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Mesolithic Prelude. Europe’s Mesolithic lasted for about 4000 years, from about 8000 B.C. until the introduction of farming in northwestern Europe, about 4000 B.C.
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Mesolithic Prelude • Europe’s Mesolithic lasted for about 4000 years, from about 8000 B.C. until the introduction of farming in northwestern Europe, about 4000 B.C. • These trends toward greater complexity, more sedentary lifeways, and more intensive hunting, foraging, and fishing took hold in Mesolithic societies throughout Europe when Southwest Asian societies were already experimenting with the deliberate cultivation and domestication of crops and animals.
The Transition to Farming in Europe • Did farming spread into Europe as a result of diffusion from Southwest Asia, or did food production develop independently in the temperate zone?
Farming in Greece and Southern Europe • By about 6000 B.C., farming was well established in parts of the Aegean area and in southeastern Europe. • Agriculture and animal husbandry developed in southeastern Europe because of a local shift to the more intensive exploitation of cereals and wild sheep, and also because of a “drift” of domestic animals and cereals from Southwest Asia. • This was a largely indigenous development.
The Spread of Agriculture into Temperate Europe • The Balkans • In the Balkans, the earliest farmers settled on fertile agricultural soils on floodplains and elsewhere. • This is an area with great environmental variability and ranges in temperature. • For example, there are fertile plains and spring areas where the soils are permanently moist. • It was here that many farming communities settled in the same locations for centuries, just as Southwest Asian and Anatolian farmers had done.
The Spread of Agriculture into Temperate Europe • Bandkeramik Cultures • The widely distributed Bandkeramik complex documents the first settlement of southeastern European farmers in the middle Danube Valley and on the light loess soils of central Europe around 5000 B.C. • The Bandkeramik people cultivated barley, einkorn, emmer wheat, and minor crops such as flax.
Frontiers and Transitions • The Bandkeramik expansion created a “frontier” in many parts of Europe between farming communities and Mesolithic groups. • Three transition phases from hunting and gathering to farming: • Availability phase • Substitution phase • Consolidation phase
Social Changes, Lineages, and the Individual • Bandkeramik communities settled on very specific parts of the landscape: gravel river terraces overlooking medium-sized streams in areas of loess soils. These forest farmers deliberately selected places where damp lowland pasture coincided with tracts of light, friable upland soils. • Cattle were an important element in the Bandkeramik economy.
Social Changes, Lineages, and the Individual • In burials, there were two general distinctions among grave goods: between graves of males and females and between those of young and old. • Political power and social authority, however, may have been in the hands of a group of older men who controlled cattle ownership and the exchange of cattle and other exotic commodities with other settlements.
Social Changes, Lineages, and the Individual • In Bandkeramik society, a complex network of social relations controlled productivity. Lineages within the society formed the links between people and the lands of their ancestors.
The Introduction of the Plow • Andrew Sherratt (1994a) believed that the introduction of plow agriculture was a seminal development in Europe. • Plows are known to have been used as early as 3600 B.C., but Sherratt says they came into far more widespread and intensive use about 2600 B.C., when a number of other innovations reached Europe from Southwest Asia.
The Introduction of the Plow • Plow agriculture allows fewer people to work an acre of land; thus, more land would be cleared and an individual’s fields would be more widely scattered, sometimes close to the outer limits of daily walking. • The result was a much more dispersed settlement pattern, with a rapid expansion onto heavier soils and hitherto uncultivated areas around 2600 B.C. • A new social order arose in which individual success, prestige, and inheritance of land were the norm—with momentous consequences.
Plains Farmers: Tripolye • By 4500 B.C., Bandkeramik peoples had moved as far east as Ukraine, bringing a mixed farming economy with them. • They settled on the higher terraces of major rivers, still interacting with Mesolithic folk in the valley bottoms. • Both Mesolithic and Neolithic peoples maintained their own identities.
Plains Farmers: Tripolye • Farming reached its greatest extent in the forest-steppe regions of western Russia with the Tripolye culture in about 4000 B.C. • In about 2800 B.C., the climate deteriorated, making cultivation less viable. At this point, balanced economies emerged, relying on stock breeding on the steppe and farming in the forest-steppe.
Mediterranean and Western Europe • In the Mediterranean basin, the long-term changes were an expansion in the use of obsidian and much wider ranging trade in this material after 5000 B.C. • Obsidian was found on three Mediterranean islands, including Sardinia, and was now regularly traded to neighboring islands and the mainland. • This trade was part of a widespread network of contacts, linked partly by sea, which carried seashells, exotic rocks, and, later, copper ore the length and breadth of the Mediterranean.
Mediterranean and Western Europe • The decisive shift from hunting and gathering in the west took place in the sixth millennium B.C., with sheep and goats being acquired by trade, exchange, or theft considerably earlier, and cereal crops arriving somewhat later. • By 4000 B.C., a series of fishing villages was thriving on the shores of the Swiss lakes.
Mediterranean and Western Europe • In the extreme northwest, food production was adopted comparatively late. • From 6000 through 4000 B.C., the newly isolated Mesolithic peoples of Britain developed with little or no significant contact with the continent.
The Megaliths • It seems likely that early European farming societies were basically egalitarian, the family being the basic productive unit at the center of a web of intricate kin ties and reciprocal social relationships that linked communities near and far and tied people to the land of their ancestors.
The Megaliths • Notable social changes are apparent throughout Europe after 4000 B.C. • As early as 4500 B.C., some French farmers were building large communal stone tombs, known to archaeologists as megaliths. • Megaliths are found as far north as Scandinavia, in Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, the western Mediterranean, Corsica, and Malta.
The Megaliths • What, exactly, were megaliths? • Were they the surviving remains of a powerful religious cult that swept western Europe, or did they symbolize the emergence of new, more sophisticated political and social structures in the west?
