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

[Prometheus]

The economy evidently was based on cultivation, stock-breeding,
hunting, fishing, and collecting, but no weapons survive save sling-
bullets. Blade tools of local flint or of obsidian from Lipari include
neither bifacially worked nor geometric types. Ground stone celts were
rare.

The only burial attributable to the Stentinello culture is that of a
skeleton in a round pit lined with slabs on edge. Nor do female figurines
survive to attest a fertility cult of the Asiatic-Balkan type. A few clay
animal heads may be ritual or merely ornamental.

While the Stentinello culture was still flourishing in Sicily, the
Middle Neolithic phase in Apulia had already been initiated with the
advent or development of a distinct culture which will here be called
the Molfetta culture, characterized by painted pottery. It is known
from numerous ditched enclosures, revealed by air photographs,2 of

1   Perhaps at Coppa Nevigata, MA., XIX (1909), 340-5; cf. AC., II, 162-6.

2   Bradford, in Antiquity, XX (1946), 191; XXIII, 60-5; XXIV, 86-8.

230
 FARMERS AND TRADERS IN ITALY AND SICILY

which only a few have been excavated.1 The enclosures can, from the
plans alone, be classified as villages and homesteads. The former cover
very large areas often subdivided into an inner enclosure, containing
within its ditch smaller round enclosures and representing the inhabited
area, and a larger outer space, presumably fields or pastures. The
inner enclosures, of which there may be 100 in one village, measure
60 to 50 feet across and must be farmyards, like Irish raths, each
corresponding to one household. Homesteads too may be divided up
into an infield or yard of about an acre in area and a larger demesne
outside it. Bradford from air-photographs alone has identified over 200
villages and homesteads in an area of less than 1500 square miles. So
the neolithic population must have been quite dense even if not all
sites were Middle Neolithic.

The population was engaged in breeding cows, pigs, sheep, and
allegedly buffaloes,2 while sickle-teeth and saddle querns3 demon-
strated the cultivation of cereals which were stored in the numerous
pits that are found within the farmyards. Again the sling is the sole
weapon attested. Obsidian was imported from the Eolian Islands.
Ground stone celts were supplemented by roughly flaked chopping-
tools. The pottery4 comprises on the one hand hard-fired burnished
ware, generally red and often decorated with rectilinear patterns
scratched after firing, and on the other light-coloured fabrics painted
with designs in red, or red and black. Some vases show a nose and two
eyes, just below the rim, as in the Trapeza ware of Crete.5 Similar
painted vases may illustrate the spread of the Molfetta culture to the
Eolian Islands, Ischia, and Capri,6 but on Sicily it is represented only
by stray painted vases (Fig. 114, 3) found on Stentinello sites. On
Lipari7 some of these vases are provided with vertical subcutaneous
handles, foreshadowing a device already encountered in Central Europe
in the Baden complex, and to meet us shortly in the Rinaldone culture
of Central Italy. And the painted ware is associated with black bur-
nished vases, some provided with broad ribbon handles as in Early
Neolithic Greece. These black vessels are sometimes crusted after
firing with red or black colours 01 incised with mseanders or less often
spirals in a manner that really recalls Dimini and Balkan-Danubian
styles.

1   BP., XLIV (1924), 107-21; MA., XX, 238 ff.

2   BP., XLV, 92.

3   But on Lipari the querns are saucer- or even trough-shaped.

4   Stevenson, PPS., XIII (1947), 88-92.

5   Rellini, La piii antica Ceramica dipinta in Italia (Rome, 1935), 56-62.

6   Rellini, op. cit. The style of painting represented on Capri, Lipari, and Sicily diverges
substantially from the Apulian.

7   Bemabo Brea, APL., Ill (1952); BP., n.s., X (1956), 18-24.

231
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

The Molfetta culture is usually supposed to have been introduced
into Apulia from the Balkan peninsula. But except for the maeander
and spiral patterns on Lipari no decisive parallels can at present be
found on that side of the Adriatic.

The Later Neolithic Phases

A second division of the Middle Neolithic (M.N.II) is conveniently
defined on the mainland and on the iEolian Islands by the “fine
painted ware” classically represented at Serra d’Alto near Mat era.
The walls and ditches of the enclosures had been allowed to col-
lapse or fill up,1 but the sites were still inhabited or used as burying-
grounds. Much of the old culture persisted, but ceramic forms and

2

Fig. 114. Middle Neolithic painted pottery: 1-2, black on buff, Serra d’Alto ware, M.N.II;

3, red and black on buff, Megara Hyblaea (J).

decorations are quite novel. The vases, including on Lipari2 rare
square-mouthed vessels, are painted, but only in warm black, and with
stumpy spirals or mseanders and step, ladder, or windmill motives
(Fig. 114, 1-2). One vase from Apulia stood on model human feet.
Long horizontal tubular handles, perforated axially, are quite dis-
tinctive; they might be surmounted by conventionalized heads of
bulls or rams.

The dead were buried flexed in pits lined with stones and provided
with a special niche for the feet.3 Rare clay stamps or pintadere,4 long

1   E.g., at Molfetta, MA., XX, 251-58; Mosso mistook the ruined wall for a streetl

2   BP. (1956), 25-8.

3   MA., XX, 255-8; Rellini, Ceramica, 67; Mayer, Matera und Molfetta, Leipzig
(1924), 20-30.

i Mayer, Matera, 67, pi. IX, 19; BP. (1956), 27; analogies to the Italian pintadere
come from early iEgean levels at G6zlu Kale (Tarsus) in Cilicia, AJA„ XLII (1938),
39—and from Neolithic Byblos.

232
 FARMERS AND TRADERS IN ITALY AND SICILY

and narrow in plan in contrast to the iEgean-Balkan forms, may
belong to the ideological equipment, but clay figurines are missing save
on Lipari.

The Serra d’Alto culture, like its predecessor, is generally considered
to be intrusive in Apulia and of Balkan origin. Similar painted pottery
has in fact been found in the cave of Khirospilia on Levkas, and the
pintadere could be derived from Balkan clay stamps. But no exact
counterpart to the culture has been identified outside Italy. Now
Puglisi1 has recently reported Mycenaean sherds associated with typical
“fine painted ware” in the Caverna di Erba in the heel of Italy. If his
observations be confirmed, the whole culture sequence in South Italy,
Sicily, and Malta will have to be drastically curtailed. But on the
acropolis of Lipari Serra d’Alto pottery is stratified well below the
layer containing abundant L.M.I imported vases, while Diana and other
groups, distinguished mainly by typology, should be intercalated
before this horizon.

In the Late Neolithic phase, more sharply distinguished in the
village of Diana on Lipari than on the mainland, painted wares went
out of fashion to give place to highly burnished red vases. These still
retained the horizontal tubular handles of Serra d’Alto which, at first
of exaggerated length and expanding towards the ends like trumpet-
lugs, subsequently degenerated into unpierced ridges. But by this
time fresh impulses were reaching the province. At Diana on Lipari
occur a few bifacially trimmed hollow-based arrow-heads and even
metal slag.2 On the mainland at Bellavista near Taranto3 polished vases
with Diana handles but also spouts were found in a small cemetery
of rock-cut collective tombs.

The Transition to a Bronze Age

The phenomena just mentioned herald the transition to a new division
of the archaeological record traditionally termed Chalcolithic, most
clearly documented in Sicily. There the Serra d'Alto culture had been
represented only by a few typical vases found as far west as Palermo.4
Vases of Diana style are more widespread and occur even on Stentinello
sites, though perhaps in intrusive graves. But in the chalcolithic
cultures of Sicily the Stentinello tradition seems to be blended with,
or transformed by, fresh foreign impulses.

So in the San Cono culture5 we find both single interments in stone-

1   Riv. Sc. Pr., VIII (1953), 86-93.

2 BP. (1956), 31-   3 B.P., XXXII (1906), 36-48.

4   BP., XLV, 113.   * BP., XXV (1898), 53; XXXIV (1908), 119; XLV, 62.

233
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

lined pit graves, as at Molfetta, and at least one rock-cut pit-cave,
used however for a single interment. The pottery is dark-faced, some-
times incised and incrusted with red or white colour, but occasionally
painted in bright red before firing. Small polished celts, hitherto rare,
are now common, and bifacially trimmed arrow-heads appear, as at
Diana. Metal is practically unrepresented, but obsidian was freely
imported and rough celts, some sharpened with a tranchet blow, were
manufactured in regular factories on the slopes of the Iblean Moun-
tains and systematically distributed.1 From this culture developed in
North-Western Sicily that termed Conco d’Oro,2 known mainly from
small groups of pit-cave tombs each containing one, or exceptionally
two corpses; sometimes two chambers open off a single shaft. Hollow-
based arrow-heads, stone beads, and an axe-amulet are among the
grave goods, and a variety of pots. Besides self-coloured wares decor-
ated by incision or rarely with white paint, clear buff ware was manu-
factured and covered all over with a dark slip that might be used as a
ground for designs in white paint. Cups and mugs are provided with
good handles, some nosed; “salt-cellars"—paired bowls linked by a
high loop handle—were conspicuous. The tomb type, the pot forms
and the dark-slipped pale ware vaguely suggest East Mediterranean
influence. On the other hand, a Bell-beaker, imported from Sardinia
or Spain, was found in a sepulchral cave at Villafrati, and another
Beaker, perhaps a local imitation, came from a Conco d’Oro tomb at
Carini.3 The Conco d’Oro culture lasted until the Casteluccio culture
was established in South-Eastern Sicily, and Late Minoan I pottery
was reaching the dBolian Islands in the fifteenth century.4

By then the Serraferlicchio5 pottery style of Southern Sicily had
developed and disappeared. The vases, red surfaced and painted in
black, include handled mugs, amphorae, and spouted jugs that look
vaguely iEgean though the patterns can be best matched in the
''Neolithic" of Acarnania. On the dSolian Islands6 the period is
represented by the village of Piana Conte, where imported vases of
Serraferlicchio style were found together with local vases provided
with vertical subcutaneous string-holes or horizontal tunnel-handles.

The Sicilian Bronze Age

The foreign influences foreshadowed in these rather nebulous tran-
sitional cultures culminate in the rise of the Castelluccio culture,

1   Ampurias (1954), 158-60.   2 MA., XL (1944). 1-17°-

3   Annales de Geol. et PaUontol. (Palermo, 1900I, No. 28.

4   APL., Ill, 85-7; BP. (1956), 5*-

8   Arias in MA., XXXVI (1937). 695-838.

6 Ampurias (1954). 181-2; APL., Ill (1952). 78-9*

234
 FARMERS AND TRADERS IN ITALY AND SICILY

Orsi’s Siculan I, in South-Eastern Sicily. Now actual iEgean imports
supplement ceramic and architectural analogies and provide an his-
torically dated horizon not only for the environs of Syracuse but for
Malta and the iEolian Islands too.

In Eastern Sicily, as on the iEolian Islands, the lowland coastal
villages had been replaced by little townships planted on naturally
defensible hilltops or promontories and well fortified. The walled areas
were still small; in two cases the estimate given is one hectare or 2,\ acres.
But large cemeteries of collective tombs imply a substantial population
settled in one place for several generations; 32 tombs have been actually
examined at Castelluccio, 20 at Syracuse, 11 at Monte Salia, and each
tomb contained from 50 to 200 corpses.1 The population, of course,
still depended primarily on farming—the bones of horses are now
reported in addition to those of food animals—but produced a surplus
to support craftsmen and traders.

Flint was still systematically mined at Monte Tabuto by expert
miners who were presumably specialists. Metal was imported and
apparently worked locally into- simple flat axes (known only by a
couple of miniatures made for funerary purposes), triangular riveted
daggers and ornaments such as spectacle-spirals, and tubes of coiled
wire. However, metal was so rare that polished stone axes and roughly
flaked picks were still made and used even for carving the tombs.
Stone beads were manufactured for the first time.

Foreign trade is explicitly disclosed by bossed bone plaques (Fig. 115)
found in several tombs,2 in the ruins of Troy II, in a Middle Helladic
layer at Lerna (p. 77), and in the “neolithic” temple of Hal Tarxien in

Fig. 115. Bossed bone plaque, Castelluccio. After Evans (£).

Malta. Its effects may also be recognized in a bone pommel3 of the
same type as the Trojan pommel shown in Fig. 21,3, in a Middle Helladic
matt-painted cup from tomb V at Monte Salia, and in numerous axe-
amulets, but some alleged “amber” beads may be made of a local resin.

Pottery remained a domestic industry, but the forms of the hand-
made vases—hour-glass tankards, high-handled mugs (Fig. 116, 4-5)
and pedestalled bowls with handles joining bowl and stem—are quite

1   von Duhn, Italische Graberkunde, 71-9.

2   Antiquity, XXX (1956), 80-94.   3 BP., XLIII, pi. II, 6.

235
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

alien to the Stentinello tradition. They may be plain or painted in
black on a reddish ground with geometric designs. On some vases from
Vallelunga the black is outlined in white, giving somewhat the effect
of Dimini ware.

The dead were now buried in rock-cut tombs of East Mediterranean
style (Fig. 108). The chambers are generally more or less circular in
plan and may be preceded by a smaller ante-chamber. When cut in a

3   4   5

Fig. 116. Early Apennine Copper and Early Bronze Age pottery: 1-2, pit-cave, Otranto;
3, “dolmen” of Bisceglie; 4-5, Castelluccio ware (£).

vertical cliff face, the entrance is normally a small window-like aperture,
rebated to receive the blocking stone. The blocking stone in one tomb
at Castelluccio was carved with spirals in low relief; the entrance to
the inner chamber of another tomb in the same cemetery was closed
by two carved slabs, which, combined (Fig. 117), produce the effect
of the funerary goddess carved on many megalithic tombs in France
and on the stele from Troy I mentioned on p. 40. The tombs often
open on to a semi-circular porch or forecourt cut in the rock, the walls
of which were in at least one case carved with pilasters.1 In some late

1   von Duhn, pis. 4, iS; 6, 22 and 7, 23; BP., XVIII, 75; Not. Sc. (1920), 304; Ausonia,
I. 7-

236
 FARMERS AND TRADERS IN ITALY AND SICILY

tombs at Monteracello the vault had been reproduced above ground
in a rectangular cist (2*05 m. by 1*2 m. square) framed with four large
slabs on edge in one of which a square window had been cut out, con-
verting it into a sort of porthole slab.1 The disused galleries of flint-
mines were also used as burial-places. All these tombs served as family
vaults in which numerous skeletons were deposited, sometimes seated
as if at a feast. Ritual objects from domestic sites include clay horns,2

Fig. 1x7. View into chamber tomb, Castelluccio.

used perhaps against the evil eye. Such horns had, however, been used
already at Serraferlicchio and in contemporary sites on the Eolian
Islands.

In a general way the Castelluccio culture, economy, and funerary
ritual might be attributed to a further extension of the causes that
occasioned the rise and westward expansion of Early Helladic culture
in Greece. But the sepulchral architecture has more analogies to the
West than to the East. The pottery, despite Early Helladic parallels
(e.g. to the tankards of Fig. 116, 2), has been more aptly compared by
Bernabo Brea3 to Anatolian wares—particularly the Cappadocian
current at the time of the Assyrian colony at Kul-tepe between 1950
and 1850 B.c. The bossed bone plaques may be just versions of the gold
ornaments from the earlier Royal Tombs of Alaca, but find their
closest analogues in Troy and Middle Helladic Lerna (p. 44). The

1   BP., XXIV, 202.

2   MA., XVIII, 643; BP., XXXVI, pi. 12.

'   237

3 Ampurias (1954), 177-18.

[Prometheus]

 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

matt-painted cup from Monte Salia unambiguously attests contact
with Middle Helladic Greece, probably after rather than before 1600 b.c.
More precise limits can be deduced from Aegean imports on the iEolian
Islands.

The islands had now become points of trans-shipment for coastwise
trade between the iEgean and the West or lairs for pirates who preyed
thereon. In contrast to the earlier open villages, settlements of the
Early Bronze Age Capo Graziano culture (so-called after a site on that
promontory of Filicudi) are located on naturally defensible sites or
fortified.1 That on the acropolis of Lipari comprises over ten oval
huts with stone wall bases and internal diameters between 3-2 x3*0 m.
and 4*5x3*i m. which are grouped round a much larger oval building
in an inner enclosure that seems a sanctuary rather than a chieftain’s
palace. Though the culture is termed Bronze Age, no metal survives
—collective tombs that might have contained some had been pillaged
long ago—and obsidian was still quarried and worked. But a relative
abundance of Minoan and Mycensean vases attest frequent contacts
with the JEgean. Most sherds are L.H.I-II, only a tiny handful might
be L.H.IIIa. Hence the Capo Graziano villages flourished mainly
between 1500 and 1400 b.c. Only a couple of sherds of Castelluccio
ware have been recognized on the iEolian Island sites. On the other
hand, the earliest Bronze Age pottery of Malta is related to native
Capo Graziano ware, while imported specimens of the latter have been
reported from Conco d’Oro tombs at Villafrati.2

Hence in North-Western Sicily the Conco d’Oro culture must have
lasted till 1500 b.c. Only thereafter was it replaced by the Castel-
luccio culture. By 1400 b.c. in South-Eastern Sicily the latter culture
had been replaced by that now named after a cemetery at Thapsos—
Orsi’s Siculan II.

By then Sicilian economy had been transformed into one of full
Middle Bronze Age type by the incorporation of the island into the
iEgean commercial system. Late Helladic III pottery,3 gold rings,
bronze vessels, mirrors, rapiers,4 and fayence beads were imported
from Greece. iEgean influence was so strong that Evans5 suspected
a Cretan colonization of the island under a Minoan prince.

But basically the Thapsos culture was rooted in the native traditions
of the island. Pottery was not industrialized. The hand-made grey
vases, though unpainted and decorated in a novel style, preserve many

1   BP. (1956), 43-52.

2   Not in the same tomb as the Beaker, though with the same local variety of pottery.

3 Fullest list by Levi in Paoli Or si a cur a dell’Archivio Storico per Calabria (Rome,
1935); cf. BP. (1936-37), 57 ff.

4   Evans, Arch., LIX, 1906, 108 ff.   5 P. of M., I, 3.

238
 FARMERS AND TRADERS IN ITALY AND SICILY

Castellnccio forms. Large cemeteries of rock-cut tombs carry on equally
old traditions. But though the cemeteries comprise far more tombs,
each chamber contained far fewer corpses, serving as the burying-
place of a single family, as at Mycenae.

Ischia,1 the iEolian Islands, and the adjacent promontory of Milazzo
in Sicily were also now incorporated in the orbit of Mycenaean trade,
but not in the Thapsos culture. They seem rather to be frontier posts
between the Aegean and the Continental-West European commercial
systems. The cemetery of Milazzo1 2 consists not of chamber tombs
but of pithos burials; these reproduce the practice of Argaric Spain,
of Anatolia, and of Middle Helladic—but not Mycenaean —Greece. The
grave goods include amber, imported from the Baltic, and fayence
from the iEgean. On the acropolis of Lipari and in the natural fortress
of Milazzesi on Panarea3 imported Mycenaean vases and Thapsos
pottery turn up in villages of oval, or exceptionally rectilinear, houses,
built on stone foundations—23 survive at Milazzesi. Native vases,
inscribed with characters derived from the first Minoan linear (A)
script, show how deeply Aegean influence had penetrated the islands'
culture. Associated are ritual objects of clay, almost identical in form
and size with the anchor ornaments so popular in Greece and Thrace
in the Early Aegean period—nearly a millennium earlier. A hoard of
imported beads found on Salina contains more segmented fayence
beads than have been found in the whole of Britain! But side by side
with these yEgean and Sicilian elements are sherds of early Apennine
ware. They indicate strong influence, if not some actual colonization,
from the Italian mainland as early as 1350 B.c. Thereafter the iEolian
Islands were annexed to the mainland province of the Apennine
culture, doubtless as a consequence of the invasion by Ausonians, of
which Diodorus has preserved a tradition.

An extension of this current to Sicily may be inferred from an
urnfield at Milazzo4; the cremation rite is that proper to the mature
Bronze Age of peninsular Italy; the funerary vases are of Apennine
type. But one at least is decorated in the old Thapsos style. Thus the
cremationists should have arrived at latest about 1150, which would
agree strikingly with the traditional dates given for the arrival of the
Sicels by Hellanikos and Thucydides! But in South-Eastern Sicily the
old tradition of inhumation in chamber tombs was maintained in the
cultures of Pantalica and Cassabili5 (both were included by Orsi and

1   Buchner, BP., n.s., I (i936_37)> 65.

2   Ampurias (1954), 184; BP. (1956), 56-7.

3   APL., Ill, 71-4, 80; BP. (1956), 53-63.

4   At a different place to the pithos cemetery; Ampurias (1954), 203-5; BP- (I956), 78.

0 Ampurias (1954), 203-5.

239
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Peet in Sicilian II). But here too ceramic styles have changed, Mycenaean
imports have ceased, the settlements and cemeteries have been trans-
ferred from the coastal plains to more defensible fastnesses farther
inland. Some of the metal-work is still based on Mycenaean traditions

(shaft-hole axes, knives like Fig. 118, i). Razors and fibulae conform
to Continental types. By the Late Bronze Age even Sicily was domin-
ated by the traditions of Temperate Europe.

The Early Metal Ages in South Italy

In tells1 and caves2 strata containing plain burnished leather-coloured
pots of Apennine types seem to be immediately superimposed on those
yielding Serra d'Alto ware, and the local Apennine culture they typify
lasted, through a period when Mycenaean pottery was imported, into
the Iron Age. The Mycenaean levels should correspond to the Thapsos
phase in Sicily and to the Middle Bronze Age of Upper Italy. Earlier
phases may be represented in some sepulchral caves,3 chamber tombs,4
and “dolmens".5

The latter are either passage graves with a chamber, no wider than
the passage, or long cists, one actually a segmented cist.6 One was
provided with a porthole slab, placed however in one side instead of at
the end.7 Of the furniture, a few amber beads and a cup with an axe-
handle (Fig. 116, 3) survive. Identical cups will meet us in Liguria,
South France, and Catalonia associated in the latter regions with a
late phase of the local megalithic culture. So it looks as if the South
Italian dolmens were an offshoot of the South French megalithic
culture. Puglisi8 suggested that it was brought through Corsica and

1   E.g., Punto del Tonno, Taranto, Saflund in Pragma Martino P. Nilsson (Skrifter
Svensk. Instl), Rome, 1939, 458 fi.

2   Riv. Sc. Pre., VIII (1953), 89-93.

8 BP., XXI (1905), 153; Quagliati, La Puglia preistorica (Trani, 1936); MA., XXVI
(1921), 494.

* LAAA., II, 80; BP., XLIV, 1x6; ib., n.s. (1938), 42; Riv. Sc. Pre., V (1950), 126;
von Duhn, 72-4.

6 Gervasio, I Dolmen (Bari, 1913).

6 Ib., p. 63.   7 Ib., p. 68.   8 Riv. Antr., LXI (1954), 1-31.

24O
 FARMERS AND TRADERS IN ITALY AND SICILY

Sardinia by pastoral groups, who, landing in Tuscany, would have
helped to develop the Apennine culture which they brought with them
by land routes to the southern extremity of the peninsula.

But some interments in chamber tombs and natural caves may be
earlier, for some of these contain Diana ware (p. 233) or vases with
striking parallels in Thessaly III.1 The chamber tombs themselves
might denote iEgean influence as in Sicily and equally early.

If so, similar funerary practices should reveal the same influence in
Central Italy too. After all, in historical times the first Greek colony
in the West was planted at Cumae near Naples, not in Sicily nor the
heel of Italy. A cemetery of pit-cave tombs at Paestum (Gaudo) near
Salerno2 might represent a precursor a millennium earlier. Most
chambers contain only one, or at most two, flexed skeletons, but some
were genuine collective tombs with 17 or even 26 corpses, while occa-
sionally two chambers open off a single pit. The funerary pottery,
monochrome, generally black, rarely ornamented with incised designs,
includes some very TEgean-looking forms, notably askoi and pyxides
with string-hole lids, while “salt-cellars,” globular vases with strap
handles, and some other types could be paralleled in the Conco d’Oro
(p. 234) as well as in Apulia. Transverse arrow-heads were found in
one tomb, but bifacially trimmed tanged arrow-heads and lance-heads
and a single copper dagger with prominent mid-rib are types proper
to the Rinaldone culture farther north. Of thirteen skulls examined,
five were brachycranial, three long-headed.

Trade from such a "colony” might have promoted the rise in Central
Italy of the Rinaldone culture, first distinguished from the North
Italian Remedello culture by Laviosa-Zambotti in 1939.3 It is repre-
sented by burials in pit-caves or natural grottoes in Latium4 and
Tuscany.5 There are tin lodes in Tuscany and there a sepulchral cave
in Monte Bradoni contained two V-bored buttons of metallic tin, a
dagger like Fig. 121, a, of Early Minoan affinities and brachycranial
skeletons. Kite-shaped or triangular daggers and flat, or exceptionally
hammer-flanged, axes recur in other Rinaldone tombs. But while the
tomb form and the metal gear may be of iEgean inspiration, other
items in Rinaldone equipment are not. Bifacially trimmed daggers and

1   Stevenson, PPS., XIII, 197.

2   Riv. Sc. Pr., I (1946), 249, 257; II, 284-92.

3   St. Et., XIII (1939). 58.

4   A sepulchral cave at Sasso near Civitavecchia containing a hundred skeletons (one
with trepanned skull), sling bullets but no arrow-heads is assigned by the excavator
(BP., VIII (1953). 43-8; Riv. d’Antr., XLI (1954), 4°-5°) to "Middle Neolithic”, but a
cup with elongated handle would seem more appropriate to an Upper Neo. or even
Apennine context.

5   To Feet's list add BP., XL, 53; XLIII, 97; n.s. VIII (1951), 109; Atti i0. Con. Preh.
Med. (Firenze, 1950), 334-40; Riv. Sc. Pr., V (1950), 122; VI, 3, 151.

Q   241
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

tanged arrow-heads of flint are common to all the “chalcolithic”
cultures of the peninsula. Stone battle-axes with symmetrically splayed
blades must be connected with the “polygonal” weapons of Northern
Neolithic II or their copper prototypes of Danubian III. In the pottery,
which is dark-faced, burnished but undecorated, the most distinctive
form is a bottle provided with no handles but vertical subcutaneous
string-holes like those of the Danubian III Baden culture or of M.N.I
on Lipari. But at Punta degli Stretti (Grosseto)1 good Rinaldone types
seem associated with an axe-handle cup like Fig. 116, 3.

Thus if southern and western influences travelled northward along
the Tiber-Arno corridor, it provided a channel also for cultures, adapted
to the Temperate zone, to spread south, and in the Apeninne peninsula
these proved the more viable.

The Apennine culture that succeeds Rinaldone in Central Italy and
that had reached the Tyrrhenian coasts and South Italy by Mycenaean
times is still known almost exclusively by its highly characteristic
pottery. This has indeed been found in some semi-megalithic tombs
under round cairns in Tuscany which, resembling the late passage
graves of the Causses d’Aude, might provide the required link between
South France and the South Italian “dolmens”.1 2 But these tombs had
been re-used in Etruscan times and robbed of any non-ceramic grave
goods. Most of the pottery comes from hilltop settlements, much eroded,
and from caves used for collective inhumations over a long period.3 The
distinctive monochrome burnished pottery is characterized by an
exuberant development of bizarre handles (cf. Figs. 116,1-3, and 119),
all inspired by wooden models. Some vases are decorated with incised
punctured ribbons forming spirals and maeanders, as at Butmir and
Vinca, or with excised ornament imitating the chip-carving of wood, as
in the West Alpine Vucedol culture. Such metal-work as is associated is
all based on North Italian and Central European traditions, but is more
appropriate to the Middle and Late Bronze Age.

No doubt the amber trade across the Brenner went on to Greece,
either along the Adriatic or across Italy by the Arno and the Tiber. But
the inhospitable Italian coasts of the Adriatic offered no convenient
halting-places to merchantmen, while the rough herdsmen and farmers
of Central Italy do not seem to have benefited by any transit trade.
Many Apennine sites yield so many stone tools as to look quite neolithic.4

1   Archivio per Antrop. ed Etnog., XLII (1912), 263; BP., XXXVIII (1923), 132.

2   Puglisi, Riv. Antrop., LXI, 1-22.

3   Especially Belleverde (Cetona), Not. Sc. (1933), 50 ff.; St. Et„ X (1936), 330-8; XII,
227 ff.; andManacore (Gargano), BSR., XIX (1951), 23-38; XXI, 1-31.

4   According to Bemabo Brea, AC., II, 259, Belleverde does in fact go back to the
Rinaldone phase.

242
 FARMERS AND TRADERS IN ITALY AND SICILY

Metal types, proper to Danubian IV, are very rare in Italy south of the
Po basin. A single hoard from Montemerano near Grosseto comprising
halberds and a dagger with triple midrib1 is the sole link with an equally
isolated cist grave furnished with a flat axe, a bronze-hilted dagger and
perhaps a halberd at Parco di Monaci near Matera. The funerary caves
of Central Italy do indeed contain amber beads, but associated with
daggers, swords, winged axes, fibulae and other types not known before
Danubian V. By then the M.N.II settlement at Punto del Tonno2 near
Tarentum had grown into a Bronze Age village the prolonged occupation
of which converted the site into a regular tell. Here were found a winged

4   5

Fig. i 19. Apennine vase-handles (jj), and bronzes (£) from Punto del Tonno (winged
axe, razor, Peschiera dagger, angled sickle).

axe, a North Italian flanged sickle, a Peschiera dagger (Fig. 119), a
razor, and a fibula like Fig. 122, together with Apennine handles. Im-
ported Late Mycenaean pottery and figurines are said to have been
found at a higher level, while the winged axe is the closest known
parallel to that made at Mycenae by an immigrant Italian smith about
1250 b.c. (p. 83). So a mature phase of the Apennine culture and the
closing phase of Danubian V (Reinecke D) had alike been reached by
1250 b.c. By that time the whole peninsula was dominated by cultures
of Continental European type while Central European traditions of
metallurgy ruled to its southern extremity.

1   BP., XXVI (1900), T.I., but cf., ib., n.s. (1938), 64.

2   Saflund, Pragma Martino P. Nilsson, 458 ff.; Not. Sc. (1900), 440-64.

243

[Prometheus]

 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Neolithic Cultures in Northern Italy

In the third natural zone of the peninsula a culture sequence, based on
stratigraphical observations, is available only in. Liguria, thanks to
fresh excavations in the cave of Arene Candide conducted by L.
Bernabo Brea since 1939.1 It is not applicable to the whole of Upper
Italy; for Liguria belongs still to the Mediterranean zone and was in
historical times a backward and provincial area. And so in this cave
stone axes were plentiful right up to the last occupation layer, where
the pottery is appropriate to the fourth or fifth century b.c. Still the
succession provides the only available standard. Twenty-eight separate
layers containing pottery could be distinguished above a deep deposit
of palaeolithic and mesolithic occupations. The nineteen lowest have
been grouped together to represent three main periods—termed
respectively Lower, Middle, and Upper Neolithic by the excavator,
while the topmost eight contain Chalcolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age,
and Roman remains.

The first neolithic occupants of this cave, and of many others in the
coastal zone of Italy and France, were a branch of those maritime
colonists who landed also on Sicily and in South Italy. Continued
contact with that area is illustrated at Arene Candide by obsidian from
Lipari. But some fusion with the local mesolithic population probably
took place in Liguria.

In the Middle Neolithic layers (24-17) this old tradition is blended
with Danubian II and Western elements. The former are exemplified
by socketed ladles, clay stamps or pintadere, female figurines, moulded
in two parts and then stuck together, and the selection of Spondylus
shells for bracelets. Microliths, plain potsherds,1 2 arc-pendants (like
Fig. 147),3 and others made from hares’ phalanges4 may rank as
Western elements since they occur in the "Cortaillod culture” of South
France. Finally, obsidian and sherds painted in M.N.I style from
Lipari5 prove continued relations with the south and synchronize the
Ligurian with the South Italian sequence. Middle Neolithic pottery in
Liguria was generally smooth, dark-faced, and decorated, if at all, with
scratched lines. The most distinctive form is the square-mouthed vase
(Fig. 120, 2) which was equally popular in the Po basin and was some-

1 Gli Scavi nella Caverna delle Arene Candide, Bordighera, I (1946), II, 1956.

3   Escalon de Fonton ‘‘Les stratigraphies du niolithique”, Bull. Musie d’Anthropologie
prdhistorique de Monaco, II (1955), 245-52.

3   Riv. Sf. Lig., XV (1949), 28; AC., II, 218.

4   Found in M.N. layers 21, 23, and 24, but also in I„N, layers 25 and 27, AC., II, 65;
cf. Vogt, CISPP., 3 (Zurich, 1950), 33.

s AC., II, 91-5,

244
 FARMERS AND TRADERS IN ITALY AND SICILY

times reproduced, on Lipari in a M.N.1 context. Among the scratched
patterns are “Danubian” spirals.

The dead were buried individually and contracted in little stone cists
within the cave. These closely resemble the Chamblandes cists of the
Upper Rhone valley and might be linked therewith by similar graves in
the Aosta valley.1 They would then disclose movements of persons,
perhaps herdsmen with their flocks, across the Alps in Middle Neolithic

Fig. 120. i, Vase from lake-dwelling at Polada (£); 2, Square-mouthed
neolithic pot from Arene Candide ($?).

times and help to confirm a synchronism between Swiss Lower Neolithic
and Ligurian Middle Neolithic.

In the Upper Neolithic of Arene Candide (layers 13-9) figurines,
pintadere, and decorated pots have disappeared. The layers are charac-
terized by plain Western pottery more akin to the Chassean of South
France than to the Lagozzian of Lombardy; for pan-pipe handles are
common as in France. In the immediately succeeding layers appear
cups with axe-handles that we have classed as Early Metal Age in South
Italy. Even the Upper Neolithic in Liguria is perhaps equivalent to
the Chalcolithic of Central Italy and the Po valley.

In the more continental environment of the Po valley and the Alpine
foothills neolithic culture is less well defined and certainly less homo-
geneous than on the Tyrrhenian coasts. The Lagozzian of the Lombard
lake-dwellings is, judged by its pottery, certainly “Western”, but not
identical with the Cortaillod culture of the Swiss lake-dwellings nor yet
with the Upper Neolithic of Arene Candide,1 2 while microlithic flints
indicate a survival of mesolithic traditions. In Emilia, south of the
Po, the late F. Malvolti3 established a succession of three cultures—

1   BP., XLIII, no.

2   Antler sleeves and other types in bone and horn, so prominent in the Swiss lake-
dwellings, are totally absent from the Lagozzian collections in the museums of Como
and Varese, and pan-pipe lugs are equally missing; cf. Sibrium, II, Centro di Studi
Preistorici (Varese, 1955), 99.

3   Appunti per una cronologia relativa neo-eneolitico emiliano, Centro Emiliano di
Studi preistorici (Modena, 1953); cf. St. Et., XVII (1943). 3-I9i BP. (i952)> 13-38.

245
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Fiorano, Chiozza, and Pescale. But these are little more than ceramic
styles, though in the second obsidian and square-mouthed vases1
suggest relations with Liguria and a quasi-synchronism with the Middle
Neolithic there.

The Bronze Age in Upper Italy

The archaeological record becomes coherent only in the “AEneolithic
Period” of Italian terminology and discloses the Remedello culture
fully formed in the Po valley. Extensive cemeteries2 of contracted or
flexed skeletons—117 at Remedello (Brescia), 41 at Cumarola, 36 at
Fontanella—sometimes arranged in regular rows, reveal substantial

Fig. 121. Copper daggers and flint copies, Remedello (|).

communities occupying the same site for several generations. Metal-
lurgical industry and rudimentary trade were now combined with
farming, hunting, and fishing. The copper-smiths produced flat axes,
some with notched butts or low-hammered flanges (as at Thermi),
daggers of two types (Fig. 121), and occasional halberds. The one type
of dagger with a tang to which the hilt was attached by rivets with a
conical head is clearly a derivative of the Early Minoan group. The
other form, kite-shaped, was hafted in the Egyptian manner with a
hollow-based hilt held in place by several small rivets (cf. p. 130).

Despite the contemporary exploitation of Tuscan tin suggested by
the tanged dagger from Monte Bradoni (p. 241), trade was not regular
enough to supply the Remedello smiths with material for bronze, and
even copper was relatively scarce. So polished stone axes were still

1 Found also in a cemetery of contracted burials at Quinzano near Verona.

3   Cf. recent lists, Aberg, Chronologie, iii, 8, and van Duhn in Real., s.v. Italien.

246
 FARMERS AND TRADERS IN ITALY AND SICILY

used, and tanged, riveted kite-shaped and unriveted West European
daggers were each copied locally in flint (Fig. 121). Axes were hafted
with the aid of antler sleeves perforated with square-cut holes for the
shaft. Still even silver was obtained, perhaps from Sardinia. But the
forms produced by the silver-smith suggest more far-flung intercourse.
A hammer pin from Remedello itself resembles, but rather remotely,
Pontic yamno types. A gorget from a tomb at Villafranca near Verona1
recalls the Irish lunulse, but also may be compared to a copper gorget
from a tomb dated to period III-IV at Velvar in Bohemia. Finally,
stone battle-axes, sometimes with knobbed butts,2 could be treated
as a reflex of intercourse with the copper-miners of Upper Austria.
And there, in the lake-dwellings of the Mondsee and Attersee, have
been found rhomboid daggers of Remedello type and stone axes with
notched butt, mistaken by Pittioni3 for prototypes of the copper
specimens, but really just copies thereof.

Nevertheless, the bulk of Copper Age relics are native products.
Transverse arrow-heads are presumably mesolithic survivals, but the
commoner tanged arrow-heads splendidly worked on both faces have
nothing in common with earlier industries nor yet with those of South
Italy nor the Danube valley. The pottery included vessels with rudi-
mentary thumb-grip or nose-bridge handles in a tradition common to
all the mountain lands north of the Mediterranean from Macedonia
to Spain (Fig. 120). The skeletons from Remedello comprise Mediter-
ranean long-heads and a minority of round-heads.

Whatever its background, the Remedello culture owes its character
partly to a northward extension of intercourse with the iBgean, moti-
vated by the tin lodes of Tuscany and attested there, as in the Po
valley, by daggers of Early Minoan type. At the same time contribu-
tions by the Bell-beaker folk must be admitted. Bell-beakers were
found in three graves in the Province of Brescia, once with a character-
istic West European dagger, and stray sherds of the same ware are
reported from Remedello itself.4 The Bell-beaker folk may have intro-
duced from the west the halberd and perhaps the gorget and assisted
in opening up intercourse with the Danube valley. The battle-axes
may well be contributions from Central Europe, perhaps even from
farther east, but hardly suffice to prove an intrusion of Battle-axe folk.
The daggers of Early Minoan type provide a vague upper limit, some-
where about 2300 b.c., for the beginning of the Remedello culture.
Since amber and fayence beads are missing from the graves, the

1   BP., LII, 9 f.; Forssander, Ostskandinavische, fig. 10.

2   BP., XLI (1915), pi. I.

3   MAGW., LXI (1931), 74-80; p. 299 below.

4   Relation to cemetery uncertain, Castillo, Campaniforme, 133.

247
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

cemeteries had presumably gone out of use before the regular trade
between Mycenae and Bohemia was established about 1600 b.c. So, too,
Danubian IV bronze types are missing from the Remedello cemeteries.
The Beaker graves do indeed establish a connection with period III
in the Danubian sequence, but no one knows whether they belong to
the beginning or the end of the long period represented by the Reme-
dello cemeteries.

The Bronze Age begins with the extension to Upper Italy of the
Danubian commercial system. Types of period IV—flanged axes like
Fig. 69, 3, round-heeled and bronze-hilted daggers, ingot torques and
even a few Unetician eyelet pins are not uncommon. Some, like the
pins, must have been imported from beyond the Alps. Many were
made locally by itinerant or resident smiths who worked in populous
settlements—lake-dwellings on the shores of the eastern lakes, marsh
villages like Lagazzi south of the Po, the celebrated terremare on the
southern margin of the marshy plain and caves on the Apennine
foothills.

The eastern lake-dwellings, among which Polada1 is taken as the
type site, though Ledro2 and Barche de Solferino3 have been better
explored, may like Lagazzi4 have been founded before the terremare.
They have yielded pottery carrying on the older Remedello tradition,
hollow-based flint arrow-heads, arrow-shaft straighteners, a few wrist-
guards and buttons with V perforation going back before period IV,
but only a few later bronzes appropriate to period V. The terremare, on
the contrary, are genuine tells—sites of villages occupied for many
generations—from which come Middle and Late Bronze Age relics and
only a few distinctive of period IV. All alike were farming villages.
Their fields were certainly tilled with the plough; the oldest dated
European plough, made entirely of wood, comes from Ledro, while
ploughs drawn by two or four oxen are depicted in rock-engravings
high up in the Alps round Monte Bigo.5 The cereals6 were reaped with
angled sickles of wood armed with flint teeth; the type is illustrated
by a complete specimen from Solferino and was literally translated
into metal in the Middle Bronze Age (Fig. 119, 5). In addition to cows,
pigs, sheep, and goats, the terremaricoli—but probably not the earlier
lake-villagers—kept horses and controlled them with bits furnished'

1   Laviosa Zambotti, St. Et., XIII, 50 ff.; BP. (1940), 120 ff.

2   BP., (1940) 69-79.

3   Battaglia, “La palafitta di Lago di Ledro”, Mem. del Museo di Storia Naturale della
Venezia Tridentana, VII (Trento, 1943).

4   BP., XVII (1891), 1-12.

B Bicknell, Rock Engravings in the Maritime Alps (Bordighera).

6 At Ledro Triticum monococcum and dicoccum, Hordeum hexasiichon, Panicum
miliacum.

248
 FARMERS AND TRADERS IN ITALY AND SICILY

with antler cheek-pieces. Carts with solid disc wheels may well have
been drawn by oxen, but a model six-spoked wheel from Solferino and
a complete wheel from Mercurago could have belonged to a horse-
drawn chariot. The latter specimen, which may belong to period VI,
illustrates the peculiar type later distinctive of Classical Greek country
carts.1

The lake-village of Ledro covered only 5000 square metres; Lagazzi
was a cluster of ten huts, probably round, but the terremare1 2 3 may cover
from four to eighteen acres. The regular plans, popularized by Pigorini,
have been shown to be products of his imagination. We do not know
the plans of the houses, nor even whether the villages were from the
outset defended by a moat and casemate rampart; Saflund considers
these defences additions made in the Late Bronze Age.

The pottery throughout imitates wooden models such as have
actually been preserved in all stages of manufacture at Ledro. In the
Polada group, that carries on the Remedello tradition, relatively
simple nose-bridge and elbow handles (Fig. 120, 1) predominate and
plainly give expression to a fashion detected all along the mountain
zone from Northern Anatolia through Thrace and Macedonia to the
Pyrenees. In the Lagazzian wares, derivable perhaps from the Lagoz-
zian,8 begins a fantastic elaboration of handles towards comute types
(Fig. 119, 1) that culminates in the terremare and eventual!}7 spread
south to the heel of the peninsula.

Moulds for casting Early Bronze Age types occur in many settle-
ments, but may have been used by perambulating merchant-artificers
who distributed metal-ware as a sideline of the amber trade across the
Brenner; one such left in the cave of Fameto near Bologna the only
surviving example of a mould for a flanged axe. Many hoards contain-
ing ingot torques, daggers, and other Early Bronze Age types illustrate
the travels of these merchants and the danger attendant thereon.
Middle Bronze Age types are not thus represented in hoards as if some
degree of security had been established throughout the Po-Adige basin
by period V. Moulds and other metallurgical appliances are relatively
common in the terremare and may well denote the workshops of resident
smiths. The earlier metal types are mostly derivable from the Un&tician,
as if the local bronze-smiths had been trained in the Danubian school.
But halberds are more likely Iberian, and if so, imply the incorporation
of Western traditions in the nascent North Italian school. To these must
be added the development of the local Remedello tradition, inspired, as

1   Lorimer, JHS., XXIII (1903). 132-51.

3   Saflund, Le Terremare (Rome, Svenska Institut, 1939),

3 Cf. Bejmabo Brea, A.C., II, 276.

249
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

suggested above, by Early iEgean models. Fresh links with the Levant
are not discernible.

North Italian metallurgists had evolved original forms of axe and
dagger even in the Early Bronze Age and developed these into original
types in the succeeding phase. They are generally credited with several
more pregnant inventions, in particular that of the safety-pin1 (Fig.
122) that was introduced into Greece in the thirteenth century and

diffused in Central Europe chiefly in period VI, but this claim has been
challenged on behalf of the Unetician culture! It was indisputably a
North Italian craftsman who at this time found a patron at Mycenae
itself (p. 83) for whom he cast medial winged axes. Other North Italian
innovations are flanged sickles, double-edged razors, “Peschiera
daggers” (double-edged knives with flanged handles) (Fig. 119, 3, 4,
and 5) and cut-and-thrust swords.1 2

No graves attributable to the Early Bronze Age lake-dwellers nor to
the terremaricoli are known. A Middle Bronze Age cemetery of extended
skeletons accompanied by Central European rapiers at Povigliano near
Verona3 may be attributed to a group of invaders from beyond the Alps.
The umfields connected with some terremare are attributed by Saflund4
to a fresh wave of conquerors who would have occupied—and fortified—
the village sites only in the Late Bronze Age. Finally, the Apennine
herdsmen continued to practise collective burial in natural caves.

The ideology of some Bronze Age societies found expression in the
celebrated rock-carvings round Monte Bigo near the 7000-ft. contour
in the Maritime Alps.5 They depict warriors, brandishing halberds,
side by side with peaceful scenes of ploughing and other agricultural
operations. To the same period, but to another group, might be
attributed the statue menhirs of the Adige6 depicting a male personage
wearing a triangular dagger. They are stylistically allied to those of
South France (p. 311). If they be inspired by a Western cult, its mother

1   J. Sundwall, Die altere italischer Fibeln (Stockholm, 1943).

s Saflund, Le Terremare, 157, n. 1, considers that a sword, bearing the cartouche of
Seti II who died in 1198, is of terramara type.

3 Montelius, CPI., 200.

1 St. Et., XII (1938), 18-22.

5   Bicknell, Prehistoric Rock Engraving in the Italian Maritime Al‘ - 'TV?’:.1 ? ?r-;', v :.

6   M. O. Acanfora, "Le Statue antropomorfe dell’Alto Adige”, ’ ? ?   ? :   !’

Studi siilla Regione Trentino-Alto Adige (Bolzano, 1953).

250

[Prometheus]

Fig. 122. Peschiera safety-pin (fibula) (J).
 FARMERS AND TRADERS IN ITALY AND SICILY

goddess has been transformed into a warrior god. The transfiguration
should reflect the conversion of a matriarchal social order into a
patriarchal one.

The rich and complex culture, formed by the convergence of diverse
traditions in Upper Italy, dominated the whole peninsula and Sicily
too before the end of the Bronze Age. Its manifestations at Punto del
Tonno and on Lipari show that it must have matured in the Po valley
by 1300 b.c.

251
 CHAPTER XIV

ISLAND CIVILIZATIONS IN THE WESTERN
MEDITERRANEAN

It is possible to sail coastwise from the ZEgean to Italy and Sicily
without ever losing sight of land. Progress thence westward meant
embarking on the pathless ocean without any guiding point in the
heavens like the Pole Star by which a mariner might set his course.1
Sicily must have set a bound to regular intercourse between the iEgean
and the western world in so far as such intercourse depended on follow-
ing the northern shores of the Mediterranean. Land routes across North
Africa and even coastal routes along the inhospitable southern shores
of the Mediterranean were of course available, however difficult they
may have been. But they traversed territories so little explored archaeo-
logically that the effect of communications along them can hardly be
even inferred. We can therefore scarcely expect to find the West
Mediterranean islands clearly revealed in the archaeological record as
stepping-stones in the transmission of culture wholes from East to
West, nor to be able adequately to assess the part they may have played
in transmission from Africa northward.

The Megalithic Civilization of Malta

The barren little islands of Malta and Gozo are last remnants of a
land-bridge from Africa to Europe and offer natural havens to mariners
blown by mischance or groping their way deliberately westward from
the East Mediterranean. They were unsuited to Old Stone Age hunters,
and, save for a questionable Neandertaler, were uninhabited thereby.
In the Holocene they supported a surprisingly dense population of
farmers who developed a vigorous insular culture,2 through two main
periods.3

The most enduring and distinctive monuments of period I are mega-
lithic “temples”, built of really gigantic stones, and labyrinthine burial-
vaults ingeniously carved out of the limestone with stone tools. And so

1   L. Hogben, Science for the Citizen, 106.

2   The best collection of illustrations and plans of Maltese monuments and relics is
L. M. Ugolini, Malta: Origini della Civiltu Mediterranea (Rome, 1934), teR the views
expressed there are scarcely plausible.

3   The culture sequence has been established on an objective basis by John Evans,
PPS., XIX (1953). 45-89.

252
 ISLAND CIVILIZATIONS

to-day the most truly native monument of Maltese culture in the
twentieth century a.d. is the village church of Musta, near Valetta,
roofed with a dome larger than that of St. Path’s Cathedral. Like it, the
neolithic temples and tombs are eloquent of a devotion to immaterial
ends which inspired the island farmers to produce a surplus above
immediate needs. And they suggest how “circulation” of this surplus
wealth was effected through unproductive works, that, just because
they were unproductive, could be repeated again and again.

Stratigraphical observations justify the division of period I into
three phases, A, B, and C, distinguishable by pottery styles and temple
plans. The first colonists who have left distinct traces in the archaeo-
logical record and who presumably initiated this unproductive activity
seem to have come from Sicily since they introduced a version of the
Stentinello type of impressed pottery. The temples of period IA, built
of undressed stones, possess a simple trefoil plan. This was elaborated
in phase B by the addition of an extra apse and further complicated
in the culminating phase C. By this phase the slabs had been beauti-
fully dressed with stone mauls and sometimes pitted all over decor-
atively. Some are carved in low relief with spirals or even processions
of animals and men.1

Community of tradition between this temple architecture and the
sepulchral architecture of West European collective tombs2 is revealed
in many details of plan and construction—semicircular forecourts in
front of shrines (Fig. 123); the deliberate use of enormous blocks;

Fig. 123. Plan of "temples” at Mnaidra, Malta, Period IC.

1 Cf. T. Zammit, Prehistoric Malta; the Tarcsien Temples (Oxford, 1930),
3 Noted first by Leeds, LA A A., IX (1922), 35 if.

253
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

porthole slabs as doorways; roofing of apses by corbelling1; walls in
which uprights set with their broad faces in line with the wall alternate
with slabs projecting at right angles thereto1 2; cup-marks on many
stones.

In fact, in the islands themselves chamber tombs were hewn in the
rock to accommodate collective burials throughout period I, and even
in phase A some replicate the trefoil plan of the temples. Most early
tombs, however, were little more than rock-cut pits containing skeletons
sprinkled with ochre.3 But at Hal Salflieni near Valetta a vast and
complicated hypogseum had been carved in the living rock. Starting
simply in phase A (to judge by the pottery), it was gradually enlarged
till by phase B it already comprised many underground rooms with
several chambers opening off a central hall. In phase C it was further
elaborated and decorated with spiraliform paintings and skeuomorphic
carvings.

Cult objects from the temples of phase C include limestone statuettes4
a foot or more in height representing an obese female personage stand-
ing, seated, or reclining on a couch and sometimes wearing a skirt
recalling Minoan or Sumerian fashions, as well as betyls, bells, altars,
and other models in stone. Most belong to phase C, but from a tomb of
phase A2 near Zebbug5 came a fragmentary statue menhir, comparable
to those of South France and to the stele from Troy I.

All these works were executed without the aid of metal tools; the
culture of period I was in this sense neolithic. But flint was imported—
probably from Sicily—by phase A and obsidian from Lipari in phase C
at least. The flaked stone implements are of the simplest kind without
bifacial working, and ground stone celts are extremely rare. Querns
were made from Sicilian lava while pebbles of fine grained rock were
imported for the manufacture of charms and ornaments. Among these,
axe-amulets are very common, pendants in the form of doves and other
shapes rare. Finally, a bossed bone plaque, identical with those from
Castelluccio tombs and resembling those from Troy and Lerna, from
the Tarxien temple is generally assigned to period IC. As ornaments
may be regarded hemispherical buttons with V perforation, found
already in phase A,6 beads of Spondylus shell and bone, and in phase C
winged beads.

1   T. Zammit, The Neolithic Temples of Hajar Kim and Mnaidra (Valetta, 1927),
9 and 28.

2   Ibid., 13; the resultant effect is that of the alternating buttresses and recesses that
adorn the fagades of early Egyptian mastabas and Sumerian temples; cf. Childe,
NLMAE., 85 and 125.

* BSR., XXII (1954), 1-21.

1 JRAI., LIV, 67 ff., IPEK. (1927), 131.

5 BSR., XXII, 13, pi. III.   « Ibid., 11.

254
 ISLAND CIVILIZATIONS

Vases, too, were carved in stone, probably already in phase A but
with exquisite skill by phase C. Then quite complicated shapes, familiar
in pottery, were reproduced in stone and even fitted with tunnel or
nose-bridge handles. A giant cup from Hagar Qim is 6 ft. in diameter
and equipped with a projecting nose-bridge handle!

The Maltese ceramic industry was as fine as the stone-work. No less
than 26 varieties of pottery had been distinguished at Hal Saflieni
by 1910.1 These have been arranged in a chronological order, based
on stratigraphy, by Evans,2 who has also recognized their affinities
with Sicilian and South Italian wares. The earliest are closely related
to the Middle Neolithic Stentinello wares, but even in phase A (Evans'
A2) appear vases still more closely related to the later San Cono group
and probably tubular handles of the Upper Neolithic Diana type, as
well as a little red-on-buff painted ware. In phase B vases were decor-
ated with scratched lines sometimes incrusted in red or white and
forming curvilinear patterns. Elbowed or triangular handles were
already attached to some vases in phase B and in C develop into fully
fledged nose-bridge and even axe-handles (like Fig. 116, 3), while
tubular lugs had been converted by a local evolution into the so-called
tunnel handle;3 that is a clay tube attached horizontally to the inner
wall of the vase the contours of which are interrupted only by two
apertures corresponding to the tube’s ends. Such handles appear in
the Piano Conte phase of the Chalcolithic on the iEolian Islands and
will meet us again in Sardinia. Axe-handles too are appropriate to the
Early Bronze Age of Italy.

Judged by ceramic analogies, therefore, the age of temple-building
and tomb-cutting on Malta should have begun late in the Middle
Neolithic of the Italian scheme, used in the last chapter, and continued
well into the succeeding Chalcolithic. The bossed bone plaque from
Tarxien, if correctly attributed to period I, should mean that period IC
overlaps with the Castelluccio culture of Sicily. It should, however,
end therein since the earliest pottery of period II can best be paral-
leled in the Capo Graziano culture of the iEolian Islands that can be
synchronized both with Castelluccio and with L.M.I. Sepulchral
architecture would suggest rather different correlations with Italy.
Chamber tombs there are at earliest Upper Neolithic, most explicitly
Chalcolithic. In the West, too, V-perforated buttons are most com-
monly associated with Bell-beakers that are late Chalcolithic.

If the first settlers on Malta and Gozo were Sicilian in ceramic tastes,
their ideology was rather East Mediterranean. But the architecture
that expressed it is more West Mediterranean; the best analogies for

1   LA A A., Ill (1910), 1-22.   2 pps., XIX, 44-62.   3 Ibid., 55-

255
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

the trefoil temples may be found in the corbelled tombs of Los Millares
(pp. 270-4). Ideological megalithicism seems again a West European
disease. The statue menhir could indeed as well be a symbol on its
way from Troy to South France as a contribution from that direction,
but V-perforated buttons are explicitly Western. Allowance must
certainly be made for West European stimuli at the birth of the islands’
remarkable culture. Fresh inspiration from the East may be suspected
in promoting the brilliant efflorescence of phase C, but despite analogies
to the spiral carvings and painting on Middle Minoan Kamares cups1
and on the Shaft Grave stelse from Mycenae, concrete evidence for this
is lacking.

Whatever its origins, the megalithic culture of period I was brought
to a violent end by an armed invasion or a religious revolution. As a
result the temple complex of Hal Tarxien was diverted from its primary
use and made a cemetery for cremation burials. With these were
deposited2 little triangular daggers and flat or hammer-flanged axes
of copper or bronze, pottery in an absolutely new tradition, and clay
figurines curiously stylized to a disc with projections.3 The novel
pottery includes vases with oculi ornaments, handled mugs, askoi, and
two-storeyed urns. Beads of silver, fayence, and shell were worn as
ornaments.

On the typological systems, valid for the East Mediterranean and for
peninsular Italy, the metal gear would be Early iEgean and Chalco-
lithic respectively, though in Sardinia almost equally archaic bronzes
survive in hoards attributable to the first millennium. The pot forms,
too, are definitely Early iEgean and find vague analogies in the Chalco-
lithic Psestum cemetery. But in Sicily and Sardinia askoi and similar
iEgeanizing forms reappear after 1200 b.c.4 The new burial-rite might
be connected with the urnfield invasion that had reached Northern
Sicily about that date. Indeed, a few sherds of Apennine ware have
turned up in the cemetery and on other period Ila sites. However,
cremation had been practised at Bogaz Koy and Troy much earlier in
the second millennium and might have reached Malta direct from that
direction. Still, the closest parallels to the pottery of period Ila are
found in the village of Capo Graziano on Filicudi, the occupation of
which was roughly contemporary with Castelluccio and L.M.I-II but
lasted nearly to 1400 b.c.5 That is not to say that the cremationist

1   Evans, P. of M., II, 182-9.

2   The best illustrations of the cemetery furniture are given by M. A. Murray, Corpus
of Bronze Age Pottery of Malta (London, 1934).

3   Curiously like some figurines from Middle Bronze Age sites near the Iron Gates on
the Danube, e.g. Hcemes-Menghin, Urgeschichte der bildenden Kunst (Vienna, 1925), 411.

4   E.g. MA„ XXV, pi. VIII; Not. Sc. (1888), pi. XV, 2; St. Et., Ill (1929), 21 ff.

8 Evans, PPS., XIX, 85; Bernabo Brea, BP. (1956), 51.

256
 ISLAND CIVILIZATIONS

invaders came from the TEolian Islands, but does suggest that the
Maltese Bronze Age began a little before 1400 b.c.

It failed to develop. Bronze merchants would not accept the spiritual
commodities that had satisfied pedlars in flint and obsidian, and the
Maltese had nothing else to offer. Nor could they, like the iEolian
Islanders, become intermediaries in Mycenaean trade with the West;
for even voyagers to Spain preferred the coastwise route up the
Tyrrhenian Sea to a direct crossing exposed to the western gales in the
fifteenth century a.d., a fortiori in the fifteenth century b.c.1 No later
bronzes survive in the islands. Still new settlers arrived and converted
some old temple sites, like Borg in-Nadur2 into fortified villages. They
introduced new pottery types, quite unlike those of the Tarxien
cemetery, and made pottery anchor ornaments. A single Mycenaean
(L.H.IIIb) kylix is the sole import or piece of loot that survives from
period lib. It serves to date the phase to the thirteenth century and so
confirms the dating of phase 11 a. Moreover, some vases from the
Thapsos cemeteries round Syracuse are thought by Bernabo Brea3 to be
imported products of the Borg in-Nadur culture. But anchor orna-
ments, just like Fig. 38, appearing about the same time also at Milazzesi
in the iEolian Islands, had been Early Helladic in Greece and so took a
thousand years to reach Malta!

In the sequel Malta made no further contribution to European
culture. In fact it was only during period I that the island culture was
original and creative. Even then its contributions to the European
heritage can only have been immaterial and may well have been
illusory.

Sardinia

Sardinia, though apparently uninhabited in the Old Stone Age, is large
enough despite its mountainous character to support numerous, if
mutually isolated, farming communities in its valleys and plains.
Moreover, it possesses natural resources—obsidian, copper, and silver'—
to attract industrial colonists. When the archaeological record opens
clearly, all these opportunities were already being exploited. The
evidence is derived in the main from natural caves and rock-cut tombs
used as collective sepulchres for many generations. Relics of different
periods accordingly occur generally mixed together.

Only in the cave of San Bartolomeo4 near Cagliari in the south of the

1   Clavijo {Embassy to Tamerlane, London, 1928) en route from Cadiz to Constantinople
in 1403 sailed from Minorca through the Straits of Bonifacio to the Tyrrhenian coast
but was forced to shelter off Lipari before passing the Straits of Messina.

2   PPS., XIX, 69, 88.

3   BP., n.s., X (1956), 60.   « BP., XXIV (1898), 253 fi.

R

257

[Prometheus]

 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

island is a stratigraphical separation possible. In an upper layer here
the grave goods comprised Beakers, tripod bowls decorated in Beaker
style (Fig. 124,1), West European daggers and a fiat axe of copper, and
a prismatic V-perforated bone plaque—in fact a typical “Copper Age"
assemblage. Below and separated by a layer of stones from the "Copper
Age" burials was an earlier funerary deposit comprising, as well as

Fig. 124. Tripod bowl, San Bartolomeo (£), and vase-handle of nose-bridge
type, Anghelu Ruju ($-).

skeletons, simple obsidian implements and hemispherical and carinated
bowls, one adorned with a stellate pattern of finely incised hatched
ribbons. Technically the last-named vase recalls some vessels from
Villafrati in Sicily, from Hal Saflieni in Malta, and from pre-Beaker
horizons in South France. The pottery from the sepulchral cave of San
Michele (Ozieri)1 includes vessels of the same type, but others with
tunnel-handles quite like the Maltese but decorated with semicircles
executed in cardial and stab-and-drag technique that is represented at
San Bartolomeo only in the upper level.

Sardinian culture of Beaker and post-Beaker age is better represented
by the rock-cut tombs, locally termed domus di gianas. Some of these
family vaults may have been dug even in pre-Beaker times, since sherds
of the incised fabrics represented in the lower level at San Bartolomeo
occur in them, but others were excavated, or in any case still used, in
the first millennium b.c. Generally the tombs are isolated or grouped in
twos or threes, but at Anghelu Ruju,2 a cemetery of no less than thirty-
one chamber tombs has been systematically explored. The burial
chambers here tend to a rectangular plan, are often preceded by an
antechamber and entered either by a stepped pit or a passage. Subsidiary
chambers may open off the principal compartment. The inner portals
may be carved to suggest a Hntelled wooden doorway like the facades
of Early Cypriot tombs.3 In two cases rock pillars were left standing in
the chamber. On such pillars and on the walls bulls’ heads or high-

1   BP., XLI, 102 ff.   2 Not. Sc. (1904), 305 ff.; MA., XIX 409 ff.

8 Antiquity, XIII (1939), 461-3.

258
 ISLAND CIVILIZATIONS

prowed ships have been carved in low relief (Fig. 125)- Traces of red
ochre were found on the floors of two tombs. Normally the bodies were
buried in the contracted attitude, but in two tombs (XV and XXbis)
cremated remains were found in small niches and in tomb XX a baby’s
skeleton in a jar.

A series of intermediate forms leads from the subterranean domus di

Fig. 125. Plan and elevation of tomb XXbis at Anghelu Ruju.

gianas (Witches’ Houses) to the megalithic tombs built above ground
and termed locally tombe di giganti (Giants’ Tombs)—rock-cut tor*03
roofed by corbelling in megalithic style,1 megalithic extensions hmlt on
in front of rock-cut tombs,2 domus di gianas with the rock fsCe above
and around the entrance carved to reproduce the portal *nd forecourt
of a Giants’ Tomb.3 Similarly Mackenzie4 has construed a typological
series leading from simple “dolmens” to the classical Giants’ Tomb—a
long narrow gallery walled with megalithic ^abs, roofed by corbelling,
covered by a cairn enclosed by masonry walls and entered through a low
arch cut in a tall upright slab or stele from a semicircular space flanked
by masonry walls (Fig. no). Of course, such a series can be reversed
as it is a pure a priori construction and unsupported by a reliable series of
closed grave finds. The so-called “dolmens” have yielded no datable
furniture. Some are just remnants of Giants’ Tombs.5 The distribution

1   BSE., V (1910), 103, fig. 5.

2   Taramelli, II Convegno archeologico sardo, fig. 65.

3   Taramelli, II Convegno archeologico sardo, fig. 66; BSE., V, pi. IX, 1.

* BSR., VI (1913), 167; BP., XLI, 15.   .   5 Antiquity, XIII (1939), 376-7.

259
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

of the latter does not agree so exactly with that of the nuraghe as to
prove contemporaneity.1 Nuragic and even Roman1 2 relics have been
found in Giants’ Tombs. But of course such finds do not establish
erection in the Iron or Late Bronze Age.

The grave goods recovered at Anghelu Ruju give the best available
picture of Sardinian culture before the Nuragic age, though tomb-
robbing in antiquity has stripped that picture of any pretence at being
complete. Metal was used, but apparently only sparingly; only two or
three West European daggers, one flat axe, one arrow-head, several
quadrangular awls, some beads, bracelets and atypical pins of copper
and olive-shaped beads, and a ring of silver have escaped the ancient
plunderers. Martial activities are indicated by numerous weapons—
the copper daggers, spheroid mace-heads of stone, arrow-heads (tri-
angular, tanged, tanged-and-barbed, and even serrated) of flint together
with wrist-guards (these, however, having for the most part only two
perforations, may have been used as whet-stones as in Crete) and an
arrow-straightener of pumice. In the pottery we might distinguish:

(i)   carinated vases, and cylindrical pyxides, vaguely iEgean in form;

(ii)   vessels decorated with semicircles and other patterns formed either
of (a) finely incised hatched ribbons or of (b) stab-and-drag lines;

(iii)   Bell-beakers and tripod bowls like Fig. 124, 1; (iv) carinated cups
and other vessels with nose-bridge handles (Fig. 124, 2), which persist
into the Nuragic age.

As ornaments and charms, stone bracelets and rings, axe-amulets,
disc-beads of shell, and tortoise beads (Fig. 126, a, c, f) and conical
buttons with V perforations were worn. Finally, three tombs contained
rabble idols, which, although made of local stone, look like deliberate
imitaur,ns 0f Early Cycladic models.

Plainly many streams have converged in the Copper Age culture
of Anghelu 'Rqjju. Its debt to Crete was admirably summarized by
Patroni3: "Not Gaty the form of the tombs but also the shape and
decoration of some oi the vases in them recur in Crete. The symbols
sculptured on the walls the statuettes of marble show relations
of a nature superior to any external relations of commerce; for they
denote a profound affinity of thought and culture.” Giuffridi-Ruggieri
adds anthropological arguments. Noting that fifty-three skulls from
Anghelu Ruju were long-headed and tm round, and that a similar
mixture is detectable in Crete, he concludes that Sardinia was invaded
at the end of the third millennium by a mixed race of Cretans. (It

1   Rivista, XX, 6 flf.; BSE., V, 135.

2   MA., XI, 268; Not. Sc., 1933, 360.

3   Quoted by Giufiridi-Ruggieri in Archivio per Antrop. ed Etnogr., XLVI, 18.

260
 ISLAND CIVILIZATIONS

would be safer now to say “East Mediterraneans, including the round-
headed type that reappears among the Beaker-folk” (p. 227). The
invaders, combined with some small pre-existing population also of
Mediterranean stock, created the Copper and Bronze Age civilizations
of Sardinia.

If Giuffridi-Ruggieri be right, the finely incised wares of our group (ii)

might be taken as representative of the “pre-existing population”.
These fabrics are certainly related to those of Malta, Apulia, and Sicily
on the one hand, of South France on the other. Their origin is not
thereby determined. The Beaker-folk’s effective contribution is demon-
strated by their pottery, armament, and ornaments. Some beakers from
Anghelu Ruju resemble especially those from Almeria, but one is
almost identical with specimens from Bohemia and Denmark.1 The
arrow-straightener, too, though locally made, is a Central European
trait in the West Mediterranean. But a beaker from a rock-cut tomb
at Cuguttu2 has a rudimentary thumb-grip handle.

This and related nose-bridge handles and many other traits, espe-
cially the V-perforated tortoise beads and prism-shaped buttons,
betoken particularly intimate relations with Catalonia and South
France. In South France such handles belong to a horizon explicitly
later than wares like our group (ii) and on the whole post-Beaker
(p. 310). In Sardinia they persist into the Nuragic age.

Despite the industrial development and wide cultural relations
attested at Anghelu Ruju, no urban civilization arose and Sardinia
held aloof from any comprehensive system of foreign commerce that
might bring datable foreign manufactures into the archaeological
record. Judging by sepulchral architecture, island culture developed

1   Nordmann, “Megalitliic,” p. 122.   2 Not, Sc. (1909), 103.

26l
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

insensibly into the extremely insular Nuragic phase. This development
did not take place without renewed contact with the East Mediter-
ranean. A Cypro-Mycenaean copper ingot stamped with Mycenaean
letters was found on the island. About 1200 b.c. maritime raiders,
termed Sh’rd’n’, appear in the Egyptian records. They are depicted
protected by horned helmets and round shields and armed with swords
precisely like those of bronze statuettes from the Sardinian nuraghi.
Whether the Shardana originated in Asia Minor, like the Etruscans,
and only settled in the Western Mediterranean after raiding Egypt,1
or were actual descendants of the Copper Age Sardinians,1 2 their con-
nection with the island in its Nuragic age is indisputable, as is the
stimulus given to West Mediterranean development by their experiences
in the East.

But the result was not the establishment of a city-state organization
such as the Etruscans created. In the island the highest social unit
was a cluster of round huts sheltering beneath the dry-stone tower—
nuraghe—of the clan chief. Architecturally as well as sociologically
these complexes are significantly like a modern Nigerian village.3
Mines and smelting furnaces, as well as many hoards belonging mostly
to founders, disclose indeed an active and efficient metallurgical
industry.

On the whole, indeed, the Late Bronze Age industry of Sardinia,
like those of peninsular Italy and Sicily, was based on Central European
traditions. Yet the variety of types comprised in the hoards would
suggest trade with, or raids on, both the iEgean (double-axes, axe-
adzes) and Atlantic coasts (double-eared palstaves, carp’s-tongue
swords). But the island industry was extraordinarily conservative.
Hoards of Nuragic age may contain every sort of axe4 from flat or
flanged types assignable by typologists to the Copper or Early Bronze
Age, up to socketed forms of the Late Bronze Age and of stabbing
weapons from archaic round-heeled daggers5 to carp’s-tongue swords.
Luckily a few imported manufactures prove that these archaic types
were still current in the eighth or even seventh century b.c., when the
Etruscan Iron Age was in full bloom in Italy.6

Yet the nuragic bronzes appear in the archaeological record as the
immediate successors of the Copper Age types just as nuragic pottery

1   So Hall, Cambridge Ancient History, II, 282.

2   BP., XXXIX, 100; MA., XXV, 896; Archivio, XLVI (1916), 9; RM., XIII (1928),
74-

3   Bosch-Gimpera, Etnologia, 194.

4   E.g. at Monte Sa’Idda, MA., XXVII, 14 ff.

5   At Monte Sa’Idda and A1& dei Sardi, Not. Sc. (1925), 466.

6   Not. Sc. (1922), 293; (1926), 374; cf. Bosch-Gimpera in CIPMO., 30 f.; Studi
Etruschi, III, 20.

262
 ISLAND CIVILIZATIONS

occurs already in the rock-cut tombs of Anghelu Ruju itself. We have
unconsciously overstepped the chronological boundaries of this book.
The excursus demonstrates how dangerous it would be to apply to the
West Mediterranean typological systems that may work well within
the Danubian and British commercial spheres and how difficult it is
to fill with developments in tools and vessels, weapons and tombs any
vast interval between the prehistoric Copper Age or Beaker period
and the proto-historic Bronze Age of the eighth century B.c. Archseo-
logically a millennium is not very plausible, two quite incredible.

The Balearic Islands

In the Balearic Islands the archaeological record begins with the mega-
lithic culture. In Mallorca the normal family vault was a rock-cut
tomb.1 The chamber (Fig. 109) takes the form of a long narrow gallery
round which runs a shallow bench divided into several stalls by low
ridges of rock. One or more cells may open off the chamber, and it may
be preceded by an antechamber. The entrance is a low arch or window
cut in the rock and may give on to an uncovered forecourt excavated in
the hillside. In Menorca the form of the underground gallery is repro-
duced above ground in megalithic chambers enclosed in boat-shaped
constructions walled with cyclopean masonry and termed navetas. The
end at which the chamber opens is flattened and sometimes even concave
in plan.2

Evidence of early contact between the islands and the Mgean is
afforded only by a matt-painted beaked jug of Middle Cycladic type
like Fig. 41, 3, certainly an import but found without definite context
on Menorca. Otherwise the earliest contacts with the outer world are
provided by a single sherd of Beaker ware3 from the rock-cut tomb of
Felanitx, and a conical button with V perforation from the tomb of Son
Mulet. Both are indicative of the activities of Beaker-folk on Mallorca.
On the other hand, splay-footed vases typical of the Horgen culture
from a rock-cut tomb at Sa Val4 prove connections northward, as do
the similarities of the Balearic tomb plans to those of the Rhone and
Seine valleys.

The bulk of the sepulchral pottery from the rock-cut tombs, however,
consists of plain vases sometimes provided with upstanding lugs but
never with true handles. Technically this fabric resembles the Argaric
ware of the East Spanish Bronze Age, and several forms can be matched

1   Arch., LXXVI, 121 fL; Ant. XIII (1933), 33 U CAS., 113.

2   CIPMQ., 26.

3   Castillo, Campanifortne, 125; CIPMO., pi. II.

4   In museum at Palma unpublished before the rebellion,

263
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

in the same context. But simple round-bottomed and carinated vessels
preserve the traditions of the oldest West European neolithic ceramics.

Little metal survives among the grave goods. Round-heeled daggers
of “Early Bronze Age” type were recovered from Sa Val and several
other tombs,1 but one tomb yielded an identically shaped dagger of
iron!

Indeed, the cultural history of the Baleares is parellel to that of
Sardinia. There is no obvious break between the “Copper Age” culture
represented in the rock-cut tombs and that represented in the
“talayots”. The latter are fortified hamlets, counterparts of the
Sardinian nuargic settlements, and like these, the talayots2 continued to
be inhabited into the Iron Age. As in Sardinia, the archaeological
material from the Balearic Isles does not show sufficient typological
development to justify a very high dating for the local megalithic
culture. If, like Hemp,3 we treat the Mallorcan rock-cut tombs as the
starting-point for the French series of gallery graves, we must still insist
that a reversal of the relations would accord far better with the tombs’
furniture and any chronology based thereon.

1   Ant, /., XIII, 35, 39; CIPMO., pi. III.

2   So the axes of the Talayot culture include both flat and socketed forms, CIPMO, 21.

3   PPS., I (1935), no.

264
 CHAPTER XV

THE IBERIAN PENINSULA

The Iberian Peninsula1 offers the natural channel through which
Oriental influences, whether transmitted by land ways across North
Africa or by sea along the Mediterranean, might penetrate to Atlantic
Europe. In the Peninsula a substantial Old Stone Age population had
probably been augmented at the end of the pleistocene by makers of
microliths in the Capsian tradition (p. 7). Some of these may indeed
have brought with them at least domestic sheep and goats if not some
rudiments of agriculture. Their traditions of flint-working and of
parietal art at least can be recognized in cultures that are admittedly
neolithic.

Now Spanish prehistorians to-day recognize two “Neolithic” phases,
I and II, followed by a “Bronze Age I”, equivalent to the old “Copper
Age”, that is divided into phases A and B; the old “Early Bronze Age”
(El Argar) thus becomes Bronze Age II. And within the Neolithic they
have long recognized two parallel cycles—the Almeria culture and the
Cave culture.

[Prometheus]

Maritime Neolithic Settlements

The Cave culture used to denote a very heterogeneous assemblage; for
at all times hunters, herdsmen, pirates, and outcasts have taken shelter
in caves for shorter or longer periods. But in some caves both in the
Peninsula and in South France, as in Liguria, it is now possible to dis-
tinguish at the base of deep deposits a recurrent assemblage of pots and
implements. This is just that culture, characterized by Cardial ware,
already encountered in South Italy and Liguria. It is found all round
the West Mediterranean coasts in North Africa,1 2 the Iberian Peninsula,3
and South France4 too. But at least in its earlier manifestations it is
strictly confined to the coastal regions where the Mediterranean en-
vironment is preserved in its most distinctive form.

It was carried by groups of hunters and stock-breeders, known

1   Pericot, Historia de Espana, I (Madrid, 1947); La Espafla Primitiva (Barcelona,
1950). 355*

2   Rev. Anthr., XLI (1931), 158; A. Ruhlmann, La Grotte prehistorique de Dar es-Sultan
(Paris, Col. Hesperies), 1951.

3   Pericot, Historia, 121; Act. y Mem., XVII, 1942, 88-108.

4   Riv. St. Lig., XV (1949), 22-5; Bailloud and Mieg, 58-71; AC., II.

265
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

almost exclusively from their occupation of caves. This circumstance
has unduly exaggerated the rdle attributed to animal husbandry in the
economy; for herdsmen periodically shelter in caves even though they
have homes in permanent farming villages. Actually the Cardial herds-
men did cultivate cereals; in their deposits have been found not only
grains of barley,1 sickle-teeth, and querns, but also—both in Spain1 2 and
Provence3—bone spatulse of the specialized type used by Starcevo folk
in the Balkans for collecting flour (p. 84). Perhaps they followed that
system of cultivation, still observable in Corsica and Liguria, by which
the scrub is burnt off and the grains planted between the trees still left
standing.4 But for hunting they employed bows and arrrows armed
with microliths and clubs, weighted with percussion-perforated
stone heads5—both items that could have been borrowed from
local "Tardenoisians”.

The flint-work is generally very simple. Axes, in preference to adzes,
were made from fine-grained rock. The pottery shows leathery forms,
generally round based and sometimes provided with small strap
handles. The vases have been profusely decorated by impressing the
edge of a shell or other stamp in the wet clay. The impressions are
normally arranged to form skeuomorphic patterns recalling wicker
cases in which pre-ceramic vessels might have been carried.

Bracelets of shell or stone were worn as ornaments together with
necklaces of bored teeth. The dead seem to have been buried in caves,
used as collective ossuaries.6

The coastal distribution of this culture leaves no doubt that it was
diffused by seafarers. Though very similar pottery is distributed very
widely in North Africa down to Tibesti and Khartoum,7 there are no
convincing grounds for supposing that the maritime distribution of
our culture began from Little Africa rather than the Balkan or Levant
coasts. Cardial decoration is found on some of the earliest neolithic
pottery of North Syria. On the other hand, Starcevo ware is related
to Cardial and associated with the bone spatulse that occur in no other
context. It certainly seems that the earliest neolithic cultures, adapted

1   San Valero Aparisi, La Cueva de la Sarsa, Servicio de Investigacion Prehistorica
(Valencia, 1950), pi. II.

2   Ibid., pi. I.

3   Bailloud and Mieg, 71 (Chateauneuf-lez-Martigues), but in Prehistoire, XII (1956),
89, this is classed as "n6olithique cardial".

4   Sereni, "II sistema agricola del debbio nella Liguria antica,” Mem. della Acad.
Lunigianese, XXV (La Spezia, 1955).

5   San Valero, op. cit., 37-46, argues that these are weights for digging-sticks. Similar
objects are widespread in the North African Capsian, cf. Vaufrey, Prehistoire de VAfrique,
I, 413-15. They are too light for digging-sticks.

6   Riv. St. Lig., XVII (1951), 132.

7   Cf. Arkell, Shaheinab (London, 1953), 69.

266
 THE IBERIAN PENINSULA

respectively to Balkan and West Mediterranean environments, at
least sprang from a common root,1 In the latter area Cardial herdsmen
may well have mingled with surviving mesolithic hunters and with
neolithic farmers of Capsian tradition. And so a certain continuity of
tradition may be observed in the cave deposits. But the varied styles
of pottery and kinds of stone tool grouped together in earlier books
to constitute a “Cultura de las Cuevas” are no more homogeneous
culturally or chronologically than the relics from the several strata
of Arene Candide. But in Spain they can seldom be distinguished
stratigraphically. At least at El Pany near Barcelona, however, col-
lective burials with Cardial ware were stratified below Bell-beakers
of Bronze I.2

The Almeria Culture

A second and possibly earlier stream of neolithic colonists, come this
time from Africa, introduced a different culture that is first recogniz-
able in Almeria and therefore thus designated.

The neolithic colonists settled generally on hilltops like the type site,
El Garcel,3 overlooking the fertile valleys; they arrived at a time when
pines still grew on the now treeless hill. In addition to breeding stock
and cultivating cereals they may have introduced the culture of olive-
trees since olive-stones were found, but grape-seeds are said to be
derived from wild vines.4 The grains were reaped with sickles armed
with serrated flint teeth, like those from the pre-dynastic Fayum,
stored in subterranean silos and ground on saddle-querns. Tied to the
soil by their fruit trees, the villagers lived in round or oval huts, partly
excavated in the soil but roofed with a superstructure of wattle-and-
daub. Huntsmen still used microlithic arrow-heads—micro-gravers
found at El Garcel may be by-products in the manufacture of these.

Carpenters employed ground stone axes, adzes, and gouges. A textile
industry is implied by biconical whorls. Pottery was undecorated and
vases were never provided with true handles, though singly or even
doubly perforated lugs were applied. Forms include jars with pointed
bases (Fig. 127, 3) like the early Egyptian (Gerzean) and North African,5
curious bottles, oval in plan, that also recur in North Africa, and sack-
like leathery vessels related to the neolithic pottery of the Fayum and
Merimde6 in Egypt. The leathery sack-like forms continued to be

1   Cf. MilojCid, Germania, XXX, 314-18; Bernabo Brea, A.C., II, 192-8.

2   Anuari, VIII (1936), 19 ff.; Ampurias, V, 190.

3   Siret, RQS., XXXIV (1893), 489 ff., and Les premiers Ages du mUal dans le sud-est
de VEspagne; Gosse, Ampurias, III (1941). 63-84.

1 Siret, Questions de chronologie et d'ethnographic iberiques, Paris, 1913.

s BSPF., XXXIII, 633; Rev. Anthr., XLI (1931), 158, fig. 1, 4-

B Caton-Thompson, The Desert Fayum; Chiide, NLMAE., 58.

267
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

popular in all later phases of Almerian culture. In Siret's second neo-
lithic phase as represented at Tres Cabezos1 they are provided with
upstanding perforated lugs (Fig. 130, 1), while bowls maybecarinated,
and even double-vases were made as at Merimde in Egypt. Vessels
were also woven of esparto grass.

Disc-beads of shell, made also by African Capsians, and bracelets
of Pectunculus1 2 shell and stone, beads of callais and later of steatite
were worn as ornaments. The dead were buried collectively in natural
cave ossuaries or in stone-walled but closed cists, usually circular in
plan and covered by low tumuli.3 Even at El Garcel a very crude

Fig. 127. 1, Gouge, El Garcel (£); 2, schist adze, Portugal (£); 3, jar, El

Garcel (£).

fiddle-shaped stone, rather like Fig. 8, 14, may represent a “Mother
Goddess''. She is slightly more recognizable in stone figures from the
tombs that may, however, be Neolithic II.

Vaufrey4 reports “the whole assemblage from El Garcel”—flints,
celts, and even pots—“is an almost exact replica of the neolithic of
Capsian tradition” as found throughout the Maghreb. The African
origin of the Almeria culture is thus established. But bifacially trimmed
arrow-heads and richly decorated pottery are missing from its neo-
lithic I phase. Hence the Straits may have been crossed before the

1   Siret, Ages du metal, pi. 3; segmented bone beads, a clay plaque perforated at the
four corners and a heap of ore suggest that this site should be assigned rather to the
Copper Age.

2   Siret, Questions, 38; APL., I (1928), 25.

3   Leisner, Megalithgrdber, 390-404.

4   Prehistoire de I'Afrique, I, Maghreb (Paris, 1955), 412.

2

3

268
 THE IBERIAN PENINSULA

main expansion that Vaufrey has traced took place in Africa. And the
radio-carbon date of 3050 b.c. for the Capsian neolithic in the Maghreb1
need not be accepted as an upper limit for its arrival in Europe.

A parallel colonization of the west coast may perhaps be inferred
from plain baggy pots and microliths, similar to those from El Garcel,
found in megalithic passage graves that are at best Neolithic II (p. 276
below). Perhaps the first phase of this western colonization will be
documented if the furniture of the Portuguese "dolmens” be pub-
lished. These are reported1 2 to be megalithic cists, each containing
a single corpse accompanied by archaic microliths.

On the east coast Spanish prehistorians have traced the spread of
the Almeria culture northward to Catalonia by a series of burials of
contracted skeletons in simple pit graves. Their furniture includes
tanged and transverse arrow-heads, Pectunmlus bracelets, callals

Fig. 128. Stages in conventionalization of parietal art in Spain. After Obermaier.
A, Maimon; B, Figuras; C. La Pileta.

beads, and plain "Western” pottery—once indeed a "square-mouthed
vase”.3 Though formally neolithic, these Almerian cemeteries in the
north may be relatively late, but at least once the distinctive plain
pottery has been found stratified below Beakers.4

On their way north these Almerians must have come into contact
not only with Cardial herdsmen but also with descendants of older,
mesolithic, tribes. Interactions with the latter must be responsible
for the curiously African character of some of the East Spanish rock-
shelter art. Pericot indeed now believes that the practice of decorating
shelter walls with lively but impressionistic scenes of animals and the
chase began in the Solutrian phase of the old Stone Age. But some
still quite lively paintings depict side by side with gathering activities
sheep, equids, and even a rider.5 If these neolithic elements be derived

1   Ibid., 415.

2   Leisner, Antas do Concelho de Reguengos de Monsarraz (Lisbon, 1951), 177.

3   Maluquer de Motes, “La Cultura neolitica del Valles,” Armhona, 1-2 (Sabadell,
1950), 4-13.

4   Ampuriaz, VI (1944), 43-58.   5 AJA., LIU (1949), 150, figs. 1-4.

269
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

from the Almerian of Capsian—i.e. North African—tradition, the
stylistic similarity of some East Spanish paintings to those of Libya1
or even Rhodesia would be more comprehensible. But the paintings in
question are demonstrably older than more conventionalized paintings
the figures of which can be matched on Copper Age I vases (Fig. 128)
and tomb walls. Rock-shelter art of this later conventionalized type
is not confined to the eastern coasts, but occurs widely in the Peninsula2
and along the Mediterranean coasts even east of the Rhone.3 It must
be the work of roving hunting and herding groups whose palaeolithic
traditions had been enriched by interaction with Almerian and other
neolithic farmers.

The Rise of a Metal Industry

The Peninsula was rich in gold, silver, copper, lead, and even tin. The
discovery of these natural resources permitted the development of a
new economy in which industry and trade could absorb some of the
rural population, as in the Eastern Mediterranean. It was presumably
initiated by actual prospectors, probably by veritable colonies, from
that direction. It is in fact first and most brilliantly attested in Almeria
at sites adjacent to the Mediterranean coasts whence colonists come
by sea from farther east could conveniently exploit and work neigh-
bouring lodes of argentiferous copper and lead ores. The type station,
Los Millares,4 a few miles up the Andorax from the modem port of
Almeria, has indeed all the aspects of an iEgean township, covering
5 hectares (i2f acres) and protected by a wall and fosse. Outside the
wall lay a cemetery of a hundred-odd collective tombs said to have
held up to a hundred interments. A similar settlement was established
at Almizaraque about a mile up from the mouth of the Almanzora.
Others may be inferred from corbelled tombs at Belmonte, Purchena,
and Tabernas.5

Most of the townsmen were of course farmers who cultivated emmer
and hexaploid wheat, barley, beans, and flax.6 But the population
included also metallurgists, presumably initiated in the East Medi-
terranean and interested especially in silver and gold. Slags from
Almizaraque attest the extraction of silver, copper, and lead. Siret7

1   Cf. e.g. Graziosi, L'Arte rupestre della Libia (Napoli, n.d.), 275-85.

2   Breuil, Les Peintures rupestres scMmatiques de la Peninsule ibdrique (Paris, 1936).

3   BSPF., XLI (1944), 168.

4   Siret, RQS. (1893); Leisner, Megalithgrdber, 19-64.

5   Leisner, ibid., 10, 13, 73.

6   T. dicoccum and compactum, H. hexastichon; Telles and Ciferri, Tr'r v '~.T'   ? de

Espaiia, Madrid (Inst. nac. de Investigaciones Agronomicas), 1954; < ?' ) :? 1 ? ? !   ?? \6),

38 f.

7   Cuadernos, III (1948), 117-24.

270
 THE IBERIAN PENINSULA

believed that clay arcs, perforated at both ends and up to 22 cm. long,
formed parts of a reverberatory furnace. But the exact Anatolian
parallels to such arcs, that are characteristic of most sites of Bronze I,
suggest that they really served as loom weights. The copper-smiths
were masters of only the simplest techniques of forging and open-

Fig. 129. Flint arrow-heads: 1, Alcald (|); 5. Los Millares (|). Halberd blades; 3, Casa
da Moura; 4, Los Millares (£); 2, Palmella points (•£).

hearth casting. So they manufactured only daggers with a midrib on
one face (like Fig. 132, bottom), as at Usatova, or quite flat and tanged
(of West European type) together with long narrow flat adzes, cutters,
as in the Cyclades, quadrangular awls, and even saws.

Trade brought to Los Millares hippopotamus ivory and ostrich
egg-shells from Africa, turquoise, callais, amber, and jet from undeter-
mined sources. But stone was still normally used instead of metal for
axe-heads, and flint was now superbly worked by pressure flaking for
arrow-heads, dagger or halberd blades (Fig. 129, 4), as well as knives

271
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

and sickle-teeth. Apart from transverse arrow-heads which were still
used, 68 per cent of the specimens from Los Millares are hollow-based,
17 Per cent tanged-and-barbed, 7 per cent leaf-shaped (Fig. 129, 5).
Thick plaques of clay, perforated at the four corners, may have been
used as wrist-guards or loom-weights.1 A stone plaque perforated at
each end from Belmonte was used as a whetstone.

The pottery on the whole carries on the native Almerian tradition,
but some vases are decorated with incised patterns that include oculi
motives (like Fig. 130, 2) and conventionalized stags (Fig. 130, 3), with

Fig. 130. 1, “Late Neolithic” vase from Tres Cabezos; 2-3, symbol vases from

Los Millares.

small knobs or even painted in warm black on a light ground. New forms
include squat birds' nest pyxides, sometimes with plaster necks,
cylindrical tumblers and little globular vases with short necks as well
as a few multiple vessels. Beakers were found, apparently as an intrusive
element in only four tholoi at Los Millares, in one each at Belmonte,
Purchena, and Almizaraque, and in five cists. Vases were also made out
of plaster to imitate ostrich eggs, and unguent flasks were carved out
of ivory or white limestone.

As toilet articles and ornaments, bone or ivory combs were worn at
Los Millares, the clothing fastened with shanked stone buttons, and
simple disc or barrel beads of stone, shell, talc, and imported materials
were hung on strings round the neck. At Almizaraque, conical and
prismatic buttons with V perforation and a grooved bone toggle of a
type found at Troy and Alisar were used as dress-fasteners, and in the
tholos at Tabernas and probably also in that at Llano de Media Legua
on the Almanzora, bone pins with grooved cylindrical heads (like
Fig. 132) were found.

The Almerians were, however, deeply preoccupied with immaterial
ends. The collective tombs were constructed with great care; sixty-

1   From Tres Cabezos (neolithic), Velez Blanco, Mas de Menente (Alicante, Bronze
Age!).

272
 THE IBERIAN PENINSULA

4

Fig. 131. Ritual objects: 1, Almeria; 2 and 4, Portugal; 3, Granada (£}.

five of those at Los Millares, as at Almizaraque, Belmonte, Tabernas,
are corbelled tholoi (Fig. 108), often with cells opening off the chamber
or passage, and with porthole slabs for entries,1 covered with circular

1 Leisner, Megalithgraber, 289-328.

273

S

[Prometheus]

 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

cairns supported by a built retaining-wall on to which straight or
curved walls may be built to frame a forecourt. Wooden pillars are said
to have supported the roofs. A few of the earlier tombs at Los Millares
are rectangular or trapezoid megalithic cists from 2 to 5 m. long, pre-
ceded by a short entrance passage. Ritual objects include owl-eyed
female figurines made by painting bovine phalanges (Fig. 131, 1), or
stone and ivory cylinders, plain plaques of schist (Los Millares), and
flat stone figures without faces like Fig. 8, 13, and, at Almizaraque,
bone models of sandals. Axe-amulets were worn as charms at Los
Millares and elsewhere.

The urbanization of Almerian economy seen at Los Millares and
Almizaraque is presumably a reflection, however indirect, of Oriental
cities' demands for metal. But the townships thus created, themselves
constituted local secondary centres of demand and radiated their
influence right across the Peninsula. Westward, parallel or colonial
settlements sprang up all across Andalusia to the coasts of Portugal
along the natural route, followed by the modern railways from Almeria
to Algarve, and principally at focal-points (now junctions) thereon or
in metalliferous districts.

On the plateau of Granada1 are several large cemeteries of collective
tombs round Guadix, Gor, and Gorafe, composed partly of tholoi,
more often of cists of the Almerian form and frequently entered through
porthole slabs. The tombs contain typical Almerian products—oculi
vases, flat stone idols, phalange idols, ribbed cylinder-headed pins—
as well as a few Beakers. Yet other tombs of the same form in these
cemeteries contain pottery and bronzes characteristic of the succeeding
Argaric Bronze Age. Farther west at Antequera2 and in the ancient
Betica,8 the route is marked by superbly built tholos tombs. But near
the princely tholos of Romeral at Antequera is a small cemetery of
rock-cut tombs4 that reproduce in miniature the plan of the tholos
but contained mainly Argaric bronzes. On the other hand, stroke-
burnished ware from villages near Jerez and Carmona5 points to fresh
impulses direct from the East Mediterranean. But at Campo Reale
near Carmona, Bonsor6 found burials in "silos”—really chamber
tombs—accompanied by polished stone axes, plain pottery, and a
little painted ware akin to the Almerian and the characteristic clay arcs.

1   Leisner, Megalithgraber, 84-168.

2   Ibid., 174-85.

3   Ibid., 194-213.

4   S. Gimenez Reyna, "Mem. arqueol. de Prov. Malaga hasta 1946”, Informes y
Memorias (Madrid, Junta para Excavaciones, 1946).

fi Acta Arqueol. Hispanica, III (1945), 37; Bonsor, "Les Colonies agricoles pr6-
roinaines de la vall6e du Bdtis," Rev. Arch., XXXV (1899), in.

6   Op. cit., 36-9, 105-10, fig. 41-2.

274
 THE IBERIAN PENINSULA

Then, in Algarve, a metalliferous region where the rocks are suited
to dry-stone masonry, a cemetery of seven tholoi at Alcala1 marks the
site of a smaller Los Millares. The tombs contained flat adzes, notched
daggers with midribs on one or both faces (Fig. 132), awls and saws
of copper, superbly worked hollow-based arrow-heads of flint (Fig.
129, 1), undecorated vases of Almerian type, a marble paint-pot, a
clay arc, hammer beads, and beads of amber, callai's, and jet, but not
Beaker ware nor West European daggers. Corbelled tombs extend along

2

Fig. 132. Copper daggers and adze, Alcala, and bone pin, Cabe9o da
Ministra (-&).

the Portuguese coasts as far north as Torres Vedras (Pena and Barro
with semicircular forecourt).1 2 Tombs at Monge and San Martinho,
Cintra,3 excavated in the rock but roofed by corbelling, illustrate the
transition from the built tholos to the rock-cut tomb.

Tombs of the latter class, agreeing in plan with the tholoi and, like
them, sometimes preceded by an antechamber, a curved forecourt or
a long entrance passage divided by rock-cut versions of the porthole
slab form regular cemeteries at Palmella,4 Alapraia,5 Estoril, and

1   Estacio de Veiga, Aniiguidades monumentaes do Algarve (Lisbon, 1886-91).

2   Pena (OAP., XIV, 354), and Barro, with semicircular forecourt; V. Correia, CIPP.,
Mem. 27 (1931), 72, relics at Belem.

3   Cartailhac, op. cit.; OAP., II, 211.   4 OAP., XII (1907), 210, 320.

6 Afonso do Pafo, “As Grutas de Alapraia”, Broteria, XXI (Lisbon, 1935); Anais

IV (Lisbon, 1941).

275
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

other sites round the Tagus estuary.1 From their situation at the
river mouth and from the tomb furniture these cemeteries of the
Palmella culture might belong to maritime colonists from the East
Mediterranean like Almizaraque and Los Millares, with which they are
in fact largely contemporary.

But in the hinterland, including the stanniferous plateaux of Northern
Portugal, are cemeteries of four or five megalithic passage graves
{antas) under round cairns which embody an older tradition of sepulchral
architecture and should belong to a native population of neolithic
ancestry (p. 269)—the builders of the unpublished “dolmens”. Nearly
all antas had been pillaged in the seventeenth century. The surviving
furniture from most includes beakers and typical relics of the Palmella
culture. But at least two1 2 were demonstrably earlier than “Almerian”
tholoi that had been built up against them under the same cairns. And
from a couple of very simple passage graves (Fig. 133) the original
furniture has been recovered intact.3 Each interment was accompanied
by an axe and an adze, a set of geometric microliths and a couple of
plain round-bottomed “Western” pots and a plate of red-slipped ware.
So the first megalithic passage graves in Portugal were built by a neo-
lithic population akin to the Almerian and at a time at least culturally
equivalent to Neolithic II in Spain. Yet larger, and presumably later,
tombs reproduce in orthostatic masonry all the features of the tholoi and
rock-cut tombs4 with their divided passage and even porthole slabs.5

The only settlement yet explored in Portugal is Vila Nova de S.
Pedro,6 not on the coast, but well in the hinterland of Lisbon. It was
founded before Beaker ware became fashionable locally,7 but was
occupied throughout the “Copper Age” (Bronze I) and until Argaric
types were locally produced in Bronze II. The villagers cultivated
hexaploid wheat,8 barley, and beans and engaged in stock-breeding and
hunting. Local copper ores were smelted at the site and the metal
worked into flat axes, saws, and other types,9 though perhaps not before
Bronze II. The domestic pottery is characterized by reinforced rims,
surprisingly like those of neolithic Britain.10 But beakers and other
vases, found in the rock-cut tombs, were also used, and on the whole
the site reveals just a provincial variant on the Palmella culture.

1   Alapraia e S. Pedro, Junta de Turismo de Cascais, 1946; Congresso Luso.-Espanhol.
do Porto, T. VIII, 1943.

2   Leisner, Antas do Concelho de Reguengos (Lisbon, 1951), 284-9.

3   Ibid., 212 and 310.

4   Correia, CIPP., Mem. 27.   5 Marburger Studien, i, 150.

6 Afonso do Pa^o, Act. y Mem., XX (1945).   7 Id. Broteria, LIV (1952), 7-16.

8 Andis, V (1954), 280-356, T. sphcerococcuw, cereals from other sites are described here.

8 Zephyrus, III (Salamanca, 1952), 32-9.

10 Childe, Revista Guimardes, LX (1950), 7-12.

276
 THE IBERIAN PENINSULA

6

Fig. 133. Plan of "neolithic” passage grave (anta) and part of furniture; Alemtejo.
After Leisner. Pottery and celts (i), flints (£).

In the Palmella culture the essential features of the Millares economy
are conserved though less fully than in Algarve. Metal tools and weapons
are rare in the rock-cut tombs and practically confined to the odd arrow-
heads1 shown in Fig, 129, 2. The place of copper in industry is taken

1   One such “point” was found sticking in a skull at Valdenabi, Leon; Corona d'Estudis
dedica a sus Martiros (Madrid, 1941), 128.

2 77
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

by stone axes and adzes and superbly worked flints, including halberd
blades like Fig. 129, 4, that may be polished on the faces as if in imita-
tion of metal. Arrow-heads include still microlithic types, but hollow-
based, tanged, and leaf-shaped forms, none comparable in delicacy to
those from Alcala, occur in the proportions of 72,19, and 9 respectively
at Palmella. Trade brought gold, callais, amber, and ivory, while the
connections with Almeria are explicitly attested by cylinder-head pins
from tombs and by clay plaques perforated at the corners from con-
temporary settlements. But tortoise beads from Palmella and Vila Nova
de S. Pedro conform to the Sardinian-Proven9al type of Fig. 126a,
while a pair of basket-shaped gold earrings from a rock-cut tomb at
Ermageira1 reproduce a familiar Irish type (cf. Fig. 154).

In the Palmella pottery Beaker ware, both of the "grand style”
(Fig. hi, 1-2) and of the "classical” variety decorated with rouletted
zones, is the most conspicuous element, but plain round-bottomed and
carinated vessels may just carry on the native "neolithic” tradition,
illustrated in the megalithic tombs. Stroke-burnished sherds have
been recovered from tholoi and from sepulchral caves while channelled
and other kinds of incised decoration are also represented in caves and
settlements.

Among the ritual objects too, besides familiar Millares types'—
phalange (S. Martinho) and cylinder idols and schist sandals (Alapraia)
—the Palmella tombs contain a variety of peculiar Portuguese forms—
plaque idols richly decorated with incised patterns (Fig. 131, 2), schist
croziers, similarly decorated, marble copies of shafted hoe-blades, large
crescentic "collars” of limestone,1 2 and pendants in the form of a rabbit.3
The owl-face of a funerary goddess and even representations of a copper
dagger were carved or painted on the uprights of some tombs.4

Similarly on the east coasts from Almeria northward to Catalonia
rural communities continued to bury the dead in natural cave ossuaries.
While they relied mainly on stone for axes, they obtained objects of
copper, and beads of callais, learned to work metals and copied locally
such Almerian types as cylinder-head pins and painted phalange idols.5
Flint daggers and hollow-based arrow-heads of Portuguese form are
not, however, found north of Almeria. The local pottery preserves the

1   Ethnos, II (Lisbon, 1942), 449-58.

2   Afonso do Paco, Anais, IV, 122, compares these to Irish gold lunulas, but the per-
forations, if any, are near the centre, not the ends; comparison with the clay arcs might
be equally legitimate.

3   Leisner, As Antas de Monsarraz (Lisbon, 1952), 145.

4   Breuil, Les Peintures rupestres schematiques, IV (1936), 148.

5   Blanquires de Labor, Murcia, Cuadernos, III, 5-30; Cami Real and Barranc de
Castellet, Alicante (Arch. Preh. Levant., I, 31-72); Monte de Barsella, Alicante, JSEA.,
Mem. 112 (1930); APL., II, 115-40.

278
 THE IBERIAN PENINSULA

rounded Almerian shapes but is generally mixed up with decorated
“Cave wares” and beakers. A round-headed minority is represented in
most of these caves.

From many Copper Age tombs and settlements, especially in Portugal,
but also in Almeria, bones of horses—or just possibly asses—have been
reported.

We might thus recognize in the Copper Age Almerian (Los Millares)
Andalusian, Algarvian, Portuguese, and East Spanish cultures though
the first four might be grouped together as local facies of one Early
Hispanic culture. Should we distinguish a sixth entity'—a “pure”
Beaker culture in the Peninsula. Beakers of the Pan-European type,
like Fig. hi, 3-4, with their usual accompaniment of West European
daggers and arrow-heads but no wrist-guards, have been found in every
type of Copper Age tomb—tholos, rock-cut, megalithic, natural cave—
but far more frequently in Portugal than in Almeria. But there are local
variants on this standard model. Fig. in, 1-2, illustrates a Portuguese
variant that may be found in the same tomb as the Pan-European
form.1 Beakers, decorated in this style, are associated with chalices of
Argaric shape at Acebuchal near Carmona in Betica.1 2 In two tombs at
Gandul in Betica beakers were associated only with the latest (Copper
Age I) and presumably intrusive, interments and must thus be later
than the erection of the tombs. Similarly, at Vila Nova de San Pedro
Beaker ware was missing from the oldest habitation deposit. On the
other hand, at Los Millares, Leisner assigns beakers to the earliest
phase. So it is impossible in the south of the Iberian Peninsula to
isolate an assemblage of relics and rites that should distinguish archseo-
logically a Beaker people from the rest of the interrelated societies
responsible for the Early Hispanic culture. Physically Beaker-folk were
undoubtedly represented among those societies, and, assuming they
were of East Mediterranean origin, should have been among the first
colonists thence who founded those societies. Yet they did not arrive
as Beaker-folk since Beakers are not known in the East Mediterranean
nor yet at Paestum, where the physical type is represented.

Presumably they separated out from them in the Peninsula. Margaret
Smith has shown that the beaker cannot be derived from the native
Cave culture pottery of Betica3 and that the Tagus estuary is the most
likely focus for the wide dispersion described in Chapter XII. But

1   The alleged stratigraphical evidence for Bosch-Gimpera’s view (Man, XL (1940),
6-10) making the Palmella style older than the Pan-European, has been demolished by
Castillo, APL., IV (1953), 135 ff.; cf. also Savory, Revista Guimaraes, LX, 363-6; Leisner,
As Antas nas Herdades da Casa de Braganga (Lisbon, 1955), 20-27.

2   "Colonies agricoles’' (Rev. Arch., XXXV), 88-90, 116-23, 132.

2 pps., xix (1953)- 95-107.

279
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

unless the fine bifacially worked arrow-heads they carried with them
evolved in the Peninsula from microlithic forms as Siret suggested,
we might suspect that they had been joined by a contingent of bowmen
from the Sahara, where such arrow-heads were made in profusion,
whether as a local continuation of the Aterian tradition or under
inspiration from the Fayum neolithic.

The foundation of the Copper Age cultures in the Peninsula, as in
Italy and Sardinia, is generally attributed to an actual colonization by
East Mediterranean prospectors. But these colonists did not, like the
Phoenicians and the Greeks, bring shiploads of manufactured articles;
not a single East Mediterranean export has been recognized on any
Peninsular site before the Argaric period. The metal gear, locally made
by the immigrant smiths, was technically inferior to that current in the
East Mediterranean even during the third millennium—but after all
the “prospectors” would have been looking for silver and gold, not
copper. Some Millares pot forms have general parallels in the Early
Minoan ossuaries of Crete,1 the stone figurines are obviously like
Cycladic and Anatolian ones; the owl-face engraved on plaques and
vases or painted on phalanges and caves belongs to the same “goddess”
whom the Sumerians depicted on the handles of funerary jars and the
Trojans on a stele and on face-urns. The plaque-idols like Fig. 131, 2,
are very like Egyptian block figures (p. 19) or Early Cypriote clay
“idols”.2 The clay arcs have exact parallels in Anatolia, as has the
toggle3 from Almizaraque; a segmented stone bead from Palmella is
quite like Fig. 12, 2, while the stroke-burnished ware from Betica
(p. 274) is identical with the East Mediterranean fabric. The idea of the
aritficial collective tomb is East Mediterranean and was translated into
corbelled vaults in Crete and the Cyclades in the third millennium.
The tholoi of Los Millares are actually rather similar to Krazi in Crete
(p. 23), while the contemporary cists resemble those of H. Kosmas
in Attica (p. 72).

Still these analogies are distinctly vague. Collective burial had
apparently been practised in the Peninsula already in the neolithic
period. In Portugal even built collective tombs may be equally neo-
lithic. There, too, megalithic tombs are demonstrably older than tholoi.
Even for the Almerian tholoi Leisner has expounded a plausible evolu-
tion from the neolithic round cists. The similarity between tholoi, like
those at Antequera and Alcala and the Mycenaean looks indeed particu-

1   Xanthudides, Vaulted Tombs, pis. XI, 1850 (stone birds' nest vases), XXXI, 687
(clay tumbler), XXX, 4982 (stud-ornament), M.M.I.

2   Act. y Mem. Soc. Espafi. Anthropologia, XIX (1944), I35-

3   Schliemann, Ilios, fig. 536; van der Osten, “The Alishar Hiiyiik, 1928-29,” OIC.
Pubs., XIX, fig. 85; for arcs, see p. 40, n. 1.

280

[Prometheus]

 THE IBERIAN PENINSULA

larly striking. It is accentuated by the cemetery of rock-cut tombs near
Antequera that seem to bear the same relation to the tholos as chamber
tombs do to Mycenaean tholoi. But perhaps the similarity in plan is
deceptive; in Greece the passage was unroofed, where in Iberia it was
always covered. In any case it is no longer plausible to derive from the
Mycenaean the Iberian tholoi any more than to make the latter the
models for the Portuguese passage graves. Indeed, it is now just as
plausible to derive the Mycenaean tholoi from the Peninsula (p. 80.)
Hence its East Mediterranean relations provide no indisputable limiting
dates for the Early Hispanic Copper Age.

Whether as a consequence of East Mediterranean colonization or
no, during the Copper Age the several societies inhabiting the Peninsula,
while asserting their autonomy in divergent ceramic styles, fashions in
amulets, and preferences for arrow-heads, had achieved a considerable
degree of uniformity in stone and metal tools and weapons, in costume
and personal ornaments and from one coast to the other. To this cultural
uniformity no political union need have corresponded. Only in Andalusia
and perhaps Algarve do a few monumental tombs look like princely
sepulchres rather than communal ossuaries or family vaults.

The exotic materials—turquoise, amber, jet, callais—and foreign
types, like tortoise beads, from Copper Age tombs illustrate wide
commercial relations, particularly with the North-west. The counter-
balancing exports—at least before the Beaker expansions—seem to
have been of a less substantial character—elements of a cult. The
passage graves of Brittany are so closely related to the Portuguese in
architecture and furniture as to suggest direct maritime intercourse
foreshadowing that of the Tartessians in the eighth century.1 The
Northern passage graves should result from a further extension of such
relations that might account for the amber at Los Millares. The symbol-
ism and the technique of ceramic decoration in Brittany and Scotland
point in the same direction, while the magic patterns on Irish bronzes2
are inspired by the hieratic art of Palmella. In the sequel, of course, the
Beaker-folk, presuming they did set out from Spain, played a decisive
role in initiating a Bronze Age in Central Europe and Upper Italy. The
main contribution of the Peninsula to Atlantic and North-Western
Europe was, however, surely "the Megalithic Religion”. With Hawkes3
we might imagine the megalith-builders sailing from the Portuguese
coasts, like the Conquistadores, to conquer for that faith a New World.

1   As described in the late Latin poem, Ora Maritima, by Avienus; cf. Hawkes in
Ampurias, XIV (1952), 81-95.

2   MacWhite, Estudios sobre las reladones atldnticas de la peninsula hispdnica (Disserta-
Hones Matritenses, II, Madrid, 1951).

3   The Prehistoric Foundations of Europe (London, 1940), 159.

281
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Or perhaps the saints of the Celtic Church would provide a better
analogy; some actually followed routes marked out by megalithic tombs
while our megalith-builders have left no superior copper weapons to
correspond to the fire-arms with which the Conquistadores vindicated
the authority of the cross.

The great creative moment was transient. As in the seventeenth
century, after the great expansion, Peninsular culture stagnated and—
compared to Britain and Central Europe—declined. Even in Copper
Age II decline is perceptible. According to Leisner the later tombs at
Los Millares contain a poorer and less varied furniture than the earlier
ones. In the succeeding Bronze Age (Bronze II), though tin was now
obtainable and alloyed with copper and methods of casting were
improved, Hispanic culture seems less progressive and its domain
contracts.

The Bronze Age

In Eastern Spain the Copper Age culture of Los Millares develops into,
or is succeeded by, a no less well-defined semi-urban culture of Bronze
Age type, named after the type station at El Argar.1 Its authors con-
tinued to live in hilltop townships, or citadels, more solidly fortified than
before. There might even be galleries in the walls. The houses are agglo-
merations of rectangular rooms with stone foundations, but the total
areas are small—the acropolis of El Officio covered 2\ acres. The dead
were no longer buried in collective tombs but individually in cists or
jars among the houses; the 780 graves actually identified at El Argar
give some indication as to how large the population must have become
or how long the Argaric Bronze Age lasted. Metal was mined and worked
locally on a larger scale than in the Copper Age and was effectively dis-
tributed throughout the province. Long-distance trade, on the contrary,
languished; it brought only a few beads of callais and segmented beads
of Egyptian fayence like those from Perjamos graves. Tin was scarce,
and the smith had generally to be content with copper or poor bronze.
But he could turn out flat axes with splayed blades or even with
hammered flanges, awls, saws, round-heeled daggers that might be
elongated into swords up to 70 cm. long (Fig. 134) and specialized
halberds which seem to be local translations of Copper Age flint forms.1 2
Silver was sometimes used for rivets. Whetstones perforated at both
ends were in regular use. Yet polished stone axes are quite plentiful on
all Argaric settlements.

1   Siret, Les premiers dges is the principal source.

2   Arch., LXXXVI (1936), 288, 298.

282
 THE IBERIAN PENINSULA

Round-bottomed and carinated pots might seem to carry on some
Copper Age traditions (Fig. 134), but technically the fabric—red, black,

A

o /?..*» «>4.v *•:nuvs .   • ~w''i '?,   %   y

v.'irl   1 " ?   1 ' Hh i« ?! "

Fig. 134. Argaric burial-jar showing diadem (^); funerary vases (J); halberd and
dagger-blades (£); sword (£). By permission of Trustees of British Museum.

or mottled—is surprisingly like Anatolian Bronze Age pottery and its
Danubian IV analogues. The carinated shapes, too, but for the absence
of handles, would fit well into the Unetician repertory; indeed, one mug

283
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

from a typical cemetery near Orihuela is actually provided with a
handle.1

Ornaments included diadems of silver (Fig. 134, top), beads, rings,
and simple bracelets of gold, silver, or copper, perforated boars’ tusks
carrying tiny rings of copper wire, shells, fish-vertebrae, and various
beads (none of amber). Rare burials with diadems (Fig. 134) must
belong to chiefs or nobles, burials of males and females together
should be instances of sati. A class division of society and a patriarchal
organization are thus attested. Concurrently the cult of a mother
goddess, in so far as it inspired the production of female figurines, was
given up. Indeed, apart from an “altar” surmounted by “horns of
consecration” at Campos, ritual objects are no longer conspicuous.
In the mixed population, round-heads were mingled with a majority of
Mediterraneans.2

The Argaric culture might be regarded as a continuation of the old
Almerian stripped of foreign elements after appropriating the technical
advances introduced therewith.3 The Almerians, having emancipated
themselves from the megalithic superstition, went on to develop the
metallurgy introduced therewith on original native lines. Yet the novel
burial practices, as strange to El Garcel as to Los Millares, but tradi-
tional in Central Anatolia and adopted in Middle Helladic Greece,
suggest that this emancipation was not effected without help from the
East Mediterranean. Indeed, there is better evidence for an East
Mediterranean colonization of Almeria at the beginning of the Bronze
Age than in the Copper Age. Agreements in burial practices are more
specific. The typical Argaric chalices are just ZBgean kylikes of wood*
or metal translated into the local pottery as they were into Minyan or
painted Mycenasan ware in Greece. The fayence beads are actual Aegean
imports. On the other hand, some would derive the innovations of the
Argaric culture from Upper Italy. Italian prehistorians, however, prefer to
regard the halberd-brandishers there as immigrants from the Peninsula.

The segmented fayence beads from Fuente Alamo in any case prove
that the Argaric culture was flourishing at latest by 1400 b.c. If due to
/Egean colonists, it could not have started much before 1500, since
even the Minyan kylikes are Late Helladic (p. 75). How long it lasted
is still more uncertain. There are no connected remains outside the
Argaric citadels and graves till the Iron Age began after 1000 b.c.,
so that Almeria is in much the same plight as Sardinia. Outside that
province the position is still worse.

1   Institut d’Estudis Valencians: Servei d’Investigacio Prehistorica, No. 5 (1928),
Colleccid de Treballs del P. J. Fergus, IV, lam. I, 2.

2   Coon, Races, 151, insists on contrast with "Copper Age" population.

3   So Bosch-Gimpera, Archivo Espanol de Arqueologia (1954), 4&-

284
 THE IBERIAN PENINSULA

Typical Argaric cemeteries, well provided with metal tools, as far
north as Alicante and Valencia1 illustrate the effective extension of the
Almerian economic system. But in the province of Alicante itself in
the Alcoy district on the hilltop citadels of Mola alta de Serelles2 and
Mas de Menente3 axes of Argaris type were cast, or Argaric riveted
daggers used, but the round-bottomed bowls and globular jars pre-
serve purer traditions of the Almerian culture in contrast to the sharper
profiles of Argaric pottery, while polished stone axes were still regularly
employed.

Westward in Granada some megalithic tombs in the cemeteries of
Gor, Gorafe, and Los Eriales contain Argaric bronzes, ornaments, and
pots. So at Alcaide near Antequera,4 rock-cut tombs, reproducing
exactly the plan of the built tholos, contain relics of Argaric type.
Otherwise there is nothing in South Spain till the Iron Age. In Portugal
cemeteries of cist graves containing (? Argaric) carinated pottery are
rare and mainly concentrated in Algarve.5 Sometimes the capstones of
the short cists are carved with representations of developed metal
axes.6 Apart from cist graves, only the megalithic passage graves and
natural cave sepulchres are available to fill the gap in the funerary
record between the Copper and Late Bronze Ages; carinated and even
handled pots from such might well be “Bronze Age”. On the other hand,
bronzes of highly specialized type, especially two-eared palstaves,7
show that there arose in North Portugal and. Galicia during the Late
Bronze Age an important centre of metallurgy the products of which
were exported to Britain in a revival of the old trade that had been
reflected in the ear-rings of Irish form from Ermageira and lunulse
from Galicia.8

With this revival the Peninsula’s Atlantic coast or at least its stan-
niferous northern part at length became again a creative centre of
metallurgy and trade, of which Avienus’ verses have preserved a
memory.9 Yet this Late (Atlantic) Bronze Age began only after 1000 b.c.
No Middle Bronze Age is defined by typological landmarks. Into this
vacuum the poor Early Bronze Age cists and even some Copper Age
collective tombs might easily slide! Between 1550 and 1400 b.c.
indirect commerce between Britain and Mycenaean Greece by some

1   Bol. R. Acad. Hist., LIV, 357; APL., II, 151-63.

2   JSEA., Mem. 94 (1927).

3   A.P.L., I, 101-12.

* Gimenez Reyna, “Mem. Arqueol. de Malaga”, Informes y Mems., 12 (Comisario
gen. de Excavaciones, Madrid, 1946), 49 ff.

s Archivo Espatlol de Arq., XXII (1949), 310.

6   OAP., XI (1906), 108; Act. y Mem., XXII (1947), 158.

7   Savory, ‘‘TheAtlantic Bronze Age”, PPS., XV (1949), 128 ff.

8   Cf. Mac White, Estudios, 48-64.

9   Hawkes, Ampurias, XIV, 81 ff.

285
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

western route is positively attested. Were Alcala—and Los Millares—
points on that route? An affirmative answer seems quite plausible1 and
the extra-short chronology for the Hispanic Copper Age cannot be
refuted just by the vague parallels in the third millennium we have
cited. But then the Peninsula’s claim to cradle the Beaker-folk would
become precarious unless the chronology for Temperate Europe be
similarly telescoped!

1   Piggott, Revista Guimaraes, LVII (1948), xo ff. Sir Lindsay Scott (PSAS., LXXXII
(1950), 44) has pointed out the close resemblances between British Middle Bronze Age
“incense cups” and stone and pottery vases from Los Millares and cognate Copper
Age sites.

286
 CHAPTER XVI

WESTERN CULTURE IN THE ALPINE ZONE

The diversified region north of the Pyrenees and west of the Rhine
and the high Alps, which had been steppe and parkland during the
Ice Age, in the subsequent forest period still supported Azilian de-
scendants of the Magdalenian reindeer-hunters and salmon-fishers, of
Tardenoisian immigrants from Africa, and of Forest-folk who spread
southward. These autochthonous food-gatherers were converted
gradually to a food-producing economy by the spread of an exotic
neolithic culture, and, multiplying in response to the new opportun-
ities of livelihood, accelerated its expansion. This conversion itself
might indeed have taken place in Provence and round the Pyrenees,
where the Cardial herdsmen, as shown in Chapter XV, had implanted
their neolithic culture and economy. It is, however, generally attributed
to a second wave of immigrants who would have introduced a Western
Neolithic culture and spread it thence to more temperate regions,
indeed to the Alps and the Channel. Even on the latter view the
primary Western farmers admittedly mixed with native food-gatherers
and, in adapting their rural economy to the novel environment, took
advantage of their experience and equipment. Moreover, in South
France the postulated Western immigrants have left only ambiguous
traces of their passage, and the Western culture they should have
brought with them is largely an inference from the “Western” cultures
of Lombardy, Western Switzerland, Central and North France, and
Southern England.

No doubt in a number of South French caves Cardial ware is replaced
in higher strata by plain leathery pots that can be more or less exactly
matched on the one hand in the Lagozza, Cortaillod, Chassey, and
Windmill Hill cultures,1 on the other in the Almeria culture and its
Portuguese counterpart (p. 269), while similar pots occur in the basal
levels of caves outside the narrow zone colonized by Cardial herdsmen.
It is less clear whether other distinctive traits occur so early in South
France or, if they do, whether they be distinctive of the Western
Neolithic. Leaf-shaped arrow-heads are thus found2 and are distinctive
of the earliest Neolithic in Britain, but not of Lagozza or Cortaillod.

1   J. Hawkes, Antiquity, VIII, 26-40; Piggott, L’Anthr., LVII (1953), 413-42.

2   Piggott, loc. cit., 426; Bailloud and Mieg, 100.

287
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Antler sleeves for celts so distinctive of Cortaillod occur early in Aude
and Ariege,1 but are missing from the deepest levels in Gard as from
Lagozza and Windmill Hill. Hares’ phalange pendants again occur2
in Gard as in South Spain and in Cortaillod and in the Lower to Middle
Neolithic of Liguria. Hence the South French caves have yielded some
material, stratified below Beaker layers, which could be treated as
intermediate between the Almeria culture on the one hand, the Ligurian
Middle Neolithic and the Alpine Cortaillod cultures on the other. In
the last-named assemblage we have the fullest picture of the Western,
indeed of any, neolithic culture available in Europe.

The Early Neolithic Phase on the West Alpine Lakes

The Swiss lakes have provided not only an unique picture of neolithic
equipment and economy, owing to the preservation by the waters of
organic materials, but also the clearest record of cultural development
in Western Europe, thanks firstly to the stratigraphical excavations
on Lake Neuchatel, initiated by Paul Vouga in 1919, and to the subse-
quent observations of E. Vogt3 and others which have clarified and
extended Vouga’s sequence. The names Cortaillod-Michelsberg, Horgen,
and Corded Ware denote three culture periods that follow one another
in that order on all the Alpine lakes and bogs. But the earliest neolithic
colonization of the area is not represented by lacustrine habitations at
all, but is known exclusively from cereal pollen blown into some peat
mosses from cultivated fields adjacent to unidentified settlements on
what is still dry land.4

So the oldest “lake-dwellings” in Western Switzerland were erected
by farmers who arrived with a complete neolithic equipment, con-
stituting what is termed the Cortaillod culture—now divisible into an
Early and a Late phase.5 But the majority of Swiss prehistorians by
19566 have become convinced that “lake-dwellings” were not raised
on piles above the waters but erected on solid, if rather moist, ground,
strung out along the shore between the reed belt and the strand scrub,
which had then been left dry owing to the contraction of the lakes in

1   Riv. Sc. Pr., VI (1951), 130-7; Helena, Les Origines de Narbonne (Paris-Toulouse,
1937)-

2   Vogt, CIPPS. (Zurich, 1950), 33; Piggott, loc. cit. 430.

3   Germania, XVIII (1934), 91 ff.

4   Welten, in Das Pfahlbauproblem (Monographien zur Ur- und Friihgeschichte der
Schweiz, XI), (Basel, 1955), 78.

6 Vouga, “Le N6olithique lacustre ancien", (Universite de Neuchatel, Recueil de
Travaux, Faculte de Lettres, 1934); Antiquity, II (1928), 388-92; von Gonzeobach, Die
Cortaillodkultur in der Schweiz (Monographien zur Ur- und Friihgeschichte, 1949).

G Vogt, Guyan, Welten in Das Pfahlbauproblem', butTschumi, Urgeschichte der Schweiz
(1948) adhered to the classical theory of pile-dwellings formulated by Keller in 1854.

288

[Prometheus]

 WESTERN CULTURE IN THE ALPINE ZONE

late Atlantic and Sub-Boreal times. Similarly the so-called "stacked
platforms" (Packwerkbauten) were not artificial islands floating in
bogs, but houses built on firm peat the floors of which required frequent
renewal owing to subsidence.

The farmers cultivated wheats (Triticum monococcum, dicoccum, and
comfiactum) and barley, and also peas, beans and lentils.1 Plums and
apples were at least gathered; apples were eventually cultivated by the
Lake-dwellers, though not certainly in the Cortaillod phase, and a sort
of cider brewed from them. Homed cattle (Bos brachyceros) were bred
together with minor herds of pigs and small flocks of sheep and goats.1 2
Cattle were tethered and fed on leaves during the winters.3 A neolithic
(? Cortaillod) yoke4 survives, and Vouga con-
siders some stone implements to have been
used as ploughshares, but more probably the
land was tilled only with antler hoes.5 Game
contributed much less to the community's
diet than domestic stock. But the huntsman
used arrows tipped with double-ended bone
points (Fig. 135), or more rarely with trans-
verse or triangular flint heads. Fish were
caught in traps, in nets weighted with grooved
stones and suspended from birch-bark floats,
and were also speared with antler "harpoons"

(Fig. 135).

Wood-work was done with stone axes and
rare adzes made from suitably shaped pebbles
or sawn-out blocks of fine-grained rock. They

were mounted directly in straight shafts or in tapering antler sleeves
(Fig. 139 A) which were fitted into straight wooden shafts. Antler
axes and picks with square-cut shaft hole were also employed.

A local flax was cultivated for its seeds and for its fibres, which were
woven into linen, but the spinner did without whorls. Skins were
doubtless largely worn; bundles of bone spines, like the antler combs
of Michelsberg and Windmill Hill, could have served for leather-
dressing. Baskets were plaited with great skill.

Fig. 135.

Antler harpoon (£) and bone
arrow-head (1). Switzerland.

1   Urgeschichte der Schweiz, 597; cf. Beck, Rytz, Steklen, and Tschumi, ‘‘Der neol.
Pfahlbau Thun”, Mitt, naturforschenden Gesellschaft (Bern, 1930).

2   The proportions are: oxen 39 per cent, swine 21 per cent, sheep and goats each
18* 5 per cent of food animals; game only 30 per cent of total animal bones; Vouga,
op. cit. Bones of wild horse are reported from Port; Tschumi, Die ur- und friihgeschicht-
liche Fundstelle von Port, im Amt Nidau (Biel, 1940), 73.

3   Troels-Smith, Pfahlbauproblem, 49-52; Guyan, ib., 262.

4   Ischer, Pfahlbauten des Bielersees (Biel, 1928), 43, pi. VII.

6 Such actually survive with wooden handles: von Gonzenbach, Cortaillodkultur, 51.
T   289
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Early Cortaillod pots are of simple leathery forms without handles
save for lugs, which may be perforated with several vertical holes
(Fig. 136). In the Late phase much more sophisticated forms were
produced and vases were often decorated1 with strips of birch bark,

Fig. 136. Cortaillod pottery. After Antiquity (£).

stuck on with birch-pitch to form patterns, including the magic con-
centric circles popular at Conguel and Beacharra (pp. 317, 326), or
just with paired nipples simulating human breasts.

In Late Cortaillod sites appear some vases of Rossen style or at
least influenced by Rossen and others of Michelsberg affinities. And on
all Cortaillod sites flint instruments were made exclusively of a trans-
lucent yellow flint, strange to the Neuchatel basin but of unknown
provenance. Otherwise Cortaillod sites have yielded no conclusive
evidence for trade.

Combs for the hair were made of wood. As ornaments were worn
beads of steatite, wood, and bored teeth, cranian amulets (p. 311),
pendants made from segmented tines, from perforated phalanges of
hares, boars’ tusks, perforated at both ends, and wooden models of
clubs.

No cemeteries attached to the lake-side villages have been found,
but some human bones, broken to extract the marrow, turned up in
the villages—as if the peasants had practised cannibalism'—while two
measurable skulls proved to be dolichocranial. On the other hand,
Sauter2 has argued that cist graves of the Chamblandes type belonged
to Cortaillod people. Cemeteries of such graves,8 containing single
contracted skeletons or a male and female together, extend from the
vicinity of Basel in the Aar valley to the Upper Rhone and thence
beyond the Great St. Bernard along the Aosta valley into Upper Italy.
The grave goods—unpolished flint axes, a triangular axe hammer,
hollow-based arrow-heads, coral and Mediterranean shells, a copper

1   von Gonzenbach, 25; Vogt, PPS., XV (1949), 50-2.

2   Sibrium, II (1955), 133-8.

8 Tschumi, "Die steinzeitliche Hockergraber der Schweiz, AsA., XXII-XXIII
(1920-21); Altschles., V, 96 ff.

290
 WESTERN CULTURE IN THE ALPINE ZONE

disc, a cranian amulet, and a V-perforated button—are certainly very
poor, but look late. The “Chamblandes culture” has therefore generally
been assigned to Swiss Middle or Late Neolithic. But its distribution
agrees very closely with that of the Cortaillod culture, and the grave-
type is identical with that characteristic of the Middle Neolithic levels
of Arene Candide.

Chronologically the Cortaillod culture, at least in its Late phase,
can be conclusively equated with the Rossen culture, again mainly
with its later manifestations,1 thus giving a partial synchronism between
Swiss Lower Neolithic and Danubian II. A knobbed battle-axe, how-
ever, from the Late Cortaillod layer at Seematte,2 must mean that
Swiss Lower Neolithic lasts into Danubian III and Northern E.N.c.
A radio-carbon estimate for the pre-Rossen Cortaillod of Egolzwil 33 put
the oldest tangible phase of Lower Neolithic at 2740^90 b.c.—a figure
that would be perfectly reasonable for Danubian II too, but only on a
“long” chronology.

In the Cortaillod culture such elements as mounting celts with
antler sleeves, antler harpoons, microlithic arrow-heads, can econ-
omically be derived from the mesolithic heritage. Of the constituents
that make it neolithic, one-corn wheat must be Danubian. But it could
have been introduced by the Rossen colonists (pp. 117-18), for it is
not yet attested before their influence becomes perceptible, and no
distinctively Danubian artifacts, necessarily older than Rossen, have
yet been found in the West Alpine area. So it still seems most likely that
the primary impulse—i.e. the cereals and domestic stock together with
a tradition of leathery vessels, cranian amulets, hares’ phalange pend-
ants—that engendered the pre-lake village cultivations and the pre-
Rossen Cortaillod culture of Egolzwill4 came up the Rhone despite the
ambiguity of the analogies in South France.

The Michelsberg Culture

North of the Cortaillod province, in lake-side villages on the Lake of
Constance, in moor villages in northern Switzerland and Wurttemberg,
in hilltop camps in South-West Germany, and at the flint-mines of
Spiennes in Belgium, the place of Cortaillod is taken by a quite different
culture—named after the hilltop camp at Michelsberg5 in Baden.

1   von Gonzenbach, 68-76; Kimmig, Bad. Fb. (1948-50), 58-64.

2   von Gonzenbach, 47; Vogt, Ada Arch., XXIV (1953), 180, Abb. 2, 2.

3   Das Pfahlbauproblem, 113.

4   The culture of this (Vogt, Ztschr.f. schweiz. AUertum. u. Kunst, XII (1951), 205-15)
and other villages in Middle Switzerland diverges from that familiar on Lake Neuch&tel;
it might be Cortaillod still quite uninfluenced by Rossen (von Gonzenbach, op. cit., 21).

6 Buttler, Donaulandische, 79-91; Baer, A., Die Michelsberger Kultur in der Schweiz,
(.Monographic zur Ur- und Friihgeschichte, Bile.)

291
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

The moor villages may comprise up to 24 houses grouped along regular
corduroyed streets.1 In land settlements as many as 75 houses have been
recorded, but, since a hut might be pulled down at its owner's death,
they cannot all be regarded as contemporary. The houses themselves
were again rectangular, varying in size from 6 by 3*6 m. to 5-3 by 3*2 m.
or less, but normally divided into two rooms with a hearth in the inner
and an oven in the outer (like Fig. 137). The dry land stations in

Germany were generally defended by flat-bottomed ditches and
palisades; the ditches of many camps are interrupted by frequent
causeways as in England.

The rural economy seems very similar to that of the Cortaillod and
First Northern A cultures. But there are some hints of more pastoral
clans separating out from the mass of Michelsberg villagers and pre-
sumably allowing their stock to graze freely. The principal crop in
Wiirtteniberg2 was barley, but wheats (T. monococcum, dicoccum, spelta,
and compactum) too were grown, and apples, strawberries, and other
fruits collected. Flour was not, according to Guyan,3 converted into

1   See also R. R. Schmidt, Jungsteinzeitliche Siedelungen in Federseemoor, Tubingen,
1930 ff.; Paret, Das Steinzeitdorf Ehrenstein bei Ulm (Stuttgart, 1955).

8 Paret, op. cit., 60.   3 Pfahlbauproblem, 269.

o

b

Fig. 137. Plan of a house at Aichbiihl (TJT)

292
 WESTERN CULTURE IN THE ALPINE ZONE

bread, but eaten as a sort of gruel, but the ovens, so conspicuous in
most villages, must surely have served for baldng bread. Guyan1
believes that the villagers practised shifting cultivation, deserting their
homes at intervals but returning to the same site as soon as the scrub
had grown up again on their old clearings. The villages were certainly
occupied over considerable periods, during which the house floors at
least had to be renewed more than once—at Ehrenstein near Ulm as
many as thirteen times.2 The evidence here suggests not reoccupation
but continuous habitation on the same site for fourteen years or
probably longer. Finally, hunting played a far more prominent role in
the Michelsberg subsistence economy than it did in that of the Cortaillod
farmers; bones of game animals, including horses,8 form a relatively
high proportion in the food refuse.

Secondary industry and trade played a recognizable part in the
Michelsberg economy. Thus at Spiennes in Belgium4 lived a com-
munity of specialized flint-miners skilled at sinking shafts and digging
out subterranean galleries. Indeed, the Michelsberg settlers there con-
stituted a specialized industrial community, supplementing their liveli-
hood by exporting the products of their mines and workshops—and
Spiennes was no isolated phenomenon within the Western complex. It
implies also the development of hunting expeditions and transhumance
into something like regular commerce. Hoards of Western axes in
Southern Germany may belong to Michelsberg traders. As a result of
such trade some communities, like that at Weiher near Thayngen,
eventually obtained copper axes and amber beads.

But on the whole Michelsberg equipment is typically neolithic and
agrees generally with that of Cortaillod; axes were preferred to adzes
and often mounted in antler sleeves. The pots are generally plain and
many could be called leathery in shape. But many have flat bases and
jugs have genuine handles. Supposedly distinctive forms are “tulip
beakers” (Fig. 138, 1, 12, 14) and flat round plates, reputedly used for
baking cakes, which, however, recur in a First Northern context
(Fig. 91). A few contemporary sites in Wurttemberg have yielded vases
of more or less Michelsberg shapes but decorated with fine incised
patterns reminiscent of Chassey (p. 303). These represent the "Schus-
senried” style, but do not suffice to define a distinct culture.5 For
leather-dressing, bunched antler combs were employed at Spiennes as
in Southern England.

The dead were normally buried, contracted or extended, within the

1 Ibid., 261.   2 Paret, op. cit., 20.

3   Ibid., 66.

4   Loe, La Belgique ancienne, I, 190 ff.; and Marien, Oud-Belgie, 59-79.

5   Kimmig, JSGU., XL (1950), 150, regards it as a Michelsberg-Rossen hybrid.

293
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

confines of the settlements, but small cemeteries comprising up to seven
graves have been recorded. On the other hand, at Ottenbourg and
Boitsfort in Belgium1 cremations have been reported under long mounds,

but the latter may be the ramparts of fortified villages rather than
barrows. The skulls examined proved to be dolichocranial to mesati-
cranial, none brachycranial.

In Switzerland, Michelsberg2 is partly parallel to Cortaillod, and both

1   Loe, La Belgique ancienne, 235, 241; Marien, Oud-Belgie, 55-83; L’Anihr., LVII, 4x0.

2   von Gonzenbach, 35, 76; Vogt, CISPP. (Zurich); Acta Arch., XXIV, 185.

294
 WESTERN CULTURE IN THE ALPINE ZONE

overlap locally with Rossen. But farther east on the Goldberg in
Wurttemberg1 the Michelsberg settlement succeeded the fortified
Rossen village. Thus in the Danubian sequence Michelsberg could not
be placed before the final phase of period II. Its persistence well into
period III can be deduced from polygonal battle-axes and even copper
celts from Michelsberg settlements.2 Indeed, Baden influence has been
recognized in the pottery from some eastern sites.3

The main concentration of Michelsberg settlements lies on the
Neckar and the Middle Rhine.4 There are outposts on the Saale, in
Bohemia, and near Salzburg. Settlements in Belgium and in the Aar
valley likewise look peripheral. This distribution might well prompt
doubts as to the Western origin traditionally attributed to our culture.
Indeed, Vogt has argued that the Michelsberg culture is just a south-
western extension of the First Northern culture of (Northern) Early
Neolithic times (p. 191). The Michelsberg rural economy is in fact
strikingly like that of the A group of First Northern as described by
Troels-Smith, and the ceramic agreements are even closer than Vogt
imagined. All might perhaps be explained more simply by positing an
acculturation of Forest hunter-fishers in Western Germany by im-
migrant Danubian peasants, parallel to that assumed farther east to
account for the First Northern itself. But if the latter originated
farther south-east, Vogt's account would seem the most probable, at
least until a primary Western Neolithic immigration be better
documented.

The Middle Neolithic Horgen Culture

On Lake Neuchatel, after a flood which overwhelmed the Early
Neolithic stations, many sites were reoccupied and new ones founded
by people of a quite different culture5—the Horgen culture. It is re-
cognizable too above a Michelsberg settlement at Greifensee, on many
lakes and probably also in land stations.6 Economically the Middle
Neolithic witnesses a cultural regression. On Lake Neuchatel agri-
cultural equipment is poorer (no more "plough-shares"); hunting con-
tributes more to the meat supply than stock-breeding, the percentage
of bones of game as against those of domestic beasts rising from 30 to
45 per cent; local flint replaces the imported material. But triangular
perforated axes now reach the Rhone valley, copper double-axes were

1   Germania, XX (1936), 230.

2   E.g. JSGU. (1944). 32.

3   Germania, XXXIII (1955), 166-9.

4   JSGU., XL, 149.

5   Childe, Danube, 171-3; Vouga, AsA., XXXI (1929). 167-70; Vogt, ib., XL, 1938, 1-14.

6   Germania, XVIII, 92-4; AsA., XL, 2-4.

295
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

copied in stone and unbored Western celts were mounted as axes in
perforated or heeled antler sleeves and as adzes in socketed ones
(Fig. 139, B). Continued inter-communal specialization is illustrated by
an axe-factory at Mumpf, Aargau. The pottery is coarse, badly baked,
and ornamented only with raised cordons (what used to be regarded as

Fig. 139. Types of antler sleeves for axes: A-B, Lower; C, first in Middle;
D, first in Upper Neolithic; Lake Neuchatel (£).

early because crude), but the vases have flat and even splayed bases
(cf. Fig. 146). Spindle-whorls of stone, however, came into use.

Even architecture declines; while some Horgen houses from the Lake
of Constance are long rectangles, as at Aichbuhl, the occupants of other
sites, like Dullenried, were content with small rectangular houses with
a peaked roof, more suited to pastoral nomads than sedentary
cultivators.1

Such a reversion to hunting and pastoralism was formerly attributed
to adversities overtaking the West Alpine farmers. Really it reflects the
advent of fresh settlers with stronger mesolithic traditions. Judged by
its pottery, its perforated antler sleeves, its arc pendants, and other
artifacts, the Horgen culture is only an aspect of that which we shall
meet (p. 3x2) in the collective tombs of the Seine-Oise-Marne basins.2
Moreover, even gallery graves of the Paris type were built near Lake
Neuchatel and on the Upper Rhine, while five megalithic cists are
known in the area.

The Altheim culture of the Upper Danube basin may be regarded as
an eastern extension of the Horgen culture. On the Goldberg3 in
Wiirttemberg the Altheim village, consisting of one-roomed huts like

1 Germania, XXI, 155-8; Buttler, Donauldndische, 76.   2 AsA., XL, 2-14.

3 Germania, XXI (1937), I49> cf. von Gonzenbach, Cortaillodhultur, 76.

296
 WESTERN CULTURE IN THE ALPINE Z

[Prometheus]

those of Dullenried grouped in clusters of four or five, was super-
imposed on the ruins of the Michelsberg settlement and thus occupies
the same stratigraphical position as Horgen layers in the Swiss sites. It
too belongs to period Ilia, but the Altheim culture is so closely linked
with the East Alpine that it can best be considered on pages 299 ff.
below.

Upper Neolithic and Chalcolithic Periods

Though separated by a “flood layer” from the Middle, the Upper
Neolithic strata on Lake Neuchatel1 exhibit essentially the continued
evolution of the Horgen culture; there are new types of antler sleeve
(Fig. 139, D) and tanged-and-barbed or hollow-based arrow-heads. But
battle-axes indicate that warlike tribes were already reaching the
western lakes. On Lake Zurich2 typical corded ware from the im-
mediate successor of a Horgen village attests already the sway of
Battle-axe warriors.

In the Chalcolithic phase on Lake Neuchatel3 their sway was extended
westwards; for cord-ornamented sherds and fine battle-axes are found
in the Chalcolithic villages. The barrows of the invaders covering
cremation burials were raised in the interior. But in the western lake-
villages the native tradition is presumably illustrated by coarse wares
decorated with finger-printed cordons. This decoration at the same time
recalls that of some pottery in North Spain, South
France, and Liguria. On the Lake of Geneva south-
western connections are more explicitly attested by
polypod bowls,4 like the Pyrenaean vase of Fig. 144.

A surplus, perhaps exacted by Battle-axe chieftains,
was now available to purchase foreign material; rare
objects of metal including flat axes and riveted
daggers, Grand Pressigny flint from Central France,
and, on the Lake of Geneva, winged beads (like Fig.

143, j, n) from the Midi5 occur in the lake-dwellings.

But not till the Late Bronze Age did bronze-smiths,
supplied with raw materials by regular commerce,
establish themselves in the lacustrine villages. Stray UnStidan'pSs^i).
axes and triangular and rhomboid daggers, appro-
priate to periods IV and even V, together with bone copies of Unetician
pins (Fig. 140), have indeed been collected from many “neolithic” (in

1 Antiquity, II, 398; AsA., XXXI, 171.   2 Germania, XVIII, 94.

3   Antiquity, II, 401; VIII, 38; Childe, Danube, 175-6.

4   Altschles., V (1934), I02-

5   Altschles., V., pi. XVIII, 5.

297
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Vouga’s sense Chalcolithic) lake-dwellings.1 But the economy remained
formally neolithic.

The West Alpine Bronze Age

But to prosperous villages on dry land must belong cemeteries of richly
furnished flat graves in the Rhone and Aar valleys.1 2 In them the
deceased, buried contracted, were equipped with flanged axes, triangular
or ogival daggers, ingot torques, and ring-head, trilobate, trefoil,
racket, bulb-headed, or even knot-headed and Bohemian eyelet pins.
All types can be derived from Central European models and disclose the
extension westward of the Danubian traditions of metallurgy. Indeed,
two currents from that quarter can be distinguished3: the one charac-
terized by classical Unetician pins, ingot torques, and axes brought
Bohemian traditions via the Upper Danube and the Aar to the Rhone
valley; the other, distingushed by a preference for ornaments of sheet
metal (Vogt’s “Blechstil”), brought the traditions of Kisapostag and
Straubing through Upper Austria and Bavaria to the Upper Rhine and
to Vallais.

Copper was won from small local lodes to exploit which metal-
lurgists penetrated far into the high Alps. They based their operations
on tiny fortified villages like Mutter-Fellers,4 Crestaulta,5 and Borscht
in Liechtenstein.6 The villagers were primarily farmers who cultivated
wheat and barley and bred cattle, sheep, cows, pigs, and goats, and
perhaps horses,7 and who must have devised a rural economy almost as
well adapted to the Alpine environment as that practised there to-day;
for the villages seem to have been permanently occupied. They included
also metallurgists who smelted the local ores and developed from
Danubian models local types—spatulate axes, bronze hilted daggers of
Rhone type, a variety of handsome engraved ornaments. Such were
exported to Upper Italy and France. In return, amber and glass beads
reached Crestaulta, while a quoit-shaped fayence pendant was acquired
by a resident in the contemporary village of Bleich-Arbon in North-

1   AsAg., IV, 2 if., Viollier in Opuscula archcsologica O. Montelio dicata, 126 ff.;
MAGZ., XXIX, 200.

2   Kraft, AsA., XXIX (1927), 5 ff.

3   Vogt in Tschumi Festschrift (Frauenfeld, 1948), 54-68.

4   ZfsAK., VI (1944), 65 ff.

5   Burkart, Crestaulta (Monographien zur Ur- und Friihgeschichte, V), Basel, 1946;

JSGU. (1947), 42.

6   The Early Bronze Age village succeeded Horgen and Michelsberg settlements, all
stratified; D. Beck in Vols. 47 and 48 of Jahrbuch des historischen Vereins fur das
Fiirstentum Liechtenstein.

7   The bones of 22 bovids, 22 sheep, 22 pigs, 10 goats, and 71 horses were recognized
at Crestaulta.

298
 WESTERN CULTURE IN THE ALPINE ZONE

Eastern Switzerland. Judged by the types produced, this brilliant Swiss
bronze industry flourished mainly in the latter part of period IV and in
period V. But despite their enterprise and originality, the Swiss smiths
seem to have remained content with supplying a local market. Cut off
from the great trade-routes to the Mediterranean, the West Alpine
Early Bronze Age culture did not progress so far towards urbanization
as did the North Italian or Hungarian.

The Eastern Alps

Altheim1 near Landshut, Bavaria, Mondsee2 in Upper Austria, Vucedol3
on the lower Drave in Slavonia, and Ljubljansko Blat (Laibach Moor)4
in Slovenia are patent stations for a series of related cultures extending
along the eastern slopes of the Alps from Goldberg in Wiirttemberg to
Debelo brdo on the Bosna near Serajevo. They are lake-dwellings or
fortified hilltop camps; at Altheim three concentric rings of ditches and
palisades enclosed an area 40 m. in diameter. Their occupants lived
by cultivating cereals which they reaped with crescentic sickles made
from a single flint flake and, on the Austrian lakes, also apples and
beans, by breeding cattle, sheep, pigs, and horses, by hunting and by
fishing—in Upper Austria using double-pronged fish-spears of bone.
Stone was still used for axes which might be mounted with antler
sleeves and sometimes notched at the butt5 and for weapons—knobbed
polygonal battle-axes, spheroid mace-heads, daggers, hollow-based
arrow-heads, and sling bullets.

But copper was generally used, too, both for flat axes and rhomboid
daggers, like Fig. 121, c, and for ornaments. On the Austrian lakes and
Ljubljansko Blat and at Vucedol it was also worked locally; for moulds
have been found in the settlements (one from Ljubljansko Blat would
yield an axe like Fig. 64, 3) as well as grooved hammer-stones. Indeed,
the Austrian lake-villagers, living at the head of navigation on the
Traun,6 were supplementing the products of farming by smelting copper
ores and shipping their winnings down the Danube's tributaries. So,
too, Ljubljansko Blat lies at the head of navigation on the Save and
may have been the precursor of the Roman station of Nauportus for
trade from the Middle Danube basin to the Adriatic. Intercommunal

1   Bayerische Urgeschichtsfreund, IV (Munich, 1924), 13 ff.; Childe, Danube, 125-8.

3   Franz, “Die Funde aus den prahistorischen Pfahlbauten im Mondsee” (Materialien
zuv Urgeschichte Osterreichs, III), Vienna, 1927; Willvonseder, Oberdsterreich in der
Vorzeit, Vienna, 1933, 2°~8 (Attersee); WPZ., XXVI (1939), 135; Pittioni, Urgeschichte.

3   Childe, Danube, 210-12; Schmidt, Vutedol', Patay, "Korai Bronzkori”, 24-8 (“Zok”
culture).

4   Childe, Danube, loc. cit.

5   MAGW., LXI, 75-80.   ® Franz, “Mondsee”, 11-12.

299
 DAWK OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

specialization is further illustrated by “axe-factories” on the Enns1
and elsewhere.

Everywhere, many of the vases are coarse and decorated only with
cordons though they have flat bases and include handled cups and jugs.
But on the Attersee and Mondsee and in land stations in Salzburg,
vases were decorated with concentric circles incised in stab-and-drag
technique and filled with white paste (Fig. 141).

Fig. 141. Mondsee Pottery (i).

In the Vucedol or Slavonian ware2 of the Lower Drave, the Save,
and the Bosna the same magical motives were combined with excised
patterns that imitate the chip-carving of wooden vessels, and dis-
tinctive shapes, proper to the latter, were reproduced in pottery.
Among these are bowls or lamps on a cruciform foot, like those of the
Starcevo culture, but even closer to the lamps from the Pontic Cata-
comb Graves (pp. 86, 156). But some vases from Ljubljanslco Blat
are provided with tunnel-handles just as in Maltese “Neolithic B”,
in Piano Conte on Lipari, and in Sardinia.

Models of animals were moulded in clay on the Austrian lakes;

1 WPZ., V, 19.   2 Schmidt, Viicedol.

300
 WESTERN CULTURE IN THE ALPINE ZONE

Slavonian ideology1 was expressed in the production also of figures of
human beings fully dressed, of vases in the shape of a bird, and of
models of huts, tables, and perhaps in “horns of consecration”. At
Vucedol itself the dead were buried in loss-cut “cellars”, formally like
the pit-caves of the Mediterranean and the Pontic “catacombs”.

On the Drave, Save, and Bosna, Vucedol ware, being exclusively
associated with the assemblage just summarized, may serve to define
a distinct Slavonian culture. But vases, decorated in the same style
and including cross-footed lamps, have been unearthed at many
points—usually fortified hilltop settlements—in Hungary,2 Austria,3
Slovakia, Moravia, and Bohemia,4 but always associated with relics
proper to some other culture, generally Baden. Still, in a small
cemetery at Caka in Slovakia,5 Slavonian vases alone furnished the
graves, one serving as a cinerary urn. For here the burial rite was
cremation.

At the Goldberg, the Altheim settlement succeeded an occupation
by Michelsberg folk, and at Vucedol Slavonian pottery was stratified
above Baden wares. Hence the East Alpine neolithic cultures cannot
well begin before period III. On the other hand, though ingot torques
and even metal types of period V have been found in and around the
Austrian lakes, the abundance of well-made polygonal battle-axes
from the lake-villages suggest that their foundation should be put early
in that period. Allied types occur in Slavonian contexts and in the
Rinaldone culture of Italy. The latter should give a partial synchronism
between East Alpine and Italian Chalcolithic.

Now, the symbolic patterns adorning Mondsee pottery are notori-
ously identical with motives popular on Early Cypriote Bronze Age
vases, while the Mondsee daggers are at least East Mediterranean in
form. If, then, Central European metallurgy were initiated by Torque-
bearers from the Levant coasts (p. 134), these patterns may well be
an ideological reflection of the arrival of a few Asiatic prospectors
among a native Baden-Horgen population whose labour they enlisted
in the exploitation of the adjacent copper lades. Analogies to Slavonian
ceramic decoration at Pescale in Upper Italy (p. 246) and to Vucedol
tombs in the Central Italian Rinaldone culture (p. 241) might even, if
less plausibly, be interpreted as indicators of the prospectors’ route,
but even closer analogies in the Pontic Catacomb graves and the cross-

x Schmidt, Vubedol.

2   Patay, “Korai Bronzkori”, 24-8.

2   WPZ., XXVI (1939), 135-47*

4   Novotny, Slov. Arch., Ill (1955), 7-22, lists and maps 15 sites in Bohemia, 3 in
Moravia and 22 in Slovakia.

5   Ibid., 16.

301
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

footed lamps therefrom (p. 156)1 might just as well mark a circuitous
route from the Black Sea coasts.

In any case, if a trading-post were early established on the Mondsee
during period III, it declined in importance during period IV. Trade
southward was diverted to the Brenner route.2 Carinthia, Slovenia, and
Slavonia lay outside the system that distributed the metal types of
period IV to Upper Italy and to the Maros valley. The Slavonian
culture presumably lasted through that period, but as none of the
constitutive metal types reached the province, it still looks neolithic.
Even in the Eastern Alps it is not till period VI that the rich graves
of the Hotting umfield culture attest a local prosperity based on
mining for copper and salt and a rural economy adapted to take full
advantage of Alpine conditions. No counterpart of the West Alpine
Early Bronze Age, described in the last section, is discernible in the
Eastern Alps nor in the North-West Balkans.

1   As far as the shape is concerned, both groups could be derived independently from
the Starfievo types of period I, but the decoration of the Slavonian and the Catacomb
lamps is also very similar.

2   The porterage (from the Adige to the Inn) is much shorter on the Brenner route
than on that across the Julian Alps which replaced it when the Romans had built a road
to Nauportus.

303
 CHAPTER XVII

[Prometheus]

MEGALITH BUILDERS IN ATLANTIC EUROPE

The corridors of the Garonne and the Rhone valleys offer passage from
the Mediterranean to the Atlantic West, traversed in historical times
by the trade-route that carried Cornish tin to the Greek colonies round
the Gulf of Lions. Along it perhaps had spread a millennium or so
earlier the megalithic religion in the wake of prehistoric trade from
colonies on the same shores. But still earlier the Western farmers whose
arrival and spread to the north-east were postulated in Chapter XVI
should have expanded also north-westward to Central France, Nor-
mandy, and Brittany. It is convenient to consider the results attribut-
able to such an expansion before describing the impact of megalithic
ideas on South France.

Chassey and Fort Harrouard

The famous but badly excavated station of the Camp de Chassey
(Saone-et-Loire)1 certainly ought to mark a stage in the assumed
expansion of Western neolithic culture. It is a fortified hilltop, and
from it have been gathered many objects distinctive of the West Swiss
Lower Neolithic Cortaillod culture—plain leathery pots, tapering
antler sleeves for axes, segmented tine pendants. But collections from
the site include also types that are not older than Middle or even
Upper Neolithic on Lake Neuchatel, such as sleeves like Fig. 139, B,
perforated stone axes, and tanged arrow-heads. If these denote a
second phase of occupation, there are no stratigraphical observations
to decide to which the decorated pottery, often called simply Chassey
ware,2 belongs. This ware bears hatched rectilinear patterns scratched
on the surface after firing or on the hard-dried clay just before (Fig.
142, 2).3 The “vase-support" is a distinctive shape.4 Such decoration is
missing from Cortaillod sites in Switzerland, but finds analogies in
Schussenried pottery farther east (p. 293). In Liguria, scratched
decoration was Middle Neolithic.

1   Ddchelette, Manuel, 1, 559; Bailloud and Mieg, 97 fi.; Piggott, L’Anthr., LVII
(1953), 410-32.

2   Many authors thus describe all plain Western pottery from France; Arnal and
Benazet distinguish therefrom "Chasseen decord" which they consider earlier than the
plain ware; BSPF., XLVIII (1951), 552-5.

3   BSPF., XLVIII, 555.   4 BSPF., XXVII (1930). 268-76.

303
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

After crossing the Massif Central the neolithic colonists would reach
the downlands of Northern France, an area rich in flint1 and already
inhabited by mesolithic hunter-fishers, probably of the Forest culture.
In the oldest recognizable neolithic settlements the farmers appear
to have adopted much of the food-gatherers’ equipment'—core and
flake axes, transverse arrow-heads, and other items—giving the local
cultures a hybrid, “secondary neolithic” aspect. Their neolithic ele-

Fig. 142. Vase-supports in Chassey style: i, Le Moustoir, Carnac; 2, Motte
de la Garde, Charente.

ments might have been contributed by Rossen farmers, spreading
through the Belfort Gap as far as Yonne2 or Danubians advancing
from the Meuse to the Somme and the Marne as well as by Westerners.
The best picture available of the ambiguous result is provided by Fort
Harrouard3 (Eure-et-Loire), a promontory camp about 17 acres (7 hr.)
in extent, where Father Philippe could distinguish two neolithic strata.

The villagers lived by cultivating indeterminate grains and breeding
mainly horned cattle; they kept also some pigs and goats and a very
few sheep too, but relied very little on hunting or fishing.4 They lived

1   This is the truth underlying Bosch-Gimpera’s thesis of the existence in North
France of a "culture de silex"—just another way of saying that in this area rich in
flint but poor in fine-grained rocks, flint was the normal material even for axes, cf.
Rev. Anthr., XXXVI (1926), 320.

2   At Nermont, Danubian pottery seems to precede Western, Bailloud and Mieg, 50.

3   Philippe, "Cinq ann6es de fouiUes au Fort Harrouard” (Socidte normande d’dtudes
pr&iistoriques, XXV bis), Rouen, 1927.

4   The actual proportions are: cattle 68 per cent, swine 18 per cent, sheep 10 per cent,
goats 1-5 per cent, game 2-5 per cent; L'Anthr., XLVII (1937), 292.

2

304
 MEGALITH BUILDERS IN ATLANTIC EUROPE

in irregular oval huts partly excavated in the ground1 and dressed in
woven fabrics, using whorls for spinning and clay loom-weights in
weaving. The carpenter used polished axes of imported stone occasion-
ally, but relied mainly on the “mesolithic” flint tranchets and “picks”,
together with rare antler axes.2 Besides transverse arrow-heads the
bowman sometimes used triangular ones. Before the end of the period
Grand Pressigny flint was imported, as were amber beads and arc-
shaped pendants of schist.3

The pots, baked in the fort in tiny kilns, are typically Western, but
include, besides simple leather forms, baking plates as in the Michels-
berg complex, vessels with pan-pipe lugs perforated vertically and
horizontal tubes expanding at the ends like the trumpet lugs of
Troy I, and vase-supports and other vessels decorated in the Chassey
style.

Though there are a megalithic tomb and some small long barrows in
sight of the camp, villagers were buried extended, or in one case con-
tracted, within the enclosure.4 Female figurines were modelled in clay,
a quite exceptional cult practice within the Western cycle.

Judging by the pottery, other sites in North France, notably the
celebrated fortified station at Le Campigny (Seine Inf6rieure) (once
made the patent station for a mesolithic culture) and the Camp de
Catenoy (Oise)5 were occupied at the same time as Fort Harrouard I.
At that station the second neolithic stratum illustrates a development
of the older culture. While cattle-breeding predominates, a large breed
of Bos brachyceros now co-existed with the small cattle of the older
herds. Goats had died out, but game bones now amount to as much
as 8 per cent of the total. And oysters and other shell-fish were imported
from the coast. Finished implements, such as daggers and lance-heads
of Grand Pressigny flint, were also obtained by barter. But the old
types of tools, including the “mesolithic” core and flake-axes, were still
retained. The pottery shows a development of the Chassey style with
much coarser incisions combined with rusticated wares.

Since the late Chassey style inspires the decoration of “Incense
Cups” at the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age in Southern England,
it must follow that Fort Harrouard II falls at least into the “Beaker”
period of the West; it may indeed outlast it, since, as on the Swiss
lakes, the record of settlement is continued only by the Late Bronze
Age occupation of Fort Harrouard III.6 For all we can tell, the pastoral

1 L’Anthr., XLVI, 270-1.   2 L'Anthr., XLVI, 559.

3 L'Anthr., XLVI, 604.   4 L'Anthr., XLVI, 541 f.

6   L’Anthr., XII (1901), 359 and 354; LVII, 441-2.

6 But besides Late Bronze Age pins the crutch-head type occurs, as in the Copper
Age lake-dwellings, Philippe, “Cinq Anndes,” pis. XI, 11, and XVIII, 19.

u   305
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

communities of Northern France preserved their neolithic economy
unaffected by the cultural impulses that crossed South-Western France.

So even Fort Harrouard I may begin relatively late; Grand Pressigny
flint in Switzerland is Middle Neolithic, so are arc-pendants in both
the Swiss and the Ligurian sequences. In other words, Fort Harrouard I
is not demonstrably pre-megalithic or anterior to the earlier SOM
tombs. Even the ceramic evidence for a pre-megalithic Western colon-
ization is no more explicit at Fort Harrouard than at Michelsberg. An
acculturation of Forest hunters by Danubians in North France,
parallel to that suggested as a possible explanation of Michelsberg,
cannot be ruled out. Indeed, if Michelsberg represent a south-western
extension of First Northern, Fort Harrouard I could be claimed as an
outpost still farther west (p. 291 ff.). Still, in 1956 the best authori-
ties consider the neolithic elements of North French culture Western.

Brittany, too, may have been reached in pre-megalithic times by
Western neolithic herdsmen-cultivators who would have joined forces
with survivors of the Teviec strand-loopers. The stone-walled “camps”
of Croh Colle and Lizo have indeed yielded pottery of the channelled
and later Chassey styles common in the peninsula’s megalithic tombs.
But leathery vases, generally plain, rarely decorated with scratched
patterns and sometimes provided with trumpet lugs, found in small
cist graves,1 conform to the standard Western neolithic types. The
cists recall the mesolithic sepulchres of Teviec, but contain cremated
human bones. Some groups of cists, e.g. at Manio, were covered by
elongated mounds of earth and stones which in plan offer the closest
West European analogy to the British long barrow.2

The Megalithic Culture of South France

If the megalithic religion were implanted round the Gulf of Lions by
colonists from the East Mediterranean, a cemetery of monumental
collective tombs on an island in the Rhone delta near Arles might well
belong to a bridgehead station comparable to Los Millares. The tombs,
cut in the rock but roofed with lintels and covered by round barrows,
are in plan long galleries3 and might have provided the models for the
built gallery graves which constitute the majority of the megalithic
tombs in South-West France and, south of the Pyrenees, in Catalonia
and the Basque Provinces.4 Segmented cists occur in Catalonia (Puig

1   L'Anthr., XLIV (1934), 486-9.

2   Antiquity, XI (1937), 441-52.

3   Cazalis de Fondouce, Les Allies couvertes de la Provence (1878), describes the
“grottes" de Bouxxias, Castellet, and des F<£es; cf. Hemp., Arch., LXXVI, 150.

4   Pericot, Sepulcros megaliticos (1950), gives a comprehensive survey of tombs and
grave goods from South France as well as from Spain.

306
 MEGALITH BUILDERS IN ATLANTIC EUROPE

Rodo), in the Basque Provinces and at La Halliade1 near Tarbes; that
at La Halliade was 14-2 m. long, divided by septal slabs into seven
compartments with a lateral compartment added at one end and
covered with a cairn of stones. Others like St Eugenie near Carcassonne
are subdivided by internal portals.2

On the other hand, passage graves in the area might be inspired from
Spain. A group of corbelled passage graves in Provence3 and Gard might
be connected directly with Los Millares. A series of rectangular ortho-
static chambers entered by dry-stone walled passages is strung out
significantly along a line from the coast to the copper and lead deposits
near Durfort,4 Gard. Architecturally these resemble Puglisi’s Tuscan
“dolmens” (p. 240), and their builders seem to have been pastoralists.
Finally, many caves in the area were still used as collective ossuaries in
megalithic, as in Early Neolithic, times. If burial in megalithic tombs
were the prerogative of aristocratic clans, commoners may have been
interred in caves.

The furniture of these various sepulchres is the principal source for
any picture of the cultures of North Spain and South France during a
long period, traditionally termed Chalcolithic, but certainly capable of
subdivision. Two phases stand out clearly: during the first (Pericot's
Bronze I) Bell-beakers were generally current; they had gone out of
fashion by the second (Pericot's Bronze II and III), which might last
down to the advent of Urnfield invaders with an equipment of
Danubian VI types. Near Narbonne, Helena5 claimed to distinguish a
pre-Beaker megalithic phase (Chalcolithic I), two phases with Beakers
(II and III), and two later. Other authorities,6 however, do not accept
his separation of Chalcolithic I from II. It is therefore a disputed issue
whether the transformation of the neolithic cultures, described in the
last chapter, into a “Chalcolithic” one were due to the simultaneous
arrival of megalith-builders and Beaker-folk or whether the latter
arrived only after the former and in either alternative precisely what is
to be attributed to the newcomers and what to the earlier neolithic and
mesolithic groups.

In any case the subsistence economy of the Chalcolithic as thus dis-
closed appears more pastoral and less sedentary than the previous

1   Mat. (1881), 522.

2   BSPF., XXVII (1930). 536-9; the tomb contained “300” skeletons, at least 7
beakers, 12 palettes, gold beads, tanged arrow-heads.

3   Goby ‘‘Les Dolmens de Provence”, Rodania: Congres de Cannes-Grasse (1929).

4   Amal, Ampurias, XI (1949), 29-44.

6 Les Origines de Narbonne (1937)- To Bernabo Brea (A.C. II, 232) only some sherds
from the Arles tombs might be (Upper) Neolithic; the pottery from all other tombs
should be Chalcolithic—in the Ligurian sequence.

6 Bailloud and Mieg (1955), 163-79; Pericot, Sepulcros megal.-, Piggott, L’Anthr.,

LVIII (1954), 7-22.

307
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

“Western Neolithic”. Apart from inhabited caves, only two settlements
are known—Fontbouisse in Gard1—a disorderly cluster of round and
rectangular huts on stone foundations'—and La Couronne—a fortified
site near the Rhone delta that might be comparable to Los Millares or
Vila Nova de San Pedro.

But food-production was now certainly combined with some secondary
industry and trade. Local ores of copper, lead, and perhaps even tin2
were probably worked. They do not seem to have formed the basis for a

Fig. 143. Late Chalcolithic types from Cevennian cists: a-e, Liquisse;
f-i, Grotte d’en Quisse, Gard; j-o, "dolmens” of Aveyron (f).

metal industry capable of satisfying local demand such as arose in the
Alpine valleys (p. 298), and only elementary techniques of casting are
illustrated by local finds. West European daggers3 were no doubt manu-
factured for the Beaker-folk, and several notched daggers with a mid-
rib on one face only (cast in an open-hearth mould) were found in a

1   Louis, Peyrolle, Arnat, Gallia, V (1947), 235-57.

2   L'Anihr., XXII (1911), 413.

3   Listed by Sandars, Inst. Arch., AR., VI (1950), 44 ff.

308
 MEGALITH BUILDERS IN ATLANTIC EUROPE

curious crematorium near Freyssinel in Lozere.1 Otherwise metal was
used mainly for ornaments. Metal daggers were replaced by bifacially
flaked flint copies—some polished on one face to enhance the similarity,2
Only in the post-Beaker phase, Helena’s Chalcolithic IV, do a few
Bronze Age types appear, and these—daggers, trefoil,3 bulb-head,4 and
racket pins5—are imports from Central Europe or Switzerland, not East
Mediterranean (Fig. 143).

Gold was obtained in Beaker times and used to cover wrist-guards
(like Fig. 113, 4), and for other purposes. Callais was imported at the
same time, but earlier in Catalonia. Amber arrived still later, in Chalco-
lithic III according to Helena, only in Bronze II on Pericot’s6 division.
The sole recognizable Mediterranean import found in any context is a
segmented fayence bead from the sepulchral Grotte du Ruisseau,
Aude.7 To this may be added a Middle Cycladic jug8 (Fig. 41, 3) dredged
up from Marseilles harbour and two contemporary Cypriote daggers
found stray in Provence.9 All three could, with the bead from Almeria,
be accounted for by coastwise traffic with the West as well as by a trans-
peninsular tin-trade with Cornwall. Yet in the first millennium the
Greek and Sicilian manufactures that should mark archseologically that
historic route are sparse enough.10 If the Cycladic jug be accepted as a
counterpart of the Classical vases, it means that the route was open
before 1600 b.c.

Most Chalcolithic pottery is based on older native traditions, but
bell-beakers are of course intrusive; those of Pan-European type are
presumably the oldest, but several local variants grew up.11 With the
latter are associated12 polypod bowls with grooved shoulders (Fig. 144),
inspired by wooden models, but at least indirectly related to British
food-vessels (p. 337) on the one hand, to the Central European and
Sardinian associates of beakers (pp. 224, 258) on the other. Well-made
bell-beakers, decorated by wrapping a cord spirally round the vase13

1   Morel, “Sepultures tumulaires de la Region de Freyssinel”, Bui. Soc. des Lettres,
Sci., Art. du Lozere (1936), 17-23.

2   L'Anthr., LVIII, 7 and 27.

3   Rev. £t. Anc., XIII, 435.

4   Helena, Origines, fig. 64.

B Mat. (1869), 328.

6   Sepulcros megal., 122, 131.

7   Helena, Les Grottes sdpulchrales de Monges (Toulouse, 1925), pi. V, 49; wrongly
termed “stone”; a segmented bone bead from the “dolmen” of Cabut, Gironde, may be
a copy, Bailloud and Mieg, 190.

8   Cuadernos, III, 37-42; Prehistoire, II (1933), 37.

9   Ibid.

10 Ibid.; cf. Hawkes, Ampurias, XIV, 90 ff.

Bailloud and Mieg, 190; BSPF., XLIX (1952), 158; (1953), 60.

12   At La Halliade and other sites in Acquitaine, Fabre, Les civilisations protohistoriques
de VAcquitaine (Paris, 1952); a similar bowl was found in a Hallstatt grave in C6te d’Or.

13   Act. v Mem., XXI (1946), 196; L’Anthr., LVIII, 6.

309

[Prometheus]

 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

may reflect a reaction from the corded ware of Central Europe; a few
stone battle-axes1 might be connected therewith. Vases decorated with
incised and punctured patterns should be related to those of Los
Millares and the later Chassey style. But channelled ware, adorned with

concentric circles, might be of Early Minoan ancestry (p. 32) and
parallel to the Portuguese. It would on Helena's view be associated with
the first megaliths in Chalcolithic I, but at Fontbouisse it is said to be
later than Beakers and so Bronze II.1 2

In this latter period emerged flat-bottomed vases, sometimes
decorated with applied ribs and presumably related to Horgen ware.
To much the same phase might be attributed carinated cups with axe-
handles, ancestral to, or derived from, those of the South Italian
dolmens3 (Fig. 116, 3). A few specimens, decorated with excised
patterns identical with those on Apennine ware,4 may be actual imports
from Italy.

If they created no novel industrial types, the Pyrensean and Provencal
societies did develop distinctive toilet articles and ornaments that were
exported to or copied by other groups. For fastening their garments
Beaker-folk, as elsewhere, used V-perforated buttons, but local
variants5 were devised and exported. Thus an elongated prismatic type
was preferred round the Eastern Pyrenees, particularly in Bronze II,
while Aude may have been the cradle of tortoise beads which were

1   Pericot, Sepulcras, 190.

8   L’Anthr., XLVIII, 8-10; BSPF., XLVIII, 557.

3   Riv. St. Lig., XV (1949), 42-4; Peric'"1' c'p:   125-6, and map 84.

4   Maluquer de Motes, ‘‘Yacimientos ; V ?1 Monografias de la Estacion de
Estudios Pyrenaicos, I (Zaragoza, 1948), 22 and n. x.

3   BSPF., LI (1954), 255-66.

310
 MEGALITH BUILDERS IN ATLANTIC EUROPE

diffused thence to Sardinia and Portugal. Winged beads of East
Mediterranean ancestry found a secondary centre of manufacture in
South France, while some bone tubes from the cave of Treille, Aude,1
and the dolmen of Cabut, Gironde, are vaguely like the Early JEgean
type of Fig. 27, 1.

The main creative impulses of Pyrenaeic-Proven$al societies were
diverted to ideological ends. The overwhelming importance attached to
the funerary cult is patently displayed in the innumerable megalithic
tombs and cave ossuaries. But no rigid orthodoxy prevailed. Some
clans adopted cremation at an uncertain date; a sort of collective
cremation is reported from some caves,2 while under a cairn near
Freyssinel3 (Lozere) fifty corpses had been burned on the spot.

South France was certainly one, and perhaps the primary, centre of
the practice of ritual trepanation, though the superstition was potent
also round the Tagus estuary4 and in the SOM culture. Certainly an
astonishingly large number of the skulls from the Cevennian megaliths
and from the caves5 had been trephined, some while their owners were
still alive! As the cranian amulets produced by this operation were
found in Cortaillod sites in Switzerland, the practice presumably goes
back to premegalithic times in South France, though it persisted like
so much else. In Aveyron, Gard, Herault, and Tarn monoliths were
carved with representations of a female divinity armed with an axe6;
one such statue-menhir was used as a lintel in a corbelled megalithic
tomb at Collorgues, Gard (Fig. 145a).7 Clearly this is no “portrait statue”
but represents the same deity as the citizens of Troy I carved also on a
monolithic stele. We shall meet her again in the Marne valley. Pre-
sumably these statue-menhirs mark her route northward, unless her
journey should be reversed; with a change of sex the deity was carried
eastward to Upper Italy (p. 250), presumably by immigrants from
South France. The latter, though recognizable in pottery too, are not
likely to have made contributions, such as ploughs and halberds, to
the material culture of the Apennine peninsula. Sculpture and surgery
in South France developed outside the frame of urban life and with-
out relation to practical ends, as we understand them, in a society
whose material culture remained fossilized for perhaps a thousand
years.

1   Ampurias, XI (1949), 29.   2 Helena, Origines, 80.   3 Seep. 309, n. 1.

4   MacWhite (Cuadernos, I (1946), 61-9) enumerates 15 trepanned skulls from this
region.

5   In Loz&re 52 cases come from “dolmens”, 105 from caves, D^chelette, Manuel, I,
474 f.; cf. AsAg., XI (1945), 56; E. Guiard, La trepanation cranienne chez les neolithiques
et chez les primitifs modernes (Paris), 1930.

6   Rev. Anthr., XLI (1931), 300 ff.

7   Afas., 1890, 629; Rev. Anthr., XLI, 362; the usual plans are wrong.

311
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

The Seine-Oise-Marne (SOM) Culture

The adoption of themegalithic faith by a Forest population on the chalk
downs of Champagne and round the Paris basin produced a remarkable
culture, known almost exclusively from collective tombs and termed
the Seine-Oise-Marne culture (abbreviated SOM).1 The burial-places
may be natural caves,2 artificial caves hewn in the chalk,3 or “Paris
cists", a specialized type Of gallery grave. In the Marne4 the rock-cut
tombs form regular cemeteries; there are some fifty in the valley of
Petit Morin alone. All are rectangular chambers entered by a descending
ramp like the dromos of a Mycenaean tomb. A few are more carefully

a   b   c

Fig. 145. Statue-menhirs from. Gard and sculptured tomb (b), Petit Morin (Marne).

excavated than the rest and are provided with an antecella on the walls
of which may be carved or sketched in charcoal representations of the
same funerary goddess, bearing an axe,5 as appears on the statue-
menhirs of the Midi (Fig. 145). While the smaller tombs contain forty
or more corpses (including some cremated bones), not more than eight
bodies were deposited in the more elaborate chambers, but the funerary
furniture in them is much richer. They accordingly belong to “chiefs”,
while poorer common-folk were crammed into family ossuaries. The
gallery graves in the valleys of the Aisne, Seine, Oise, and Eure6 (Paris
cists) are generally built of slabs erected in a long trench, a compart-

1   General review Childe and Sandars, L'Anthr., LIV (1950), 1 ff., and Bailloud and
Mieg, 190-9.

2   E.g. Vaucelles, Namur, Loe, La Belgique ancienne, I, 144.

3   In Marne and also Oise, Mem. Soc. academique d’Archeol. du Dep. de VOise, IV
(Beauvais, i860), 465.

4   J. de Baye, L'Archeologie prehistorique (Paris, 1884); cf. also BSPF., VIII (1911),
669; Gallia, I (1943), 20-5.

6 Rev. Antkr., XLI, 371-3.

6 Ddchelette, Manuel, I, 397 ff.; Rev. Arch., XXVII (1928), 1-13; Forde, Am. Anthr.,
XXXII, 63-6; AsA., XL (1938), 1-14.

312
 MEGALITH BUILDERS IN ATLANTIC EUROPE

ment at one end, divided from the rest by a porthole slab, serving as the
entrance (cf. Fig. ioo). The funerary goddess1 reappears in the entrance,
generally more conventionalized than on the Marne, so that only her
breasts are recognizable.

The grave goods disclose a warlike population living by stock-breed-

Fig. 146. Horgen pot from Paris cist (Mureaux) (?$?), and channelled vase
from Conguel, Morbihan (?$•).

ing and hunting, but almost certainly also tilling the soil. Its role in
flint-mining is uncertain, but Grand Pressigny flint was obtainable, and
the chieftains of the Marne secured even beads of amber, callals and
rock-crystal and small copper trinkets. Even flanged axes of bronze
have been reported from SOM gallery graves.2 The grave gear consisted,
however, of polished flint axes, normally mounted in perforated antler

Arc-pendant of stone (}).

sleeves, antler axes with square-cut shaft-holes, very numerous trans-
verse arrow-heads together with a very few leaf-shaped ones, daggers of
Grand Pressigny flint and characteristic splay-footed vases of rather
coarse ware (Fig. 146, i).a The ornaments include shells, bracelets, rings,
and arc-pendants (Fig. 147) of stone, a leg amulet of antler,4 axe-

1 Rev. Anthr., XLI, 371-3.   2 Breuil in Afas. (1899), 590.

3   See also BSPF. (1934), 282-5; (1951), 558; L‘Anthr., LVIII, 18-20.

4   Gallia, I (1943). 24.

3*3
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

amulets, and cranian amulets. Nearly a third of the population was
round-headed, less than a quarter really dolichocranial. Quite a large
number of individuals had undergone ritual trepanation as in South
France.

The tomb plans and sculptures and the trepanned skulls suggest that
the megalithic religion had reached the Seine-Marne basins from the
lower Rhone. Paris cists, as slab-lined trenches, reproduce most faith-
fully the plan of the rock-cut tombs near Arles, and the chalk-hewn
tombs of the Marne are the most Mediterranean chamber tombs north
of the Pyrenees and the Alps. The missionaries who introduced the faith
must have travelled fast and kept it fresh. But the SOM culture pre-
serves so many mesolithic traits that the bulk of their converts must
have been descendants of native Forest-folk. The transformation of
these "savages’1 into farmers may be attributed not so much to the
“missionaries” as to Danubian peasants who had established colonial
outposts on the Somme, the Marne, and the Seine,1 or to less well-
documented Westerners (p. 304).

The composite warlike population thus unified by the megalithic
faith soon embarked on a crusade of conquest and colonization, in the
course of which some items of the faith, or at least their durable ex-
pressions, were lost or distorted. Westward the whole complex with its
specialized gallery graves, porthole slabs, and splay-footed vases reached
Brittany,2 Normandy, and Jersey—but not Guernsey—while Beakers
were still current there. Even the funerary goddess, albeit degraded to
a mere pair of breasts, was thus carried to the Atlantic coasts. To the
north-east the culture is classically represented in Belgian caves,3 while
Paris cists were built in Belgium, Westfalia, and Hesse. Finally the
long cists of South Sweden (p. 198) not only reproduce the Paris plan
but also contain splay-footed pots of SOM form. To the south-east
the Horgen culture (p. 295) must be attributed to a similar colonization,
though relatively few tombs were built for its spiritual leaders. Even to
the south the grave goods from Bougon (Deux Sevres) unmistakably
mark the site of a SOM colony, while a couple of “porthole dolmens”
in the Cevennes and the pottery already mentioned from South France
and the Baleares might denote a return of the faith in a barbarized
version towards its assumed starting-point.4
From this expansion chronological limits for the rise of the SOM

1   Bailloud and Mieg, 48.

2   E.g. Tregastel, BSPF., XLIII (1946), 305.

3   Marien, Oud-Belgie, 142-5; 152 ff.

4   But if the megalithic religion were introduced into the Seine-Marne basins from
the Loire, from the coasts of Normandy (Piggott, L’Anthr., LVIII, 20), or from the
Caucasus via Hesse, the Paris cists and the Marne carvings must represent the germs
from which evolved the rock-cut tombs and statue-menhirs of South France!

314
 MEGALITH BUILDERS IN ATLANTIC EUROPE

culture can be more precisely deduced. Not only have Beaker sherds
been found in three tombs in the Paris basin/ but also in those of its
colonial outposts in Brittany. Thus in the French sequence the culture
goes back at least to Chalcolithic II or Pericot’s Bronze I. So its arrival
in Switzerland initiates Middle Neolithic there. Collared flasks appro-
priate to Northern Neolithic II occur in the Paris cists of Westfalia
and of Brittany,1 2 while, judging from a couple of tiny Rossen sherds
from their counterparts in Hesse (p. 190), the culture should have
arrived there near the beginning of Danubian III if not in Danubian II.
The SOM culture must then be among the earliest manifestations of
the megalithic religion in temperate Europe. Yet it lasted a long time
with no recognizable progress or change. It reached Scandinavia only
in Northern Neolithic IV—i.e. Danubian IV, the Early Bronze Age.
In its homeland there are no other burials save those in Paris cists and
SOM caves to represent the Early and Middle Bronze Ages in the
funerary record, while types of these periods are inordinately scarce.
The region remained isolated from the great currents of Bronze Age
trade, and its population, absorbed in cult practices, was content to
subsist in a neolithic stage.

The Armorican Megalithic Culture

In megalithic times the Armorican Peninsula with its extension to the
Channel Islands became a goal of pilgrimage so that a bizarre assort-
ment of cultures was superimposed on the primary Western neolithic
described on p. 306. Brittany offers the first land-fall on the northward
voyage from the Iberian Peninsula to Cornish tin-lodes and Irish gold-
fields and sets the limit to terrestrial wanderings in search of isles of the
blest beneath the setting sun. Moreover, its old rocks contain gold,
perhaps also tin and callais.3 The densest and most varied concentration
of collective tombs in Europe is to be found round the Gulf of Morbihan,4
but from this centre the tombs spread coastwise to the mouth of the
Loire and to Jersey (still perhaps joined to the Continent in megalithic
times) and Guernsey. The diverse tomb plans and the heterogeneous
articles constituting the furniture of every sepulchre indicate the
varied traditions that went to make up the Armorican culture and the
complexity of their interweaving.

1   Sievekng, Inst. Arcli. AR., IX (1953), 60-7; L’Anthr., LVIII, 20.

2   BSPF., XLIII, 307.

s Forde, Am. Anthr., XXXII, 85.

4   Types summarized by le Rouzic, L’Anthr., XLIII (1933), 233-48; for Guernsey,
T. D. Kendrick, Archcsology of the Channel Islands, I (1928), for Jersey, J. Hawkes,
Archeeology of the Channel Islands, II (1939).

315
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Corbelled passage graves are concentrated on the coasts and Islands
and are obviously inspired by Iberian, immediately by Portuguese,
models. Their counterparts in the orthostatic architecture, more suited
to the local rocks, are megalithic passage graves, often P-shaped in
plan (Fig. 148), rarely with a lateral cell, as the standard type for

Morbihan, while undifferentiated passage graves, like the South
Spanish, are commoner in the Channel Islands. The gallery grave,1 on
the other hand, exhibits a more inland distribution and does not cross
the sea to Guernsey. Accordingly the idea was brought by land from
the Paris basin by migrant pastoralist families. Divergent variations
on the exotic models were devised locally. Undifferentiated passage
graves with one or two pairs of lateral chambers, arranged like tran-
septs on either side of the principal gallery, may be derived from tholoi
with lateral cells, as at Los Millares, and are common to the peninsula2
and the Islands (La Houge Bie, Jersey,3 and Dehus, Guernsey4).
Passage graves with a bent corridor and gallery graves similarly
"angled” are peculiar to Armorica.

1   Forde, Man, XXIX, So; Am. Anthr., XXXII, 74.

2   L’Anthr., XLIII, 242; Antiquity, XI, 455.

3   Soci£t6 Jersiaise, Bulletin (St. Helier, 1925).

4   V. C. C. Collum, “Re-excavation of Ddhus”, Trans. Soc. Guernesiaise (1933).

0

Fig. 148. Passage grave, Kercado, Morbihan.

316
 MEGALITH BUILDERS IN ATLANTIC EUROPE

Most tombs were covered by a cairn or barrow, generally round and
carefully constructed, but sometimes two or even three tombs are
covered by a single mound which may then be oblong. Elaborate
carvings, including representations of hafted axes and human feet, are
a feature of the megaliths of Morbihan.1 And in Brittany the tombs
often contain remains of cremated skeletons. The same heretical rite
is associated with other equally novel manifestations of the megalithic
cult that are peculiar to the extreme west, but common to Brittany
and Britain. Oval or horseshoe settings of megalithic uprights on the
islet of Er Lannic,2 now half submerged, were associated with vase
supports decorated with punctured patterns in late Chassey style. But
at the feet of the orthostats were little stone cists containing cremated
bones almost certainly human; these must be compared to the
cremations in pits within British “henge monuments” (p. 325). So, too,
alignments of huge upright stones, one of which runs across one of the
long barrows described on p. 306, might be Armorican equivalents
of the English cursus which too are associated with long barrows.

Most tombs have been violated in Roman times and further dis-
turbed in the nineteenth century, so that the grave goods do not
contribute as much help as might be expected to unravelling the com-
ponents of the megalithic complex and establishing the sequence of
events. Tombs of most types contain Beaker ware, proving that the
Paris galleries had arrived and the local variants been elaborated
during the Beaker phase. But the number and variety of the beakers
prove that this period was a long one. Z. le Rouzic3 and Jacquetta
Hawkes4 assign to a pre-Beaker phase the corbelled passage graves
of Morbihan and Jersey; they certainly contain no Beaker ware. That
some megaliths are really pre-Beaker is established by the succession
of burials in the passage grave (one wall of which was formed of natural
rock) at Conguel,5 Quiberon. There the later interments only were
accompanied by beakers, the earlier by vases bearing channelled
semicircle patterns as in Portugal and South France (Fig. 146, 2).
This fabric is found in other tombs too, and in the fortified settlement
at Croh Colie.6 It links the Pyrenees or Portugal with the Beacharra
culture in Scotland.

Chassey pottery, chiefly in the form of vase-supports, is represented
in many tombs on the Mainland and in Jersey (Fig. 142). In that

1 Pecquart et le Rouzic, Corpus des signes gravis, Paris, 1927; Prehistoire, VI (i938)*

1-48

2

3

4
s
«

Z. le Rouzic, Les Cromlechs de Er Lannic (Vannes, 1930).

L’Anthr., XLIII, 233-5; XLIV, 490-2, so Breuil, Prehistoire, VI, 47.
CISPP. (Oslo, 1936); Archceol. Channel Islands, II, 90, 248.

BSA. (Paris, 1892), 41.

L’Anthr., XLIV (1934), 496, fig. 9, numbers 8, and 12-16.

317

[Prometheus]

 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

island it was found below the Beaker layer in the stratified settlement
at le Pinnacle.1 It was presumably introduced by land from Central
France, and the first connections with Grand Pressigny were probably
established at the same time. Neither Chassey ware nor Grand Pressigny
flint reach Guernsey.

The Beaker-folk seem to have come by sea, like the first megalith-
builders from Portugal; they reached even Guernsey, but on land have
left only one grave between the Garonne and the Loire, and that not
far from the coast.2 Besides the classic rouletted style, cord ornament
is common on Breton beakers, while specifically South French variants
are missing. Wrist-guards3 are represented by a gold strip from Mane
Lud, like the South French ones, and a few doubtful stone specimens
which may really be whetstones. Two West European daggers have
been found in Brittany4 and one on Guernsey.5

From the Paris basin came the SOM gallery grave, the porthole
slab, carvings of a funerary goddess, characteristic splay-footed vases6
and arc-pendants.7 Finally, from the North came an amber bead and
a boat axe.8 But "collared flasks’’9 may be local SOM pots rather than
First Northern vessels.

The culture which blended all these foreign elements preserved a
rigidly neolithic aspect in Morbihan. Axes with pointed butts were
made of fibrolith and greenstone. Large, thin and superbly polished
specimens, obviously ceremonial and perhaps late,10 are surprisingly
common and were exported to Portugal and England. Celts with a
knob at the butt end found stray in Morbihan seem to copy Egyptian
adzes,11 while double-axes of stone12 imitated the Minoan metal form or
the "ingot axes’’ from Vogtland.13 For arrows, transverse and tanged-
and-barbed heads were preferred; leaf-shaped forms are exceptional.14
In addition to the foreign pottery absorbed, carinated bowls adorned

1 CISPP. (London, 1932), 140; Hawkes, Channel Islands, 7, 162.

*   In a “small dolmen'1 near Trizay, Charente Inferieure, with, a West European
dagger, tanged-and-barbed arrow-heads and gold ribbon; BSPF., XXXVIII (1941), 45;
cf. L’Anthr., LVIII, 26.

3   L’Anthr,, XLIV, fig. 19, u; Rev. Arch. (1883), pi. XIV.

*   Inst. Arch., AR. VI (1950), 49.

6   V. C. C. Collum, “Re-excavation of Delius”, Trans. Soc. Guernesiaise (1933).

*   Kendrick, Axe Age, 34.

7   Jersey, Kendrick, Channel Islands, 94.

8   L’Anthr., XLIV, 504, figs. 14, 5 and 15.

9   From an angled passage grave at Lann Blaen (Morb.) and a SOM gallery at Trdgastel
(Cotes du Nord); BSPF., XLIII (1946), 306.

10   Some have expanded blades imitating copper axes, Am. Anthr., XXXII, 87.

11   Petrie, Tools and Weapons, Z., pi. XVII.

12   L’Anthr., XLIV, figs 14, 11 and 16, 1; Ant. /., VII, 17.

13   Copper double-axes with a hole too small to take a shaft occur in Central France,
Switzerland, and Southern Germany, ZfE., XXXVII, 525; Childe, Danube, 177, 193;
BSA., XXXVII, 152-6.

14   L’Anthr., XLIV, 500.

3*8
 MEGALITH BUILDERS IN ATLANTIC EUROPE

with pairs of vertical ribs are a distinctively Breton variant on the
West European tradition, replaced in Jersey by similar shapes decor-
ated with horizontal lines and punctuations.

As charms were worn rather simple beads of talc, callais, rock-
crystal, or gold, axe-amulets and bracelets of hammered gold. The
callais and gold may have been obtained locally, but Grand Pressigny
flint was certainly imported. Unless the Portuguese and South French
callais be of Armorican origin, the peninsula’s exports must have been
immaterial goods. Whatever they were, they were employed to obtain
magical rather than practical materials. The whole society was so
obsessed with funerary cult that material advancement was neglected.

The chronological criteria applicable to more materialistic societies
cannot then be used for dating the megalithic culture in Brittany.
Despite its neolithic exterior it may have lasted well into the Bronze
Age elsewhere. In fact, in Guernsey some megalithic tombs do contain
"incense cups" and cinerary urns of types appropriate to the mature
Bronze Age of England. In Morbihan closed megalithic chambers under
gigantic barrows at Tumiac, Mont St Michel and Mane er Hroek are
assigned to the Bronze Age by le Rouzic on typological grounds.1 But
they contained ceremonial axes of greenstone, greenstone bracelets
and beads of callais and rock-crystal that can be matched in more
normal megalithic tombs.

The Armorican Bronze Age

Throughout the Atlantic megalithic province, desire for a good burial
stimulated production of surplus wealth; the erection of gigantic
tombs and the importation of magic substances kept accumulated
wealth in circulation. But it was not used to support professional smiths
nor to purchase ores. In France, graves furnished with bronze tools
and weapons and hoards of bronzes begin in general only during the
Middle Bronze Age when Tumulus-builders from Central Europe spread
along the Massif Central. Only in Armorica is there a group of graves2
richly furnished with weapons of Early Bronze Age type.

The tombs in question are closed chambers of dry masonry, some-
times roofed by corbelling and always surmounted by a cairn. The dead
were buried in them, generally but not always after cremation, on
wooden planks (remains of coffins ?), with arms and ornaments. The
armament consisted typically of one or two flat or hammer-flanged

1   L’Anthr., XLIII, 251-3; Forde, Am. Anthr., XXXII, 76-9, notes that the supports
are sculptured like those of normal collective tombs.

2   L’Anthr., XI, 159; XLIV, 511; LV, 425-43; Bui. Soc. Arch. FinisUre, XXXIV (1907),
125; Ant. J., VII, 18; Les Tresors arcMologiques de VArmorique occidentale.

319
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

axes, several daggers and superb arrow-heads with squared barbs and
tangs. The daggers are either round-heeled and strengthened with a
midrib or triangular with grooves parallel to the edge and sometimes
a rudimentary tang. In eight cases the wooden hilts
(or scabbards) had been adorned with tiny gold nails
forming a pointille pattern. Ornaments include a
ring-head pin1 and some spiral rings of silver, beads
of amber, and one segmented fayence bead.2 Pottery
is represented by biconical urns with two to four
handles joining rim and shoulder (Fig. 149).

Evidently these graves belong to rich and war-
like chiefs. They are concentrated3 in the north
and interior of the peninsula and in general avoid
the principal megalithic centres, where the old family vaults were
presumably still in use. The Bronze Age war-lords can therefore
hardly be descendants of the old megalithic chiefs or Beaker-folk, and
owe nothing of their equipment to these. Their silver probably came
from Almeria or Sardinia. The ring-head pin is a Central European
type. The grooved daggers seem related most closely to those of the
Saale-Warta culture (p. 200). But the chief source of metal and the
dominant inspiration in metal-work must have been in the British
Isles, where for instance gold-studded dagger hilts also occur. Relations
with Britain were indeed so close that for a while Armorica and Wessex
became a continuous cultural province.

Piggott4 explained this continuity by an invasion of Southern
England from Brittany. Cagne and Giot5 would reverse the process
or postulate parallel occupations of both regions by seafarers, coming
like the Vikings from farther North. Actually the last-named view
is the most likely and the Saale-Warta area the ultimate starting-point.
To link the Armorican with the West German Tumulus culture,
Hawkes6 can cite only two isolated "Bronze Age" barrows between
the Rhine and the Atlantic.7 Relations with the Saale-Warta culture,
on the contrary, are clear but direct. While these give a limiting date

1   Bui. Soc. Arch. Fin., XXXIV.

2   From the tholos of Parc Guerin which had been converted into a single grave of
Bronze Age type, L'Anihr., LV (1952), 427.

3   See maps in PPS., IV (1938), 65, and L'Anihr., LV, 428.

4   PPS., IV (1938), 64 ff.

6   L'Anihr., LV (1952), 442-3.

8 Foundations, 312-14.

7   Apart from these barrow graves in Allier and Dordogne (Dechelette, II, 142, 147),
the poor non-megalithic cists in Vienne, Charente, and Loz&re (de Mortillet, Origine du
culte des marts (Paris, 1921), 79 f.) might be “Bronze Age" though only one contained
any metal. East of the Sa6ne, of course, there are Early Bronze Age graves, related to
the Swiss though several contained polished flint or greenstone axes (Dechelette, II,
136 ff.).

Fig. 149.

Breton Bronze Age
vase.

320
 MEGALITH BUILDERS IN ATLANTIC EUROPE

for the rise of the Armorican Bronze Culture, its strict parallelism with
the Wessex culture equates it with Early Bronze Age 2—Danubian
IVb—which, judging by the fayence beads, should last down to 1400
b.c. The conquering aristocrats may have freed the local population
from excessive devotion to megalithic rites, but the metal industry
that flourished under their patronage failed to develop. The leaders
sailed away or were absorbed. No graves in Brittany are furnished with
types of my period V, and it is not till the Late Bronze Age—or perhaps
even Iron Age I—that large hoards reveal the inclusion of Brittany
in a commercial system guaranteeing regular supplies of metal gear.

x

321
 CHAPTER XVIII

THE BRITISH ISLES

All routes from the South hitherto considered converge on Britain.
It is the northern terminus of the “megalithic” seaway along the
Atlantic coasts from Portugal; the land route across France is con-
tinued beyond the Channel by the South Downs; the Danube thorough-
fare and the wide corridor formed by the North European plain con-
verge on the North Sea coasts to be continued in Kent and East Anglia.
And the British Isles offers to voyagers, migrants, and prospectors
inducements to settlement—downs and moors swept bare of trees,
excellent flint, copper, and gold, and above all tin. But islands they were
already in neolithic times. Would-be colonists embarking in frail craft
must discard unessential equipment and relax the rigid bonds of tribal
custom. Any culture brought to Britain must be insularized by the
very conditions of transportation. Many streams contributed to the
formation of British culture, but the blending of components already
insularized inevitably yielded a highly individualized resultant.

Nor is Britain a unity. The Highland Zone of mountains and ancient
rocks to the West and North is contrasted with a “Lowland Zone” of
more recent formation in the South-East.1 And beyond the Highland
Zone lies Ireland. It is the Highland Zone with Ireland that yields tin,
copper, and gold. But the megalithic route alone leads thither directly.
Cultures and peoples, desiring “short sea crossings”, must land in the
Lowlands and reach the Highland Zone only after crossing them and
absorbing their already insular cultures.

Cultures arriving from the Continent often preserve their ancestors'
lineaments recognizably in the Lowland Zone; in the Highlands they
assume a mask of stubborn insularity.

Great Britain and Ireland were relatively well populated with meso-
lithic hunters and fishers. But a neolithic culture2 of distinctive Western
type was first introduced by peasants who crossed to Southern England
from North France or Belgium and did not mingle with the pre-existing
food-gatherers. In Sussex the latter occupied the greensands, the
neolithic peasants colonized the chalk,3 The neolithic farmers owed

1   Fox, The Personality of Britain (Cardiff, 1938).

2   For Neolithic Britain see Piggott, The Neolithic Cultures of the British Isles (1954),

unless other reference is given. But on relations with Northern Europe see now PPS.,
XXI (1955), 96-101.   3 Clark, Mesolithic Britain, 90.

322
 THE BRITISH ISLES

hardly an item in their equipment to their mesolithic forerunners and
competitors.

Windmill Hill Culture

The oldest neolithic culture is best known from a series of hilltop
encampments strung out all along the downs and uplands of Southern
England from Eastern Sussex at least to Devon and probably to
Cornwall. The classic site where this culture was first really defined'—
as recently as 1925!—Windmill Hill, near Avebury, Wilts, must serve
hereafter as the patent station. The hilltops are girt with a system of
three or four flat-bottomed ditches, interrupted at frequent intervals
by causeways, as in Michelsberg camps, and supplemented by palisades.
The areas thus enclosed are often small: the diameters of the inner
ring lie between 250 ft. at Windmill Hill and 400 ft. at the Trundle,
though there is room for settlement beyond it, and Maiden Castle
covered 12 acres. It is not yet clear how far the “camps" should be
regarded as permanent villages. Piggott regards them rather as en-
closures where cattle were rounded up in the autumn. No houses have
been identified inside them, but in Devon, Wales, and Ireland a few
isolated neolithic houses are known—most rectangular in plan.1

The camps’ occupants lived principally by breeding cattle—of a
robust breed, perhaps a cross between imported short-horns and native
oxen of Bos primigenius stock. But they kept a few sheep, goats, and
pigs, and cultivated crops—principally wheat (emmer with a small
proportion of one-corn), but also a little barley.2 And naturally they
hunted deer and collected nuts and shell-fish. The huntsman used leaf-
shaped arrow-heads, Fig. 150, 3. Axes were made of flint where this

1   23

Fig. 150. 1, lop-sided, 2, Tanged-and-barbed, 3, leaf-shaped, and arrow-heads

from Britain (£).

1 Piggot, op. cit.; cf. PRIA., LVI (1956), 300-6, 447-7; Arch. CambCII, (1953), 24-9.
a Jessen and Helbaek, Det hong, danske Videns. Selskdb, Biol. Skrifter, III, 2; PPS.,
XVIII, 194-200.

323
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

material is abundant and then include archaic "picks” as well as
polished implements. Elsewhere, in Devon for instance, polished celts
of fine-grained stone competed with flint axes. In Southern England
and Norfolk flint was systematically mined by specialized groups of
highly skilled miners, who must have lived largely by exporting the
products of their industry. But while hint-mining began early in
Neolithic times, it flourished more in the subsequent Beaker period.
And in Norfolk and even Wiltshire "Peterborough folk” (p. 331, below)

were associated with its exploitation. A textile industry is not clearly
attested but flint scrapers and bunched combs of antler emphasize
the importance of leather-dressing.

The earliest Windmill Hill vases (Fig. 151) are leathery round-
bottomed pots with simple rims and sometimes vertically pierced lugs.
Thickening of the rims by pressing down or rolling over the wet clay
is thought by Piggott to mark a later phase in Southern England and
is more prominent in the Highland Zone. To an equally late phase
should belong incised and channelled decoration and shallow flutings
produced by drawing the finger-tips over the moist clay. Trumpet
lugs, confined to Dorset and Devon, denote specially close relations
with Brittany (p. 306).

Fig. 151. Windmill Hill pot-forms. After Piggott.

324
 THE BRITISH ISLES

A few figurines and phalli, carved in chalk so rudely as to be almost
dubious, are all that survives of ritual paraphernalia. Windmill Hill
ideology found more durable expression in funerary monuments. Most
authorities believe that Windmill Hill farmers or their "chiefs” were
buried under “unchambered long barrows”. These are pear-shaped
mounds reaching the extravagant length of 300 feet though the inter-
ments occupy only a small space near the wide end. The corpses, from
one to twenty-five in number, had been interred disarticulated or
cremated on chalk platforms or in crematorium-trenches. In two cases
a timber revetment at the wide end looks like an attempt to reproduce
the forecourt of the chambered long barrows of Highland Britain
(p. 326). So it has been suggested that unchambered long barrows are
just substitutes for the megalithic tombs of the Atlantic coasts in
stoneless regions. However, the extravagantly long mounds seem alien
to the general megalithic tradition while the plans and the arrangement
of the interments within them find surprisingly close parallels in the
long dolmens and Kuyavish graves of the German and West Polish
tracts of the North European plain of which Lowland England is just
the westernmost section.

If such monumental sepulchres were reserved to families of special
rank or sanctity, commoners perhaps were buried, after cremation,
in pits, arranged in a ring in a cemetery surrounded by a penannular
bank and internal ditch. For a few of these so-called "class I henges”
have yielded pure Windmill Hill relics though most contain also
“Secondary Neolithic” types.1 But even these henges may not have
been primarily constructed as cemeteries and to the same periods
belong certain non-funerary but ceremonial monuments, traditionally
known as "cursus”,2 enclosures varying from one to six miles in length
and defined by banks and ditches. Association with long barrows
justifies their attribution to the Windmill Hill culture.

No causewayed camps have been identified north of the Thames.
But judging from pottery finds and long barrows, Windmill Hill
farmers colonized East Anglia and the Yorkshire Wolds and spread
over Northern England and Eastern Scotland as far as the Moray
Firth. In the Highland Zone their culture is known only from mega-
lithic tombs.

Megalithic Tombs in Britain

Apostles of the megalithic faith presumably arrived by the Atlantic
seaway; for the tombs they should have introduced fan out from land-

1   Atkinson et ah, Excavations at Dorchester, Oxon. (Oxford, 1951).

2   Atkinson in Antiquity, XXIX (1955), 4-10.

325

[Prometheus]

 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

falls on the west coasts and round the Irish Sea. More or less close
parallels can be found in Western Europe to the plans of these tombs,
but their furniture and the long cairns that cover them seem distinc-
tively British. So in Britain the megalith-builders do not appear so
much as fresh contingents of neolithic farmers as a spiritual aristo-
cracy who may have led Windmill Hill farmers to the colonization of
the rugged coasts of Scotland and Ulster and the adjacent islands.
Peculiarities of sepulchral architecture allow of the recognition of at
least three groups of missionaries in Great Britain.

The Bristol Channel would have been the entry for the designers of
the Cotswold-Severn tombs. All are covered by long cairns with a
cuspidal, rather than semicircular, forecourt. Typologically the oldest
chambers are long galleries with one or more pairs of transepts or
lateral cells opening off them and roofed by corbelling. Cairns, termin-
ating in a dummy portal in the wide end but with small chambers
opening on to their sides, twice through porthole slabs, should be later
degenerations. Tombs of this family occur on both sides of the Bristol
Channel and spread across the Cotswolds to the chalk downs of North
Wiltshire and Berkshire. The finest of them all was built under a
typically English long barrow at West Kennet near Avebury and
Windmill Hill, and the first interments were accompanied by Windmill
Hill vases though the tomb remained open till Beaker and Peterborough
wares had come into fashion.

Segmented cists characterize the Clyde-Carlingford group of tombs
that spread inland from these sea-inlets in South-West Scotland and
Northern Ireland but occur also in Man, in Wales, and on the limestone
plateau of Derbyshire. Two tombs of this group—in Man and Stafford-
shire—were entered through porthole slabs. The tombs contain up to
sixteen corpses, normally inhumed but occasionally cremated. In
addition to classical Windmill Hill pottery and arrow-heads, the
grave goods comprise vases of Beacharra ware, decorated with semi-
circles arranged in panels and executed by channelling or cord-
impression as at Conguel in Brittany (Fig. 146, 2), but also types to
be classed as “Secondary Neolithic”; Beakers accompanied the latest
interments in three cases. The sepulchral architecture of the tombs
and the semicircular forecourts on to which they open (Fig. no), but
not the long cairns that cover them, seem to be inspired by Pyrenasic
or even Sardinian traditions. Beacharra ware too might have been
introduced from the same quarter, but since its decorative technique
was used also in the non-megalithic province of Southern England,
only the magic semicircle motive need be regarded as a fresh contribu-
tion from the south-west.

326
 THE BRITISH ISLES

Tombs of the Pentland group on the treeless moors and sandy coasts
of North Scotland and the adjacent archipelagoes are formally passage
graves. But some are covered by extravagantly long cairns with “horns”
framing semicircular forecourts at both ends and the corbelled chambers
are normally subdivided into at least three segments by paired jambs
projecting from the side walls (Fig. 152). In the stalled cairns of Orkney

Fig. 152. Passage grave in horned cairn, 240 ft. long, Yarrows, Caithness.

a multiplication of the same device divided a long corbelled gallery
into six to twelve benched stalls (Fig. 153). Round or oval cairns in
Orkney, too, cover elongated corbelled chambers with three or more

Fig. 153. Long stalled cairn, Midhowe, Rousay.

small cells opening off them. In Pentland tombs, too, Beakers accom-
pany only the last interments. The older grave goods include leaf-
shaped arrow-heads, developed Windmill Hill ware, a single vase
decorated in Beacharra style, and others ornamented with stab-and-
drag patterns best represented at Unstan, Orkney, but also Secondary

327
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Neolithic types. Here, too, cases of cremation have been reported, but
inhumation was the normal practice.

Judging from the dispersal of the tombs, each, if it were a communal
ossuary, might correspond to a single homestead. But such a unit and
the number of burials would be too small to provide the manpower
for the erection of such monuments. They should rather be, like un-
chambered long barrows, the family vaults of the leaders of small
local groups. These remained simple farmers. The multitude of bones
of calves, sheep, and game animals—including horses even in the
Cotswolds1—imply an economy based primarily on stock-breeding and
hunting. But barley (not, however, wheat) was demonstrably culti-
vated in Orkney and one-corn wheat in Ulster.2 Metal is totally absent
from the grave goods. A few beads of soft stone can be paralleled in
the causewayed camps of Southern England. The only imports are
products of axe-factories not far away. Chronologically these mega-
lithic tombs had demonstrably been built before the arrival in the
province of Beaker-folk and no fresh ones were built thereafter. These
round-headed invaders replaced the megalithic aristocracy. If, then,
the latter came from the Armorican or Iberian peninsulas, they must
have set out before the rise of Beaker-folk there. On the other hand,
the secondary neolithic types, so prominent in the Clyde-Carlingford
and Pentland tombs, may be little, if at all, older than the Beaker
invasion of Southern England; some indeed occur in graves of Early
Bronze Age II.

On Ireland a direct impact of megalithic culture from the south-west
can be detected only after the island had been colonized from Britain
by neolithic farmers of the Clyde-Carlingford and other groups, and
hardly before bands of Beaker-folk had established themselves in
Limerick and Sligo. The recognizable result of that impact was the
erection of passage graves under round cairns that constitute the sole
monuments of a Boyne culture.

The standard and most widespread type of Boyne tomb is cruciform
in plan—a corbelled chamber entered through a long passage with
three cells grouped symmetrically round the remaining sides. Such
tombs, generally located on conspicuous heights, form scattered
cemeteries, notably on Carrowkeel and other limestone mountains
in Sligo, along the Boyne, and on the Lough Crew hills. The stones
walling the tomb and supporting the cairn are often adorned with
elaborate incised or pecked patterns, including stylized boats, spirals,
and distorted conventionalizations of the funerary goddess of Los

1   Crawford, Long Barrows of the Cotswolds (Gloucester, 1925), 26; AntJ., XV, 435.
a Jessen and Helbaek, see p. 323, n. 2.

328
 THE BRITISH ISLES

MiUares and Palmella. Most tombs had been plundered. In the finest,
large stone basins alone survive of the original furniture. At Carrowkeel,
cremated bones, resting on stone slabs but originally enclosed in hide
bags fastened with skewer pins of bone or antler, should represent
primary interments while cremations in food-vessels may be intrusive.
Of the furniture survive stone balls, V-perforated buttons and beads,
including hammer beads, of hard stone, small scraps of ill-fired pottery,
but not a scrap of metal.

It is assumed that these magnificent sepulchres were built for aristo-
cratic lineages. A few decorated tombs in Anglesey and Antrim indicate
an extension of their sway to the coasts of Wales and the shores of
the North Channel. A spread thence may be denoted by some simpler
tombs in Galloway and round the Moray Firth. Most authorities agree
that the founders of the Boyne culture came by sea from Portugal and
—with less unanimity—that they started after, rather than before,
the Beaker phase there.1 In their wake should have come prospectors
and metallurgists who initiated the exploitation of Irish copper and
gold and introduced Hispanic types and techniques. In Britain their
products—decorated axes and basket-shaped gold earrings—were
purchased first by Beaker-folk, while the most significant British
parallels to the furniture of the Boyne tombs are hammer-beads from
Wessex graves of the succeeding period, but British B Beaker sherds
were found in an atypical Boyne tomb at Moytirra, Sligo. Such are the
rather slender grounds for believing that the Boyne culture began as
early as the Beaker period of England. Raftery has found evidence
that at least one decorated tomb at Lough Crew was built as late as
Iron Age II!

The Earliest Bronze Age and Secondary Neolithic Phase

The Bronze Age of the British Isles is traditionally considered to begin
with the arrival in England and Eastern Scotland of bands of round-
headed invaders who buried their dead individually in single graves,
generally under round barrows and accompanied by some kind of
Beaker. Variations of the latter and of the associated grave goods
allow us to distinguish three or even five main groups of invaders. The
earliest arrivals used Bi Beakers, decorated with simple zones of
rouletted patterns and preserving the profile of Pan-European beakers.
They used West European daggers, tanged-and-barbed arrow-heads

1 The. sole probable Hispanic import found in a Boyne tomb is matched in a Spanish
sepulchral cave, JSEA. (1929), pi. VII, 11-12; Rev. Guim. (1948), 12.

329
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Fig. 154.
Gold earring

and stone wrist-guards, as on the Continent, and wore as ornaments
basket-shaped earrings (Fig. 154) and sun discs bearing a cruciform
pattern of gold.1 B3 Beakers, of the same shape but decorated with
a spiral cord impression, have close analogies in
Western Europe (p.224) and the Rhineland, and may
denote a distinct invasion from the latter quarter
unless they spread from Britain.2 A second major
group of invaders, coming this time from Holland
and landing on the coasts of Northern England and
Scotland, introduced the same arrow-heads and
wrist-guards, but coarser and more angular Beakers,
labelled C. But perhaps the most prominent group
of Beaker-folk are characterized by A Beakers, gen-
erally decorated with metopic patterns and in profile more like corded
than bell-beakers. These vases have no Continental counterparts and
are associated with stone battle-axes and flint, or rarely round-heeled
bronze daggers. So the A-Beaker culture is believed to be due to a
local fusion of intrusive North European Battle-axe with established
C—and perhaps also B—Beaker traditions.

From their landing-places on the south and east coasts Beaker-folk
must have spread rapidly across Britain and even sent out contingents
to Ireland.3 The latter are just as likely as the Boyne megalith-builders
to have organized the exploitation and export of Irish copper and gold,
but must have been quickly absorbed in the native populations; for
they are scarcely represented in the funerary record in which in Britain
the Beaker-folk figure so conspicuously. But even in Britain Beaker-
folk must have formed a small ruling class, or a succession of ruling
classes, among the already heterogeneous Neolithic population,
replacing the “Megalithic aristocracy”. Their advent accelerated a
general trend towards pastoralism and promoted the cultivation of
barley in preference to wheat.4 But no pure Beaker settlements are
known; Beaker pottery is always mixed with Late Neolithic pottery
and flints whether in secondary occupation levels of South English
causewayed camps, in coastal encampments in the Highland zone, or
in hut-villages in Western Ireland.5

The surplus they appropriated enabled them to become the first

1   Childe, PCBI., 92-4; add Arch. Aeliana (1936), 210, and Oxoniensia, XIII (1948),
1-9; the earrings are associated with B3 rather than Br beakers.

2   Childe, Act. y Mem., XXI (1946), 196; Piggott, L’Anthr., LVIII, 6; Fox, Arch.,
LXXXIX (1943), 100-4.

3   To Co. Limerick from the Bristol Channel {PRIA., XLVIII (1942), 260-9); LTV.
(1951), 56-9, 70-2; to Ulster from Southern Scotland (UJA., II, 264; III, 79).

4   PPS., XVIII, 204.

8 PRIA., LVI (1954), 343- 379; PPS., XVII, 53.

330
 THE BRITISH ISLES

purchasers of metal gear in Britain. But metal is found in only 5 per
cent of the known Beaker graves, and their bronze axes came from
Ireland while the round-heeled daggers should be of Central European
manufacture. In addition to the metal trade, Beaker-folk may have
organized the distribution of axes from flint-mines and from factories
at Langdale in the Lake District, Penmaenmawr in North-West Wales,
and Tievebulliagh in Antrim,1 and elsewhere; these factory products
were distributed all over England and Scotland, but always turn up
in a Secondary Neolithic context.

By displacing the spiritual aristocracy, the invaders liberated
farmers and herdsmen in Britain—but not in Ireland—from the Mega-
lithic superstition, but they patronized native cults or gave them a
new celestial, rather than chthonic, orientation. Circles of great stones
were set up, sometimes in old class I henges or in those of the new
class II, with two entrances,2 that the Beaker-folk had begun to con-
struct. From the Presely Mountains in South-West Wales huge blocks
of spotted dolerite (Bluestone) were transported to Salisbury Plain
for erection in a Secondary Neolithic class I henge to become Stone-
henge II.3 This fantastic feat, like the construction of the huge class II
henge (diameter 1,400 feet!) at Avebury (North Wilts4), must illustrate
a degree of political unification or a sacred peace guaranteed by the
Beaker aristocracy or by the spiritual leaders of the Cotswold-Sevem
culture before them, and reflects the resources at their disposal but
produced by the neolithic farmers of the Wiltshire Downs,

The round-headed invaders did not exterminate the native neolithic
population or replace their culture by a new one, brought ready made
from the Continent. Yet, while they were establishing themselves as a
ruling class, the old Windmill Hill culture changed into, or was replaced
by, what Piggott terms “Secondary Neolithic” cultures. In all these,
animal husbandry plays a more prominent part in the subsistence
economy than even in the older “Western” Neolithic, and in sympathy
therewith ceramic technique declines. Types of mesolithic ancestry,
such as lopsided arrow-heads (Fig. 150, 1), derivatives of the petit
tranchet (cf. Fig. 3, 6-7), re-appear as if the traditions of autochthonous
hunter-fishers were being incorporated in those of neolithic societies.
Novel types—narrow flint knives with polished edges, antler mace-
heads and cushion or pestle-shaped mace-heads of stone, bone pins,
some with a lateral loop or bulb, boars'-tusk pendants—came into
use. These, though missing from primary Windmill Hill sites in Southern

1   PPS., XVII, 1951, 100-59; uja., xv, 1952,32-48.

2   Atkinson, Excavations at Dorchester, I, 84 ff.

3   Atkinson, Stonehenge (London, 1956), 63 ff.

4   Childe, PCBI., 102-4.

331
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

England, are found in long barrows in Northern England, in Clyde-
Carlingford and Pentland tombs, and in class I henges, but also alone
in single graves under round barrows or at the centre of a ring ditch.
Yet none are regular components of the Beaker culture nor of any
other assemblage outside Britain. So all may be accepted as insular
products of native genius.1

Even the new pottery styles were not introduced ready made from
the Continent. With Peterborough ware2 no assemblage of distinctive
types is exclusively associated. Three consecutive styles can now be
recognized under this head. In the earliest, Ebbsfleet, style the rather
ovoid pots have distinct necks but simple rims; they are decorated
with a row of pits below the rim supplemented at times with an incised
lattice band above the pits or vertical cord impressions. In the deriv-
ative Mortlake style the rims are thickened and the pits are supple-
mented by a lavish decoration of "maggot” imprints or the impressions
of a “comb” or a bird’s leg bone that covers the whole vase surface
(Fig. 155). Vases of the still later Fengate style are the immediate
forerunners of the Overhanging Rim Urns of the “Middle Bronze Age”.
Ebbsfleet pottery is found, alone or associated with normal Windmill
Hill ware, in two causewayed camps in Sussex, in one Cotswold-Severn
tomb, and with normal Windmill Hill pottery and arrow-heads in a
barrow on the Chilterns.3 Mortlake pottery recurs repeatedly together
with Windmill Hill, and usually also Beaker, wares in causewayed
camps, megalithic tombs and around long barrows, but always in
strata later than the primary occupational or burial deposits. Hence,
despite the really surprising similarity of Peterborough pottery to
that of the Swedish “dwelling-places” and to pit-comb ware beyond
the Baltic, no invasion from the Baltic need be postulated to explain it.
It may more economically be regarded as the product of the established
Windmill Hill farmers, now mixed with descendants of mesolithic
stocks and, in the Mortlake stage, subject to the Beaker aristocracy.

Rinyo-Clacton pottery, found in East Anglia in pits submerged
by the subsequent “Lyonesse transgression” and in henge monuments
in Wiltshire—sometimes with, never demonstrably before, Beaker
ware—does characterize conveniently a distinctive culture,4 best
known from the Orkney Islands,5 created by a tribe of sheep- and
cattle-breeders who had reached Orkney before the first Beaker-folk

1   Bone pins with lateral loops occur in a boat-axe grave in Sweden and in another in
Estonia {Fv. (1956), 196-207); all may be copies of—rare—metal Unetician pins of like
form.

2   Piggott, op. cit., 315, must be revised in the light of Isobel Smith’s researches.

3   Smith, PPS., XX (1954), 227.

4   Piggott, op. cit., 321-40.

3   Childe, Skara Brae (London, 1931); PSAS., LXXIII, 6-31 (Rinyo).

332

[Prometheus]

 THE BRITISH ISLES

arrived there. On those wind-swept islands they found ideal pasture
for their flocks and herds, but were forced to translate into stone,
dwellings and furniture elsewhere made of wood. Their huts, grouped
in hamlets of seven or eight, and several times rebuilt on the old site,
were some 15 ft. square. On either side of the central hearth were

Fig. 155. Peterborough bowl from Thames (£), and sherds from West Kennet
Long Barrow. By permission of Trustees of British Museum.

fixed beds framed with stone slabs on the edge and covered with
canopies of hide. A dresser stood against the back wall, there were
cupboards above the beds and tanks let into the floor. As clothing,
skins were worn, for the dressing of which innumerable scrapers of
flint and awls and other bone tools were made. Adzes, of polished stone,
were mounted in perforated antler sleeves. The pots, though badly
fired, were flat-bottomed and decorated with grooved or applied ribs
and knobs forming lozenges, wavy lines, and even spirals.

333
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Personal ornaments, ingeniously made entirely from local materials,
include beads of bone, cows' teeth, and walrus ivory, arc-pendants of
boars’ tusk laminae and bone pins with lateral loops.

The Rinyo-Clacton culture was an insular British creation, but
doubtless incorporates fresh Continental traditions. So Rinyo houses
are stone versions of the Horgen huts (p. 296), and antler sleeves and
arc-pendants again point to Horgen. The patterns adorning the vases
can be paralleled in late Cave pottery from Catalonia,1 in the Late
Chassey ware of Brittany, and its Wessex derivatives and in the
carvings on Boyne tombs. But in the earliest habitation level at Rinyo
“Western” Unstan pottery was still current side by side with the local
ware as if the latter had grown up out of the former. Though in Essex
Rinyo-Clacton ware is older than the Lyonesse transgression and in
Orkney than the oldest local Beaker, the similarity of its decoration
to that of Wessex incense cups has convinced Scott2 and others that
the Rinyo-Clacton culture need be no older than the Wessex culture
in Southern England, i.e. Early Bronze Age II. In any case, its tradi-
tions live on in the Encrusted and Cordoned Urns of our Middle and
Late Bronze Ages.

The Wessex Culture and International Trade

If the Beaker culture represent the first phase of our Early Bronze
Age (E.B.A.I), that phase ended with the emergence of a new warrior
aristocracy in Wessex and Cornwall and of more isolated warrior
chieftains in East Anglia, Yorkshire, and Scotland, known exclusively
from burials under elaborate barrows. The Wessex chieftains3 dominated
the chalk downs from Sussex to Dorset, but established outposts on
both sides of the Bristol Channel. Their bones or ashes were buried,
sometimes in coffins hollowed out of a tree-trunk,4 with extravagantly
rich furniture—handled cups of gold, amber or shale, grooved triangular
or, later,5 ogival daggers (some with gold-studded hilts or amber
pommels), tanged spear-heads (Fig. 156, 2), flat or low-flanged axes,
but also superb flint arrow-heads tanged and barbed in the Breton
manner, arrow-shaft straighteners, and stone battle-axes (derivable
from the A Beaker type, but absurdly like the Northern Middle Neo-
lithic type of Fig. 95, 4). Their ladies wore gold-bound discs and
crescentic necklaces with pattern-bored spacers of amber, halberd

1   PSAS., LXIII (1929), 273.

2   PSAS., LXXXII (1950), 44 ft.

3   Piggott, PPS., IV (1938). 52-106; cf. ibid., 107-21; Inst. Arch. AR., X, 107-21.

4   PPS., XV (1949), 101-6.

6 Ap Simon, Inst. Arch. AR., X (1954), 107-10.

334
 THE BRITISH ISLES

pendants of amber, gold, and bronze, double-axe, hammer and other
beads of jet and amber and of fayence imported from the Mediterranean.

The vases distinctive of the Wessex graves (domestic pottery is
unknown) are “incense cups” decorated with punctured ribbons or
knobs admittedly inspired by the Late Chassey tradition of Brittany,
but contemporary Cinerary Urns reflect the Secondary Neolithic

2   3

Fig. 156. Evolution of a socketed spear-head in Britain after Greenwell:
1, Hintelsham, Suffolk; 2, Snowshill, Glos.; 3, Arreton Down, I. o W. (•£).

traditions of the subject population. Though they are not found in the
aristocratic Bronze Age barrows there, the Armorican parallels to
Wessex funerary pottery are the strongest arguments for regarding
the Wessex chiefs as immigrants from Brittany (p. 320); the rest of
their equipment cannot be derived thence, but, in so far as it is not
of British origin, is based on Unetician (Saale-Warta) models.1 If the
Wessex rulers be not just aggrandized A-Beaker-Battle-axe folk, they
are most likely to have come immediately from the Saale valley.

Wherever the chiefs themselves came from, their wealth was prim-

1   For instance, the earlier Wessex daggers seem derivable from the Elbe-Oder type;
the halberd pendants reproduce the Saale-Warta bronze-shafted type.

335
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

arily based on the produce of flocks and herds grazed on the chalk
downs. But it was greatly augmented by the profits of trade. For the
chieftains controlled trade in Irish gold and copper and Cornish tin
with the Baltic, Central Europe, and even the Aegean. In return they
secured lumps of amber and late Unetician pins like Fig. 71, 6, 8, and 9.
Their wealth enabled them to enlist the services of highly skilled
craftsmen who devised original British products. Smiths, who had
learned core-casting in Bohemia, developed for instance a distinctively
British type of socketed spear-heads (Fig. 156). Jewellers translated
Highland crescentic necklaces into amber and bound with Irish gold
amber discs. Such products found a market even in the civilized iEgean;
the amber disc from Knossos (p. 33) and the necklaces from Mycenae
and Kakovatos (p. 80) must rank as “made in England”. In return,
the Wessex chieftains were of course given segmented fayence beads,
(Fig. 157), trinkets suitable for barbarians. But surely they acquired

Fig. 157. Segmented fayence beads, Wilts (£). By permission of the Trustees
of the British Museum.

more enticing rewards. A dagger, carved on a trilithon in Stonehenge
III, may represent an imported Mycenaean dirk. The hilt of an actual
imported Mycenaean L.H.IIIb sword (like Fig. 15, 1) was in fact
recovered from a barrow at Pelynt near the south coast of Cornwall
though not from a typical Wessex grave1.

At the same time the Wessex chieftains devoted part of their wealth
to sanctifying their power by transforming and enriching the grandest
sanctuary of their predecessors. Stonehenge IIP combines a new
arrangement of the holy Bluestones with the trilithon horseshoe and
circle of sarsen blocks, dragged some twenty-five miles from Marl-
borough Downs; the well-dressed uprights are consecrated and dated
by carved representations of the axes found in Wessex graves and of a
dagger, possibly imported from Greece.

Meanwhile in the Highland Zone of Britain the absorption of the
Beaker aristocracy is symbolized by the gradual replacement of their
lordly drinking-cups by humble Food Vessels as the appropriate
funerary vessels. For these can be derived from Secondary Neolithic
vases though sometimes hybridized with Beaker or Battle-axe types.
At the same time individual interment finally replaces collective burial
in megalithic tombs. But the single graves are often grouped in little

1   Childe, PPS., XVII (1951), 95.

336

2 Atkinson, Stonehenge, 68-77.
 THE BRITISH ISLES

cemeteries, as in class I henges, and inhumation slowly gives place to
cremation, a change that once more documents a revival of Neolithic
rites and ideas. Food Vessels—of the Yorkshire vase form with a
sharp, generally grooved shoulder (Fig. 158, 2)—were introduced into
Ireland, presumably by a fresh wave of immigrants from Great Britain.
As a result, there too collective burial gradually gave way to individual

X   2

Fig. 158. Food Vessels, Argyll and East Lothian (|): 1, Bowl; 2, Vase.

interment; in several Boyne tombs Food Vessels accompanied intrusive
secondary cremations. But in Ireland and Western Scotland1 developed
a bowl type of Food Vessel (Fig. 158, 1) as a substitute for wooden
bowls, the form and decoration of which may also be inferred from the
Pyrenaean polypod bowls like Fig. 144 and Beaker associates like
Fig. hi, 2.

The predominantly pastoral economy favoured by the Beaker-folk
was maintained by Food Vessel societies. Though the latter are less
obviously stratified than that of Wessex, industry and trade flourished
among them too. Halberds and decorated axes made in Ireland2 were

1   Childe, PCBI., 1x9-34; SBS., 8-10, 51-62, 105-18.

2   PPS., IV, 272-82; Arch., LXXXVI, 305 £E.; Childe, PCBI., 115-17.

Y   337
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

transported across North Britain for shipment to Northern Europe
without paying tribute to the chieftains of Wessex. Direct maritime
intercourse with the Atlantic coastlands as far as Portugal may be
deduced from a cylinder-headed pin, like Fig. 131, found with a
Yorkshire Food Vessel in a grave in Galway, from the exact agreement
of the cup-and-ring marks, carved on the slabs of such graves with the
petroglyphs of Galicia and Northern Portugal1 and from the distribu-
tion in Brittany and Normandy (and perhaps the imitation in Portugal,

Fig. 159. Gold lunula, Ireland. By permission of Trustees of British Museum.

p. 285) of gold lunulas like Fig. 159. For the latter, if inspired in the
last resort by gold collars worn by Egyptian nobles, are immediately
Irish translations into sheet gold of the crescentic jet necklaces,
repeatedly associated with Food vessels in Scotland,1 2 which were
copied in amber in Wessex.

Finally cremationists,3 of Secondary Neolithic stock, using as Ciner-
ary Urns derivatives of Peterborough vases, were spreading from
South-East England into the Highland Zone. They had reached Ireland

1   MacWhite, Estudios, 42-3; Sobrino Buhigas, Corpus Petroglyphorum GallacicB
(Compostella, 1945).

2   Childe, PCBI., 123-4. Note that the gold lunulas found in Northern Europe are not
of Irish manufacture.

3   Childe, PCBI., 145-59.

338
 THE BRITISH ISLES

while segmented fayence beads were still current,1 while another
party, crossing the North Sea, colonized the Low Countries.1 2 Burials
in Cinerary Urns, like the urns themselves, preserve even more clearly
than those with Food Vessels the native neolithic traditions. For they
cluster in small cemeteries or urnfields, some enclosed in a penannular
bank and ditch like a class I henge.3 They are still poorer and less
aristocratic. Nevertheless, contemporary hoards of Middle Bronze Age
II show that, though the Wessex chieftains had been expelled or
absorbed, the established bronze industry continued to flourish,
creating novel types—distinctively British spear-heads with a loop at
the base of the blade, palstaves, and rapiers, while goldsmiths devised
a variety of splendid ornaments, culminating in the superb tippet of
sheet gold richly embossed, found in a grave at Mold in Flintshire.4

The widespread diffusion of Britannico-Hibemian metal-work, and
the variety of products that reached the British Isles in exchange,
not only illustrate the leading role of these islands at the dawn of the
Continental Bronze Age and the diverse influences that fertilized
insular culture; they also provide a unique opportunity for corre-
lating several local sequences and assigning to them historical dates.
The crescentic amber necklaces from the Shaft Graves of Mycenae and
from Kalcovatos (p. 79) give a terminus ante quem not later than 1600
B.c. for the rise of the Wessex culture, though the imported segmented
fayence beads probably indicate that it lasted till 1400. Danubian and
North European chronologies can be checked against this dating.

The pins of late Unetician form from Wessex graves (p. 336) on the
one hand. Irish axes, halberds, and even a gold ornament of the bar-style
from the Unetician hoards on the other5 prove that our Early Bronze
Age 2 falls within period IV of the Danubian sequence. The Early
Bronze Age I round-heeled daggers, associated here with A Beakers,
are typologically parallel to the earliest Unetician forms and can
in fact be matched in late Bell-beaker graves in Bohemia and the
Rhineland. The earlier Bi beakers should then be contemporary with
their Central European counterparts and go back to late Danubian III.
A synchronism with Northern Neolithic Illa-b (M.N. Ill) can in fact
be established by J. J. Butler with the aid of the sun-disc mentioned
on p. 330. Northern Neolithic IV is substantially parallel to our Wessex
culture. But it is itself equivalent to Montelius’ Northern Bronze

1   Such, a bead was discovered in a secondary grave in the Mound of the Hostages at
Tara by Prof. O’Riordain in 1955.

2   Glasbergen, “Excavations in the Eight Beatitudes” (Palceohistoria, II-III), Gron-
ingen, 1954, esp. pp. 127-31; 168-70.

3   Childe, PCBI., 151-3.

4   PPSXIX (1953), 161 ff.   6 Germania, XXII (1938), 7-11.

339
 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION

Age I, though metal was locally too rare to be buried in its characteristic
Long Cist tombs. But one of the earliest Northern graves, furnished
with metal gear and so representative of Montelius’ Bronze Age Ha
at Liesbiittel in Schleswig1 contained an imported British spear-head
of the type distinctive of our Middle Bronze Age 2. In the opposite
direction a synchronism between Northern Neolithic II (E.N.C.) and
some phase of our Clyde-Carlingford (Megalithic) culture may be
deduced from the adoption of the Western semicircle motive, prom-
inent on Beacharra vases, on C funnel-beakers in Denmark and Sweden,
and the application of the Northern device of cord impression to the
decoration of some Beacharra vases.1 2

Correlations with the Iberian Peninsula are not quite so conclusive.
Segmented fayence beads no doubt prove an overlap between the
Wessex culture and the El Argar culture of South-Eastern Spain—
Spanish Bronze II. But the cylinder-headed pin found with a Food
Vessel in Ireland should belong there to Bronze I while the incense
cups from Wessex graves and associated with Cinerary Urns have
significant parallels in the incised pots and stone vessels of Los Millares
and contemporary sites. So, too, daggers with a midrib on one face only,
as at Los Millares and Alcala, have been found with Cinerary Urns
in Scotland and Southern Ireland.3 This phase of the Los Millares
culture should then on the British evidence be assigned to Bronze lb
(Los Millares II) and later than the popularity of at least Pan-European
Beakers in the Peninsula. These would have to be assigned to Bronze la
(Los Millares I as Leisner put it), which would be roughly parallel to
the Beaker period in England. Even so, the neolithic passage graves
of Portugal maybe at least as early as the Northern ones of Neolithic III.

1   Kersten, Zur alteren nordisehen Bronzezeit (Neumiinster, n.d.), 65; cf. also Broholm,
Dcmmavhs Bronzealder, I (Copenhagen, 1944), 223.

2   Childe in Corolla archtsologica in honorem C. A. Nordmann (Helsinki, 1952), 8.

3   Childe, APL., IV (1953), 182-4.

340
 CHAPTER XIX

RETROSPECT: THE PREHISTORY OF EUROPEAN SOCIETY

What meaning can be extracted from the intricate details compressed
into the foregoing pages? What patterns unify the fragmentary archae-
ological data? To clarify the issue the abstract results have been
schematized into tables and maps. These present the distribution in
time and space of cultures, assemblages of archaeological phenomena
that should reflect the distinctive behaviour patterns of human societies.

The maps at first sight present a very complicated mosaic of con-
temporary cultures. But historical reality was certainly more compli-
cated still. So many pieces of the mosaic are missing that even the
spatial pattern is blurred. Here it has been deliberately simplified
by the omission of a number of assemblages, some of which have been
mentioned in the text but most of which in 1956 are little more than
pottery styles. This bewildering diversity, though embarrassing to the
student and confusing on a map, is yet a significant feature in the
pattern of European prehistory. Across it another pattern may be
discerned. The first two maps exhibit quite clearly the gradual spread
of neolithic farmers, or at least of farming, from the south-east during
two consecutive periods of uncertain duration. (But even here there is
some doubt as to the right of “Western cultures” to a place on map II!)
Map III should suggest the groups, the complex relations between
these and the impact upon them of alien or peripheral cultures in a
period not necessarily longer than I or II, but more crowded with
archseologically recognizable events. The main cultures distinguishable
at the opening of the period are designated by letters, their boundaries
defined by solid lines. Different hatchings denote cultures that subse-
quently arose from, or were superimposed upon, the foregoing. Finally,
map IV displays the main areas that benefited from the Early Bronze
Age economy, their interrelation and their dependence on Mycenaean
Greece.

The distribution of entries on the several maps is based on the
chronological discussions included in all the preceding chapters and
summarized in the following tables. In most of the columns the actual
order of the entries, the sequence of cultures, is reasonably well-
established, though here again a reference to the text will disclose
doubts as to the order both in the extreme West and in the East.

34i