THE ORIGINS OF AGRICULTURE IN EUROPE- LBK ECONOMY AND SOCIETY

The Linienbandkeramik (LBK) appears around 5400 BC and represents the next major agricultural transition. It is characterised by settlements of substantial longhouses, except in its eastern extension, mainly located on fertile soils (usually windblown silt—loess) close to water. 

It has clearly been established that the LBK economy was almost completely agricultural in nature, with little or no contribution from wild resources. The main crop plants were einkorn and emmer wheat, barley, peas and lentils (Willerding 1980), although given the relatively small size of many of the available samples this picture may prove to be oversimplified. Substantial animal bone assemblages are rarely preserved on the acid loess soils, so the evidence for animal exploitation is little better. The general picture is of 80–95 per cent of animal bones deriving from domesticated species, and these being dominated by cattle, with sheep/goat a second preference and pigs generally rare (Milisauskas and Kruk 1989). Glass (1991:75) has argued that the rarity of pigs is due to their lack of non-meat products in contrast to cattle and sheep/goat which also provide milk.

The subsistence economy of the LBK was traditionally characterised as slash-and-burn agriculture, in which the soil was quickly exhausted and settlements moved on frequently, perhaps once every generation (e.g. Clark 1952:95–6). This interpretation arose from the apparently insubstantial nature of LBK settlement traces by comparison with the tells of southeast Europe and the relatively large number of LBK sites (Childe 1929). Apparent gaps in the sequence at major sites such as Köln-Lindenthal in Germany and Bylany in Bohemia seemed to confirm the model. A rather more sophisticated version of slash-and-burn was proposed by Soudský (Soudský and Pavlů 1972), in which a regular pattern of site movement took place within a limited area, returning to a location after it had time to recover, with the cycle lasting some sixty years.

The reaction against this hypothesis has come from both the archaeological and theoretical standpoints (e.g. Rowley-Conwy 1981; Bogucki 1988:79–92). Current opinion is that LBK sites were continually occupied for hundreds of years rather than only intermittently, judging from radiocarbon dating and the presence of substantial longhouses. The analogy previously made with tropical cultivators has been dismissed as inappropriate, given the contrast between the shallow tropical soils and the rich thick soils of central Europe. The ground has shifted considerably (Bogucki 1988:81–2), to the point where the current orthodox view is that the agricultural regime of LBK settlements involved intensive horticulture in gardens situated close by or within the site. The weed remains recovered from LBK settlements (Willerding 1980) suggest that the fields cleared were small in size and bordered by hedges or the edge of the forest. These fields or gardens could have borne a crop for several years without a break to judge by the results of experimental agriculture on loess soils (Milisauskas 1986:162).

Turning to animal husbandry, Bogucki has stressed the importance of dairy production in a number of publications (1984; 1988:85–91). In particular, he has focused on the existence of what appear to be ceramic sieves for straining cheese at many LBK sites. From this he has argued that milk rather than meat was the primary product of LBK cattle herds and that the existence of large numbers of cattle demanded a degree of mobility among these early farming communities due to their needs for forage and fodder (1988:91). He sees sheep as of relatively little significance, only outnumbering cattle on a few sites in eastern Germany (Bogucki and Grygiel 1993). However, the idea of an LBK cattle economy exploiting the forest grazing of the North European Plain has been questioned by a number of authors (e.g. Whittle 1987; Milisauskas and Kruk 1989; Midgley 1992:25) because of the relatively high numbers of sheep/ goat at various sites, even where they are not in the majority, and because they envisage a fixed-plot agricultural regime which would not allow the degree of mobility demanded by large cattle herds. Although the use of ceramic sieves is certainly suggestive, the evidence from the animal bones themselves is as yet inadequate to pursue the issue much further, although a highly specialised economy seems inherently improbable.

Assessing the wider economy, it appears that both a degree of specialisation and exchange networks developed during the LBK. Evidence of specialised production can be traced at a number of LBK settlements (Keeley and Cahen 1989; Hodder 1990:103–5), in the form of querns, ceramics, flintwork and stone axes. Exchange practices were significant, with items such as shells and lithics moving over long distances (Whittle 1985:91–2). Spondylus shell bracelets are found throughout the area of the LBK, probably emanating from Aegean or Adriatic sources. The amounts involved are usually small, but can be extremely large even at the furthest extent of the LBK. Axes of hard, fine-grained, rock such as amphibolites and basalts travelled distances of some 200–300 km from their sources. Obsidian from northern Hungary reached southern Poland, while the chocolate-coloured flint from the Holy Cross Mountains moved in the opposite direction. The much wider distribution of barley impressions on pottery than as crop remains on LBK settlement has led to suggestions that pottery was also being exchanged (Dennell 1992). This high degree of exchange contacts may also have led to the quite remarkable homogeneity of early LBK pottery across the area from Holland to Hungary (Halstead 1989).

Halstead (1989) has provided an informative contrast between exchange practices and hospitality in southeast and central Europe. He notes that the location of cooking facilities in open areas between houses in Thessaly may indicate a tradition of sharing cooked food between neighbours, while the dominance of fine painted pottery points to the importance of consuming food and drink in the context of feasting. In central Europe fine painted pottery and communal cooking facilities are absent, which Halstead sees as an indication of food sharing and local hospitality being less important there. Instead, he argues that their place was taken by much wider networks of contact revealed by the movement of shells and stonework. Halstead puts this evidence in a highly ecological context of minimising the risk of food shortages, although he does not envisage a continental assistance network, merely one on a less local scale than in south-east Europe. Halstead’s observations need not actually imply any food sharing between widely separated groups, and indeed could be seen in an entirely different light: the southeast European tradition of communal eating could be interpreted as evidence of competition between households, while the wider ties of the LBK may show the existence of competition between larger social groups, perhaps under the leadership of particular households. That local competition did not disappear is suggested by LBK pottery, which is still finely decorated if not painted and thought to be used in the preparation and serving of food (Hodder
1990:108).

One significant context in which exchanged items appear in the archaeological record is as grave goods. LBK cemeteries dominate the burial record, although a number of ‘settlement burials’ are known which occur in or near houses or other elements of settlements (Veit 1993). The cemeteries are situated up to 500 m away from the settlements (Bogucki and Grygiel 1993). The layout and burial rites of the cemeteries are standardised and generally uniform within if not between cemeteries (Whittle 1988b: 153–64). There was generally a preferred orientation within each cemetery, and at some sites the graves are in rows, suggesting the use of grave markers. Both inhumations and cremations are known, but inhumations predominate. Children are generally underrepresented. There are also apparent token burials and cenotaphs, although some of the latter may reflect burial in variable soil conditions. There are between twenty and a hundred burials in a cemetery (Hodder 1990:109).

The backfilling of the grave seems to have taken place as a single act, although it is noticeable that the main body of grave goods often lies slightly higher than the body itself. Grave goods are often placed near the head or waist. All major cemeteries have burials without grave goods, these amounting to between a quarter and a half of all burials (Whittle 1988b: 160). The grave goods represented were decorated or undecorated pots, probably containing food offerings, adzes, arrowheads and other flintwork, antler axes, copper objects, shell or stone bead necklaces or belts and bracelets of spondylus shell, and haematite (Veit 1993). There are some differences between male and female grave goods—adzes and arrowheads generally occurring with men and ornaments, querns and small tools such as awls with women (Hodder 1990:109), but these are by no means absolute divisions, and in the frequent absence of sufficient bone surviving for an anatomical definition of the sex of the individual such arguments can soon become circular (Whittle 1988b: 161).

As Whittle notes (1988b: 164), it is difficult to decide what significance the variety in grave goods may have had in terms of status or wealth, as there are several cross-cutting possible indicators. At Niedermerz in the Rhineland (Dohrn-Ihmig 1983) eight categories of grave goods have been identified: 36 of 102 burials lacked grave goods, twenty-eight burials possessed a single category, and only a few all or most items; but a number of burials were accompanied by only one or two categories but had those in large quantities; alternatively, one could emphasise the thirty-one burials with adzes, which were the item imported from the furthest distance to the site. The pattern is clearly not simple, and it seems likely that a complex interplay of household origin, gender, age and perhaps manner of death is responsible for the final pattern of burial and grave goods.

For a fuller picture we must also consider the evidence from settlement burials (Veit 1993). Few of these are in separate graves, being found mostly in existing pits, and some in association with house walls or construction pits alongside longhouses. There are no known cremations among them. Children outnumber adults, although not sufficiently to balance their relative shortage in cemeteries, and few infants are found. Rather more females than males are found, although the imbalance is not great. Less than half the settlement burials were accompanied by grave goods, which may relate to the high number of children and females, but the nature of the grave goods was the same as in cemeteries. A separate category is the house burials, of which all twenty-three examples are of children. Veit concludes that the settlement burials are of those who were deemed of insufficiently high social status to enter the cemetery either because of an early death or because of the manner of their death. This seems likely to be part of the answer, given the difference in the presence of children and the smaller number of grave goods.

It suggests, however, that access to grave goods by the burial party was in itself not sufficient to ensure burial in a cemetery, while both the settlement burials and the rows of graves in cemeteries point to the continuing significance of the household. Exotic items may well have been channelled through competing households and the links to the outside which they symbolised may well have been just as significant as the actual items themselves. Such exchange relations may themselves have been founded on surplus agricultural and other production organised through the household as a unit of supply, and both the public face of the household and its private being may have been expressed through different funerary rituals.

Available evidence indicates quite clearly that the focus of early LBK society was the longhouse complex post arrangements pointing to divisions of the internal space (Hodder 1990:103–8). The longhouse was the centre of household activities, such as grain storage, and the production of flintwork, ground stone tools and antler axes. Longhouses seem to have been painted, and some were associated with foundation deposits in the walls and with child burials, while the use of fine decorated pottery on settlements is closely tied to the longhouses. The entrance may be elaborated, with the creation of a linear grading of space as one moves further into the interior of the building (Hodder 1990:137). It is no wonder that Hodder can here identify the domus, his idea of a concept and practice of nurturing and caring which is tied to the household as social unit.

The question of how many longhouses on these long-lived LBK sites may have been occupied at any one time is a vexed one, given the lack of stratigraphic controls (Whittle 1985:82–3). Figures given for particular settlements vary between eight and twenty, but these generally rely on the application of particular assumptions about the life of the timbers in the longhouse walls. The often-quoted figure of fifteen years before replacement became necessary certainly seems to be an underestimate of their use-life (Whittle 1985:82).

Distinctions between longhouses, and thus presumably households, are as yet little established, as the identification of different household activity areas has only recently been a priority of LBK settlement excavations (Bogucki and Grygiel 1993). This may well be because the traditional model of LBK social organisation has been of an egalitarian community, so differences between households would not be expected to exist. Traditionally, the issue of social ranking has been limited to comment on the varying size of longhouses, which can indeed be quite significant on individual sites. The larger longhouses do show differences from smaller examples, as at Langweiler 8, where Lüning (1982) noted that the longer buildings had more pits, more related finds (although this may simply be a product of greater pit volume), more decorated pottery and more weeds and wheat chaff, suggesting that primary processing of grain took place in them.

Variation in subsistence related material may relate to functional differences between structures, although the decorated pottery is more difficult to explain in such terms, and discussion has generally stalled there. In his excavations at Olszanica in Poland, Milisauskas (1986) has, however, identified a degree of clustering of exotic obsidian and of fine imported pottery around certain quite small longhouses which he argues (1978:88) reflects the control of exchange practices by certain families or individuals, while he suggests that a particularly substantial longhouse associated with large numbers of polished axes could be interpreted as a men’s house, or the dwelling of a community leader. A simple analysis of the size of different buildings may thus be of relatively little significance, especially if some represent communal structures for use by a group larger than the household. The local level of social competition therefore lies largely beyond analysis at present, in the absence of further detailed contextual studies.

Social relations on a larger scale can be seen with the creation of substantial enclosures later in the LBK. There is considerable variety in Early Neolithic enclosures as a whole (Bogucki and Grygiel 1993), except that most of the early examples have several entrances even though these are not positioned to any clear pattern, and they tend to be quite small (Bradley 1993:74). There is much debate concerning the function of the enclosures (Keeley and Cahen 1989), with three alternative theories for their use being proposed: as cattle ‘kraals’, as ritual sites, or as defended sites.

The cattle kraal theory has been revived by Bogucki (Bogucki and Grygiel 1993), based on his interpretation of the importance of cattle in the LBK economy. The evidence is slight, however, given that it is limited to certain German enclosures lacking complex earthworks and being situated on the edge of the floodplain in locations which do not appear to be very defensible. That is not of course to deny that stock control may have been important at times, just that it need not necessarily involve the construction of permanent enclosures. Where the earthworks are both more substantial and seem to enclose buildings the standard view has been that these are defended settlements (e.g.Bogucki and Grygiel 1993). There are, however, some real difficulties with this as a general interpretation.

A less considered theory is that of enclosures as demarcating spaces set aside for ritual activities. This possibility has generally been raised concerning earthworks which do not enclose houses and have a non-defensive character (e.g. Lüning and Stehli 1989), but has yet to receive much genuine consideration (although see Whittle 1988a). Instead it often represents an interpretation entertained only if no other seems plausible (e.g. Bogucki and Grygiel 1993). However, it is clear that many causewayed enclosures in Scandinavia and Britain were the scene of intense ritual activities, and post-LBK enclosures in central Europe also have a definite ritual character. Midgley et al. (1993), reporting on excavations at the Rondel at Bylany in Bohemia, note the absence of settlement traces inside Rondels and suggest that the palisades are not defensive in intention but serve to constrict the entrance and so symbolically, and perhaps practically, restrict access to the interior. Special deposits are few in number, but perhaps include grinding stones.

Suggestions that enclosures may have been constructed on the site of founding settlements and may have played a significant role in the movement of raw materials (Bradley 1993:74–5) bring us back to the question of competition between households and between communities. The construction of an enclosure to mark the primacy of one settlement over others must have been a source of considerable tension and competing claims over the prestige that this would confer on those in direct line of descent from the ancestral farmers. A degree of control over access to the enclosure would inevitably heighten such tensions and represent a significant source of power. That such conflicts were not, however, played out exclusively in the ritual sphere is demonstrated by the evidence from Talheim in Germany (Wahl and König 1987), where a mass grave of some thirty-five men, women and children, many apparently killed by blows to the head with a shoe-last adze, has been discovered. The precise significance of this unique discovery is as yet not established, but it certainly points to the possibility that competition and conflict within LBK society may not always have been constrained and channelled by ritual rivalries.

By I.J. Thorpe in "The Origins of Agriculture in Europe", Routledge, UK, 1999, excerpts pp.29-34. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.