Critical data for understanding early central european farmers

Abstract

Encompassing an area of nearly a million square kilometers, central continental Europe (defined as the modern territories of Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Poland) has perhaps the densest archaeological record in the world for an area this size (FIG. 1). From the initial appearance of Homo erectus in this region about 500,000 years ago, about 25,000 generations of prehistoric inhabitants have left their remarkably well-preserved traces. This region is seismically stable with limited volcanic activity, with soils that are generally favorable to the preservation of all inorganic archaeological materials. In many areas, organic materials have also been exceptionally preserved in waterlogged deposits. The major enemies of the archaeological record in central Europe are human beings, both as agents of disturbances to the lithosphere and as archaeologists. I study the early farming societies of central Europe. The major cultural outlines of these societies were sketched out a century ago, but the gaps in the picture are still being filled in. Chronologically, this corresponds to the Neolithic period between about 5500 B.C. (recalibrated dating) and 2500 B.C. Major research questions include the process behind the establishment of farming communities across this area; the consequences of agriculture and the adoption of farming by indigenous foraging peoples; the development of societies which could be called " transegalitarian" in which temporary differences between individuals and households in status, power, and wealth emerged; the appearance of mortuary ceremonialism in the form of large burial monuments; the use of animals for socalled "secondary" products, especially animal traction; and evidence for conflict between individuals and communities. All these questions require a very highresolution corpus of data, and luckily this is generally available in central Europe. Field research on early European farmers has long been driven by rescue archaeology, and many major advances have arisen directly from the excavation of sites threatened by modern activity. In the 1930s, the site ofK̈oln-Lindenthal in Germany was discovered by workers doing landscaping for a park in Cologne (Buttler and Haberey 1936), and Brzesc Kujawski in Polandwas discovered as a result of gravel digging (Jazdzewski 1938). In the 1950s, suburban sprawl in the Netherlands brought the sites of Sittard and Elsloo to light (Modderman 1985). In the 1960s and 1970s, brown coal extraction in the Rhineland resulted in the exposure of whole Neolithic landscapes (L̈uning 1982), while the continued need for gravel drove the excavations in the Aisne valley of France of sites like Cuiry-les-Chaudardes (Ilett 1983). Recently, excavations along a pipeline right-of-way in Poland brought to light an apparent Neolithic longhouse at Bozejewice (Czerniak 1998).Without the impetus at crucial points provided by large-scale rescue projects, the study of early European farmers would be far behind where it is today. The degree to which rescue archaeology and especially developer-funded archaeology can change the picture of prehistoric settlement has been demonstrated most recently by the virtual explosion in the number of Neolithic houses known in Ireland in the last decade (Grogan 2002, Armit et al. 2003), increasing the sample from a tiny handful to several dozen. The majority of these are rectangular structures constructed from planks set in bedding trenches, clearly reflecting substantial permanent structures. The discovery that Neolithic houses in Ireland were neither flimsy nor rare has caused a reconsideration of the prevailing academic model of the British Neolithic which emphasized mobility over sedentism (see discussion in Rowley-Conwy 2004). The appearance of so many houses in Ireland is in the context of the country's dramatic economic growth experienced since 1990, creating conditions for infrastructure and industrial development that have also emerged in the former communist countries of Central Europe. The purpose of this paper is to attempt to identify the critical data needed at the beginning of the third millennium A.D. to understand better what happened in the sixth through third millennia B.C. in Central Europe. It is especially important that a clear understanding of the key data be in hand as the modern landscape of eastern central Europe begins to be transformed by major infrastructure projects such as highways and pipelines and as residential and industrial zones expand from their current concentrations into farmlands and pastures. Some rescue archaeology projects have already been completed, and others are underway, but these are just the beginning of many decades of work. Since my own field research has taken place in Poland, my thoughts here are cast with special reference to research in that country, but these concerns are relevant more broadly throughout this region. © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.