First Migrants: Ancient Migration in Global Perspective by Peter Bellwood

Author:Peter Bellwood [Bellwood, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-01-12T20:00:00+00:00

Neolithic Migration Beyond Greece and the Balkans

The huge radiocarbon database available to modern archaeologists (from no less than 735 sites in Pinhasi et al. 2005) leaves no doubt that Neolithic economies spread through most of temperate Europe between 6500 and 4000 BC (Figure 7.2).17 Those who followed the Mediterranean route reached Iberia and parts of North Africa by about 5500 BC, leaving a trail of village settlements with stamped Cardial Ware pottery of apparently Anatolian ultimate inspiration.18 These people were interspersed here and there with surviving Mesolithic populations, but clear signs of interrelationship between Neolithic and Mesolithic populations are rare in Europe, except in rugged and mountainous regions such as the Iron Gates gorge on the Danube, and peripheral regions of central and northern Europe (Alps, Scandinavia, Baltic) where food production diminished due to short growing seasons.19 One recent suggestion is that Neolithic people might have carried serious zoonoses (diseases derived from domesticated animals) such as smallpox, which, if correct, would have given them a survival advantage over Mesolithic populations who lacked immunity (Holtby et al. 2012).

The movement up the Danube valley reached the Carpathian Basin by about 6000 BC. The fertile alluvial soils of the Danube and its tributaries here allowed considerable demographic growth to occur as a foundation for a further advance. This took place with incredible speed, within a century or so either side of 5400 BC, over the glacial windblown loess soils that occupy much of the European landscape north of the Alps. This cultural advance has become known as the Danubian or Linearbandkeramik, and its immediate origins appear to have been in the Körös culture of the Tisza Valley, in the northern part of the Carpathian Basin. The LBK spread rapidly westwards with its characteristic longhouses to reach the Paris Basin, while other culturally-related groups spread eastwards towards the lower Danube in Romania.20

The LBK economy was based on permanent field cultivation of emmer and einkorn wheat, and common millet (Panicum miliaceum), together with husbandry of Fertile Crescent lineages of cattle, pigs, sheep and goats. It is likely that a simple ard (a plow that scratches a furrow rather than turns the soil over) was used by this time for plowing, although there is no good evidence for cattle traction. However, cattle appear to have been milked, giving an all year round food and infant weaning supply that undoubtedly would have fuelled further population growth. Indeed, new evidence for a presence of milk fat in what appear to be perforated LBK pottery strainers, used to separate milk curds from whey, attest a likely presence of cheese making (Salque et al. 2013).

Roughly 2000 villages, each consisting of several longhouses up to 45 m in length, perhaps two-storeyed for dwelling and storage, have been reported across the whole LBK region. They held populations living at densities of 8.5 persons/km2 in the settled areas, although much of the landscape was taken up by unoccupied buffer territories that doubtless served to keep untrusting populations apart.21 The loess soils of northern

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