Urals and from F.O to F.IV. Flint tips for arrows and darts
Fig. 106. 1-3 Slate knives and dart-head, Sweden (£), 4-5 stone mace-heads, Finland
(£), and 6 slate pendant (|).
with little invasive retouch on the bulbar surface, occurring in F.O and F.I sites may be derived from the Swiderian and were copied in slate. Rare transverse arrow-heads4, found with the oldest F.I pottery in Finland and on early sites along the Oka, could be derived from the Ukraine as well as from the West Baltic. Bifacially trimmed arrow-heads, generally leaf-shaped, appear first in F.II and in F.III were translated into slate, as were older flint and bone types with a triangular or rhomboid cross-section (Fig. 106, 3). Rhomboid club-
1 SA„ III, 101; V, 44; cf. Clark, Ant. /., XXVIII (1928), 67-8.
2 Imprints of nets are often found on pit-comb ware, IGAIMK., ro6, 118.
3 Finds listed and mapped by Foss, MIA., XXIX (1952), 46; cf. TGIM., XXIX, 108 f.
4 FM., LXII, 30-3; Briusov, Olerhi, 58, 69.
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Hill and Michelsberg might also have arisen. Or it could be argued that on the now submerged coasts of the North Sea representatives of the Forest culture's coastal variant learned farming from pioneer Western immigrants. That too, however, makes excessive draughts on the unknown, since neither the Mesolithic coastal culture nor that of the Western pioneers is tangibly represented in the existing archaeo- logical record.
On the other hand, First Danubian farmers had demonstrably spread right to the Baltic coasts between the Oder and the Vistula and, west of the Elbe, had advanced into territories later occupied by First Northern farmers.1 In Denmark itself, while no Danubian settle- ments occur, stone implements of Danubian type have been found, some on Ertebplle sites.2 The First Northern long barrows could well be regarded as durable imitations of the external appearance of a Danubian I long house.3 Finally, the Triticum monococcum, demon- strably cultivated in Northern IA could hardly have reached Northern Europe save through the Danubian province. East of the Oder'— admittedly rather hypothetical—Forest hunter-fishers could have learned from the pioneer Danubian outposts to breed stock and till the soil.
Still, it remains possible that predominantly pastoral tribes without pottery, with no specialized kit of stone tools nor ideology expressed in funerary monuments or figurines of clay, pushed in through Vol- hynia from the south-east. But for such an invasion there is of course no positive evidence.
Middle Neolithic Northern Cultures on the Continent
During what corresponds to Northern Middle Neolithic, the West, South, and East groups of First Northern cultures in contact with surviving mesolithic groups and remnants of the Rossen, Jordanova, and Michelsberg cultures dissolved into a multiplicity of local groups, known mainly from grave-finds and distinguished primarily by ceramic peculiarities.
In the West group the Elbe-Weser culture carried on the traditions of burial in Huns' Beds and earth graves and of basketry vases. But Bell and S beakers found even in Huns’ Beds illustrate the increasing dominance of Beaker and Battle-axe folk over the First Northern elements, and also the late survival of the culture in Danubian III.
1 Potratz NNU., XV (1941), quoted by MilojSid, Chron., 97.
8 Glob, Acta Arch., X (1939), 132-9.
3 Sprockhoff, Megalithkultur, 10, emphasizes the similarity of such a long barrow to a "house with low-pitched gabled roof".
192 THE NORTHERN CULTURES
A gold armlet with expanded terminals from an earth grave at Himmels- pforten near Stade1 should in fact belong to Danubian IV.
The W alternienburg-Bernburg culture2 developed on the Lower Saale and in Havelland out of the local branch of First Northern, termed the Baalburg culture,3 through the so-called Salzmunder culture of MN.i.4 The angular vases, distinctive of Walternienburg i, obviously copy basketry models (Fig. 98), but in subsequent phases the basketry origin seems to have been forgotten. Pottery of this sort is found in simple pit-graves, grouped in small cemeteries, in mega-
Fig. 98. x, Walternienburg vases, 2, Latdorf drum, and Baalburg jug.
lithic cists or galleries, in Huns’ Beds with lateral passage and in cists of thin slabs. Axe-heads were made by preference of Wida shale from the South Hartz; the rest of the Walternienburg equipment seems to be derived indiscriminately from various Northern and foreign cultures. It includes double-axes of Passage Grave type, amber beads, crutch- headed pins, perhaps derived from the Pontic hammer-pins, and metal ornaments of Unetician type or bone copies of such. The culture, while beginning in Northern period III, lasts therefore well into Danubian IV.
In part of the areas formerly occupied by the East and South groups
1 NNU., VII, 50; X (1936), 22.
2 Childe, Danube, 133-9; Sprockhoff, Megaliihkultur, 106-16.
2 Grimm, Mannus, XXIX (i937)> *86 ft.
4 JST., XXIX (1938), 20 ff. For the culture sequence in Central Germany, see Mildenberger, Studien zum Mitteldeutschen Neolithikum (Leipzig, 1951); Behrens, JMV. (1953), 105; Fischer, Festschr. d. Rom-Germ. Zenfralmuseums, III (Mainz, 1953), 175.
N 193 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
emerged the culture typified by and named after the Globular Amphora.1 The type-vase, like the other vessels habitually associated with it, is clearly a copy of leather models and is always decorated in a very distinctive manner round the neck, with fillets hanging over the shoulder (Fig. 99). The characteristic vases are accompanied by small trapeze-shaped axes and chisels of flint, frequently of the banded variety mined in Galicia, transverse and tanged arrow-heads, bored
Fig. 99. Bone girdle-clasp, Podolia (£), and globular amphorae, Saxo-Thuringia
and Podolia (£).
teeth and boars’ tusks, amber beads and, east of the Oder, ornate bone girdle-clasps. Antler axes, double-axes of stone, flint knives and other articles were occasionally borrowed from contemporary groups. Ring- pendants of bone and other ornaments characteristic of the Scan- dinavian long cists, and bronze rings and spirals demonstrate the sur- vival of the culture during period IV.
The makers of these vases might be interred, extended, in simple trench graves forming cemeteries of not more than twelve graves, cremated, or buried, generally squatting, in collective tombs, containing as a rule not more than seven corpses and generally less. The collective
1 Sprockhoff. Megalithkuttur, 120-30; Mark-Brandenburg, 108; JST., XXVIII (1938).
I94 THE NORTHERN CULTURES
tombs are sometimes megalithic cists or large cists made of thin slabs. The latter are often divided into two compartments, sometimes by a porthole slab.
The principal concentration of Globular Amphorae is in the Saale- Elbe region and Havelland, but they extend northward to Riigen, southward into Bohemia, and eastward through Galicia into Volhynia and Podolia. In Bohemia1 Globular Amphorae are sometimes found on hilltops in fortified settlements, but even in Volhynia and Podolia they are normally found alone in characteristic slab-cists, subdivided and containing up to six skeletons.2 Even the pottery from the cists, divided by porthole slabs, at Novosvobodnaya in the Kuban valley (p. 153), is reminiscent of the Globular Amphorae.
Evidently these vases were made by swine-breeders who roamed about in small groups far and wide, presumably mainly as hunters and swineherds, but doubtless engaging in casual robbery and trade. They were thus agents in the distribution of amber, Galician flint, and even metal trinkets, but developed no specialized industries of their own that we can recognize.
In Holstein a Globular Amphora was associated with pottery of Northern Neolithic Hid or even IVa,3 while in Kuyavish graves Globular Amphorae represent the latest intrusions. An oft-quoted report of the association of a Globular Amphora with Danubian lb pottery at Klein Rietz is quite unreliable and intrinsically improbable.4 In the Danubian sequence they cannot be earlier than period III; the Bohemian sites that have yielded specimens belong at earliest to the Baden culture.
Kossinna derived the Globular Amphorae from those of the Danish dolmens and made them the symbols of his second wave of Indo- Germanic expansion from the West Baltic coasts. The culture they typify is still considered by all German writers “Nordic” and is now supposed to have developed between Elbe and Oder and thence spread eastward. But, if so, why did it not spread westward too? Forssander,5 on the contrary, suggested that the culture arose somewhere in the Pontic zone and that its authors introduced into Northern Europe not only Galician banded flint but also porthole cists, such as we have in fact met in Novosvobodnaya; presumably the idea then spread from Central Germany both to Sweden and to the Paris basin. In fact, it is not easy to derive the culture simply from the First Northern, but it remains essentially a culture of the woodland zone and its outposts in
1 Stocky1, Bohbme prehist., 128; Proc. Amer. Philos. Soc., LXXXI (1932), 380,
2 Levitskii, Antropolgiya, II (Kiev, 1928); Zapiski Vse-Ukrainskogo Arkh. Komitetu, I (Kiev, 1931); Briusov, Oie-rki, 220-3.
3 Offa, XII (1953), 8-9. 4 Germania, XXXIII (1955), 239.
195
5 Boolaxikultur, 174. DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
Volhynia are separated by a huge tract of steppe, bare of comparable finds, from the Caucasian group of porthole cists.
Sometimes associated with Globular Amphorae are curious tubular pots like Fig. 98, 2 (top), often embellished with crosses and other symbolic figures and generally interpreted on the strength of good ethnographic parallels as drums. Most come from the Elbe valley in Saxo-Thuringia and Bohemia, but they are not peculiar to any one culture; the jug from Latdorf is a Baalburg type and some Moravian drums1 were found in a Baden context.
We must accordingly imagine numbers of small groups, each dis- tinguished by peculiarities in pottery and sometimes also in burial rites or equipment, wandering about the North European plain simul- taneously. Especially in Central Germany, groups adhering respectively to Walternienburg, Globular Amphorse and Battle-axe traditions must have been not only contemporary but also in close spatial contact. And they must have encountered also Danubian peasants making stroke-ornamented ware and others making Jordanova pots to say nothing of makers of collared flasks and miscellaneous megalith- builders. It is not surprising that such groups frequently interchanged ideas—perhaps they intermarried; the wonder is,that they retained the individuality of their ceramic traditions so long. The number of distinct types of pottery tends to give a quite exaggerated idea of the density of population and the duration of Northern Neolithic III. Actually the several kinds of vases must have been made by relatively small and nomadic groups, several of which must have been living side by side. It is only by trying to arrange all groups in a sequence, which may really be valid at one particular site, that period III becomes inordinately inflated. But that it overlaps with Danubian IV may be once more demonstrated by the metal trinkets associated with Globular Amphorse and Walternienburg vases.2
The Northern Late Neolithic Period
During the fourth period of the Northern Stone Age the sharp contrast between Megalith-builders and Battle-axe folk began to break down in Denmark and Southern Sweden. Though each party still retained its traditional burial practices, there is little difference between the furni- ture of the Long Stone Cists, collective tombs that carry on the mega- lithic tradition, and that of the Upper (Separate) Graves of the Battle- axe population. But it is the culture of the latter that is dominant.
The area of settlement remains unaltered, but the population has
1 ar., vi (1954) • 652-8.
2 Bohm, Die altere Bronzezeit in der Mark-Brandenburg, 32.
196 THE NORTHERN CULTURES
perhaps increased: in Vastergotland there are 4266 relics belonging to period IV, as against 3106 from the preceding period.1 These figures further indicate that the Stone Cist period can hardly have been shorter than that of the Passage Graves. But the general economy remained unaltered. The importance of agriculture may be inferred from the number of flint sickles, curved in imitation of metal models.
Fig. ioo. Flint daggers (Denmark, £) and porthole cists (Sweden)- types of Montelius' IV.
But weapons are still the most prominent relics. The flint axes now regularly imitate metal axes with a splayed blade; but the faces are seldom polished; indeed, polished flint axes made in period III were sometimes flaked all over for use in period IV. Battle-axes were still used, but are less shapely and less metallic. The classical weapon was the dagger, at first lanceolate in form but culminating before the end of the period in the famous fish-tailed form (Fig. 100).2 The arrow- heads are hollow-based rather as in the Copper Age of Iberia.
1 Forssander, Ostskcmdinavische, 162.
2 Ibid., 118, fig. 23; Brondsted, Danmarks, I, fig. 251.
197 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
The fish-tailed flint daggers certainly copy the bronze-hilted daggers of Central Europe. The models for these and other weapons were indeed imported from time to time. A certain number of bronzes from Italy, Central Europe, and Britain have survived from this period, stray or in hoards. And before the period ended smiths may have been producing for a local market in Schleswig-Holstein and even Southern Sweden.1 To obtain metal for rearmament the northerners had to rely chiefly on the export of amber. Every scrap of the precious gum was reserved for foreign trade, so it could no longer be used locally for charms. In the tombs the place of amber beads is taken by long pendants of slate, ring-pendants of stone or bone, and a few metal trinkets of Unetician type.1 2 But for all their sacrifices the Northerners’ equipment and economy remained essentially neolithic throughout period IV.
The practice of collective burial persisted, alongside burial in separate graves in the mass of the barrow. But the passage grave gave place to the long stone cist or gallery grave generally sunk in the ground. These are not, as Montelius thought, the result of a degeneration of the passage grave.3 One group might be treated as an evolution of the dolmen, but even so that evolution must have been inspired by new ideas from outside the Northern province. A group of Swedish cists, built of thin slabs and often subdivided by a porthole slab, must be derived from the Paris basin, presumably through the Westfalian group mentioned on p. 190. Even the splay-footed pot, characteristic of the French Horgen culture (p. 313), was reproduced in a variant in Sweden and Denmark.4 These new ideas must have been introduced by immigrant families joining the established communities. But the normal pottery of the period is represented by flower-pot forms imi- tating wooden models and decorated with rouletted zig-zag ribbons (Fig. 83, bottom left) perhaps derived from the Oder Battle-axe culture.
Imitations of Unetician pins and Unetician gold ornaments associated with even the early flint daggers show that the fourth period of the Northern Stone Age did not even begin till the Early Bronze Age was well established in Central Europe and in Britain. Though metal- workers and traders were spreading northward, the Northern Stone Age outlasted Danubian IV. In Denmark and Scandinavia the Bronze Age proper begins first in the Middle Bronze Age of Hungary and Britain.5 Till that date metal was too scarce for bronze weapons to be
1 Forssander, 95 f., 116 if.; Kersten, Nordischen Bronzezeit, 98; Broholm, Danmarks Bronzsalder, 2 (1944), 30 ff.
2 Nordmann, “MegaJithic Culture”, 44.
3 Forssander, Ostskandinavische, 114, 140, 156; Brondsted, Danmarks, 290.
4 AsA., XL (1938), 14.
6 Forssander, Ostskandinavische, 176, 196; Kersten, Nordischen Bronzezeit, 100.
198 THE NORTHERN CULTURES
buried with even the richest chief. And one of the earlier graves fur- nished with products of the local Northern bronze industry (at Lies- biittel in Schleswig-Holstein) contained an imported spear-head of a type characteristic of Middle Bronze Age 2 in Britain,1 while British palstaves of the same typological age are included in contemporary Danish hoards.2 If the preceding phase of the British Bronze Age be correctly dated to the fifteenth century by the fayence beads then imported (p. 339), Northern Neolithic IV must have lasted till 1400 b.c. in the sense that till then metal weapons were not normally deposited in native graves in Denmark, Southern Sweden, and the adjacent parts of North Germany. A segmented fayence head was, however, found in a grave of Bronze Age form in North Jutland.3
The Saale-Warta Bronze Age
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DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
axes, imitating Aegean metal models transmitted up the Danube thoroughfare (Fig. 95, 4), flint daggers, disc-shaped mace-heads of Danubian origin and transverse flint arrow-heads.
The earlier pots, including funnel-necked beakers, are decorated with patterns executed with whipped or braided cords and arranged vertic- ally or in panels, thus carrying on the Early Neolithic traditions.1 Still in the settlement of Tr0ldebjerg the distinctive innovations of deeply cut or stamped incisions in what Sophus Muller called “the grand
Fig. 95. Pottery (f, ?$•), double-axe (£), and arrow-head (^) from Danish Passage Graves.
style” and even cardial decoration (p. 353) already appear and with them new Danubian forms—the pedestalled bowl and the socketed ladle.2 In a later settlement, like Blandebjerg,3 phase Illb, the tech- nique of deep incision is completely dominant and is used to form basketry patterns on angular vases, inspired by basket models (Fig. 95,1) and derived from North-West Germany or the early Walternien-
1 I follow the division established on the basis of settlement finds by Mathiassen in Acta Arch., XV (1944), 89-97. rather than that of Eckholm, Real., IX, 42; cf. now Lili Kaelas, Fv. (1951), 352-7.
2 These ceramic type'. -:er to Danubian II in Hungary and Moravia, may
have reached Denmark 1 , the Upper Elbe-Oder region and, if so, would not
justify a synchronism between Northern Ilia and Danubian II as suggested by Schwabedessin, Offa, XII (1953), 58-64; cf., Milojfiid, Germania, XXXIII (1955), 401-4.
3 Winther, Blandebjerg (Rudkabing, 1940).
184 THE NORTHERN CULTURES
burg group of Central Germany. Next in IIIc the profiles are rounded off (Fig. 95, 2) and rouletted lines, presumably derived from the Bell- beakers (p. 227), replace the cardial technique in shading. Finally, in phase Hid the shapes are further simplified while simple incision or stab-and-drag lines were preferred to rouletted ones for the sparing decoration. This, however, includes oculi motives (Fig. 95, 3), recalling the Copper Age of Almeria.
Of the domestic pots, 50 per cent were decorated in Ilia at Trplde- bjerg, but the percentage had fallen to 4 per cent at Lindp in Hid. Still, at all times some vessels were ornamented with pits in the native Ertebplle tradition, indicating how large a proportion of the old popu- lation was absorbed in the new farming societies.1 Yet of course un- absorbed groups of food-gatherers survived.
As in Early Neolithic times, a non-megalithic branch of the First Northern1 2 culture survived in the succeeding period. But among the better-known Megalith-builders, soon after the beginning of Northern III,3 came in the practice of collective burial in a megalithic passage grave. The latter cannot be regarded as an independent development from the dyss—such tombs were still used—as Montelius’ disciples have contended, but reflects fresh influence from the West, explicitly imitating the corbelled tholos of the Atlantic coasts (p. 215). The earliest passage graves, standing closest to the models, are polygonal chambers sometimes with a cell attached, entered through a long passage and covered with a circular mound. In later versions the chamber is elongated at right angles to the passage. Passage graves served of course as family vaults. Some contain as many as a hundred skeletons. But in others the earlier interments with their gear had been removed and reburied outside the vault to make room for subsequent burials. Votive offerings continued to be deposited in bogs during Northern III, and by this phase, if not before, there is evidence fora cult of the axe. But at no time did the manufacture of female figurines in any durable material form part of First Northern ideological activity.
In Middle Neolithic II or III a new group of warlike herdsmen, the Battle-Axe folk, had invaded Jutland (p. 159), while kindred groups occupied the Danish islands. Then bands of hunter-fishers4 from the Scandinavian peninsula began crossing the Belts to win raw flint which they traded far into Sweden and Norway. They were armed with heavy
1 Forssander, "Gropomerad Megalithkeramik”, Arsberattelse (1930-31), 10-30.
2 Becker, Acta Arch., XXV (1954), 22-5.
3 Kaelas, Fv. (1951), 352-7; Bagge and Kaelas, Acta Arch., XXII (1951), 118; Becker, Acta Arch., XXV 55-66; Berg, “Klintebakken”, Medd. Langelands Mus, (Rudk0bing, 1951)*
* Becker, Aarb0ger (1950), 155-251.
185 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
bows from which they could shoot the curious arrow-heads of Fig. 95, 5. The latter may ultimately he derived from the mesolithic Games point, but immediately seem to be translations of bone models; for they have a triangular cross-section more appropriate to bone than to flint work.
Imported objects or copies thereof found, sometimes in stratified horizons, in passage graves establish the chronological relations of Northern Neolithic III with cultural sequences in other provinces. A Bell-beaker, probably of Bohemian manufacture,1 thus provides a synchronism between Northern IIIc and a late phase of Danubian III; the metal ware from Bygholm, if of Danubian origin, should not be very much earlier in the same period. The contemporary fruitstands and socketed ladles, made locally in the North, cannot then be con- temporary with their Danubian II analogues, and are in fact associated with handled cups and tankards derivable from Baden and Bodrog- keresztur types. At the same time the hammer-pin establishes a quasi- synchronism with the Middle Kuban and Catacomb phases in South Russia.
The First Northern Culture on the Continent and Its
Origin
The West Baltic cultures whose development during the local Early and Middle Neolithic stages has just been surveyed were just regional variants of a wider culture the unity of which has been typified for prehistorians by the ubiquity in one form or another of the Funnel Beaker. As this vase does not yield a euphonious culture name in English and still less in French, and as almost any open-mouth bowl— even the "Arpachiya milk bowl" of Mesopotamia in the fourth mil- lennium1 2—could be called a funnel-beaker (!)—I have substituted the term "First Northern".
This First Northern culture is far less homogeneous than the Starcevo, First Danubian, or Tripolye culture. In addition to the Northern province whose diversity has just been disclosed in the last two sec- tions, Eastern, Southern, and Western provinces have been recognized since 1912 but are even less unitary and less fully explored than the Northern. Yet certain distinctive peculiarities other than ceramic are common to all four. Everywhere the subsistence economy was mixed farming combined with hunting and gathering, though there may have been the variations in animal husbandry that pollen-analysis alone
1 Nordmann, "Megalithic”, 122; Glob, Danshe Oldsager, II, 119, 196; cf. Acta Arch., XXV, 80.
2 Childe, NLMAE., pi. XVI, a.
186 THE NORTHERN CULTURES
has revealed in Denmark and more hunting in the Continental than in the Peninsular provinces. In the South province, positive evidence for cultivation with the aid of an ox-drawn plough is provided by a clay model of a pair of yoked oxen from Kreznica Jara near Lublin.1 But it cannot be proved that plough cultivation was an original trait and not a secondary borrowing from, for instance, Baden neighbours. Horse bones have been reported from many settlements but may have belonged to game animals1 2 since wild horses had roamed the North European plain since Pre-Boreal times (p. 9). Centrally perforated clay discs,3 about 4 cm. in diameter, may represent model wheels rather than spindle whorls, but no vehicles survive.
Hunters used arrows, armed normally with transverse heads but occasionally also with lozenge-shaped points, and doubtless clubs. Flint was preferred for axes, but in the East and South provinces these do not have the rectangular cross-section favoured in the North and West, but resemble Fig. 92, 3. The material was extensively traded from Riigen, and in Galicia banded flint was won by regular mining,4 while the village on Gawroniec Hill can properly be described as an axe-factory.5
Though a trade in flint had been thus early organized, the organiza- tion did not extend to the distribution of metal, which, though known, was very little used. So, too, amber ornaments were occasionally worn, but only in quantities that could have been obtained from local moraines supplemented by irregular barter. Warlike behaviour is abundantly attested by stone battle-axes, usually of the polygonal type and always with symmetrically splayed blades in contrast to the drooping blades of Battle-Axe cultures.6
In pottery, divergent modifications in the form and decoration of the ubiquitous funnel-beakers, collared flasks, and amphorae illustrate divergence of taste between local groups and influences from other societies. So in the South group the attachment of strap handles or nipple feet to flasks and beakers, and still more the flanged character of the handles (Fig. 96, i),7 might have been suggested by Baden. Basketry ornament, popular in the West group, might be inspired by Rossen or by the basketry vessels of an hypothetical pre-existing
1 Z Otchlani Wiekow, XVIII (1949). 184; WA., XVII, 120.
2 WA., XVII (1950), 228; cf. Germanenerbe, IV (1939), 240; Hanfiar, Das Pferd, 34-7.
2 WA., XVII, pi. XXXV, 1.
4 WA., VII, 53-4; Krukowski, Krzemionki Opatowskie (Warszawa, 1939). Dawna
Kultum, IV (Wroclaw, 1955) 204.
6 WA., XVII, 143.
0 Jazdrzewski, “Kultura Puhardw Lejkowatych w Polsce” (Bibliotheka Prehist., 2 (Poznan, 1936), 365-8.
* Cf. also WA., XVII, pis. XXXVII-XLI.
187 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
hunter-fisher population. But, as in Denmark, fruitstands and socketed ladles must be derived ultimately from Danubian II.
In the ideological domain, votive deposits in bogs are reported at least from the East group. Female figurines were nowhere manu- factured, but figures of animals were sometimes modelled in clay in the South group, as in the Baden cultural province. The characteristic burial rite everywhere was to inter a single corpse extended in an earth grave—i.e. on the ground surface surrounded by a kerb of boulders.1
Fig. 96. Furniture of a grave at Zastow (f), and collared flask from grave at
Nalenczow (£).
But, save in the South group, some persons—perhaps only “chiefs"— were interred in stone or perhaps wooden chambers under long or round barrows. In the East group the Kuyavish graves of Western Poland1 2 must have been wedge-shaped mounds, up to 80 m. in length, bordered with stone kerbs and containing the burial near the broader east end (Fig. 97). West of the Oder,3 trapeze-shaped mounds of more modest dimensions enclose a cist of slabs without entrance passage (such are termed long dolmens). In the West group4 long oval or rectangular mounds bordered with large boulders covered at first closed chambers and later chambers as long as the barrow generally, provided with a short entrance passage in the middle of one long side, and popularly termed Huns’ Beds. These North-West German and Dutch passage graves were collective tombs, presumably inspired by
1 Jazdrzewski, op. cit.; for Holland, van Giffen in Drenthe (1943), 435.
2 W. Chmielewski, ‘‘Zagadanie Grobowcdw Kujawskich” (Biblioteka Muz, Archeol., 2), L6dz, 1952. He regards them as collective tombs, but the maximum number of interments recorded was ten and the skeletons were not buried together in a single chamber.
3 Sprockhoff, Megalithkultur, 25-31.
* Ibid., 59 fif.; van Giffen, Hunebedden.
188 THE NORTHERN CULTURES
Fig. 97. Kuyavish grave, Swierczyn. After Koziowski.
189 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
the same ideology as their Danish-Swedish counterparts under round barrows. They contain, like the latter, fruitstands and socketed ladles, decorated with basketry patterns, but also collared flasks similarly decorated.
Thus in the West group contradictory chronological conclusions could be drawn from the tomb types and their furniture. On the typology established for the North group, the collective tombs, the basketry ornament on the pottery, and the fruitstands and socketed ladles would be MN., the collared flasks EN.1 Did the innovations reach North-West Germany and Holland from the Atlantic coasts and the Danubian province before they reached Denmark and Sweden? That would be a priori likely. But still farther south in Westfalia and Hesse collared flasks appear in long cists with porthole entries identical with those of the Paris basin (p. 312) and of Sweden in LN. times.1 2 Now the slabs of the cist at Ziischen, Hesse, are carved and the carvings seem to include representations of ox-carts.3 On the other hand, among the sparse ceramic finds, two tombs are said to have yielded minute sherds of Rossen pottery.4 These sherds, if really part of the tomb furniture, would accord with the collared flasks in making these West German long cists EN. in terms of the Northern sequence. But then they would be a whole period earlier than the LN. Swedish tombs of identical plan!
Now, since in 1910 Kossinna purported to explain the distribution of funnel-beakers, collared flasks, and amphorse on the Continent as the result of an expansion of Ur-Indogermanen from Denmark, it has been tacitly assumed that the Continental cultures characterized by these vases are later than their nearest Danish analogues of Northern II (EN.C). Such a relation may still hold good for the West group. But the imported disc from a Neolithic II grave at Salten (p. 180) now proves that the South group was by then already established between the Warta and the Oder. So there is no longer any reason to doubt that the long barrows covering dolmen-like chambers and earth graves furnished with funnel-beakers, collared flasks, and amphorse in Poland and North-Eastern Germany were in fact substantially contemporary with the Danish dolmens and earth graves of EN.C. In this case the analogues to Early Neolithic A-B vases, found-—twice under long barrows—between the Vistula and the Elbe, may be as old as the
1 The flint celts too are thin-butted, but diverge from the Danish forms, Sprockhoff, NNU., IV (1930), 36.
2 Sprockhoff, Megalithkultur, 59 f.; cf. Westfalen, XIX (1934), 150-7.
3 Mannus, XXV (1933), 131-2; Kuhn, Die Felsbilder Europas (1952), 153-4.
* Sangmeister, Die Glockenbecher . . . (Die Jungsteinzeit in Nordmainischen Hessen, III), Melsingen, 1951, p. 73 and n. 246.
I90 THE NORTHERN CULTURES
Danish specimens. Thus, though best known from the West Baltic coasts, the First Northern culture in its earliest manifestations may already have occupied the whole area from the North Sea to the Upper Oder, from the Vistula to the Elbe. “The origin of the First Northern culture” thus means the origin of this widespread complex.
Outside this region no single culture is known that exhibits all the distinctive traits—ceramic forms, battle-axes, arrow-heads, burial rites, bog offerings—enumerated above. On the other hand, survivals of mesolithic Forest culture traditions (transverse arrow-heads, tranchet axes, antler axes, extended burials, etc.) are conspicuous in the First Northern neolithic culture. Since even in Boreal times the Forest culture must have spread more widely on the Continent than the surviving bone tools can show, and a local invention of pottery cannot be excluded, the archaeological content of the First Northern culture could be explained as an autochthonous development of that vigorous and adaptable culture save for the cereals and domestic stock. The question of its origin would then be reduced to this: Whence did the Forest-folk acquire these and learn the arts of cultivating and breeding them?
Of course, pottery might provide some clue. Hinsch1 has convincingly stated the case for deriving First Northern pottery from the Western neolithic. Becker,1 2 too, would admit Western—or more precisely Michelsberg—inspiration in his B-group vases. Troels-Smith,3 how- ever, insists that the rural economy as well as the pottery of the A group agrees with that of the Michelsberg and Cortaillod cultures. Vogt,4 on the contrary, has contended that Michelsberg itself is not a Western culture but an offshoot of the First Northern. His thesis has been substantially strengthened by the subsequent publication5 of baking plates, distinctive of the Michelsberg culture, as an integral element in the First Northern from its earliest, A, phase. Indeed, the striking similarity of British and Breton long barrows (p. 325), for which no satisfying explanation has yet been found in South-Western Europe, to Kuyavish graves and long dolmens6 might provide an argu- ment for admitting at least a First Northern element even in the Wind- mill Hill and Armorican Early Neolithic cultures. Still, the First Northern is not an offshoot of any known Western culture.
That is not to say it could not spring from some earlier and less- specialized assemblage from which such Western cultures as Windmill
1 Universitets Oldsaksamling Arbok (Oslo, 1951-53), 140-60.
a Aarbsger (1947), 262.
3 Ibid. (1953). 61.
4 Acta Arch., XXIV (1953), 174-86.
5 Aarb0ger (1954).
6 Antiquity, XXIII (1949), 130-5; PPS., XXI, 96-101.
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CHAPTER X
THE NORTHERN CULTURES
The coveted amber of Jutland, whose magic virtue was appreciated as far away as Greece by the sixteenth century, attracted a commerce which brought fresh ideas and foreign manufactures to Denmark. Thus stimulated, the local farmers developed an exceptionally rich culture on the fertile morainic soils left by the recent retreat of the ice-sheets. At the same time extensive peat bogs provide unusually favourable conditions for the preservation of relics and for the recon-
struction of the environment in which they were made and used. Finally, since the beginning of the nineteenth century Swedish, and still more Danish, antiquities have been systematically studied by successive generations of gifted investigators. By 1812 Thomsen had established the system of the Three Ages, still used by all prehistorians, and had divided the prehistoric period of the North into Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages. By 1870Worsaae had distinguished an Earlier and a Later Stone Age that subsequently became Mesolithic and Neolithic respec- tively. Finally, Montelius divided the Northern Neolithic Age into four periods—Neolithic I, II, III, and IV—based on the typology of flint axes (Fig. 90) and megalithic tombs.
175 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
During the 1920s the existence of Montelius’ Neolithic I as an inde- pendent period was seriously questioned; for it was then represented solely by flint axes with pointed butts, found without context. The remaining periods were designated by the names of the megalithic tombs by which Montelius had characterized them—Dolmen (dyss, dos), Passage Grave (ganggrift, jcettestuer), and Stone Cist (hallkist) periods. But since 1945 Danish and Swedish prehistorians1 have adopted a triple division into Early, Middle, and Late Neolithic (EN, MN, and LN), each subdivided. The subdivision of Early Neolithic was originally based on the typology of the funnel-beaker—the most dis- tinctive vase in the dominant culture which is usually called after it, not at all euphoniously, the Funnel-Beaker culture (Tnchterbecher or Tragtbagre kultur—abbreviated TRB culture). But the subdivision of Early Neolithic had in practice the effect of re-establishing in somewhat different form a pre-Dolmen phase equivalent to Montelius' Neolithic I. Hence in the sequel his numeration will be retained albeit for the sake of brevity alone. Its correlation with other nomenclatures can be effected with the aid of the following table:
Montelius TRB Tombs Flint Axes, etc. Northern Neolithic 1 B Early Neolithic B Pointed-butted II C Dolmens Thin-butted a III J c d Middle Neolithic I II III IV Passage Graves Thick-butted IV Late Neolithic Stone Cists Daggers
Montelius’ typological system had been worked out on the basis of closed finds from the West Baltic coasts and is still substantially valid there, though no one now supposes that Dolmen, Passage Grave, and Long Cist mark stages in a self-contained evolution. But his disciples and imitators have clumsily extended his system beyond the regions for which it was devised and have used it as a frame of reference into which cultural phenomena in Central Europe, South Russia, and even Turkestan must be fitted! From a fog of misconceptions and distortions they have evoked a “Nordic myth”. The “Nordic” cultures, crystallized
1 Cf. P. V. Glob, Danske Oldsager, II (Copenhagen, 1952).
176 THE NORTHERN CULTURES
in Montelius’ II, would have expanded in periods III and IV till they reached the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Caucasus.1 These fantasies were never accepted in Denmark and have recently been emphatically rejected in Sweden and even Germany. An explicit refutation here is accordingly superfluous. None the less, it will be convenient to base our survey on the Danish and Swedish record which is incomparably more complete, though not necessarily longer or originally richer, than that from the Continent.
The Early Neolithic Period of the West Baltic
The first farmers to reach Denmark are represented by the bones of cows and sheep or goats and by sherds bearing impressions of one-corn, emmer, club, and dwarf wheats and of barley2 found in several votive deposits, in certain “Ertebolle kitchen middens”, and in one or two pure domestic sites, all of the Atlantic phase. In all cases the farmers’ archaeological personality is expressed in flat-bottomed funnel-beakers and amphorae of Becker’s A group. Troels-Smith3 insists that these pots are made by the same technique of ring-building as the standard Erteb0lle jars and lamps, though their walls are thinner, and are associated with the latter in many kitchen-middens. Hence he con- cludes that the Erteb0lle culture of Late Atlantic times was in fact the culture of the A group of First Northern Neolithic farmers.
Becker,4 on the contrary, in 1954 described a pure assemblage of A types—including flat clay discs or baking plates—from a site that was not a normal kitchen-midden (Fig. 91). So he maintains the con- trast between intrusive neolithic farmers and survivors of the older mesolithic population of hunter-fishers. In 1956, therefore, it would be premature for an English author to try and define too precisely the economy and the stone industries of the earliest or A group of neolithic farmers recognized on Danish soil. So much at least is certain.
About 2600 b.c. (according to a radio-carbon estimation) A farmers were cultivating cereals (including Triticum monococcum and the hexaploid club wheat Triticum compactum) and breeding domestic stock. The latter were not allowed to graze freely but were tethered by day and stalled at night, being fed during winter on leaves—a small decline in elm pollen, coinciding with the farmers’ appearance, has been attributed to the provision of winter fodder.5 In the kitchen-
1 E.g. N. Aberg in Das nordische Kutturgebiet, and Reinerth, Chronologie der jiingeren Steinzeit.
2 Helbaek in A arboger (1954), 202-4.
3 Aarbeger (1953), 5-62. 4 Becker, Aarbeger (i954> published in 1956), 127-97.
8 Aarb0ger (1953), 16-21.
m 177 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
middens, bones of game and fish still predominate. A few polished flint celts with pointed butts (Fig. 90,1) are the only notable additions to the mesolithic stone industry.
No graves attributable to phase A have been identified, but votive deposits in bogs give some indication of the current ideology. They include beside human and animal bones—presumably from sacrifices
Fig. 91. A-type funnel-beakers (bottom), amphora, “baking plate,” etc. (|).
After Becker.
—amber beads, the magic value of the resin having been recognized even in Boreal times.
Amphorse and funnel-beakers like the Danish A type have been found in North-Eastern Germany and Poland.1 They may mean that the First Northern culture in its A form extended over a wide area of the wooded plain south of the Baltic.
In Denmark these cultivators with their tethered stock were followed by other farmers with larger herds who burnt wide tracts of forest for pasture and plots and cultivated thereon emmer wheat and barley. A layer of ashes in the bogs, followed by a sharp decline in all tree pollen, marks the arrival of these B-group farmers.1 2 Doubtless their
1 Aarboger (1947), 205 ff.; (1954), 168-9.
2 Iversen, “Landnam. i Danmarks Stenalder”, Dansk. Geol. Undersog., R. II, No. 66
(1941).
178 THE NORTHERN CULTURES
flocks and herds grazed freely in the clearings, but their masters cannot have remained very long at any one place since in time the forest regenerated. Nor did they drive out their precursors. At Havnelev1 in Zealand a settlement of B farmers is marked by numerous rubbish pits. In them the bones of cows, sheep or goats, and pigs preponderate over those of game animals. Polished thin-butted axes were used side by side with the mesolithic flake axes. The blade tools were inferior to the Erteb0lle types, but polygonal battle-axes of polished stone (Fig. 92) were already in use. The funnel-beakers were] sometimes decor-
Fig. 92. Tongued club-head, Denmark, polygonal battle-axe, Jordanova (•$?), and flint axe of Eastern type (J).
ated with cord impressions below the rim (Fig. 79, 5), but were round- bottomed, as were the contemporary amphorae and collared flasks. But not far away on the shore at Strandegaard Erteb0lle folk were still living almost exclusively by hunting, fishing, and collecting with a mesolithic equipment.
Similarly at Siretorp in Scania2 herding folk, using funnel-beakers adorned with cord impressions and sometimes exhibiting com imprints, twice encamped on the same strip of sandy shore. Between the two periods of herder settlement, Erteb0lle hunter-fishers had occupied the site. To the B farmers may be attributed a grave at Virring in Jutland,3 large enough to contain onlya single contracted adult skeleton, but no bones survived.
1 Mathiassen, Aarb0ger, 1940, 3-16.
2 Bagge and Kjellmark, SV'?’Jv- '-V-tt- 'T939); but cf. Acta Arch., XXII
(1951), 88 ff., where the first ; 1 : to Northern II=E,N.C.
3 Br0ndsted, Danmarks, I, 130, 338.
179 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
Pottery appropriate to the B group of First Northern farmer-herders has been found all over Denmark and right across Southern Sweden to the east coast.1 On the Continent, B vases are not readily dis- tinguishable from those just attributed to the A group.
In Northern Neolithic II-—Early Neolithic C the First Northern culture even in Denmark dissolves into several local sub-cultures. All are characterized by the same type-fossils—funnel-beakers, collared flasks, amphorae, thin-butted flint axes, polygonal battle-axes, etc., but are mutually distinguished by divergences in pot forms and decoration and by burial rites. By this time, too, Denmark and Southern Sweden themselves form only quarters of a larger province eventually extending from the Vistula to the lower Rhine.
Everywhere farming provided the basis of life, but some Danish groups followed the practice of their A ancestors in animal husbandry while others may have grazed stock freely, as in the B phase. By judicious burning of scrub, using the ashes as fertilizers, substantial communities could live together for a generation or more. The village of Barkaer in Jutland2 consisted of fifty-four one-roomed houses arranged on either side of an open space in two continuous rows, each 85 m. long.
The farmers still used thin-butted axes of flint with rectangular cross-section and mounted directly on wooden handles, but now also others of fine-grained rock, sometimes splayed at the blade.3 Numerous weapons survive—arrows, their shafts polished on stone straighteners like Fig. 113 and tipped with transverse flint heads, polygonal battle- axes, and tongued club-heads like Fig. 92. The stone celts and battle- axes with splayed blades evidently copy metal models. In fact, many minute scraps of copper were observed at Barkaer while a con- temporary earth-grave at Salten in Jutland4 contained a bossed copper disc that can be exactly matched in the graves of Brze£d Kujawski (p. 123). This import not only established an exact synchronism between Northern II (EN.C.) and early Danubian III, but also indicates the source of the metal, already known in Northern Neolithic II, albeit only as a luxury material.
The pottery of Neolithic II (Fig. 93) is a development of that made in Neolithic I, but is now more often decorated with pits, ribs, or im- pressions of whipped cords so as to produce vertical patterns. Variations in techniques and pattern serve to distinguish three or four local
1 Florin, “Vr&-Kulturen”, Kulturhistonska Studier tillagnade N. Aberg (Stockholm, 1938).
2 FNA. (1949).
> 3 Nordmann, "Megalithic”, fig. 63.
1 Aarb0ger (1947), 250-5.
l80 THE NORTHERN CULTURES
groups.1 As charms and ornaments amber beads, sometimes decorated in the drill-technique inherited from Maglemose times and strung together in necklaces of several strands kept apart by spacers, were worn.
One classical method of disposal of the dead, or perhaps only of deceased chiefs, which gives its name to the whole period in Denmark,
Fig. 93/Pottery from Danish dysser (J).
was ceremonial burial in a megalithic dolmen or dyss. In its oldest form a dyss is a small chamber formed by four uprights supporting a single large capstone, and less than 6 ft. long by 2 ft. wide.2 Such small chambers sound as if they were designed to contain a single corpse only; though as many as six skeletons3 have been found in one, they cannot rank as collective tombs. Later, one end-stone is generally lower than the remaining uprights, leaving an aperture through which subsequent burials might be introduced after the completion of the tomb. A rare and archaic-looking variant of the dolmen is an enclosure of inward-tilted slabs not supporting a capstone, but converging,4 just as in Portugal. Small polygonal chambers with a rudimentary passage and rectangular chambers with more than two side-stones have also yielded relics of the kind described above and are accordingly classed as dysser by Danish authorities. Dolmens of all types were normally partially buried by mounds, sometimes round but often long and rectangular and demarcated by a peristalith of large boulders.
The distribution of dolmens along the Danish coasts indicates a
1 Ibid., 141 ff.
8 Nordmann, "Megalithic Culture", 26.
l8l
2 Aarb0ger (1941), 63-8; (1947), 266. 4 Aarb0ger (1936), 1-8. DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
population of accomplished seafarers. Indeed, both the basis of the new economy and the metal tools that were imitated in stone might have reached Denmark by sea. But no regular supplies of metal were obtained by this or any other route. The economy of the dolmen- builders is typically neolithic though they lived when societies in Central Europe or Britain were already in a Copper Age.
But even in Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein people, perhaps descendant of the B group herders, might be buried in non-megalithic earth graves accompanied by a typical “dolmen” equipment of thin- butted axes, collared flasks, etc.1 In such burials one or rarely two corpses were laid extended on the ground surrounded by a setting of boulders, as in Fig. 94, and sometimes covered with an elongated
mound (in contrast to “Battle-axe” burials, contracted in a pit under a round barrow).
In Northern III about the time of the last marine transgression new influences affected both the architecture of the megalithic tombs and their furniture. The spacious passage graves that partly replaced the dolmens were used as collective sepulchres by clans for several genera- tions; for they may contain as many as a hundred skeletons2 and pottery of several styles the succession of which serves as a basis for the subdivision of the period. But owing presumably to the need for fresh land as old plots became exhausted, the settlements were shifted
1 Forssander (1935-36), 2 if.; NNU., X (1936), 22 1; Aarboger (1936), 15; (1947), 141 ff.; Brandsted, Danmarks, I, 162, 344.
2 Nordmann, "Megalithic Culture”, 28.
182
Fig. 94. Grave 28 at Jordanova. After Seger.
The Danish Passage Graves THE NORTHERN CULTURES
more often and yield as a rule pottery of only one stylistic phase.1 A settlement of the first phase at Tr0ldebjerg on Langeland2 consisted of several apsidal huts, 13 to 18 ft. long, and a continuous row of rectangular buildings with a total length of 71 m. Two of these were certainly houses, each about 28 m. long and apparently subdivided so that one end was occupied by humans, the other by cattle. The gabled roof, about 11 ft. high, sloped down to the ground on one side and on the other rested on a wall only 6 ft. high. (Obviously these houses have nothing to do with the iEgean and Balkan megaron type but derive directly from the Barkaer form.) They could accommodate a household larger than the "natural family”—i.e. a clan—whose deceased members might rest in the spacious passage grave.
Hunting was now relatively unimportant. Hexaploid wheat in addition to one-corn, emmer, and flax were certainly cultivated, but, as in England, wheat was far more popular than barley.
Specialization in industry is attested by the existence of communities of flint-miners and by specialized tools such as gouges for the carpenters. Trade was sufficiently developed to secure for the Passage Grave builders a certain number of metal tools and ornaments. A hoard found in Bygholm in Jutland3 and dating from the very beginning of the period, comprised four flat axes, a dagger with an imitation midrib on one face, like Fig. 132, 5, and two arm-cylinders. A distribution map of copper axes in Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein suggests that they were imported by sea, though most of them must have come from Hungary.4 Halberds have a similar distribution to axes and certainly were brought by sea from Ireland;5 Amber was presumably the prin- cipal export bartered for metal and was very likely worked locally to form necklaces. Beads reached Brittany, Central France, and the Iberian Peninsula, and, as we saw, were common throughout Central Europe in Unetician times. In exchange the Danes obtained hammer- headed pins of Pontic type6 by phase III. But the supplies obtained by such barter were quite insufficient to allow metal even to compete with stone and bone. Even the ornaments imported are mostly inferred from bone imitations made locally.
The emergence of Battle-axe folk during the period (p. 161), com- bined with the increased competition for land as the population grew, intensified militarism. The outstanding weapons are stone double-
1 Mathiassen, Acta Arch., XV, 88; cf. Becker, ib., XXV, 50-66.
2 Winther, Treldebjerg (Rudk0bing), 1935, and Tillaeg, 1938.
3 Nordmann, *''T ?-•••i-'.;. (?'"’?‘?vre”, £g_ g0
4 Forssander, 6\> .? ; '• ?' . io, 51, etc., Kersten, Zur alteren nordischen Bronze-
zeit, 72, 98.
6 Arch., LXXXVI (1936), 277.
8 Aarb0ger (1929), 204.
183
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The Oder culture in Brandenburg shares with the Saxo-Thuringian the usual beaker, but is distinguished by the absence of amphorae and the presence of cylindrical ‘‘flower-pot” vases, sometimes with ledge- handles.1 Such are found in pit graves, occasionally under barrows and at least once containing red ochre, but also in slab cists of Central German type. Other grave goods include small battle-axes, flint adzes with a pointed-oval cross-section, and Danubian "plough-shares” as in Saxo-Thuringia. While occasionally associated with Globular Amphorae or Waltemienburg 3-5 pottery (p. 193), a few bronze orna- ments and Scandinavian flint daggers2 show that the Oder culture lasted well into period IV.
In the Marschwitz culture of Silesia and Moravia this persistence is more amply demonstrated. The graves contain flower-pots of Oder form, but these are accompanied by pouched jugs, decorated with cord-impressions, but of early Unetice shapes (Fig. 72, 1). With them go battle-axes made of Sobotka serpentine3 (Fig. 85, 3), rather like the Fatyanovo form but also wrist-guards, derived from the Beaker folk, and even bronze ornaments. The whole group occupies economic- ally as well as geographically an intermediate position between the Bronze Age Unetician culture of Bohemia and the still neolithic culture of the middle and lower Oder.
The Fatyanovo Culture4
In the forest zone of Central Russia the first reliable indications of the neolithic economy are afforded by bones of domestic cattle, swine, sheep, goats, and horses, and grain-rubbers from graves of the Fatya- novo cycle of cultures. These have been divided into three local groups which differ in age as well as in spatial distribution, by Kritsova-Grakova.6 The earliest is the Moscow group on the Oka and Kliazma, next the Yaroslav group on the Upper Volga to which the eponymous cemetery belongs. The Cuvas group on the lower Kama near the confluence of that river and the Oka with the Volga should begin latest.
The graves, never surmounted by barrows and normally containing one contracted skeleton, rarely a male and female together, occasionally cremations,6 form cemeteries of half a dozen to a score, and occur both
1 Sprockhoff, Mark-Brandenburg, 60 ff., 160; Mannus, XXVIII, 374.
2 Forssander, Ostskandinav., 60; Bolim, Bronzezeit Mark-Brandenburg, 30.
3 PrzegA., VIII (1949), 256.
4 Tretyakov, IGAIMK., 106, 126-8; SA., II 32; cf. FM. (1924), x ff. Hausler, Wissenschaftliche Zts. d Martin-Luther Universitat, Halle-Wittenberg, V (1955-56), H. 1 (Arbeiten aus d. Inst. f. Vor- u. FrUhgeschichte, 5) gives a convenient German summary of the Russian literature.
5 KS., XVI (1947), 22-32. 9 Problemy GAIMK. (1934), Nos. 11-12,
l68 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?
in the low-lying basins, long occupied by the hunter-fishers, and also on the uplands right to the Volga-Oka watershed, where the gatherers had never settled- This extension is itself a symbol of the new economy since the uplands are better suited to tillage and grazing than the chilly vales,1 but it was possible only with aid of the polished flint celts that occur alike in men’s and women’s graves,2 since the new territory was densely wooded. At the same time bones of pike and teeth of bear, wolf, fox, lynx, and reindeer, as well as shells, used for ornaments, attest a persistence of the old economy of the Forest.
But now cattle-raising provided a prize for more serious warfare than the hunter-fishers had indulged in, and so the graves are furnished with an armoury of weapons strange to the older forest dwelling-places.
Fig. 87. Fatyanovo battle-axe and Finnish boat-axe ($).
Stone battle-axes accompany every male interment. The finest, the classical Fatyanovo axes (Fig. 87, 1) are confined to the Yaroslav group; some of the rest can be treated as degenerations of these,8 but at least one, from the Trusovo cemetery in the Moscow4 group, belongs to the heeled type proper to the Catacomb culture of the steppes. Another grave contained a pair of arrow-shaft straighteners,5 yet another a Pontic hammer-pin. In chieftains’ graves in the Yaroslav and Cuvas groups copper shaft-hole axes accompany or replace the stone weapons, but miniature clay battle-axes were buried with children in the Yaroslav group.8
Flint strike-a-lights with tinder too were sometimes7 buried with the dead. Perforated clay discs, some 5*5 cm. in diameter,8 are doubtless model wheels and attest familiarity with wheeled vehicles.
1 SA., II, 33-5. 2 TGIM., XII (1941), 125.
3 As by Ayrapaa, ESA., VIII, 16-23. 4 S^4., IV, 302. 5 SA., XXII, 120.
3 TGIM., VIII, 63. Showing that the models from Mikhalic and Tripolye sites are not necessarily ritual objects!
» TGIM., XII, 132. 8 SA., VI, 79.
169 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
The numerous pots tend to be globular, provided with flat bases, sometimes ornamented, and distinct necks, but never with handles; so none could be called an amphora! In the Moscow group early vases are ornamented with cord impressions (Fig. 88, i); elsewhere combs or other stamps were used.
3
Fig. 88. Fatyanovo pottery of the Moscow, Yaroslav, and Cuvas groups.
Peaceful if irregular commerce brought the Fatyanovo warriors occasional amber beads,1 silver earrings, disc-pendants, lock-rings, cuff armlets, and neck-rings of copper.
In the Vaulovo cemetery two rich graves, each containing male and female skeletons buried together and furnished with copper shaft-hole axes, surely belong to chieftains. Graves in the same cemetery, con- taining respectively the skeleton of a boar and that of a kid, suggest to Krainov2 the totems of two clans.
A clue to the relative position of the Central Russian cultures in the general sequence is given by the Catacomb types; they establish a partial synchronism between the Moscow group and the Catacomb phase on the Steppes. Kritsova-Grakova8 uses the cuff-armlets from Mytiscensk to establish a synchronism between the Yaroslav group and Unfetice; though the agreement is not exact, Danubian IV should be an upper limit for the Yaroslav group.
The copper axes from the Yaroslav cemeteries approximate closely to those included in the hoards found at Seima and Galic4 (Fig. 89). These presumably represent southern imports intercepted by the Fatyanovo population that must have controlled the fur trade so important in the first millennium B.c. But both hoards contain types that would be more appropriate to the srubno phase in the Pontic sequence. But by that time the Cuvas version of the Fatyanovo culture was developing into the fully metal-using Abasevo culture.
1 TGIM., VIII, 70. 2 TGIM., XII (1941). 119, 135-7.
* KS., XVI, 30. « ESA., II, 137 ff.
170 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?
Bader and other Russian prehistorians1 in the ’thirties regarded the Fatyanovo culture as a development of the native culture of local hunter-fishers to exploit the new sources of food made available by the introduction of cereals and domestic stock. These were admittedly introduced from outside into the woodland zone of Central Russia.
Anthropometric studies of the Fatyanovo populations by Trofimova2 have subsequently shown that the cultivators and stock-breeders themselves must be immigrants; for the skulls, Europeoid or Medi- terranean, are in sharp contrast to those of the autochthonous hunter- fishers, which are Lapponoid. Briusov3 proposes to derive the Moscow group at least from the Middle Dniepr culture. But, after all, the origin of the latter is not at all clear, and Briusov himself admits the possibility of a more western origin for the Yaroslav group. German and many other Western prehistorians, emphasizing—and perhaps exaggerating—the similarities of the classic Fatyanovo pots to Saxo- Thuringian and Globular Amphorae, have thence deduced an invasion of Central Russia by warriors from Central Germany, Scandinavia, or Sammland.4 But of course the Fatyanovo cultures are not mere trans- plantations of any one of the known western or southern Battle-axe cultures and "amphorae” are not necessarily derived from Saxo- Thuringia. The Fatyanovo battle-axes derive from East Poland.5
Fig. 89. The GaliS hoard, 1-4 (£).
1 SA., II, 30 ff.; Ill, 38 ; IGAIMK., 106, 100 ff.
2 Sovietskaya Etnografiya (1949), 3, 72; (1950), 3, 37.
3 Oierhi, 94.
171 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
Origin and Significance of the Battle-Axe Cultures
The cultures of several peoples that in historical times spoke Indo- European languages could plausibly be derived from those described in the preceding pages. The list could be further enlarged if cord- ornamented sherds from Greece, Macedonia, and Thrace (pp. 71, 96), and battle-axes from Troy and the Caucasus were accepted as evidence for kindred cultures in the Balkans and Anatolia. Hence, if the several cultures considered in this chapter be all provincial variants of one single culture, the latter could be identified with that of the hypothetical Indo-European parent stock, “Aryans” or “Wiros”.
Many prehistorians have in fact tried to derive all the distinct cultures from one primary culture whose expansion and local divergence should account for the emergence of the several distinct cultures that alone are presented in the archaeological record. By 1910 Kossinna1 had argued that the postulated primary culture developed in Jutland through the acculturation of Maglemosians by Erteb0lle immigrants and megafith-builders, and Aberg elaborated his thesis in 1918.1 2 From Jutland the bearers of the resultant neolithic culture—the Single Grave culture—would have spread across Central Europe to the iEgean and the Caucasus.
Danish prehistorians, however, are unanimous in regarding the Single Grave culture as intrusive in Jutland. Even German pre- historians, since the “Versailles Diktat” detached South Jutland from the Reich, have preferred to transfer the cradle of the Single Grave and other Battle-axe cultures, and so of the Indo-Europeans, to the more thoroughly Germanic soil of Saxo-Thuringia!3 There should be the focus from which the warriors radiated not only to the Balkans and the Ukraine but also to Sweden, Denmark, and Switzerland!
On the contrary, near fifty years ago J. L. Myres suggested reversing Kossinna’s migrations and deriving the Single Grave, Saxo-Thuringian, and other Battle-axe cultures from the Pontic steppes. Borkovskij4 pointed out how well the ovoid beakers from yamno graves could serve as prototypes for the Central and North European vases. Forssander5 6 inclined to think that the makers of Globular Amphorae (infra, p. 195), coming from the Caucasus and bringing with them the idea of the porthole cist, affected the development of the Central and North
1 “Ursprung und Verbreitung der Urfinnen und Urindogermanen”, Mannus, 1-11.
2 Das nordische Kulturgebiet (1918).
3 Most recently by Killian, Die Haffkiistenkultur (Bonn, 1955), who relies, in addition
to battle-axes, on the skeuomorphic pattern impressed or painted on amphorae.
* “Snurova keramika na Ukrajine,” Obzor IX (1930), cf. PA. (1933).
6 jBootaxtkultur, 174, 213.
X72 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?
European cultures, which, would still have been rooted in the Saxo- Thuringian. The discovery of Pontic hammer pins in a Danish passage grave of Northern IIIc and in more or less contemporary Corded Ware graves in Central Europe and Sammland, has provided some concrete, if by no means conclusive, evidence in favour of a Pontic origin. Still the Ochre Grave culture, the oldest concretely recognizable on the steppes, on the one hand does not exhibit even in germ all the dis- tinctive traits common to the Battle-axe cultures, and on the other hand contains elements not replicated in any of them. In a word, the Pontic steppes can offer a concrete ancestor for all no more than Jutland or Saxo-Thuringia.
A satisfactory explanation of the distribution of our battle-axes, of cord-ornamented vases, and of amphorae decorated like Figs. 42 and 84 in Central Europe, Central Russia, Greece, and the Troad, would be provided by Sulimirski's postulate of an early herding culture in the woodlands between the Vistula and the Upper Dniepr. The hypo- thetical cattle-breeders would, Sulimirski1 suggests, have used wood- and-leather vessels that, translated into clay, assumed the form and decoration of the amphorae. They expanded first to Central Russia, the East Baltic, and the Eastern Balkans, but to Jutland and Saxo- Thuringia only after adopting the practice of barrow-burial from Ochre Grave pastoralists who had advanced as far west as the head- waters of the Vistula, if not farther (p. 158). The main defect of Suli- mirski’s account is that the assumed East Polish-Byelo-russian culture is still not directly documented archseologically. But, after all, such documentation will be hard to find (p. 148), and the presumptive cradle-land is virtually unexplored.
Marxist prehistorians in the U.S.S.R. have rejected any explanation of the agreements between the several Battle-axe cultures in terms of migration or conquest. They would result from parallel or convergent developments of local societies in accordance with general laws of social-economic progress. In temperate Europe, with a neolithic equip- ment, pastoralism combined with hunting was the most productive rural economy, and with pastoralism are associated a patriarchal social organization, differentiation of status, and warfare. The Battle- axe cultures would represent “pastoral tribes separated out from the mass of agricultural barbarians”. In a remarkable article Kricevskil2 showed how many of the features of the Battle-axe cultures of Danubian III—even cord ornament on vases and ochre in graves—were explicitly foreshadowed in Danubian cemeteries and settlements of the preceding
1 PPS., XXI (1955), 108 ff.
8 "Indogermanskil vopros arkheologi6eskirazre§ennyi”, IGAIMK., ioo (1933), 158 fi.
173 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
period. Some such account has the incomparable advantage of economy; it makes minimal draughts on undemonstrable assumptions and un- documented entities. It is not incompatible with the belief that “the battle-axe”—i.e. the copper translation of an antler axe (Fig. 87, 2-3) and “wheeled vehicles”—concretely the idea of making wooden discs and mounting local sledges upon them-—were diffused. Only dogmatists need assume that the battle-axes were brandished by conquering hordes or that the waggons carried migrating tribes. Yet human agents were inevitably involved. In neither case do “traders” fit the bill. We might postulate behind the known Battle-axe and Steppe cultures, a loose continuum of scattered groups of herdsmen or indeed of hunter- fishers; for our tangible pastoral groups might have arisen from the one-sided acculturation of savages, as well as from specialization among barbarians. Seasonal shifts of pasture or hunting expeditions would guarantee sufficient intercourse between the several groups for the transmission of ideas. Such transmission is established for the period of the fully differentiated Battle-axe and Steppe cultures. Perhaps it should be postulated earlier to explain the association of wheeled vehicles with chieftains’ funerals and the spread of plough cultivation in Central Europe.
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stock ate up the young tree seedlings. Archseologically these graziers are known only by little cemeteries of barrows, and so they are termed the Single Grave folk.
In Jutland the Single Grave folk1 replaced all remnants of the Gudenaa hunter-fishers and came to occupy the interior of the peninsula to the exclusion of the Megalith-builders, but never engaged in that commerce the results of which allow the several phases of Megalithic culture to be arranged in the general scheme of prehistoric chronology. Contact between the two groups was, however, sufficiently frequent to allow the chronology for the Northern Stone Age, set forth on p. 176, to be applied also to the Battle-axe cultures. A reliable chronology of these cultures’ own development can in turn be based upon successive interments under the same barrow, as on the Pontic steppes.
The oldest graves (Bottom Graves or Undergrave), timber-lined pits2 dug in virgin soil and designed to hold a single contracted corpse, contain the finest battle-axes (often very metallic looking) and beakers with an S profile decorated with cord imprints round the neck (Fig. 83). Next, in graves on the ground surface (Ground Graves or Bundgrave), large enough to hold an extended skeleton, the axes deteriorate and the beakers are decorated with incised herring-bones. Finally, the Upper Graves (Overgrave) in the body of the mound contain flower- pot vases decorated with rouletted zig-zags, degenerate axes, and even flint daggers such as are found in the latest megalithic tombs. They denote the fusion of the two cultures, with that of the Battle-axe folk triumphant.
The furniture of the Upper Graves shows that the latest phase of the Battle-axe culture in Denmark falls into Northern period IV. The prior development represented by only two or three interments in the same barrow cannot cover a vast number of years—indeed perhaps only three generations. But it begins already during Northern Illb or IIIc.3
In Sweden4 separate graves containing contracted skeletons, but not surmounted by barrows, are contrasted to the collective tombs of the agricultural megalith-builders and to the extended burials of a native food-gathering population. They are furnished at first with battle-axes, gouges of flint or greenstone, facetted polishing stones, and shallow beakers decorated round the neck with cord imprints. The battle-axes (Fig. 83), termed boat-axes, are always provided with
1 Brondsted, Dcmmarks, I, 2x5 ff.; Aarb0ger (1944).
2 Sometimes encircled by an annular ditch, A arbeger (1944), 170.
3 Glob, Aarb0ger (1944), 207, implicitly dates the beginningto M.N.IIb (Ilia), Becker, Acta. Arch., XXV (1954), i*4> I27> explicitly to M.N.III (IIIc).
4 Forssander, Die schwedische Bootaxtkultur (Lund, 1933).
l6o CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?
a shaft-tube which gives them a very metallic look. Indeed, a copper boat-axe was found in East Russia, but the tube might be suggested by the tine stump through which the shaft-hole of some antler axes
DANMARK•
SVERIGE
UNbtmAVL
JdSDALA-SMDCT
BUNDGMVZ
muim-SKCDCT
Fig. 83. Pottery and battle-axes from the Single Graves of Jutland (left) and Sweden (right). After Fv, 1922 (tV) •
has been bored. Pottery of this type has been found associated with that in vogue about the middle of the Passage Grave phase (Northern IIIc), while later graves containing rouletted vases like the bottom row in Fig. 83 admittedly belong to Northern IV. Very similar graves with just the same kind of battle-axes are found in Norway1 and on
1 Hinsch, "Yngre steinalders stridsokskulturer i Norge”, Bergen Universitets Arbok (1954), No. 1.
L l6l DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
the opposite coasts of the Baltic in Esthonia and Finland. The dis- tribution of these graves, confined to South-Western Finland with a sharp frontier between them and the encampments of the native hunter-fishers, leaves no doubt that the Boat-axe folk were intruders.1
On the heathlands of North-West Germany and Holland2 many barrows (two dated by radio carbon to 2480 and 2240 b.c.) covering Single Graves reveal an extension of the Battle-axe cultures to the English Channel. Many barrows are demarcated by a ring of upright posts; some, that may belong to period IV, cover small mortuary houses3 and so may rank as chieftains’ tombs. The earlier graves are furnished with battle-axes akin to Jutland types, but less finely worked, and S beakers, bearing cord or herring-bone ornament, and exceptionally also with amphorae of Saxo-Thuringian form. But the Battle-axe folk here came into contact with local Megalith-builders (p. 192) and Bell- beaker folk from the west and developed hybrid cultures. S beakers are not seldom found with the later burials in megalithic tombs; from the Bell-beaker group the Battle-axe folk took over their bow and the wrist-guards appropriate thereto and even adopted the roulette technique for ornamenting their beakers and spread the designs in zones over the whole vase-surface in the style regularly applied on Bell-beakers. Nevertheless, the Battle-axe component remained dominant in the resultant fusion.
Despite their intimate contact with the metal-using westerners, the Battle-axe folk in North-West Germany and Holland remained con- tent with a neolithic equipment throughout period IV. They managed at times to import Danish amber and English jet, but failed to secure regular supplies of metal. However, a flat axe of copper was found with an S beaker in a cremation grave at Sande near Hamburg.4 This grave incidentally forms part of a regular umfield which is perhaps the earliest example of such a cremation cemetery in Northern Europe, though no earlier than the Bronze Age urnfields of Kisapostag in Hungary.
Battle-axe cultures arrive later on the Danish islands where the Megalith-builders were firmly established, and are represented prin- cipally by intrusive elements in late Passage Graves and only rarely by true separate graves.5 The battle-axes approximate to the later Jutland
1 SM. (1952), 22-5; cf. SMYA., XXXII, i, 152 ff. For Esthonia, see Gerasimov, Litsa, 396-9; the skulls closely resemble those from Pontic yamno graves.
2 van Giffen, Die Bauart der Einzelgraber; Stampfuss, JungneoL Kuliuren; NNU.t II (1928), 20; Albrecht, "Die Hugelgraber der jiingeren Steinzeit in Westfalen”, Westfalen, XIX (1934), 122 ff-I Glasbergen, Palcsohistoria, V, VI.
8 See e.g. Off a, I (1936), 62-77. 4 Kiel-Festschrift (1936), 79.
5 Aarbeger (1936), 145 ff., for parallels from Holstein, see Mannus, XXVII (1935), 60; cf. Brondsted, Danmarks, I, 269-75, and Acta Arch., XXV, 74-6.
162 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?
or even Swedish types. The funerary pots are squat S beakers, recurving at the rim and ornamented all over with rouletted zig-zags or wavy ribbons executed with a comb, clearly inspired by the Bell-beaker style. Indeed, the Battle-axe folk who reached the islands probably brought with them the Bell-beaker culture’s bows and wrist-guards and arrow-straighteners.
Saxo-Thuringian Corded Ware and its Congeners
Food-gatherers undoubtedly survived from mesolithic times on the heaths and boulder clays of Central Germany and on the sandy lands farther east fringing and interrupting the loss. But here Battle-axe
Fig. 84. Saxo-Thuringian corded ware (r1ff).
cultures represent neither the first food-producers—those were the Danubians (pp. 105, 118)—nor yet the sole result of the acculturation of residual food-gatherers or of the internal development of Danubian society itself. The most important—the Saxo-Thuringian to whose pottery alone the term Corded Ware was originally applied—emerges in Central Germany and Bohemia as only one among several groups, all more pastoral and more warlike than any Danubians.
Its distinctive cemeteries of barrows or flat graves are concentrated in the Saale basin, but extend south-east into Central Bohemia and westward to the Rhineland and even Central Switzerland. While common enough on the loss, Saxo-Thuringian barrows are still more
163 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
prominent on heaths and uplands, as if hunting and stock-breeding had been the foundations of the economy. Yet the cemeteries are too extensive to belong to nomads, and grain imprints on vases1 prove some sort of cultivation.
Characteristic of Saxo-Thuringian corded ware is the conjunction of amphorae (Fig. 84, 1-3) with the usual beakers which here have an ovoid body contrasted with a long straight neck (Fig. 84,4-7). Ornament is effected, as usual, on the earlier vases by cord impressions which then later give place to stamped herring-bone patterns (Fig. 84, 3). Equally distinctive is the faceted battle-axe (Fig. 85, 1), though this
is not often found in graves and then not with the earliest pottery.2 Its peculiar form may show some influence from spiked club-heads3 of mesolithic ancestry (the Vogtland type), but stray copper battle- axes exhibit much the same form4 and the influence of antler weapons is admitted. Actual antler axes, asymmetrical stone axes like Danubian “ploughshares”, almond-shaped celts of flint or greenstone mounted as adzes (one was found thus mounted in an antler haft) and occasional spheroid mace-heads or rough flint daggers also served as weapons.
Small rings of copper and even spirals of poor bronze sometimes served as ornaments. But though these were allegedly made from local
1 JST., XIV, 30; XXIV, 115. 2 Forssander, Bootaxthultur, 146.
3 Mannus, XXV (1933), 271-82. 4 E.g. Danube, fig. 92.
164 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?
ores,1 the Saxo-Thuringians remained content with a neolithic equip- ment and armoury. The best evidences for trade of any kind are a carving in Sammland style and a few other amber beads. Discs made from local shells but ornamented with a cross1 2 constitute the most distinctive additions to the usual bored-teeth necklaces. One man, buried with a herring-bone beaker and a tanged copper spear-head or dagger, had worn a hammer pin of Pontic type as a head ornament.3
Normally the Saxo-Thuringians were interred in simple pit graves, rarely in wood-lined shafts, by no means always covered by barrows. North of the Unstrut, modest megalithic cists, measuring up to 3*5 m. by 2-25 m., were often used as collective sepulchres.4 The practice was presumably borrowed from adjacent Northern or Horgen megalith- builders (p. 190), but might have been inspired from the Kuban5 since some are divided by a porthole slab as in Fig. 81, 1. Trephined skulls occur in both Central German and Bohemian graves. In some tombs, mostly late and more often in Western than in Central Germany, the bodies have been burned. Exceptionally the cremated remains lay in wooden mortuary houses.6 The latter prove that some Saxo-Thuringian groups were led by chiefs and that the herdsmen lived in substantial houses with at least a porch in addition to a living-room.
The later phases of the Saxo-Thuringian culture admittedly last into period IV, and grave-groups7 establish synchronisms with Globular Amphorae and Walternienburg 2 in period III. A beginning in period II might be deduced from corded ware sherds in Danubian village-sites and faceted battle-axes associated in hoards with shoe-last celts, but the associations are not very reliable.
Westward, burials under barrows accompanied by corded beakers and amphorae and faceted battle-axes document an extension of Saxo- Thuringian culture to the Rhine. Beyond it in Switzerland, in the latest occupation levels of the neolithic Alpine lake-dwellings, sherds of corded ware mark the replacement of the Middle Neolithic Horgen population or the superposition thereon of a pastoral aristocracy such as we met at Usatova. Eastward, too, barrow-burials if accompanied by cord-ornamented vases that could be derived from amphorae like Fig. 84, 1-3, are likewise attributed to colonists from Saxo-Thuringia.
1 Nbl. f. d. V., X (1934), I46: XIV, 73; Witter, Die dlieste Erzgewinnung in nord- german. Lebenskreis.
2 PA., XL (1934-35). 21.
3 Behrens, JMV., XXXVI (1952), 52-65.
4 Mannus, XXVIII (i936). 363.' Nbl. f. d. V., IX (i933)» 93-
5 Forssander, Bootaxtkultur, 164; Arsberdt. (1937-38), 38.
6 Germania, VI (1922), no (Haldorf near Cassel); Mannus, VI, Erg.-Bd., 214 (Sarmens- torf, Switzerland).
7 Altschles., V (1934), 37; Mannus, XXVIII, 376.
165 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
So in Sammland1 are graves furnished with amphorae and beakers, and in a couple of cases with bone hammer-pins, while at least three faceted battle-axes are reported from the province. Here corded ware is found also in the substantial houses of farmers who combined cultivation and the breeding of cattle, sheep, and pigs with hunting, fowling, and fishing with bone harpoons.2 But with the supposedly Saxo-Thuringian pots go other vases that may represent an East Baltic version of the Erteb0lle or First Northern culture.
Fig. 86. Zlota pottery. After Kozlowski.
On the Polish loss lands within the great elbow of the Vistula, already intensively colonized by Danubians by period II, corded beakers and amphorae are associated with Oder flower-pots, handled cups, funnel-necked beakers, and globular amphorae that elsewhere denote distinct groups, in the Zlota culture (Fig. 86) .3 Extensive cemeteries of contracted skeletons, generally in flat graves, sometimes
1 Killian, Die HaffkUstenkultur (Bonn, 1955). 8 Altschles., V, 62.
8 Childe, Danube, 152; Kozfowski, Mlodsa, 66; WA., VIII, 98; IX, 34.
l66 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?
in pit-caves, mark the population as sedentary. Ritual burials of cattle, pigs, and horses demonstrate the economic importance of these domestic animals. Battle-axes are not very often included among the grave goods, but such as occur are typologically early.
In Eastern Moravia1 one barrow at Nemetice covered a shaft grave containing an amphora and a beaker, and another barrow one furnished with a faceted battle-axe. But other graves here, as also at Drevohostice and Prusinovice, contained battle-axes of Silesian type (Fig. 85, 3) and keeled mugs with cylindrical necks and strap handles derived from the Jordanova group; others again Bell-beakers.
Then in East Galicia2 some barrows, girt with a circular trench and heaped after the black earth’s formation—and therefore later than those mentioned on p. 166 above—cover graves containing corded amphorae and beakers and copper trinkets. So do the flat graves of the Tomaszow culture3 forming large cemeteries and representing a sedent- ary population extending across the Carpathians into the Nitra valley of Slovakia.4 These burials are furnished with segmented fayence beads like those from the Tisza-Maros region (p. 128) and occasional round-heeled triangular daggers. The Tomaszdw cemeteries therefore extend over period IV.
Still farther east the corded ware from Usatova (p. 145) has been claimed as evidence that the pastoral aristocracy there superimposed on Tripolye peasants was of Saxo-Thuringian extraction! Even the Middle Dniepr culture5 has been regarded as an offshoot of the Saxo- Thuringian. “Amphorae” do no doubt occur in the urnfield of Sofiivka6; among the grave goods associated with 141 cremations are also stone battle-axes, flat axes and daggers of copper, flint celts and sickles, and vases painted in late Tripolye style (as at Usatova). Barrows of this culture, however, do not seem to have contained amphorae; the beakers are sometimes ovoid as in yamno graves (Fig. 79, 3), more often basket- shaped (Fig. 79, 2).
The Oder and Marschwitz Cultures
On the other hand, between these alleged outposts of Saxo-Thuringian culture and its centre on the Saale-Elbe intervene other groups dis- tinguished by corded ware and battle-axes of quite different forms.
1 Pravek, V (1909), 56-130; Real., s.v. Drevohostice.
2 Ksiega Pamietkowa, 141-9; Swiatowit, XVI (1934-35), 117-44; Sulimirski, "Die schnurkeramischen Kulturen”, 3-5.
3 Kostrzewski, Prehistoria, 183; Swiatowit, XIX (1946-47), 105 ff.
4 Material from 300 graves at Nitra, unpublished.
5 Briusov, OSerki, 215-20; KS., XVI (1947).
8 Arhh. Pam., IV (1952), 112-21; Arhheologiya, Kiev, VIII (1953), 94-101,
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DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
ing compartments, less richly furnished, but all the bodies were covered with red ochre. The royal weapons (Fig. 8o) include a transverse axe, certainly, and a straight axe together with an axe-adze1 that looks like a combination of the other two, but also rhomboid arrow-heads of flint and microlithic lunates of mesolithic ancestry. A gold flask with a silver ring round the neck, jars of silver and of stone, and imitations in reduced grey pottery are certainly Asiatic. Beads of turquoise and
4 5
Fig. 79. Vases: 1, from Catacomb grave, Donetz (J); 2-3, from pit-graves, Yatskovice, near Kiev (•$?); 4, from yamno grave Donetz basin (£); 5, B funnel beaker from Denmark (£).
lapis lazuli had been imported from Iran, meerschaum1 2 from Anatolia. Two silver vases are engraved with local mountain scenes and a pro- cession of animals—two kinds of ox, a mouflon, a tame boar, Prze- walski’s horse, and a panther.
Yessen's second and rather less homogeneous chronological division within the Early Kuban period is represented by the furniture of the tombs in two huge cairns at Novosvobodnaya (generally but incor- rectly termed Tsarevskaya).3 Both were megalithic cists divided into two compartments by porthole slabs (Fig. 81, 1). Cist II measured
1 LAAA., XXIII (1936), 114-15.
2 Yessen, TGAIMK., 120, 81.
152
3 Hanfiar, 244. CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?
internally i*8o m.+ i-i5 m. by i*6o m. by 1-20 m., and was surrounded by a ring of orthostats over a metre high. The princely dead, one wearing a linen garment, dyed red and purple, a cloak of earners wool
Fig. 8o. Transverse axe, axe-adze, knife, and gold and silver vases (J), carnelian bead and flint arrow-heads (p, from Maikop barrow. DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
covered with a black hide and profusely sprinkled with red ochre, were provided with shaft-hole axes, bidents, spear-heads, cauldrons, ladles, wands, and drill bits of copper, together with flint arrow-heads and globular clay vases (Fig. 82). The spear-head is directly derived from an Early Sumerian type and the bident and gouge have an equally Early Sumerian pedigree, but exact parallels to them and to the ladles, perhaps also to the wand, can be cited from Hissar III1 in Northern Iran. The pottery, on the contrary, undoubtedly resembles the Central Russian Fatyanovo ware and the Globular Amphorae of Central Europe (pp. 170,194).
A dozen other burials are assigned to this second phase of the Early Kuban period and enlarge the repertory of types attributable to it. They include battle-axes2 both in copper (Fig. 78, 1) and stone and probably a clay model of a covered cart3; the latter, if really Early Kuban, demonstrates the use of wheeled vehicles and ox traction on the slopes of the Caucasus as on the steppes.
Yessen4 insists that none of the metal ware from any Early Kuban tomb is a local North Caucasian product; all are imports or loot from more advanced regions south of the range. By the Middle Kuban period resident or itinerant smiths were producing local types of tools, weapons, and ornaments, and Oriental imports have disappeared.
The North Caucasian smiths manufactured flat axes, chisels5 with an incomplete socket, made by folding the butt end round a mandril, flat daggers the tang of which expands for the pommel,6 shaft-hole axes with a drooping shaft-hole and long narrow body, and ornaments— including elaborate versions of the hammer-pin (Fig. 78, 4)—on which filigree work has been ingeniously imitated by cire perdue casting. Most of these types recur farther north in the catacomb and con- temporary shaft graves. Their extension suggests that the rich copper resources of the Urals were now being exploited. Querns, pestles, flint sickle-teeth,7 and animal bones attest a regular farming economy to support the metal-workers and the chiefs.
On the Caucasian foothills, south of the Kuban and the Terek, the Middle Kuban graves are more varied and more numerous than the Early Kuban. None are so obviously “royal” as those described above, but many must belong to small chiefs. The catacomb graves that define a contemporary local culture extending from near Odessa to the valleys
1 MusJ., XXIII (1933), pis. CXIX, CXX.
2 Hanfiar, 253; Letniskoe, Yessen, SA., XII.
3 : I , loc. cit.
4 “Iz Istoril drevnei Metallurgiya Kavkaza”, IGAIMK., 120 (1935).
5 IGAIMK., 120, 99.
6 SA., XII, Plate, Col. Ill, 3; Rau, Hochergraber, pi. Ill, 3.
7 Hooked metal sickles were being made in Yessen’s phase IV.
154 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?
Fig. 82. Pottery ($), weapons and tools (£), and pins (i) from tomb at Novosvobodnaya.
155
VZeaM# DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
of the Donets, Don, Manyc, and Upper Kuban-Terek and just into Daghestan (Fig. 81, 2) are really pit-caves under barrows. Most contain only a single corpse, but some served as family tombs housing as many as seven persons. There is explicit evidence of one or even two females having been slain to accompany their lords.1 Round-headed persons now appear and these perhaps practised annular deformation of the skull.1 2
Additions to armaments peculiar to the catacomb graves are heeled battle-axes,3 like Fig. 35, arrow-shaft straighteners, and sling bullets. The pottery, distinctive of the period, is represented by flat-bottomed vases profusely decorated with the imprints of cords, whipped or braided cords, and shells sometimes forming spiral patterns (Fig. 79, i).4 Peculiar to the Manyc and Kuban-Terek group of catacomb graves are cruciform-footed lamps—shallow saucers, divided into two unequal compartments and standing on four solid and united feet. They are richly decorated in the style of the period.
Other characteristic pots and catacomb types recur in shaft graves in several regions. On the Lower Volga, one grave probably of this period under a very large barrow contained no less than three carts with tripartite disc wheels, while a clay model of a covered cart lay in an “offering place" above the shaft mouth.5
The catacomb type of tomb and its distribution suggest Aegean inspiration. Cranial deformation had been practised in Cyprus from neolithic times.6 A few beads of “paste”, presumably fayence, reported from catacomb tombs and copper imitations of winged beads (Fig. 78,2) might be derived from the same quarter. A hoard of metal objects from Cetkovo near the mouth of the Dniepr,7 probably assignable to this period, comprises double-axes, presumably of Minoan or Helladic manufacture. Conversely, the unfinished battle-axe from the Early Macednic site of H. Mamas (p. 68) belongs to a distinctively South Russian family first appearing in the catacomb phase. On the other hand, the cross-footed lamps are absurdly like Starcevo forms from Moldavia and Hungary (Fig. 46) and still more the later Vucedol type. Moreover, the “pit-caves” of the Vucedo culture at Vucedol are rather like catacomb graves.
1 Artsikovskii, Osnovy Arkheologii (1954), 75-
a SA.j IV, 122; XI (1949), 327; KS., VIII, 86; cf. Dingwall, Artificial Cranial De- formation.
3 ESA., VIII, 61; in Cis-Caucasia Yessen attributes these to phase IV.
4 Popova, SA„ XXII (1955), 20-60 distinguishes six local varieties, some not repre- sented in catacomb tombs at all.
5 SA., X (i948), 147-56.
6 Angell in Dikaios, Khirohitia (London, 1953).
7 ESA., II (1932).
156 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?
But if the chiefs of the pastoral clans were imitating the fashions of TEgean colonists on the Black Sea coasts, nothing of precise dating value has come from their tombs. The battle-axe from H. Mamas alone could be invoked to justify a partial synchronism between the Middle Kuban-Catacomb period and the Early iEgean.
The actual Oriental imports in the Early Kuban tombs are not incompatible with such a dating, but are all too long-lived to confirm it. The transverse axe from Maikop is a type of undoubtedly Meso- potamian origin, but was current from 3000 B.c. for nearly two mil- lennia.1 The type was being cast in clay moulds at Shah Tepe in Trans- caspia,1 2 3 while axe-adzes of the Maikop variant were being similarly manufactured in the contemporary settlement of Hissar III.® The grey ware from Maikop likewise recalls Iranian fabrics of the Hissar III phase. There too the ladles, bidents, and drill-bit from Novosvobodnaya can be paralleled,4 but just as well in the Early Sumerian metal-work of Ur. Only the hammer-pins are more illuminating, for the type is comparatively rare. In Anatolia, gold specimens occur in the Royal Tombs of Alaca,5 at Ahlatlibel, in Troy Ilf., and in the Middle Helladic Greece. Moreover, bone hammer-pins have been found in a Danish passage grave of Northern IIIc and in Central European graves of Danubian III or IV. In time the Pontic pins should come at least between the Anatolian and the Central European examples.
Now the rare gold pins from the treasures of Anatolian princes may well be luxury versions of a Pontic type. If so, their absolute date— certainly about 2000 b.c.—is a terminus ante quern for the creation of the type in South Russia. Hammer-pins are not attested before the Middle Kuban phase in Cis-Caucasia and mark the end of the yamno period of the steppes. Thus the beginnings of the Ochre Grave culture should go back well into the third millennium. So too yamno graves in Eastern Poland had been dug before the dry Sub-Boreal climate had promoted the formation of black earth.
Only in the light of these chronological considerations can possible contributions from the Steppe societies to the development of European culture farther west be evaluated. That they did really transmit ideas westward is proved by the hammer-pins just mentioned and by the
1 Childe, NLMAE., 159.
2 Arne, Excavations at Shah Tepe (Sino-Swedish Expedition, Pub. 27, Stockholm, 1945). 258.
3 Schmidt, Excavations at Tepe Hissar, 1931-3 (Philadelphia, 1937), *85; actual axe-adzes of this precise type are known from Uzbekistan (KS., XXXIII, 1950, 152) and the Indus valley.
* Schmidt, op. cit.
5 Hamit Zubeyr Kosay, Alaca Hoytik Kazisi, 1937-9 (Ankara, 1951), pi. 135, 68-9; cf. Germania, XXXIII (1955), 240-2, and pp. 44, 183 here.
157 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
animal sceptre-heads from Romania (p. 103); one of these came from an ochre grave in the Dobrudja1 and there is another from Cis-Caucasia.2 Yet early Central European metallurgy cannot be proved to owe any- thing to the Caucasian school. To derive the great family of Transyl- vanian axe-adzes from the single Maikop specimen seems far-fetched. Nor are the later Hungarian shaft-tube axes obviously related to the Maikop-Novosvobodnaya type and its Middle Kuban derivatives. Even at Usatova no types are distinctively Caucasian, and at Mikhail- ovka metal had been worked in the first settlement perhaps before makers of yamno pots arrived there in the third.
Wheeled vehicles, horses, and even sheep are in a different category. Genuine ochre graves under round barrows in Romania, Eastern Slovakia,3 and Eastern Poland4 do attest infiltrations of herdsmen from the steppes into the zone of temperate forest. But the position of these graves in the Danubian sequence is still undetermined. Further west cord-ornamented pots from barrow-burials5 and globular amphorae from porthole cists have been claimed at once as indications of a wider expansion and as proofs that the steppe folk themselves came from Germany!
For the moment it will suffice to insist that there is no evidence for an origin in Central Asia. Relations can indeed be traced right to the Yenesei. There the earliest steppe culture, termed Afanasievo,6 is characterized by ovoid vases resembling those from European yamno graves; but they seem later, being accompanied by catacomb types; and they accompany skeletons of Europeoid type. At the same time the ovoid yamno pots are strikingly like those made by the hunter-fisher folk of the Eurasian taiga from the Baltic to Lake Baikal. But these hunter-fishers were mostly Lapponoid, the Steppe herdsmen Europeoid.
Battle-Axe Cultures
All the cultures that emerge round the fringe of the territories colonized by Dniestro-Danubian peasants on the wooded North European plain from the Middle Dniepr to the Lower Rhine exhibit so many common features that they may be designated by a single name, Battle-axe cultures. That does not imply that all are branches of a single culture. By divergences in burial rites, armament, and pottery we may dis-
1 Dacia, VII-VIII (1937-40), 81-91.
2 KS., XLVI (1952). 48-53*
3 Slovenski Dejiny, 64-6.
4 Ksiega Pamietkowa, 141-95; Swiaiowit, XVI (1934-35), 117-34.
6 Shaft graves under barrows without pottery may, however, be earlier even in Saxo- Thuringia. Festchr. d. Rom-Germ. Zentralmuseums, III (Mainz, 1953). 168.
Kiselev, Drevnaya Istoriya Yuzhnoi Sibiri (Moskva, 1951).
158 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?
tinguish a number of cultures, of which the most important are: (i) the Single Grave culture of Jutland with relatives in North-West Germany and Holland; (2) the Swedish Boat-axe culture with exten- sions east of the Baltic; (3) the Saxo-Thuringian or ‘'Classical” Corded Ware culture; (4) the Oder culture; (5) the Middle Dniepr culture; and (6) the Fatyanovo groups in Central Russia.
All these cultures were based primarily on stock-breeding and hunt- ing, but always combined with cereal cultivation. In all groups at least the earliest graves contain a single skeleton1 buried in the con- tracted position. Timber linings to the grave pit have been observed in groups 1, 2, 3, and 6. Save in groups 2, 4, and 6, the grave was normally surmounted by a barrow. Grave goods common to all groups include stone battle-axes, necklaces of bored teeth, and a pottery drinking- vessel that may be termed a beaker and that may everywhere be ornamented with cord-impressions. All the battle-axes in this series are characterized by drooping blades—that is the blade expands only downwards in contrast to the symmetrical splay of Baden and poly- gonal battle-axes. Though each group is distinguished by peculiar local types, in nearly every area are to be found specimens of a simple type, like a stone version of Fig. 63, 1, and at least in Jutland these are stratigraphically, as well as typologically, the oldest.2 Finally, on all early drooping-bladed battle-axes a longitudinal ridge imitates the seam of a casting and reinforces the metallic impression given by the splayed blade though the original model were antler.3
North Sea-Baltic Battle-Axe Cultures
Towards the western extension of the plain between the Vistula and the Rhine the pastoral societies represented by barrow cemeteries were juxtaposed to and contrasted with more sedentary farmers. After such farmers had already reached Denmark, a herding group who sometimes decorated their funnel-breakers (Fig. 79, 5) with cord imprints had cleared tracts of Denmark and Southern Sweden for pasture in Late Atlantic times. They do not seem to have settled permanently, since forests soon returned and smothered the pastures they had cleared.4 A second and more drastic clearance by fire was made in Jutland, and this time no regeneration of forest followed.5 A new wave of herdsmen had colonized Jutland, and their free-grazing
1 Save for occasional sati burials of a male and female.
2 Ayrapaa, ESA., VIII (1933), 5; Glob, Aarb0ger (1944), I8,‘ Forssander, Bootaxt., 56.
3 Childe, ESA., IX (1934), 156-67.
* Troels-Smith, A arboger (1953), p. 178, below.
8 Troels-Smith in Mathiassen, JDyrholmen (1942), 175-6.
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THE PEASANTS OF THE BLACK EARTH
The new pastoral aspect of the economy is disclosed by the very numerous animal bones from the village and the prominence among them of sheep and horses, now surely domesticated; the percentages are : 37*8 sheep, 31 cows, 15-5 horses, only 2-2 pigs. Game accounts for only 28*4 per cent of the total.1
The rulers were buried under barrows which form two cemeteries near the village. A chief2 was interred contracted on one side or on his back in a central shaft grave encircled by a ring of slabs on edge. Under one barrow a slab in the kerb had been engraved with very rough representations of a man, a stag, and perhaps a horse.3 Before the barrow was heaped, one or two slaves or dependents would be slain and interred in accessory graves. Bones of animals and statuettes, too, were buried in separate pits.
Contrasted with these almost royal tombs are the flat graves belong- ing presumably to the cultivators. These are shallow pits, each covered by a flat slab and containing a single contracted skeleton. That these cultivators were an off-shoot from Tripolye communities may be inferred from survivals of the Tripolye ideology and ceramic art. Figurines were still made in clay though stylized almost beyond recognition (Fig. 77, 6-8).
In the village and both under the barrows and in flat graves well- fired vases, painted and fashioned in the Tripolye technique, occur side by side with coarser vessels ornamented with cord impressions. The designs on the painted pots can be regarded as degenerations of the good spiral ornament of Tripolye A and Bi, and some old Tripolye forms are reproduced. The cord-ornamented pottery must represent the new pastoral element; some of the jars could be regarded as degen- erations of Thuringian amphorae (Fig. 77,1, 3), but the impressed cord designs are more elaborate than any from North or Central Europe and include the imprints of crocheted necklaces, maggot patterns, and horse-shoe loops.4
Trade brought amber, presumably from the Baltic, antimonite allegedly from Turkey, and substantial supplies of copper. The metal was cast into characteristic local types. The most distinctive is a kite- shaped riveted dagger with a midrib on one face only (Fig. 77, 4), but flat axes and quadrangular awls were also made. The shaft-hole axe from Cucuteni may also be a product of Usatova industry, since a typical dagger comes from the site. Small spiral rings of copper or
1 SA., V, 258; Naukove Zapiski IIMK., II (TJkrain. Akad. Nauk, Kiev, 1937), n6.
2 For these barrows see also SA., V (1940), 240-56.
3 Figured in Mongait, Arkheologiya v SSSJR. (Moskva, 1955), 109.
4 Rosenberg, Kulturstromungen in Europa zur Steinzeit (Copenhagen).
K 145 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
silver were worn as well as necklaces of bored deers’ teeth. The stone industry is comparatively poor. A perforated antler axe had been buried with one of the chiefs and so must rank as a battle-axe, as in the Danubian III graves of Brzesc-Kujawsld.
Fig. 77. Usatova types.
{Top) Usatova Barrows: 1-2, cord-ornamented and painted vases (£); 3-5, copper objects (!) barrow I; 6-10, figurine (£), painted pot ($), copper spirals, bored wolfs teeth (i) barrow II.
{Below) 3-7, cord-ornamented and painted pots (£), clay figurine (J) from other barrows; 8 figurine from Usatova settlement (after Passek).
146 THE PEASANTS OF THE BLACK EARTH
Ustatova ceramic and metal types occur in a number of barrow graves on the steppes between the Tripolye province and the Black Sea and in a few marginal Tripolye villages.1 The first two villages at the fortified site of Mikhailovka2 on a tributary of the Lower Dniepr may well have been occupied by a kindred society, again predomin- antly pastoral. Metal was certainly worked here too, but no distinctively Usatova types have been published in 1956.
Kricevskii3 and Passek treated the Usatova culture as the final result of the conversion of the Tripolye economy to pastoralism. Briusov,4 however, could easily show that Usatova represented a distinct culture not later than Tripolye B2 or at least C. A Tripolye component is indeed obvious enough. The origin of the pastoral element will be considered in Chapter IX. What of the metal industry?
The distribution of the distinctive. metal types leaves little doubt that the raw material reached the Black Sea coasts by sea. If that means that the knowledge of metal-working was introduced by pro- spectors from the ^Egean or Asia Minor, it cannot be claimed that their local products reproduced any specific southern models. The technique of casting midrib daggers in a one-piece mould is a barbarism quite foreign to any of the advanced schools of metallurgy and paralleled only in the Iberian peninsula and South France. Usatova metal types give no clue as to the origin of their makers nor as to the absolute date of the Usatova culture. Relatively it might be assigned to period IV or a late phase of period III in the Balkan sequence. In the Danubian sequence it should occupy a similar position. Usatova must surely be earlier than period V, since Hungarian bronzes of that phase are quite common in the province.5 A little support for an equation with Danubian IV might be derived from the kite-shaped daggers of the East Polish and Slovakian Tomaszow culture6; at least in plan they recall the Usatova type and they are associated with segmented fayence beads. Still the latter might be correlated with the amber beads from Troy II and Usatova as indicative of a trade in metals and Sammland amber in the Illrd., millennium.
1 Passek, loc. cit.; Avkheolosiya, VIII (Kiev, 1953), 95-107.
2 KSU., IV (1955). 119-23; V, 13-17-
3 MIA., II (1941), 251-3.
4 05erki, 240 ff. Note distribution map on p. 234.
5 Tallgren, ESA., II.
6 Kostrzewski, J., Prehistoria Ziem Polskich (Krakow, 1939-48), pi. LXII, 18.
I47 CHAPTER IX
CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER THE EURASIAN PLAIN?
Last century anthropologists regarded the Eurasiatic plain as a corridor through which Asiatic hordes, precursors of the Huns and the Tartars, swept neolithic culture to Western Europe. Their guess is hardly confirmed by the evidence of the spade. But of course con- firmatory evidence would be hard to obtain; predominantly pastoral and ex hyfiothesi mobile communities need leave no durable equipment that archaeologists could recognize, and certainly would leave no stratified tells in their wake. Stock-breeding is indeed not attested earlier near the eastern than near the western extremities of the plain, but only in the sense that no geological nor pollen dates are available in the former area while the culture sequence as distinguished in 1956 seems less varied, and therefore shorter, than farther west. No doubt in the wide chilly forest zone a “palaeolithic” economy based on collect- ing, hunting, and fishing along the shores of meres and rivers persisted long, albeit made increasingly sedentary by the emphasis on fishing. Farther south, in the wide belt of parkland and the steppe zone border- ing the Black Sea, collections of flint tools may indicate a continuity of settlement from late pleistocene times. Chopping tools, sharpened by a tranchet blow (p. 9), are reported from the parklands of Vol- hynia, Podolia, and the Ukraine.1 Only in a few stratified caves in Crimea1 2 can even the relative antiquity of the archaic flints be deter- mined, and even there, though microliths are associated with pots with pointed bases3 no very high antiquity need be assigned to them since geometric microliths may survive quite late.
Still less can such collections be cited as documenting precocious animal husbandry, since no bones survive on sandhill sites. The flints collected from dunes between Lake Aral and the Oder may have been left by ancestors of the herdsmen who reached Denmark in Atlantic times, but there is not a scrap of evidence that they were.
On the fringe of the vast loss lands, colonized by primary neolithic Danubian, Starcevo and Tripolye peasants, there did indeed emerge communities of herdsmen, known almost exclusively from graves. Do
1 Briusov, Oierhi, 181-203.
2 Antropologiya, II (Kiev, 1928), 190-1.
3 KS., XXXI (1950), 110-16; SA., V (1940), 97-100; cf. Gerasimov, Litsa, 263-5.
148 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?
these represent pastoral tribes separated out from the more agricultural Dniestro-Danubian societies? Or are they local mesolithic communities converted by their neighbours’ example to food-production? Or, finally, are they immigrants from the steppes farther south and east? There, too, are barrow graves of a peculiar kind, the so-called ochre graves.
The Ochre Grave Cultures of the Pontic Steppes
The true steppe zone extends from the Dobrudja and the wooded outposts of the Carpathians round the Black Sea coasts to the Caucasus and beyond the Volga to the Altai. The steppes are covered with barrows of all periods down to the late Middle Ages. The prehistoric ones, generally small, cluster in little cemeteries, presumably marking some sort of tribal territory, and most cover many successive inter- ments. On the strength of his excavations between the Donets and the Don, Gorodtsov defined three main stages on periods distinguished primarily by tomb types—first shaft graves (yamy), next pit-caves (“catacombs”) and finally wooden cists (sruby). Hence the archaeo- logical record in South Russia has been divided into yamno, catacomb, and srubno periods, and this terminology is retained even though it is now established that catacomb graves are confined to the Black Sea coasts and the valleys of the Donetz, the Don, and the Manyc, and define a culture rather than a period of time. On the slopes of the metalliferous Caucasus, however, some barrows are so rich that a finer typological division into five periods has been established by Yessen.1 His phases I and II correspond roughly to the old Early Kuban2 and more roughly to Gorodtsov’s yamno stage,3 while his group III may equal Middle Kuban and catacomb. But these burials under round barrows are not the earliest. Just as the funerary record in Britain begins with collective burial under long barrows, so in South Russia it begins with multiple burials in long trenches or under long mounds.
In all these graves the skeletons he extended, usually covered with red ochre and arranged in groups. At Vovnigi4, near Dniepropetrovsk, 130 skeletons in three layers were lying side by side under a sandhill. At Mariupol on the Sea of Azov5 120 adults and six children had been
1 SA., XII (1950), 157-85. 2 ESA., IV, 1-19.
3 Degen-Kovalevskii (ITS., II (1939), 14-16) and Artamonov {SA., X (1948), 161-81) proposed much later dates for the Early Kuban barrows.
4 KSU., TV (1955). 147-9; cf. Arkheologiya, V (Kiev, 1951), 163, for a similar burial farther down the Dniepr, and Gerasimov, Litsa, 260-80, for others; the skulls are ‘ ‘ Cromagnonoid’ ’.
6 Makarenko, Mariupilski Mogilnik (Kiev, Vse-Ukrainska Akad. Nauk, 1933); Stolyar (SA., XXIII, 16) distributes the burials over four successive phases.
I49 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
buried in groups across one long trench filled with red earth. At Nalcik1 a low irregular mound covered 130 contracted skeletons, again buried in groups and covered with red pigment. Such numbers exceed those recorded from any mesolithic cemetery of food-gatherers so that the denial of neolithic status may be unjustified. Actually flint celts with polished blades were found at Mariupol together with stone beads and bracelets and a variety of ornaments carved out of wild beasts’ teeth and boars' tusks. Two skeletons were accompanied by knobbed mace- heads (cf. Fig. 65), interpreted as emblems of chieftainship. A female figurine of stone lay in one grave at Nalcik, and pottery in others. However these communities got their food, they were not economically isolated. A pendant of porphyry imported from the Urals occurred at Mariupol; a copper lock-ring and beads of “vitreous paste” and car- nelian at Nalcik. The last-named ornaments are explicitly results of connection with Oriental civilization, and even the knobbed maces from Mariupol may be thus interpreted, since the type was common in Mesopotamia from Early Dynastic times.
The burials just described recall most strikingly those of mesolithic Natufians in the Wad cave on Mount Carmel, but agree in several points also with those of neolithic hunter-fishers on Gotland and on Olenii Island in Lake Onega. They are not for these reasons neces- sarily earlier than the single burials, sometimes accompanied by metal objects, under the commoner round barrows. Indeed, knobbed mace- heads farther west are Danubian III or Balkan III (pp. 122). On the other hand, microliths are found in Early Kuban barrows.
The earliest food-producers detectable on the steppes in South Russia are those buried under round barrows in the yamno graves. In these, remains of domestic animals—only sheep have been recorded—are exceptional, while bones of game, flint arrow-heads, and bone harpoons do attest hunting and fishing. Finds from domestic sites,2 however, prove that cows, sheep, goats, and probably horses and pigs were bred and millet cultivated. The stock-breeders were interred, thickly sprinkled with red ochre, lying on a bier or bed of rushes on the back with the legs drawn up or more rarely extended, sometimes in a tent-shaped mortuary house,3 at the bottom of the shaft, which was roofed with birch poles resting on ledges in the sides (as in the Shaft Graves of Mycenae).4 In the Ukraine, rudely anthropomorphic stelae covered some graves.5
1 MIA., Ill (1940), 69 fi.
2 Near Nalcik, MIA., Ill (1940), 192; Mikhajlovka on the Lower Dniepr, KSU., IV (1955), 119-22.
2 IGAIMK., 100 (1933), 105.
* Rau, Hockergraber der Wolgasteppe (Marxstadt, 1928); SAIV (1937), 93 ff.; MIA., XLVI, 12 if.
2 KSU., I (1952), 21; V (1955), 75-8.
150 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?
In no grave does much furniture survive—at best a pot, some hunting or fishing tackle, necklaces of bored teeth and—only in the latest graves—a hammer-headed pin of bone (Fig. 78, 5-6) .*? The pot, if present, is an ovoid beaker, often plain, sometimes decorated with pits below the inturned rim or even with cord impressions2 (Fig. 79, 4).
Fig. 78. Copper battle-axe, Vozdvizhenskaya (J), copper beads (?§?), copper spear-head (?$?), copper and bone hammer-pins (£).
A lucky chance has revealed dramatically how unreliable negative conclusions, based on the inevitable deficiencies of the archaeological record, may be. Under a large barrow of the period, “Storozhevaya”, near Dnepropetrovsk3 an exceptional conjuncture has preserved remains of a wooden cart with two solid wheels, 48 cm. in diameter, that served as a hearse. It demonstrates at once that wheeled vehicles were used by the steppe folk, that these had not only domesticated but also harnessed oxen—or conceivably horses—and that they recognized chiefs who enjoyed the privileges of Sumerian kings.
On the slopes of the Caucasus such chiefs secured more substantial emblems and instruments of authority. A celebrated barrow near Maikop4 is representative of the eleven rich “royal burials” that con- stitute Yessen’s group I. The tomb was a tripartite wooden chamber in a deep shaft enciicled by a ring of boulders. A prince had been buried in the main chamber under a canopy adorned with gold and silver lions and bulls. A male and a female corpse occupied the remain-
1 Though found in graves that are typologically “yamno”, most common from “catacombs”.
2 Found from the Dniepr to as far east as Stalingrad.
3 KS., XXXVII (1951), 117; Arkheologiya, V (Kiev, 1951), 183-8.
1 Haniar, 248,
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DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION The large ovens, 2 m. or more square, were made of clay on a frame- work of saplings. In addition, some rooms were furnished with raised benches of baked clay, and—at least in phase B2 on the Bug—also with cruciform pediments ornamented on their surfaces with engraved lines or with paint. Russian archaeologists agree that these last were offering-places. Six or seven fragmentary models illustrate the interior of a Tripolye house, showing the porch, the oven, the cruciform pedi- ment, the jars of grain, and the quern just as excavators have found them (Fig. 73). All these models stand on legs and so suggest that 138 THE PEASANTS OF THE BLACK EARTH Tripolye houses were really raised on piles. That would be quite reasonable as the sites were liable to swamping; it would at once explain the burning of the clay floors and of the wooden beams under them. But there is no excavational evidence for this very plausible hypothesis. Russian excavators frequently refer also to half-subter- ranean dwellings or zemlianki, but the plans look almost as dubious as those of Danubian “pit-dwellings". Kricevskii believed that the large houses with three or more rooms resulted from the enlargement of one-roomed houses to accommodate married children of the latters’ builders. The enlarged family would keep together, as in the recent Slav zadruga. If so, the sites in question must have been occupied for at least two generations. Tripolye farmers were generally content to use local materials for their equipment which consequently looks purely neolithic. Adzes were made of local stone, often rather soft, but axe-hammers or even simple battle-axes were perforated with a hollow borer, and mattocks or adzes were made from bored antlers (Fig. 75, 15). Weapons are not common. Triangular flint arrow-heads occur sporadically from phase Bi at least. A knob bed mace like one from Danubian III is reported from a B2 site near Kiev,1 while model battle-axes—surely warriors’ weapons—were made at Ariusd and Haba^esti in phase Bi. Trade secured farmers even at Petreny on the middle Dniestr obsidian from west of the Carpathians by phase B2. Copper too was similarly obtained from the very first, but in phase A2 was employed only for fish-hooks, rings, bangles, and beads; one fragment analysed contained 30 per cent of zinc, so native copper at least is excluded. In phase Bi copper was used occasionally for making flat adzes, while a B2 site yielded a copper pick-axe, allied to the Transylvanian axe- adzes of Danubian III. Phase C is certainly contemporary with the frankly Bronze Age Usatova culture (p. 145), but even in Bi a knot- headed pin is reported from Sabatinovka on the Bug.3 It may be evidence for Asiatic inspiration of the school of metallurgy that grew up west of the Black Sea, but it could just as well be derived from the Perjamos and Unetician cultures in the Danube valley. In that case phase Bi of Tripolye would fall already into Danubian IV. The products of Tripolye potters have been celebrated in archaeo- logical literature for nearly a century. In every village local potters made vases of sophisticated forms and substantial dimensions and 1 F. Vovk in Antropologiya, 1927 (Kiev, 1928), 20-5, pi. Ill, 9. 2 See p. 137, n. 3. 3 Arkheolog. Pamat. Ukrain. S.S.R., IV (Kiev, 1952), 78-83; a clay copy of a Scythian cauldron, allegedly from the same horizon, prompts doubts as to the reliability of the excavation report. 139 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION fired them in kilns to a hard red or orange ware. A model vertical kiln and remains of an actual one stacked with vases were found at Ariusd1 (Fig. 74), perforated clay grills from Habasesti2 may have served to separate the firing chamber from the hearth. Yet housewives most probably made at home the pots required for domestic use instead of purchasing them from a full-time specialist potter; for stocks of pre- 9 JO HA ? ? ? Fig. 74. Potters' oven and model, Ariu§d (Exosd), After Laszld. pared clay were discovered in some houses and instruments for decor- ating vases in many. Actually two wares are found on most Tripolye sites—a coarse ware tempered with shell and a finer fabric with chaff or sand temper. The former, not reported from phase A sites, is orna- mented with a comb, impressed into, or drawn over, the wet clay; its affinities lie with the products of surviving hunter-fisher societies in the boreal forest zone of North-Eastern Europe. The finer wares, red or orange in hue, were richly decorated. In all phases the patterns might be outlined with deep channelled grooves supplemented with dots and, in phases A and Bi, filled with rouletted lines; the curved stamps of antler, bone, or shell used to produce such lines have been found on several sites3 (Fig, 75, Bi, 12). Broad flutings were sometimes employed with, or instead of, grooves in phase A and especially in Bi.4 Exceptionally these devices were enriched by incrusta- tions in ochre or with lines of white paint applied before firing to the red ground in phase A. The most familiar decoration in phases B and 1 See p. 137, n. 2. 2 Page 137, n. 3, pp. 189 ft., fig. 9. 3 At Luka-Vrublevetska (p. 136, n. ; Ariusd; Sabatinovka, etc. 4 Especially atTraian on the Seret, Dacia, IX-X (1941-44), ix ff. 140 THE PEASANTS OF THE BLACK EARTH Fig. 75. Tripolye types (after Passek). B I: Polychrome pottery (T\) and ladle, figurine, clay cone, and stamp (J), comb for decorating pottery, stone adze, antler pick. B II: 1 (^7), 3, 7 grooved, 5-6 painted ware PyaniSkovo; Yladimirovka. C I: 1-3 Popodnia; 6-8 (y^), Staraya Buda. DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION C was, however, painted'—in white or red (mainly in Bi), outlined with black on red, or red outlined in black on a white slip. Warm black, sometimes supplemented by thin lines in red, on buff or orange was the favourite style in phases B2 and C. In phase A running spirals, used as a repetition pattern, formed the basis of the decoration, but they gave place to closed S spirals in phase Bi. In the sequel these dissolved into circles and the old all-over composition gave place to a tectonic arrangement emphasizing the vase’s articulation. From the first the vase forms are highly sophisticated and too varied even for enumeration. Tubular stands (Fig. 75, Bi, 2) are con- fined to phases A and Bi. Fruitstands (Fig. 75, Bi, 1) were most popular in phase Bi and in that phase alone are accompanied by jars on profiled and perforated pedestals. “Binocular vases” (Fig. 75, Bn, 7) were char- acteristic at all periods. Vases in the form of animals, usually bulls, or anthropomorphic, may rank as ritual vessels, but a “bird vase” of phase A1 could just as well be regarded as an askos. In the light of the total excavation of Kolomishchina Tripolye society would seem to have been as democratic and equalitarian as the Dan- ubian of Koln-Lindental, since the size of the houses was determined by the number of families inhabiting them jointly. But at Fedele^eni, a Moldavian village of stage Bi, Nestor2 mentions that one house was more richly furnished than the rest and contained a stone animal sceptre-head (Fig. 76) as if it had belonged to a chief. Moreover, the mace-head from Veremye might be interpreted as a symbol of authority. The ideology of the Tripolye farmers was as “Asiatic” as that of their y Balkan and Danubian II contemporaries. In addition to the cruciform “altars”, many houses were littered with clay figurines and models. .The former, predominantly female, in phases A and Bi were steato- pygous, and in phase Bi richly ornamented with incised spirals (Fig. 75, Bi, 10), though fiddle-shaped types like Fig. 8, 2 were also common at Habasesti.3 In phase B2 the figurines are flat, often perforated for suspension and painted (Fig. 75, Bn, 13; C, . Males are represented^ sporadically even in phase A, phalli4 too in phase Bi. Clay stamps occur only in phase Bi and are confined to sites between the Oltu and the Prut—Ariu^d, Cucuteni, Haba^ti, and Ruginoasa; one bears a filled cross design, the rest spirals (Fig. 76). As ornaments, besides copper and very rare gold trinkets, clay beads, some star-shaped, were worn at all periods. Copper beads and bored deers’ teeth seem confined to phases A and Bi, to which belong also 1 MIA., XXXVIII, p. 338, tab. 46. 2 BRGK., XXII, 45 and 51, n. 80. 3 Page 137, n. 3, 414. 4 Page 137, n. 4, 468. 142 THE PEASANTS OF THE BLACK EARTH laminae from boars’ tusks perforated at the four corners. Clay cones, common in phase Bi (Fig. 75, may have been gamesmen, though one is surmounted by a rough human head. The position of the Tripolye phases in the Balkan sequence is fairly! clear. On the Seret, phase A is preceded by Boian, while a brokeir binocular vase was found as an import in the earliest Gumelnita level at Vidra (p. 98). At Verbicoara in Wallachia, polychrome sherds, attributed to phase Bi, were found in the Salcu|:a layer, while the Fig. 76. Stone sceptre-head, Fedele^eni and clay stamp, Ariu§d. sceptre-head from Fedelefeni is paralleled at Salcufa itself. On the Upper Oltu, remains of the Ariu^d, Bi, version of Tripolye are super- imposed on early Boian strata. On the Dniestr at Nezviska, the settlement with early Bi pottery overlies the late Danubian I village (p. no), but at Traian, Danubian I sherds are reported from a Tripolye A layer.1 Hence, while phase A may overlap with Boian in Balkan II, most of phases A and B must be parallel with Gumelnita and Salcu^a in Balkan III. Links with the Danubian sequence are more ambiguous. The clay stamp-seals might be used as a basis for synchronizing phase Bi with Danubian II, and so might the Ariusd figurines that, as in Moravia, were modelled in two parts separately and then stuck together. On the other hand, the relative abundance of metal, the battle-axes, repre- sented by models, a bossed copper disc from Habafe^ti2 would all be 1 St. s. Qerc. (1954), V, 36. 2 Page 136, n. 6, 436; the disc is very like that from the Danubian III grave at BrzeSd Kujawski, p. 123 above. 143 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION more appropriate to Danubian III. So the jars on high profiled pedestals of phase Bi have their closest analogies in the transitional Tiszapolgar pottery that is likewise Danubian III, while at Marosvasarhely poly- chrome Bi and decorated Bodrogkeresztur pottery seem to have been associated. An even lower limit in terms of the Danubian sequence would be given by the one possible import found in a Tripolye settle- ment: the knot-headed pin from Sabatinovka, if imported from Bohemia or Hungary, would mean that Tripolye Bi did not end before Danubian IV began. But of course the pin might have come from Asia. That Tripolye C lasts into and perhaps beyond Danubian IV is nearly certain.1 Here Tripolye has been assigned to periods II, III, and IV, but perhaps its several phases should each be set a period later. In its economy, as in its art, the Tripolye culture is so fundamentally Danubian that one might speak of a Dniestro-Danubian cycle of cultures. The Danubian element can be most economically derived from the colonists established at Nezviska and elsewhere in pre- Tripolian times. But they had been preceded by earlier Starcevo settlers, if not by the hypothetical hunter-fishers who might have remained in occupation of the region since the Ice Age (p. 88). Indeed, the latter now become almost tangible in the coarse ware found on all Tripolye sites and related to that of the more boreal hunter-fisher tribes of the Eurasiatic taiga. It is now no longer necessary to look to Central Asia to account for the painted Tripolye vases, since the Starcevo pioneers painted their vases and must have possessed the vertical kilns requisite for producing light-faced wares. The Tripolye ideology and the elaborate ritual paraphernalia that expressed it were of course shared by the Tripolye farmers with their cultural antecedents in South-West Asia, but equally with neighbour- ing Gumelnijia, Vinca, and Danubian II societies; it could have reached the Tripolye province thence, if not earlier with the Starcevo colonists." The Beginnings of Metallurgy on the West Pontic Coasts By Tripolye phase C, and probably earlier, there had arisen on the steppes bordering the Black Sea a local metal industry serving stratified societies, best represented in the Usatova culture,2 so named after a village and cemeteries near Odessa. Warlike chiefs, leaders of a pastoral aristocracy, were enabled to exercise an effective demand for metal armaments by concentrating the surplus wealth produced by their pastoral followers and by their Tripolye subjects. 1 Sulimirski, PPS., XVI (1950), 45-52. 8 Full summary by Passek in MIA., X, 190-200. I44
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DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION
descended from local groups; for everywhere the pottery is technically in the Lengyel-Baden tradition, but everywhere, save on the Tisza, influence from Bell-beaker folk is patent even in the pottery. But the universally used strap-handled jugs and tankards with the body and neck modelled separately have nothing to do with the Bell-beakers.
68 69 70
Fig. 68. Daggers from UnStician graves (£)•
Fig. 69. Hoard of Sobochleby (£)•
Fig. 70. Bronze-hilted dagger (J).
All after Schr&nil.
In the Middle Danube basin settlements were founded in period IV on sites chosen primarily with a view to commerce where natural routes intersect at a ford or pass mouth.1 And these settlements were permanent townships occupied so long that their ruins form tells. Cemeteries of contracted skeletons no less clearly attest a sedentary life; that at Szoreg near Szeged comprised 200 graves, 103 attributed to period IV and 54 to period V. But even these communities were
1 PZ., XXII (1931), 33- DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
more nearly self-sufficing villages than industrial cities. Bone and stone were still used for implements and even battle-axes; metal toilet- articles such as girdle-clasps were imitated in bone. The pots were hand-made, but the slipped and polished vases, red, black, or mottled, recall Anatolian and Iberic fabrics. In the basal or Nagyrev levels at Toszeg and in the older Szoreg graves the jugs have only one loop or strap handle. Later these give place to hour-glass tankards which develop in period V into metallic-looking cantharoi with quatrefoil mouths like the Middle Minoan and Hittite vases (p. 33). While the local smiths made most of the types characteristic of the period, they did not develop the flanged axe nor the same variety of pins as was popular farther north. Segmented fayence beads were, however, imported and Oriental lunula-pendants1 were imitated, as were iEgean “sacred ivy-leaves”.2
North of the Bakony and Carpathians no tells have been recognized, but cemeteries in Austria comprising over a hundred graves3 must belong to permanent villages, occupied even into period V (sixteen rectilinear houses have in fact been recognized at Postoloprty).4 All the foregoing graves contained contracted skeletons. Only in the Kisapostag group and the earliest graves near Szeged was cremation the normal practice. Their cemeteries are indeed urnfields like that of Troy VI. Of course, cremation had been practised locally by some Baden communities and also by Bell-beaker folk in Hungary. In South Bohemia, Poland, and Thuringia Unetician burials have been found under barrows (p. 200)
The Unetician culture proper extends from the Austrian Danube to Silesia and Saxony, but is most typically developed on the Upper Elbe in Bohemia and along the Saale and Oder. Here, owing to the proximity of the Ore Mountains and the amber trade across the Brenner, the metal industry developed most luxuriantly. By casting in valve-moulds, the celts were equipped with high flanges and the knot-headed pin was translated into the distinctive “Bohemian eyelet- pin” (Fig. 67, 2). Towards the end of period IV core casting allowed the manufacture of socketed spear-heads and socketed chisels. More- over, Unetician smiths could produce not only ornaments of sheet bronze but also bell helmets if, as Hencken5 has shown grounds for believing, the specimen found a century ago at Beitsch in Saxony was
1 Cf. e.g. Schaeffer, Stratigraphie comparee, fig. 183, 36.
2 Essays in Mgean Archeology, ed. Casson, pp. 1-4; cf. Petrie, Ancient Gaza, III, pi. XIV, 29-33.
8 Four hundred at Hainberg-Teichtal (MAGW., LX (1930), 65 ff.); 255 at Gemein- lebam (Szombathy) Flachgraber bie Gemeinlebarn, R.-G. Forsch. 3, Berlin, 1929.
4 AR., V (1953). 308-18
6 “Beitsch and Knossos”, PPS., XVIII (1952), 36-47, cf. p. 30 above.
132 DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION
really associated with Unetician ingot-torques and a triangular daggei. Amber, gold, and Mediterranean shells were freely imported, but fayence beads are rare and the segmented variety (like Fig. 157) is not found north of Brno.
Fig. 71. Bulb, disc, trilobate, and crutch-headed pins from later Unetician graves. After Schr4nil (£).
The hand-made pots agree in fabric with those from Perjamos, but the most distinctive shapes were at first pouched jugs and mugs some- times decorated with cord-impressions or incised lines (Fig. 72) .1
1 Formerly attributed to a distinct “Marschwitz culture” and period III.
133 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
Then in the classical phase of Unetice (IVb) these are transformed by flattening out the belly into keeled mugs and jugs. Neumann1 has analysed the constituents of Unetician pottery into elements derived from the Bell-beaker and Corded ware groups and a southern com-
Fig. 72. Marschwitz and early Unetician pottery, Silesia and Bohemia.
After Stocky.
ponent. His analysis summarizes the constitution of the whole culture. Bell-beaker folk established the requisite commercial connection, battle-axe warriors made the demand for metal effective, metallurgists from the south may have provided the technical basis, but the founda- tion was still Baden and so Danubian.
The development of the Central European bronze industry was undoubtedly correlated with that of the amber trade across the province; the guaranteed market that alone could make regular trade among barbarians worth while was in Mycenaean Greece and Crete. It is undoubtedly assumed that the initiation of the industry was equally due to prospectors, ultimately relying for a livelihood on the purchasing power of East Mediterranean cities. On this assumption the Oriental types reproduced by Danubian smiths should provide limiting dates for period IV. The limits thus given prove to be unex- pectedly wide. Most of the ornaments mentioned on p. 129 had been current in Egypt or Mesopotamia long before 2000 b.c. Even the ingot- torques, introduced into Syria about that date, had earlier wiry pre- cursors at Ahlatlibel, as in Austria (p. 125). So period IV might begin before 2000 b.c. But regular trade with the ZBgean is attested first about 1600 b.c.
The initial assumption, however intrinsically probable, has not yet been demonstrated by actual dateable imports; for segmented fayence beads were current in Hither Asia for a millennium before 1400 b.c. Now the metal-working clan, who introduced ingot-torques with core casting and other advances into Syria, are thought to have been
1 PZ., XX (1929), 70-128.
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immigrants. As no other cradle has been found for them, they might have come from Central Europe. In that case their advent a century it before or after 2000 b.c. would be a terminus ante quem for the beginning { of Danubian IV. So too the amber beads from the Shaft Graves of Mycenae at least prove that the commerce that enriched the Un&tician culture was fully established before 1550 b.c. Crescentic necklaces with pattern-bored spacers, like the Mycenaean, in Bavaria and Alsace are found in graves of period V. So 1550 should be near the end of period IV.
If so, the strikingly close Middle Minoan and contemporary Hittite analogies to the quatrefoil cantharoi that developed from the Perjamos tankards in period V (p. 132) become chronologically significant. Moreover, by 1200 b.c. fibulae and other Central European or North Italian types were appearing in Greece, and the types in question are more proper to period VI than to period V.1 If, then, period V—the*j Middle Bronze Age—ended about 1250 b.c., and began in 1550, period IV, y the initial phase of the Continental Bronze Age, might very well have occupied five centuries and begun before 2000 b.c. On the available Central European evidence, 2100 is as likely a date as 1700 for the start of the Early Bronze Age.
But whether Perjamos and Unetice are to be compared to Sargonid cities in Mesopotamia or early Mycenaean townships in Greece, they must rank several stages lower in the cultural scale. Economically they have not. reached the level of the Early Aegean townships of the Peloponnese or the Troad. Most of the population must remain peasants. But one industry at least did absorb a few of the farmers’ younger sons; trade did indirectly secure a share in the Oriental surplus to supple- ment home-grown supplies. The smiths, the only specialist craftsmen recognizable in the archaeological record of period IV, displayed far more originality and inventiveness than their fellows in Asia or Egypt. And their products were more democratic. Even in period IV they were making sickles while Egyptian peasants were still reaping with flints. By period VI their successors would have invented an axe of bronze J that was as efficient and as cheap as an iron one, and an armament 'J| with which European barbarians could challenge the well-equipped armies of Oriental monarchies.
1 Cf. p. 83; even violin-bow fibulae are first reliably attested in urnfields of period VI.
A fragment from an Un£tice grave at Polepy in Bohemia (Schranil, Bohmen, ioi; Bohm, CISPP, (London. 1932), 242; cf. AR., VI (1954), 533> where the fragment is accepted jas an Unetician fibula) is too small for reliable diagnosis', another from Gemeinlebam is just as likely to belong to the umfield at that site as to the late UnStician cemetery. CHAPTER VIII
THE PEASANTS OF THE BLACK EARTH
On the loss-clad flanks of the Carpathians, in the valleys of the upper Oltu and the Seret, and on the parkland plateau extending north- eastward across the Prut, the Dniestr, and the Southern Bug to the Dniepr, there developed, on a Starcevo foundation enriched by Dan- ubian elements, a remarkable farming culture named after Tripolye, a site near Kiev.1 Though its authors were throughout farmers and lived in large villages of substantial houses, they seem, like their kinsmen farther west, to have practised a sort of shifting cultivation.2 Hence the village sites are very numerous—twenty-six have been identified in no sq. miles just south of Kiev—but none formed tells. A few sites —Nezviska3 on the Dniestr, Cucuteni4 and Izvoare5 on the Prut, Traian6 on the Seret—were occupied more than once. The stratigraphy there observed justifies a division of the culture into four main stages: A, Bi, B2, and C7. It is based primarily on a stylistic analysis of the ceramic decoration in which local divergences may have sometimes been mistaken for discrepancies in age. Phase A is confined to a few sites on the upper reaches of the Prut, the Dniestr, and the Bug. The valleys of the Oltu and Dniepr would then have been colonized in phase Bi (AB). Only in phase C does Tripolye pottery occur in settle- ments of quite different cultures on the steppes and in the forests north of the Teterev.
The basis of life was throughout the cultivation of wheats—Tnticum monococcum, dicoccum, and vulgare—barley, and millet, and the breed- ing of cattle, goats, sheep, and pigs.8 Cows were always the most important stock; horses’9 bones occur in all stages, but perhaps repre- sent game animals save in the latest stage. Hunting was at all times important, but the percentage of game bones in the food refuse declines from 52 in stage A to 20 in stage C. Fishing must also have made
1 Passek, Periodizatsiya Tripolskikh Poselenii (MA., X, 1949), tliough. written in 1946, documents facts unless another reference be given.
2 Krifievskii, KS„ VIII (1940), 53-
3 KSU., IV (1955), 142-6.
4 Schmidt, H., Cucuteni in der oberen Moldau (Berlin, 1932).
6 Vulpe, ESA., XI (1937). I34-46-
6 St. s. Cere., V (1954), 36-54.
7 Passek, La Cdramique tripolienne (GAIMK., Leningrad, 1935).
8 Bibikov, Ranne-tripolskoe poselenie Luka-Vrublevetska, MIA., XXXVIII (1953).
8 Hancar, Das Pferd, 65 if; KS., LI (1953), 53.
I36 THE PEASANTS OF THE BLACK EARTH
a substantial contribution; hooks of copper or bone are found even on phase A sites, while along the Dniestr remains of fish over 1*5 m. long have been reported. Net-fishing may be inferred from clay sinkers. Finally, the collection of shell-fish and berries added substantially to the food-supply.
The settlements are normally located on spurs of loss, protected on three sides by ravines. At the time of their occupation the plateaux were moister than to-day, liable to swamping, covered with damp woods and inhabited by tortoises, otters, and water-rats.1 Most sites were probably defended by ditch and rampart. Those at Ariusd2 on the Oltu (phase Bi) enclosed ij acres that would accommodate at most 21 houses arranged in three rows. Haba^esti on the Seret3 comprised perhaps 44 dwellings, while as many as 150, mostly B2, are reported from Vladimirovka. Normal villages of phases B2 and C consisted of 30 to 42 houses usually arranged radially on the circumferences of one or more concentric circles 200 m. to 500 m. in diameter.
Only alleged pit-dwellings of phase A have been described; the houses of later phases are represented by the celebrated ploUadki, areas of baked clay resulting from the burning and collapse of walls and floors. The walls of wattle and daub heavily plastered with clay and straw were supported by earth-fast posts at Ariufd in phase Bi; their sockets define houses measuring 8*25 by 5-4 m. and divided into two rooms by a partition. Ovens were found in both rooms, a hearth in the outer one. In plan and internal arrangements these houses are identical with those of Rossen and contemporary settlements round the Alps (Fig. 137), and assumed for period II along the Middle Danube. In phases B2 and C, posts planted in sleeper beams seem to have served to support only a skeleton frame and the roof-tree, the walls being built of compacted earth—kerpitsh. In most villages a few houses were small and one-roomed, 7 by 4 m. in area and containing only a single oven. The average house measured about 14 by 5*5 m. and contained two to four ovens. The largest house recorded measured 27 by 6*5 m. and was divided into five rooms, four furnished with one oven each, the fifth with two. The most puzzling features in many houses are the hard-baked and well-smoothed clay floors on which ovens, querns, and vases stood and on the undersides of which imprints of close-set timbers are preserved.4
1 Pidopliika in Passek, note 1, 146.
2 Childe, Danube, 98-104.
3 Hdb&sesti, Monografie Arheologica (Acad. Repub. Pop. Romine, Bucuresti, 1954).
* KriCevskil, "Tripolskie Ploscadki”, SA., VI (1940), argued that the floors were baked by fires kindled upon them before the house was roofed over.
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The Transitional Baden-Pecel Culture
West and north of the Danube between Buda-Pest and Vienna emerged a culture complex variously designated Baden,1 Ossarn,1 2 or Pecel3 after Austrian and Hungarian sites or "channel”4 or “radially5 orna- mented" after ceramic features. Its domain extends northward through Moravia to the Upper Elbe and the Upper Vistula and eastward across the Tisza and the Maros. Its regional manifestations in architecture and burial rites as well as pottery differ so widely as to raise doubts whether the discrepancies be due to the partial assimilation of distinct traditions or local divergences of a single tradition. Much of the data comes from isolated burials or rubbish pits; only Ossarn in Austria, Vucedol on the Drave, some sites near the Maros, and two large ceme- teries near Buda-Pest have been systematically explored on an adequate scale.
While one-corn and emmer wheats2 were regularly cultivated (very likely with the plough), stock-breeding combined with hunting made major contributions to the food-supply. Ritual burials of cattle and deer underline the importance of these activities. Experts conclude that the cattle were bred for milk, not just for flesh.6 The bones from Ossarn2 disclose for the first time on the Middle Danube large flocks of sheep. The first remains of horses in the province, too, have been reported from this and other sites. Perhaps they were already domesti- cated.7 At least there were vehicles for horses to draw.
A model waggon, carried on four solid disc wheels,8 from the ceme- tery of Buda-Kalasz affords the oldest evidence for such vehicles north of the Alps, if not in Europe as a whole. But these vehicles were not drawn by horses. At least paired oxen, buried in two rich graves at Alsonemedi,9 must surely have drawn the hearses in which their masters were conveyed to the grave.
On the fertile plains and in mountain valleys the farmers lived on fortified hilltops or in caves. The best-attested house type is a one-roomed rectangular hut with rounded corners,10 but at Vucedol,
1 Fittioni, Osterreich., 189-208.
2 Bayer, Die Eiszeit, V (Vienna, 1928), 60 ff.
3 Banner, "Die P6celer Kultur” Arch. Hung., XXXV (1956).
4 Stocky, Boh. Preh., 115 ff.; B6hm, Kronika, 134-49; cf. SlovensM Dejiny, 61-4.
5 WA.,XII (1933), 140-67.
6 AAH., I (1951). 49. 75-
7 Dolg., XV. (1939), 166; the attribution of an antler cheek-piece from a bit to the P£cel culture is dubious.
8 Folya Arch., VI (1952), 29-35; Banner, loc. cit., 127.
8 AAH., I (1951). 38-40.
10 Measuring 4-5 by 3^4 m. at Palotabazsolc (Banner, “Peceler Kultur”, 214), 8-o by 5-5 m. at Praha-Bubenic (B6hm, Kronika, 198).
124 DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION
Schmidt1 reports apsidal houses. Circular pits (? bothroi) are common in all settlements; at Vucedol they led into subterranean cellars excavated in the loss. At least in Hungary the size of the cemeteries—305 graves at Buda-Kalasz, 41 at Alsonemedi—point to large and stable villages. But these did not grow into tells, and the huts seem more appropriate to semi-nomad pastoralists. Their location, like the weapons from graves, emphasizes the martial aspect of pastoral societies.
Stone was still the normal material for knives, axes and adzes, arrow-heads, and battle-axes. But the last-named exhibit an imitation seam as if copied from a cast metal model, and Pittioni2 assigns copper weapons, like Fig. 63, from Austria to the Baden culture. Copper ornaments alone have so far been found in graves; two in Lower Austria3 were furnished with neck-rings of twisted wire with recoiled ends, immediate precursors of the cast ingot-torques (Fig. 69, 11-12) of period IV. Long-distance trade is positively documented by Spon- dylus and Tridacna shells, imported from the Mediterranean.
Spools, like the Early Troadic, and whorls attest an active textile industry. Pottery was self-coloured and generally dark-faced, occasion- ally mottled. A universal peculiarity is presented by large ribbon handles rising above the rims of mugs and jugs; at the top they are often deeply flanged, as in Fig. 96, or fanned out. Subcutaneous string-holes are not uncommon, and occasionally trumpet lugs (like Fig. 17, column 1) grow from the bowls. Bowls have inverted rims and, in Hungary and Slovakia, are divided into two unequal compartments and provided with conspicuous button handles. Channelled decoration is universal, but is often combined with other techniques—punctured ribbons, incised lattices, exceptionally crusting combined with incision as in the Tisza culture, or even cord impressions.
Female figurines have not been recorded, but clay animal figures and models of waggons and boats may represent a survival of the old ideological tradition. It was quite overshadowed by funerary ritual. A few burials of men and women together may be taken as evidences of sati and of a patriarchal family. At Alsonemedi two centrally situated graves containing oxen and hearses must belong to chiefs interred in accordance with the tradition of royal burials that can be traced back to the Early Dynastic tombs of Kish and Ur and here marking the oldest royal funerals in Europe. The normal burial rite was interment in a contracted or flexed position, but in Hungary a small group of cremation graves has been recently reported. In a couple of Austrian tombs five or eight corpses had been buried together. Round Buda- pest graves were grouped in distinct cemeteries; at some other sites
* Vuiedol, 10-15. 2 Osterreich., 204. 2 WPZ., XXIV (1937) 15-21.
125 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
they are said to have been dug within the inhabited area. Collective tombs containing up to twenty corpses were reported from Slovakia.1 But in western Hungary cemeteries of cremation burials in urns constitute regular urnfields.2 At Vucedol men were laid on the right, women on the left side.
In the Danubian sequence Baden is undoubtedly later than Lengyel. At Kiskoros3 on the Hungarian plain a Bodrogkeresztur grave had been dug into an abandoned Baden settlement, but east of the Tisza the relation between the two cultures was reversed. At Fonyod Baden graves had been disturbed by later Early Bronze Age graves of the Kisapostag culture, while the copper neck-rings from Austria are typologically older than the torques of period IV. So the Baden culture is well fixed within period III; the extent of its overlap with the Bell- beaker culture remains to be determined. Racially the Pecel population shows a mixture of round and long heads.4
To Menghin, R. R. Schmidt and Pittioni Baden is just a "Nordic” culture, the result of an invasion from the wooded plain of Northern Europe. No doubt a few specifically Northern types, like collared flasks, occur sporadically on Baden sites as at Jevisovice in Moravia. On the other hand, peculiarities in Northern ceramic decoration have been ascribed to Baden influence,5 and there is far more evidence for southern than for northern influences in the fundamentally Danubian Baden pottery. The distinctive channelled ornament is prominent in the Vinca culture; the incised and punctured patterns can be paralleled there and, still more precisely, in the Macedonian Late Neolithic; trumpet lugs are Troadic; flanged handles have been met in Troy while the Chalcolithic of Mersin6 provides an exact parallel to the Baden variant. Similarly, subcutaneous string-holes recur in the Rinaldone culture of Central Italy. The wire torques from the Austrian graves can be exactly matched in "Copper Age” burials at Ahlatlibel in Anatolia7 and so could be. claimed as concrete evidence of the south- eastern inspiration tor the metallurgy at least of the Baden culture. Finally, wheeled vehicles were invented in Mesopotamia about 3000 b.c. and employed as hearses in royal funerals there by 2500. They were surely diffused thence, though the nearest analogues—spatially and chronologically—to the Baden model—from South Russia—are two- wheeled carts.
1 AR., IV (1952), 244; V, 733-6.
1 Banner "P6celer Kultur”, 200-4. 3 PZ., XXII (1931), m-15.
4 Arch. Hung., XXXV, 293-309.
8 Maier in Germania, XXXIII (1955), 159-73.
a Garstang, LA A A., XXV, p. XXVIII, 22.
7 Turk Tarih Arkeologya ve Etnografya, Dergisi, II (1934), 9°-
126 DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION
The southern connections just summarized, save the last, do not necessarily mean influences from the south. The “torque bearers’’ who introduced better metallurgical techniques into Syria1 might conceiv- ably have come from Central Europe, and, if so, the earlier torque from Ahlatlibel might after all be Danubian. Italian prehistorians would prefer to derive the Baden features in the Rinaldone culture from the north. If the Baden analogies in the Balkans, Macedonia, and Anatolia too could be thus interpreted, the Baden culture does exhibit all the archaeological characters—horses, wheeled vehicles, cattle and sheep, a dairy economy, patriarchal families, bows and arrows— deduced by linguistic palaeontology for the ancestral Indo-Europeans; their expansion could be beautifully documented by the connections just mentioned! Of course, such an interpretation would demand a literal inversion of current chronologies both relative and absolute. Still, these are based—mainly but not entirely—on undemonstrated postulates. With that reservation on purely archaeological evidence the Baden culture cannot begin more than a couple of centuries before 2000 b.c. and so could only be influenced by Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age cultures of the iEgean.
The Early Bronze Age
During period III the growth of population was calling for a new economy and making labour available for industry and commerce. War was stimulating a demand for metal, and chiefs were accumulating capital; the prejudices of immigrant warriors had to be satisfied with trade-goods from the Baltic and Galicia. The Bell-beaker folk (pp. 222- 227.) established regular communications with the West and North and opened up new connections with the Mediterranean across the Brenner Pass. The rise of rich cities on the Levant coasts by 2000 b.c., in Crete by 1800, and in peninsular Greece by 1600 had created markets for metals and other raw materials not too far from Central European sources of supply and provided capital for their exploitation. Perhaps prospectors trained in Asiatic traditions had begun working the copper of Transylvania, Slovakia, and the Eastern Alps, and even the tin lodes of Bohemia and Saxony. At least as soon as the lords of Mycenae and Knossos began to demand amber, it became worthwhile to organize the transport of the magic resin from Denmark and at the same time the distribution of metal among the peasant societies of the Danube basin. The appearance of the metal wares thus distributed defines for archaeologists period IV.
1 PPS., XVII (1951), 178 ft.
12 7 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
No actual mines can be dated by direct evidence to period IV, but there are indications that the copper lodes of the eastern Alps, demon- strably mined during period VI, may have been exploited by surface workings as early as period IV (p. 301). Equally early exploitation of copper lodes near Saalfeld and of Vogtland tin has been deduced from recent analyses.1 Moulds have been found in several settlements, but do not necessarily belong to resident smiths.
The distribution of the industry's products was effected by a regular class of itinerant merchant-artificers. Their routes are defined by hoards of finished and half-finished articles—the merchant's stock in trade— that had been buried when danger threatened and never recovered. They show that the merchants were following ancient Danubian traditions (p. 109) and that they dealt also in amber, gold, and presum- ably substances such as salt that leave no trace in the archaeological record. The amber routes are particularly well defined: the fossil resin was brought from Jutland and Sammland to the Saale valley and thence passed on through Bohemia and across the Brenner to Upper Italy and the Aegean, while a little was diverted across Moravia to the Hungarian plain and the Maros.1 * 3 A counterpart to this export trade is certainly to be seen in segmented and cruciform beads of Egyptian or iEgean fayence common in cemeteries round Szeged3 and in Slovakia,4 and found sporadically in Western Hungary,5 Lower Austria,6 Moravia,7 and Poland.
The activities of these merchants linked up the Central European region round the Brenner amber route into a single commercial system with branches to the tin-lodes of Cornwall and the gold-fields of Tran- sylvania, but completely by-passing the Balkans. The types of metal ware thus diffused from the beginning of the Bronze Age produce a superficial appearance of uniformity throughout the Danubian province which no longer includes the Save or Drave, the Danube below Buda- pest, or the Tisza south of the Maros mouth. At the same time Asiatic parallels to the arbitrary metal ornaments suggest the source of the fresh chemical knowledge, the alloy of copper with tin, on which the new economy was based.
Cast neck-rings with recoiled ends (Fig. 69, 11) were not only worn
1 Otto-Witter, Handbuch der altesten Meiallurgie in Mitieleuropa (Leipzig, 1952).
8 Only in graves 2 and 211 at Szfireg and 14 at Deszk; Dolg., XVII (1941); cf. Milojdid, CJSPP. (Zurich, 1950), 268.
3 A]A., XLIII (1939), 17; Banner, Dolg., XVII.
4 Especially at VySapy-Opatovce near Nitra, unpublished.
5 In Kisapostag graves at Dunapentele, AAH., II (1952), 66.
8 Germania, XXI (1937), 89.
7 At Nemiice and Jiriltovice, Mus. Brno.
128 DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION
as ornaments but served also as ingots and therefore are termed “ingot- torques”. Such torques were the insignia of members of a metal-working clan or guild in North Syria about 2000 b.c.1 and were deposited as symbols of abstract wealth in contemporary shrines at Byblos.1 2 Lock- rings with flattened ends and racket pins have explicitly Sumerian prototypes3; knot-headed pins (Fig. 67, 0), appearing in predynastic Egypt4 recur later at Troy and in Cyprus: the basket-shaped earrings of gold wire (Fig. 67, 4, 5) are detached members of the Trojan ornaments
4 5
Fig. 67. Pins and earrings from Unetician graves. After Schr&nil (l).
shown in Fig. 22, 1. The first bronze-smiths producing for a Central European market seem to have been trained in Asiatic schools and to have introduced, together with the secret of bronze, Oriental fashions in personal adornment.5 If so, the absence of these types on the Euro- pean coasts of the Aegean and in the Balkans requires the admission
1 Schaeffer, Ugavitica, II (1949), 49, calls these metallurgists “Torque-Bearers”.
2 Syria, VI (1925), 18.
3 Childe, NLMAE., 161-2.
4 Ibid., 53, 63.
5 MilojSid, Germania, XXXIII (1955), 405-7, points out that the "Asiatic” types do not all appear simultaneously at the beginning of period IV, but severally during phases Ai, A2, and B respectively.
I
T29 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
that they were introduced up the Adriatic and across the Brenner, unless they had been introduced through Troy by metallurgists work- ing for export only till the fall of the “second city” destroyed their market.
The novel metal tools and weapons appearing at the same time were neither so uniform in the Danubian province nor so clearly related to Oriental models. The flat axe which at Thermi had been provided with flanges by hammering (p. 38) was translated into a flanged axe, cast in a two-piece mould (Fig. 69,1). Hence it can be inferred that Central European bronze axes, like Danubian adzes, were mounted in knee shafts. Chisels were even|provided with cast tubular sockets in Moravia and Austria.1 Only in Hungary was a shaft-tube axe of Sumerian ancestry preferred (Fig. 64, 5-6).2 Shaft-hole axes were, however, used as weapons elsewhere in the province, while a remarkable weapon from a Saxon hoard3 of the end of period IV seems a barbaric version of the crescentic axe represented in the Royal Tombs of Ur and rather later in North Syria.4
The universal weapon was the round-heeled knife-dagger (Fig. 68). Its bone or wooden hilt was hollowed at the base like the bronze hilt of the rather later dagger shown in Fig. 70, an old Egyptian trick never popular in Asia nor Greece, but traceable in Central, as in Western, Europe, on the flat-tanged daggers of the Bell-beaker folk during period III. Halberds5 were used in Germany and Lower Austria and occasionally even in Hungary, but not in Bohemia. The type is sup- posedly West European, and reached the Danubian province from Ireland or from the Iberian Peninsula.
The unity created by the metallurgical industry and commerce had no political counterpart. It was imposed on a number of distinct cultures called after the sites of Perjamos6 on the Maros, Toszeg, or NagyrSv on the Tisza,7 Kisapostag west of the Danube,8 Unetice in Bohemia, and Straubing in Bavaria, and asserting their independence not only in peculiarities of pottery and personal ornaments but even by divergences in burial rites and economic status. Most are presumably
1 PA., XLIV (1953), 203; Arch. Aust., VII (1950), 1-8.
2 Derived through the Caucasus, or Crete; cf. PZ., XXVII (1936), 150; Folya Arch., VIII, 43.
3 PZ., XXXIV (1949-50), 232-8; JMV., XXXV (1951), 65.
* Iraq, XI (1949), 118.
8 P.Z., XXV, 130-42; Arch., LXXXVI (1937), 222-5.
* Banner, Dolgozatoh, VII (1931), 1-53; XVII, 70-82; Patay, FruhbronzezeiiUche Kulturen in Ungarn; Nestor, BRGK., XXII, 84-8; CISPP. (1950), 267-77.
7 The culture from the lowest levels in the T6szeg tell is termed Nagyr£v.; cf. Patay, FruhbronzezeiiUche Kulturen in Ungarn (1939); Mozsolic, AAH., II (1952); Banner, PPS., XXI, 127.
8 Mozsolic, Arch. Hung., XXVI (1942); Patay, op. tit.-, in Slovakia Kisapostag and UnStice types occur with inhumations, AR., VI (1954), 297-300.
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DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION
ware may be burnished and ornamented with designs in white paint or covered with a white slip on which the design is painted in red, as in Middle Neolithic Thessalian or Tripolye B wares. In the latest Moravian phase, coloured decoration was abandoned altogether. While crusted spirals were everywhere employed and in Hungary composed in the old Danubian style (Fig. 61, i), basketry patterns, breaking up the surface into panels as in the Tisza style, were even more popular.
Fig. 6i. Danubian II pottery, Lengyel. i, 3, 4 (£); 2 (|).
A South-West Asian ideology found expression in female figurines, models of animals and doves, and zoomorphic vases. But in Hungary regular cemeteries of well-furnished graves containing flexed skeletons attest already ancestor tendence; at Zengovarkony near Pecs, seventy- eight graves (including six double burials of male and female—? sati) divided between eleven groups (? lineages) had been uncovered by 1939.1 Farther north Danubian II burials are rare; at one Moravian site twelve skeletons were found buried together in a shaft grave,2 at others cremations, or evidence for cannibalism3, are reported.
The Lengyel culture could most readily be explained as a result of the further extension of the south-eastern influence that induced the Vinca culture on the Danube. But if such influence be denied, Lengyel might claim a parental relation to Vinca and so to Larisa!
Comparisons with the Aegean and Anatolia offer ambiguous possi- bilities for dating period II. The resemblances of crusted ware to that
1 Arch. Hung., XXIII (1939). 2 Obzor, XIV (1950), 335.
8 AR., VIII, 1956, 773-4. DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
of phase C in Thessaly, of the indented lugs on the Tisza to Early Macedonian, and of clay stamps and block vases to Early Minoan forms, suggest a date round about 2500 b.c. for the period’s beginning. On the other hand, pedestalled bowls, very much of Danubian II form, may go back to the fourth millennium in the chalcolithic of Alisar, at Kum Tepe and in “neolithic” Crete; the red on white painted sherds from Moravia recall equally ancient Thessalian fabrics. On this evi- dence 3000-2600 would seem just as plausible as 2500-2200 as the historical dates of period II.
Danubian I Survivals in the North
The expansion of Danubian II farmers, like that of their precursors in Danubian I, was a slow process. Indeed, it had begun while Danubian I folk were still spreading down the Oder, the Elbe, and the Rhine valleys. Since period II begins with the emergence of the Danubian II and Tisza cultures in the Middle Danube basin, we may say that Danubian I cultures survived in the north into period II. In fact they outlasted even that period in remote places. Moreover, the Danubian I expansion did not take place in vacuo. In the hill countries between the Danube and the Rhine and in Thuringia, along the rivers of the North European plain and on the sand-dunes of Silesia and Poland, still lived scattered groups of Tardenoisian, Maglemosian, and Swiderian food-gatherers. Some of these were absorbed into Danubian com- munities or copied the Danubians’ way of life. Thus arose various cultural groups,1 essentially Danubian in economy and equipment, but diverging from the norm in details, particularly in ceramic art. Hence the groups are defined by their pottery. And most flourished in period III too.
(1) Stroke-ornamented ware (Stichbandkeramik) (Fig. 62, 1) distin- guishes a group which arose probably in Bohemia and spread thence back into Moravia, and into Bavaria, Central Germany, and Western Poland in the wake of the Danubian I groups, and under pressure from the same economic forces. Economically it differs from Danubian I only in a tendency to supplement farming by hunting, for which transverse arrow-heads2 of Tardenoisian ancestry were employed. The arrow-shafts were straightened on grooved stones, as in the Danubian II culture and farther east.3 The pots were still round- bottomed, but were decorated exclusively with skeuomorphic zig-zag patterns composed of ribbons executed by a series of distinct jabs
1 Buttler, Donau., 29, 45; Anthropozoikum, III, (1953), 207; IV, 411.
2 E.g. at Lobec, Bohemia, AR., Ill, 130. 3 PA., XXXIX (1933), 50-3.
Il6 DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION
instead of continuous lines. In Bohemia, Bavaria, and Central Germany the dead were cremated.1 In Moravia and Poland stroke-ornamented ware occurs in late Danubian II settlements, and at Gleinitz in Silesia an imported Tisza vase was found with stroke-ornamented ware,2
Fig. 62. Stroke-ornamented vases, Bohemia (•$, £); Rossen vases. Central
Germany (f5).
while at Vochov near Plzen a figurine of Danubian II type turned up in a similar context.3 Hence the culture thus defined at least lasts into period II.
(2) The Rossen group arose in Western Bohemia and Saxo-Thuringia through the adoption by Forest-folk of a fundamentally Danubian equipment and economy.4 They spread down the Main and then up the Rhine to Switzerland, and into France through the Belfort gap.5 Though the Danubian agricultural economy had been taken over
1 AR., VIII {1956), 710-18.
2 Altschles., Ill (1931), 153,' Buttler, Donau., 60.
3 Obzor, XIV (1950). 330.
4 The theory of its derivation from “the North-West German Megalith Culture”, once dominant in Germany, was refuted by Stocky, Boh, Prdh., 161, and more conclusively by Engel, Mannus, XXXII (1940), 57-81.
5 See Buttler, Donau., 40 fi., and Kimmig, Bad. Fb. (1948-50), 47-62.
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entire, hunting retained much of the importance that it had enjoyed in the ancestral Forest culture. The increased competition for land, due to the rise of this and other new groups of cultivators, may by now have led to war. The Rossen people were the first in the Rhine valley to fortify their settlements, while weapons—transverse and hollow-based arrow-heads, disc-shaped mace-heads and the old per- forated antler-axes of the Forest-folk—were relatively common. The Rossen folk lived in rectangular houses with vertical walls and gabled roofs supported by three rows of earth-fast posts,1 and they also erected rectangular granaries. But their settlements were no more permanent than those of the preceding groups. Their pots are hemi- spherical or globular in profile, but are often provided with stand-rings and are decorated with rectilinear patterns imitating basketry and executed in stab-and-drag technique (Fig. 62, 2). Exceptional forms are quadrilobate dishes with analogues in the Balkans and North Italy and a small clay barrel with closed ends and an opening in the side, a form well-represented in Troy I.1 2
As ornaments the Rossen folk wore marble bracelets, disc-beads of shell, bored tusks and deers’ teeth and marble buttons identical with those from Lengyel. The dead were buried contracted in ceme- teries. One skull from Alsace had been trepanned.3
The buttons of Danubian II type from the graves at Rossen in Central Germany prove that the group even there belongs to period II, while on the Isar, in Alsace, and in the Wetterau, Rossen house- foundations have disturbed the ruins of those left by later Danubian I peasants. On the other hand, on the Goldberg, in Wurttemburg, the Rossen village was succeeded by a settlement of the Western Michels- berg culture that generally belongs to period III. Hence Rossen flourished in period II.4
The Danubian I peasants themselves persisted, wandering about during period II and in the Rhine basin even into period III, preserving their culture intact, but not unaffected by the example of their neigh- bours and rivals. Plastic suggestions of a human face from Koln- Lindental, in the manner of Trojan face-urns, may belong to this phase.5 Even in Central Germany the later Danubian I pottery is associated with the stroke-ornamented ware of period II. Such late Danubian I people fortified Koln-Lindental. Pressure on the land was
1 Germania, XX (1936), 229-34; see Fig- 137 here.
* Buttler, Donau., 47, pis. 10, 12; 12, 1; cf. Blegen, Troy, I, form D 28. The R8ssen and Troadic “barrels" could both be derived from geomorphic vases of the Lengyel culture like Stocky Boh. Preh., pi. LIX, n, or WPZ., XXVIII (1941), 39-
3 Germania, XXVI (1942), 177-81.
1 Buttler, Donau., 62. 6 Buttler, Donau., 31.
118 DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION
becoming serious. In addition to the natural increase of the population and the competitive groups resulting from the conversion of food- gatherers into cultivators, new groups were spreading from the south- east and from the west.
PERIOD III
By period III the natural growth of peasant populations, the con- version to food-production of food-gathering communities, and immi- grations of fresh tribes from beyond the I5ss lands had produced a pressure upon the soil that entailed adjustments in everyday life. Inferior lands above the loss were exploited; hunting and pastoralism became more important economically, and in fact in the temperate zone they would be more productive than hoe-agriculture. Settlements were often planted on hilltops as well as in the valleys, and were fre- quently fortified.1 Competition for land assumed a bellicose character, and weapons such as battle-axes became specialized for warfare. The consequent preponderance of the male members in the communities may account for the general disappearance of female figurines. Part of the new surplus population may have sought an outlet in industry and trade; imported substances such as Baltic amber, Galician flint and copper begin to be distributed more regularly than heretofore. Warriors would appreciate more readily than cultivators the superiority of metal, and chiefs may already have been concentrating surplus wealth to make the demand for metal effective. Its satisfaction was none the less dependent on the diffusion of the requisite technical knowledge, whether by immigrant prospectors or captives, from the south-east.
A general picture of the period in the loss lands would present a bewildering variety of small conflicting groups. Some of these are admittedly intruders and can be better described elsewhere. From the West, Michelsberg folk (p. 291) spread as far as Upper Austria, Bohemia, and Central Germany, while Beaker-folk (p. 223) reached the Danube near Buda-Pest and spread across Germany and Czechoslovakia as far as the Vistula. From the Pontic-North European plain warriors using battle-axes and cord-ornamented pottery spread as far as Bavaria, Bohemia, and Moravia, and even into the Middle Danube basin. In other groups there is an injection of types (collared flasks, globular amphorae, and so on) which we shall find in Chapter X to be genuinely Northern. But these hardly suffice to demonstrate a large-scale “Nordic" invasion of the Danubian province. We shall describe here only certain
1 E.g. Homolka in Bohemia, Proc. Am. Phil. Soc., LXXI (1932), 357-92.
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cultures which remain fundamentally Danubian even though they be found on fortified hilltops or in caves.
Bodrogkeresztur designates the culture into which the Lengyel culture developed through a Tiszapolg&r stage in North-East Hungary and beyond the Tisza, whence it spread north to Silesia.1 It is known almost exclusively from cemeteries larger than those of previous periods. That at the patent station comprised at least fifty graves, at Jaszlad&ny forty, at Pusztaistvanhaza thirty-two,2 while at Tiszapolgar-
Basatanya 158 graves have been excavated out of an estimated total of 225.3 The size of the cemeteries may be due as much to prolonged occupation of the same village as to density of population. At Basatanya, Kutzian could distinguish two consecutive phases, both transitional, between Lengyel and mature Bodrogkeresztur. Double graves, in which one body had been buried with rich furniture, the other with none, suggest a division of society into classes.
Trade now brought to the Hungarian plain flint from Galicia, gold and copper from Transylvania. In the cemeteries copper is represented by several quadrangular awls, three or four rhomboid knife-daggers without midribs or rivet holes, a flat adze, five axe-adzes and at least one battle-axe.4 Several similar battle-axes (Fig. 63) have been found
1 Nbl.f. d. V., XV (1939). 114-17.
2 Arch. Hung., IV; AE., XLI (1927), 50-7; BRGKXXIV-XXV, 53.
3 Report by Kutzian to the "Conference Arch^ologique de l’Acad&nie hongroise des Sciences’’ (Buda-Pest, 1955); cf. AE. (1946-48), 42-62.
* PZ., XXII, in; AE. (1944-45), 1 ff.
120 DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION
stray and disclose the translation into metal of antler axes that in turn became the model for stone weapons (p. 159). Adzes and axe- adzes are very common stray and sometimes occur in hoards.1 Evi- dently copper was being systematically extracted in the Carpathian basin. Roska1 2 long ago argued that axe-adzes served as miners’ tools. Driehaus3 has now shown that the simplest types, like Fig. 64, 1 and 5, are virtually confined to metalliferous Transylvania while the classic type of Fig. 64, 6, radiates thence to the Balkans, Bavaria, Silesia,
and the Ukraine. They must have been traded; and the hoards, though rare, suggest an incipient organization on the fines established by period IV. The metal employed was mainly native copper, of which there must once have been really large deposits. It was undoubtedly melted, but none of the products shows unambiguous evidence of having been shaped by casting in a mould,4 but all traces would be removed by the necessary hammering.
1 Dolg., xix (1943). 135-9*
2 Dacia, III-IV, 352-55; cf. Kozlemenyeh, Cluj, II (1942), 15 ft,
3 Archceologia Geographica, III (1952), 1-5.
4 Inst. Arch. AR., VII (1951), 44-5.
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Copper did not oust stone tools. Graves contain long knives on flint blades, polished stone adzes, hollow-bored celts and, in a late phase, triangular flint or obsidian arrow-heads and a mace embellished with four projecting knobs (Fig. 65).
Technically Bodrogkeresztur pottery carries on the late Lengye] tradition and in the Tiszapolgar phase at least vessels on high hollow pedestals—though more often bowls as in Tripolye than fruitstands—were still popular. But bowls’ rims are now inverted, never expanding. Distinctive of mature Bodrogkeresztur are the so-called milk-jugs (Fig. 66, 2.)1 Handled tankards and pyxides, very like Early iEgean ones, occur spo- radically. Apart from warts and dimples, ornament is not common. Some vases, however, are decorated with cross-hatched ribbons forming mseander patterns even more like those of Dimini than the cognate Tisza designs. Late vases decorated with plastic ribs foreshadow the Bronze Age usage.
Fig. 65.
Knobbed mace- head from Maros Decse (£).
Fig. 66. Bodrogkeresztur pyxis and milk-jug.®After Tompa (J).
Girdles of disc-beads of shell together with stray copper or gold trinkets were worn as ornaments.
Obviously the Bodrogkeresztur population was descended from the
1 What looks like a typical milk-jug was found at Maltepe near Sivas in northern Anatolia, Belleten, XI (1937), 659 ff.
122 DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION
Lengyel group. But had mining and metallurgy been initiated by prospectors from the Aegean or the Caucasus? No doubt axe-adzes of different shapes were used by Early Aegean peoples and were actually manufactured—by casting in clay moulds—at Tepe Hissar in Northern Iran. Prospectors should have introduced the techniques of casting and smelting, but the Transylvanian products seem made of native copper. The forms could be regarded as translations into this "superior stone” of Danubian II adzes, hammer-axes and battle-axes of ordinary stone or antler. Native copper-working could perfectly well have originated in such a metalliferous region. Indeed, the iEgean axe-adzes could theoretically be derived from Transylvania while Heine-Geldem1 has invoked axe-adzes like Fig. So, to mark the Aryans' route to India. In other words the iEgean and Asiatic parallels to Bodiog- keresztur metal types might just as well give termini ante, as termini post, quos. Still, independent invention of casting is hard to admit.
The Jordanova culture of Bohemia2 and Silesia3 can be regarded as a parallel local development of the Lengyel tradition. It too is best known from graves—fifty-seven from the eponymous site (once called Jordansmuhl) in Silesia and thirty-eight at Brzesd Kujawski on the middle Vistula.4 Metal was here used solely for ornaments—spectacle spirals (Fig. 60, i), cylindrical ribbon armlets, and small discs bearing embossed patterns. Antler axes, deposited in men’s graves at BrzeSd Kujawski, illustrate the weapons, copper translations of which were current south of the Carpathians. The distinctive pot-forms are mugs with one or two band handles (Fig. 94) and bowls, again with inverted rims. Bracelets were made of Spondylus shell or of engraved bone, while disc beads of shell were strung together as girdles or necklaces. As in the Bodrogkeresztur culture, female figurines are no more in evidence. The old ideology has been changed. That may reflect a change from a matrilineal to a patrilineal organization of society.
The copper spectacle spirals might have been inspired by Early IEgean gold ones like those of Fig. 22. If so, they would constitute a substantial argument for Oriental participation in the foundation of the Danubian III copper industry. Otherwise there are no more indi- cations of influence from that quarter in Jordanova than in Bodrog- keresztur. Such can, however, be detected in the largely contemporary Baden culture.
1 /. Indian Oriental Soc., IV (1936), 1-30.
2 Obzor, XIV (1950), 163-257.
3 Buttler, Donau., 43.
4 WA., XV (1938), 1-X05; the graves have disturbed foundations of Danubian I long houses.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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