Topic: The Dawn of European Civilization By V. GORDON CHILDE 1923

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ware may be burnished and ornamented with designs in white paint
or covered with a white slip on which the design is painted in red, as in
Middle Neolithic Thessalian or Tripolye B wares. In the latest Moravian
phase, coloured decoration was abandoned altogether. While crusted
spirals were everywhere employed and in Hungary composed in the
old Danubian style (Fig. 61, i), basketry patterns, breaking up the
surface into panels as in the Tisza style, were even more popular.

Fig. 6i. Danubian II pottery, Lengyel. i, 3, 4 (£); 2 (|).

A South-West Asian ideology found expression in female figurines,
models of animals and doves, and zoomorphic vases. But in Hungary
regular cemeteries of well-furnished graves containing flexed skeletons
attest already ancestor tendence; at Zengovarkony near Pecs, seventy-
eight graves (including six double burials of male and female—? sati)
divided between eleven groups (? lineages) had been uncovered by
1939.1 Farther north Danubian II burials are rare; at one Moravian
site twelve skeletons were found buried together in a shaft grave,2 at
others cremations, or evidence for cannibalism3, are reported.

The Lengyel culture could most readily be explained as a result of
the further extension of the south-eastern influence that induced the
Vinca culture on the Danube. But if such influence be denied, Lengyel
might claim a parental relation to Vinca and so to Larisa!

Comparisons with the Aegean and Anatolia offer ambiguous possi-
bilities for dating period II. The resemblances of crusted ware to that

1 Arch. Hung., XXIII (1939).   2 Obzor, XIV (1950), 335.

8 AR., VIII, 1956, 773-4.
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of phase C in Thessaly, of the indented lugs on the Tisza to Early
Macedonian, and of clay stamps and block vases to Early Minoan
forms, suggest a date round about 2500 b.c. for the period’s beginning.
On the other hand, pedestalled bowls, very much of Danubian II form,
may go back to the fourth millennium in the chalcolithic of Alisar, at
Kum Tepe and in “neolithic” Crete; the red on white painted sherds
from Moravia recall equally ancient Thessalian fabrics. On this evi-
dence 3000-2600 would seem just as plausible as 2500-2200 as the
historical dates of period II.

Danubian I Survivals in the North

The expansion of Danubian II farmers, like that of their precursors
in Danubian I, was a slow process. Indeed, it had begun while Danubian
I folk were still spreading down the Oder, the Elbe, and the Rhine
valleys. Since period II begins with the emergence of the Danubian II
and Tisza cultures in the Middle Danube basin, we may say that
Danubian I cultures survived in the north into period II. In fact they
outlasted even that period in remote places. Moreover, the Danubian I
expansion did not take place in vacuo. In the hill countries between the
Danube and the Rhine and in Thuringia, along the rivers of the North
European plain and on the sand-dunes of Silesia and Poland, still
lived scattered groups of Tardenoisian, Maglemosian, and Swiderian
food-gatherers. Some of these were absorbed into Danubian com-
munities or copied the Danubians’ way of life. Thus arose various
cultural groups,1 essentially Danubian in economy and equipment,
but diverging from the norm in details, particularly in ceramic art.
Hence the groups are defined by their pottery. And most flourished
in period III too.

(1) Stroke-ornamented ware (Stichbandkeramik) (Fig. 62, 1) distin-
guishes a group which arose probably in Bohemia and spread thence
back into Moravia, and into Bavaria, Central Germany, and Western
Poland in the wake of the Danubian I groups, and under pressure from
the same economic forces. Economically it differs from Danubian I
only in a tendency to supplement farming by hunting, for which
transverse arrow-heads2 of Tardenoisian ancestry were employed.
The arrow-shafts were straightened on grooved stones, as in the
Danubian II culture and farther east.3 The pots were still round-
bottomed, but were decorated exclusively with skeuomorphic zig-zag
patterns composed of ribbons executed by a series of distinct jabs

1   Buttler, Donau., 29, 45; Anthropozoikum, III, (1953), 207; IV, 411.

2   E.g. at Lobec, Bohemia, AR., Ill, 130.   3 PA., XXXIX (1933), 50-3.

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instead of continuous lines. In Bohemia, Bavaria, and Central Germany
the dead were cremated.1 In Moravia and Poland stroke-ornamented
ware occurs in late Danubian II settlements, and at Gleinitz in Silesia
an imported Tisza vase was found with stroke-ornamented ware,2

Fig. 62. Stroke-ornamented vases, Bohemia (•$, £); Rossen vases. Central

Germany (f5).

while at Vochov near Plzen a figurine of Danubian II type turned up
in a similar context.3 Hence the culture thus defined at least lasts into
period II.

(2) The Rossen group arose in Western Bohemia and Saxo-Thuringia
through the adoption by Forest-folk of a fundamentally Danubian
equipment and economy.4 They spread down the Main and then up the
Rhine to Switzerland, and into France through the Belfort gap.5
Though the Danubian agricultural economy had been taken over

1   AR., VIII {1956), 710-18.

2   Altschles., Ill (1931), 153,' Buttler, Donau., 60.

3   Obzor, XIV (1950). 330.

4   The theory of its derivation from “the North-West German Megalith Culture”, once
dominant in Germany, was refuted by Stocky, Boh, Prdh., 161, and more conclusively
by Engel, Mannus, XXXII (1940), 57-81.

5   See Buttler, Donau., 40 fi., and Kimmig, Bad. Fb. (1948-50), 47-62.

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entire, hunting retained much of the importance that it had enjoyed
in the ancestral Forest culture. The increased competition for land,
due to the rise of this and other new groups of cultivators, may by
now have led to war. The Rossen people were the first in the Rhine
valley to fortify their settlements, while weapons—transverse and
hollow-based arrow-heads, disc-shaped mace-heads and the old per-
forated antler-axes of the Forest-folk—were relatively common. The
Rossen folk lived in rectangular houses with vertical walls and gabled
roofs supported by three rows of earth-fast posts,1 and they also
erected rectangular granaries. But their settlements were no more
permanent than those of the preceding groups. Their pots are hemi-
spherical or globular in profile, but are often provided with stand-rings
and are decorated with rectilinear patterns imitating basketry and
executed in stab-and-drag technique (Fig. 62, 2). Exceptional forms
are quadrilobate dishes with analogues in the Balkans and North Italy
and a small clay barrel with closed ends and an opening in the side,
a form well-represented in Troy I.1 2

As ornaments the Rossen folk wore marble bracelets, disc-beads
of shell, bored tusks and deers’ teeth and marble buttons identical
with those from Lengyel. The dead were buried contracted in ceme-
teries. One skull from Alsace had been trepanned.3

The buttons of Danubian II type from the graves at Rossen in
Central Germany prove that the group even there belongs to period II,
while on the Isar, in Alsace, and in the Wetterau, Rossen house-
foundations have disturbed the ruins of those left by later Danubian I
peasants. On the other hand, on the Goldberg, in Wurttemburg, the
Rossen village was succeeded by a settlement of the Western Michels-
berg culture that generally belongs to period III. Hence Rossen
flourished in period II.4

The Danubian I peasants themselves persisted, wandering about
during period II and in the Rhine basin even into period III, preserving
their culture intact, but not unaffected by the example of their neigh-
bours and rivals. Plastic suggestions of a human face from Koln-
Lindental, in the manner of Trojan face-urns, may belong to this
phase.5 Even in Central Germany the later Danubian I pottery is
associated with the stroke-ornamented ware of period II. Such late
Danubian I people fortified Koln-Lindental. Pressure on the land was

1 Germania, XX (1936), 229-34; see Fig- 137 here.

* Buttler, Donau., 47, pis. 10, 12; 12, 1; cf. Blegen, Troy, I, form D 28. The R8ssen
and Troadic “barrels" could both be derived from geomorphic vases of the Lengyel
culture like Stocky Boh. Preh., pi. LIX, n, or WPZ., XXVIII (1941), 39-

3   Germania, XXVI (1942), 177-81.

1 Buttler, Donau., 62.   6 Buttler, Donau., 31.

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becoming serious. In addition to the natural increase of the population
and the competitive groups resulting from the conversion of food-
gatherers into cultivators, new groups were spreading from the south-
east and from the west.

PERIOD III

By period III the natural growth of peasant populations, the con-
version to food-production of food-gathering communities, and immi-
grations of fresh tribes from beyond the I5ss lands had produced a
pressure upon the soil that entailed adjustments in everyday life.
Inferior lands above the loss were exploited; hunting and pastoralism
became more important economically, and in fact in the temperate
zone they would be more productive than hoe-agriculture. Settlements
were often planted on hilltops as well as in the valleys, and were fre-
quently fortified.1 Competition for land assumed a bellicose character,
and weapons such as battle-axes became specialized for warfare. The
consequent preponderance of the male members in the communities
may account for the general disappearance of female figurines. Part
of the new surplus population may have sought an outlet in industry
and trade; imported substances such as Baltic amber, Galician flint
and copper begin to be distributed more regularly than heretofore.
Warriors would appreciate more readily than cultivators the superiority
of metal, and chiefs may already have been concentrating surplus
wealth to make the demand for metal effective. Its satisfaction was
none the less dependent on the diffusion of the requisite technical
knowledge, whether by immigrant prospectors or captives, from the
south-east.

A general picture of the period in the loss lands would present a
bewildering variety of small conflicting groups. Some of these are
admittedly intruders and can be better described elsewhere. From the
West, Michelsberg folk (p. 291) spread as far as Upper Austria, Bohemia,
and Central Germany, while Beaker-folk (p. 223) reached the Danube
near Buda-Pest and spread across Germany and Czechoslovakia as far
as the Vistula. From the Pontic-North European plain warriors using
battle-axes and cord-ornamented pottery spread as far as Bavaria,
Bohemia, and Moravia, and even into the Middle Danube basin. In
other groups there is an injection of types (collared flasks, globular
amphorae, and so on) which we shall find in Chapter X to be genuinely
Northern. But these hardly suffice to demonstrate a large-scale “Nordic"
invasion of the Danubian province. We shall describe here only certain

1   E.g. Homolka in Bohemia, Proc. Am. Phil. Soc., LXXI (1932), 357-92.

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cultures which remain fundamentally Danubian even though they be
found on fortified hilltops or in caves.

Bodrogkeresztur designates the culture into which the Lengyel
culture developed through a Tiszapolg&r stage in North-East Hungary
and beyond the Tisza, whence it spread north to Silesia.1 It is known
almost exclusively from cemeteries larger than those of previous
periods. That at the patent station comprised at least fifty graves, at
Jaszlad&ny forty, at Pusztaistvanhaza thirty-two,2 while at Tiszapolgar-

Basatanya 158 graves have been excavated out of an estimated total
of 225.3 The size of the cemeteries may be due as much to prolonged
occupation of the same village as to density of population. At Basatanya,
Kutzian could distinguish two consecutive phases, both transitional,
between Lengyel and mature Bodrogkeresztur. Double graves, in
which one body had been buried with rich furniture, the other with
none, suggest a division of society into classes.

Trade now brought to the Hungarian plain flint from Galicia, gold
and copper from Transylvania. In the cemeteries copper is represented
by several quadrangular awls, three or four rhomboid knife-daggers
without midribs or rivet holes, a flat adze, five axe-adzes and at least
one battle-axe.4 Several similar battle-axes (Fig. 63) have been found

1   Nbl.f. d. V., XV (1939). 114-17.

2   Arch. Hung., IV; AE., XLI (1927), 50-7; BRGKXXIV-XXV, 53.

3   Report by Kutzian to the "Conference Arch^ologique de l’Acad&nie hongroise des
Sciences’’ (Buda-Pest, 1955); cf. AE. (1946-48), 42-62.

* PZ., XXII, in; AE. (1944-45), 1 ff.

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stray and disclose the translation into metal of antler axes that in
turn became the model for stone weapons (p. 159). Adzes and axe-
adzes are very common stray and sometimes occur in hoards.1 Evi-
dently copper was being systematically extracted in the Carpathian
basin. Roska1 2 long ago argued that axe-adzes served as miners’ tools.
Driehaus3 has now shown that the simplest types, like Fig. 64, 1 and
5, are virtually confined to metalliferous Transylvania while the classic
type of Fig. 64, 6, radiates thence to the Balkans, Bavaria, Silesia,

and the Ukraine. They must have been traded; and the hoards, though
rare, suggest an incipient organization on the fines established by
period IV. The metal employed was mainly native copper, of which
there must once have been really large deposits. It was undoubtedly
melted, but none of the products shows unambiguous evidence of
having been shaped by casting in a mould,4 but all traces would be
removed by the necessary hammering.

1   Dolg., xix (1943). 135-9*

2   Dacia, III-IV, 352-55; cf. Kozlemenyeh, Cluj, II (1942), 15 ft,

3   Archceologia Geographica, III (1952), 1-5.

4   Inst. Arch. AR., VII (1951), 44-5.

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Copper did not oust stone tools. Graves contain long knives on flint
blades, polished stone adzes, hollow-bored celts and, in a late phase,
triangular flint or obsidian arrow-heads and a mace embellished with
four projecting knobs (Fig. 65).

Technically Bodrogkeresztur pottery carries on the
late Lengye] tradition and in the Tiszapolgar phase
at least vessels on high hollow pedestals—though
more often bowls as in Tripolye than fruitstands—were
still popular. But bowls’ rims are now inverted, never
expanding. Distinctive of mature Bodrogkeresztur are
the so-called milk-jugs (Fig. 66, 2.)1 Handled tankards
and pyxides, very like Early iEgean ones, occur spo-
radically. Apart from warts and dimples, ornament
is not common. Some vases, however, are decorated
with cross-hatched ribbons forming mseander patterns
even more like those of Dimini than the cognate Tisza designs. Late
vases decorated with plastic ribs foreshadow the Bronze Age usage.

Fig. 65.

Knobbed mace-
head from Maros
Decse (£).

Fig. 66. Bodrogkeresztur pyxis and milk-jug.®After Tompa (J).

Girdles of disc-beads of shell together with stray copper or gold
trinkets were worn as ornaments.

Obviously the Bodrogkeresztur population was descended from the

1 What looks like a typical milk-jug was found at Maltepe near Sivas in northern
Anatolia, Belleten, XI (1937), 659 ff.

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Lengyel group. But had mining and metallurgy been initiated by
prospectors from the Aegean or the Caucasus? No doubt axe-adzes of
different shapes were used by Early Aegean peoples and were actually
manufactured—by casting in clay moulds—at Tepe Hissar in Northern
Iran. Prospectors should have introduced the techniques of casting
and smelting, but the Transylvanian products seem made of native
copper. The forms could be regarded as translations into this "superior
stone” of Danubian II adzes, hammer-axes and battle-axes of ordinary
stone or antler. Native copper-working could perfectly well have
originated in such a metalliferous region. Indeed, the iEgean axe-adzes
could theoretically be derived from Transylvania while Heine-Geldem1
has invoked axe-adzes like Fig. So, to mark the Aryans' route to
India. In other words the iEgean and Asiatic parallels to Bodiog-
keresztur metal types might just as well give termini ante, as
termini post, quos. Still, independent invention of casting is hard to
admit.

The Jordanova culture of Bohemia2 and Silesia3 can be regarded as
a parallel local development of the Lengyel tradition. It too is best
known from graves—fifty-seven from the eponymous site (once called
Jordansmuhl) in Silesia and thirty-eight at Brzesd Kujawski on the
middle Vistula.4 Metal was here used solely for ornaments—spectacle
spirals (Fig. 60, i), cylindrical ribbon armlets, and small discs bearing
embossed patterns. Antler axes, deposited in men’s graves at BrzeSd
Kujawski, illustrate the weapons, copper translations of which were
current south of the Carpathians. The distinctive pot-forms are mugs
with one or two band handles (Fig. 94) and bowls, again with inverted
rims. Bracelets were made of Spondylus shell or of engraved bone,
while disc beads of shell were strung together as girdles or necklaces.
As in the Bodrogkeresztur culture, female figurines are no more in
evidence. The old ideology has been changed. That may reflect a change
from a matrilineal to a patrilineal organization of society.

The copper spectacle spirals might have been inspired by Early
IEgean gold ones like those of Fig. 22. If so, they would constitute a
substantial argument for Oriental participation in the foundation of
the Danubian III copper industry. Otherwise there are no more indi-
cations of influence from that quarter in Jordanova than in Bodrog-
keresztur. Such can, however, be detected in the largely contemporary
Baden culture.

1   /. Indian Oriental Soc., IV (1936), 1-30.

2   Obzor, XIV (1950), 163-257.

3   Buttler, Donau., 43.

4   WA., XV (1938), 1-X05; the graves have disturbed foundations of Danubian I
long houses.

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The Transitional Baden-Pecel Culture

West and north of the Danube between Buda-Pest and Vienna emerged
a culture complex variously designated Baden,1 Ossarn,1 2 or Pecel3
after Austrian and Hungarian sites or "channel”4 or “radially5 orna-
mented" after ceramic features. Its domain extends northward through
Moravia to the Upper Elbe and the Upper Vistula and eastward across
the Tisza and the Maros. Its regional manifestations in architecture
and burial rites as well as pottery differ so widely as to raise doubts
whether the discrepancies be due to the partial assimilation of distinct
traditions or local divergences of a single tradition. Much of the data
comes from isolated burials or rubbish pits; only Ossarn in Austria,
Vucedol on the Drave, some sites near the Maros, and two large ceme-
teries near Buda-Pest have been systematically explored on an adequate
scale.

While one-corn and emmer wheats2 were regularly cultivated (very
likely with the plough), stock-breeding combined with hunting made
major contributions to the food-supply. Ritual burials of cattle and
deer underline the importance of these activities. Experts conclude
that the cattle were bred for milk, not just for flesh.6 The bones from
Ossarn2 disclose for the first time on the Middle Danube large flocks
of sheep. The first remains of horses in the province, too, have been
reported from this and other sites. Perhaps they were already domesti-
cated.7 At least there were vehicles for horses to draw.

A model waggon, carried on four solid disc wheels,8 from the ceme-
tery of Buda-Kalasz affords the oldest evidence for such vehicles
north of the Alps, if not in Europe as a whole. But these vehicles were
not drawn by horses. At least paired oxen, buried in two rich graves
at Alsonemedi,9 must surely have drawn the hearses in which their
masters were conveyed to the grave.

On the fertile plains and in mountain valleys the farmers lived
on fortified hilltops or in caves. The best-attested house type is a
one-roomed rectangular hut with rounded corners,10 but at Vucedol,

1   Fittioni, Osterreich., 189-208.

2   Bayer, Die Eiszeit, V (Vienna, 1928), 60 ff.

3   Banner, "Die P6celer Kultur” Arch. Hung., XXXV (1956).

4   Stocky, Boh. Preh., 115 ff.; B6hm, Kronika, 134-49; cf. SlovensM Dejiny, 61-4.

5   WA.,XII (1933), 140-67.

6   AAH., I (1951). 49. 75-

7   Dolg., XV. (1939), 166; the attribution of an antler cheek-piece from a bit to the
P£cel culture is dubious.

8   Folya Arch., VI (1952), 29-35; Banner, loc. cit., 127.

8 AAH., I (1951). 38-40.

10 Measuring 4-5 by 3^4 m. at Palotabazsolc (Banner, “Peceler Kultur”, 214),
8-o by 5-5 m. at Praha-Bubenic (B6hm, Kronika, 198).

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Schmidt1 reports apsidal houses. Circular pits (? bothroi) are common in
all settlements; at Vucedol they led into subterranean cellars excavated
in the loss. At least in Hungary the size of the cemeteries—305 graves
at Buda-Kalasz, 41 at Alsonemedi—point to large and stable villages.
But these did not grow into tells, and the huts seem more appropriate
to semi-nomad pastoralists. Their location, like the weapons from
graves, emphasizes the martial aspect of pastoral societies.

Stone was still the normal material for knives, axes and adzes,
arrow-heads, and battle-axes. But the last-named exhibit an imitation
seam as if copied from a cast metal model, and Pittioni2 assigns copper
weapons, like Fig. 63, from Austria to the Baden culture. Copper
ornaments alone have so far been found in graves; two in Lower
Austria3 were furnished with neck-rings of twisted wire with recoiled
ends, immediate precursors of the cast ingot-torques (Fig. 69, 11-12)
of period IV. Long-distance trade is positively documented by Spon-
dylus and Tridacna shells, imported from the Mediterranean.

Spools, like the Early Troadic, and whorls attest an active textile
industry. Pottery was self-coloured and generally dark-faced, occasion-
ally mottled. A universal peculiarity is presented by large ribbon
handles rising above the rims of mugs and jugs; at the top they are
often deeply flanged, as in Fig. 96, or fanned out. Subcutaneous
string-holes are not uncommon, and occasionally trumpet lugs (like Fig.
17, column 1) grow from the bowls. Bowls have inverted rims and, in
Hungary and Slovakia, are divided into two unequal compartments
and provided with conspicuous button handles. Channelled decoration
is universal, but is often combined with other techniques—punctured
ribbons, incised lattices, exceptionally crusting combined with incision
as in the Tisza culture, or even cord impressions.

Female figurines have not been recorded, but clay animal figures
and models of waggons and boats may represent a survival of the old
ideological tradition. It was quite overshadowed by funerary ritual.
A few burials of men and women together may be taken as evidences of
sati and of a patriarchal family. At Alsonemedi two centrally situated
graves containing oxen and hearses must belong to chiefs interred in
accordance with the tradition of royal burials that can be traced back
to the Early Dynastic tombs of Kish and Ur and here marking the
oldest royal funerals in Europe. The normal burial rite was interment
in a contracted or flexed position, but in Hungary a small group of
cremation graves has been recently reported. In a couple of Austrian
tombs five or eight corpses had been buried together. Round Buda-
pest graves were grouped in distinct cemeteries; at some other sites

* Vuiedol, 10-15.   2 Osterreich., 204.   2 WPZ., XXIV (1937) 15-21.

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they are said to have been dug within the inhabited area. Collective
tombs containing up to twenty corpses were reported from Slovakia.1
But in western Hungary cemeteries of cremation burials in urns
constitute regular urnfields.2 At Vucedol men were laid on the right,
women on the left side.

In the Danubian sequence Baden is undoubtedly later than Lengyel.
At Kiskoros3 on the Hungarian plain a Bodrogkeresztur grave had
been dug into an abandoned Baden settlement, but east of the Tisza
the relation between the two cultures was reversed. At Fonyod Baden
graves had been disturbed by later Early Bronze Age graves of the
Kisapostag culture, while the copper neck-rings from Austria are
typologically older than the torques of period IV. So the Baden culture
is well fixed within period III; the extent of its overlap with the Bell-
beaker culture remains to be determined. Racially the Pecel population
shows a mixture of round and long heads.4

To Menghin, R. R. Schmidt and Pittioni Baden is just a "Nordic”
culture, the result of an invasion from the wooded plain of Northern
Europe. No doubt a few specifically Northern types, like collared
flasks, occur sporadically on Baden sites as at Jevisovice in Moravia.
On the other hand, peculiarities in Northern ceramic decoration have
been ascribed to Baden influence,5 and there is far more evidence for
southern than for northern influences in the fundamentally Danubian
Baden pottery. The distinctive channelled ornament is prominent in
the Vinca culture; the incised and punctured patterns can be paralleled
there and, still more precisely, in the Macedonian Late Neolithic;
trumpet lugs are Troadic; flanged handles have been met in Troy
while the Chalcolithic of Mersin6 provides an exact parallel to the
Baden variant. Similarly, subcutaneous string-holes recur in the
Rinaldone culture of Central Italy. The wire torques from the Austrian
graves can be exactly matched in "Copper Age” burials at Ahlatlibel
in Anatolia7 and so could be. claimed as concrete evidence of the south-
eastern inspiration tor the metallurgy at least of the Baden culture.
Finally, wheeled vehicles were invented in Mesopotamia about 3000 b.c.
and employed as hearses in royal funerals there by 2500. They were
surely diffused thence, though the nearest analogues—spatially and
chronologically—to the Baden model—from South Russia—are two-
wheeled carts.

1   AR., IV (1952), 244; V, 733-6.

1   Banner "P6celer Kultur”, 200-4.   3 PZ., XXII (1931), m-15.

4 Arch. Hung., XXXV, 293-309.

8 Maier in Germania, XXXIII (1955), 159-73.

a Garstang, LA A A., XXV, p. XXVIII, 22.

7 Turk Tarih Arkeologya ve Etnografya, Dergisi, II (1934), 9°-

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The southern connections just summarized, save the last, do not
necessarily mean influences from the south. The “torque bearers’’ who
introduced better metallurgical techniques into Syria1 might conceiv-
ably have come from Central Europe, and, if so, the earlier torque
from Ahlatlibel might after all be Danubian. Italian prehistorians
would prefer to derive the Baden features in the Rinaldone culture
from the north. If the Baden analogies in the Balkans, Macedonia, and
Anatolia too could be thus interpreted, the Baden culture does exhibit
all the archaeological characters—horses, wheeled vehicles, cattle and
sheep, a dairy economy, patriarchal families, bows and arrows—
deduced by linguistic palaeontology for the ancestral Indo-Europeans;
their expansion could be beautifully documented by the connections
just mentioned! Of course, such an interpretation would demand a
literal inversion of current chronologies both relative and absolute.
Still, these are based—mainly but not entirely—on undemonstrated
postulates. With that reservation on purely archaeological evidence
the Baden culture cannot begin more than a couple of centuries before
2000 b.c. and so could only be influenced by Late Neolithic and Early
Bronze Age cultures of the iEgean.

The Early Bronze Age

During period III the growth of population was calling for a new
economy and making labour available for industry and commerce.
War was stimulating a demand for metal, and chiefs were accumulating
capital; the prejudices of immigrant warriors had to be satisfied with
trade-goods from the Baltic and Galicia. The Bell-beaker folk (pp. 222-
227.) established regular communications with the West and North
and opened up new connections with the Mediterranean across the
Brenner Pass. The rise of rich cities on the Levant coasts by 2000 b.c.,
in Crete by 1800, and in peninsular Greece by 1600 had created markets
for metals and other raw materials not too far from Central European
sources of supply and provided capital for their exploitation. Perhaps
prospectors trained in Asiatic traditions had begun working the copper
of Transylvania, Slovakia, and the Eastern Alps, and even the tin
lodes of Bohemia and Saxony. At least as soon as the lords of Mycenae
and Knossos began to demand amber, it became worthwhile to organize
the transport of the magic resin from Denmark and at the same time
the distribution of metal among the peasant societies of the Danube
basin. The appearance of the metal wares thus distributed defines
for archaeologists period IV.

1 PPS., XVII (1951), 178 ft.

12 7
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

No actual mines can be dated by direct evidence to period IV, but
there are indications that the copper lodes of the eastern Alps, demon-
strably mined during period VI, may have been exploited by surface
workings as early as period IV (p. 301). Equally early exploitation of
copper lodes near Saalfeld and of Vogtland tin has been deduced from
recent analyses.1 Moulds have been found in several settlements, but
do not necessarily belong to resident smiths.

The distribution of the industry's products was effected by a regular
class of itinerant merchant-artificers. Their routes are defined by hoards
of finished and half-finished articles—the merchant's stock in trade—
that had been buried when danger threatened and never recovered.
They show that the merchants were following ancient Danubian
traditions (p. 109) and that they dealt also in amber, gold, and presum-
ably substances such as salt that leave no trace in the archaeological
record. The amber routes are particularly well defined: the fossil resin
was brought from Jutland and Sammland to the Saale valley and
thence passed on through Bohemia and across the Brenner to Upper
Italy and the Aegean, while a little was diverted across Moravia to the
Hungarian plain and the Maros.1 * 3 A counterpart to this export trade
is certainly to be seen in segmented and cruciform beads of Egyptian
or iEgean fayence common in cemeteries round Szeged3 and in Slovakia,4
and found sporadically in Western Hungary,5 Lower Austria,6 Moravia,7
and Poland.

The activities of these merchants linked up the Central European
region round the Brenner amber route into a single commercial system
with branches to the tin-lodes of Cornwall and the gold-fields of Tran-
sylvania, but completely by-passing the Balkans. The types of metal
ware thus diffused from the beginning of the Bronze Age produce a
superficial appearance of uniformity throughout the Danubian province
which no longer includes the Save or Drave, the Danube below Buda-
pest, or the Tisza south of the Maros mouth. At the same time Asiatic
parallels to the arbitrary metal ornaments suggest the source of the
fresh chemical knowledge, the alloy of copper with tin, on which the
new economy was based.

Cast neck-rings with recoiled ends (Fig. 69, 11) were not only worn

1   Otto-Witter, Handbuch der altesten Meiallurgie in Mitieleuropa (Leipzig, 1952).

8 Only in graves 2 and 211 at Szfireg and 14 at Deszk; Dolg., XVII (1941); cf. Milojdid,
CJSPP. (Zurich, 1950), 268.

3   A]A., XLIII (1939), 17; Banner, Dolg., XVII.

4   Especially at VySapy-Opatovce near Nitra, unpublished.

5   In Kisapostag graves at Dunapentele, AAH., II (1952), 66.

8 Germania, XXI (1937), 89.

7 At Nemiice and Jiriltovice, Mus. Brno.

128
 DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION

as ornaments but served also as ingots and therefore are termed “ingot-
torques”. Such torques were the insignia of members of a metal-working
clan or guild in North Syria about 2000 b.c.1 and were deposited as
symbols of abstract wealth in contemporary shrines at Byblos.1 2 Lock-
rings with flattened ends and racket pins have explicitly Sumerian
prototypes3; knot-headed pins (Fig. 67, 0), appearing in predynastic
Egypt4 recur later at Troy and in Cyprus: the basket-shaped earrings of
gold wire (Fig. 67, 4, 5) are detached members of the Trojan ornaments

4   5

Fig. 67. Pins and earrings from Unetician graves. After Schr&nil (l).

shown in Fig. 22, 1. The first bronze-smiths producing for a Central
European market seem to have been trained in Asiatic schools and to
have introduced, together with the secret of bronze, Oriental fashions
in personal adornment.5 If so, the absence of these types on the Euro-
pean coasts of the Aegean and in the Balkans requires the admission

1   Schaeffer, Ugavitica, II (1949), 49, calls these metallurgists “Torque-Bearers”.

2   Syria, VI (1925), 18.

3   Childe, NLMAE., 161-2.

4   Ibid., 53, 63.

5   MilojSid, Germania, XXXIII (1955), 405-7, points out that the "Asiatic” types do
not all appear simultaneously at the beginning of period IV, but severally during
phases Ai, A2, and B respectively.

I

T29
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

that they were introduced up the Adriatic and across the Brenner,
unless they had been introduced through Troy by metallurgists work-
ing for export only till the fall of the “second city” destroyed their
market.

The novel metal tools and weapons appearing at the same time were
neither so uniform in the Danubian province nor so clearly related to
Oriental models. The flat axe which at Thermi had been provided with
flanges by hammering (p. 38) was translated into a flanged axe, cast
in a two-piece mould (Fig. 69,1). Hence it can be inferred that Central
European bronze axes, like Danubian adzes, were mounted in knee
shafts. Chisels were even|provided with cast tubular sockets in Moravia
and Austria.1 Only in Hungary was a shaft-tube axe of Sumerian
ancestry preferred (Fig. 64, 5-6).2 Shaft-hole axes were, however, used
as weapons elsewhere in the province, while a remarkable weapon from
a Saxon hoard3 of the end of period IV seems a barbaric version of the
crescentic axe represented in the Royal Tombs of Ur and rather later
in North Syria.4

The universal weapon was the round-heeled knife-dagger (Fig. 68).
Its bone or wooden hilt was hollowed at the base like the bronze hilt of
the rather later dagger shown in Fig. 70, an old Egyptian trick never
popular in Asia nor Greece, but traceable in Central, as in Western,
Europe, on the flat-tanged daggers of the Bell-beaker folk during
period III. Halberds5 were used in Germany and Lower Austria and
occasionally even in Hungary, but not in Bohemia. The type is sup-
posedly West European, and reached the Danubian province from
Ireland or from the Iberian Peninsula.

The unity created by the metallurgical industry and commerce had
no political counterpart. It was imposed on a number of distinct
cultures called after the sites of Perjamos6 on the Maros, Toszeg, or
NagyrSv on the Tisza,7 Kisapostag west of the Danube,8 Unetice in
Bohemia, and Straubing in Bavaria, and asserting their independence
not only in peculiarities of pottery and personal ornaments but even
by divergences in burial rites and economic status. Most are presumably

1   PA., XLIV (1953), 203; Arch. Aust., VII (1950), 1-8.

2   Derived through the Caucasus, or Crete; cf. PZ., XXVII (1936), 150; Folya Arch.,
VIII, 43.

3   PZ., XXXIV (1949-50), 232-8; JMV., XXXV (1951), 65.

*   Iraq, XI (1949), 118.

8 P.Z., XXV, 130-42; Arch., LXXXVI (1937), 222-5.

*   Banner, Dolgozatoh, VII (1931), 1-53; XVII, 70-82; Patay, FruhbronzezeiiUche
Kulturen in Ungarn; Nestor, BRGK., XXII, 84-8; CISPP. (1950), 267-77.

7   The culture from the lowest levels in the T6szeg tell is termed Nagyr£v.; cf. Patay,
FruhbronzezeiiUche Kulturen in Ungarn (1939); Mozsolic, AAH., II (1952); Banner,
PPS., XXI, 127.

8   Mozsolic, Arch. Hung., XXVI (1942); Patay, op. tit.-, in Slovakia Kisapostag and
UnStice types occur with inhumations, AR., VI (1954), 297-300.

I30

[Prometheus]

 DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION

descended from local groups; for everywhere the pottery is technically
in the Lengyel-Baden tradition, but everywhere, save on the Tisza,
influence from Bell-beaker folk is patent even in the pottery. But the
universally used strap-handled jugs and tankards with the body and
neck modelled separately have nothing to do with the Bell-beakers.

68   69   70

Fig. 68. Daggers from UnStician graves (£)•

Fig. 69. Hoard of Sobochleby (£)•

Fig. 70. Bronze-hilted dagger (J).

All after Schr&nil.

In the Middle Danube basin settlements were founded in period IV
on sites chosen primarily with a view to commerce where natural
routes intersect at a ford or pass mouth.1 And these settlements were
permanent townships occupied so long that their ruins form tells.
Cemeteries of contracted skeletons no less clearly attest a sedentary
life; that at Szoreg near Szeged comprised 200 graves, 103 attributed
to period IV and 54 to period V. But even these communities were

1 PZ., XXII (1931), 33-
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

more nearly self-sufficing villages than industrial cities. Bone and stone
were still used for implements and even battle-axes; metal toilet-
articles such as girdle-clasps were imitated in bone. The pots were
hand-made, but the slipped and polished vases, red, black, or mottled,
recall Anatolian and Iberic fabrics. In the basal or Nagyrev levels at
Toszeg and in the older Szoreg graves the jugs have only one loop or
strap handle. Later these give place to hour-glass tankards which
develop in period V into metallic-looking cantharoi with quatrefoil
mouths like the Middle Minoan and Hittite vases (p. 33). While the
local smiths made most of the types characteristic of the period, they
did not develop the flanged axe nor the same variety of pins as was
popular farther north. Segmented fayence beads were, however,
imported and Oriental lunula-pendants1 were imitated, as were iEgean
“sacred ivy-leaves”.2

North of the Bakony and Carpathians no tells have been recognized,
but cemeteries in Austria comprising over a hundred graves3 must
belong to permanent villages, occupied even into period V (sixteen
rectilinear houses have in fact been recognized at Postoloprty).4 All
the foregoing graves contained contracted skeletons. Only in the
Kisapostag group and the earliest graves near Szeged was cremation
the normal practice. Their cemeteries are indeed urnfields like that of
Troy VI. Of course, cremation had been practised locally by some
Baden communities and also by Bell-beaker folk in Hungary. In South
Bohemia, Poland, and Thuringia Unetician burials have been found
under barrows (p. 200)

The Unetician culture proper extends from the Austrian Danube
to Silesia and Saxony, but is most typically developed on the Upper
Elbe in Bohemia and along the Saale and Oder. Here, owing to the
proximity of the Ore Mountains and the amber trade across the
Brenner, the metal industry developed most luxuriantly. By casting
in valve-moulds, the celts were equipped with high flanges and the
knot-headed pin was translated into the distinctive “Bohemian eyelet-
pin” (Fig. 67, 2). Towards the end of period IV core casting allowed
the manufacture of socketed spear-heads and socketed chisels. More-
over, Unetician smiths could produce not only ornaments of sheet
bronze but also bell helmets if, as Hencken5 has shown grounds for
believing, the specimen found a century ago at Beitsch in Saxony was

1   Cf. e.g. Schaeffer, Stratigraphie comparee, fig. 183, 36.

2   Essays in Mgean Archeology, ed. Casson, pp. 1-4; cf. Petrie, Ancient Gaza, III,
pi. XIV, 29-33.

8 Four hundred at Hainberg-Teichtal (MAGW., LX (1930), 65 ff.); 255 at Gemein-
lebam (Szombathy) Flachgraber bie Gemeinlebarn, R.-G. Forsch. 3, Berlin, 1929.

4   AR., V (1953). 308-18

6   “Beitsch and Knossos”, PPS., XVIII (1952), 36-47, cf. p. 30 above.

132
 DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION

really associated with Unetician ingot-torques and a triangular daggei.
Amber, gold, and Mediterranean shells were freely imported, but
fayence beads are rare and the segmented variety (like Fig. 157) is not
found north of Brno.

Fig. 71. Bulb, disc, trilobate, and crutch-headed pins from later Unetician
graves. After Schr4nil (£).

The hand-made pots agree in fabric with those from Perjamos, but
the most distinctive shapes were at first pouched jugs and mugs some-
times decorated with cord-impressions or incised lines (Fig. 72) .1

1 Formerly attributed to a distinct “Marschwitz culture” and period III.

133
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Then in the classical phase of Unetice (IVb) these are transformed by
flattening out the belly into keeled mugs and jugs. Neumann1 has
analysed the constituents of Unetician pottery into elements derived
from the Bell-beaker and Corded ware groups and a southern com-

Fig. 72. Marschwitz and early Unetician pottery, Silesia and Bohemia.

After Stocky.

ponent. His analysis summarizes the constitution of the whole culture.
Bell-beaker folk established the requisite commercial connection,
battle-axe warriors made the demand for metal effective, metallurgists
from the south may have provided the technical basis, but the founda-
tion was still Baden and so Danubian.

The development of the Central European bronze industry was
undoubtedly correlated with that of the amber trade across the
province; the guaranteed market that alone could make regular trade
among barbarians worth while was in Mycenaean Greece and Crete.
It is undoubtedly assumed that the initiation of the industry was
equally due to prospectors, ultimately relying for a livelihood on the
purchasing power of East Mediterranean cities. On this assumption
the Oriental types reproduced by Danubian smiths should provide
limiting dates for period IV. The limits thus given prove to be unex-
pectedly wide. Most of the ornaments mentioned on p. 129 had been
current in Egypt or Mesopotamia long before 2000 b.c. Even the ingot-
torques, introduced into Syria about that date, had earlier wiry pre-
cursors at Ahlatlibel, as in Austria (p. 125). So period IV might begin
before 2000 b.c. But regular trade with the ZBgean is attested first
about 1600 b.c.

The initial assumption, however intrinsically probable, has not yet
been demonstrated by actual dateable imports; for segmented fayence
beads were current in Hither Asia for a millennium before 1400 b.c.
Now the metal-working clan, who introduced ingot-torques with core
casting and other advances into Syria, are thought to have been

1 PZ., XX (1929), 70-128.

134
 DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION

immigrants. As no other cradle has been found for them, they might
have come from Central Europe. In that case their advent a century it
before or after 2000 b.c. would be a terminus ante quem for the beginning {
of Danubian IV. So too the amber beads from the Shaft Graves of
Mycenae at least prove that the commerce that enriched the Un&tician
culture was fully established before 1550 b.c. Crescentic necklaces with
pattern-bored spacers, like the Mycenaean, in Bavaria and Alsace are
found in graves of period V. So 1550 should be near the end of period IV.

If so, the strikingly close Middle Minoan and contemporary Hittite
analogies to the quatrefoil cantharoi that developed from the Perjamos
tankards in period V (p. 132) become chronologically significant.
Moreover, by 1200 b.c. fibulae and other Central European or North
Italian types were appearing in Greece, and the types in question are
more proper to period VI than to period V.1 If, then, period V—the*j
Middle Bronze Age—ended about 1250 b.c., and began in 1550, period IV, y
the initial phase of the Continental Bronze Age, might very well have
occupied five centuries and begun before 2000 b.c. On the available
Central European evidence, 2100 is as likely a date as 1700 for the
start of the Early Bronze Age.

But whether Perjamos and Unetice are to be compared to Sargonid
cities in Mesopotamia or early Mycenaean townships in Greece, they
must rank several stages lower in the cultural scale. Economically they
have not. reached the level of the Early Aegean townships of the
Peloponnese or the Troad. Most of the population must remain peasants.
But one industry at least did absorb a few of the farmers’ younger sons;
trade did indirectly secure a share in the Oriental surplus to supple-
ment home-grown supplies. The smiths, the only specialist craftsmen
recognizable in the archaeological record of period IV, displayed far
more originality and inventiveness than their fellows in Asia or Egypt.
And their products were more democratic. Even in period IV they were
making sickles while Egyptian peasants were still reaping with flints.
By period VI their successors would have invented an axe of bronze J
that was as efficient and as cheap as an iron one, and an armament 'J|
with which European barbarians could challenge the well-equipped
armies of Oriental monarchies.

1   Cf. p. 83; even violin-bow fibulae are first reliably attested in urnfields of period VI.

A fragment from an Un£tice grave at Polepy in Bohemia (Schranil, Bohmen, ioi;
Bohm, CISPP, (London. 1932), 242; cf. AR., VI (1954), 533> where the fragment
is accepted jas an Unetician fibula) is too small for reliable diagnosis', another from
Gemeinlebam is just as likely to belong to the umfield at that site as to the late
UnStician cemetery.
 CHAPTER VIII

THE PEASANTS OF THE BLACK EARTH

On the loss-clad flanks of the Carpathians, in the valleys of the upper
Oltu and the Seret, and on the parkland plateau extending north-
eastward across the Prut, the Dniestr, and the Southern Bug to the
Dniepr, there developed, on a Starcevo foundation enriched by Dan-
ubian elements, a remarkable farming culture named after Tripolye,
a site near Kiev.1 Though its authors were throughout farmers and lived
in large villages of substantial houses, they seem, like their kinsmen
farther west, to have practised a sort of shifting cultivation.2 Hence
the village sites are very numerous—twenty-six have been identified
in no sq. miles just south of Kiev—but none formed tells. A few sites
—Nezviska3 on the Dniestr, Cucuteni4 and Izvoare5 on the Prut,
Traian6 on the Seret—were occupied more than once. The stratigraphy
there observed justifies a division of the culture into four main stages:
A, Bi, B2, and C7. It is based primarily on a stylistic analysis of the
ceramic decoration in which local divergences may have sometimes
been mistaken for discrepancies in age. Phase A is confined to a few
sites on the upper reaches of the Prut, the Dniestr, and the Bug. The
valleys of the Oltu and Dniepr would then have been colonized in
phase Bi (AB). Only in phase C does Tripolye pottery occur in settle-
ments of quite different cultures on the steppes and in the forests north
of the Teterev.

The basis of life was throughout the cultivation of wheats—Tnticum
monococcum, dicoccum, and vulgare—barley, and millet, and the breed-
ing of cattle, goats, sheep, and pigs.8 Cows were always the most
important stock; horses’9 bones occur in all stages, but perhaps repre-
sent game animals save in the latest stage. Hunting was at all times
important, but the percentage of game bones in the food refuse declines
from 52 in stage A to 20 in stage C. Fishing must also have made

1   Passek, Periodizatsiya Tripolskikh Poselenii (MA., X, 1949), tliough. written in
1946, documents facts unless another reference be given.

2   Krifievskii, KS„ VIII (1940), 53-

3   KSU., IV (1955), 142-6.

4   Schmidt, H., Cucuteni in der oberen Moldau (Berlin, 1932).

6 Vulpe, ESA., XI (1937). I34-46-

6   St. s. Cere., V (1954), 36-54.

7   Passek, La Cdramique tripolienne (GAIMK., Leningrad, 1935).

8   Bibikov, Ranne-tripolskoe poselenie Luka-Vrublevetska, MIA., XXXVIII (1953).

8 Hancar, Das Pferd, 65 if; KS., LI (1953), 53.

I36
 THE PEASANTS OF THE BLACK EARTH

a substantial contribution; hooks of copper or bone are found even on
phase A sites, while along the Dniestr remains of fish over 1*5 m. long
have been reported. Net-fishing may be inferred from clay sinkers.
Finally, the collection of shell-fish and berries added substantially to
the food-supply.

The settlements are normally located on spurs of loss, protected on
three sides by ravines. At the time of their occupation the plateaux
were moister than to-day, liable to swamping, covered with damp
woods and inhabited by tortoises, otters, and water-rats.1 Most
sites were probably defended by ditch and rampart. Those at Ariusd2
on the Oltu (phase Bi) enclosed ij acres that would accommodate
at most 21 houses arranged in three rows. Haba^esti on the Seret3
comprised perhaps 44 dwellings, while as many as 150, mostly B2,
are reported from Vladimirovka. Normal villages of phases B2 and
C consisted of 30 to 42 houses usually arranged radially on the
circumferences of one or more concentric circles 200 m. to 500 m. in
diameter.

Only alleged pit-dwellings of phase A have been described; the
houses of later phases are represented by the celebrated ploUadki,
areas of baked clay resulting from the burning and collapse of walls
and floors. The walls of wattle and daub heavily plastered with clay
and straw were supported by earth-fast posts at Ariufd in phase Bi;
their sockets define houses measuring 8*25 by 5-4 m. and divided into
two rooms by a partition. Ovens were found in both rooms, a hearth
in the outer one. In plan and internal arrangements these houses are
identical with those of Rossen and contemporary settlements round
the Alps (Fig. 137), and assumed for period II along the Middle Danube.
In phases B2 and C, posts planted in sleeper beams seem to have served
to support only a skeleton frame and the roof-tree, the walls being
built of compacted earth—kerpitsh. In most villages a few houses
were small and one-roomed, 7 by 4 m. in area and containing only
a single oven. The average house measured about 14 by 5*5 m. and
contained two to four ovens. The largest house recorded measured
27 by 6*5 m. and was divided into five rooms, four furnished with one
oven each, the fifth with two. The most puzzling features in many
houses are the hard-baked and well-smoothed clay floors on which
ovens, querns, and vases stood and on the undersides of which imprints
of close-set timbers are preserved.4

1   Pidopliika in Passek, note 1, 146.

2   Childe, Danube, 98-104.

3   Hdb&sesti, Monografie Arheologica (Acad. Repub. Pop. Romine, Bucuresti, 1954).

* KriCevskil, "Tripolskie Ploscadki”, SA., VI (1940), argued that the floors were
baked by fires kindled upon them before the house was roofed over.

137

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 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

The large ovens, 2 m. or more square, were made of clay on a frame-
work of saplings. In addition, some rooms were furnished with raised
benches of baked clay, and—at least in phase B2 on the Bug—also

with cruciform pediments ornamented on their surfaces with engraved
lines or with paint. Russian archaeologists agree that these last were
offering-places. Six or seven fragmentary models illustrate the interior
of a Tripolye house, showing the porch, the oven, the cruciform pedi-
ment, the jars of grain, and the quern just as excavators have found
them (Fig. 73). All these models stand on legs and so suggest that

138
 THE PEASANTS OF THE BLACK EARTH

Tripolye houses were really raised on piles. That would be quite
reasonable as the sites were liable to swamping; it would at once
explain the burning of the clay floors and of the wooden beams under
them. But there is no excavational evidence for this very plausible
hypothesis. Russian excavators frequently refer also to half-subter-
ranean dwellings or zemlianki, but the plans look almost as dubious
as those of Danubian “pit-dwellings".

Kricevskii believed that the large houses with three or more rooms
resulted from the enlargement of one-roomed houses to accommodate
married children of the latters’ builders. The enlarged family would
keep together, as in the recent Slav zadruga. If so, the sites in question
must have been occupied for at least two generations.

Tripolye farmers were generally content to use local materials for
their equipment which consequently looks purely neolithic. Adzes
were made of local stone, often rather soft, but axe-hammers or even
simple battle-axes were perforated with a hollow borer, and mattocks
or adzes were made from bored antlers (Fig. 75, 15). Weapons are not
common. Triangular flint arrow-heads occur sporadically from phase
Bi at least. A knob bed mace like one from Danubian III is reported
from a B2 site near Kiev,1 while model battle-axes—surely warriors’
weapons—were made at Ariusd and Haba^esti in phase Bi.

Trade secured farmers even at Petreny on the middle Dniestr
obsidian from west of the Carpathians by phase B2. Copper too was
similarly obtained from the very first, but in phase A2 was employed
only for fish-hooks, rings, bangles, and beads; one fragment analysed
contained 30 per cent of zinc, so native copper at least is excluded. In
phase Bi copper was used occasionally for making flat adzes, while
a B2 site yielded a copper pick-axe, allied to the Transylvanian axe-
adzes of Danubian III. Phase C is certainly contemporary with the
frankly Bronze Age Usatova culture (p. 145), but even in Bi a knot-
headed pin is reported from Sabatinovka on the Bug.3 It may be
evidence for Asiatic inspiration of the school of metallurgy that grew
up west of the Black Sea, but it could just as well be derived from the
Perjamos and Unetician cultures in the Danube valley. In that case
phase Bi of Tripolye would fall already into Danubian IV.

The products of Tripolye potters have been celebrated in archaeo-
logical literature for nearly a century. In every village local potters
made vases of sophisticated forms and substantial dimensions and

1   F. Vovk in Antropologiya, 1927 (Kiev, 1928), 20-5, pi. Ill, 9.

2   See p. 137, n. 3.

3   Arkheolog. Pamat. Ukrain. S.S.R., IV (Kiev, 1952), 78-83; a clay copy of a Scythian
cauldron, allegedly from the same horizon, prompts doubts as to the reliability of the
excavation report.

139
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

fired them in kilns to a hard red or orange ware. A model vertical kiln
and remains of an actual one stacked with vases were found at Ariusd1
(Fig. 74), perforated clay grills from Habasesti2 may have served to
separate the firing chamber from the hearth. Yet housewives most
probably made at home the pots required for domestic use instead of
purchasing them from a full-time specialist potter; for stocks of pre-

9   JO   HA

? ? ?

Fig. 74. Potters' oven and model, Ariu§d (Exosd), After Laszld.

pared clay were discovered in some houses and instruments for decor-
ating vases in many. Actually two wares are found on most Tripolye
sites—a coarse ware tempered with shell and a finer fabric with chaff
or sand temper. The former, not reported from phase A sites, is orna-
mented with a comb, impressed into, or drawn over, the wet clay;
its affinities lie with the products of surviving hunter-fisher societies
in the boreal forest zone of North-Eastern Europe.

The finer wares, red or orange in hue, were richly decorated. In all
phases the patterns might be outlined with deep channelled grooves
supplemented with dots and, in phases A and Bi, filled with rouletted
lines; the curved stamps of antler, bone, or shell used to produce such
lines have been found on several sites3 (Fig, 75, Bi, 12). Broad flutings
were sometimes employed with, or instead of, grooves in phase A and
especially in Bi.4 Exceptionally these devices were enriched by incrusta-
tions in ochre or with lines of white paint applied before firing to the
red ground in phase A. The most familiar decoration in phases B and

1   See p. 137, n. 2.

2   Page 137, n. 3, pp. 189 ft., fig. 9.

3   At Luka-Vrublevetska (p. 136, n. ; Ariusd; Sabatinovka, etc.

4   Especially atTraian on the Seret, Dacia, IX-X (1941-44), ix ff.

140
 THE PEASANTS OF THE BLACK EARTH

Fig. 75. Tripolye types (after Passek).

B I: Polychrome pottery (T\) and ladle, figurine, clay cone, and stamp (J), comb for
decorating pottery, stone adze, antler pick.

B II: 1 (^7), 3, 7 grooved, 5-6 painted ware PyaniSkovo; Yladimirovka.

C I: 1-3 Popodnia; 6-8 (y^), Staraya Buda.
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

C was, however, painted'—in white or red (mainly in Bi), outlined
with black on red, or red outlined in black on a white slip. Warm
black, sometimes supplemented by thin lines in red, on buff or orange
was the favourite style in phases B2 and C. In phase A running spirals,
used as a repetition pattern, formed the basis of the decoration, but
they gave place to closed S spirals in phase Bi. In the sequel these
dissolved into circles and the old all-over composition gave place to a
tectonic arrangement emphasizing the vase’s articulation.

From the first the vase forms are highly sophisticated and too
varied even for enumeration. Tubular stands (Fig. 75, Bi, 2) are con-
fined to phases A and Bi. Fruitstands (Fig. 75, Bi, 1) were most popular
in phase Bi and in that phase alone are accompanied by jars on profiled
and perforated pedestals. “Binocular vases” (Fig. 75, Bn, 7) were char-
acteristic at all periods. Vases in the form of animals, usually bulls,
or anthropomorphic, may rank as ritual vessels, but a “bird vase” of
phase A1 could just as well be regarded as an askos.

In the light of the total excavation of Kolomishchina Tripolye society
would seem to have been as democratic and equalitarian as the Dan-
ubian of Koln-Lindental, since the size of the houses was determined
by the number of families inhabiting them jointly. But at Fedele^eni,
a Moldavian village of stage Bi, Nestor2 mentions that one house was
more richly furnished than the rest and contained a stone animal
sceptre-head (Fig. 76) as if it had belonged to a chief. Moreover, the
mace-head from Veremye might be interpreted as a symbol of authority.

The ideology of the Tripolye farmers was as “Asiatic” as that of their y
Balkan and Danubian II contemporaries. In addition to the cruciform
“altars”, many houses were littered with clay figurines and models.
.The former, predominantly female, in phases A and Bi were steato-
pygous, and in phase Bi richly ornamented with incised spirals (Fig.

75, Bi, 10), though fiddle-shaped types like Fig. 8, 2 were also common
at Habasesti.3 In phase B2 the figurines are flat, often perforated for
suspension and painted (Fig. 75, Bn, 13; C, . Males are represented^
sporadically even in phase A, phalli4 too in phase Bi. Clay stamps
occur only in phase Bi and are confined to sites between the Oltu
and the Prut—Ariu^d, Cucuteni, Haba^ti, and Ruginoasa; one bears
a filled cross design, the rest spirals (Fig. 76).

As ornaments, besides copper and very rare gold trinkets, clay beads,
some star-shaped, were worn at all periods. Copper beads and bored
deers’ teeth seem confined to phases A and Bi, to which belong also

1   MIA., XXXVIII, p. 338, tab. 46.

2   BRGK., XXII, 45 and 51, n. 80.

3   Page 137, n. 3, 414.

4   Page 137, n. 4, 468.

142
 THE PEASANTS OF THE BLACK EARTH

laminae from boars’ tusks perforated at the four corners. Clay cones,
common in phase Bi (Fig. 75, may have been gamesmen, though
one is surmounted by a rough human head.

The position of the Tripolye phases in the Balkan sequence is fairly!
clear. On the Seret, phase A is preceded by Boian, while a brokeir
binocular vase was found as an import in the earliest Gumelnita level
at Vidra (p. 98). At Verbicoara in Wallachia, polychrome sherds,
attributed to phase Bi, were found in the Salcu|:a layer, while the

Fig. 76. Stone sceptre-head, Fedele^eni and clay stamp, Ariu§d.

sceptre-head from Fedelefeni is paralleled at Salcufa itself. On the
Upper Oltu, remains of the Ariu^d, Bi, version of Tripolye are super-
imposed on early Boian strata. On the Dniestr at Nezviska, the
settlement with early Bi pottery overlies the late Danubian I village
(p. no), but at Traian, Danubian I sherds are reported from a Tripolye
A layer.1 Hence, while phase A may overlap with Boian in Balkan II,
most of phases A and B must be parallel with Gumelnita and Salcu^a
in Balkan III.

Links with the Danubian sequence are more ambiguous. The clay
stamp-seals might be used as a basis for synchronizing phase Bi with
Danubian II, and so might the Ariusd figurines that, as in Moravia,
were modelled in two parts separately and then stuck together. On
the other hand, the relative abundance of metal, the battle-axes, repre-
sented by models, a bossed copper disc from Habafe^ti2 would all be

1   St. s. Qerc. (1954), V, 36.

2   Page 136, n. 6, 436; the disc is very like that from the Danubian III grave at BrzeSd
Kujawski, p. 123 above.

143
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

more appropriate to Danubian III. So the jars on high profiled pedestals
of phase Bi have their closest analogies in the transitional Tiszapolgar
pottery that is likewise Danubian III, while at Marosvasarhely poly-
chrome Bi and decorated Bodrogkeresztur pottery seem to have been
associated. An even lower limit in terms of the Danubian sequence
would be given by the one possible import found in a Tripolye settle-
ment: the knot-headed pin from Sabatinovka, if imported from
Bohemia or Hungary, would mean that Tripolye Bi did not end
before Danubian IV began. But of course the pin might have come
from Asia. That Tripolye C lasts into and perhaps beyond Danubian IV
is nearly certain.1 Here Tripolye has been assigned to periods II, III,
and IV, but perhaps its several phases should each be set a period later.

In its economy, as in its art, the Tripolye culture is so fundamentally
Danubian that one might speak of a Dniestro-Danubian cycle of
cultures. The Danubian element can be most economically derived
from the colonists established at Nezviska and elsewhere in pre-
Tripolian times. But they had been preceded by earlier Starcevo
settlers, if not by the hypothetical hunter-fishers who might have
remained in occupation of the region since the Ice Age (p. 88). Indeed,
the latter now become almost tangible in the coarse ware found on all
Tripolye sites and related to that of the more boreal hunter-fisher
tribes of the Eurasiatic taiga. It is now no longer necessary to look
to Central Asia to account for the painted Tripolye vases, since the
Starcevo pioneers painted their vases and must have possessed the
vertical kilns requisite for producing light-faced wares.

The Tripolye ideology and the elaborate ritual paraphernalia that
expressed it were of course shared by the Tripolye farmers with their
cultural antecedents in South-West Asia, but equally with neighbour-
ing Gumelnijia, Vinca, and Danubian II societies; it could have reached
the Tripolye province thence, if not earlier with the Starcevo colonists."

The Beginnings of Metallurgy on the West Pontic Coasts

By Tripolye phase C, and probably earlier, there had arisen on the
steppes bordering the Black Sea a local metal industry serving stratified
societies, best represented in the Usatova culture,2 so named after a
village and cemeteries near Odessa. Warlike chiefs, leaders of a pastoral
aristocracy, were enabled to exercise an effective demand for metal
armaments by concentrating the surplus wealth produced by their
pastoral followers and by their Tripolye subjects.

1 Sulimirski, PPS., XVI (1950), 45-52.

8 Full summary by Passek in MIA., X, 190-200.

I44

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 THE PEASANTS OF THE BLACK EARTH

The new pastoral aspect of the economy is disclosed by the very
numerous animal bones from the village and the prominence among
them of sheep and horses, now surely domesticated; the percentages
are : 37*8 sheep, 31 cows, 15-5 horses, only 2-2 pigs. Game accounts for
only 28*4 per cent of the total.1

The rulers were buried under barrows which form two cemeteries
near the village. A chief2 was interred contracted on one side or on
his back in a central shaft grave encircled by a ring of slabs on edge.
Under one barrow a slab in the kerb had been engraved with very
rough representations of a man, a stag, and perhaps a horse.3 Before
the barrow was heaped, one or two slaves or dependents would be
slain and interred in accessory graves. Bones of animals and statuettes,
too, were buried in separate pits.

Contrasted with these almost royal tombs are the flat graves belong-
ing presumably to the cultivators. These are shallow pits, each covered
by a flat slab and containing a single contracted skeleton. That these
cultivators were an off-shoot from Tripolye communities may be
inferred from survivals of the Tripolye ideology and ceramic art.
Figurines were still made in clay though stylized almost beyond
recognition (Fig. 77, 6-8).

In the village and both under the barrows and in flat graves well-
fired vases, painted and fashioned in the Tripolye technique, occur
side by side with coarser vessels ornamented with cord impressions.
The designs on the painted pots can be regarded as degenerations of
the good spiral ornament of Tripolye A and Bi, and some old Tripolye
forms are reproduced. The cord-ornamented pottery must represent
the new pastoral element; some of the jars could be regarded as degen-
erations of Thuringian amphorae (Fig. 77,1, 3), but the impressed cord
designs are more elaborate than any from North or Central Europe
and include the imprints of crocheted necklaces, maggot patterns, and
horse-shoe loops.4

Trade brought amber, presumably from the Baltic, antimonite
allegedly from Turkey, and substantial supplies of copper. The metal
was cast into characteristic local types. The most distinctive is a kite-
shaped riveted dagger with a midrib on one face only (Fig. 77, 4), but
flat axes and quadrangular awls were also made. The shaft-hole axe
from Cucuteni may also be a product of Usatova industry, since a
typical dagger comes from the site. Small spiral rings of copper or

1   SA., V, 258; Naukove Zapiski IIMK., II (TJkrain. Akad. Nauk, Kiev, 1937),
n6.

2   For these barrows see also SA., V (1940), 240-56.

3   Figured in Mongait, Arkheologiya v SSSJR. (Moskva, 1955), 109.

4   Rosenberg, Kulturstromungen in Europa zur Steinzeit (Copenhagen).

K   145
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

silver were worn as well as necklaces of bored deers’ teeth. The stone
industry is comparatively poor. A perforated antler axe had been
buried with one of the chiefs and so must rank as a battle-axe, as in
the Danubian III graves of Brzesc-Kujawsld.

Fig. 77. Usatova types.

{Top) Usatova Barrows: 1-2, cord-ornamented and painted vases (£); 3-5, copper objects
(!) barrow I; 6-10, figurine (£), painted pot ($), copper spirals, bored wolfs teeth (i)
barrow II.

{Below) 3-7, cord-ornamented and painted pots (£), clay figurine (J) from other barrows;
8 figurine from Usatova settlement (after Passek).

146
 THE PEASANTS OF THE BLACK EARTH

Ustatova ceramic and metal types occur in a number of barrow
graves on the steppes between the Tripolye province and the Black
Sea and in a few marginal Tripolye villages.1 The first two villages at
the fortified site of Mikhailovka2 on a tributary of the Lower Dniepr
may well have been occupied by a kindred society, again predomin-
antly pastoral. Metal was certainly worked here too, but no distinctively
Usatova types have been published in 1956.

Kricevskii3 and Passek treated the Usatova culture as the final
result of the conversion of the Tripolye economy to pastoralism.
Briusov,4 however, could easily show that Usatova represented a
distinct culture not later than Tripolye B2 or at least C. A Tripolye
component is indeed obvious enough. The origin of the pastoral
element will be considered in Chapter IX. What of the metal industry?

The distribution of the distinctive. metal types leaves little doubt
that the raw material reached the Black Sea coasts by sea. If that
means that the knowledge of metal-working was introduced by pro-
spectors from the ^Egean or Asia Minor, it cannot be claimed that their
local products reproduced any specific southern models. The technique
of casting midrib daggers in a one-piece mould is a barbarism quite
foreign to any of the advanced schools of metallurgy and paralleled
only in the Iberian peninsula and South France. Usatova metal types
give no clue as to the origin of their makers nor as to the absolute
date of the Usatova culture. Relatively it might be assigned to period
IV or a late phase of period III in the Balkan sequence. In the Danubian
sequence it should occupy a similar position. Usatova must surely
be earlier than period V, since Hungarian bronzes of that phase are
quite common in the province.5 A little support for an equation with
Danubian IV might be derived from the kite-shaped daggers of the
East Polish and Slovakian Tomaszow culture6; at least in plan they
recall the Usatova type and they are associated with segmented fayence
beads. Still the latter might be correlated with the amber beads from
Troy II and Usatova as indicative of a trade in metals and Sammland
amber in the Illrd., millennium.

1   Passek, loc. cit.; Avkheolosiya, VIII (Kiev, 1953), 95-107.

2   KSU., IV (1955). 119-23; V, 13-17-

3   MIA., II (1941), 251-3.

4   05erki, 240 ff. Note distribution map on p. 234.

5   Tallgren, ESA., II.

6   Kostrzewski, J., Prehistoria Ziem Polskich (Krakow, 1939-48), pi. LXII, 18.

I47
 CHAPTER IX

CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER THE EURASIAN PLAIN?

Last century anthropologists regarded the Eurasiatic plain as a
corridor through which Asiatic hordes, precursors of the Huns and the
Tartars, swept neolithic culture to Western Europe. Their guess is
hardly confirmed by the evidence of the spade. But of course con-
firmatory evidence would be hard to obtain; predominantly pastoral
and ex hyfiothesi mobile communities need leave no durable equipment
that archaeologists could recognize, and certainly would leave no
stratified tells in their wake. Stock-breeding is indeed not attested
earlier near the eastern than near the western extremities of the plain,
but only in the sense that no geological nor pollen dates are available
in the former area while the culture sequence as distinguished in 1956
seems less varied, and therefore shorter, than farther west. No doubt
in the wide chilly forest zone a “palaeolithic” economy based on collect-
ing, hunting, and fishing along the shores of meres and rivers persisted
long, albeit made increasingly sedentary by the emphasis on fishing.
Farther south, in the wide belt of parkland and the steppe zone border-
ing the Black Sea, collections of flint tools may indicate a continuity
of settlement from late pleistocene times. Chopping tools, sharpened
by a tranchet blow (p. 9), are reported from the parklands of Vol-
hynia, Podolia, and the Ukraine.1 Only in a few stratified caves in
Crimea1 2 can even the relative antiquity of the archaic flints be deter-
mined, and even there, though microliths are associated with pots
with pointed bases3 no very high antiquity need be assigned to them
since geometric microliths may survive quite late.

Still less can such collections be cited as documenting precocious
animal husbandry, since no bones survive on sandhill sites. The flints
collected from dunes between Lake Aral and the Oder may have been
left by ancestors of the herdsmen who reached Denmark in Atlantic
times, but there is not a scrap of evidence that they were.

On the fringe of the vast loss lands, colonized by primary neolithic
Danubian, Starcevo and Tripolye peasants, there did indeed emerge
communities of herdsmen, known almost exclusively from graves. Do

1   Briusov, Oierhi, 181-203.

2   Antropologiya, II (Kiev, 1928), 190-1.

3   KS., XXXI (1950), 110-16; SA., V (1940), 97-100; cf. Gerasimov, Litsa, 263-5.

148
 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?

these represent pastoral tribes separated out from the more agricultural
Dniestro-Danubian societies? Or are they local mesolithic communities
converted by their neighbours’ example to food-production? Or,
finally, are they immigrants from the steppes farther south and east?
There, too, are barrow graves of a peculiar kind, the so-called ochre
graves.

The Ochre Grave Cultures of the Pontic Steppes

The true steppe zone extends from the Dobrudja and the wooded
outposts of the Carpathians round the Black Sea coasts to the Caucasus
and beyond the Volga to the Altai. The steppes are covered with
barrows of all periods down to the late Middle Ages. The prehistoric
ones, generally small, cluster in little cemeteries, presumably marking
some sort of tribal territory, and most cover many successive inter-
ments. On the strength of his excavations between the Donets and the
Don, Gorodtsov defined three main stages on periods distinguished
primarily by tomb types—first shaft graves (yamy), next pit-caves
(“catacombs”) and finally wooden cists (sruby). Hence the archaeo-
logical record in South Russia has been divided into yamno, catacomb,
and srubno periods, and this terminology is retained even though
it is now established that catacomb graves are confined to the Black
Sea coasts and the valleys of the Donetz, the Don, and the Manyc,
and define a culture rather than a period of time. On the slopes of the
metalliferous Caucasus, however, some barrows are so rich that a
finer typological division into five periods has been established by
Yessen.1 His phases I and II correspond roughly to the old Early
Kuban2 and more roughly to Gorodtsov’s yamno stage,3 while his
group III may equal Middle Kuban and catacomb. But these burials
under round barrows are not the earliest. Just as the funerary record
in Britain begins with collective burial under long barrows, so in South
Russia it begins with multiple burials in long trenches or under long
mounds.

In all these graves the skeletons he extended, usually covered with
red ochre and arranged in groups. At Vovnigi4, near Dniepropetrovsk,
130 skeletons in three layers were lying side by side under a sandhill.
At Mariupol on the Sea of Azov5 120 adults and six children had been

1 SA., XII (1950), 157-85.   2 ESA., IV, 1-19.

3   Degen-Kovalevskii (ITS., II (1939), 14-16) and Artamonov {SA., X (1948), 161-81)
proposed much later dates for the Early Kuban barrows.

4   KSU., TV (1955). 147-9; cf. Arkheologiya, V (Kiev, 1951), 163, for a similar burial
farther down the Dniepr, and Gerasimov, Litsa, 260-80, for others; the skulls are
‘ ‘ Cromagnonoid’ ’.

6 Makarenko, Mariupilski Mogilnik (Kiev, Vse-Ukrainska Akad. Nauk, 1933);
Stolyar (SA., XXIII, 16) distributes the burials over four successive phases.

I49
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

buried in groups across one long trench filled with red earth. At Nalcik1
a low irregular mound covered 130 contracted skeletons, again buried
in groups and covered with red pigment. Such numbers exceed those
recorded from any mesolithic cemetery of food-gatherers so that the
denial of neolithic status may be unjustified. Actually flint celts with
polished blades were found at Mariupol together with stone beads and
bracelets and a variety of ornaments carved out of wild beasts’ teeth
and boars' tusks. Two skeletons were accompanied by knobbed mace-
heads (cf. Fig. 65), interpreted as emblems of chieftainship. A female
figurine of stone lay in one grave at Nalcik, and pottery in others.
However these communities got their food, they were not economically
isolated. A pendant of porphyry imported from the Urals occurred at
Mariupol; a copper lock-ring and beads of “vitreous paste” and car-
nelian at Nalcik. The last-named ornaments are explicitly results of
connection with Oriental civilization, and even the knobbed maces
from Mariupol may be thus interpreted, since the type was common
in Mesopotamia from Early Dynastic times.

The burials just described recall most strikingly those of mesolithic
Natufians in the Wad cave on Mount Carmel, but agree in several
points also with those of neolithic hunter-fishers on Gotland and on
Olenii Island in Lake Onega. They are not for these reasons neces-
sarily earlier than the single burials, sometimes accompanied by metal
objects, under the commoner round barrows. Indeed, knobbed mace-
heads farther west are Danubian III or Balkan III (pp. 122). On the
other hand, microliths are found in Early Kuban barrows.

The earliest food-producers detectable on the steppes in South Russia
are those buried under round barrows in the yamno graves. In these,
remains of domestic animals—only sheep have been recorded—are
exceptional, while bones of game, flint arrow-heads, and bone harpoons
do attest hunting and fishing. Finds from domestic sites,2 however,
prove that cows, sheep, goats, and probably horses and pigs were bred
and millet cultivated. The stock-breeders were interred, thickly sprinkled
with red ochre, lying on a bier or bed of rushes on the back with the
legs drawn up or more rarely extended, sometimes in a tent-shaped
mortuary house,3 at the bottom of the shaft, which was roofed with birch
poles resting on ledges in the sides (as in the Shaft Graves of Mycenae).4
In the Ukraine, rudely anthropomorphic stelae covered some graves.5

1   MIA., Ill (1940), 69 fi.

2   Near Nalcik, MIA., Ill (1940), 192; Mikhajlovka on the Lower Dniepr, KSU., IV
(1955), 119-22.

2   IGAIMK., 100 (1933), 105.

* Rau, Hockergraber der Wolgasteppe (Marxstadt, 1928); SAIV (1937), 93 ff.;
MIA., XLVI, 12 if.

2 KSU., I (1952), 21; V (1955), 75-8.

150
 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?

In no grave does much furniture survive—at best a pot, some hunting
or fishing tackle, necklaces of bored teeth and—only in the latest
graves—a hammer-headed pin of bone (Fig. 78, 5-6) .*? The pot, if
present, is an ovoid beaker, often plain, sometimes decorated with
pits below the inturned rim or even with cord impressions2 (Fig. 79, 4).

Fig. 78. Copper battle-axe, Vozdvizhenskaya (J), copper beads (?§?), copper
spear-head (?$?), copper and bone hammer-pins (£).

A lucky chance has revealed dramatically how unreliable negative
conclusions, based on the inevitable deficiencies of the archaeological
record, may be. Under a large barrow of the period, “Storozhevaya”,
near Dnepropetrovsk3 an exceptional conjuncture has preserved
remains of a wooden cart with two solid wheels, 48 cm. in diameter,
that served as a hearse. It demonstrates at once that wheeled vehicles
were used by the steppe folk, that these had not only domesticated
but also harnessed oxen—or conceivably horses—and that they
recognized chiefs who enjoyed the privileges of Sumerian kings.

On the slopes of the Caucasus such chiefs secured more substantial
emblems and instruments of authority. A celebrated barrow near
Maikop4 is representative of the eleven rich “royal burials” that con-
stitute Yessen’s group I. The tomb was a tripartite wooden chamber
in a deep shaft enciicled by a ring of boulders. A prince had been
buried in the main chamber under a canopy adorned with gold and
silver lions and bulls. A male and a female corpse occupied the remain-

1   Though found in graves that are typologically “yamno”, most common from
“catacombs”.

2   Found from the Dniepr to as far east as Stalingrad.

3   KS., XXXVII (1951), 117; Arkheologiya, V (Kiev, 1951), 183-8.

1 Haniar, 248,

151

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 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

ing compartments, less richly furnished, but all the bodies were covered
with red ochre. The royal weapons (Fig. 8o) include a transverse axe,
certainly, and a straight axe together with an axe-adze1 that looks like a
combination of the other two, but also rhomboid arrow-heads of flint
and microlithic lunates of mesolithic ancestry. A gold flask with a
silver ring round the neck, jars of silver and of stone, and imitations
in reduced grey pottery are certainly Asiatic. Beads of turquoise and

4   5

Fig. 79. Vases: 1, from Catacomb grave, Donetz (J); 2-3, from pit-graves, Yatskovice, near
Kiev (•$?); 4, from yamno grave Donetz basin (£); 5, B funnel beaker from Denmark (£).

lapis lazuli had been imported from Iran, meerschaum1 2 from Anatolia.
Two silver vases are engraved with local mountain scenes and a pro-
cession of animals—two kinds of ox, a mouflon, a tame boar, Prze-
walski’s horse, and a panther.

Yessen's second and rather less homogeneous chronological division
within the Early Kuban period is represented by the furniture of the
tombs in two huge cairns at Novosvobodnaya (generally but incor-
rectly termed Tsarevskaya).3 Both were megalithic cists divided into
two compartments by porthole slabs (Fig. 81, 1). Cist II measured

1   LAAA., XXIII (1936), 114-15.

2   Yessen, TGAIMK., 120, 81.

152

3 Hanfiar, 244.
 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?

internally i*8o m.+ i-i5 m. by i*6o m. by 1-20 m., and was surrounded
by a ring of orthostats over a metre high. The princely dead, one
wearing a linen garment, dyed red and purple, a cloak of earners wool

Fig. 8o. Transverse axe, axe-adze, knife, and gold and silver vases (J),
carnelian bead and flint arrow-heads (p, from Maikop barrow.
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

covered with a black hide and profusely sprinkled with red ochre,
were provided with shaft-hole axes, bidents, spear-heads, cauldrons,
ladles, wands, and drill bits of copper, together with flint arrow-heads
and globular clay vases (Fig. 82). The spear-head is directly derived
from an Early Sumerian type and the bident and gouge have an equally
Early Sumerian pedigree, but exact parallels to them and to the ladles,
perhaps also to the wand, can be cited from Hissar III1 in Northern
Iran. The pottery, on the contrary, undoubtedly resembles the Central
Russian Fatyanovo ware and the Globular Amphorae of Central
Europe (pp. 170,194).

A dozen other burials are assigned to this second phase of the Early
Kuban period and enlarge the repertory of types attributable to it.
They include battle-axes2 both in copper (Fig. 78, 1) and stone and
probably a clay model of a covered cart3; the latter, if really Early
Kuban, demonstrates the use of wheeled vehicles and ox traction on
the slopes of the Caucasus as on the steppes.

Yessen4 insists that none of the metal ware from any Early Kuban
tomb is a local North Caucasian product; all are imports or loot from
more advanced regions south of the range. By the Middle Kuban
period resident or itinerant smiths were producing local types of tools,
weapons, and ornaments, and Oriental imports have disappeared.

The North Caucasian smiths manufactured flat axes, chisels5 with
an incomplete socket, made by folding the butt end round a mandril,
flat daggers the tang of which expands for the pommel,6 shaft-hole
axes with a drooping shaft-hole and long narrow body, and ornaments—
including elaborate versions of the hammer-pin (Fig. 78, 4)—on which
filigree work has been ingeniously imitated by cire perdue casting.
Most of these types recur farther north in the catacomb and con-
temporary shaft graves. Their extension suggests that the rich copper
resources of the Urals were now being exploited. Querns, pestles, flint
sickle-teeth,7 and animal bones attest a regular farming economy to
support the metal-workers and the chiefs.

On the Caucasian foothills, south of the Kuban and the Terek, the
Middle Kuban graves are more varied and more numerous than the
Early Kuban. None are so obviously “royal” as those described above,
but many must belong to small chiefs. The catacomb graves that define
a contemporary local culture extending from near Odessa to the valleys

1   MusJ., XXIII (1933), pis. CXIX, CXX.

2   Hanfiar, 253; Letniskoe, Yessen, SA., XII.

3   : I , loc. cit.

4   “Iz Istoril drevnei Metallurgiya Kavkaza”, IGAIMK., 120 (1935).

5   IGAIMK., 120, 99.

6   SA., XII, Plate, Col. Ill, 3; Rau, Hochergraber, pi. Ill, 3.

7   Hooked metal sickles were being made in Yessen’s phase IV.

154
 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?

Fig. 82. Pottery ($), weapons and tools (£), and pins (i) from tomb at
Novosvobodnaya.

155

VZeaM#
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

of the Donets, Don, Manyc, and Upper Kuban-Terek and just into
Daghestan (Fig. 81, 2) are really pit-caves under barrows. Most contain
only a single corpse, but some served as family tombs housing as many
as seven persons. There is explicit evidence of one or even two females
having been slain to accompany their lords.1 Round-headed persons
now appear and these perhaps practised annular deformation of the
skull.1 2

Additions to armaments peculiar to the catacomb graves are heeled
battle-axes,3 like Fig. 35, arrow-shaft straighteners, and sling bullets.
The pottery, distinctive of the period, is represented by flat-bottomed
vases profusely decorated with the imprints of cords, whipped or
braided cords, and shells sometimes forming spiral patterns (Fig. 79, i).4
Peculiar to the Manyc and Kuban-Terek group of catacomb graves are
cruciform-footed lamps—shallow saucers, divided into two unequal
compartments and standing on four solid and united feet. They are
richly decorated in the style of the period.

Other characteristic pots and catacomb types recur in shaft graves
in several regions. On the Lower Volga, one grave probably of this
period under a very large barrow contained no less than three carts
with tripartite disc wheels, while a clay model of a covered cart lay
in an “offering place" above the shaft mouth.5

The catacomb type of tomb and its distribution suggest Aegean
inspiration. Cranial deformation had been practised in Cyprus from
neolithic times.6 A few beads of “paste”, presumably fayence, reported
from catacomb tombs and copper imitations of winged beads (Fig. 78,2)
might be derived from the same quarter. A hoard of metal objects from
Cetkovo near the mouth of the Dniepr,7 probably assignable to this
period, comprises double-axes, presumably of Minoan or Helladic
manufacture. Conversely, the unfinished battle-axe from the Early
Macednic site of H. Mamas (p. 68) belongs to a distinctively South
Russian family first appearing in the catacomb phase. On the other
hand, the cross-footed lamps are absurdly like Starcevo forms from
Moldavia and Hungary (Fig. 46) and still more the later Vucedol type.
Moreover, the “pit-caves” of the Vucedo culture at Vucedol are rather
like catacomb graves.

1   Artsikovskii, Osnovy Arkheologii (1954), 75-

a SA.j IV, 122; XI (1949), 327; KS., VIII, 86; cf. Dingwall, Artificial Cranial De-
formation.

3   ESA., VIII, 61; in Cis-Caucasia Yessen attributes these to phase IV.

4   Popova, SA„ XXII (1955), 20-60 distinguishes six local varieties, some not repre-
sented in catacomb tombs at all.

5   SA., X (i948), 147-56.

6   Angell in Dikaios, Khirohitia (London, 1953).

7   ESA., II (1932).

156
 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?

But if the chiefs of the pastoral clans were imitating the fashions of
TEgean colonists on the Black Sea coasts, nothing of precise dating
value has come from their tombs. The battle-axe from H. Mamas
alone could be invoked to justify a partial synchronism between the
Middle Kuban-Catacomb period and the Early iEgean.

The actual Oriental imports in the Early Kuban tombs are not
incompatible with such a dating, but are all too long-lived to confirm
it. The transverse axe from Maikop is a type of undoubtedly Meso-
potamian origin, but was current from 3000 B.c. for nearly two mil-
lennia.1 The type was being cast in clay moulds at Shah Tepe in Trans-
caspia,1 2 3 while axe-adzes of the Maikop variant were being similarly
manufactured in the contemporary settlement of Hissar III.® The
grey ware from Maikop likewise recalls Iranian fabrics of the Hissar III
phase. There too the ladles, bidents, and drill-bit from Novosvobodnaya
can be paralleled,4 but just as well in the Early Sumerian metal-work
of Ur. Only the hammer-pins are more illuminating, for the type is
comparatively rare. In Anatolia, gold specimens occur in the Royal
Tombs of Alaca,5 at Ahlatlibel, in Troy Ilf., and in the Middle Helladic
Greece. Moreover, bone hammer-pins have been found in a Danish
passage grave of Northern IIIc and in Central European graves of
Danubian III or IV. In time the Pontic pins should come at least
between the Anatolian and the Central European examples.

Now the rare gold pins from the treasures of Anatolian princes may
well be luxury versions of a Pontic type. If so, their absolute date—
certainly about 2000 b.c.—is a terminus ante quern for the creation
of the type in South Russia. Hammer-pins are not attested before the
Middle Kuban phase in Cis-Caucasia and mark the end of the yamno
period of the steppes. Thus the beginnings of the Ochre Grave culture
should go back well into the third millennium. So too yamno graves in
Eastern Poland had been dug before the dry Sub-Boreal climate had
promoted the formation of black earth.

Only in the light of these chronological considerations can possible
contributions from the Steppe societies to the development of European
culture farther west be evaluated. That they did really transmit ideas
westward is proved by the hammer-pins just mentioned and by the

1   Childe, NLMAE., 159.

2   Arne, Excavations at Shah Tepe (Sino-Swedish Expedition, Pub. 27, Stockholm,
1945). 258.

3   Schmidt, Excavations at Tepe Hissar, 1931-3 (Philadelphia, 1937), *85; actual
axe-adzes of this precise type are known from Uzbekistan (KS., XXXIII, 1950, 152)
and the Indus valley.

* Schmidt, op. cit.

5   Hamit Zubeyr Kosay, Alaca Hoytik Kazisi, 1937-9 (Ankara, 1951), pi. 135, 68-9;
cf. Germania, XXXIII (1955), 240-2, and pp. 44, 183 here.

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 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

animal sceptre-heads from Romania (p. 103); one of these came from
an ochre grave in the Dobrudja1 and there is another from Cis-Caucasia.2
Yet early Central European metallurgy cannot be proved to owe any-
thing to the Caucasian school. To derive the great family of Transyl-
vanian axe-adzes from the single Maikop specimen seems far-fetched.
Nor are the later Hungarian shaft-tube axes obviously related to the
Maikop-Novosvobodnaya type and its Middle Kuban derivatives.
Even at Usatova no types are distinctively Caucasian, and at Mikhail-
ovka metal had been worked in the first settlement perhaps before
makers of yamno pots arrived there in the third.

Wheeled vehicles, horses, and even sheep are in a different category.
Genuine ochre graves under round barrows in Romania, Eastern
Slovakia,3 and Eastern Poland4 do attest infiltrations of herdsmen from
the steppes into the zone of temperate forest. But the position of these
graves in the Danubian sequence is still undetermined. Further west
cord-ornamented pots from barrow-burials5 and globular amphorae
from porthole cists have been claimed at once as indications of a wider
expansion and as proofs that the steppe folk themselves came from
Germany!

For the moment it will suffice to insist that there is no evidence
for an origin in Central Asia. Relations can indeed be traced right to
the Yenesei. There the earliest steppe culture, termed Afanasievo,6
is characterized by ovoid vases resembling those from European
yamno graves; but they seem later, being accompanied by catacomb
types; and they accompany skeletons of Europeoid type. At the same
time the ovoid yamno pots are strikingly like those made by the
hunter-fisher folk of the Eurasian taiga from the Baltic to Lake Baikal.
But these hunter-fishers were mostly Lapponoid, the Steppe herdsmen
Europeoid.

Battle-Axe Cultures

All the cultures that emerge round the fringe of the territories colonized
by Dniestro-Danubian peasants on the wooded North European plain
from the Middle Dniepr to the Lower Rhine exhibit so many common
features that they may be designated by a single name, Battle-axe
cultures. That does not imply that all are branches of a single culture.
By divergences in burial rites, armament, and pottery we may dis-

1   Dacia, VII-VIII (1937-40), 81-91.

2   KS., XLVI (1952). 48-53*

3   Slovenski Dejiny, 64-6.

4   Ksiega Pamietkowa, 141-95; Swiaiowit, XVI (1934-35), 117-34.

6   Shaft graves under barrows without pottery may, however, be earlier even in Saxo-
Thuringia. Festchr. d. Rom-Germ. Zentralmuseums, III (Mainz, 1953). 168.

Kiselev, Drevnaya Istoriya Yuzhnoi Sibiri (Moskva, 1951).

158
 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?

tinguish a number of cultures, of which the most important are:
(i) the Single Grave culture of Jutland with relatives in North-West
Germany and Holland; (2) the Swedish Boat-axe culture with exten-
sions east of the Baltic; (3) the Saxo-Thuringian or ‘'Classical” Corded
Ware culture; (4) the Oder culture; (5) the Middle Dniepr culture;
and (6) the Fatyanovo groups in Central Russia.

All these cultures were based primarily on stock-breeding and hunt-
ing, but always combined with cereal cultivation. In all groups at
least the earliest graves contain a single skeleton1 buried in the con-
tracted position. Timber linings to the grave pit have been observed in
groups 1, 2, 3, and 6. Save in groups 2, 4, and 6, the grave was normally
surmounted by a barrow. Grave goods common to all groups include
stone battle-axes, necklaces of bored teeth, and a pottery drinking-
vessel that may be termed a beaker and that may everywhere be
ornamented with cord-impressions. All the battle-axes in this series
are characterized by drooping blades—that is the blade expands only
downwards in contrast to the symmetrical splay of Baden and poly-
gonal battle-axes. Though each group is distinguished by peculiar
local types, in nearly every area are to be found specimens of a simple
type, like a stone version of Fig. 63, 1, and at least in Jutland these
are stratigraphically, as well as typologically, the oldest.2 Finally,
on all early drooping-bladed battle-axes a longitudinal ridge imitates
the seam of a casting and reinforces the metallic impression given by
the splayed blade though the original model were antler.3

North Sea-Baltic Battle-Axe Cultures

Towards the western extension of the plain between the Vistula and
the Rhine the pastoral societies represented by barrow cemeteries
were juxtaposed to and contrasted with more sedentary farmers.
After such farmers had already reached Denmark, a herding group
who sometimes decorated their funnel-breakers (Fig. 79, 5) with cord
imprints had cleared tracts of Denmark and Southern Sweden for
pasture in Late Atlantic times. They do not seem to have settled
permanently, since forests soon returned and smothered the pastures
they had cleared.4 A second and more drastic clearance by fire was
made in Jutland, and this time no regeneration of forest followed.5
A new wave of herdsmen had colonized Jutland, and their free-grazing

1   Save for occasional sati burials of a male and female.

2   Ayrapaa, ESA., VIII (1933), 5; Glob, Aarb0ger (1944), I8,‘ Forssander, Bootaxt., 56.

3   Childe, ESA., IX (1934), 156-67.

* Troels-Smith, A arboger (1953), p. 178, below.

8 Troels-Smith in Mathiassen, JDyrholmen (1942), 175-6.

159

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 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

stock ate up the young tree seedlings. Archseologically these graziers
are known only by little cemeteries of barrows, and so they are termed
the Single Grave folk.

In Jutland the Single Grave folk1 replaced all remnants of the
Gudenaa hunter-fishers and came to occupy the interior of the peninsula
to the exclusion of the Megalith-builders, but never engaged in that
commerce the results of which allow the several phases of Megalithic
culture to be arranged in the general scheme of prehistoric chronology.
Contact between the two groups was, however, sufficiently frequent to
allow the chronology for the Northern Stone Age, set forth on p. 176,
to be applied also to the Battle-axe cultures. A reliable chronology of
these cultures’ own development can in turn be based upon successive
interments under the same barrow, as on the Pontic steppes.

The oldest graves (Bottom Graves or Undergrave), timber-lined
pits2 dug in virgin soil and designed to hold a single contracted corpse,
contain the finest battle-axes (often very metallic looking) and beakers
with an S profile decorated with cord imprints round the neck (Fig. 83).
Next, in graves on the ground surface (Ground Graves or Bundgrave),
large enough to hold an extended skeleton, the axes deteriorate and
the beakers are decorated with incised herring-bones. Finally, the
Upper Graves (Overgrave) in the body of the mound contain flower-
pot vases decorated with rouletted zig-zags, degenerate axes, and even
flint daggers such as are found in the latest megalithic tombs. They
denote the fusion of the two cultures, with that of the Battle-axe folk
triumphant.

The furniture of the Upper Graves shows that the latest phase of
the Battle-axe culture in Denmark falls into Northern period IV. The
prior development represented by only two or three interments in the
same barrow cannot cover a vast number of years—indeed perhaps
only three generations. But it begins already during Northern Illb or
IIIc.3

In Sweden4 separate graves containing contracted skeletons, but
not surmounted by barrows, are contrasted to the collective tombs
of the agricultural megalith-builders and to the extended burials of
a native food-gathering population. They are furnished at first with
battle-axes, gouges of flint or greenstone, facetted polishing stones,
and shallow beakers decorated round the neck with cord imprints.
The battle-axes (Fig. 83), termed boat-axes, are always provided with

1   Brondsted, Dcmmarks, I, 2x5 ff.; Aarb0ger (1944).

2   Sometimes encircled by an annular ditch, A arbeger (1944), 170.

3   Glob, Aarb0ger (1944), 207, implicitly dates the beginningto M.N.IIb (Ilia), Becker,
Acta. Arch., XXV (1954), i*4> I27> explicitly to M.N.III (IIIc).

4   Forssander, Die schwedische Bootaxtkultur (Lund, 1933).

l6o
 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?

a shaft-tube which gives them a very metallic look. Indeed, a copper
boat-axe was found in East Russia, but the tube might be suggested
by the tine stump through which the shaft-hole of some antler axes

DANMARK•

SVERIGE

UNbtmAVL

JdSDALA-SMDCT

BUNDGMVZ

muim-SKCDCT

Fig. 83. Pottery and battle-axes from the Single Graves of Jutland (left)
and Sweden (right). After Fv, 1922 (tV) •

has been bored. Pottery of this type has been found associated with
that in vogue about the middle of the Passage Grave phase (Northern
IIIc), while later graves containing rouletted vases like the bottom
row in Fig. 83 admittedly belong to Northern IV. Very similar graves
with just the same kind of battle-axes are found in Norway1 and on

1   Hinsch, "Yngre steinalders stridsokskulturer i Norge”, Bergen Universitets
Arbok (1954), No. 1.

L   l6l
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

the opposite coasts of the Baltic in Esthonia and Finland. The dis-
tribution of these graves, confined to South-Western Finland with a
sharp frontier between them and the encampments of the native
hunter-fishers, leaves no doubt that the Boat-axe folk were intruders.1

On the heathlands of North-West Germany and Holland2 many
barrows (two dated by radio carbon to 2480 and 2240 b.c.) covering
Single Graves reveal an extension of the Battle-axe cultures to the
English Channel. Many barrows are demarcated by a ring of upright
posts; some, that may belong to period IV, cover small mortuary
houses3 and so may rank as chieftains’ tombs. The earlier graves are
furnished with battle-axes akin to Jutland types, but less finely worked,
and S beakers, bearing cord or herring-bone ornament, and exceptionally
also with amphorae of Saxo-Thuringian form. But the Battle-axe folk
here came into contact with local Megalith-builders (p. 192) and Bell-
beaker folk from the west and developed hybrid cultures. S beakers are
not seldom found with the later burials in megalithic tombs; from the
Bell-beaker group the Battle-axe folk took over their bow and the
wrist-guards appropriate thereto and even adopted the roulette
technique for ornamenting their beakers and spread the designs in
zones over the whole vase-surface in the style regularly applied on
Bell-beakers. Nevertheless, the Battle-axe component remained
dominant in the resultant fusion.

Despite their intimate contact with the metal-using westerners, the
Battle-axe folk in North-West Germany and Holland remained con-
tent with a neolithic equipment throughout period IV. They managed
at times to import Danish amber and English jet, but failed to secure
regular supplies of metal. However, a flat axe of copper was found with
an S beaker in a cremation grave at Sande near Hamburg.4 This grave
incidentally forms part of a regular umfield which is perhaps the
earliest example of such a cremation cemetery in Northern Europe,
though no earlier than the Bronze Age urnfields of Kisapostag in
Hungary.

Battle-axe cultures arrive later on the Danish islands where the
Megalith-builders were firmly established, and are represented prin-
cipally by intrusive elements in late Passage Graves and only rarely by
true separate graves.5 The battle-axes approximate to the later Jutland

1   SM. (1952), 22-5; cf. SMYA., XXXII, i, 152 ff. For Esthonia, see Gerasimov,
Litsa, 396-9; the skulls closely resemble those from Pontic yamno graves.

2   van Giffen, Die Bauart der Einzelgraber; Stampfuss, JungneoL Kuliuren; NNU.t II
(1928), 20; Albrecht, "Die Hugelgraber der jiingeren Steinzeit in Westfalen”, Westfalen,
XIX (1934), 122 ff-I Glasbergen, Palcsohistoria, V, VI.

8 See e.g. Off a, I (1936), 62-77.   4 Kiel-Festschrift (1936), 79.

5   Aarbeger (1936), 145 ff., for parallels from Holstein, see Mannus, XXVII (1935), 60;
cf. Brondsted, Danmarks, I, 269-75, and Acta Arch., XXV, 74-6.

162
 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?

or even Swedish types. The funerary pots are squat S beakers, recurving
at the rim and ornamented all over with rouletted zig-zags or wavy
ribbons executed with a comb, clearly inspired by the Bell-beaker
style. Indeed, the Battle-axe folk who reached the islands probably
brought with them the Bell-beaker culture’s bows and wrist-guards
and arrow-straighteners.

Saxo-Thuringian Corded Ware and its Congeners

Food-gatherers undoubtedly survived from mesolithic times on the
heaths and boulder clays of Central Germany and on the sandy lands
farther east fringing and interrupting the loss. But here Battle-axe

Fig. 84. Saxo-Thuringian corded ware (r1ff).

cultures represent neither the first food-producers—those were the
Danubians (pp. 105, 118)—nor yet the sole result of the acculturation
of residual food-gatherers or of the internal development of Danubian
society itself. The most important—the Saxo-Thuringian to whose
pottery alone the term Corded Ware was originally applied—emerges
in Central Germany and Bohemia as only one among several groups,
all more pastoral and more warlike than any Danubians.

Its distinctive cemeteries of barrows or flat graves are concentrated
in the Saale basin, but extend south-east into Central Bohemia and
westward to the Rhineland and even Central Switzerland. While
common enough on the loss, Saxo-Thuringian barrows are still more

163
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

prominent on heaths and uplands, as if hunting and stock-breeding
had been the foundations of the economy. Yet the cemeteries are too
extensive to belong to nomads, and grain imprints on vases1 prove
some sort of cultivation.

Characteristic of Saxo-Thuringian corded ware is the conjunction of
amphorae (Fig. 84, 1-3) with the usual beakers which here have an
ovoid body contrasted with a long straight neck (Fig. 84,4-7). Ornament
is effected, as usual, on the earlier vases by cord impressions which
then later give place to stamped herring-bone patterns (Fig. 84, 3).
Equally distinctive is the faceted battle-axe (Fig. 85, 1), though this

is not often found in graves and then not with the earliest pottery.2
Its peculiar form may show some influence from spiked club-heads3
of mesolithic ancestry (the Vogtland type), but stray copper battle-
axes exhibit much the same form4 and the influence of antler weapons
is admitted. Actual antler axes, asymmetrical stone axes like Danubian
“ploughshares”, almond-shaped celts of flint or greenstone mounted
as adzes (one was found thus mounted in an antler haft) and occasional
spheroid mace-heads or rough flint daggers also served as weapons.

Small rings of copper and even spirals of poor bronze sometimes
served as ornaments. But though these were allegedly made from local

1 JST., XIV, 30; XXIV, 115.   2 Forssander, Bootaxthultur, 146.

3   Mannus, XXV (1933), 271-82.   4 E.g. Danube, fig. 92.

164
 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?

ores,1 the Saxo-Thuringians remained content with a neolithic equip-
ment and armoury. The best evidences for trade of any kind are a
carving in Sammland style and a few other amber beads. Discs
made from local shells but ornamented with a cross1 2 constitute the most
distinctive additions to the usual bored-teeth necklaces. One man,
buried with a herring-bone beaker and a tanged copper spear-head
or dagger, had worn a hammer pin of Pontic type as a head ornament.3

Normally the Saxo-Thuringians were interred in simple pit graves,
rarely in wood-lined shafts, by no means always covered by barrows.
North of the Unstrut, modest megalithic cists, measuring up to 3*5 m.
by 2-25 m., were often used as collective sepulchres.4 The practice was
presumably borrowed from adjacent Northern or Horgen megalith-
builders (p. 190), but might have been inspired from the Kuban5 since
some are divided by a porthole slab as in Fig. 81, 1. Trephined skulls
occur in both Central German and Bohemian graves. In some tombs,
mostly late and more often in Western than in Central Germany, the
bodies have been burned. Exceptionally the cremated remains lay in
wooden mortuary houses.6 The latter prove that some Saxo-Thuringian
groups were led by chiefs and that the herdsmen lived in substantial
houses with at least a porch in addition to a living-room.

The later phases of the Saxo-Thuringian culture admittedly last
into period IV, and grave-groups7 establish synchronisms with Globular
Amphorae and Walternienburg 2 in period III. A beginning in period II
might be deduced from corded ware sherds in Danubian village-sites
and faceted battle-axes associated in hoards with shoe-last celts, but
the associations are not very reliable.

Westward, burials under barrows accompanied by corded beakers
and amphorae and faceted battle-axes document an extension of Saxo-
Thuringian culture to the Rhine. Beyond it in Switzerland, in the latest
occupation levels of the neolithic Alpine lake-dwellings, sherds of
corded ware mark the replacement of the Middle Neolithic Horgen
population or the superposition thereon of a pastoral aristocracy such
as we met at Usatova. Eastward, too, barrow-burials if accompanied
by cord-ornamented vases that could be derived from amphorae like
Fig. 84, 1-3, are likewise attributed to colonists from Saxo-Thuringia.

1   Nbl. f. d. V., X (1934), I46: XIV, 73; Witter, Die dlieste Erzgewinnung in nord-
german. Lebenskreis.

2   PA., XL (1934-35). 21.

3   Behrens, JMV., XXXVI (1952), 52-65.

4   Mannus, XXVIII (i936). 363.' Nbl. f. d. V., IX (i933)» 93-

5   Forssander, Bootaxtkultur, 164; Arsberdt. (1937-38), 38.

6   Germania, VI (1922), no (Haldorf near Cassel); Mannus, VI, Erg.-Bd., 214 (Sarmens-
torf, Switzerland).

7   Altschles., V (1934), 37; Mannus, XXVIII, 376.

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 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

So in Sammland1 are graves furnished with amphorae and beakers, and
in a couple of cases with bone hammer-pins, while at least three faceted
battle-axes are reported from the province. Here corded ware is found
also in the substantial houses of farmers who combined cultivation
and the breeding of cattle, sheep, and pigs with hunting, fowling, and
fishing with bone harpoons.2 But with the supposedly Saxo-Thuringian
pots go other vases that may represent an East Baltic version of the
Erteb0lle or First Northern culture.

Fig. 86. Zlota pottery. After Kozlowski.

On the Polish loss lands within the great elbow of the Vistula,
already intensively colonized by Danubians by period II, corded
beakers and amphorae are associated with Oder flower-pots, handled
cups, funnel-necked beakers, and globular amphorae that elsewhere
denote distinct groups, in the Zlota culture (Fig. 86) .3 Extensive
cemeteries of contracted skeletons, generally in flat graves, sometimes

1 Killian, Die HaffkUstenkultur (Bonn, 1955).   8 Altschles., V, 62.

8   Childe, Danube, 152; Kozfowski, Mlodsa, 66; WA., VIII, 98; IX, 34.

l66
 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?

in pit-caves, mark the population as sedentary. Ritual burials of cattle,
pigs, and horses demonstrate the economic importance of these domestic
animals. Battle-axes are not very often included among the grave goods,
but such as occur are typologically early.

In Eastern Moravia1 one barrow at Nemetice covered a shaft grave
containing an amphora and a beaker, and another barrow one furnished
with a faceted battle-axe. But other graves here, as also at Drevohostice
and Prusinovice, contained battle-axes of Silesian type (Fig. 85, 3) and
keeled mugs with cylindrical necks and strap handles derived from the
Jordanova group; others again Bell-beakers.

Then in East Galicia2 some barrows, girt with a circular trench and
heaped after the black earth’s formation—and therefore later than
those mentioned on p. 166 above—cover graves containing corded
amphorae and beakers and copper trinkets. So do the flat graves of the
Tomaszow culture3 forming large cemeteries and representing a sedent-
ary population extending across the Carpathians into the Nitra valley
of Slovakia.4 These burials are furnished with segmented fayence
beads like those from the Tisza-Maros region (p. 128) and occasional
round-heeled triangular daggers. The Tomaszdw cemeteries therefore
extend over period IV.

Still farther east the corded ware from Usatova (p. 145) has been
claimed as evidence that the pastoral aristocracy there superimposed
on Tripolye peasants was of Saxo-Thuringian extraction! Even the
Middle Dniepr culture5 has been regarded as an offshoot of the Saxo-
Thuringian. “Amphorae” do no doubt occur in the urnfield of Sofiivka6;
among the grave goods associated with 141 cremations are also stone
battle-axes, flat axes and daggers of copper, flint celts and sickles, and
vases painted in late Tripolye style (as at Usatova). Barrows of this
culture, however, do not seem to have contained amphorae; the beakers
are sometimes ovoid as in yamno graves (Fig. 79, 3), more often basket-
shaped (Fig. 79, 2).

The Oder and Marschwitz Cultures

On the other hand, between these alleged outposts of Saxo-Thuringian
culture and its centre on the Saale-Elbe intervene other groups dis-
tinguished by corded ware and battle-axes of quite different forms.

1   Pravek, V (1909), 56-130; Real., s.v. Drevohostice.

2   Ksiega Pamietkowa, 141-9; Swiatowit, XVI (1934-35), 117-44; Sulimirski, "Die
schnurkeramischen Kulturen”, 3-5.

3   Kostrzewski, Prehistoria, 183; Swiatowit, XIX (1946-47), 105 ff.

4   Material from 300 graves at Nitra, unpublished.

5   Briusov, OSerki, 215-20; KS., XVI (1947).

8 Arhh. Pam., IV (1952), 112-21; Arhheologiya, Kiev, VIII (1953), 94-101,

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The Oder culture in Brandenburg shares with the Saxo-Thuringian the
usual beaker, but is distinguished by the absence of amphorae and
the presence of cylindrical ‘‘flower-pot” vases, sometimes with ledge-
handles.1 Such are found in pit graves, occasionally under barrows and
at least once containing red ochre, but also in slab cists of Central
German type. Other grave goods include small battle-axes, flint adzes
with a pointed-oval cross-section, and Danubian "plough-shares” as
in Saxo-Thuringia. While occasionally associated with Globular
Amphorae or Waltemienburg 3-5 pottery (p. 193), a few bronze orna-
ments and Scandinavian flint daggers2 show that the Oder culture
lasted well into period IV.

In the Marschwitz culture of Silesia and Moravia this persistence is
more amply demonstrated. The graves contain flower-pots of Oder
form, but these are accompanied by pouched jugs, decorated with
cord-impressions, but of early Unetice shapes (Fig. 72, 1). With them
go battle-axes made of Sobotka serpentine3 (Fig. 85, 3), rather like
the Fatyanovo form but also wrist-guards, derived from the Beaker
folk, and even bronze ornaments. The whole group occupies economic-
ally as well as geographically an intermediate position between the
Bronze Age Unetician culture of Bohemia and the still neolithic culture
of the middle and lower Oder.

The Fatyanovo Culture4

In the forest zone of Central Russia the first reliable indications of the
neolithic economy are afforded by bones of domestic cattle, swine,
sheep, goats, and horses, and grain-rubbers from graves of the Fatya-
novo cycle of cultures. These have been divided into three local
groups which differ in age as well as in spatial distribution, by
Kritsova-Grakova.6 The earliest is the Moscow group on the Oka and
Kliazma, next the Yaroslav group on the Upper Volga to which the
eponymous cemetery belongs. The Cuvas group on the lower Kama
near the confluence of that river and the Oka with the Volga should
begin latest.

The graves, never surmounted by barrows and normally containing
one contracted skeleton, rarely a male and female together, occasionally
cremations,6 form cemeteries of half a dozen to a score, and occur both

1   Sprockhoff, Mark-Brandenburg, 60 ff., 160; Mannus, XXVIII, 374.

2   Forssander, Ostskandinav., 60; Bolim, Bronzezeit Mark-Brandenburg, 30.

3   PrzegA., VIII (1949), 256.

4   Tretyakov, IGAIMK., 106, 126-8; SA., II 32; cf. FM. (1924), x ff. Hausler,
Wissenschaftliche Zts. d Martin-Luther Universitat, Halle-Wittenberg, V (1955-56), H. 1
(Arbeiten aus d. Inst. f. Vor- u. FrUhgeschichte, 5) gives a convenient German summary
of the Russian literature.

5   KS., XVI (1947), 22-32.   9 Problemy GAIMK. (1934), Nos. 11-12,

l68
 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?

in the low-lying basins, long occupied by the hunter-fishers, and also
on the uplands right to the Volga-Oka watershed, where the gatherers
had never settled- This extension is itself a symbol of the new economy
since the uplands are better suited to tillage and grazing than the
chilly vales,1 but it was possible only with aid of the polished flint celts
that occur alike in men’s and women’s graves,2 since the new territory
was densely wooded. At the same time bones of pike and teeth of bear,
wolf, fox, lynx, and reindeer, as well as shells, used for ornaments,
attest a persistence of the old economy of the Forest.

But now cattle-raising provided a prize for more serious warfare
than the hunter-fishers had indulged in, and so the graves are furnished
with an armoury of weapons strange to the older forest dwelling-places.

Fig. 87. Fatyanovo battle-axe and Finnish boat-axe ($).

Stone battle-axes accompany every male interment. The finest, the
classical Fatyanovo axes (Fig. 87, 1) are confined to the Yaroslav
group; some of the rest can be treated as degenerations of these,8 but
at least one, from the Trusovo cemetery in the Moscow4 group, belongs
to the heeled type proper to the Catacomb culture of the steppes.
Another grave contained a pair of arrow-shaft straighteners,5 yet
another a Pontic hammer-pin. In chieftains’ graves in the Yaroslav
and Cuvas groups copper shaft-hole axes accompany or replace the
stone weapons, but miniature clay battle-axes were buried with
children in the Yaroslav group.8

Flint strike-a-lights with tinder too were sometimes7 buried with the
dead. Perforated clay discs, some 5*5 cm. in diameter,8 are doubtless
model wheels and attest familiarity with wheeled vehicles.

1   SA., II, 33-5.   2 TGIM., XII (1941), 125.

3   As by Ayrapaa, ESA., VIII, 16-23.   4 S^4., IV, 302.   5 SA., XXII, 120.

3 TGIM., VIII, 63. Showing that the models from Mikhalic and Tripolye sites are
not necessarily ritual objects!

» TGIM., XII, 132.   8 SA., VI, 79.

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 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

The numerous pots tend to be globular, provided with flat bases,
sometimes ornamented, and distinct necks, but never with handles;
so none could be called an amphora! In the Moscow group early vases
are ornamented with cord impressions (Fig. 88, i); elsewhere combs
or other stamps were used.

3

Fig. 88. Fatyanovo pottery of the Moscow, Yaroslav, and Cuvas groups.

Peaceful if irregular commerce brought the Fatyanovo warriors
occasional amber beads,1 silver earrings, disc-pendants, lock-rings, cuff
armlets, and neck-rings of copper.

In the Vaulovo cemetery two rich graves, each containing male and
female skeletons buried together and furnished with copper shaft-hole
axes, surely belong to chieftains. Graves in the same cemetery, con-
taining respectively the skeleton of a boar and that of a kid, suggest
to Krainov2 the totems of two clans.

A clue to the relative position of the Central Russian cultures in
the general sequence is given by the Catacomb types; they establish
a partial synchronism between the Moscow group and the Catacomb
phase on the Steppes. Kritsova-Grakova8 uses the cuff-armlets from
Mytiscensk to establish a synchronism between the Yaroslav group
and Unfetice; though the agreement is not exact, Danubian IV should
be an upper limit for the Yaroslav group.

The copper axes from the Yaroslav cemeteries approximate closely
to those included in the hoards found at Seima and Galic4 (Fig. 89).
These presumably represent southern imports intercepted by the
Fatyanovo population that must have controlled the fur trade so
important in the first millennium B.c. But both hoards contain types
that would be more appropriate to the srubno phase in the Pontic
sequence. But by that time the Cuvas version of the Fatyanovo
culture was developing into the fully metal-using Abasevo culture.

1 TGIM., VIII, 70.   2 TGIM., XII (1941). 119, 135-7.

* KS., XVI, 30.   « ESA., II, 137 ff.

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 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?

Bader and other Russian prehistorians1 in the ’thirties regarded the
Fatyanovo culture as a development of the native culture of local
hunter-fishers to exploit the new sources of food made available by
the introduction of cereals and domestic stock. These were admittedly
introduced from outside into the woodland zone of Central Russia.

Anthropometric studies of the Fatyanovo populations by Trofimova2
have subsequently shown that the cultivators and stock-breeders
themselves must be immigrants; for the skulls, Europeoid or Medi-
terranean, are in sharp contrast to those of the autochthonous hunter-
fishers, which are Lapponoid. Briusov3 proposes to derive the Moscow
group at least from the Middle Dniepr culture. But, after all, the
origin of the latter is not at all clear, and Briusov himself admits the
possibility of a more western origin for the Yaroslav group. German
and many other Western prehistorians, emphasizing—and perhaps
exaggerating—the similarities of the classic Fatyanovo pots to Saxo-
Thuringian and Globular Amphorae, have thence deduced an invasion
of Central Russia by warriors from Central Germany, Scandinavia, or
Sammland.4 But of course the Fatyanovo cultures are not mere trans-
plantations of any one of the known western or southern Battle-axe
cultures and "amphorae” are not necessarily derived from Saxo-
Thuringia. The Fatyanovo battle-axes derive from East Poland.5

Fig. 89. The GaliS hoard, 1-4 (£).

1   SA., II, 30 ff.; Ill, 38 ; IGAIMK., 106, 100 ff.

2   Sovietskaya Etnografiya (1949), 3, 72; (1950), 3, 37.

3   Oierhi, 94.

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 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Origin and Significance of the Battle-Axe Cultures

The cultures of several peoples that in historical times spoke Indo-
European languages could plausibly be derived from those described
in the preceding pages. The list could be further enlarged if cord-
ornamented sherds from Greece, Macedonia, and Thrace (pp. 71, 96),
and battle-axes from Troy and the Caucasus were accepted as evidence
for kindred cultures in the Balkans and Anatolia. Hence, if the several
cultures considered in this chapter be all provincial variants of one
single culture, the latter could be identified with that of the hypothetical
Indo-European parent stock, “Aryans” or “Wiros”.

Many prehistorians have in fact tried to derive all the distinct
cultures from one primary culture whose expansion and local divergence
should account for the emergence of the several distinct cultures that
alone are presented in the archaeological record. By 1910 Kossinna1 had
argued that the postulated primary culture developed in Jutland
through the acculturation of Maglemosians by Erteb0lle immigrants
and megafith-builders, and Aberg elaborated his thesis in 1918.1 2 From
Jutland the bearers of the resultant neolithic culture—the Single Grave
culture—would have spread across Central Europe to the iEgean and
the Caucasus.

Danish prehistorians, however, are unanimous in regarding the
Single Grave culture as intrusive in Jutland. Even German pre-
historians, since the “Versailles Diktat” detached South Jutland from
the Reich, have preferred to transfer the cradle of the Single Grave and
other Battle-axe cultures, and so of the Indo-Europeans, to the more
thoroughly Germanic soil of Saxo-Thuringia!3 There should be the
focus from which the warriors radiated not only to the Balkans and
the Ukraine but also to Sweden, Denmark, and Switzerland!

On the contrary, near fifty years ago J. L. Myres suggested reversing
Kossinna’s migrations and deriving the Single Grave, Saxo-Thuringian,
and other Battle-axe cultures from the Pontic steppes. Borkovskij4
pointed out how well the ovoid beakers from yamno graves could serve
as prototypes for the Central and North European vases. Forssander5 6
inclined to think that the makers of Globular Amphorae (infra, p. 195),
coming from the Caucasus and bringing with them the idea of the
porthole cist, affected the development of the Central and North

1   “Ursprung und Verbreitung der Urfinnen und Urindogermanen”, Mannus, 1-11.

2   Das nordische Kulturgebiet (1918).

3   Most recently by Killian, Die Haffkiistenkultur (Bonn, 1955), who relies, in addition

to battle-axes, on the skeuomorphic pattern impressed or painted on amphorae.

* “Snurova keramika na Ukrajine,” Obzor IX (1930), cf. PA. (1933).

6   jBootaxtkultur, 174, 213.

X72
 CULTURE TRANSMISSION OVER EURASIAN PLAIN?

European cultures, which, would still have been rooted in the Saxo-
Thuringian. The discovery of Pontic hammer pins in a Danish passage
grave of Northern IIIc and in more or less contemporary Corded Ware
graves in Central Europe and Sammland, has provided some concrete,
if by no means conclusive, evidence in favour of a Pontic origin. Still
the Ochre Grave culture, the oldest concretely recognizable on the
steppes, on the one hand does not exhibit even in germ all the dis-
tinctive traits common to the Battle-axe cultures, and on the other
hand contains elements not replicated in any of them. In a word, the
Pontic steppes can offer a concrete ancestor for all no more than
Jutland or Saxo-Thuringia.

A satisfactory explanation of the distribution of our battle-axes, of
cord-ornamented vases, and of amphorae decorated like Figs. 42 and
84 in Central Europe, Central Russia, Greece, and the Troad, would
be provided by Sulimirski's postulate of an early herding culture in
the woodlands between the Vistula and the Upper Dniepr. The hypo-
thetical cattle-breeders would, Sulimirski1 suggests, have used wood-
and-leather vessels that, translated into clay, assumed the form and
decoration of the amphorae. They expanded first to Central Russia,
the East Baltic, and the Eastern Balkans, but to Jutland and Saxo-
Thuringia only after adopting the practice of barrow-burial from
Ochre Grave pastoralists who had advanced as far west as the head-
waters of the Vistula, if not farther (p. 158). The main defect of Suli-
mirski’s account is that the assumed East Polish-Byelo-russian culture
is still not directly documented archseologically. But, after all, such
documentation will be hard to find (p. 148), and the presumptive
cradle-land is virtually unexplored.

Marxist prehistorians in the U.S.S.R. have rejected any explanation
of the agreements between the several Battle-axe cultures in terms of
migration or conquest. They would result from parallel or convergent
developments of local societies in accordance with general laws of
social-economic progress. In temperate Europe, with a neolithic equip-
ment, pastoralism combined with hunting was the most productive
rural economy, and with pastoralism are associated a patriarchal
social organization, differentiation of status, and warfare. The Battle-
axe cultures would represent “pastoral tribes separated out from the
mass of agricultural barbarians”. In a remarkable article Kricevskil2
showed how many of the features of the Battle-axe cultures of Danubian
III—even cord ornament on vases and ochre in graves—were explicitly
foreshadowed in Danubian cemeteries and settlements of the preceding

1 PPS., XXI (1955), 108 ff.

8 "Indogermanskil vopros arkheologi6eskirazre§ennyi”, IGAIMK., ioo (1933), 158 fi.

173
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

period. Some such account has the incomparable advantage of economy;
it makes minimal draughts on undemonstrable assumptions and un-
documented entities. It is not incompatible with the belief that “the
battle-axe”—i.e. the copper translation of an antler axe (Fig. 87, 2-3)
and “wheeled vehicles”—concretely the idea of making wooden discs
and mounting local sledges upon them-—were diffused. Only dogmatists
need assume that the battle-axes were brandished by conquering
hordes or that the waggons carried migrating tribes. Yet human agents
were inevitably involved. In neither case do “traders” fit the bill. We
might postulate behind the known Battle-axe and Steppe cultures, a
loose continuum of scattered groups of herdsmen or indeed of hunter-
fishers; for our tangible pastoral groups might have arisen from the
one-sided acculturation of savages, as well as from specialization
among barbarians. Seasonal shifts of pasture or hunting expeditions
would guarantee sufficient intercourse between the several groups for
the transmission of ideas. Such transmission is established for the
period of the fully differentiated Battle-axe and Steppe cultures.
Perhaps it should be postulated earlier to explain the association of
wheeled vehicles with chieftains’ funerals and the spread of plough
cultivation in Central Europe.

m

[Prometheus]

 CHAPTER X

THE NORTHERN CULTURES

The coveted amber of Jutland, whose magic virtue was appreciated
as far away as Greece by the sixteenth century, attracted a commerce
which brought fresh ideas and foreign manufactures to Denmark.
Thus stimulated, the local farmers developed an exceptionally rich
culture on the fertile morainic soils left by the recent retreat of the
ice-sheets. At the same time extensive peat bogs provide unusually
favourable conditions for the preservation of relics and for the recon-

struction of the environment in which they were made and used.
Finally, since the beginning of the nineteenth century Swedish, and
still more Danish, antiquities have been systematically studied by
successive generations of gifted investigators. By 1812 Thomsen had
established the system of the Three Ages, still used by all prehistorians,
and had divided the prehistoric period of the North into Stone, Bronze,
and Iron Ages. By 1870Worsaae had distinguished an Earlier and a Later
Stone Age that subsequently became Mesolithic and Neolithic respec-
tively. Finally, Montelius divided the Northern Neolithic Age into
four periods—Neolithic I, II, III, and IV—based on the typology of
flint axes (Fig. 90) and megalithic tombs.

175
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

During the 1920s the existence of Montelius’ Neolithic I as an inde-
pendent period was seriously questioned; for it was then represented
solely by flint axes with pointed butts, found without context. The
remaining periods were designated by the names of the megalithic
tombs by which Montelius had characterized them—Dolmen (dyss,
dos), Passage Grave (ganggrift, jcettestuer), and Stone Cist (hallkist)
periods. But since 1945 Danish and Swedish prehistorians1 have
adopted a triple division into Early, Middle, and Late Neolithic (EN,
MN, and LN), each subdivided. The subdivision of Early Neolithic was
originally based on the typology of the funnel-beaker—the most dis-
tinctive vase in the dominant culture which is usually called after it,
not at all euphoniously, the Funnel-Beaker culture (Tnchterbecher or
Tragtbagre kultur—abbreviated TRB culture). But the subdivision
of Early Neolithic had in practice the effect of re-establishing in
somewhat different form a pre-Dolmen phase equivalent to Montelius'
Neolithic I. Hence in the sequel his numeration will be retained albeit
for the sake of brevity alone. Its correlation with other nomenclatures
can be effected with the aid of the following table:

Montelius   TRB   Tombs   Flint Axes, etc.
Northern Neolithic 1 B   Early Neolithic B      Pointed-butted
II   C   Dolmens   Thin-butted
a  III J  c  d   Middle Neolithic I II  III  IV   Passage Graves   Thick-butted
IV   Late Neolithic   Stone Cists   Daggers

Montelius’ typological system had been worked out on the basis of
closed finds from the West Baltic coasts and is still substantially valid
there, though no one now supposes that Dolmen, Passage Grave, and
Long Cist mark stages in a self-contained evolution. But his disciples
and imitators have clumsily extended his system beyond the regions
for which it was devised and have used it as a frame of reference into
which cultural phenomena in Central Europe, South Russia, and even
Turkestan must be fitted! From a fog of misconceptions and distortions
they have evoked a “Nordic myth”. The “Nordic” cultures, crystallized

1   Cf. P. V. Glob, Danske Oldsager, II (Copenhagen, 1952).

176
 THE NORTHERN CULTURES

in Montelius’ II, would have expanded in periods III and IV till they
reached the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Caucasus.1 These fantasies were
never accepted in Denmark and have recently been emphatically
rejected in Sweden and even Germany. An explicit refutation here is
accordingly superfluous. None the less, it will be convenient to base
our survey on the Danish and Swedish record which is incomparably
more complete, though not necessarily longer or originally richer, than
that from the Continent.

The Early Neolithic Period of the West Baltic

The first farmers to reach Denmark are represented by the bones of
cows and sheep or goats and by sherds bearing impressions of one-corn,
emmer, club, and dwarf wheats and of barley2 found in several votive
deposits, in certain “Ertebolle kitchen middens”, and in one or two
pure domestic sites, all of the Atlantic phase. In all cases the farmers’
archaeological personality is expressed in flat-bottomed funnel-beakers
and amphorae of Becker’s A group. Troels-Smith3 insists that these
pots are made by the same technique of ring-building as the standard
Erteb0lle jars and lamps, though their walls are thinner, and are
associated with the latter in many kitchen-middens. Hence he con-
cludes that the Erteb0lle culture of Late Atlantic times was in fact
the culture of the A group of First Northern Neolithic farmers.

Becker,4 on the contrary, in 1954 described a pure assemblage of
A types—including flat clay discs or baking plates—from a site that
was not a normal kitchen-midden (Fig. 91). So he maintains the con-
trast between intrusive neolithic farmers and survivors of the older
mesolithic population of hunter-fishers. In 1956, therefore, it would be
premature for an English author to try and define too precisely the
economy and the stone industries of the earliest or A group of neolithic
farmers recognized on Danish soil. So much at least is certain.

About 2600 b.c. (according to a radio-carbon estimation) A farmers
were cultivating cereals (including Triticum monococcum and the
hexaploid club wheat Triticum compactum) and breeding domestic
stock. The latter were not allowed to graze freely but were tethered
by day and stalled at night, being fed during winter on leaves—a small
decline in elm pollen, coinciding with the farmers’ appearance, has
been attributed to the provision of winter fodder.5 In the kitchen-

1   E.g. N. Aberg in Das nordische Kutturgebiet, and Reinerth, Chronologie der jiingeren
Steinzeit.

2   Helbaek in A arboger (1954), 202-4.

3   Aarbeger (1953), 5-62.   4 Becker, Aarbeger (i954> published in 1956), 127-97.

8 Aarb0ger (1953), 16-21.

m   177
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

middens, bones of game and fish still predominate. A few polished
flint celts with pointed butts (Fig. 90,1) are the only notable additions
to the mesolithic stone industry.

No graves attributable to phase A have been identified, but votive
deposits in bogs give some indication of the current ideology. They
include beside human and animal bones—presumably from sacrifices

Fig. 91. A-type funnel-beakers (bottom), amphora, “baking plate,” etc. (|).

After Becker.

—amber beads, the magic value of the resin having been recognized
even in Boreal times.

Amphorse and funnel-beakers like the Danish A type have been
found in North-Eastern Germany and Poland.1 They may mean that
the First Northern culture in its A form extended over a wide area
of the wooded plain south of the Baltic.

In Denmark these cultivators with their tethered stock were followed
by other farmers with larger herds who burnt wide tracts of forest for
pasture and plots and cultivated thereon emmer wheat and barley.
A layer of ashes in the bogs, followed by a sharp decline in all tree
pollen, marks the arrival of these B-group farmers.1 2 Doubtless their

1   Aarboger (1947), 205 ff.; (1954), 168-9.

2   Iversen, “Landnam. i Danmarks Stenalder”, Dansk. Geol. Undersog., R. II, No. 66

(1941).

178
 THE NORTHERN CULTURES

flocks and herds grazed freely in the clearings, but their masters cannot
have remained very long at any one place since in time the forest
regenerated. Nor did they drive out their precursors. At Havnelev1 in
Zealand a settlement of B farmers is marked by numerous rubbish
pits. In them the bones of cows, sheep or goats, and pigs preponderate
over those of game animals. Polished thin-butted axes were used side
by side with the mesolithic flake axes. The blade tools were inferior to
the Erteb0lle types, but polygonal battle-axes of polished stone (Fig.
92) were already in use. The funnel-beakers were] sometimes decor-

Fig. 92. Tongued club-head, Denmark, polygonal battle-axe, Jordanova (•$?),
and flint axe of Eastern type (J).

ated with cord impressions below the rim (Fig. 79, 5), but were round-
bottomed, as were the contemporary amphorae and collared flasks.
But not far away on the shore at Strandegaard Erteb0lle folk were still
living almost exclusively by hunting, fishing, and collecting with a
mesolithic equipment.

Similarly at Siretorp in Scania2 herding folk, using funnel-beakers
adorned with cord impressions and sometimes exhibiting com imprints,
twice encamped on the same strip of sandy shore. Between the two
periods of herder settlement, Erteb0lle hunter-fishers had occupied
the site. To the B farmers may be attributed a grave at Virring in
Jutland,3 large enough to contain onlya single contracted adult skeleton,
but no bones survived.

1   Mathiassen, Aarb0ger, 1940, 3-16.

2   Bagge and Kjellmark, SV'?’Jv- '-V-tt- 'T939); but cf. Acta Arch., XXII

(1951), 88 ff., where the first   ; 1   : to Northern II=E,N.C.

3   Br0ndsted, Danmarks, I, 130, 338.

179
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Pottery appropriate to the B group of First Northern farmer-herders
has been found all over Denmark and right across Southern Sweden
to the east coast.1 On the Continent, B vases are not readily dis-
tinguishable from those just attributed to the A group.

In Northern Neolithic II-—Early Neolithic C the First Northern
culture even in Denmark dissolves into several local sub-cultures.
All are characterized by the same type-fossils—funnel-beakers, collared
flasks, amphorae, thin-butted flint axes, polygonal battle-axes, etc.,
but are mutually distinguished by divergences in pot forms and
decoration and by burial rites. By this time, too, Denmark and Southern
Sweden themselves form only quarters of a larger province eventually
extending from the Vistula to the lower Rhine.

Everywhere farming provided the basis of life, but some Danish
groups followed the practice of their A ancestors in animal husbandry
while others may have grazed stock freely, as in the B phase. By
judicious burning of scrub, using the ashes as fertilizers, substantial
communities could live together for a generation or more. The village
of Barkaer in Jutland2 consisted of fifty-four one-roomed houses
arranged on either side of an open space in two continuous rows, each
85 m. long.

The farmers still used thin-butted axes of flint with rectangular
cross-section and mounted directly on wooden handles, but now also
others of fine-grained rock, sometimes splayed at the blade.3 Numerous
weapons survive—arrows, their shafts polished on stone straighteners
like Fig. 113 and tipped with transverse flint heads, polygonal battle-
axes, and tongued club-heads like Fig. 92. The stone celts and battle-
axes with splayed blades evidently copy metal models. In fact,
many minute scraps of copper were observed at Barkaer while a con-
temporary earth-grave at Salten in Jutland4 contained a bossed copper
disc that can be exactly matched in the graves of Brze£d Kujawski
(p. 123). This import not only established an exact synchronism
between Northern II (EN.C.) and early Danubian III, but also indicates
the source of the metal, already known in Northern Neolithic II,
albeit only as a luxury material.

The pottery of Neolithic II (Fig. 93) is a development of that made
in Neolithic I, but is now more often decorated with pits, ribs, or im-
pressions of whipped cords so as to produce vertical patterns. Variations
in techniques and pattern serve to distinguish three or four local

1   Florin, “Vr&-Kulturen”, Kulturhistonska Studier tillagnade N. Aberg (Stockholm,
1938).

2   FNA. (1949).

> 3 Nordmann, "Megalithic”, fig. 63.

1 Aarb0ger (1947), 250-5.

l80
 THE NORTHERN CULTURES

groups.1 As charms and ornaments amber beads, sometimes decorated
in the drill-technique inherited from Maglemose times and strung
together in necklaces of several strands kept apart by spacers, were
worn.

One classical method of disposal of the dead, or perhaps only of
deceased chiefs, which gives its name to the whole period in Denmark,

Fig. 93/Pottery from Danish dysser (J).

was ceremonial burial in a megalithic dolmen or dyss. In its oldest
form a dyss is a small chamber formed by four uprights supporting a
single large capstone, and less than 6 ft. long by 2 ft. wide.2 Such small
chambers sound as if they were designed to contain a single corpse
only; though as many as six skeletons3 have been found in one, they
cannot rank as collective tombs. Later, one end-stone is generally
lower than the remaining uprights, leaving an aperture through which
subsequent burials might be introduced after the completion of the
tomb. A rare and archaic-looking variant of the dolmen is an enclosure
of inward-tilted slabs not supporting a capstone, but converging,4
just as in Portugal. Small polygonal chambers with a rudimentary
passage and rectangular chambers with more than two side-stones
have also yielded relics of the kind described above and are accordingly
classed as dysser by Danish authorities. Dolmens of all types were
normally partially buried by mounds, sometimes round but often long
and rectangular and demarcated by a peristalith of large boulders.

The distribution of dolmens along the Danish coasts indicates a

1 Ibid., 141 ff.

8 Nordmann, "Megalithic Culture", 26.

l8l

2 Aarb0ger (1941), 63-8; (1947), 266.
4 Aarb0ger (1936), 1-8.
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

population of accomplished seafarers. Indeed, both the basis of the
new economy and the metal tools that were imitated in stone might
have reached Denmark by sea. But no regular supplies of metal were
obtained by this or any other route. The economy of the dolmen-
builders is typically neolithic though they lived when societies in
Central Europe or Britain were already in a Copper Age.

But even in Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein people, perhaps
descendant of the B group herders, might be buried in non-megalithic
earth graves accompanied by a typical “dolmen” equipment of thin-
butted axes, collared flasks, etc.1 In such burials one or rarely two
corpses were laid extended on the ground surrounded by a setting
of boulders, as in Fig. 94, and sometimes covered with an elongated

mound (in contrast to “Battle-axe” burials, contracted in a pit under
a round barrow).

In Northern III about the time of the last marine transgression new
influences affected both the architecture of the megalithic tombs and
their furniture. The spacious passage graves that partly replaced the
dolmens were used as collective sepulchres by clans for several genera-
tions; for they may contain as many as a hundred skeletons2 and
pottery of several styles the succession of which serves as a basis for
the subdivision of the period. But owing presumably to the need for
fresh land as old plots became exhausted, the settlements were shifted

1   Forssander (1935-36), 2 if.; NNU., X (1936), 22 1; Aarboger (1936), 15; (1947),
141 ff.; Brandsted, Danmarks, I, 162, 344.

2   Nordmann, "Megalithic Culture”, 28.

182

Fig. 94. Grave 28 at Jordanova. After Seger.

The Danish Passage Graves
 THE NORTHERN CULTURES

more often and yield as a rule pottery of only one stylistic phase.1
A settlement of the first phase at Tr0ldebjerg on Langeland2 consisted
of several apsidal huts, 13 to 18 ft. long, and a continuous row of
rectangular buildings with a total length of 71 m. Two of these were
certainly houses, each about 28 m. long and apparently subdivided so
that one end was occupied by humans, the other by cattle. The gabled
roof, about 11 ft. high, sloped down to the ground on one side and on
the other rested on a wall only 6 ft. high. (Obviously these houses have
nothing to do with the iEgean and Balkan megaron type but derive
directly from the Barkaer form.) They could accommodate a household
larger than the "natural family”—i.e. a clan—whose deceased members
might rest in the spacious passage grave.

Hunting was now relatively unimportant. Hexaploid wheat in
addition to one-corn, emmer, and flax were certainly cultivated, but,
as in England, wheat was far more popular than barley.

Specialization in industry is attested by the existence of communities
of flint-miners and by specialized tools such as gouges for the carpenters.
Trade was sufficiently developed to secure for the Passage Grave
builders a certain number of metal tools and ornaments. A hoard found
in Bygholm in Jutland3 and dating from the very beginning of the
period, comprised four flat axes, a dagger with an imitation midrib on
one face, like Fig. 132, 5, and two arm-cylinders. A distribution map
of copper axes in Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein suggests that they
were imported by sea, though most of them must have come from
Hungary.4 Halberds have a similar distribution to axes and certainly
were brought by sea from Ireland;5 Amber was presumably the prin-
cipal export bartered for metal and was very likely worked locally to
form necklaces. Beads reached Brittany, Central France, and the
Iberian Peninsula, and, as we saw, were common throughout Central
Europe in Unetician times. In exchange the Danes obtained hammer-
headed pins of Pontic type6 by phase III. But the supplies obtained by
such barter were quite insufficient to allow metal even to compete
with stone and bone. Even the ornaments imported are mostly inferred
from bone imitations made locally.

The emergence of Battle-axe folk during the period (p. 161), com-
bined with the increased competition for land as the population grew,
intensified militarism. The outstanding weapons are stone double-

1   Mathiassen, Acta Arch., XV, 88; cf. Becker, ib., XXV, 50-66.

2   Winther, Treldebjerg (Rudk0bing), 1935, and Tillaeg, 1938.

3   Nordmann, *''T ?-•••i-'.;. (?'"’?‘?vre”,   £g_ g0

4   Forssander, 6\>   .? ; '• ?' . io, 51, etc., Kersten, Zur alteren nordischen Bronze-

zeit, 72, 98.

6 Arch., LXXXVI (1936), 277.

8 Aarb0ger (1929), 204.

183

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 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

axes, imitating Aegean metal models transmitted up the Danube
thoroughfare (Fig. 95, 4), flint daggers, disc-shaped mace-heads of
Danubian origin and transverse flint arrow-heads.

The earlier pots, including funnel-necked beakers, are decorated with
patterns executed with whipped or braided cords and arranged vertic-
ally or in panels, thus carrying on the Early Neolithic traditions.1 Still
in the settlement of Tr0ldebjerg the distinctive innovations of deeply
cut or stamped incisions in what Sophus Muller called “the grand

Fig. 95. Pottery (f, ?$•), double-axe (£), and arrow-head (^) from Danish
Passage Graves.

style” and even cardial decoration (p. 353) already appear and with
them new Danubian forms—the pedestalled bowl and the socketed
ladle.2 In a later settlement, like Blandebjerg,3 phase Illb, the tech-
nique of deep incision is completely dominant and is used to form
basketry patterns on angular vases, inspired by basket models (Fig.
95,1) and derived from North-West Germany or the early Walternien-

1   I follow the division established on the basis of settlement finds by Mathiassen in
Acta Arch., XV (1944), 89-97. rather than that of Eckholm, Real., IX, 42; cf. now Lili
Kaelas, Fv. (1951), 352-7.

2   These ceramic type'.   -:er to Danubian II in Hungary and Moravia, may

have reached Denmark 1   , the Upper Elbe-Oder region and, if so, would not

justify a synchronism between Northern Ilia and Danubian II as suggested by
Schwabedessin, Offa, XII (1953), 58-64; cf., Milojfiid, Germania, XXXIII (1955), 401-4.

3   Winther, Blandebjerg (Rudkabing, 1940).

184
 THE NORTHERN CULTURES

burg group of Central Germany. Next in IIIc the profiles are rounded
off (Fig. 95, 2) and rouletted lines, presumably derived from the Bell-
beakers (p. 227), replace the cardial technique in shading. Finally, in
phase Hid the shapes are further simplified while simple incision or
stab-and-drag lines were preferred to rouletted ones for the sparing
decoration. This, however, includes oculi motives (Fig. 95, 3), recalling
the Copper Age of Almeria.

Of the domestic pots, 50 per cent were decorated in Ilia at Trplde-
bjerg, but the percentage had fallen to 4 per cent at Lindp in Hid.
Still, at all times some vessels were ornamented with pits in the native
Ertebplle tradition, indicating how large a proportion of the old popu-
lation was absorbed in the new farming societies.1 Yet of course un-
absorbed groups of food-gatherers survived.

As in Early Neolithic times, a non-megalithic branch of the First
Northern1 2 culture survived in the succeeding period. But among the
better-known Megalith-builders, soon after the beginning of Northern
III,3 came in the practice of collective burial in a megalithic passage
grave. The latter cannot be regarded as an independent development
from the dyss—such tombs were still used—as Montelius’ disciples
have contended, but reflects fresh influence from the West, explicitly
imitating the corbelled tholos of the Atlantic coasts (p. 215). The
earliest passage graves, standing closest to the models, are polygonal
chambers sometimes with a cell attached, entered through a long
passage and covered with a circular mound. In later versions the
chamber is elongated at right angles to the passage. Passage graves
served of course as family vaults. Some contain as many as a hundred
skeletons. But in others the earlier interments with their gear had been
removed and reburied outside the vault to make room for subsequent
burials. Votive offerings continued to be deposited in bogs during
Northern III, and by this phase, if not before, there is evidence fora
cult of the axe. But at no time did the manufacture of female figurines
in any durable material form part of First Northern ideological activity.

In Middle Neolithic II or III a new group of warlike herdsmen, the
Battle-Axe folk, had invaded Jutland (p. 159), while kindred groups
occupied the Danish islands. Then bands of hunter-fishers4 from the
Scandinavian peninsula began crossing the Belts to win raw flint which
they traded far into Sweden and Norway. They were armed with heavy

1   Forssander, "Gropomerad Megalithkeramik”, Arsberattelse (1930-31), 10-30.

2   Becker, Acta Arch., XXV (1954), 22-5.

3   Kaelas, Fv. (1951), 352-7; Bagge and Kaelas, Acta Arch., XXII (1951), 118;
Becker, Acta Arch., XXV 55-66; Berg, “Klintebakken”, Medd. Langelands Mus,
(Rudk0bing, 1951)*

* Becker, Aarb0ger (1950), 155-251.

185
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

bows from which they could shoot the curious arrow-heads of Fig. 95, 5.
The latter may ultimately he derived from the mesolithic Games point,
but immediately seem to be translations of bone models; for they have
a triangular cross-section more appropriate to bone than to flint work.

Imported objects or copies thereof found, sometimes in stratified
horizons, in passage graves establish the chronological relations of
Northern Neolithic III with cultural sequences in other provinces.
A Bell-beaker, probably of Bohemian manufacture,1 thus provides a
synchronism between Northern IIIc and a late phase of Danubian III;
the metal ware from Bygholm, if of Danubian origin, should not be
very much earlier in the same period. The contemporary fruitstands
and socketed ladles, made locally in the North, cannot then be con-
temporary with their Danubian II analogues, and are in fact associated
with handled cups and tankards derivable from Baden and Bodrog-
keresztur types. At the same time the hammer-pin establishes a quasi-
synchronism with the Middle Kuban and Catacomb phases in South
Russia.

The First Northern Culture on the Continent and Its

Origin

The West Baltic cultures whose development during the local Early
and Middle Neolithic stages has just been surveyed were just regional
variants of a wider culture the unity of which has been typified for
prehistorians by the ubiquity in one form or another of the Funnel
Beaker. As this vase does not yield a euphonious culture name in
English and still less in French, and as almost any open-mouth bowl—
even the "Arpachiya milk bowl" of Mesopotamia in the fourth mil-
lennium1 2—could be called a funnel-beaker (!)—I have substituted the
term "First Northern".

This First Northern culture is far less homogeneous than the Starcevo,
First Danubian, or Tripolye culture. In addition to the Northern
province whose diversity has just been disclosed in the last two sec-
tions, Eastern, Southern, and Western provinces have been recognized
since 1912 but are even less unitary and less fully explored than the
Northern. Yet certain distinctive peculiarities other than ceramic are
common to all four. Everywhere the subsistence economy was mixed
farming combined with hunting and gathering, though there may have
been the variations in animal husbandry that pollen-analysis alone

1   Nordmann, "Megalithic”, 122; Glob, Danshe Oldsager, II, 119, 196; cf. Acta Arch.,
XXV, 80.

2   Childe, NLMAE., pi. XVI, a.

186
 THE NORTHERN CULTURES

has revealed in Denmark and more hunting in the Continental than in
the Peninsular provinces. In the South province, positive evidence for
cultivation with the aid of an ox-drawn plough is provided by a clay
model of a pair of yoked oxen from Kreznica Jara near Lublin.1 But it
cannot be proved that plough cultivation was an original trait and not
a secondary borrowing from, for instance, Baden neighbours. Horse
bones have been reported from many settlements but may have
belonged to game animals1 2 since wild horses had roamed the North
European plain since Pre-Boreal times (p. 9). Centrally perforated
clay discs,3 about 4 cm. in diameter, may represent model wheels rather
than spindle whorls, but no vehicles survive.

Hunters used arrows, armed normally with transverse heads but
occasionally also with lozenge-shaped points, and doubtless clubs.
Flint was preferred for axes, but in the East and South provinces these
do not have the rectangular cross-section favoured in the North and
West, but resemble Fig. 92, 3. The material was extensively traded
from Riigen, and in Galicia banded flint was won by regular mining,4
while the village on Gawroniec Hill can properly be described as an
axe-factory.5

Though a trade in flint had been thus early organized, the organiza-
tion did not extend to the distribution of metal, which, though known,
was very little used. So, too, amber ornaments were occasionally worn,
but only in quantities that could have been obtained from local moraines
supplemented by irregular barter. Warlike behaviour is abundantly
attested by stone battle-axes, usually of the polygonal type and always
with symmetrically splayed blades in contrast to the drooping blades
of Battle-Axe cultures.6

In pottery, divergent modifications in the form and decoration of
the ubiquitous funnel-beakers, collared flasks, and amphorae illustrate
divergence of taste between local groups and influences from other
societies. So in the South group the attachment of strap handles or
nipple feet to flasks and beakers, and still more the flanged character
of the handles (Fig. 96, i),7 might have been suggested by Baden.
Basketry ornament, popular in the West group, might be inspired by
Rossen or by the basketry vessels of an hypothetical pre-existing

1   Z Otchlani Wiekow, XVIII (1949). 184; WA., XVII, 120.

2   WA., XVII (1950), 228; cf. Germanenerbe, IV (1939), 240; Hanfiar, Das Pferd, 34-7.

2 WA., XVII, pi. XXXV, 1.

4   WA., VII, 53-4; Krukowski, Krzemionki Opatowskie (Warszawa, 1939). Dawna

Kultum, IV (Wroclaw, 1955) 204.

6 WA., XVII, 143.

0 Jazdrzewski, “Kultura Puhardw Lejkowatych w Polsce” (Bibliotheka Prehist., 2
(Poznan, 1936), 365-8.

* Cf. also WA., XVII, pis. XXXVII-XLI.

187
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

hunter-fisher population. But, as in Denmark, fruitstands and socketed
ladles must be derived ultimately from Danubian II.

In the ideological domain, votive deposits in bogs are reported at
least from the East group. Female figurines were nowhere manu-
factured, but figures of animals were sometimes modelled in clay in
the South group, as in the Baden cultural province. The characteristic
burial rite everywhere was to inter a single corpse extended in an earth
grave—i.e. on the ground surface surrounded by a kerb of boulders.1

Fig. 96. Furniture of a grave at Zastow (f), and collared flask from grave at

Nalenczow (£).

But, save in the South group, some persons—perhaps only “chiefs"—
were interred in stone or perhaps wooden chambers under long or
round barrows. In the East group the Kuyavish graves of Western
Poland1 2 must have been wedge-shaped mounds, up to 80 m. in length,
bordered with stone kerbs and containing the burial near the broader
east end (Fig. 97). West of the Oder,3 trapeze-shaped mounds of more
modest dimensions enclose a cist of slabs without entrance passage
(such are termed long dolmens). In the West group4 long oval or
rectangular mounds bordered with large boulders covered at first
closed chambers and later chambers as long as the barrow generally,
provided with a short entrance passage in the middle of one long side,
and popularly termed Huns’ Beds. These North-West German and
Dutch passage graves were collective tombs, presumably inspired by

1   Jazdrzewski, op. cit.; for Holland, van Giffen in Drenthe (1943), 435.

2   W. Chmielewski, ‘‘Zagadanie Grobowcdw Kujawskich” (Biblioteka Muz, Archeol.,
2), L6dz, 1952. He regards them as collective tombs, but the maximum number of
interments recorded was ten and the skeletons were not buried together in a single
chamber.

3   Sprockhoff, Megalithkultur, 25-31.

* Ibid., 59 fif.; van Giffen, Hunebedden.

188
 THE NORTHERN CULTURES

Fig. 97. Kuyavish grave, Swierczyn. After Koziowski.

189
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

the same ideology as their Danish-Swedish counterparts under round
barrows. They contain, like the latter, fruitstands and socketed
ladles, decorated with basketry patterns, but also collared flasks
similarly decorated.

Thus in the West group contradictory chronological conclusions
could be drawn from the tomb types and their furniture. On the
typology established for the North group, the collective tombs, the
basketry ornament on the pottery, and the fruitstands and socketed
ladles would be MN., the collared flasks EN.1 Did the innovations
reach North-West Germany and Holland from the Atlantic coasts
and the Danubian province before they reached Denmark and Sweden?
That would be a priori likely. But still farther south in Westfalia and
Hesse collared flasks appear in long cists with porthole entries identical
with those of the Paris basin (p. 312) and of Sweden in LN. times.1 2
Now the slabs of the cist at Ziischen, Hesse, are carved and the carvings
seem to include representations of ox-carts.3 On the other hand,
among the sparse ceramic finds, two tombs are said to have yielded
minute sherds of Rossen pottery.4 These sherds, if really part of the
tomb furniture, would accord with the collared flasks in making these
West German long cists EN. in terms of the Northern sequence. But
then they would be a whole period earlier than the LN. Swedish tombs
of identical plan!

Now, since in 1910 Kossinna purported to explain the distribution of
funnel-beakers, collared flasks, and amphorse on the Continent as the
result of an expansion of Ur-Indogermanen from Denmark, it has been
tacitly assumed that the Continental cultures characterized by these
vases are later than their nearest Danish analogues of Northern II
(EN.C). Such a relation may still hold good for the West group. But
the imported disc from a Neolithic II grave at Salten (p. 180) now
proves that the South group was by then already established between
the Warta and the Oder. So there is no longer any reason to doubt
that the long barrows covering dolmen-like chambers and earth graves
furnished with funnel-beakers, collared flasks, and amphorse in Poland
and North-Eastern Germany were in fact substantially contemporary
with the Danish dolmens and earth graves of EN.C. In this case the
analogues to Early Neolithic A-B vases, found-—twice under long
barrows—between the Vistula and the Elbe, may be as old as the

1   The flint celts too are thin-butted, but diverge from the Danish forms, Sprockhoff,
NNU., IV (1930), 36.

2   Sprockhoff, Megalithkultur, 59 f.; cf. Westfalen, XIX (1934), 150-7.

3   Mannus, XXV (1933), 131-2; Kuhn, Die Felsbilder Europas (1952), 153-4.

* Sangmeister, Die Glockenbecher . . . (Die Jungsteinzeit in Nordmainischen Hessen,
III), Melsingen, 1951, p. 73 and n. 246.

I90
 THE NORTHERN CULTURES

Danish specimens. Thus, though best known from the West Baltic
coasts, the First Northern culture in its earliest manifestations may
already have occupied the whole area from the North Sea to the
Upper Oder, from the Vistula to the Elbe. “The origin of the First
Northern culture” thus means the origin of this widespread complex.

Outside this region no single culture is known that exhibits all the
distinctive traits—ceramic forms, battle-axes, arrow-heads, burial
rites, bog offerings—enumerated above. On the other hand, survivals
of mesolithic Forest culture traditions (transverse arrow-heads, tranchet
axes, antler axes, extended burials, etc.) are conspicuous in the First
Northern neolithic culture. Since even in Boreal times the Forest culture
must have spread more widely on the Continent than the surviving
bone tools can show, and a local invention of pottery cannot be excluded,
the archaeological content of the First Northern culture could be
explained as an autochthonous development of that vigorous and
adaptable culture save for the cereals and domestic stock. The question
of its origin would then be reduced to this: Whence did the Forest-folk
acquire these and learn the arts of cultivating and breeding them?

Of course, pottery might provide some clue. Hinsch1 has convincingly
stated the case for deriving First Northern pottery from the Western
neolithic. Becker,1 2 too, would admit Western—or more precisely
Michelsberg—inspiration in his B-group vases. Troels-Smith,3 how-
ever, insists that the rural economy as well as the pottery of the A
group agrees with that of the Michelsberg and Cortaillod cultures.
Vogt,4 on the contrary, has contended that Michelsberg itself is not
a Western culture but an offshoot of the First Northern. His thesis has
been substantially strengthened by the subsequent publication5 of
baking plates, distinctive of the Michelsberg culture, as an integral
element in the First Northern from its earliest, A, phase. Indeed, the
striking similarity of British and Breton long barrows (p. 325), for
which no satisfying explanation has yet been found in South-Western
Europe, to Kuyavish graves and long dolmens6 might provide an argu-
ment for admitting at least a First Northern element even in the Wind-
mill Hill and Armorican Early Neolithic cultures. Still, the First
Northern is not an offshoot of any known Western culture.

That is not to say it could not spring from some earlier and less-
specialized assemblage from which such Western cultures as Windmill

1 Universitets Oldsaksamling Arbok (Oslo, 1951-53), 140-60.

a Aarbsger (1947), 262.

3   Ibid. (1953). 61.

4   Acta Arch., XXIV (1953), 174-86.

5   Aarb0ger (1954).

6   Antiquity, XXIII (1949), 130-5; PPS., XXI, 96-101.

I9I

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 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Hill and Michelsberg might also have arisen. Or it could be argued
that on the now submerged coasts of the North Sea representatives
of the Forest culture's coastal variant learned farming from pioneer
Western immigrants. That too, however, makes excessive draughts
on the unknown, since neither the Mesolithic coastal culture nor that
of the Western pioneers is tangibly represented in the existing archaeo-
logical record.

On the other hand, First Danubian farmers had demonstrably
spread right to the Baltic coasts between the Oder and the Vistula
and, west of the Elbe, had advanced into territories later occupied by
First Northern farmers.1 In Denmark itself, while no Danubian settle-
ments occur, stone implements of Danubian type have been found,
some on Ertebplle sites.2 The First Northern long barrows could well
be regarded as durable imitations of the external appearance of a
Danubian I long house.3 Finally, the Triticum monococcum, demon-
strably cultivated in Northern IA could hardly have reached Northern
Europe save through the Danubian province. East of the Oder'—
admittedly rather hypothetical—Forest hunter-fishers could have
learned from the pioneer Danubian outposts to breed stock and till
the soil.

Still, it remains possible that predominantly pastoral tribes without
pottery, with no specialized kit of stone tools nor ideology expressed
in funerary monuments or figurines of clay, pushed in through Vol-
hynia from the south-east. But for such an invasion there is of course
no positive evidence.

Middle Neolithic Northern Cultures on the Continent

During what corresponds to Northern Middle Neolithic, the West,
South, and East groups of First Northern cultures in contact with
surviving mesolithic groups and remnants of the Rossen, Jordanova,
and Michelsberg cultures dissolved into a multiplicity of local groups,
known mainly from grave-finds and distinguished primarily by ceramic
peculiarities.

In the West group the Elbe-Weser culture carried on the traditions
of burial in Huns' Beds and earth graves and of basketry vases. But
Bell and S beakers found even in Huns’ Beds illustrate the increasing
dominance of Beaker and Battle-axe folk over the First Northern
elements, and also the late survival of the culture in Danubian III.

1 Potratz NNU., XV (1941), quoted by MilojSid, Chron., 97.

8 Glob, Acta Arch., X (1939), 132-9.

3   Sprockhoff, Megalithkultur, 10, emphasizes the similarity of such a long barrow to
a "house with low-pitched gabled roof".

192
 THE NORTHERN CULTURES

A gold armlet with expanded terminals from an earth grave at Himmels-
pforten near Stade1 should in fact belong to Danubian IV.

The W alternienburg-Bernburg culture2 developed on the Lower
Saale and in Havelland out of the local branch of First Northern,
termed the Baalburg culture,3 through the so-called Salzmunder
culture of MN.i.4 The angular vases, distinctive of Walternienburg i,
obviously copy basketry models (Fig. 98), but in subsequent phases
the basketry origin seems to have been forgotten. Pottery of this sort
is found in simple pit-graves, grouped in small cemeteries, in mega-

Fig. 98. x, Walternienburg vases, 2, Latdorf drum, and Baalburg jug.

lithic cists or galleries, in Huns’ Beds with lateral passage and in cists
of thin slabs. Axe-heads were made by preference of Wida shale from
the South Hartz; the rest of the Walternienburg equipment seems to be
derived indiscriminately from various Northern and foreign cultures.
It includes double-axes of Passage Grave type, amber beads, crutch-
headed pins, perhaps derived from the Pontic hammer-pins, and metal
ornaments of Unetician type or bone copies of such. The culture,
while beginning in Northern period III, lasts therefore well into
Danubian IV.

In part of the areas formerly occupied by the East and South groups

1   NNU., VII, 50; X (1936), 22.

2   Childe, Danube, 133-9; Sprockhoff, Megaliihkultur, 106-16.

2 Grimm, Mannus, XXIX (i937)> *86 ft.

4   JST., XXIX (1938), 20 ff. For the culture sequence in Central Germany, see
Mildenberger, Studien zum Mitteldeutschen Neolithikum (Leipzig, 1951); Behrens, JMV.
(1953), 105; Fischer, Festschr. d. Rom-Germ. Zenfralmuseums, III (Mainz, 1953), 175.

N   193
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

emerged the culture typified by and named after the Globular Amphora.1
The type-vase, like the other vessels habitually associated with it, is
clearly a copy of leather models and is always decorated in a very
distinctive manner round the neck, with fillets hanging over the
shoulder (Fig. 99). The characteristic vases are accompanied by small
trapeze-shaped axes and chisels of flint, frequently of the banded
variety mined in Galicia, transverse and tanged arrow-heads, bored

Fig. 99. Bone girdle-clasp, Podolia (£), and globular amphorae, Saxo-Thuringia

and Podolia (£).

teeth and boars’ tusks, amber beads and, east of the Oder, ornate bone
girdle-clasps. Antler axes, double-axes of stone, flint knives and other
articles were occasionally borrowed from contemporary groups. Ring-
pendants of bone and other ornaments characteristic of the Scan-
dinavian long cists, and bronze rings and spirals demonstrate the sur-
vival of the culture during period IV.

The makers of these vases might be interred, extended, in simple
trench graves forming cemeteries of not more than twelve graves,
cremated, or buried, generally squatting, in collective tombs, containing
as a rule not more than seven corpses and generally less. The collective

1 Sprockhoff. Megalithkuttur, 120-30; Mark-Brandenburg, 108; JST., XXVIII (1938).

I94
 THE NORTHERN CULTURES

tombs are sometimes megalithic cists or large cists made of thin slabs.
The latter are often divided into two compartments, sometimes by a
porthole slab.

The principal concentration of Globular Amphorae is in the Saale-
Elbe region and Havelland, but they extend northward to Riigen,
southward into Bohemia, and eastward through Galicia into Volhynia
and Podolia. In Bohemia1 Globular Amphorae are sometimes found on
hilltops in fortified settlements, but even in Volhynia and Podolia they
are normally found alone in characteristic slab-cists, subdivided and
containing up to six skeletons.2 Even the pottery from the cists, divided
by porthole slabs, at Novosvobodnaya in the Kuban valley (p. 153),
is reminiscent of the Globular Amphorae.

Evidently these vases were made by swine-breeders who roamed
about in small groups far and wide, presumably mainly as hunters and
swineherds, but doubtless engaging in casual robbery and trade. They
were thus agents in the distribution of amber, Galician flint, and even
metal trinkets, but developed no specialized industries of their own
that we can recognize.

In Holstein a Globular Amphora was associated with pottery of
Northern Neolithic Hid or even IVa,3 while in Kuyavish graves
Globular Amphorae represent the latest intrusions. An oft-quoted report
of the association of a Globular Amphora with Danubian lb pottery
at Klein Rietz is quite unreliable and intrinsically improbable.4 In the
Danubian sequence they cannot be earlier than period III; the Bohemian
sites that have yielded specimens belong at earliest to the Baden
culture.

Kossinna derived the Globular Amphorae from those of the Danish
dolmens and made them the symbols of his second wave of Indo-
Germanic expansion from the West Baltic coasts. The culture they
typify is still considered by all German writers “Nordic” and is now
supposed to have developed between Elbe and Oder and thence spread
eastward. But, if so, why did it not spread westward too? Forssander,5
on the contrary, suggested that the culture arose somewhere in the
Pontic zone and that its authors introduced into Northern Europe
not only Galician banded flint but also porthole cists, such as we have
in fact met in Novosvobodnaya; presumably the idea then spread from
Central Germany both to Sweden and to the Paris basin. In fact, it is
not easy to derive the culture simply from the First Northern, but it
remains essentially a culture of the woodland zone and its outposts in

1   Stocky1, Bohbme prehist., 128; Proc. Amer. Philos. Soc., LXXXI (1932), 380,

2   Levitskii, Antropolgiya, II (Kiev, 1928); Zapiski Vse-Ukrainskogo Arkh. Komitetu, I
(Kiev, 1931); Briusov, Oie-rki, 220-3.

3   Offa, XII (1953), 8-9.   4 Germania, XXXIII (1955), 239.

195

5 Boolaxikultur, 174.
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Volhynia are separated by a huge tract of steppe, bare of comparable
finds, from the Caucasian group of porthole cists.

Sometimes associated with Globular Amphorae are curious tubular
pots like Fig. 98, 2 (top), often embellished with crosses and other
symbolic figures and generally interpreted on the strength of good
ethnographic parallels as drums. Most come from the Elbe valley in
Saxo-Thuringia and Bohemia, but they are not peculiar to any one
culture; the jug from Latdorf is a Baalburg type and some Moravian
drums1 were found in a Baden context.

We must accordingly imagine numbers of small groups, each dis-
tinguished by peculiarities in pottery and sometimes also in burial
rites or equipment, wandering about the North European plain simul-
taneously. Especially in Central Germany, groups adhering respectively
to Walternienburg, Globular Amphorse and Battle-axe traditions must
have been not only contemporary but also in close spatial contact.
And they must have encountered also Danubian peasants making
stroke-ornamented ware and others making Jordanova pots to say
nothing of makers of collared flasks and miscellaneous megalith-
builders. It is not surprising that such groups frequently interchanged
ideas—perhaps they intermarried; the wonder is,that they retained
the individuality of their ceramic traditions so long. The number of
distinct types of pottery tends to give a quite exaggerated idea of the
density of population and the duration of Northern Neolithic III.
Actually the several kinds of vases must have been made by relatively
small and nomadic groups, several of which must have been living
side by side. It is only by trying to arrange all groups in a sequence,
which may really be valid at one particular site, that period III becomes
inordinately inflated. But that it overlaps with Danubian IV may be
once more demonstrated by the metal trinkets associated with Globular
Amphorse and Walternienburg vases.2

The Northern Late Neolithic Period

During the fourth period of the Northern Stone Age the sharp contrast
between Megalith-builders and Battle-axe folk began to break down in
Denmark and Southern Sweden. Though each party still retained its
traditional burial practices, there is little difference between the furni-
ture of the Long Stone Cists, collective tombs that carry on the mega-
lithic tradition, and that of the Upper (Separate) Graves of the Battle-
axe population. But it is the culture of the latter that is dominant.

The area of settlement remains unaltered, but the population has

1   ar., vi (1954) • 652-8.

2   Bohm, Die altere Bronzezeit in der Mark-Brandenburg, 32.

196
 THE NORTHERN CULTURES

perhaps increased: in Vastergotland there are 4266 relics belonging to
period IV, as against 3106 from the preceding period.1 These figures
further indicate that the Stone Cist period can hardly have been
shorter than that of the Passage Graves. But the general economy
remained unaltered. The importance of agriculture may be inferred
from the number of flint sickles, curved in imitation of metal models.

Fig. ioo. Flint daggers (Denmark, £) and porthole cists (Sweden)-
types of Montelius' IV.

But weapons are still the most prominent relics. The flint axes now
regularly imitate metal axes with a splayed blade; but the faces are
seldom polished; indeed, polished flint axes made in period III were
sometimes flaked all over for use in period IV. Battle-axes were still
used, but are less shapely and less metallic. The classical weapon was
the dagger, at first lanceolate in form but culminating before the end
of the period in the famous fish-tailed form (Fig. 100).2 The arrow-
heads are hollow-based rather as in the Copper Age of Iberia.

1   Forssander, Ostskcmdinavische, 162.

2   Ibid., 118, fig. 23; Brondsted, Danmarks, I, fig. 251.

197
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

The fish-tailed flint daggers certainly copy the bronze-hilted daggers
of Central Europe. The models for these and other weapons were indeed
imported from time to time. A certain number of bronzes from Italy,
Central Europe, and Britain have survived from this period, stray or
in hoards. And before the period ended smiths may have been producing
for a local market in Schleswig-Holstein and even Southern Sweden.1
To obtain metal for rearmament the northerners had to rely chiefly
on the export of amber. Every scrap of the precious gum was reserved
for foreign trade, so it could no longer be used locally for charms. In
the tombs the place of amber beads is taken by long pendants of slate,
ring-pendants of stone or bone, and a few metal trinkets of Unetician
type.1 2 But for all their sacrifices the Northerners’ equipment and
economy remained essentially neolithic throughout period IV.

The practice of collective burial persisted, alongside burial in separate
graves in the mass of the barrow. But the passage grave gave place
to the long stone cist or gallery grave generally sunk in the ground.
These are not, as Montelius thought, the result of a degeneration of the
passage grave.3 One group might be treated as an evolution of the
dolmen, but even so that evolution must have been inspired by new
ideas from outside the Northern province. A group of Swedish cists,
built of thin slabs and often subdivided by a porthole slab, must be
derived from the Paris basin, presumably through the Westfalian
group mentioned on p. 190. Even the splay-footed pot, characteristic
of the French Horgen culture (p. 313), was reproduced in a variant
in Sweden and Denmark.4 These new ideas must have been introduced
by immigrant families joining the established communities. But the
normal pottery of the period is represented by flower-pot forms imi-
tating wooden models and decorated with rouletted zig-zag ribbons
(Fig. 83, bottom left) perhaps derived from the Oder Battle-axe culture.

Imitations of Unetician pins and Unetician gold ornaments associated
with even the early flint daggers show that the fourth period of the
Northern Stone Age did not even begin till the Early Bronze Age was
well established in Central Europe and in Britain. Though metal-
workers and traders were spreading northward, the Northern Stone
Age outlasted Danubian IV. In Denmark and Scandinavia the Bronze
Age proper begins first in the Middle Bronze Age of Hungary and
Britain.5 Till that date metal was too scarce for bronze weapons to be

1   Forssander, 95 f., 116 if.; Kersten, Nordischen Bronzezeit, 98; Broholm, Danmarks
Bronzsalder, 2 (1944), 30 ff.

2   Nordmann, “MegaJithic Culture”, 44.

3   Forssander, Ostskandinavische, 114, 140, 156; Brondsted, Danmarks, 290.

4   AsA., XL (1938), 14.

6 Forssander, Ostskandinavische, 176, 196; Kersten, Nordischen Bronzezeit, 100.

198
 THE NORTHERN CULTURES

buried with even the richest chief. And one of the earlier graves fur-
nished with products of the local Northern bronze industry (at Lies-
biittel in Schleswig-Holstein) contained an imported spear-head of a
type characteristic of Middle Bronze Age 2 in Britain,1 while British
palstaves of the same typological age are included in contemporary
Danish hoards.2 If the preceding phase of the British Bronze Age be
correctly dated to the fifteenth century by the fayence beads then
imported (p. 339), Northern Neolithic IV must have lasted till 1400 b.c.
in the sense that till then metal weapons were not normally deposited
in native graves in Denmark, Southern Sweden, and the adjacent
parts of North Germany. A segmented fayence head was, however,
found in a grave of Bronze Age form in North Jutland.3

The Saale-Warta Bronze Age

[Prometheus]

Round the salt deposits and ore lodes of the Saale and Elbe, and along
the trade-route leading thence to the East Baltic amber coast, a peculiar
version of the Unetician culture had arisen by the beginning of Northern
period IV. Metal had been brought thither in the time of the Jordanova
culture and weapons already by the Beaker-folk in Danubian III.
These or some other unidentified prospectors may have begun the
exploitation of the ores of Vogtland and exported their winnings as
ingots in the form of the sacred double-axe.4 For double-axes with a
shaft-hole too small to take a real shaft are concentrated in that region
and strung out thence across Switzerland to Central France. At the
same time, connections with the Pontic zone to the east are attested
by the hammer-pins mentioned on p. 165. In the sequel Unetician
farmers had spread down the Elbe and the Oder to the Saale and Warta.5
Their poor graves contain a few Unetician ornaments—but not the
oldest forms such as knot-headed pins—but their pots with provincial
conservatism preserved the pouched form that had gone out of fashion
in Czechoslovakia after the earliest phase of Danubian IV.

The local bronze industry was based on the same Unetician tradition,
but it was fertilized by the importation of Britannico-Hibernian manu-
factures6 and very likely by the immigration of Irish craftsmen. Its
products were exported to the still neolithic North and raw amber

1   Kersten, Zur alteren nordischen Bronzezeit, 65.

2   Broholm, Danmarks Bronzealder, 1, 224; M81.

3   Acta Arch., XXV, 241.

4   Hawkes, BSA., XXXVII, 144-51.

3 PZ., XX (1929), 128 ff.

6 E.g. Irish axes from Dieskau and Leubingen, Arch., LXXXVI, 303; PPS., IV,
272 ff. Note that the Irish axe from Dieskau is rich in tin, the other "bronzes" frotn the
board contain none! JMV., XXXIV (1950), 90 ff.

199
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

obtained in exchange. Some of this was re-exported in the raw state
to England, there to be worked up into amber cups and crescentic
necklaces. Local chieftains succeeded in concentrating the profits
derived from this commerce and thus accumulated capital for the
industry’s further development. Their rich burials under imposing
barrows present a striking contrast to the flat graves of Unetician

Fig. ioi. Section of Leubingen barrow.

farmers and confer a distinctive character upon the Bronze Age of the
province quite reminiscent of the Kuban.

At Leubingen,1 for instance, an old man and a young girl had been
interred in a lean-to chamber of stone slabs and oak beams (Fig. ioi)
enclosed by a circular fosse 20 m. in diameter, and furnished with
bronze rounded-heeled daggers, gold pins and lock-rings of Unetician
types, a halberd derived from the Irish series, a massive gold bracelet,
and a perforated stone axe (or ploughshare).

Even richer burials were discovered in a barrow cemetery at Leki

1   JST., V, 1-59; Arch., LXXXVI (1936), 205; cf. also JST., VI (Helmsdorf); I
(Baalberg), and perhaps Kuttlau, Silesia [Gotze-Fest., 84-9), and Anderlingen, Hanover,
Jb. ProvMus. Hannover, 1907-08, 242-4, and Arch., LXXXVI, 225.

200
 THE NORTHERN CULTURES

Male in Poznania during 1953.1 A wooden chamber built in a shaft
grave at the centre of a barrow, 30 m. in diameter, had contained the
remains of a man and a woman. The former was accompanied by a
bronze-shafted halberd like Fig. 102, 1, a flat knife-dagger, a flat
Unetician axe, a knot-headed pin of poor bronze, and two gold lock-
rings, the woman by only two bronze bracelets. A secondary grave on

Fig. 102. 1, Bronze-shafted halberd (}), 2, halberd-blade from
Leubingen barrow (J).

the periphery contained a bronze-hilted dagger of Elbe-Oder type, an
axe, a Bohemian eyelet pin and three gold lock-rings. Horses, oxen,
pigs, and sheep were represented, in that order of frequency, among
the remains of funerary feasts under the barrow.

Such richly furnished barrow burials must belong to chieftains who
had won economic power as well as authority by taking toll on the
trade that traversed their territories. They established no kingdoms
guaranteeing order and security beyond the narrow limits of tribal

1 Kowianska-Piaszykowa and Kurnatowski, “Kurhan Kultury Unietyckiej”, Forties
Archesol. Posnanienses, TV (Poznan, 3954), I-34 (with analyses of bronzes, and English
rdsum^).

201
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

domains. A large number of merchants’ hoards of bronzes and amber
beads vividly illustrate the dangers to which traders and perambulating
metal-workers were exposed between these local realms.

These hoards, together with the grave goods just mentioned, show
how by blending varied foreign traditions in producing for their warlike
patrons local craftsmen had created a variety of original types1—
halberds, modelled on late Irish types, but decorated with grooves
and triangles and ultimately mounted on bronze shafts (Fig. 102, 1),
curious narrow “double-axes”, daggers with bronze hilts, cast in one
piece with the blades either oval in imitation of daggers like Fig. 70,
or flat like the gold-studded Anglo-Armorican weapons,1 2 and what may
be clumsy imitations of the elegant crescentic axes of the Kings of Ur.3
Their products were exported to North Germany and across Poland to
Sammland.4 Thence and from Denmark came in exchange amber
beads to be used in turn for barter with England, Bohemia, Hungary,
and Italy.

Though definitely Early Bronze Age, the graves and hoards contain-
ing these products need not be early within Danubian IV. As compared
with Britain, the actual imports establish synchronisms only with
phase II of our Early Bronze Age. In Central European terminology
graves and hoards containing true Middle Bronze Age—Reinecke B-C
—types are practically non-existent in just those parts of Central
Germany and Poland where the chieftains’ graves occur5; there the
archaeological record seems to recommence with the Lusacian culture
generally attributed to Danubian VI! That might suggest that the
Saale-Warta culture occupies part of Danubian V too.6 On the other
hand, in Southern England and in Brittany we shall witness the abrupt
emergence of richly furnished barrow graves whose furniture, though
still Early Bronze age, exhibits specially close affinities with, if not
derivation from, that of the Saale-Warta chieftains’ tombs,7 and the
English graves at least seem fairly well dated by ASgean connections
between 1600 and 1400 b.c.

1   Childe, Danube, 242-4.

2   Gotze-Fest., 93, and PZ., XVI, 205; cf. p. 335 below.

3   PZ., XXXIV (1949-50), 238, Taf. 15, 1; cf. Childe, NLMAE., fig. 91; Jahn in
JMV., XXXV (1951), 65-70.

1 See for halberds O’Riordain’s map, Arch., LXXXVI, 277, and for narrow double-
axes, Sturm's jDie Bronzezeit im Ostbaltikum (Berlin, 1936), 32.

5   Cf. Childe, Danube, 3x3.

6   One bronze-shafted halberd of Saale-Warta type is said to have been found with
a socketed celt, Mannus, XIII (1923), 42-55.

7   So the characteristic Wessex and Armorican daggers seem to be derived from the
Elbe-Oder type, the Anglo-Armorican gold-studded hilts were copied in the Saale
region, Wessex amber pendants copy bronze-hilted halberds.

202
 CHAPTER XI

SURVIVALS OF THE FOREST CULTURE

The circumpolar zone of Eurasia, extending from the Norwegian coasts
across the Baltic and the North European plain far into Siberia, offered
no propitious soil to neolithic cultivators, but was rich in game, wild
fowl, fish, nuts and berries such as mesolithic Forest-folk had pursued
or collected round the North Sea and the western Baltic in Boreal
times. By then the Forest-folk had perfected an efficient equipment for
the exploitation of these natural resources. They continued to use a
similar equipment long after farmers had colonized Denmark and
Southern Sweden; for the coniferous forests or taiga to the north con-
stituted a botanical environment very similar to that of Britain and
Denmark in the Boreal phase. In it much of the Maglemose culture
survived. Now, the survival of equipment implies also continuity of
tradition prescribing its manufacture and uses. And continuity of
tradition means in turn some continuity of population too. However
much immigration or invasion have modified its genetic constitution,
cultural traditions have been preserved locally for eight or nine
thousand years (cf. p. 14).

But continuity of culture is not equivalent to immutability. In fact,
the environment was neither static nor uniform. Cultures were modified
to take advantage of new opportunities, were differentiated to exploit
local resources, and were enriched by inventions and borrowings. Nor
was the population of the European taiga zone homogeneous; by Sub-
Boreal times Mongoloid, Lapponoid, Europeoid and hybrid types are
represented in the graves.

Throughout the period here considered the Forest-folk remained
food-gatherers. All indeed possessed domestic dogs which were some-
times fed on fish,1 but nowhere were animals bred for food save in
Eastern Sweden, where the hunter-fishers, perhaps inspired by the
example of the B group herders (p. 178), kept pigs of native stock. On
the Norwegian coasts, round the Baltic and along the shores of the
White Sea the pursuit of aquatic mammals provided an important
element in the food supply and evoked a specialized equipment of
harpoons, ice-picks, and blubber-axes, while fishing was universally a
major economic activity. Hence the most permanent settlements were
1 E.g. at PanfLlovo in Central Russia, JGAIMK., 106 (1935), 125.

203
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

close to the coast or along the shores of lakes and rivers. Even these—
the so-called Dwelling-places (Bopladser)—seem mere encampments
where not more than ten households congregated temporarily. Large
cemeteries of 49 graves on Gotland1 and of 150 on Deer Island in Lake
Onega2 do not necessarily imply large and permanent villages.

But despite their comparatively nomadic mode of life, all the hunter-
fishers save those in Northern Norway made pots from Sub-Boreal
times on, and these help to define local and chronological groups. From
Sweden to Siberia indeed all pots were manufactured by the same
technique of ring-building,3 all taper downward to a rounded base
and all may be decorated with horizontal rows of pits, frequently
combined with zones of comb-impressions.4 The whole ceramic family
is therefore termed “pit-comb ware”. But west of the Baltic most

Fig. 103. 1, F.II pit-comb vase from Karelia (£); 2, vase of East Swedish style from
Aland Islands (|); 3, flint figures from Volosovo (fa).

vases have a concave neck separated from the conical body by a
shoulder, while farther east neckless ovoid vessels predominate. Within
these branches variations in the technique and arrangement of
the decoration demarcate stylistic groups and phases. In Sweden5
and Finland6 four consecutive styles can be arranged in chronological
order by the relations of the coastal dwelling-places on which typical
sherds occur to the receding shore of the Litorina Sea; for the land here
was still rising, so that the higher a camp is above the present strand
the older it should be. The Swedish scheme can be correlated with the

1   M. Stenberger, Das Grabfeld von Vdsterbjers auf Gotland (Stockholm, 1943).

a SA., VI (1940), 46-62; cf. Gerasimov, Litsa, 296-320; physically the population was
mixed Europeoid and Mongoloid.

3   The techniques have been admirably described by Voyevodskii, SA., I (1935), 51-78.

4   Made at first with the curved and notched edge of a flat pebble, later with short-
toothed bone combs figured by Voyevodskii, loc. cit.

6   Bagge, Acta Arch., XXII (1951), 56-88.

6 Ayrapaa, Acta Arch., I, 165-90, 205 ff.; he discusses correlations with Sweden in
FM., LXII (1955), 26-50.

204
 SURVIVALS OF THE FOREST CULTURE

subdivisions of the Northern Neolithic indicated in the last chapter
and less precisely with the Finnish. An extension of the latter to North
and Central Russia has been attempted by Finnish prehistorians,
while Gurina1 has outlined a roughly parallel sequence based on observa-
tions round Lake Onega and the White Sea. But other Russian
authorities2 reject such generalizations and deny the extension of

pit-comb ware to the Urals altogether.3 Nevertheless, we shall apply
the Finnish scheme to the whole region, using the expressions F.I,
F.II, F.III, and F.IV to denote similar styles and to indicate relative
positions in local sequences rather than contemporaneity throughout
the zone, and assigning to F.O assemblages not associated with pottery
that are probably pre-ceramic.

1   MIA., XX (1951), 77-140.   2 E.g. Foss, MIA., XXIX (1952); Briusov, Olerki.

3 Wrongly since good comb-ware is cited in SM., LVII (1950), 5-22.

205
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

F.O then denotes the Suomusjarvi culture, characterized by rough
stone adzes (Fig. 104, 2) and slate points1 that in Finland appear in
Atlantic contexts and do recur in the Urals, and assemblages of Magle-
mosian types in North-West Russia similarly dated by Russian pollen-
analysts.2 F.I pots, decorated with broad zones, sometimes of whipped-
cord impressions, are reported from the Baltic coasts to Lake Onega
and the White Sea and from one site in the Upper Dniepr basin.3 F.II
would be well represented also in Central Russia and up to the Urals

2345   6

Fig. 105. Eastern Maglemosian types (£); 1-4, Esthonia, after Clark; 5, Ukraine;

6, leister from Ural peat bogs (£).

if it include stylized representations of aquatic birds.4 (Fig. 103, 1.)
Subsequently local divergences are too great to allow of correlations
presumably owing to the rise of Battle-axe cultures on the Baltic
coasts and in Central Russia. But pit-comb ware of F.IV styles was
still being made by hunter-fishers when a few socketed celts of Late
Bronze Age types and even iron were reaching Finland and Northern
Russia.

For fishing, leisters with bone prongs (Fig. 105, 6) more or less like
the Maglemosian, were in use throughout our period from Norway

1   Also transverse arrow heads; SM., LIV (1947-48), 1-18; LVII (1950), 9.

2   Lower Veretye (Foss, MIA., XXIX), Pogostis£e, 1 (ibid., XX, 46); cf. Briusov,
Ocerki, 28-31.

3   Mapped by Gurina, MIA., XX, 95.

4   MIA., XX (1951), iro, Gurina’s group 3; SM., LX (1953), 33-44—F.III!

206
 SURVIVALS OF THE FOREST CULTURE

to Siberia. Fish-hooks of the Boreal Pemau type (Fig. 105, 5) survived
too in North Russia and even on the Desna, but by the Sub-Boreal
were supplemented throughout the zone by composite implements
with a notched shank of stone or bone and a separate barb.1 But net-
fishing was at least equally important.2

Of the Maglemosian hunting-equipment, slotted bone points survived
everywhere, conical bone arrow-heads3 and the type of Fig. 105, 3 as
far as the Urals and from F.O to F.IV. Flint tips for arrows and darts

Fig. 106. 1-3 Slate knives and dart-head, Sweden (£), 4-5 stone mace-heads, Finland

(£), and 6 slate pendant (|).

with little invasive retouch on the bulbar surface, occurring in F.O
and F.I sites may be derived from the Swiderian and were copied in
slate. Rare transverse arrow-heads4, found with the oldest F.I
pottery in Finland and on early sites along the Oka, could be derived
from the Ukraine as well as from the West Baltic. Bifacially trimmed
arrow-heads, generally leaf-shaped, appear first in F.II and in F.III
were translated into slate, as were older flint and bone types with a
triangular or rhomboid cross-section (Fig. 106, 3). Rhomboid club-

1   SA„ III, 101; V, 44; cf. Clark, Ant. /., XXVIII (1928), 67-8.

2   Imprints of nets are often found on pit-comb ware, IGAIMK., ro6, 118.

3   Finds listed and mapped by Foss, MIA., XXIX (1952), 46; cf. TGIM., XXIX, 108 f.

4   FM., LXII, 30-3; Briusov, Olerhi, 58, 69.

207

[Prometheus]

 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

heads like Fig. 106, 4, current from Norway to the Urals and the Lower
Volga,1 may be descended from Maglemosian spiked weapons.

For woodworking, antler wedges2 and socketed bone chisels remained
in use in Norway as in North Central Russia, but in the north were
supplemented by more efficient adzes, gouges, and chisels of polished
stone (Fig. 104, 3); in Central Russia such tools of polished stone are
not apparently found before the rise of the Fatyanovo culture. So too
the Maglemosian boars’ tusk knife survived in Norway, Sweden, and
Central Russia,3 but was translated into slate in the north, giving
rise to forms like Fig. 106,1.

For land transport the man-pulled sleighs of Boreal age were supple-
mented by dog sleighs, represented by runners found from Sweden
to the Urals and dated in Finland as early as F.II.4 A still heavier
sledge, suited for reindeer traction, is attributed to “the transition from
the Stone to the Bronze Age” in Finland. Skis too are attested in
Finland and Sweden.5 For use on water, the skin boats, inferred for
the Maglemosian, are actually depicted in a Norwegian rock engrav-
ing,6 while paddles of the Maglemosian type have been dug up from
Ural peat.

Each little group of hunter-fishers could be self-sufficing, but this
economic independence did not exclude interchanges of goods and
materials. Indeed, the seasonal hunting trips, imposed by their pre-
datory mode of subsistance, might well be combined with inter-
communal barter and easily grow into trading expeditions. So Russian
flint was largely imported into Finland during F.II, but was ousted
by Scandinavian flint in F.III.7 Chisels like Fig. 104, 3, were manu-
factured east of the Baltic, but were imported into Sweden.8 Forest
folk had discovered the amber deposits of Sammland and carved it in
their own naturalistic style, but exported it to Norway, Central
Germany, Finland, and Central Russia.9 Becker10 has convincingly
attributed to Forest hunter-fishers the surprisingly wide distribution
of South Swedish or Danish flint attested by regular hoards of celts
from Northern Scandinavia while Clark11 has envisaged an export of
dried cod from Norway in return.

1   Ailio, Wohnplatzfunde, 29, 33; SGAIMK. (1931), No. 6, 7, found with, contracted
skeleton in an “ochre grave”.

2   Veretye and Kubenino, MIA., XXIX; Lyalovo, near Moscow, RAZ., XIV (1925), 37.

3   Fv. (1924), 298; RAZ., XIV, loc. cit.

4   SM., LVI (1949), 1-26.

6 SM., XLI, 1-10.

6   Clark, Preh. Europe, 283, pi. IV, b.

7   Acta Arch., I, 210.

8   Real., VI, 222.

9   Brogger, Den arktiske Stenalder, 185; Real., 1, 436; IGAIMK., 106, 132.

10   Aarboger (1950), 155-245.   11 Preh. Europe, 88, 256.

208
 SURVIVALS OF THE FOREST CULTURE

The ideology, as far as it is expressed in the archaeological record, was
as uniform as the economy on which it reposed, So the dead were
always buried extended, often accompanied by lumps of red ochre
or sprinkled with that colouring matter, either on camp sites or in
distinct cemeteries.1 The latter are usually very small, 8 to 22 inter-
ments, but those at Vasterbjers on Gotland comprised 49 graves,
on Deer Island in Lake Onega over 150.2 In the latter cemetery five
bodies had been interred standing erect in deep pits and accompanied
by an exceptional profusion of hunting weapons of flint and bone (all
of types appropriate to F.O.!) and personal ornaments. They must
belong to chiefs and reveal distinctions in rank within hunter-fisher
societies.

At least east of the Baltic human figures, some explicitly male,
were carved in bone or wood and later modelled in clay.1 2 3 The ideological
purpose they doubtless served was probably not the same as that
fulfilled by the familiar female statuettes made by neolithic peasants,
and the style is quite different. In Norway elks and reindeer were
engraved on rocks in a style as realistic as the Magdalenian.4 In Sweden
and North Russia5 figures of animals, birds and men and even ritual
scenes were pecked out on ice-smoothed surfaces in a far more con-
ventional manner. Beasts and birds were carved realistically in bone,
stone, and wood by all the Forest hunter-fisher tribes, but curious little
flint sculptures6 are concentrated rather in Eastern Russia from the
Oka to the White Sea.

The authors of these relatively uniform cultures did not constitute
a racially homogeneous population. Most of the skulls from sites in
North and Central Russia are described as Lapponoid, some as Euro-
peoid, Mongoloid or hybrid,7 and even on Gotland one skull has been
diagnosed as Mongoloid.

The most economical account of the hunter-fisher cultures just
surveyed would be to treat them all as derived by divergent adaptation
from the North Sea—West Baltic Maglemosian of the Boreal phase.

1   North Russian burials are described and listed by Gerasimov, Vostanovlenie litsa po
Herepu (Trudy Inst. Etnografiya, XXVIII), Moscow, 1955, 328-65. Stenberger, Das
Grabfeld . . the cemetery should be Northern III, D, or F.III.

2   SA., VI (1940), 46-62; Ravdonikas dates the cemetery to F.III or IV, but Briusov
(Oberki, 108) to the Atlantic phase, i.e. F.O.! See also Gerasimov, op. cit.

3   Foss, MIA., XXIX, 35 ff.; Ayrapaa, SM., XLVIII (1941), 82-119. Save perhaps
for the bone figurine from Deer I., all seem late.

4   Boe, Felsenzeichnungen in westlichen Norwegen (Bergen, 1932).

s Ravdonikas, Les Gravures rupestres des bords du lac Onega et de la Mer Blanche
Trudy Inst. Etnografiya), Moscow, 1936, 1938.

6   Zamiatnin, “Miniatiurnye kremnevye skulptury", SA., X (1948); Hausler, IFiss.
Zts. d. Martin-Luther Universitat, HaUe-Wittenberg, III (1954), 767-82.

7   Briusov, Oberki, 35-6; KS. Inst. Etnografiya, XVIII (1953), 55-65; Gerasimov,
Vostanovlenie litsa (1955), 296-395.

O

209
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

The anthropological data would suffice to exclude such an over-
simplification. Becker1, without of course denying its Maglemosian
constituents, regards the culture symbolized by the pit-comb ware of
Scandinavia as introduced there immediately from beyond the Baltic.
Russian prehistorians deny vehemently all dependence of the Central
Russian, Uralian, and Siberian aspects on the Baltic cultures. Accord-
ing to Briusov,1 2 the Urals would have been colonized in early post-
glacial times from the Aral-Caspian basin, Central Russia and the East
Baltic from the Pontic region; the classical cultures distinguished by
pit-comb ware would have crystalized in the Oka-Upper Volga and
Upper Dniepr basins. His account involves rather heavy draughts on
ignorance. The early cultures of the North Pontic zone and Trans-
caspia are still very ill-defined. The chronological relations of assem-
blages from the Ural peat bogs, from sand-dune sites in the Oka-Volga
basin, and even from the White Sea-Onega-Ladoga belt to those
collected round the Baltic are quite ambiguous. Few pollen-diagrams3
have been published, and their interpretation in terms of the West
Baltic zonation remains disputable.

Types proper to the Boreal phase round the Baltic do indeed occur
in the Ural bogs, but their context is unknown. They might theoretic-
ally have spread westward rather than eastward, but without inde-
pendent evidence of date no final decision is justified. So, too, ovoid
pots, similar in technique to the Swedish and Finnish, are found both
in Siberia4 and across the Pontic steppes to the Caucasus.5 The coarse
ware, associated with Tripolye pottery at all stages, is technically
akin to pit-comb ware. Whipped-cord patterns that might have
inspired Finnish styles I and II6 were at some time very popular in
the Ukraine and Dniepr basin. But the relative antiquity of all these
phenomena is uncertain. The apparent brevity of culture sequences
round the Urals, in Central Russia, and in the Ukraine gives the West
Baltic a semblance of priority. But that brevity is partly due to de-
ficiencies of exploration and of publication and, in so far as archaeo-
logical events are occasioned by climatic changes or land movements,
to the greater stability of the continental environment.

The archaeological data here summarized do prove that the hunter-
fisher populations of the taiga zone, however sparse, constituted a
continuum for cultural transmissions all through the circumpolar zone

1   Aarb0ger (1950), 251.

2   Oierki, 30-40, 164-74, 147-49; Ayrapaa, too, seems to favour a south-east origin

for pit-comb ware, FM., LXII, 32.   3 TGIM., XXIX (1956), 70.

4   E.g. MIA., XVIII, 169 if.; but some pots in addition to pits bear net impressions.

6 HanCar, Kaukasiens, pi. XXIX.

6 A. Rosenberg, Kulturstromungen in Europa zur Steinzeit (Copenhagen, 1931).

210
 SURVIVALS OF THE FOREST CULTURE

of Eurasia and between it and the parklands and steppes to the south.
They prove too that this was not a one-way traffic, but they give no
measure of the relative importance of contributions from the east, the
south, and the west respectively. The technique of bifacial retouch on
flint flakes and blades is more likely to have reached the north from
the south-east than from the south-west; the contemporary apprecia-
tion of amber must have been diffused in the opposite direction. The
heavier bow introduced into Denmark by the pit-comb traders may
have been of the composite type attested in Siberia by the Serovo
stage1 and ancestral to the Turko-Mongolian type, but even the
Maglemosian bows had been re-inforced with sinews. The transmission
through the food-gathering cultures of the taiga of Asiatic contributions
to European civilization is in fact better attested in Sub-Boreal than
in Boreal times, but still eludes precise evaluation.

The cultural continuum thus constituted was disrupted by the
arrival of warlike farmers and herdsmen of the Boat Axe and Fat-
yanovo cultures. The former occupied the East Baltic coastlands, but
beyond a frontier, sharply defined in Finland,2 left undisturbed the
old hunter-fishers. These preserved intact the old ceramic tradition
of pit-comb ware, though they sometimes used asbestos as temper
for the pots, and continued to rely on stone implements and weapons

Fig. 107. Knives and axe from Seima hoard: 1, (•£); 2, ($); 3 (detail of 2), (J); 4-5, (?£).

with the addition of local imitations of boat axes even when a few
imported socketed axes of Swedish Malar and East Russian Ananino
types3 proclaim that the Final Bronze Age had already been reached
in Denmark and Southern Sweden. So too in Central Russia the Fat-
yanovo warriors did not replace the older population of the Volga
valley. Camp sites, yielding pottery made in conformity with the old

1   Okladnikov, MIA., XVIII (1950), 220.

2   SM., LIX (1952), 6-24.   3 ESA., XI (1937), 16-30; MIA., XX (1951), 133.

211
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

prescriptions, though now sometimes decorated with textile impressions,
illustrate the survival of a predominantly neolithic hunter-fisher
population when socketed celts and other metal types represented in
the hoard from Seima (on the Oka west of Gorki)1 were filtering in
from the Late Bronze Age cultures of the srubno phase to the south and
east. The realistic elk’s head of the Seima knife-handle (Fig. 107, 2-3)
has indeed analogues in Siberian and Chinese bronze-work,2 but
springs from the naturalistic art of the Eurasiatic hunter-fishers and
can be closely matched not only on stone battle-axes that have turned
up from Norway to the Urals3 but also on the bone dagger from the
Deer Island cemetery on Lake Onega. But such belated survivals of
the Stone Age lie outside the scope of this book.

1   Tallgren, “Ett viktigt fornfynd", FM. (1915), 73 ff., and ESA., II (1926), 137,
remains the best publication of this “hoard”.

2   Childe, Inst. Arch., AR., X (1954), II_25-

3   Clark, Northern Europe, 186; SM., XXXV (1928), 36-43.

For further details consult in additions to works mentioned in the footnotes:

on Norway: “Vistefundet”, Stavanger Museums Arsheft, 1907; Gjessing, Norges
Sten&lder (Oslo, 1945).

on Latvia: Balodis, Det aldsta Lettland (Uppsala, 1940).
on Estonia: Moora, Die Vorzeit Estlands (Tartu, 1932).
on Finland: Ailio, Steinzeitliche Wohnplatzfunde in Finland (Helsinki, 1909).
on the whole region: Gjessing, “The Circum-Polar Stone Age”, ActaArctica, II (Copen-
hagen, 1944).

212
 CHAPTER XII

MEGALITH BUILDERS AND BEAKER-FOLK
Megalithic Tombs

The diffusion of Oriental culture in Western Europe must have been
effected in part by maritime intercourse. And evidence of such inter-
course is supposedly afforded by the architecture of groups of tombs
spread significantly along the coasts of the Mediterranean and the
Atlantic and along terrestrial routes joining these coasts. Judged by
their contents, the tombs in question do not belong to a single culture
and were not therefore erected and used by a single people. But archi-
tectural details recur with such regularity at so many distinct places
that a general survey of the main types at this stage will save repetition.

The most intriguing tombs of the series, which consequently received
the first attention from archaeologists, are built of extravagantly large
stones. They are therefore termed “megalithic”. But as the same plans
are followed in tombs built in dry masonry with small stones and in
others excavated in the ground (;rock-cut tombs) the application of the
term to the whole series is misleading. In Portugal,1 for instance,
beehive chambers entered through a low, narrow passage were exca-
vated in hillsides where the soft limestone facilitated digging. Where
the subsoil was shallow and the rock hard, the same plan was repro-
duced above ground in dry-stone masonry roofed by corbelling if the
local sandstone or schists broke naturally into convenient slabs. Where
the rock is more refractory, like granite, large blocks set on end,
orthostats, supporting large capstones or lintels form the framework for
chamber and passage. And tombs constructed by all three methods
often contain the same furniture.

Many authorities2 therefore contend that in such regions the method
of construction is conditioned by local geology alone. That thesis will
be adopted in the sequel with the reservation that it is not universally
applicable. “Rock-cut” tombs could easily have been excavated in
the chalk of the English Downs, but in fact the burial chambers here

1   V. Correia, "El Neolitico de Pavia”, Mem. CIPP., XXVII (1921). 63 f.; cf. Forde,
Am. Anthr., XXXII (1930), 41.

2   Elliot Smith, "The Evolution of the Rock-cut Tomb and Dolmen”, in Essays and
Studies presented to Sir William Ridgeway (Cambridge, 1913), was a pioneer in this
interpretation.

213
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

were always built above ground. At Antequera and other cemeteries
in Southern Spain (p. 274), orthostatic and corbelled tombs—of differ-
ent plans'—stand side by side. In such instances the method of con-
struction must have been dictated exclusively by the traditional
prejudices of the tombs' builders. In a preliminary survey, however,
it is community of plan that is most significant.

Among a bewildering variety of local deviations it is convenient to
distinguish two main types—Passage Graves consisting of a chamber
entered by a distinct passage, lower and narrower than the chamber

Fig. 108. Rock-cut tomb, Castelluccio, and corbelled tomb,
Los Millares.

proper; and Long Cists (Gallery Graves) in which the chamber itself is
long and narrow and entered directly through a portal without any
preceding passage. But if this conventional distinction be rigidly main-
tained, it leads to quite arbitrary classifications. A tomb like Fig. 153
is on plan as much a Gallery Grave as Fig. 109, but by its furniture
and method of construction it belongs to the same group as Fig. 152.
Long Cists may be covered by long or round barrows and so may
Passage Graves. No complex of relics is peculiar to one type rather than
the other save that the SOM culture (p. 312) is regularly associated
with Long Cists of the Paris type. Hence even in Western Europe the
facts do not authorize us to postulate the diffusion of two distinct
versions of the “megalithic idea”.1

The Passage Grave is the most widely distributed type, being com-

1 Of. Daniel, PPS., VII (1941), 1-49.

214

[Prometheus]

 MEGALITH BUILDERS AND BEAKER-FOLK

mon throughout the East Mediterranean area, in Sicily, Sardinia,
Southern Spain, Portugal, Brittany, Central Ireland, Northern Scot-
land, Denmark, South Sweden, and Holland. Cellular annexes open
off the main chamber in the rock-hewn tombs of the East Mediter-
ranean, Sardinia, and the Balearic Islands and in some corbelled
tombs in Southern Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and Scotland, in a few
orthostatic tombs in Brittany and Denmark. Roughly circular chambers
characterize the corbelled tombs of Crete and the Cyclades, the earlier
rock-hewn tombs of Sicily, and many South Spanish, Portuguese,
Breton, Irish, and Scottish sepultures and the oldest Danish ones. A
corbelled passage grave of circular plan is often called a tholos (Figs. 44
and 108).

In rock-cut tombs the passage is often a descending ramp. Where
the ground surface is nearly level it may be reduced to a stepped shaft,
producing the pit-cave (Fig. 25, 2) already encountered in Greece and
South Russia and to meet us again in Sicily. If the chamber is cut in
the face of a cliff, the passage may be abbreviated to a mere doorway
as often in Sicily (Fig. 108). A well-marked variety of passage grave,
built with large orthostats, has been termed an undifferentiated passage
grave because the passage gradually expands towards the chamber
which is generally bottle-shaped. Near Arles and in the Balearic Isles
the rock-hewn chambers are themselves long and narrow and not
preceded by any length of passage though cellular annexes sometimes
open off the chamber (Fig. 109). In Menorca the same type is repro-
duced above ground in dry-stone masonry in so-called navetas.

The long stone cist or gallery reproduces this Balearic plan in ortho-
static masonry. In Sardinia the orthostats support dry-stone walling
corbelled in to a barrel vault. But in the classic form represented in
the Paris basin, Brittany and Jersey, Belgium, Western and Central
Germany, and Sweden the uprights support the lintels, and the long
narrow rectangular chamber is preceded by a short porch as wide as
the chamber. Most cists of the Paris type are subterranean, being built
in an excavated trench. Variants on the long cist occur in South Italy,
Sardinia, Northern Spain, France, Britain, Denmark, and Holland.
On the slopes of the Pyrenees, in Northern Ireland, and South-West
Scotland gallery graves are divided into a series of intercommunicating
compartments by low, transverse slabs, termed septal stones, sometimes
combined with upright portals; such tombs are known as segmented
cists (Fig. no).

Dolmen is a term applied sometimes to any megalithic tomb, but
generally only to small rectangular or polygonal chambers without
entrance passage, formed of three to six megalithic uprights. Even

215
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

when thus restricted, the name obscures the genetic and functional
variety of the monuments to which it is applied. Some “dolmens", for

instance in Sardinia1 and in the Cotswolds,2 appear to be just the most
stubborn remains of more complex monuments destroyed by culti-

1   Antiquity, XIII, 376.

2   Crawford, Long Barrows of the Cotswolds, 21; Daniel, Antiquity, XI (1937), 183-200.

2l6
 MEGALITH BUILDERS AND BEAKER-FOLK

vators or road-builders. Some are closed chambers, not collective
tombs. Others are obviously just abbreviated gallery graves.1 To
avoid confusion we have used the Danish name dyss (plural dysser) for
dolmens which are marked by furniture as well as structure as a distinct
type. But even the classical dyss, as defined on p. 181, might be regarded
as a segmented cist abbreviated to one compartment only.

The portal of the tomb was treated with special care, and one form
—termed the porthole slab—must be mentioned here. A round or sub-
rectangular aperture, 45 to 80 cm. (1 ft. 6 in. to 2 ft. 8 in.) across is

Fig. 110. Segmented cist in horned cairn, North Ireland, and Giants’
Tomb, Sardinia.

cut out in a slab—or in the proximal edges of two juxtaposed slabs—
which closes the entrance to chamber or passage (Figs. 81 and 100).
Porthole slabs were a regular feature in Caucasian '‘dolmens” and
occur even in the Indian ones. They form the portals to megalithic
cists and rock-cut tombs in Sicily, to the gallery graves of Sardinia, to
corbelled and other passage graves in Southern Spain,2 to long cists
of the Paris type not only in the Seine valley, but also in Brittany,
Jersey, Central Germany, and Sweden; they were even incorporated in
the megalithic temples of Malta.3 A porthole stone often enhances the
resemblance of a built tomb's doorway to the entry into a natural

1   For instance Adam’s Grave near Dunoon is just a segmented cist reduced to a
single segment.

2   Marburger Studien, I (1938), 147-55.

3 Arch., LXVIII, 266.
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

or artificial cave. The desire to emphasize the similarity has in fact
been suggested as an explanation for the porthole stone’s origin.1 But
a porthole slab was employed to form the portal of a tomb cut in
friable rock at Monte Salia,1 2 and the device does not always simulate
a cave mouth at all realistically.

Built chamber tombs, when not erected in an artificial excavation,
were probably always put underground artificially by burial in a
mound or cairn. The latter was always carefully constructed and was
often, if not always, supported by a built masonry revetment wall,
or by a peristalith of large uprights. Masonry revetments are well
illustrated in the Balearic navetas, in some Almerian round cairns, and
in the long cairns of the Cotswolds and Northern Scotland. But it is
doubtful whether these finely built walls were intended to be seen
in Britain, since the faces were masked deliberately by an “extra
revetment”3 of slabs piled obliquely.

The passage or portal of a chamber tomb often gives on to a fore-
court so carefully planned that it must have played an essential part
in funerary ritual. Semicircular forecourts cut in the rock precede
some Siculan tombs, and are delimited by built walls in front of Sar-
dinian gallery graves and North Scottish passage graves and by ortho-
stats in front of tholoi at Los Millares in Almeria and Barro in Portugal
and of North Irish and South-West Scottish segmented cists4 (Figs. 108
and no). In England the forecourts are more often cuspidal in plan,
as are those connected with one or two Mycenaean, Danish, Swedish,
and Armorican passage graves.5 More careful examinations of the
environs of chamber tombs or of the barrows covering them will
certainly reveal the presence of forecourts in other regions. Despite
their careful construction, the forecourts in Great Britain are generally
found filled up with earth and rubble. This filling may be deliberate.
In any case the entrances to tombs have usually been intentionally
blocked up and hidden. That need not mean, as Hemp6 has inferred,
that the numerous skeletons found in such tombs had all been laid
to rest simultaneously, after which the vault was finally sealed up.
The initiated could always rediscover the entrance and remove the
blocking, as happened at Mycenae (p. 82). Irrefutable evidence of the

1   Kendrick, Axe Age, 48.

2   BP., XLIII, 17, fig. 6.

3   Arch., LXXXVI, 132; PPS., IV (1938), 201.

* BP., XVIII, 75; Ausonia, I, 7; Not. Sc. (1920), 304; Correia, “Pavia”, 72; Childe,
Prehistory of Scotland, 26, 33. Vestiges of such a forecourt can be seen in Balearic
navetas (CIPMO,, 26), and with timber revetmentin English unchambered long-barrows
(p. 325, below).

5   Nordmann, Megalithic, figs. 36-9.

6   Arch. Camb. (1927), 13, 17.

218
 MEGALITH BUILDERS AND BEAKER-FOLK

use of tombs for successive interments is forthcoming from one or
two graves in Scotland, Brittany, and Denmark,1 as at Mycenae.

The distribution of chamber tombs is presumably due to the spread
of some religious idea expressed in funerary ritual. Save in Egypt, they
seem everywhere to have served as collective sepulchres or family
vaults. A family likeness between the skeletons buried in the same
tomb has been reported in England and Denmark2 as at Mycenae, and
the features noted in Crete (p. 23: fires kindled in the chamber, con-
fusion of bones) are repeated almost universally. Collective burial
alone can hardly represent the unifying idea, since collective burial in
natural caves was practised even in mesolithic Palestine (p. 23). It
has indeed been suggested that the tombs were just copies of cave
ossuaries,3 and Wheeler4 describes the erection of megalithic tombs as
“the mass production of artificial caves” by populations accustomed
to collective burial in natural ones. But in Scotland and elsewhere
perfectly good natural caves were neglected; collective burial comes
in simultaneously with megalithic sepulchral architecture. But mega-
lithic tombs were not always used as communal ossuaries. The finest
tholoi, the Mycenaean, were designed for a single chieftain and perhaps
his spouse. The most elaborate rock-cut tombs of the Marne contain
only a few skeletons, the rest a hundred or so. Moreover, burial practices
were far from uniform. While inhumation, generally in the contracted
attitude, was everywhere the normal practice, cases of cremation have
been reported from many South Spanish, South French, Armorican,
and British tombs and are conclusively attested in Northern Ireland.

It is in fact only detailed agreements in seemingly arbitrary peculi-
arities of plan and in accessories, such as porthole slabs and forecourts,
that justify the interpretation of megalithic tombs as evidences of the
diffusion of ideas. The grave goods afford little support for this inter-
pretation. They are characterized at first by purely local idiosyncrasies
and would suggest to the typologist differences in date. In Egypt,
Cyprus, and the Aegean even the earliest tombs contain a relative
abundance of metal objects, and such are not uncommon even in the
first Siculan and Sardinian vaults. Moreover, in all these regions
chamber tombs continued to be built and used even in the Iron Age.
In Portugal, as in Malta, some megalithic tombs seem to be genuinely
pre-metallic, but in most tombs in the Iberian Peninsula and South
France, too, despite numerous stone tools, the grave goods are explicitly
Copper Age, while during the Bronze Age collective burial in chamber

3   Childe, Scotland, 43; Nordmann, Megalithic, 28.

2 PPS., TV, 147; Aarboger (1915), 3x9; Nordmann, Megalithic, 30.

8 Hemp, in PPS., I (1935), no.

4   In Eyre, European Civilization, II, 182.

219
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

tombs went out of fashion. In Brittany metal is exceptional in chamber
tombs. In Great Britain and the rest of North-Western Europe such
tombs contain an exclusively neolithic furniture and in general went
out of use as bronze became available.

This disparity has been used to support the thesis that megalithic
tombs, invented in the extreme north or in Portugal in a fabulously
ancient Stone Age, were carried thence to reach South Spain in the
Copper Age and the iEgean in a still later Bronze Age. In reality the
quantity of metal from the tombs is no criterion of their absolute age.
In North Europe we have proved conclusively that at least the later
“Stone Age” passage graves and long cists were in use during the full
Bronze Age or Danubian period IV in Central Europe and that none
of the dysser even need be appreciably older than period III. On the
short chronology outlined on p. 339 megalith building in Denmark
should begin about 2500 b.c., or several centuries later than the Early
Minoan and Cycladic tombs, to say nothing of the Egyptian.

The extreme rarity of metal and indeed of other imported objects
in the megalithic tombs of Northern and North-Western Europe seems
an almost fatal objection to the theory that the idea of building such
tombs was diffused by “prospectors" or “Children of the Sun”1 setting
out from Egypt or some other East Mediterranean centre to settle in
regions where ores or precious stones, valued for magical qualities as
givers of life, were to be found. There is a general, but far from exact,
correlation between the distribution of such substances (for instance,
copper in the Iberian Peninsula, the Pyrenees, Sardinia, Ireland,
Galloway, and the Crinan district, tin in Galicia and Cornwall, gold
in Brittany, Ireland, and the Strath of Kildonan, pearls in Orkney,
amber in Jutland, etc.) and foci of megalithic architecture. The tomb
furnitures afford surprisingly little evidence for the exploitation of
these resources (no Scottish copper, gold, or pearls have been found in
a local megalith) and none whatever of Egyptian or JEgean imports
obtained in exchange for their exportation. Yet such products would
be expected in the graves of merchant princes enjoying such prestige
that they could persuade local savages laboriously, if rather barbar-
ously, to copy for them the sepultures appropriate to their rank at
home, and inspired also with the desire for securing their own immor-
tality by necklaces of pearls and gold beads.

The rarity or complete absence of imports from megalithic tombs
is furthermore a serious obstacle to their correlation with any inde-
pendent sequence of cultures by which their relative or absolute age
might be determined. Once in Sicily, very frequently in Sardinia, the

1   Perry, The Growth of Civilization,

220
 MEGALITH BUILDERS AND BEAKER-FOLK

Iberian Peninsula, South France, and Brittany, occasionally in Scot-
land and even Denmark, Bell-beakers or their derivatives are found
in megalithic tombs of almost every form. From individual tombs in
Brittany, Spain, Scotland, and Denmark1 it has been proved con-
clusively that the Beakers were associated only with the later inter-
ments in the tombs concerned. The Beaker-folk cannot therefore have
been the vehicles in the original diffusion of the “megalithic idea”, nor
can their expansion, which reached the Danube basin late in period III,
fix the relative age of the earlier chamber tombs.

Gallery graves in Central France, Brittany, and Jersey and even
in the Balearic Islands and Southern Sweden regularly contain relics
of the Horgen culture (p. 198). Indeed, it may be said that Horgen folk
diffused the Paris type of long cist to Brittany and across Germany to
Sweden. In Central Europe the Horgen culture too seems to belong to
a late phase of period III, and lasts into IV. But megalithic tombs are
not attached to the best-dated Horgen settlements, and the long cist
may be a secondary accretion in their culture.

In default of better founded chronologies, a resort to typology is
tempting. In Scandinavia the sequence, dyss (dolmen), passage grave,
long stone cist really seems to hold good, though it is no longer regarded,
as it was by Montelius, as a self-contained process of evolution and
degeneration. Similar sequences have been applied by Leeds, Ober-
maier, and Bosch-Gimpera1 2 to the Iberian Peninsula, and by Mackenzie
to Sardinia.3 Bosch-Gimpera, by labelling some ruinous tombs in
Northern Portugal “dolmens”, traces their development into ortho-
static passage graves, rock-cut tombs, and lastly tholoi. But of the
Iberian Peninsula Forde could write4 quite justly, “small passage
dolmens have a poorer, but not earlier furniture and represent a pro-
vincial degradation typical of peripheral areas”. In the sequel, however,
it has been established that some orthostatic passage graves are really
earlier than any tholoi in Portugal, while the still unpublished furniture
is said to confirm the yet higher antiquity of “small dolmens”, con-
taining it would seem only a single burial. Mackenzie’s "dolmens” in
Sardinia prove on closer examination to be just badly ruined Giants’
Grave.5 Only in Denmark is the priority in time of the simplest types
proved by grave goods. But even in Denmark out of hundreds of dysser
only 57 are dated by their contents to Northern II; a very large

1   L’Anthr., XLIII (1933), 248; Childe, Scotland, 43; Nordmann, “Megalithic", 122;
Leisner, Megalithgrdber, 554.

2   Arch., LXX, 215 £f.; "El Dolmen de Matarxibilla’’ (CIPP., 26); Real., X, 358;
Rev. Anthr., XL (1930), 244 ff.; Prehistoire, II (1933), 189 f.

3   BSR., V (1910), 87-137; VI, 127-70.

4   Am. Anthr., XXXII, 16.   s Antiquity, XIII (1939), 376-7.

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 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

proportion must have been built, like the passage graves, during
period III.1

No new typology need be attempted here. The architectural agree-
ments cited reveal the megalithic province as a cultural continuum.
Within that continuum culture grows in every aspect poorer as we
pass westward and northward from the East Mediterranean to Scotland
and Denmark. We see the same sort of cultural zoning that has been
disclosed in the Danubian corridor and on the Eurasiatic plain.

Beaker Traders

The Beaker-folk was a principal agency in opening up communications,
establishing commercial relations, and diffusing the practice of metal-

4

Fig. iii. Beaker pottery: i, (i) and 2 ($), Palmella, Portugal; 3, La
Halliade, South France (•£); 4, Villafrati, Sicily (?£).

lurgy. We have already mentioned their activities in Central Europe,
and they will meet us so frequently in the West that a brief characteriza-
tion becomes convenient at this point.

1 Brendsted, Danmarks, 198, 345.

222

[Prometheus]

 MEGALITH BUILDERS AND BEAKER-FOLK

Beaker-folk can be recognized not only by their economic activities
but also by the distinctive armament, ornaments, and above all
pottery, associated together everywhere in their graves. Indeed, the
inevitable drinking-cup, which gives a name to its users, may be more
than a readily recognized diagnostic symptom; it symbolizes beer as
one source of their influence, as a vodka flask or a gin bottle would
disclose an instrument of European domination in Siberia and Africa
respectively. Millet grains1 were in fact found in a beaker in Portugal.

The Beaker-folk are known principally from graves which never
form large cemeteries. When their pottery and other relics are found
in settlements, they are normally mixed, save perhaps in Central
Spain, with remains distinctive of other groups. Thus Beaker-folk
appear as bands of armed merchants who engaged in trading copper,
gold, amber, callals, and similar scarce substances which are frequently
found in their graves. The bands included smiths—the mould for
casting a West European dagger was found in a Moravian Beaker
grave1 2 3—and women who everywhere fashioned the distinctive vases
with scrupulous attention to traditional details of form and ornament.
They roved from the Moroccan coasts8 and Sicily to the North Sea
coasts, and from Portugal and Brittany to the Tisza and the Vistula.4
Sometimes they settled down, by preference in regions of natural
wealth or at the junctions of important routes. At times they obtained
economic and political authority over established communities of
different cultures, formed hybrid groups with these, and even led them
on farther wanderings; the Beaker groups that invaded Britain give
indications of composite origin.

A detailed study of Beaker pottery does not disclose a single and
irreversible expansion. It suggests an early uniformity so remarkable
as to be hardly explicable merely by the rapidity of a migration and the
conservatism of the migrants followed by the emergence of distinct
local groups, but the maintenance of intercourse between some of these
at least. The “classical” or “Pan-European” beaker (Fig in, 3-4),5 *
made of relatively fine grit-tempered ware coated with a burnished

1   CIA A., 1930 (Portugal), 356.

2   Casopis vlastenickeho spolku museijniho v Olomouci, XLI (1929), T. 11; Forssander,
Ostskand. Norden, 70.

3   Germania, XXXIII (1955). 13-22.

1 General review in A. del Castillo, La Culture :I:l Yr.i :t,:: *- 7;-*-f (Barcelona,
1928), and “Cronologia de la cultura del vaso <';.? .i;-, r'v •'.>i r- < EspaHol de
Archeologia, LIII (1943), 388-435; (1944), 1-67; add for Belgium, Marien, Bui. Musdes
roy. d'Art et d’Hist. (Brussels, 1948), 16-48; for Poland, 2urowski, Wiad. Arch., XI
(1932), 116-56; for Central Germany, Neumann, PZ., XX (1929), 35 ff.; for North
Germany, NNU., II (1928), 25 £f.; X, 20; for Holland, Bursch, Oudh. Med., XIV (1933),
39-122.

5 Savory, Revista Guimardes, LX (1950), 363 ff.

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 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

slip that is liable to peel off and brick red to black in colour, is decorated
with zones of "rouletted” hatchings, alternating with plain zones. The
“rouletted” decoration is executed with a comb with very short teeth,
separated by extremely narrow interstices and probably with a curved
edge. It yields a practically continuous “hyphenated line" of round or,
more often, rectangular dots, separated by low septa. The horizontal
zones may be combined with a radial decoration on the base.

This classic Pan-European style is represented in nearly every
region1 reached by the Beaker-folk, though it grows less common and
characteristic as one goes eastward from the Rhine-Brenner line. But
wherever Beaker-folk settled down at all, local styles grew up. These
are presumably in general later and specialized variants on the origin-
ally common theme. On the other hand, an Iberic style using sharply
incised or stamped lines (well represented at Ciempozuelos and Pal-
mella) (Fig. hi, 1-2) is possibly older than the classic style.2 Be that
as it may, some local or derivative styles have such a wide distribution
that they must denote secondary intercourse if the dispersion of the
rouletted style be ascribed to a primary expansion. For instance,
beakers decorated by a cord, wrapped spirally round the vase, occur
in Northern Holland, Scotland, Brittany, and South France.3

In the Iberian Peninsula, South France, and Central Europe beakers
are often associated in graves with shallow hemispherical bowls decor-
ated in the same technique but more often with patterns radiating
from the base (Fig. in, 2).

A distinctive weapon associated everywhere with the Beaker com-
plex is the tanged West European knife-dagger (Fig. 113, 2). The tang
may be flanged; the hilt, never riveted to the blade, was hollowed at
the base in the Egyptian manner explained on p. 130. Flint copies
were frequently made as substitutes at least for funerary use. But
Beaker-folk were primarily bowmen. Arrows were normally tipped
with tanged-and-barbed flint heads in Western Europe, with hollow-
based heads in Holland, Central Europe, and Upper Italy. In Central
Europe (including Italy and Poland), Holland, and Great Britain,
rarely also in Brittany, but only once certainly in Spain,* the Beaker
archer wore a concave plaque of stone perforated at the four corners

1   E.g. Castillo, pis. VII, 4 (Andalusia); L, 2 (Portugal); LXI (Castellon); LXXVI,

1   (Catalonia); LXXXIV (Galicia); XCIV (Hautes Pyrenees); CIII (Brittany); CXIX,

2   (Sicily); CXXIII (Po valley); CL, 7 (Bohemia); CLII, 8 (Moravia); CLXXXII, 2
(Middle Rhine).

8 Nordmann, "Megalithic”, 100; A etas y Mem., XIV (1935), Noticiario, 5; Bosch-
Gimpera, Man, XL (1940), 2; but the stratigraphy of Somaen on which the latter relies
does not, as published, afford any clue as to the relations between my “classic” and
“grand” styles; Savory, lac. cit., 169.

a Childe, Scotland, 83; PCBI., 93.

4   Corona d'Estudis dedica a sus Martires (Madrid, 1941), 128.

224
 MEGALITH BUILDERS AND BEAKER-FOLK

as a wrist-guard for protection against the recoil of the bow-string
(Fig. 112). In South France, Brittany, and Bohemia1 thin strips of
gold-leaf (Fig. 113, 4), similarly perforated for the same purpose. Thick

Fig. 112. Beaker, -wrist-guard, and associated vases, Silesia.
After Seger (J).

Fig. 113. West European dagger (Bohemia) and flint copy (Silesia); arrow-straightener
(Wiltshire); gold-leaf from wrist-guard and copper awl, Bohemia (?£).

* Mat., 1881, 552; Cazalis de Fondouce, Les Allies couvertes de Provence', L’Anthr.
XLIV, 507; Childe, Danube, 191, 193.

P   225
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

clay plaques of the same plan, but flat and also perforated at the corners,
are found on Beaker sites in Portugal and Spain and may also have
been used as wrist-guards. Stone arrow-straighteners,1 used by Beaker-
folk in Bohemia and Poland and also in Sardinia, do not seem to be
an original part of their equipment since in Central Europe they appear
in pre-Beaker times, in Britain only in the early Middle Bronze Age,
well after the Beaker invasions were over.

A distinctive element of the Beaker-folk’s costume was a button of
stone, bone, amber, or jet with V perforations.

In Northern Sicily, Sardinia, the Iberian Peninsula, South France
and Brittany, and the Channel Islands, Beakers and their normal
associated armaments are found, generally accompanied by relics
distinctive of other cultures, in collective sepulchres—natural caves,2
rock-cut tombs,3 tholoi,4 orthostatic passage graves,5 gallery graves,6
and segmented cists.7 In no case, however, do they demonstrably
accompany the primary interments, while in isolated instances they
were proved to be secondary (p. 327). Beaker-folk had sometimes
obtained admission to the families or clans entitled to burial in such
sepulchres, but arrived only after the tombs were erected. In North
Italy and throughout Central Europe, Beaker-folk were interred
individually and strictly contracted, in simple trench graves.

These form cemeteries comprising in Moravia as many as thirty
graves,8 but normally considerably less, as if the communities settled
in one place were small. But the Beaker-folk must have settled down
and multiplied in Central Europe, since the total numbers of Beaker
burials recorded from Bohemia is about 300, from Saxo-Thuringia 103,9
and from the small province of Veluwe in Holland 150.10 Settled in
Central Europe, the Beaker-folk formed hybrid cultures through con-
tact with other groups. In Moravia some adopted cremation and
burial under barrows perhaps from Battle-axe folk. From these in the
Rhineland, Holland, and North Germany Beaker-folk adopted barrow-
burial, battle-axes, and some elements even in ceramic decoration,
including presumably the use of cord impressions. In fact the contact

> PA., xxxix (1933), 50-3; cf. pp. 102, 106.

2   E.g. Villafrati in Sicily, commonly in the caves of Monges, near Narbonne, in
Central and Northern Spain and in Portugal.

3   E.g. Anghelu Ruju, Sardinia; Palmella and Alapraia (Portugal).

4   E.g. at Los Millares and other Almerian sites, and in Var.

5   E.g. in Brittany and Portugal.

6   E.g. in Brittany and in the Paris basin.

7   Puig Rodo (Catalonia) and La Halliade (Hautes Pyrenees).

8   Childe, Danube, 192; cf. Mannus, XXXI (1939), 467 if., for a cemetery of twenty-
four graves in Swabia.

» PZ., XX, 45.

10 Oudh. Med. (1933), 120.

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 MEGALITH BUILDERS AND BEAKER-FOLK

produced a hybrid population with a composite culture and art. At
least the B2 and C groups of Beaker invaders in Britain are offshoots
of such a hybrid.

The people buried with Bell-beakers at Ciempozuelos, near Madrid1
and almost invariably in Central Europe and Britain, are round-headed,
and brachycranial skulls are found in nearly every collective tomb
that yields Bell-beakers, even in regions so dominantly Mediterranean
as Sardinia and Sicily. In Germany,1 2 though not representing a strictly
homogeneous population, skulls from Beaker cemeteries regularly
comprise a novel racial type, better known in the Iberian Peninsula
and ultimately of East Mediterranean stock. In this instance, there-
fore, it looks as if culture and race coincided and one might legitimately
speak of a Beaker race. Even in Central Europe Beaker skulls had
been trephined.

Both in form and decoration Bell-beakers of the classic style and
the associated bowls look like copies of esparto-grass vessels such as
are made in the Sudan to-day.3 Beaker-like vases decorated with zones
of incision which might be clay translations of such basketry vessels
occur in Egypt in the early “Tasian” phase of culture.4 Potsherds found
in a still undatable settlement on the western edge of the Nile valley
at Armant and in a “neolithic" context in the Sudan and Africa Minor5
show roulette decoration, though rather coarser than that on classical
beakers, while typical beakers have been found in a cave on the
Moroccan coast.6 A hollow-based hilt like that regularly attached to
West European daggers was attached to flint and copper blades on the
Nile in Predynastic times.7 Hollow-based arrow-heads were character-
istic of the “neolithic" Fayum and of Early Predynastic Egypt. There
is accordingly some evidence for an African element in the Beaker
culture. Still most authorities hold that the culture as we know it took
form in Andalusia or on the lower Tagus,8 though plausible typological
arguments favour a North-West German origin.

The Beaker-folk’s expansion, from whatever cradle it started, was
presumably rapid. It thus constitutes a convenient chronological
horizon in several otherwise separated areas. But the number of beakers
and the variety of their decorations in each area imply that such vases

1   Bol. R. Acad. Madrid, LXXI, 22 fi.

2   Gerhardt, Die Glockenbecherleute in Mittel- und West-Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1953).

3   Schuchhardt, PZ., I (1909), 43.

4   Childe, NLMAE., 34, fig. 10; cf. pi. XVIIIb for Mesopotamian analogies.

6   Mond and Myres, Cemeteries of Armant, 268 ff., Arkell, Early Khartoum, pi. 89;
Vaufrey, Inst. Pal. Hum., Mem., 20 (1939), 72 ff.

8 Germania, XXXIII (1955), 13-22.

7   Childe, NLMAE., 98, fig. 39.

8   Castillo, op. cit., Bosch-Gimpera, Real., X, 356; PPS., XXIX, 95 ff.

227
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

must have been in fashion for several generations. It is therefore a
grave error to treat all beakers as contemporary.1 Such vases mark
rather a substantial period of time, not everywhere of equal duration.
In Central Europe beakers go back to period III. On the other hand, in
Moravia, Bohemia, and even on the Rhine, beakers2 are associated in
graves with round-heeled riveted daggers typical of period IV and in
Austria3 with mature Unetician forms. A beaker, with exact parallels
in Bohemia and in Sardinia too, reached Denmark, in Neolithic IIIc.
And the bronzes of period IV are often decorated with patterns that
recur on beakers. In other words, beakers remained in fashion into
period IV in Central Europe and the Beaker and Un&tician cultures
overlap. Beakers do not denote a point in time. But the Beaker cultures
are everywhere on the same economic plane. Judged by form and
decoration, most British and Central European Beakers seem to be
later than the “classic type”, those from the edge of the Beaker terri-
tory—Scotland and Poland—looking particularly late.

1   Forssander, Ostskand. Norden, 37; Childe, Am. Anthr., XXXIX (1937), 10.

2   Childe, Danube, 190; Forssander, Ostskand. Norden, 72; Mannus, XXXI, 478, fig. 17.

2 PZ., XXV, 137.

228
 CHAPTER XIII

FARMERS AND TRADERS IN ITALY AND SICILY

Spreading westward by sea, the neolithic economy would be expected
to reach the Apennine Peninsula next after Greece. This expectation
is justified by quite early settlements in Apulia, in Sicily and on the
adjacent iEolian Islands, and along the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea.
But ecologically Italy is less uniform than Greece. In the south and
on the Tyrrhenian coasts a rural economy that had worked in the
Levant would still serve. It would need drastic adjustments to meet
the more continental conditions that reign on the northern slopes of
the Apennine chain. In fact, the two sides of the Peninsula enjoyed
very different fortunes in the neolithic phase, but during the Bronze
Age a remarkable degree of uniformity was attained.

The general outlines of Italian prehistory were sketched last century
by Pigorini and Orsi and summarized for English readers by Peet.1
After fifty years of stagnation they have been corrected and filled in
largely as a result of stratigraphical excavations by Bemabo Brea in
Liguria, on the iEolian Islands, and in Sicily. His division2 of the Italian
Neolithic into Lower, Middle, and Upper will be followed in the sequel.

The Neolithic Colonization of South Italy and Sicily

In the south and in Liguria the record begins with settlements char-
acterized best by rough-looking but well-fired vases of quite sophisti-
cated shapes that agree very closely both in technique, form, and
ornament with the “barbottine” ware of Starcevo, that we have
encountered all over the Balkan peninsula. That their makers came
by sea is clear from the coastwise distribution of the sites and the
occupation of small islands in the Tremiti and iEolian archipelagoes.
It must have been the rich deposits of obsidian that attracted early
neolithic voyagers to the iEolian Islands; for fertile though they be,
water supplies are totally lacking. In fact, the volcanic glass was
extensively exported and used in neolithic villages all over the main-
land and Sicily. These first settlers might have come direct from the

1   The Stone and. Bronze Ages in Italy and Sicily (Oxford, 1909). No equally compre-
hensive survey has superseded this work save for Sicily, where Bemabo Brea, "La
Sicilia prehistorica”, Ampurias, XY-XVI (1954), has replaced Orsi’s system.

2   Bernabo Brea, Gli Scavi nella Caverna delle Arene Candide, II (Bordighera, 1956)
(cited AC., II), 155-292.

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 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Balkans, but the occurrence, together with simple rustication, of
patterns executed with the edge of a shell (generally Car diuni) and
in particular the so-called rocker motive might suggest a parallel but
independent movement from the Levant where this motive was
popular on neolithic pottery. Still, “rocker patterns”, executed with
a notched stamp if not a shell edge, occur on “neolithic” pottery in
the Urals, in the Sudan, and widely in North Africa, and cannot all
be plausibly traced to a single origin! This distinctive pottery is found
only exceptionally1 unmixed with other styles. Hence the Lower
Neolithic culture, introduced by these maritime colonists, cannot be
further defined. In Sicily it developed directly into the Stentinello
culture. This takes its name from a village on the shore just north of
Syracuse, but is represented at similar sites at Matrensa and Megara
Hyblaea. All three villages he near the coast on level ground, but were
girt with rock-cut ditches and internal ramparts of some kind. At
Matrensa the ditch was interrupted by frequent causeways as in
English and Rhenish neolithic camps. On these sites, as elsewhere in
Sicily and at Castellaro on Lipari, the rough-looking rusticated pottery
is associated with a very fine local ware characterized by the use of a
greater variety of stamps, more diversified motives, their composition
to form well-ordered patterns (in contrast to the casually scattered
finger-tip or cardial impressions of the “rough ware”), and an equal
diversity of shapes; the latter include simple round-bottomed types
such as are attributed to the “Western Neolithic” in Chapter XV, and
also sophisticated vessels with, for instance, ring handles rising above
the rims.