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Maiden Bower: Portal to the Neolithic
: LAYER UPON LAYER In late April 2005 the press agency AFP reported a major archaeological discovery beneath the ruins of Pompei. The tale of that city’s burial by volcanic debris in 79AD and its rediscovery, largely intact, with the forms of human bodies preserved in often poignant frozen poses, is the stuff of popular ancient history. Its mention evokes an immediate image as clear as that of the tumbling Jericho walls or the sacking of Rome. Thanks to ongoing media reminders, we all know about Pompei. Yet a century and a half after the first excavation, a new layer of human presence is now revealed. A Stone Age settlement was buried beneath the known Pompei by a previous eruption around 5,500 years ago. Burnt wood and emmer wheat grains have been unearthed with the promise of more to come. (AFP, 2005)
While the Pompei discovery is dramatic, the theme of site re-use is familiar to historians and pre-historians. Maiden Bower, on the South Downs near the villages of Houghton Regis and Sewell, is a case in point. This endearingly named Iron Age fort lies close to other important ancient monuments and structures. The Neolithic-Bronze Age Five Knolls cluster of burial mounds lies a kilometre or two to the south-east, on the northern edge of the Dunstable Downs. Waulud’s Bank, the Neolithic temple at the source of the River Lea, is an easy walk away - just six kilometres (as the shaman flies) to the north-east. Both Watling Street and the Icknield Way pass close by. The two ancient routes cross in what is now Dunstable, itself once a substantial Roman settlement.
Maiden Bower, then, is no isolated place of interest. On the contrary, it is located in an area containing a range of known, and presumably unknown, ancient and prehistoric remains. More generally it stands close to the fringes of the Chilterns, a long established focus of human interest and settlement.
The broadly circular site is surrounded by a single rampart that still stands up to two metres in height and spans some 4.4 hectares. A substantial ditch is now filled in and an entrance once stood on the south-east. Dyer identifies it as a “plateau camp”. (Dyer, 1973, p.3) Maiden Bower overlooks gently rolling downland hills and fields. Occasional local walkers and their dogs encircle or cross the site. Otherwise undisturbed wide views pan out beneath a very open sky.
As a visible and accessible Iron Age site, Maiden Bower remains impressive, despite serious recent damage. Rusting abandoned cars are stranded on the bank itself. Bikers allegedly inflicted further damage on the earthworks while building cycling ramps with a mechanical digger. (BBC, 2003) Even so, the wide sweep of the bank and the elevation of the terrain are memorable and inspiring. But beneath the visible monument lie the remains of something far older: a Neolithic causewayed enclosure. Much is controversial concerning such sites and there is little awareness of them beyond specialised prehistorical and archaeological circles. Popular consciousness of Neolithic heritage centres on still visually striking henge and dolmen sites. Despite semi-ruination, spectacular monuments like Avebury, Stonehenge and Castlerigg remain tangible within the landscape and, at least at first sight, appear to speak for themselves. By contrast the causewayed enclosures offer relatively little - sometimes nothing at all - to the more casual visitor: so the tourist buses do not come.
But increasingly their importance – however elusive it may be - is being recognised. According to English Heritage, most causewayed enclosures are dated to the five centuries beginning 5,000 years ago. (Eng. Her, n.d., 2) Francis Pryor, on the other hand, proposes an earlier origin and suggests that: “…they were in use from about 3800BC. None appear to have been constructed after 3000BC.” (Pryor, 2004, p.164) Pryor's earlier dating is shared by most other recent writers. In the late 1980’s Aubrey Burl discussed these “protected sites” within the chapter of his study “The Stonehenge People” spanning 5,500-5,200 years before the present. (Burl, 1987, pp.33-38) More recently Alasdair Whittle and his colleagues identify them as: “…the most complex of the monuments which characterise the first part of the Neolithic in southern Britain.” (Whittle et al, n.d., p.3)
ENCLOSURES OF MYSTERY
It is now clear that causewayed enclosures long preceded the great age of henge monument construction. They remained in use for close to a thousand years, in a degraded form during the later centuries. By around 4,500 years ago they were being superceded by the new wave of megalithic henges. The decline of Windmill Hill near Avebury henge fits this pattern of demise - which, despite its curious dating of camp construction, English Heritage endorses (Eng. Her., n.d., 8) - quite precisely. What was happening was replacement of the causewayed enclosures by innovative henge and megalithic monuments as components of wider transformed landscapes. Equally, the old enclosures postdate the earliest identified farming in Britain around 6,500 years ago. Dyer suggests that the initial communal efforts of the pioneer farmers would have centred on forest clearance, housebuilding and generally establishing the agricultural way of life: monumental earthwork construction, for Dyer, could only have begun after “a generation or two” of such primary settlement. (Dyer, 1997, pp.37-38) Long barrows and chambered tombs were the first monumental constructions of the British Neolithic. Though appearing two or three centuries later, the causewayed enclosures represent an early development within the Neolithic and – if we can hear them - address the basic character of Neolithic society.
The enclosures are generally circular in plan and are bounded by one or more (up to four) steep sided ditch rings. The ditches were dug in sections and the removed earth shaped into an internal bank. The resulting adjacent ditch sections were separated by undug, ground level causeways allowing entry and exit to and from the monument. Such enclosures have no single typical location. Dyer (1997, p.34) notes that some (The Trundle on St. Roche’s Hill, West Sussex; Knap Hill, Wiltshire) crown rounded hills. Others occupy low lying valleys, as at Staines in Middlesex. Alternatively, enclosures were sited on saddles and ridges, an example being Combe Hill near Jevington, Sussex. Multiple adjacent sites exist and overall the enclosures, or at least those identified so far, are heavily concentrated in southern and central England. Green How near Uldale in Cumbria is a notable exception to this general pattern.
Controversy surrounds the character and uses of the causewayed enclosures to the point where they become the Rorschach Test of Neolithic archaeology. They have been interpreted as early settlement sites or, in one version, defended camps - perhaps precursors of at least some Iron Age hillforts. Others have seen them as cattle corrals within the period of largely pastoral economy that preceded agriculture proper. They have been viewed as centres for tribal gatherings and/or seasonal regional fairs. The evidence for these various explanations is both uneven and suggestive. English Heritage points out that where site preservation is good, remnants of houses, streets, barriers and wells are found inside enclosures. (Eng. Her., n.d., 3) Support for this view of at least some enclosures as settlement sites comes from Dyer, who notes the discovery of rubbish, pottery fragments, charcoal, animal bones and vegetable refuse in the ditches at Etton in the Cambridgeshire Fens.. (Dyer, 1997, p.35) Dyer adds that a few enclosures resemble “strongly defended settlements” on strategic hill spurs. Cattle are often found to be associated with enclosures, for example at Northborough near Peterborough. (Time Team, 2005) Gardom’s Edge enclosure in the Peak District has been interpreted as a “trading centre”, partly on the basis of large numbers of Neolithic flint artefacts found there, partly owing to the site’s location between two known settlement regions. (British Archaeology News, 1997) Evidence of flint tool working has been found at St. Osyth enclosure in Essex, despite the local absence of good quality flint. (Denison, 2003) Similarly Julian Thomas points to flint core preparation at enclosures including Combe Hill, Sussex. Thomas more broadly speculates that such sites were of major geographical significance, bound up with control of human and artefactual mobility across regional boundaries. (Thomas, 1999)
It seems probable that many or all of the activities mentioned took place at some sites at some times. But with that said, the settlement thesis runs up against a major problem centred on the character of the Neolithic itself. As discussed on this website in "Enigma of Stones", a major shift in interpretation of this period has taken place in recent years. Neolithic populations are viewed increasingly as largely mobile, herding societies without a site of permanent settlement. Janusz Czebreszuk describes this pastoralist ethos as it developed in the Central European Lowlands during the Late Neolithic and beginnings of the Bronze Age. Alongside the early agrarian farming communities, very different food procurement strategies were emerging some 5,000 years ago. Czebreszuk describes a new emphasis on the rearing of domesticated animals as the foundation of human livelihoods. The period was distinguished by diversity of cultural groupings in this region. Pointing to the societies associated by archaeologists with the Corded Ware Culture, Czebreszuk identifies a process of “abandoning the stable lifestyle of agrarian farming communities in favour of pastoralism.” (Czebreszuk, n.d.) This entailed smaller and more temporary settlements within a more nomadic way of life – not unlike that described by Burl in the context of the slightly later British Neolithic. Burl rejects the possibility that Silbury Hill, begun around 4,750 years ago, could have been the work of full-time agriculturalists:
“A largely pastoral way of life would have allowed time for such ventures while the mature herds were safely feeding on the autumn pastures watched over by boys. The fact that Silbury was started around the beginning of August points to many of its builders being pastoralists free to range the grasslands, not entirely dependent on crops, not restricted by the demands of the harvest. Some agriculture, more animals, a sporadic movement of families living in spacious leather tents that were easily dismantled, lashed to poles dragged along after the cattle and the flocks, on the high land in the warmer weather, down in the valleys in the icy bitterness of a chalk winter. There were still briefly occupied summer camps, and perhaps some longer lasting homesteads dispersed about the countryside. Whether there were larger and permanent settlements is not known.” (Burl, 1979, p.136)
The insight that a great and enduring place-specific monument was essentially the work of mobile people is counter-intuitive but consistent with known facts. Julian Thomas, moreover, argues strongly that such Neolithic occupation sites as can be identified in Britain do not correspond to the causewayed enclosures. (Thomas, 1999, p.38) It can be deduced that they were not the Neolithic equivalent of housing estates of either urban or suburban types. The Flintstones notwithstanding, a modern conception of residence is simply not applicable.
DREAMING OF EQUALITY
More plausible is Burl's suggestion: "It may be that such enclosures were not occupied all year round but were intended partly as places of retreat when danger threatened, partly as meeting places at special times of the year." (Burl, 1979, p.106) However, the notion of "defensive" sites has also taken heavy blows in recent years. Many, especially the larger ones, were simply indefensible in conventional military terms. Which leaves them looking like "meeting-places" of one sort or another. Burl draws a comparison with the Native American Hopewell culture, describing "...most of the people still living in small, semi-permanent villages but going for their trading occasions and ceremonies to great earthworks alongside the rivers of Ohio." (ibid., p.107) In addition to quantities of animal bones suggestive of great feasts in the British causewayed enclosures, strong evidence of a "ritual” focus has been found, for example in the careful placing of human and animal skulls along with other bones inside enclosure ditches. (Harris, 2004, ch.3) English Heritage notes: “At Crickley Hill, Gloucestershire, a ritual compound comprising a stone platform fenced off from the rest of the site has been investigated.” (Eng. Her., n.d., 3) The Neolithic carved bone phallus and chalk plaques with incised lines discovered in the ditches of The Trundle could further support ceremonial or “religious” site interpretation. (“The Trundle”, 2003) Impressed by such evidence, Dyer concludes that the causewayed enclosures were “…most likely ritual cult centres…” where concern for the dead would be focussed and fertility celebrated. (Dyer, 1997, p.37)
Additional evidence for ancestral or ceremonial significance can be found in the frequent association of the enclosures with such monuments as cursuses and long barrows. (Eng. Her., n.d., 7) The link between cursuses and water is, in turn, persistent. Kenneth Brophy writes: “Across Britain there seems to be a close connection between cursus monuments and streams and rivers. The majority lie on flood-plains or river-terraces, close to the river.” (Brophy, 1999) The Maxey cursus in Cambridgeshire, Brophy points out, is entirely surrounded by water, while the ditches of other sites were subject to seasonal flooding. (The parallel with Silbury Hill is striking.) David McOmish observes of a remarkable double-cursus: “It is notable that at Buscot, near Swindon in the Thames Valley, the relationship between the two cursuses – in terms of relative size and orientation – mirrors that between the River Thames and the River Cole.” (McOmish, 2003) The remarkable Thornborough complex in Yorkshire is close to the River Ure.
The importance of these sites is underscored by subsequent use of some cursus locations. Neolithic enclosures were superimposed across cursuses at Dunragit in Scotland, Thornborough, Dorchester on Thames in Oxfordshire and Llandegai in Gwynnedd, north Wales. (University of Manchester, n.d.) Most famously of all, a cursus some three kilometres in length sits near Stonehenge and its associated constellation of barrows and other prehistoric structures. (Burl, 1987, pp.43-6) In such examples the precise character of persistence in location use may be debated, but the fact of site re-use is beyond dispute. Equally certain is the collective character of all the great Neolithic monuments, including causewayed enclosures, as landscape engineering and development projects. The size of the enclosures varies greatly, ranging from one to almost thirty hectares, but even for the smallest, substantial cooperative effort can be assumed. Thomas (1999), among others, interprets the ditch segments as associated with specific clans or kinship groups. Cooperation among such groupings within overall construction and perhaps design of the enclosures would signify symbolic development or consolidation of wider social solidarities and alliances. How an egalitarian ethos may have been programmed into the structure of the enclosures and reiterated through their use as communal places is elaborated by Peter Ellis:
“(Causewayed enclosures)…are actually clever and sophisticated architectural statements with lots of entrances across each ditch which don’t then go straight across the next ditch but mean you have to circulate. Once within the ditches you are in the same boat as everyone else within the ditches. What causewayed camps tell us is that people then already knew all there was to know about fraternity and comradeship.” (Ellis, 2003)
Whatever else they may have been or become, it seems the enclosures were technologies designed for social engineering of cooperation and common status. The ingenuity of the arrangements is not lessened by the likelihood that the people engineering these processes comprised at least an embryonic social elite. Future research will refine and draw more firmly established distinctions, including the chronology of various sites. Already, however, there seems little doubt that the enclosures were decisive initial foci of emerging, post-foraging ways of life. Much remains unclear and open to alternative interpretations. Certainly elements of exclusion and differentiation of access to core activities, for example in relation to gender and age, cannot be ruled out. (Harris, 2004, ch.4) Even so, the apparent basic openness of the causewayed camps (by comparison with, say, Stonehenge) lends support to Ellis’ interpretation stressing commonality and an overall - if temporary - egalitarian ethos.
NO ISLAND IS AN ISLAND
What became the largest island within the British Isles is, in relation to geological time, a newcomer as a separate land area on the western fringes of the Eurasian landmass. Rising sea levels at the end of the last glaciation broke through the landbridge and gave Shakespeare the opportunity to celebrate his “sceptred isle”. The time frame is striking when related to the human prehistoric sequence. The present west European coastline took broad shape some 8,500 years ago: that is, roughly double the time since the causewayed enclosures began to appear.
It would be just as easy to say “only” double the time, for on human as well as geological scales this is an eyeblink. The implications for the British Neolithic are not often drawn out. There is every reason to believe that whoever brought the original plant and animal domesticates across the water knew exactly where they were going. Whether colonising farmers or, as Dyer (1997, p.30) speculates, wised-up locals, it seems likely that they were sailing into already quite familiar lands – much as would the Romans three millennia later (Bloomfield, 2005). Accessible water and land routes had carried Mesolithic (and before them Palaeolithic) travellers in both directions. John Lewis (2000) recounts an unverified story of a pair of matching flints found in England and Belgium from the pre-deluge period. Even if not literally true, Lewis’ tale could well be.
The future isles to the west, it must be assumed, were known to Europeans long before domesticates were brought. Creative memory would likely have mythologised the traumatic flood that cut off the once visited peripheral regions. That catastrophe, or a distant recollection of it, could even have contributed to the myth of Atlantis which, as Plato has Critias recount, disappeared beneath the waves "opposite the strait which you call...the pillars of Hercules". (Plato, 1965, 37) What was to become Britain may well have been the legendary, difficult-of-access and liminal European Tibet of the late Palaeolithic and after – a zone of extremes, isolation and wonder. Place of pilgrimage or not, it seems unlikely that the first boats to the west were the bringers of seed and animal stock. The precursor of the Thames no longer linked to the Rhine but a full break in contact seems improbable.
Change doubtless came from the east and south. The familiar story begins with domestication of plants and animals in the Near East or West Asia. Cereal agriculture spread to Southern Anatolia and the Zagros and Taurus foothills, though it was in Mesopotamia that intensified agriculture and irrigation would initially underpin complex urban life. Animals were used in novel ways in the Near East, permitting new means of transport, energy for agricultural work and resources for fabric production. (Thomas, 1999, p.194)
The spread of agriculture through Europe, from the south-east, took place over three millennia beginning some 8,000 years ago. (Bogucki, 1997) Initially it took root in the tell communities of Greece and the Balkans. Maximilian Baldia identifies two major routes of continental penetration for the new ways of life: along the mediterranean coastal area; and a more northerly path through Greece and Hungary. (Baldia, 2003a) The latter movement, following the Danube, gave rise to the culture of the Danube Basin. Identified by its characteristic pottery banding style, the Danubian complex was the pioneering focus of farming in central Europe. (Baldia, 2003b)
The first food-producing communities on the North European Plain were established on the fertile loess belt across the centre of the continent before 7,000 years ago. (Bogucki, n.d.) Archaeologically associated with the Linear Pottery or “Bandkeramik” Culture (LBK), these farming groups, as Sherratt (1997) points out, developed complex exchange networks for both staples and prestige goods. Among the latter were valued resources confined to particular areas – amber for jewelry in the western Baltic, high grade stone for polished axes from places like Great Langdale in the English Lake District. The switch to domesticated plant varieties across central and western Europe took place around 7,500 years before the present. Settlement sites have yielded ceramics alongside flint and ground stone tools. The Lengyel farming communities of north-central Poland a millennium later developed the traditions of LBK longhouses organised within permanent settlements, before giving way, after some 600 years, to the more widespread Funnel Beaker Culture (TRB). Bogucki suggests that these more diverse new communities of Poland and north Germany: “…developed out of the local Mesolithic foraging societies, while the Lengyel inhabitants of sites like Brzesc Kujawski played a crucial, but indirect, role. The earliest Funnel Beaker sites of northern Poland appear to reflect communities with one foot in the Mesolithic past and the other in the Neolithic future.” (Bogucki, n.d.) Bogucki describes complex interactions between gatherer-hunters and farmers across the region before loss of resources to agriculture finally undermined the foraging option around 5,500 years ago. Julian Thomas (1999, p.15) similarly concludes: “…it seems evident that late Mesolithic and Neolithic northern Europe represented a complex patchwork of communities which had elected to make use of different combinations of innovations in different ways.” Such accounts suggest complex patterns of negotiated interaction between farmers and indigenous populations and emergence of local variants on the Neolithic package: it could be adopted in various ways.
FARMERS’ REVENGE
The last century has seen a succession of pendulum swings in interpretation of the generally accepted north-westerly spread of agriculture across Europe. David Harris describes how researchers in the 1970’s mainly emphasised the gradual, incremental nature of the shift from foraging. Following the retreat of the ice, it was believed, farming communities emerged through a sequence of modifications to foraging and nomadic subsistence patterns. This was seen as having happened at many separate centres of agricultural origin. (Harris, 1997) The effect of this line of thinking was to gradualise the changes taking place and to downplay the notion of a primary initial source of development, as classically formulated by V. Gordon Childe (1973).
Harris notes the strains placed on the seventies paradigm by more recent research. In response the earlier concept of diffusion has been partly restored, though in a different form to that of early twentieth century versions. While the possibly independent origin of mixed farming in Asia is still debated, occidental development is in the process of being re-theorised. As Harris describes this interpretive shift: “…the evidence as a whole points strongly to the conclusion that agriculture developed throughout western Eurasia not as a result of a series of independent shifts from foraging to farming but by a process of diffusion from a single area of origin in the Fertile Crescent.” (Harris, 1997)
For Harris, in addition, it was specifically “…the diffusion of agro-pastoralism by farmers rather than its adoption by foragers…” that was occurring. What evidence can be said to support the revival of diffusionist interpretation? For Harris the key archaeological data indicates that domesticated crops and animals did not arrive in isolation, like a consignment of IKEA furniture on a high Himalayan camping site. Instead a distinctive cluster of innovations – in particular architectural methods and materials, alongside pottery - were dispersed with farming as it spread to the Thessalian Plain in eastern Greece and then deeper into Europe. (Harris, 1997) Bogucki describes a similar set of developments in central Europe. There, he argues, a constellation of cultural discontinuities mark off the pioneer farming populations from their predecessors. Bogucki points to the striking uniformity across the region of novel chipped stone tool types and house forms as well as plant and animal domesticates. Moreover, the presumed newcomers introduced hitherto unknown pottery manufacture to central Europe. The systematic character of the material culture of the earliest farmers, in short, is difficult to reconcile with a picture of gradual, locally initiated transitions: “…the establishment of sedentary communities with an economy based on cultivation and the keeping of livestock was not the product of the localized adoption of these characteristics by indigenous foraging peoples.” (Bogucki, 1995) Bogucki rejects traditional terms such as “colonisation” and “migration” as imprecise, preferring to speak of “demic diffusion” – the small-scale, incremental movements of Neolithic households, budding off from established sites, with the overall effect of bringing about a shift in subsistence activity across the continent. Cumulative local moves, then, were sufficient to ensure the diffusion of the new ways, leaving no need to evoke mass migrations like those of more recent times.
The farmer-diffusion model identifies a small core of cultivators moving west from central Anatolia. (Pinhasi and Pluciennik, 2004) This still developing perspective, however, concerns initial adoption of farming within areas and locales and in itself does not explain incorporation of wider populations. Given lack of evidence suggesting that indigenous people were exterminated or driven elsewhere by the original bearers of agriculture, the essential question concerns the mode or modes of reception of Neolithic innovations by the pre-existing social groups. It is this second phase of Neolithic diffusion and debates over it that have greatest significance for developments such as causewayed enclosures - like that at Maiden Bower - in the far west.
FROM LKB TO TRB: AGRICULTURALIST ENCLOSURES
What is most striking about the central European Neolithic by contrast with that of Britain is the settledness of the former. From the outset the LBK was associated with its famous and distinctive timber longhouses which archaeological investigation has consistently shown to be domestic in character. The remains of hundreds have survived ongoing erosion and cultivation to the present day. They were highly uniform in design and construction. Bogucki (1995) notes their being “of virtually-identical dimensions from one end of central Europe to another, suggesting domestic units of constant size.” The longhouse has been described as: “…a means for creating social identity and a sense of becoming…where the everyday life of inhabitants was linked with the timeless and stable world of ancestors, securing stability and security for them.” (Marciniak, n.d.) They were primary habitations and, like the early “fortified” hill villages, were hallmarks of “the earliest European farmers.” Bogucki (1995)
Coming from south-east Europe with its traditions of sedentary communities, the central European farmers seem to have arrived with a commitment to settled life in and around the archetypal longhouse clusters. These were not in the main isolated sites, but rather were connected over substantial distances through their relationship to “central places” that were themselves linked by roads and tracks. Consolidation of this pattern within the TRB from around 5,900 years ago also saw its regionalisation. With this came the partial relocalisation of the longhouse communities: “Previously dominant villages/settlements with longhouses that were the basic social units…eventually lost their significance. They were replaced by households in the middle and late Lengyel groups.” (Marciniak, n.d.) The longhouses, it seems, were both iconic and transient. Julian Thomas, for example, notes their rarity after 6,000 years before the present. (Thomas, 1999, p.17) Marciniak (n.d.) points to “a more flexible and diverse character of the domestic domain” emerging at this time, facilitating the further dispersal of TRB communities. Much is still unclear about this centuries long process and many areas of development remain largely unresearched. Even so, it seems clear that what was earlier described as the second phase of European Neolithic development, perhaps unevenly, was taking the farming traditions in new directions.
Continuity from the LBK through the TRB underpins the latter’s innovations, particularly those related to subsumption of local foraging groups. Marciniak (n.d.) observes: “The formation of the TRB was undertaken within the old agricultural tradition…(L)ocal hunter-gatherers…assimilated and adopted this system into their own traditions. Assimilation of local hunter-gatherers took place only in later TRB phases.” With this new influx, or more likely wave of influxes, already dispersed farming ways of life were becoming more typical as well as more diverse within the region. At the same time appeared the first moves toward collective monumental projects. As the longhouses disappeared, the Kujavian longmounds of Poland began to be built. “From the pottery and from the radiocarbon dates obtained, the building of the first Kujavian mounds can be dated to the turn of the fifth and fourth millennia BC. (Joussaume, 1988, p.28) Pre-megalithic mounds, described by Baldia (1998) as initially “unstandardized, befitting local experimentation”, appeared early in the TRB. In a pragmatic and improvisational way, the focus of communality was shifting from the household to places of burial and the separate but accessible world of the ancestors. The TRB was at the same time generating other symbolic collective material forms. Causewayed enclosures and fortified central sites were being built across the region. The first enclosures had appeared toward the end of the LBK, around 7,000 years ago. (Harris, ch.3; Baldia, 1998) They became both more common and more formalised through the Lengyel and related cultures, evolving into the vast, road-linked network of enclosures and central sites identifiable by TRB and German Gallery-Grave culture. “This network tied together the various local groups of North and Cental Europe, by joining the causewayed camps/central sites through roads.” (Baldia, 1998) More local dependencies linked such “central places” to smaller neighbourhood settlements and activity sites. (Baldia, 2001)
Causewayed enclosures are found throughout the TRB settlement area and have been interpreted in differing ways. Baldia contrasts the Danish view that they were ritual meeting places with identification of those in Germany as fortified villages. (ibid.) Future archaeology may help clarify how far such apparent variations reflect different prehistoric realities or are phenomena of interpretation. However that may be, the timing of the central European enclosures argues strongly for a symbolic, integrative project in the context of accelerated community incorporation. This is consistent with the view of Alasdair Whittle, in “Europe in the Neolithic”, that their creators were “…building a tradition or idea of permanence and order.” (Whittle, 1996a, p.191) The substance of the transition would be consolidation of farming life on an enlarged scale. The new recruits, long familiar with farming communities but with prior, foraging-based solidarities of their own, would modify the heritage as they were integrated within it.
Some Mesolithic groups survived into the early Bronze Age. (Marciniak, n.d.) In addition, crop cultivation need not always have been an irreversible, single step. Adoption of more nomadic, pastoralist ways of life by former central European farming groups (bearers of the Corded Ware Culture) around 4,000 years ago does not suggest a consolidated Neolithic monoculture. (Czebreszuk, n.d.) There were transitional forms, probably associated by many among those who participated with pre-settlement cultural memories, but now modified by contact with domesticates and their possessors. Thus research at the Doel site in the Belgian coastal lowlands reveals adoption of ceramics by late Mesolithic gatherer-hunters in the absence of evidence for animal domestication or crop cultivation. (Innes et al, 2003) Through what types of social interactions might such hybrids have emerged? Lech Czerniak reconstructs the likely appearance of the pioneer farmers and their works from the viewpoint of the pre-inhabiting gatherer-hunters of central Europe:
“Let us…imagine the cultural context of the native population, living in small temporary camps consisting of shelter in a forest clearing situated near a riverbank. Suddenly what must have seemed gigantic constructions appeared in their local landscape – houses built to a rectangular or trapezoidal ground-plan…made of wood covered with colourful spiral and curvilinear motifs.” (Czerniak, n.d.)
It sounds like a cool and welcoming sixties hippy commune, except its occupants were committed to regular and demanding work. In addition to longhouses, the gatherer-hunters (perhaps the real hippies in this situation) would have seen fenced off and cultivated land with novel animals, new types of clothing fabric and appealing decorated pottery ware. Their feelings may well have been complex, especially when agricultural labour came up in conversation. Their ambivalence may in turn have prompted proselytising farmers to build majestic enclosures, with feasts of rare delights, to provide a focus and symbolic magnet for conversion and incorporation. Alternatively, the enclosures may have been developed more adhocly in response to a reactive influx as the impact of farming made environments less supportive of the foraging ways. However it happened, the new recruits entered the legacy of the iconic longhouse and, it must be assumed, made it very much their own.
ATLANTIC ZONE DEVELOPMENTS
Selective adaptation of Neolithic technologies and other innovations gave rise to distinctive new patterns on the fringes of northern and western Europe. The gatherer-hunter communities there were anything but blank sheets upon which a pre-defined Neolithic template could be printed. Their internal dynamics would instead shape the acculturation process so that “…new material forms provided a means of amplifying and facilitating indigenous processes of change.” (Thomas, 1999, p.15) On the Atlantic shoreline the Cerny communities of northern France are taken to be the outcome of interaction between indigenous Mesolithic gatherer-hunters and LBK-bearing Danubian migrants. From around 7,500 years ago the latter settled initially in the Parisian basin, on valley bottom light soils. Over following centuries the Cerny blend of agriculture, animal husbandry and continued hunting extended into upland areas, perhaps facilitated by use of oxen-drawn ploughs. (Lontcho, 1999) The Cerny communities are recognised as the first Europeans to have cultivated wheat as their primary cereal and a distinctive Cerny ceramic style developed.
The main consolidation of Cerny culture took place over five centuries ending 6,000 years before the present. In the same period earth and stone mounds, some of them enormous, appeared in different areas of western Europe. Also contemporary within Cerny territory were new types of monumental structure including “…circular spaces surrounded by impressive ditches” – interpreted variously as sites of fairs, gathering places, or possible retreats in situations of threat. (ibid.) Novel collective social foci were thus present and evolving, yet degree and type of settlement are less clear. Unlike those of the original settlers, Lontcho observes, “…houses…belonging to Cerny are still difficult to discern.” (ibid.) The elusiveness of such buildings by 6,000 years ago is part of a wider picture. Thomas notes: “…a shift to smaller, more temporary structures is widespread…” in Europe following the opening phase of Neolithic development. (Thomas, 1999, p.9) It is as if the inheritors of the Neolithic breakthrough were having second thoughts, or at least were re-exploring more mobile options once the initial effort to establish agricultural ways had been made. Quite possibly the waves of indigenous recruits, with memories of foraging still fresh, were a powerful pressure to de-centralise domestic life, especially as they came to outnumber the core of farming pioneers. A shift toward semi-pastoral approaches to subsistence is a feasible response to unavoidable choices about how to integrate the familiar and the novel. Great monuments and enclosures would provide both cultural anchorage and scope for adaptive change.
Local differentiation of Danubian culture took place across the far west of the continent, but not within a regional vacuum. A credible case has been made for wide-ranging relationships having existed among the coastal peoples of pre-Neolithic western Europe. Barry Cunliffe proposes: “…it is only by assuming that sea travel created considerable mobility along the Atlantic seaways that the remarkable similarities in Mesolithic culture across this zone can be easily explained.” Cunliffe further points to extensive Atlantic maritime networks as a likely vehicle for the diffusion of Neolithic pastoralism “…from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic coast of Portugal and from Continental Europe to the British Isles and Ireland.” Finally he notes: “…during the 4th millennium BC there developed a belief system, shared from Portugal to Shetland, that involved the construction of megalithic collective tombs and the use, in ritual contexts, of a highly distinctive art” – again underpinned by maritime communications. (Cunliffe, 2002)
It is widely accepted that Neolithic developments associated with Cardial (or Impressed Ware) pottery took place along the coastal regions of southern Italy and the Adriatic. Additional sites (Epi-Cardial) yielding pottery are known along the Spanish and French Mediterranean, with comparable discoveries (Roucadour) on the Atlantic coasts of Portugal and France. Recent radiocarbon redating from southern European sites suggests a remarkably rapid spread of farming around 7,400 years ago, within a maximum of 200 years, to locations from central Italy to Portugal. Joao Zilhao rules out short distance settlement expansion as incompatible with such a rate of expansion. He proposes instead “a maritime pioneer colonization model” (Zilhao, 2001) – echoing Cunliffe’s account of late Mesolithic Atlantic seaways and their facilitation of Neolithic diffusion.
The southern Neolithic route gave rise to the first known farming settlements of south-western France around 7,000 years ago. (Balfour, 1997) Whittle (2000, p.254) notes: “South of the Loire there is…evidence for monument construction in the mid-fifth millennium BC…and there is in general a good case for significant influence from the Cardial complex.” Such an influence seems distinct from the Danubian movement passing into north-eastern France, through the Parisian basin and reaching as far as Guernsey in the Channel Isles. The outcome of the encounter of the two in the far west could only be hybridisation of Neolithic variants at the same time as they were interacting, separately and conjointly, with indigenous cultures.
By 6,600 years ago, the first megalithic chamber-tombs were appearing in the vicinity of the French Atlantic. A second phase of megalithic development began around 600 years later, differentiating by area into varieties of transepted and passage graves. (Joussaume, 1988, p.129) Yet the sites which began appearing in coastal France and Brittany another thousand years on mixed domesticates and wild food within a subsistence pattern that fell far short of the Neolithic stereotype. The contrast with the firmer farming bias of the LBK is marked. Still further west, in Britain and Ireland, the Neolithic took on equally distinctive forms. Farming reached the Atlantic shores of Europe and had jumped the water barrier by 6,500 years ago. Yet far from megalithic construction requiring the prior establishment of agriculture, it has recently become clear that the earliest stone monuments in the western isles date from some 900 years before then. At that point – centuries before recognisable farming spread to Ireland or Britain – roofed stone tombs within stone circles were being built at Carrowmore, Co. Sligo. (Keys, 1998) The first causewayed enclosures appeared around the same time as the earliest agriculture, toward the end of the brief moment (8000-6000 years before the present) viewed widely as the “critical time” for initial adoptation of Neolithic culture in north-western Europe. (Innes et al, 2003) By that time megalithic monuments were also becoming more widespread within the landscape.
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