handbook to life in prehistoric europe

HANDBOOK TO LIFE

IN PREHISTORIC EUROPE

SELECTED BOOKSBY THE SAME AUTHOR

Eyewitness Archaeology(London: Dorling Kindersley; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994)

The Practical Archaeologist. How We Know What We Know about the Past.2d edition (New York: Facts On File, 1999)

Civilizations. Ten Thousand Years of Ancient History.With Clint Twist (London: BBC Worldwide Ltd., 2001)

A Peaceful Realm. The Rise and Fall of the Indus Civilization.A Peter Nevraumont Book (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2002)

Ancient Mesopotamia. New Perspectives(Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2005)

HANDBOOK TO LIFE IN

PREHISTORICEUROPE

JANE MCINTOSH

Handbook to Life in Prehistoric Europe

Copyright © 2006 by Jane McIntosh

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McIntosh, Jane.Handbook to life in prehistoric Europe / Jane McIntoshp.cm. (Handbook to life)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-8160-5779-61. History, Ancient. 2. Civilization, Ancient. 3. Antiquities, Prehistoric. 4. Archaeology—History. 5. Europe—History—To 476. I. Title. II. Series. D60.M45 2006930.1′4—dc22 2005019775

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CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS vii

LIST OF MAPS viii

LIST OF TABLES viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

INTRODUCTION xi

1 GEOGRAPHY OF ANCIENT EUROPE 1The Mediterranean 2The Mountains 5Temperate Europe 5The Atlantic Facade and the North Sea 8The Far North 9Environmental Change 10Reading 12

2 THE DEVELOPMENT OF EUROPE 15Palaeolithic Europe 16Early Postglacial Europe 24Neolithic Consolidation 39Late Neolithic 46Chalcolithic 55The Bronze Age 63The Iron Age 80After the Roman Conquest 96Reading 98

3 ECONOMY 101Agriculture 102Wild Resources 112Economic Strategies 117Reading 125

4 SETTLEMENT 127Construction 128Domestic Architecture 132Settlements 140Landscapes 158Reading 163

5 TRADE AND TRANSPORT 165Trade 166Land Transport 180Water Transport 183Reading 189

6 INDUSTRY AND CRAFTS 191Wood 192Textiles, Basketry, Nets, and Mats 195Leather and Furs 202Bone, Horn, Antler, and Ivory 204Stone 206Salt 211Metallurgy 212Ceramics 226Vitreous Materials 230Other Materials 232Reading 236

7 RELIGION 239Religious Belief and Practice 240Shrines and Sacred Places 253Reading 270

8 DEATH AND BURIAL 271Funerary Practices 272Monumental Tombs 286Reading 293

9 WARFARE 295Weapons and Armor 297Fortifications and Defenses 301Warriors 305Conflicts, Battles, and Wars 308Reading 312

10 LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND THE ARTS 315European Languages 316Writing 319Literature 320Visual Arts 321Performing Arts 325Reading 326

11 SOCIETY AND LIFE 329Social and Political Organization 330Crime and Punishment 333The Organization of Industry 333Gender 334Everyday Life 335Personal Appearance 339Food 344Health and Medicine 347Reading 349

CHRONOLOGICAL CHART 351

LIST OF MUSEUMS WITHIMPORTANT EUROPEAN MATERIAL AND OPEN-AIR MUSEUMS 358

BIBLIOGRAPHY 361

ELECTRONIC RESOURCES 373

INDEX 375

L I S T O F I L L U S T R A T I O N S

vii

Romantic view of Palaeolithic Europeans 21Mesolithic and Palaeolithic harpoon heads 27Early farming 31Neolithic polished stone axes 36An early Breton megalith 45Beaker grave goods 61Copper and bronze axes 68A Danish flint dagger 70A decorated bronze disc 72A burial from Hallstatt 88The Torrs pony-cap 91A Roman killing barbarians 96Cereal cultivation 103A scavenging dog 112Hunting wild boar 115Bronze fish hooks 117A flint sickle 121Skara Brae 130Mousa broch 139An Iron Age settlement 145A Swiss lake village 147Section through a crannog 149The Trundle Iron Age hillfort 155The Vix krater 168A stone ax in a wooden haft 170Two bronze spearheads and a palstave 172A Beaker 176A rock carving of a wagon 181Log boats 184Razors decorated with boats 188A decorated wooden bowl 195Clothing from a Danish tree-trunk coffin 198The Iceman 203

Grimes Graves 208Stone shafthole axes 210Elaborate bronze axes 215A bronze founder’s workshop 219Molds for casting bronze axes 220A gold torc 222Iron pincers and shears 224A Celtic bronze coin 226A TRB collared flask 228Glass gaming counters 231Shale buttons 233Amber ornaments 235A bronze figure of a god 244Two lurer 246Pieces from the Rynkeby cauldron 247The Ballachulish wooden figure 251The Corrymuckloch hoard 256Lindow Man 260Carnac alignments 265Plan of the Avebury area 268Reconstruction of a funeral party entering

a megalithic tomb 272A Danish tree-trunk coffin burial 279A cinerary urn 284A Danish megalithic mound 288The passage grave of Newgrange 289A French gallery grave 290Bronze swords 299A shirt of chain mail 300An attack on a fortified camp 302Rock carvings of warriors 305The Deskford carnyx 310A Neolithic carved stone ball 321

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

H A N D B O O K T O L I F E I N P R E H I S T O R I C E U R O P E

viii

A Danish pottery bowl 322A lunula 323A bronze situla 324The Basse-Yutz flagon 325A bronze arm ring 326A bronze horn 327A rich grave at Varna 330Two flint axes 331

Material from a Swiss lake village 338A mended fibula 339Bronze Age woman’s clothing 342Two fibulae 343Two bracelets 343Personal toilet equipment 344A saddle quern 345

Postglacial climate and vegetation 11

LIST OF TABLES

Political map of Europe 3Topographical map of Europe 6Changing coastlines in Europe following

the last Ice Age 25Postglacial hunter-gatherers and the spread

of farming to 4500 B.C. 30The further spread of farming to 3500 B.C. 47Neolithic monumental tombs 53

Later farming communities 56Flint mining and the spread of metallurgy 57Bronze Age trade and industry 64Bronze Age Europe 65Early Iron Age Europe 81Europe in the Early La Tène period 90Europe in the Late Iron Age 93

LIST OF MAPS

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Iam deeply indebted to the late David Clarke andEric Higgs and their still flourishing colleagues

whose inspired teaching first introduced me to Euro-pean prehistory, and to my fellow students of thosedistant days and the other scholars I have since

encountered with whom I have enjoyed many fruitfuldiscussions. I owe special thanks to Dr. Alison Sheri-dan, who very kindly made it possible for my artist,Audrey McIntosh, to draw objects from the collec-tions of the National Museums of Scotland.

To produce a handbook to life in prehistoricEurope is a daunting task: The postglacial pre-

history of Europe covers nearly 10,000 years, duringwhich time there were enormous changes andmomentous innovations, and the continent is an areaof great environmental diversity, reflected in the con-trasting lifestyles of the inhabitants of its individualregions. Antiquarians have been investigatingEurope’s remote past for hundreds of years, and ithas remained the focus of attention of armies ofarchaeologists, equipped with a constantly growingarsenal of techniques for gathering data, both byexcavation and by nondestructive means. The hugevolume of material and information that has beenrecovered and the lively interpretive debates that ithas sparked mean that a study of prehistoric Euro-pean life in just one small region or short period caneasily fill a whole book (and there are many such vol-umes). Nevertheless, there has been much that inte-grates Europe geographically and culturally, andsome features of life that changed little through theages. Europe has its own character and an overarch-ing shared story that unites its disparate components.

For most of the long span of Europe’s past it hasbeen a land without writing, without named individ-uals, and without recorded deeds. This means that itshistory is almost entirely that of the ordinary indi-vidual, the hunter-gatherer, farmer, or metallurgistrather than the king. In this, prehistoric Europe isfavored, for it focuses attention on the lives lived by

the majority rather than on the exceptional lifestylesof the privileged elite (as is so often the case inrecorded history). Evidence of the latter is not lack-ing, however, nor is material magnificence absent:The skills and expertise of prehistoric Europeanswere often employed in the production of exquisitejewelry, elaborately woven cloth, beautifully madetools, and finely wrought weapons as well as in theproduction of more mundane objects. Though thepalaces that have attracted excavators in other landsare absent, there are few monuments elsewhere inthe world to rival Europe’s massive megalithic tombsor great stone circles. And though individuals pre-serve their anonymity and many of their secrets,modern technology has made it possible to revealparts of their life history in astonishing detail: thelast meal they ate and their general diet, their geneticrelationships, where they were born, what sort ofwork they had regularly performed, the exact year inwhich they felled individual trees to build houses ortrackways, or the season in which they died.

Innovations in technology, such as remote sens-ing, examination with scanning electron micro-scopes, and DNA testing, constantly offer new scopefor obtaining data, and archaeologists are constantlyextending the boundaries of their investigations:Where once the focus was on uncovering individualburials and dwellings, now European archaeologistslook at whole landscapes; at the opposite end of thescale they also examine the micromorphology of

INTRODUCTION

I N T R O D U C T I O N

xi

individual deposits of soil; they recover microscopicclues to tool use, and painstakingly collect tiny plantand animal remains to provide information on econ-omy and environment. Chance discoveries, such asthat of the Iceman in 1991, have also played a part inadvancing knowledge of Europe’s past. Hand in handwith the accumulation of data have been changing

interpretations of those data, attempts to understandthe course of development in prehistoric Europe andpenetrate the human meaning behind the artifactsand monuments. This Handbook to Life in PrehistoricEurope is an attempt to give some account of what isknown or surmised about these objects and struc-tures and their authors.


xii

GEOGRAPHY OFANCIENT EUROPE

1

Europe is the meeting place of two contrastingenvironmental systems. On the one hand it is

the western end of the vast continent of Asia, shar-ing extreme features characteristic of large land-masses. On the other it is a peninsula, girt on threesides by seas and enjoying aspects of the moderatemaritime regime of islands. While largely part ofthe temperate zone, it runs from the fringes of thesubtropical to the beginnings of the arctic regions.Substantial mountains and ranges of hills break itinto many contrasting areas, but it also has exten-sive plains. While the topography favors the devel-opment of independent communities, the greatrivers crossing the continent provide, with theirtributaries, highways of interregional communica-tion, as do the surrounding seas. Though Europe isrich in minerals, flora, and fauna, offering comfort-able subsistence throughout its length and breadth,these resources are unevenly distributed, promotingthe need for communications, movement, andexchanges to satisfy requirements that have devel-oped since the earliest times, for shell and stone,metal ores and salt, furs and foodstuffs.

Topography, latitude, climate, and vegetationdivide Europe into a number of major zones thathave shaped the history of the continent, offeringdifferent economic opportunities to which itscolonists and inhabitants have responded in a varietyof ways at different times. Diversity has promotedindependent development in the different regionswhile proving no barrier to the creation at times ofmuch larger political entities.

THE MEDITERRANEAN

SeaThe southern part of Europe takes its form from theMediterranean, of which it is the northern edge.The small relic of the once mighty Tethys Sea, theMediterranean is saved from becoming a landlockeddead sea by the Strait of Gibraltar at its western end.Nine nautical miles wide, this narrow outlet linksthe Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean, allowing a

limited tidal influx of ocean waters, which preventthe waters of the Mediterranean from stagnating butare insufficient to disrupt its calm surface and warmregime.

The warm waters of the Mediterranean supportonly limited amounts of plankton, and its coasts fallsteeply below the water, so the sea is today relativelypoor in marine resources, though a rich catch ofmigratory tuna is available annually. Lower sea lev-els and the absence of pollution made the Mediter-ranean seas less unproductive in the past. Seafaringdeveloped early—obsidian at Franchthi cave inGreece obtained from the island of Melos showsthat seagoing boats were in use before 9000 B.C.(while seafaring was already well established else-where on the globe tens of millennia earlier, as thecolonization of Australia bears witness). At first thedistances traveled were relatively small, but shortvoyages between adjacent regions allowed the even-tual spread of ideas and commodities throughout theMediterranean lands. By the second millennium B.C.navigation in the eastern basin regularly connectedcommunities its length and breadth, from Egypt toGreece and beyond to southern Italy; in the west,the short distance across the Strait of Gibraltarproved no barrier to interaction between the peoplesof Iberia and North Africa; while in the first millen-nium B.C. regular seaborne communications linkedthe entire Mediterranean basin.

LandThe relative ease of maritime communications con-trasted with and compensated for the difficulties ofthose on land, for the Mediterranean regions ofEurope are to a great extent made up of narrowcoastal strips bordering mountains and high plateaus.In the west the arid inhospitable Meseta plateau cov-ers most of the Iberian peninsula, a region scorch-ingly hot in the dry summer and cold and wet in thewinter; the southern French coast is backed by theMassif Central and the Cevennes; the Apenninesform a mountain spine throughout the length ofItaly; across the Adriatic the Dinaric Alps stretchalmost to the sea and run into the mountains of thePindhus, Rhodope, and Balkan ranges, and in thesouth are the hills of the Peloponnese. The moun-


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tains, an ancient substrate covered by sedimentarydeposits in the Tethys Sea, were uplifted and foldedin the Tertiary period, and a number are still actively

volcanic—Etna, Vesuvius, and Stromboli, forinstance. A massive eruption that blew the center outof the Greek island of Thera around 1628 B.C.

G E O G R A P H Y O F A N C I E N T E U R O P E

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Map 1. Political map of Europe

adversely affected the climate of the whole ofEurope. Though an ever-present threat, the volca-noes have some advantages, being the source ofobsidian (volcanic glass), highly prized in antiquityfor its sharpness and attractive appearance, and creat-ing rich productive soils, those round Vesuvius beingfamous in Roman times for the quality of their vines.

Extensive areas of fertile level ground are rare inthe Mediterranean, the largest being the Po plainand the Rhône delta, and their advantages for agri-culture are offset by their tendency to flooding,making them not only marshy but also a breedingground for malaria, a longtime scourge of Mediter-ranean lands. The region is relatively poorly fur-nished with rivers, and the majority of these carrywater for only around three months of the year.Apart from the few plains and valleys, fertile groundfor agriculture was available only in small patches onthe lowlands and on the lower slopes of the moun-tains, while the uplands provided summer pasturesfor wild herbivores and domestic herds. The moun-tains also provided their share of mineral wealth: tinin parts of the Iberian peninsula, gold in the Balkanmountains, and copper in ranges spread across thebasin, as well as stone.

Climate and VegetationClimatically, the Mediterranean basin enjoys mildwinters, warmed by its sea, during which the bulk ofthe annual precipitation falls, starting in the west inOctober and driving toward the east. Most falls asrain, except on the mountains, swelling the streamsand rivers into torrents that brought flooding anderosion during some periods, but which also carriedsediments that were deposited, building up alluvialsoils in their deltas in other periods. By April therains are over and the temperature is rising, bringingsix months of arid heat, exacerbated by hot windsblowing north from the Sahara. The mitigatingeffects of the seas decrease and the effect of the con-tinental massif of Asia increases as one travels east-ward, further raising summer temperatures.

The vegetation of Mediterranean Europe isdetermined by the climate, favoring species able towithstand the long summer drought but also allow-ing the growth of frost-tender plants. The poten-

tially high productivity allowed by the high input ofsolar energy is not realized due to the restrictedavailability of water and good soils. Originally,woodlands including cork oak, chestnut, cypress,and other evergreens were widespread but humanactivity over millennia has seriously depleted them,trees being replaced by maquis and scrub. Amongthe native species, however, are vines and olive trees,which became pillars of Mediterranean agriculture.Cereal crops are sown in the autumn and harvestedin the spring to take advantage of the winter rainfalland avoid the summer heat and drought. The cli-mate also dictates the pattern of life for herd ani-mals, with winters spent in the mild conditions ofthe lowlands and summers in grassy upland pastures:This and the vegetation have favored sheep, goats,and the omnivorous and fast-growing pig as domes-tic animals, while the natural fauna also includesboar along with smaller mammals and reptiles.

External LinksSicily and the other smaller islands of the centralMediterranean divide the Mediterranean basin intotwo, while the eastern half is further subdivided byits topography. The Aegean, strewn with islands thatare linked by short sea crossings, forms a naturalunit that also includes the western portion of theAnatolia plateau. This in turn provides a bridge link-ing Europe to the vibrant world of the Near East,with which down the millennia Europe exchangedideas, commodities, innovations, and peoples, andoccasionally membership of shared political units—the Persian and Ottoman Empires, the ecumene ofclassical Greece, and the empire of Rome, forinstance. These links go back far into prehistory;elsewhere in the Mediterranean cultural exchangesbetween its northern and southern shores were rela-tively limited until historical times, with the estab-lishment of Phoenician trading outposts in Spainand North Africa.

The Aegean also leads into the Black Sea, whencethe Mediterranean world gains access to the vastexpanse of the Asian steppes and to the valleys of theDanube and other rivers leading into the heart ofEurope. Farther west, the valley of the Rhône con-nects the French riviera with central Europe and


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gives easy access to other rivers flowing into theAtlantic and North Sea, while the Aude andGaronne link the western Mediterranean basin withthe Atlantic coast of France. The Atlantic seawaysare also accessible via the Strait of Gibraltar, but ingeneral it was not until the first millennium B.C. thatMediterranean seafarers began to venture out oftheir mare nostrum—their own sea.

THE MOUNTAINS

Mediterranean Europe is sharply divided from therest of the continent by an almost continuous belt ofhigh mountains, starting in the west with theCantabrian Mountains and the Pyrenees. From herethe lower ranges of the Cevennes and the FrenchMassif Central provide a slight reduction of the bar-rier, but they soon give way to the massive bloc ofthe Alps, rising as high as 4,500 feet (1,400 meters)and in places a formidable 150 miles (240 kilome-ters) wide from north to south. The Alps run with-out a break into the Dinaric Alps, which veer sharplysouth to join with the mountain ranges of theBalkans and Greece. At the same time the moun-tains continue farther north through the lowerranges of the Bohemian Foreland, the MoravianHeights, and the Sudetes into the high mountains ofthe Carpathian range, rising to more than 2,500 feet(800 meters). The Carpathians turn southward far-ther east running into the Transylvanian Alps, whichare separated from the western edges of the Balkanmountains by the valley of the Danube. These east-ern mountains encircle the fertile Carpathian basin,one of the few extensive plains of Europe. Lowermountains and hills fringe the northern edge of themountain barrier, striking deep into Europe, fromthe Ardennes in the west through the Harz andErzgebirge Mountains to the Sudetes in the east.

Despite their formidable height and extent themountains do not present an impenetrable barriersince they are broken by many passes linkingMediterranean and temperate Europe. These wereused by traders and other travelers from timeimmemorial and are still major access routes linking

modern communities. The two major river valleysthat cut through the mountains were corridors ofimmense importance for communications: in thewest the Rhône valley and farther east the Danubevalley, which rises on the north side of the Alps incentral Europe, slicing between the Alps and theCarpathians to run through the Carpathian basinand the interior of the Balkans and thence to theBlack Sea coast.

Topography and VegetationWithin the mountains are upland valleys and widerbasins and plateaus, their areas greater in the lowerranges and among the older mountains in the east.Forests cover all but the cold high reaches of theAlps and Pyrenees, where tundra vegetation isfound; at higher elevations the trees are coniferouswhile the lower slopes share the deciduous wood-land that is the predominant natural vegetation oftemperate Europe. Valleys and plateaus offer gener-ally limited opportunities for cultivation while theforests and pastures provide grazing for domesticand wild animals. Particularly favorable environ-ments for human settlement, rich in wild plants,smaller land animals, and freshwater resources, wereoffered by lake margins during the drier periods ofEurope’s past, though the flooding brought by wet-ter conditions at times drove lake settlers away. Thecompression of environmental zones by elevation inthe mountain regions made their lower slopesattractive for settlement since it offered a diversity ofresources within a short distance as the crow flies.The mineral resources of the mountains were alsoattractive to early Europeans: Here stone and metalores, often absent from lowland regions, were to beobtained, as well as salt, which was mined from thelater second millennium B.C.

TEMPERATE EUROPE

North of the mountain barrier lie the Europeanlowlands, a large part of them consisting of the vast


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North European Plain, stretching east from theAtlantic coast (and, before Britain became an island,from southern England) until it reaches the barrier

of the Ural Mountains deep inside Russia. At theirwestern end the lowlands extend round the MassifCentral to continue south to the Pyrenees, while in


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Map 2. Topographical map of Europe

the east beyond the Carpathians they run south tothe northern shores of the Black Sea, meeting thedelta of the Danube. From there, more restrictedlowlands run northwest along the Danube: the Wal-lachian plain sandwiched between the TransylvanianAlps and the Balkan Mountains, and the mountain-encircled Carpathian basin. Smaller plains lie alongthe course of other rivers running through the lowermountains.

The steppe region on the eastern margin stretchesto the borders of China in the east and connects withthe Near East in the south. Home to nomadic pas-toralists by the second millennium B.C., the immensesteppe zone provided an influential corridor for com-munications between east, south, and west. Not onlywere ideas and innovations transferred via this corri-dor, but it also marked the route by which oftenaggressive groups pushed into Europe, on occasiondriven by population movements that originated asfar away as China.

In the north the Baltic Sea provided rich fishingfor the inhabitants of the lands along its coasts.Southern Sweden and the southern tip of Finlandform the northernmost extension of the temperatezone, sharing climate and vegetation with thenorthern coastal lands of continental Europe southof the Baltic. Numerous rivers rising in Europe’smountain spine link inland regions to the coastalareas to west, north, and south. The Danube and itstributaries, the Drava, Sava, Tisza, Morava, andothers, flow into the Black Sea, which is also thedestination of rivers farther east, the Dnestr, Bug,and Dnepr, which once shared a delta with theDanube, now drowned. The Danube rises in theAlpine Foreland not far from the source of theRhine; together they provide a route right acrossthe continent from north to south, the Rhine flow-ing north to debouch into the North Sea. To its eastthe North European Plain is traversed from themountains to the North Sea by the Weser and Elbe,and to the Baltic by the Oder, Vistula, Nieman, andDvina, linking Britain and Scandinavia with centraland eastern Europe, while to the west the Meuse,Seine, Loire, and Garonne link the interior of west-ern Europe with the Atlantic Ocean. A short over-land journey links the Seine to the Saône, whichflows into the Rhône, the main corridor betweenwestern Europe and the Mediterranean, while the

source of the Loire is also not far overland from theRhône. Another route follows the Garonne, passesthrough the Carcassonne Gap, and reaches theMediterranean via the Aude. These rivers are thehighways by which people and goods have traveledacross Europe down the millennia.

Climate, Flora, and FaunaThe climate of transalpine Europe is temperate,with mild summers and adequate to substantial rain-fall year round, but major changes occur from westto east, and north to south. In the west and north-west the moderating influence of the surroundingocean brings mild winters and relatively cool sum-mers; moving eastward, the continental climate ofthe Asian landmass is progressively felt, bringingincreasingly bitter and snowy winter conditions,lasting for many months. Winters are longer andcolder as one moves north through the region, andsummer temperatures rise as one goes south. In thesoutheast around the Black Sea and in the easternBalkans as far north as the Carpathians, latitudecombines with proximity to the warm seas of theMediterranean and Black Sea to give hot summers,short relatively mild winters, and moderate rainfall,peaking in the spring and summer. The volume ofrain across temperate Europe, brought in largely bynorthwesterly winds, decreases from northwest tosouth and east but rises with altitude, so thetransalpine regions are well watered but not so theCarpathian basin. The Carpathians mark theboundary between the mild winters of the south andthe long, cold snowy winters of central Europe.

The vegetation reflects the climatic and topo-graphic variations. The coincidence of good rainfalland adequate sunlight makes temperate Europe anexceptionally rich natural environment, with a veryhigh number of edible species. Rivers, lakes, andmarshes were a source of many edible plants as well asproviding fish and shellfish and attracting otherwildlife such as wildfowl. Most of temperate Europewas originally densely forested, with mainly decidu-ous trees such as oak, hazel, beech, lime, and elder inthe west; farther east, in central and eastern Europe,the forests were still predominantly deciduous butmixed with some coniferous species. As rainfall


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declined progressively eastward and southeastward,the natural forest became thinner, giving way tolighter woodland increasingly mixed with grassland,shading into the mixed desert and grassland of thesteppe, a region with areas of good grazing originallysupporting herds of antelope, aurochs, and wildequids, and with deep, highly fertile chernozem soils,but largely inaccessible for exploitation until thedomestication of horses and the development ofwheeled transport. The forests were home to a richfauna, including several types of deer, aurochs, boar,bear, wolves, wildfowl, and rabbits and hare, and sup-ported an abundance of other plant species. Millenniaof intensive human exploitation of the forests hasreduced their extent and diversity as trees were felledto provide fuel and timber, and cleared for agricul-tural land and settlement. In prehistory, however,transalpine Europe was a region of great naturalabundance. Forest areas cleared for agriculture pro-vided easily cultivable soils and pastureland, while fer-tile alluvial soils were available in the lower reaches ofthe rivers. A swathe of extremely fertile and easilyworked loess soils (wind-deposited sediments) run-ning across Europe from south of the Carpathianbasin to the Atlantic coast of France attracted cultiva-tion by the first farming communities in temperateEurope. Similarly attractive brown earth soils high inorganic material and nutrients supported farmingcommunities in other areas where drainage was good.Heavier soils, however, were not brought into cultiva-tion until the introduction of the plow. Around thefoothills of the Alps and in much of the North Euro-pean Plain, moraine deposits of clay, sand, and gravelleft by the melting of glaciers and ice sheets after thelast glacial period created many areas of poordrainage: Here rivers, lake margins, and marshes pro-vided a rich harvest of wild resources, but elsewherein the region there were numerous areas of infertileheathland. Many areas of fragile poorer soils on theuplands were taken into cultivation during the BronzeAge and thereafter degenerated into heathland andmoor, providing rough grazing but never subse-quently usable for cultivation.

The mix of environments provided access tomany valued resources: timber from the forests aswell as honey, fruit and nuts, fodder, furs and hides;clay for making pottery and building materials; metalores, particularly in the center and southeast; and

outcrops of flint for making tools across the NorthEuropean Plain from Britain to Poland and beyond.Iron, widely exploited from the first millennium B.C.,was available in many areas of temperate Europe.From the north, around the Baltic and in Denmark,came amber, highly prized and widely traded.

THE ATLANTICFACADE ANDTHE NORTH SEA

From Iceland to the Canaries and west coast ofAfrica, the Atlantic Ocean unites a range of environ-mental zones, linking them not only throughseaborne communications but also through sharedcharacteristics of great significance. The constantpounding of the seas has eroded the softer rocks,creating a coastline of many islets, rocks, shoals, andinlets, with promontories of harder Paleozoic rockleft jutting into the sea, notably the southwest cor-ner of Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany, Finisterre, andCape St. Vincent. These provide both hazards toshipping and protection against the forces of sea andweather, combining with the drowned estuaries ofnumerous rivers to form many deep safe anchorages,such as Plymouth Sound, Rade du Brest, and the bayof Cádiz. In stretches where softer rocks predomi-nated, notably the Gulf of Cádiz and the Frenchcoast south of the Loire, the sea has sculpted asmooth coastline upon which sand bars and beacheshave developed. Often these form substantial dunesinland, impeding drainage and causing ponded-uplakes and great areas of marsh to form, such as theMarais Breton and Marais Poitevin in France andLas Marísmas in southern Spain. Unsuitable forfarming and therefore unattractive to agriculturalsettlement, these waterlogged regions are a havenfor wild plants and animals.

The interaction of tides, winds, and currents hasdictated and controlled the patterns of movementaround the Atlantic facade. Heavy gales bringingrough seas combine with cold and fog to make winter


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voyaging hazardous and best avoided, though notimpossible. In the days of oar and sail most voyageswere undertaken between April and October. Alongmost of the coast the prevailing winds are westerlies,but south of Cádiz these give way to the north-easttrade winds that provide an easy passage southwarddown the African coast but make it difficult to return.This southern stretch of the European coast also hasaccess via the Strait of Gibraltar to the Mediter-ranean. A strong west-to-east current aided marinersseeking to enter the inner sea, while outward-goingvessels had to hug the shores on either side of thechannel, but the main determinant of sailing direc-tion was the wind, with mostly westerlies blowingJanuary to February, April to June, and October toNovember, and mostly easterlies for the rest of theyear. In general, Mediterranean sailors did not ven-ture into the Atlantic until the first millennium B.C.,but the Atlantic sea-lanes were plied by their ownmariners from a far earlier date. In the north thesepassed through the Irish Sea to reach Scotland as faras Orkney and Shetland, perhaps even reaching Ice-land, which seems to have been known to Atlanticcommunities by the time that Pytheas, a Greekexplorer, circumnavigated Britain in the fourth cen-tury B.C. The Straits of Dover provided a passage bywhich seafarers could reach the North Sea and thecoasts of northern continental Europe. The prevail-ing southwest winds favored voyages east through theStraits and the English Channel, while strong tides,which run for six and a quarter hours in one directionthen reverse for the same length of time, could beused to sail west in a series of hops interspersed withanchoring to ride out the reverse eastward tide.

Many rivers give access from the Atlantic and theNorth Sea to the interior of Europe, some, like themajority of Iberian rivers, to the hinterland on theAtlantic side of the continent, others, particularlythe Guadalquivir, Garonne, Loire, Seine, and Rhine,linking with rivers flowing into the Mediterraneanand Black Sea, notably the Rhône and the Danube.Britain in the west is also well furnished with rivers,flowing down from the mountains that cover muchof its western and northern parts.

The cold nutrient-rich polar waters that flowinto the Atlantic and North Sea combine with thewarm waters of the Gulf Stream arriving from theCaribbean; rich in plankton, they are home to

numerous species of deepwater fish, such as cod andhaddock, available in abundance until modern over-fishing began to threaten their existence, and to seamammals. In addition, the substantial continentalshelf provides an ideal environment for shellfish andshallow-water fish species, similarly abundant in thepast. Salmon and eels cross the Atlantic and enterBritish rivers during their breeding cycle, giving animportant seasonally available resource. Theseresources place the North Atlantic and North Seaamong the world’s richest fisheries.

The Gulf Stream also significantly raises thetemperature of the Atlantic coasts from Scotland toGalicia. This combines with the overall oceaniceffect of the Atlantic on the west and northwest ofEurope, including the islands of Britain and Ireland,to produce an equable climate, with mild wintersand mildly warm summers.

Settlements along the Atlantic facade and theNorth Sea coasts were located to exploit both landand sea, taking advantage of good anchorages andsafe places to beach ships, easy availability of fish andshellfish, access to rivers for water and transport andto their valleys, plains, and deltas for agriculturalland. Estuaries and marshy stretches also offeredabundant wild flora and fauna, including many edi-ble species. In addition, many coastal locations wereselected in order to exploit important mineralresources, such as the metal ores of the Río Tintodrainage, Galicia, Brittany, and western Britain, orthe high-quality hard stones of the Irish and Welshmountains. In the low-lying lands along the NorthSea, settlement was at the mercy of the climate,attractive during dry periods, for example, duringthe second millennium, and flooded during periodsof higher rainfall, as, for example, in the early cen-turies A.D., when many of those driven from theirancestral lands by flooding moved westward toinvade the lands of their civilized neighbors.

THE FAR NORTH

From around latitude 65 degrees north, in an areaencompassing most of Norway and Finland, and


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much of Sweden, leading into the great sweep ofnorthern Russia to their east, one enters a differentworld. The west of the region is dominated by theKjölen range of mountains, while the remainder islowland dissected by numerous lakes and rivers. Theclimate here is subarctic, with extremely long, coldwinters and short, cool summers. The predominantvegetation of the region is boreal coniferous forest,low in productivity of edible species attractive tohumans, but supporting animals prized for theirfurs, such as fox, marmot, beaver, bear, and lynx, aswell as elk and deer, and producing useful timber,including pine and spruce. Modest variations in theclimate have a marked impact here, determininghow far north it is possible to practice agriculture; inthe warmer drier conditions of the second millen-nium B.C., for example, communities farmed in areasnow too far north for crop cultivation. Nevertheless,the strongly leached podsol soils of the region offeronly limited productivity. The prehistoric farmers ofthe region, therefore, made much use of the avail-able wild resources as well.

The mountains in the west of the region and thenarrow northern strip of land within the Arctic Cir-cle, even colder and with little winter sunlight, can-not support trees but only low varieties such asdwarf birch and dwarf willows. Most of the vegeta-tion of this arctic tundra is formed of mosses andlichens as well as sedges and other cold-tolerantspecies. It supports only a limited range of nativefauna, such as Arctic fox and various migratorybirds, but also large numbers of reindeer, which areherded by the hardy inhabitants of the region. Muchof the ground is permanently frozen, and there is lit-tle development of soil, so cultivation is impossible.Similar conditions and vegetation are to be found insome of the high areas of the Alps.

ENVIRONMENTALCHANGE

Although many of the conditions of modernEurope also operated in much of the past, there

have been many major natural and man-inducedchanges to the environment over the course of time.During the cold dry conditions at the height of themost recent glacial period, a massive ice cap coveredIreland, most of mainland Britain and Scandinavia,and part of the North European Plain, and lesserice caps covered the Alps and Pyrenees and someadjacent areas. Most of the transalpine Europeanenvironment was tundra, mixed in the south andeast with parkland shading into steppe. Only incoastal and lowland areas of the Mediterraneanwere there forests. High winds caused massive ero-sion in the treeless European plains, creating largeexpanses of loess soil. Sea levels were much lower,adding substantially to coastal plains—for example,exposing half of what is now the Adriatic sea—andjoining mainland Britain, Ireland, and continentalEurope into a great plain extending far west of thepresent coast of France. The gradient of riverbedsrunning out into this plain was steeper, causing therivers to flow faster in more deeply incised, nar-rower channels.

After the glacial maximum around 18,000–16,000B.C. temperatures began to rise again, reaching levelssimilar to those of today by around 8500 B.C. Gradu-ally the glaciers melted, releasing new lands for set-tlement in the north and Alpine regions. Relieved oftheir weight, parts of Scandinavia and northernBritain slowly rose (isostatic recovery), in placescounteracting the loss to rising sea levels of coastalland. The progressive drowning of continental shelfaround the Atlantic coast created a rich habitat forfish and shellfish, which was enthusiasticallyexploited by human groups; the lack of continentalshelf in the Mediterranean made the development ofmarine food sources less marked here, and theiradvantages were outweighed by the progressive lossof the already restricted coastal lands. By 6000 B.C.the rising sea level had also drowned much of theplain in Europe’s north and west, flooding the NorthSea and creating the English Channel, separatingBritain from continental Europe. The melting icesheets had formed a huge body of freshwater northof Poland: by 5500 B.C. the North Sea brokethrough the narrow land barrier between Swedenand Denmark to turn this into the saline Baltic Sea.The Black Sea was also a freshwater lake untilaround 5500 B.C., when the Mediterranean broke


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through, drowning an enormous belt of coastal landaround it. Other melting ice created many pondsand streams and a string of lakes across the northand east of Europe and others in the Alps: initiallythese lakes were relatively poor in nutrients, butwithin a thousand years they had become exception-ally fertile and productive locations, rich in plants,fish, and fauna. Only much later did silting signifi-cantly reduce their productivity and therefore theirappeal for settlement.

The drowning of the continental shelf reduced thegradient of many rivers, while the hugely increased

volumes of water flowing in them carried massiveamounts of silt and other debris. These created newand extensive estuaries and areas of alluvium thatwere very attractive to plants, animals, and people.

As temperatures rose and rainfall increased, trees,grasses, and other vegetation spread from theirrefuges in southern Europe into most of the rest ofthe continent. For a period that lasted in differentparts until 7000 to 5000 B.C., the Mediterraneanzone became covered with deciduous forests, unitingtheir naturally high productivity with high levels ofsunlight to achieve optimal conditions for sustaining


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POSTGLACIAL CLIMATE AND VEGETATION

Climate Period Date B.C. Cultural Period NW Europe Climate and Vegetation

11,500–10,800 Late Glacial Alleröd warmer and wetterconiferous forests in northwest

10,800–9600 Final Late Glacial Younger Dryas sudden dramatic drop in temperaturevery cold and drysubarctic conditions with open

grassland and some trees in northwest9600–8500 Mesolithic Pre-Boreal dramatic rise in temperature and humidity

warm and wetconiferous forest (mainly birch and pine)

with some deciduous trees in northernand central Europe, deciduous forest in Mediterranean

8500–7200 Mesolithic/Neolithic Boreal warmer and drydeciduous forest colonizing central

and northern Europe7200–3800 Mesolithic/Neolithic/ Atlantic warmest and wet, mild winters,

Bronze Age long growing seasondeciduous mixed oak woodland with

elm and lime in northern and centralEurope—sudden very dramatic short dip c. 6200 but afterward very stable with very slight fluctuations

3800–1000 Chalcolithic/ Sub-Boreal slightly cooler but still warmBronze Age warm summers, cold winters, dry

from 1000 Bronze Age/Iron Age Sub-Atlantic cooler and wettergrowth of blanket bog

Sources: Barker 1985, Milisauskas (ed.) 2002, Mithen 2003, Price 2000, Renfrew and Bahn 2004, ArizonaUniversity 2005; Metindex 2005.

plant and animal life. Gradually, however, risingtemperatures created hot dry summers in theMediterranean that caused the northward retreat ofdeciduous forests and their replacement in theMediterranean zone by the far less productive ever-green vegetation that today characterizes the region.This effect was felt earlier and more keenly in theeastern Mediterranean than farther west.

As deciduous forest pushed northward, cold-lov-ing species like reindeer moved into the extremenorthern regions of the continent where tundradeveloped and were replaced farther south by forestspecies such as red and roe deer. Between the decidu-ous forests and the tundra, boreal forests developed.Forests in turn created humic soils that encouragedthe further development of vegetation. By around4000 B.C. the pattern of European climate, environ-ment, flora, and fauna approximated to the naturalsituation today. But humans had been making a sig-nificant impact on the landscape long before thistime. The hunter-gatherer communities that becameestablished throughout suitable locations in Europedeveloped ways of managing the environment fortheir own benefit, clearing areas of forest, using fireor bark-ringing, in order to encourage the develop-ment of open woodland with plant species attractiveto themselves and their prey. The spread of farmingas the preferred way of life, beginning around 7000B.C. and penetrating most parts of Europe by 3000B.C., exponentially increased the area of cleared for-est and altered the vegetation of many regions,extending grassland, causing erosion, and in someareas producing degraded soils that have neverrecovered. The extension of human settlement intomarginal areas in climatically favorable periods led inmany cases to their permanent reduction to scrub-land or bog. The effect of humanity has been totransform the landscape. Nor has this been only bydirect and intentional actions, such as felling trees.The animals kept by farming communities have alsobeen instrumental in destroying some aspects of thelandscape and encouraging others: Pigs, for example,contributed to permanent forest clearance bydestroying young regenerating growth. Wild animalsbecame not only prey for food as before but alsopests that threatened crops, encouraging their hunt-ing, in some cases to extinction (as, for example, theaurochs, the massive wild cattle of Europe).

Superimposed on the human impact on the envi-ronment was that of natural climatic changes andoccasional catastrophic events, with both local andmore extensive effects. Fluctuations in temperatureand rainfall have occurred throughout prehistory andhistory: Sustained temperature increases or decreasesof only a few degrees have significant effects on theextent and range of different plants and animals, bothin terms of latitude and of elevation, while higherrainfall can transform dry land into bogs and drownlake margins. Earthquakes and volcanoes have trans-formed the landscape in some areas, such as aroundVesuvius: Devastating at first, volcanic eruptions havehad longer-term benefits in the creation of highly fer-tile soils. In exceptional cases, such natural disastershave more widespread effects: In particular, the mas-sive eruption on the Aegean island of Santorini(Thera) around 1628 B.C. threw enough debris intothe atmosphere to block solar radiation for months,resulting in colder temperatures and causing a majorsetback to vegetation, particularly trees. Many signif-icant cultural changes can be traced back to alter-ations in the climate and landscape, and vice versa.

READING

GeneralMilisauskas, ed. 2002, Clarke 1976, Butzer 1972,Hoffman 1983, Cunliffe 1994a, Kristiansen 1998,Champion et al. 1984: general survey; Scarre 1988,Black 1999, Philip 1991: maps.

The MediterraneanBraudel 2001, Barker 1985: general; Perles 2001:Greece; Chapman 1990, Harrison 1996: Iberia.

The MountainsBarker 1985, Sherratt 1997.


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Temperate EuropeBarker 1985: general; Sherratt 1997: various regions;Bailey 2000: Balkans.

The Atlantic Facade andNorth SeaCunliffe 2001a, Sherratt 1997, Barker 1985: general;Reed 1990, Pryor 2003: Britain.

The Far NorthBarker 1985, Price 2000.

Environmental ChangeScarre 1988, Jochim 2002c, Mithen 2003: lateglacial and Mesolithic changes; Mellars 1994: glacialconditions; Harding 2000: Bronze Age.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF EUROPE

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Europe is both the westernmost extension of thecontinent of Asia and one, with West Asia and

Africa, of the landmasses that ring the Mediter-ranean. At various times during its past it hasreceived people, new materials, and ideas from itsneighbors, while at others it has been those neigh-bors who have been recipients. Groups of humanspenetrated Europe less than a million years ago andothers arrived later, with fully modern humans theonly survivors after around 26,000 B.C. Significantchanges in their way of life took place in the wake ofthe climatic and environmental changes at the endof the last Ice Age around 9600 B.C. Initially, subsis-tence was based entirely on wild resources, but after7000 B.C. farming communities using plants andanimals domesticated in West Asia also began toappear in Southeast Europe, and by 3000 B.C. foodproduction was the main way of life for most Euro-peans.

In the fifth millennium B.C. metalworking beganin the southeast, using gold and copper, and by 2000B.C. bronze was being manufactured across most ofthe continent, while iron came into use during thefirst millennium B.C. A diversity of burial practiceswas employed. Large mounds covered burials at var-ious times, while Atlantic Europe had seen the cre-ation of megalithic tombs from the fifth millenniumonward. Monumental architecture was alsoemployed for ritual structures, such as stone circlesin the northwest and temples on Malta. Stone wasused at times to construct dwellings, though houseswere more commonly built of wood and clay.Domestic strongholds and fortified settlementssprang up in many areas at various times, and armedconflict can be traced back to the hunter-gatherercommunities of the early postglacial period.

In the second millennium civilized societiesemerged in Greece as well as along the southeasternshores of the Mediterranean, and during the firstmillennium appeared more widely in the Mediter-ranean. Their writings shed occasional specific lighton their neighbors; most of Europe, however,remained prehistoric and therefore without a historyof individuals and events. Archaeology, however,sheds considerable light on the way of life of ancientEuropeans and the changes that took place.

One of the difficulties in writing a chronologicalaccount of prehistoric Europe is the uneven pace of

development, both on a Europe-wide scale andmore locally. Traditional labels such as Neolithic andBronze Age refer to different time periods in differ-ent areas; and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers not onlyflourished in territories bordering those occupied byNeolithic farmers but for millennia were still themajority of Europe’s population. The followingaccount is therefore divided on the basis of absolutechronology into sections to which the traditionaldivisions of Palaeolithic through Iron Age have beenbroadly applied although they do not necessarilyreflect the technology of all the areas under consid-eration at that time.

PALAEOLITHICEUROPE (C. 1 MILLIONTO 9600 B.C.)

BackgroundThe record of human activity in the remote past isextremely patchy, and the remains of early peoplethemselves are even more elusive. Problems withdating present a major handicap in chroniclingEurope’s earliest inhabitants and their activities asdoes the uncertain nature of some of the material.For example, crude chipped stone objects may betools made by humans or the result of fracture bynatural forces. While new and more sophisticatedtypes of tool were created as time went on, simplerforms were not necessarily abandoned, and theapparent sophistication or crudity of tools made in aparticular place also owes much to the quality of thestone available to the toolmakers, with the resultthat the typology of tools often cannot be used togive a broad relative date for the early sites wherethey have been found.

DATING THE EARLY PAST

While radiocarbon dating allows a chronologicalframework to be established for later European pre-


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history, and dates to be assigned to sites and otherfinds within this time frame, the greater part of thePalaeolithic occupation of Europe falls outside itsrange, which currently extends back only to around50,000 years ago.

Other dating methods have therefore to beemployed: many of these are applicable to naturalprocesses, such as the accumulation of marine sedi-ments or the eruption of volcanoes, which are notassociated with human activities and can thereforeonly indirectly be used to date archaeologicalremains. Fluctuations in climate and vegetationreflected in cores taken from deep-sea and freshwa-ter sediments and ice sheets are dated using variousmethods, including the countable annual layering ofthe sediments and ice sheets, correlation with paleo-magnetic reversals, and uranium series dating. Thelatter is also applicable to stalagmites in limestonecaves; and fission-track, potassium-argon, and ther-moluminescence dating are also used on varioustypes of rock that may under- or overlie archaeolog-ical remains.

Thermoluminescence can also be applied directlyto some Palaeolithic artifacts: flint tools that hadbeen subjected to heat, and accidentally or deliber-ately baked clay, such as hearths and, during theUpper Palaeolithic, some figurines. Animal teethassociated with human debris can be dated by elec-tron spin resonance and by uranium series dating;and the remains of extinct fauna can also provide arelative date. The typology of stone tools gives someclues to relative date, too, although there are associ-ated problems, as discussed above.

ICE AGES

Around 35 million years ago slight global coolingcaused the development of the first ice sheets inAntarctica and from around 2.3 million (Pleis-tocene) ice sheets also developed in the Arctic, dueto considerably increased cooling. Since then, theEarth has experienced numerous cycles of shortglacial periods of extremely cold, usually dry condi-tions and short interglacial periods of considerablewarmth and humidity, separated by much longerperiods in which the climate was less extreme. Thedescent into glacial conditions was generally grad-ual, while warming after a glacial maximum pro-

ceeded much more rapidly. The course of thesechanges has been charted and dated using data fromvarious sources that built up over very long periods:notably deep-sea cores that preserve a record of fluc-tuations in the oxygen-isotope composition of theoceans, reflecting the proportion of the Earth’smoisture locked up in ice sheets; ice cores thatrecord the annual extent of ice sheets; and pollencores that show changes in vegetation, relatedlargely to climate. In the last 750,000 years (Middleand Upper Pleistocene) there have been eightglacial-interglacial cycles, with the most recentinterglacial period beginning around 130,000 yearsago (Upper Pleistocene) and the last glacial maxi-mum around 20,000 years ago. By c. 9600 B.C., tem-peratures had risen to a level comparable to today:This postglacial warm period, the latest in the con-tinuing cycles, is known as the Holocene. Withinthis there have been further lesser fluctuations intemperature and precipitation, including conditionswarmer and drier than today between c. 7000 and1000 B.C.

Early Humans

INITIAL COLONIZATION

The evolutionary line that produced both chim-panzees and humans diverged by 7–6 million yearsago, giving rise in Africa to a number of hominidspecies. By 2.5 million years ago, these included one orseveral small but relatively large-brained creaturesthat are assigned to our own genus Homo (H. habilis, H.rudolfensis). Around the same time, and probably madeby Homo, the first (Olduwan) stone tools appeared,pebbles with a cutting edge made by striking off flakes.

A larger species of human (H. ergaster/ H. erectus)emerged around 1.9 million years ago and rapidlyspread as far as China and Indonesia, a movementpossibly spurred by climatic and environmentalpressures or encouraged by the development ofadaptations, such as successfully obtaining and eat-ing meat, which allowed a population explosion andthe colonization of new environments. At sometime, possibly as early as 1.6 million and certainly by500,000 years ago, humans began using fire: to cook,

T H E D E V E L O P M E N T O F E U R O P E

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to keep themselves warm, and to defend themselvesagainst predators. By 1.6 million, H. ergaster haddeveloped more sophisticated (Acheulean) flaketools. These included the distinctive hand axe, care-fully shaped by removing flakes from both faces of alarge flake or small cobble to create a tool with asymmetrical shape and tapering point with sharpedges, probably used for many purposes, particularlybutchering animals.

While remains of H. ergaster (alternatively classi-fied as H. georgicus) have been found at Dmanisi inGeorgia, on the edge of Europe, dated around 1.8million years ago, evidence of an early human pres-ence in Europe itself is confined to a few finds ofpossible but disputed stone tools. Cold winter tem-peratures (below 10 degrees Centigrade) may haveinhibited advance into Europe until a later datewhen fire was under human control. The earliestindubitable evidence, dated c. 800,000 years ago,comes from Gran Dolina, Atapuerca, in Spain,where the bones of some six individuals belonging toan evolved form of H. ergaster, named H. antecessor orH. mauritanicus, were found in a cave. Cut marks andbreaks suggest that these individuals may have beenthe victims of cannibalism. Another skull of similarage has been found at Ceprano in Italy: It may alsobelong to H. antecessor or to a separate species, H.cepranensis.

EARLY EUROPEANS

More detailed information on the lives of earlyEuropeans comes from a number of later sites, datedafter 500,000 years ago. Skeletal remains show a fur-ther evolution had occurred: These individualsbelonged to a species with brains larger than earlierforms, known as H. heidelbergensis. Boxgrove insouthern England has a number of working floorswhere flint tools, particularly hand axes, were made,using stone hammers for initial shaping and bonehammers for the finer work of finishing. Woodenspears, found, for example, at Clacton in Englandand Schöningen in Germany, were probably usedfor hunting: Faunal remains and other clues indicatethat a considerable amount of meat, often from largeanimals, was consumed by these people, who also ateshellfish and perhaps some plant foods. Hunting wasprobably opportunistic rather than organized or

regular, and meat was probably also scavenged. AtTerra Amata in France arrangements of stakeholesand stones suggest the possibility of shelters built ofbrushwood stakes, perhaps covered by skins, con-taining a hearth and working floors. A few sites suchas Wallendorf and Markleeberg in Germany seemlikely to have been camps where people extractedgood-quality flint for making tools.

MIDDLE PALAEOLITHIC

A massive deposit of human bones in a rock shaft,Sima de los Huesos, at Atapuerca in Spain, seem-ingly chosen as a convenient place to dispose of deadbodies, provides evidence that European hominidsaround 400,000 years ago were evolving toward theNeanderthals (H. neanderthalensis), a type of humanthat had emerged by 250,000 years ago. Short andstrongly built, the Neanderthals had brains as largeas those of modern humans; the later (after 70,000years ago) “Classic” Neanderthals of Europe wereeven more stocky, adapted to cope with life in coldconditions. Their (Mousterian) stone tools includedlarge flakes made by carefully preparing a “tortoise”core to enable a flake of predetermined shape finallyto be struck from it. A range of other flake toolswere also used, skillfully retouched to form artifactsfor different purposes, including fine leaf points foruse as projectiles. Stone for making these tools nolonger came exclusively from the vicinity of thecampsite: A small proportion (around 5 percent)might be obtained from more than 60 miles (100kilometers) away and in a few cases as far as 200miles (300 kilometers) away, though the rest camefrom no more than 12 miles (20 kilometers) away.On balance it seems that people obtained thesematerials themselves; there is little indication ofinteraction or exchange between groups.

Wood was also used for an increasing range oftools, including plates in one rock shelter (Romani,Spain). Microscopic examination of the wear onstone tools (microwear analysis) made by the Nean-derthals shows that the majority had been used towork wood, making not only tools but also handles.Bone and antler were now also occasionally workedby flaking to make edge tools. Hides and furs fromanimals were prepared and may have been used forclothing as well as for constructing shelters.


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Although some may have been roofed, the balanceof opinion seems to be that most Neanderthal struc-tures were windbreaks, usually associated withhearths. Much of the occupation evidence comesfrom caves and rock shelters. The harsh conditionsof life are reflected in the Neanderthals’ short lifeexpectancy, few individuals surviving beyond age 40.

Neanderthal Life The powerfully built Nean-derthals led a strenuous and often risky life, as manyhealed injuries show. Many of these injuries musthave been inflicted during hunting, which probablyinvolved close contact with the often large and dan-gerous prey such as aurochs (wild cattle). The Nean-derthals’ most common hunting weapon was a spear,of plain wood or wood with a stone tip, with whichthey stabbed their prey. Other hunting techniquesprobably included driving animals over cliffs, as atLa Cotte on Jersey: This implies a degree of cooper-ation and coordination, perhaps involving someadvance planning. Scavenging also provided somemeat; small creatures such as shellfish, reptiles, andtortoises were caught; and some part of the dietprobably derived from plant foods, although the evi-dence is rare and these would have been relativelyscarce in the tundra and grassland that covered aconsiderable part of Europe during the colder peri-ods. Resources available seasonally were exploited,and over the course of a year a group probablymoved around within a territory of up to 40 miles’(65 kilometers’) radius in order to obtain these.Campsites were selected to take advantage of differ-ing environments where a diversity of resourcescould be obtained: Often these were located on theedge or slopes of river valleys. Desirable resourcesincluded not only foodstuffs but also good-qualitystone for making tools.

Other aspects of Neanderthal culture are thesubject of much debate. A few objects with simpleengraved lines may be the beginnings of art, while itseems fossils and other curios were occasionallypicked up and treasured, evidence of awakening aes-thetic sensibilities. The survival of crippled individ-uals implies that they were cared for by other,able-bodied, members of their community or family.A number of skeletons have been found in situationsthat suggest deliberate burial, although not all schol-ars accept this. In a number of instances it is claimed

that there were associated grave goods, such aspieces of meat, although in every case another expla-nation is possible for the claimed grave offerings,and bodies may have been disposed of for conve-nience rather than as a reflection of a notion of lifebeyond death. Some attested instances of cannibal-ism are similarly open to differing interpretations:there might have been symbolic reasons for canni-balism, as there have generally been in historical andrecent times, or the practice might simply have beento provide food.

Another crucial question is whether the Nean-derthals could speak. Cooperation in hunting andother shared activities, particularly those involvingsome forward planning, indicate that they were ableto communicate in some way, perhaps using a rangeof manual signs and gestures, and some sounds,including, it has recently been suggested, singingand music, but the currently accepted majority viewis that they did not have the cognitive abilities tocreate language and were probably physically inca-pable of articulating the full range of sounds thatmodern humans can make.

Modern HumansAlthough the development of modern humans, H.sapiens, is still the subject of lively debate, the mostwidely held view is that they emerged around200,000 to 150,000 years ago in Africa and fromthere eventually colonized the globe, replacing thepopulations of humans resident in other regions,probably without interbreeding with them, althoughsome evidence suggests there may have been limitedinterbreeding between Neanderthals and modernhumans in Europe. In West Asia, where Nean-derthals coexisted with modern humans fromaround 100,000 years ago, there was no significantdifference in the tools used by these two types ofhuman, and it seems likely that they were culturallyand intellectually similar for a long period.

CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION

Marked changes occurred around 60–40,000 yearsago, which roughly coincides with the time whenmodern humans were moving into Europe (as


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indicated both by archaeology and by DNA studies).Large flake tools were replaced or complemented byslender blades modified to create a wide range oftools specifically designed for individual purposes.Many blades could be struck from a single core, rep-resenting a far more efficient and economical use ofraw material. Stone blade tools were smaller andtherefore more portable than before. As well aswood and stone, bone, ivory, and antler were nowregularly used for making tools. From around30,000 years ago these included needles, showingthat for the first time garments were sewn. Otheraspects of life, such as housing, art, indubitable buri-als, and sophisticated hunting practices, show thatthere had been a quantum change in human cogni-tion and aesthetic sensibility. It has been suggestedthat this change was linked to the development oftrue spoken language. Language enables ideas to beexchanged and discussed and plans to be made; italso exponentially increases and enhances the quan-tity, quality, and nature of knowledge that can behanded down through the generations. Only mod-ern humans are thought to have been capable of truespeech. Recent DNA research appears to show thatthis was made possible by a genetic mutation in earlymodern humans, sometime between 200,00 and100,000 years ago.

EARLY UPPER PALAEOLITHIC

The Aurignacian period began with the arrival inEurope of modern humans c. 50–45,000 years ago,first in the southeast but rapidly spreading west andnorth to occupy the whole of southern Europe fromSpain and France to Bulgaria. The period was char-acterized from the start by the use of blade tools andthe manufacture of jewelry and ivory figurines, aswell as engravings and the recently discovered spec-tacular paintings at Chauvet cave in France.

At the same time a number of industries com-posed of tools displaying a mixture of Middle andUpper Palaeolithic technology appeared in parts ofEurope from Russia to Spain, the best known beingthe Châtelperronian in northern Spain and France.These seem likely to have been made by Nean-derthals who had come into contact with modernhumans. The Neanderthals may have been inca-pable of inventing the new technology themselves,

but they were able to imitate it; and the quality ofsome of the tools made by earlier Neanderthalsshows that they did not lack an aesthetic sense.

GLACIAL EUROPE

Modern humans and Neanderthals coexisted inEurope for at least 10,000 years. Although it is adebated issue, there is no evidence that modernhumans deliberately wiped out the Neanderthals.Far more probably, their superior technology andcultural adaptability gave modern humans advan-tages over the Neanderthals in procuring the neces-sities of life and surviving cold conditions. Taller andless strongly built than Neanderthals, modernhumans were physically adapted to a warmer envi-ronment but were able to devise cultural and tech-nological means, such as efficient and sophisticatedclothing, shelter, and hearths, to overcome theirphysical limitations so they were better able toexploit the full global range of environments avail-able for settlement, and to cope with environmentaland climatic change.

Between 30,000 and 25,000 years ago advancingice sheets drove both Neanderthal and Aurignacianpopulations into a few favored areas of southernEurope, and by around 28,000, Neanderthalsbecame extinct; Aurignacian industries continued ina few areas, including southwestern France, until24,000 years ago. From around 30,000 years ago,however, new groups of modern humans (Gravet-tians) began to arrive in eastern Europe, perhapsfrom central Asia, bringing new technology, includ-ing basketry and cordage, fishing equipment, andeyed needles for sewing clothing. The new technol-ogy seems likely to have enabled modern humans tocope with the increasingly cold conditions, andGravettian industries appeared over much of Europebetween 30,000 and 27,000 years ago. The most dis-tinctive Gravettian products were the models ofwomen known as Venus figurines. At Dolní Vestonicein Moravia, and at other sites, there is evidence thatclay models were fired with the intention of makingthem explode, perhaps for ritual reasons.

Housing was one of the principal ways in whichpeople met the climatic challenge, constructingtents of hides stretched over a framework of timberor, in the east, of mammoth bones or tusks, sup-


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ported by stones. Often the floor was dug into theground. Windbreaks and other structures were alsoerected in caves and rock shelters. Efficient hearthswere constructed, ringed, and sometimes lined withstones. Many open-air sites belong to the Gravettianperiod, particularly in eastern Europe. Tempera-tures continued to fall, and during the period ofextreme cold from c. 22,000 years ago leading intothe last glacial maximum c. 20,000–18,000 yearsago, the more northerly areas of Europe becamesparsely populated or were abandoned and occupa-tion was largely confined to caves and rock shelters.This period is known in western Europe (southernFrance and Spain) as the Solutrean (21,000–17,000years ago), characterized particularly by very finepressure-flaked “leaf” points made from carefullyselected high-quality stone and too fragile for actual

use. Farther east, from Italy to Russia, less well stud-ied industries continued from the Gravettian periodand are known as Epigravettian.

Although no clothing itself has survived, the exis-tence of needles shows that tailored garments weremade. More detailed information comes from buri-als: In one at Sungir in Russia, the distribution ofivory beads that had decorated a man’s clothes indi-cates that he wore trousers and a shirt or jacket witha hood or a separate cap. Tiny seashells, animalteeth, and fish vertebrae were also used as ornamentson clothing and as beads and pendants worn as jew-elry, and many scholars argue that these were usedto demonstrate identity, for instance as a member ofa social group. Social interactions were probably ofkey importance in coping with the world in whichthe Upper Palaeolithic people lived. Connections


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2.1 A romantic view of Upper Palaeolithic Europeans. In reality, by this time prehistoric Europeans werewearing stitched clothing and hunting and defending themselves with spears and eventually bows andarrows; they also had control of fire, a powerful weapon against predators. (Figuier, Louis. Primitive Man.London: Chatto and Windus, 1876)

between groups over a huge area spread the risks oflife by providing a support network, for instancewhen resources became scarce in one region. Thedensity of population, which rose enormously in thisperiod, probably also made it vital to develop strate-gies for managing intergroup relations. Althoughpeople seemed to have been settled in small regionalgroups where conditions were favorable, communi-cations between groups allowed the exchange ofmaterials and ideas over long distances. The move-ment of commodities such as seashells, amber, fossilshells, and quality stone for tools over distances ofup to 625 miles (1,000 kilometers) and the wide-spread occurrence of similar art objects underlinesthe extent of these connections.

ECONOMY

The economy of Upper Palaeolithic Europeans wasmore complex than that of their Neanderthal prede-cessors. While the latter seem generally to haveobtained food opportunistically, Upper Palaeolithicpeople employed a range of organized strategies. Itis likely some hunting involved the use of well-planned ambushes in which many people playedindividual but coordinated parts; remains of hides,drive lanes, and constructed cul-de-sacs (kites) havebeen found from the late Palaeolithic onward in theNear East, and similar devices may have beenemployed in Europe. The site of Solutré in Francewas selected to take advantage of a natural dead-endcanyon that was used as a drive lane and trap inwhich to slaughter animals en masse; horses madeup the majority of the prey at this site. People tookadvantage of the seasonal movements of big gameanimals to ambush large numbers in the autumn,cold-storing the meat in pits. People themselves alsomoved, often over long distances, to gain access toseasonally available resources in different areas. Set-tlements that have been found include short-termhunting camps and workshop camps for obtainingand processing stone for tools but also sites occupiedfor a season or year round. These settlements variedin size, suggesting the fissioning and fusion ofgroups at different times of year, depending on thedistribution and density of available resources; somesites were of a considerable size, suggesting largegroups at certain times of year, probably during the

winter when the community could live off frozengame and other stored food. The use of fire forthawing and cooking meat was critically important;cooking pits have been found in some of the Russiansites. While they made use of a wide variety of food-stuffs, such as plants, fish, birds, shellfish, smallgame, and wildfowl, the Upper Palaeolithic peoplealso often concentrated upon particular species, forinstance horses in the east and reindeer in southernFrance. Nets were made of knotted twine and wereperhaps used for catching hares. The expanded anddedicated tool kit reflects improvements in the effi-ciency of hunting, and included spear-throwers,which extended the range at which projectiles couldaccurately be used.

AESTHETIC AND SYMBOLICBEHAVIOR

The most dramatic demonstration of the intellectualand aesthetic sophistication of the Upper Palae-olithic people is their art. This ranges from engrav-ings and paintings on the walls of caves and rockshelters, through engravings on stone plaques, topieces of portable art, carved from bone, stone,antler, or ivory, or modeled in clay, of which theexaggeratedly female Venus figurines are the mostfamous exemplars. Early figurines, dated before30,000 B.C., include several lion-headed men. Thevast majority of surviving European Palaeolithic artdates from the Magdalenian period, after the lastglacial maximum.

Many artworks were sensitive and beautifullyobserved portraits of animals, such as those used todecorate bone and antler tools such as spear-throw-ers. The purposes of this art are the subject of enor-mous debate, and no single explanation can accountfor all the diverse manifestations. Plausible explana-tions for particular objects or representationsinclude records of the seasons and of common orunusual aspects of the environment, for the purposeof planning or education; representations of theexperiences of shamans; totemic symbols; and sim-ple decoration for pleasure and the enhancement oflife. None can be proved though some can be ruledout; for example, the notion of hunting magic isundermined by the paucity of representations of thepreferred prey species and the virtual absence of


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hunting scenes or depictions of wounded animals.The quality of the artists’ aesthetic perceptions andtheir mastery of execution cannot be doubted, how-ever. These are also apparent in the tools they cre-ated: Many new techniques, such as pressure flakingof stone and groove-and-splinter working of boneand antler, were developed to refine their produc-tion of artifacts, which were often things of greatbeauty as well as being efficient and practical.

The beginning of burials with grave goods, ingraves dug both in caves and in open-air sites, alsoindicates intellectual development, since these werenow clearly not simply a means of disposing of deadbodies, as might have been the case for Nean-derthals, and imply some concept of an individual’sexistence beyond or outside death. Some of thegraves contained multiple burials and might repre-sent the interment of bodies that had been storedover the winter when the ground was too cold forgraves to be dug. Grave goods such as jewelry, toolsand weapons, and figurines were now commonlyplaced with the dead.

The Late Glacial PeriodAfter the glacial maximum at around 18,000 B.C.,conditions became slightly less cold, and a period offrequent fluctuations in the cold, dry conditions setin, bringing gradual changes in the vegetation andfauna of the continent. This late glacial period isknown in western Europe as the Magdalenian, andwas a time of considerable innovation and of thefinest flowering of Palaeolithic art.

The environmental changes that took place inEurope during the later glacial period occurredgradually and therefore had a progressive impact onthe way of life of the inhabitants of the region.Around 12,700 B.C. a dramatic rise in temperatureand rainfall occurred (Bølling and Alleröd intersta-dial), reaching climatic conditions similar to today,followed by a dramatically contrasting period(Younger Dryas) around 10,800 B.C., when tempera-tures dropped steeply, causing some ice sheets toexpand, before suddenly rising again around 9600.The climatic changes brought about gradual andfluctuating changes in the distribution of variousanimals and in the vegetation, with an increasing

number of trees and more grassland in the tundraand steppe and areas of forest expanding in moresoutherly parts of the continent. Areas abandonedduring the glacial maximum were recolonized byanimals and people, and Europe’s population rose.Open-air sites greatly increased in number thoughcaves and rock shelters were still the main places ofsettlement.

Many of the large herbivores hunted by Palae-olithic people, such as reindeer and horses, contin-ued to thrive on the tundra and steppe and toprovide a major part of the diet, though somespecies, such as musk ox and giant deer, graduallybecame extinct in Europe. Increased hunting effi-ciency was achieved through a number of innova-tions. Small blades manufactured during this periodwere probably set into shafts of bone or wood tomake arrows: Definite evidence of bows and arrows,which allowed prey to be felled at less close range, isknown by the end of the late glacial period. Dogs,useful during hunting expeditions and particularlyfor driving game, were probably domesticated—thefirst domestic animals. As temperatures rose, adiversity of foods became increasingly important,including birds, small mammals, fish, and variousplants. Finds at La Riera, a cave in Spain, show thatduring the Magdalenian period shellfish gathered onthe seashore became part of the diet of people whocamped in the cave. Coastal sites, however, mustgenerally lie in areas drowned by the later rise of sealevels so the importance of marine resources in theEuropean late glacial period cannot be assessed.

The vast majority of surviving portable Palae-olithic art objects come from the Magdalenianperiod, including both figurines and engravedplaques, and decorated tools. Similarly, the greaterpart of the cave paintings that can be assigned a datecome from this period, though cave painting wasgradually abandoned as new areas were colonized inthe later Magdalenian. Vividly portrayed animalsprovided the subject matter for most of the art.

As the ice sheets melted, new areas became avail-able for settlement in the north, including southernBritain, the Low Countries, and Poland, and in theAlpine regions. By around 12,000 B.C., much ofnorthern Europe was freed from the ice sheets andbecame tundra and steppe, with a progressivelyincreasing amount of forest. Cold-adapted animals,


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including the large herds of reindeer, moved north-ward into the newly habitable regions, and somehuman groups moved with them. Deciduous forestdeveloped in southern Spain, southern Italy, Greece,and the western Balkans. A large number of regionalindustries developed, characterized by different toolassemblages.

EARLY POSTGLACIALEUROPE(C. 9600–5000 B.C.)

Early Holocene Climate and Environment

LAND AND SEA

After the briefly renewed glacial conditions of theYounger Dryas (c. 10,800–9600 B.C.), temperaturesagain rose very rapidly, marking the beginning ofthe Holocene period. Ice sheets and glaciers melted,increasing the volume of water in the seas and ofmoisture circulating in the air so that rainfallincreased. Only northern Scotland, Norway andSweden, and the Alps were still beneath ice sheets.Melting ice rapidly raised sea levels, drowning alarge area of continental shelf west of the presentAtlantic coast from Ireland to northern Spain and anarrower strip along the Portuguese coast, and thenorthern part of Doggerland (the land now beneaththe North Sea between Scotland, northern England,and Denmark). In the Mediterranean, land exposedin the glacial period between Italy and the Balkanswas drowned by the rising Adriatic Sea, and the nar-row coastal strip around much of the Mediterraneancoast began to be submerged. For example, Sicilylost about half its area and became separated fromItaly while almost two-thirds of the coastal plain ofthe Argolid in Greece was lost by 8000 B.C. Glacialmeltwaters also created many new lakes and ponds,particularly in northern and eastern Europe and

around the Alps. Initially poor in nutrients, thesebecame rich environments within a millennium,though eventually they silted up.

By around 7000 B.C. Ireland had become anisland, although southern England was still joined tocontinental Europe, and a substantial island existedwhere Dogger Bank is today. Ice sheets remainedonly over parts of Norway, Sweden, and northernRussia. In areas of the north previously under the icesheets, rising sea levels were eventually offset by iso-static recovery: After being freed from the weight ofthe ice, the land rose gradually but very substantiallywith the result that some early Holocene beaches arenow several hundred feet above sea level; the processcontinues today. Other areas, such as East Anglia,have sunk as the land has tilted. In the area that isnow the Baltic Sea, a freshwater lake dammed by ice(Baltic Ice Lake) had existed during the glacialperiod: As sea levels rose, this became connected tothe North Sea, growing greatly in size and becom-ing saline (Yoldia Sea). By 6500 B.C., however, landrising due to isostatic recovery dammed the inletand cut off the Yoldia Sea, converting it into thefreshwater Ancylus Lake, which lasted until the landwas breached and the Baltic was again joined to theNorth Sea around 5500 B.C.

Between 6500 and 6000 B.C. the North Sea andEnglish Channel reached approximately their mod-ern form, severing the land bridge between Britainand the continent. Ireland continued to lose itscoastal lands to the sea, especially in the north, untilaround 4400 B.C., when isostatic recovery began totip the balance, raising the land, with the result thatsome beaches of that time are now several feet abovepresent sea level. Most of the coastal lands aroundthe Mediterranean were reduced to a narrow stripby the still-rising sea levels. The narrow straitsbetween the Atlantic and the Mediterranean hadremained open even when glacial sea levels were lowbut in the east the Mediterranean was separated by aland bridge from a substantial body of freshwater,the New Euxine Lake, which lay 500 feet (150meters) below sea level. Around 5500 B.C. rising sealevels breached this land bridge, pouring huge quan-tities of saline water into the lake, which became theBlack Sea, and inundating an enormous area of landaround its coast, particularly on its northern side.American investigators working in this area suggest


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Map 3. Changing coastlines in Europe following the last Ice Age

that the memories of the survivors of this inundationgave rise to the Flood stories current in the NearEast (though other scholars favor a Mesopotamianorigin for the legend).

ENVIRONMENT

Freed of ice, new areas of tundra and steppe devel-oped in the far north, attracting reindeer and othercold-loving animals, whose habitat was disappearingfarther south. Some species, however, such as thegiant Irish elk and the mammoth, were unable toadjust to the shrinking habitat and became extinct.Farther south the tundra and steppe became increas-ingly wooded as trees spread from their glacial refu-gia into regions now warmer and wetter than before:birch and pine initially, followed by hazel after 8000B.C., then oak, lime, elm, and other deciduous speciesby 6000. Changing vegetation and the loss of coastalland to the sea brought about local extinctions, suchas the wild ass and the aurochs in southern Greece.

In the Mediterranean rainfall rather than tem-perature had been the main factor limiting thespread of trees, which now flourished. By 8500 B.C.deciduous forest dominated by oak covered Iberia,Italy, and the Balkans, and had spread to most ofEurope except Scandinavia by 6000 B.C. The earlyHolocene was a time of plenty in the Mediterranean,where a high level of annual sunshine hours, warmsummer temperatures, and mild winters were cou-pled with the rich productivity and large number ofedible species characteristic of deciduous forest; butby 7000 B.C. deciduous forest was gradually givingway to less productive evergreen woodland in theMediterranean zone.

The deciduous forests produced nuts, fruits andberries, bulbs, roots, and tubers, while on more openground grew legumes, pulses, and grasses includingsome wild cereals. A rich fauna inhabited theseregions: herbivores such as red and roe deer, ibexand aurochs, other mammals such as boar and rab-bits, as well as birds and snails. Marshlands, the mar-gins of lakes and ponds, and the banks of rivers,particularly at their estuaries, were especially richand diverse environments, offering not only landflora and fauna but also water resources such as fish,shellfish, turtles, and aquatic plants like water chest-nuts, as well as wildfowl. The shallow waters of the

drowned continental shelf around the tidal Atlanticcoast and to a lesser extent the drowning coasts ofthe Mediterranean also furnished shellfish, such asmussels, limpets, and oysters, and in the seas therewere fish, including sturgeon in the Black Sea, tunain the Mediterranean, and cod, seabream, and saithein the Atlantic, where there were also marine mam-mals such as seals and whales.

Early Mesolithic(9600–6000/5500)

ECONOMY

Human groups adapted their way of life to exploitthese new circumstances. Success depended on flexi-bility in the strategies they adopted, enabling themto take advantage of opportunities and deal withshortfalls and fluctuations in their environmentfrom season to season and year to year. It was impor-tant to make use of resources from a range of envi-ronments: People tended to settle for part or, later,sometimes all of the year in situations that allowedthem to exploit a range of ecological settings, such aslake margins, rivers, estuaries, or coastal sites withaccess to woods, marshes, and upland. In northernIberia, for example, some Mesolithic communitiesoccupied coastal and estuarine locations (Asturian),exploiting aquatic resources, and game such as deerand boar, and their abundant settlements are markedby shell middens. Artifacts from these sites suggestline fishing and the use of drag nets. Other groups(Azilian) occupied both coastal and inland locations,including parts of the Pyrenees and CantabrianMountains, where game such as ibex were hunted.Caves and rock shelters as well as open sites wereused for habitation. Mountain regions, such as thesouthern slopes of the Alps and the CantabrianCordillera, were exploited during summer months.Undifferentiated environments, such as the interiorof thick forests, were generally avoided for settle-ment, though expeditions might be made into them.

Some groups continued traditional economiesexploiting reindeer and other cold-loving fauna, butthese were now confined to the north, which was


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progressively colonized as areas exposed by the melt-ing ice sheets became available; eventually these ani-mals and groups dependent on them lived only in theextreme north where tundra still existed. The grad-ual spread of forest favored herbivores, such as roeand red deer, whose pattern of life was less gregariousand involved far more restricted seasonal movementthan that of the reindeer, horse, and other specieshunted on the tundra. Hunting strategies had to bechanged to deal with more solitary prey and terrainwith reduced visibility. The bow and arrow, inventedin the Magdalenian period, became more developed,using wooden arrows tipped with microliths to kill byslicing or penetrating the prey, or wooden arrowswith blunt tips to stun or kill fur animals and birdswithout damaging their pelts. Burning sticks werealso used to overcome fur animals for the same rea-son. Dogs became of great importance not only toaid in finding, flushing out, tracking, and drivinggame but also to pursue wounded animals and locateand retrieve prey fallen in the woods. Although inareas of open ground communal game drives mightstill be used as a hunting strategy, in the main huntersseem to have operated singly or with one or twocompanions. Pitfall traps and snares were also fre-quently used. Deer and boar were most widelyhunted; elk and aurochs were also taken, as were rab-bits in the Mediterranean, ibex and chamois in moremountainous regions, and birds everywhere, particu-larly around lakes, marshes, estuaries, and coasts.Hides from food animals were used for tents, cloth-ing, and containers, but animals like beaver, wolf,otter, and pinemarten were also killed for their furs.Land snails and other small creatures were alsoexploited, and honey was obtained from the forests,as a Spanish rock painting attests. Meat could bedried or smoked for later use.


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2.2 Hunting equipment: A Mesolithic barbed bonepoint from Denmark (left) and a Magdalenian(Late Glacial) biserially barbed bone harpoon headfrom France (right). Both would have beenattached to long wooden shafts and were used forhunting large game. (Lubbock, John. PrehistoricTimes. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1890)

The great increase in plant foods, includingroots, rhizomes, bulbs, tubers, leaves, fruits, seeds,nuts, fungi, and berries, available in the spreadingforests and developing lake margins and marshes,must have led to an explosion in their importance inthe diet. Many of them such as nuts and some tubersand fruits were suitable for storage for winter use.However, the evidence is limited, since most plantsleave little trace in the way of imperishable wastematerial. Nevertheless, plant remains in water-logged sites, coprolites (preserved feces), tooth wear,and, most recently, isotope analysis of human boneattest the regular consumption of plants where theywere available. Indirect evidence comes frommicrowear analysis, which provides information onthe use to which tools were put, and from the intro-duction of new tools for obtaining and processingplant foods. Many of these used microliths, tinyblades and flakes of stone (usually flint) that madeextremely efficient use of the raw material; thesewere mounted singly or together in wood or bone tomake composite tools such as graters and knives.Grindstones and hammerstones were probably usedfor processing seeds, nuts, and other hard foods.Perforated round stones (“maceheads”) may havebeen weights used on wooden digging sticks. Evenin the early Mesolithic there is evidence of consciousmanagement of plants and the environment. In par-ticular, fire and bark-ringing were used to cleartrees, reeds, and other dense vegetation, creatingclearings and encouraging the growth of youngshoots attractive to prey animals and of a variety ofedible plants, such as nut-bearing hazel. In the northchipped flint axes were used probably to fell treesand certainly to work wood.

The coasts, lakes, estuaries, and rivers also fur-nished abundant fish and shellfish. New tools,including fishhooks, fish spears (leisters), and har-poons, were also devised to catch freshwater andmarine fish, as were traps, weirs, and nets of woodand plant fibers, and special knives and “limpetpicks” were used to prize shellfish from rocks and toopen them. Like meat, fish could be preserved foruse during lean times of the year. Huge shell mid-dens, made up of a mixture of waste material ofwhich seashells are the most bulky component, arethe most visible remains of many coastal Mesolithicsettlements. In the north marine mammals were also

exploited, the smaller ones like seals being hunted,though the whales eaten were probably usuallystranded specimens. Coastal sites from the earlierpart of the Mesolithic have been lost to rising sealevels, and it is therefore impossible to assess theirrelative importance, but certainly by the later part ofthe Mesolithic period marine and coastal resourceswere of great importance and coasts were the mainfocus of settlement in many parts of Europe such asthe Atlantic regions. Numerous fish bones atFranchthi in Greece show that tuna fishing devel-oped after 7000 B.C. to compensate for the reduc-tion in land resources as the coastal plain shrank,and became increasingly important after 6000 B.C.

SETTLEMENT, MOVEMENT, AND SOCIETY

Seasonal movement to obtain resources available indifferent places at different times of year had beenpracticed in the glacial period. This continued, butnew patterns were developed to exploit newresources or to accommodate the changing locationof old. Deer, for example, were followed when theymoved between lowland and upland grazinggrounds, but the range of their seasonal migrationswas far more restricted than that of Palaeolithic preylike reindeer; coastal locations were visited at sea-sons when spawning fish were present and lakes andmarshes when migratory birds were expected. In theearlier part of the Mesolithic period, up to c.6000/5500 B.C., communities seem to have beengenerally small and moved between seasonal campsto exploit these resources, traveling in the course ofa year over a territory of around 50 to 100 miles’ (80to 150 kilometers’) diameter or sometimes more.Seasonal movements brought groups into contact,allowing social relations to be maintained; commu-nities could renew ties and exchange marriage part-ners but also make economic exchanges of goods.Raw materials and goods might travel substantialdistances through a chain of such exchanges.

The development of boats for fishing permittedwaterborne communications and exploration. In theearlier Mesolithic period evidence for these wasindirect: a number of wooden paddles from varioussites; tools and other human debris on islands,including Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia by the eighth


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millennium B.C. From later Mesolithic times, how-ever, dugout canoes survive from a few sites, includ-ing Tybrind Vig, which also yielded beautifullydecorated paddles. One canoe from here was nearly33 feet (10 meters) long and contained a clay hearth,presumed to be for night fishing, probably for eels.By 9000 B.C. people from southern Greece were vis-iting the island of Melos, from which they broughtback obsidian. This was among a number of prizedmaterials that were exchanged between communi-ties, traveling long distances from their source;other included seashells and amber.

Evidence of Mesolithic housing is scanty, in mostcases limited to sunken floors and traces of woodenstakes that may have supported walls of reeds or bark,or tents of hides, prepared using stone scrapers. Insome cases, remains of a floor also survive, made ofbark or clay, protected by a patch of sand where thehearth was built. Occasionally the hut foundationswere built of stone. At Lepenski Vir in the Iron Gatesgorge of the Danube the foundations of a number oftrapezoidal huts built of stakes have been found.Within these there were remarkable limestone sculp-tures of fish-faced people with bulging eyes and openmouths. Art in general is far less well known than inthe Upper Palaeolithic period. Pebbles painted withgeometric designs of dots or lines are known in theearly Mesolithic: These seem likely to have had somecoded significance, now irretrievably lost. The rarefinds of artwork such as the carved elks’ heads amongthe grave goods at the later Mesolithic site of Ole-neostrovski Mogilnik, however, show that there wasno lack of skill or artistic creativity; but little has sur-vived of the mostly perishable materials in whichMesolithic people worked. Late Mesolithic rockpaintings in southern Spain and rock engravings inScandinavia give rare, vivid glimpses of Mesolithiclife, showing people at work, for example, hunting orcollecting honey, and at leisure, for instance, engag-ing in communal dances. Masks made of deer skullswith antlers found at Star Carr in England may havebeen used in dances or other ritual activities althoughthey may alternatively have been aids to hunting.Massive postholes near the site of the much latermonument of Stonehenge once held posts madefrom huge pine tree trunks, erected in the eighthmillennium B.C.—another elusive trace of Mesolithicsymbolic activity.

Early Neolithic 7000–5500 B.C.

THE BEGINNINGS OF EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE

The postglacial period in the Near East had seen therapid development and spread of farming as a way oflife, including in Anatolia, Europe’s nearest neigh-bor. Until c. 5500 B.C. northwest Anatolia was evenlinked to the far southeast of Europe by a small landbridge, destroyed when the Black Sea was floodedfrom the Mediterranean. In addition, SoutheastEurope and Anatolia were linked by seas over whichcompetent navigators in seaworthy boats had beenactive from at least 9000 B.C.

By around 7000 B.C., the first settlements of farm-ers were appearing in eastern Greece and on theisland of Crete. Their domestic animals and cropsincluded sheep and goats, wheat and barley, all intro-duced from the Near East, where these were staples.Also raised by Anatolian farmers were pigs, cattle,and various pulses. These may have been introduced,although wild boar, aurochs, and some cereals andpulses existed in the wild in Europe, and so they mayhave been domesticated locally. As farming spreadacross Europe, new domesticates were added to therange exploited, and there was probably some inter-breeding between wild and domestic animals.

Although the original farming domesticates wereintroduced from the Near East, it is still debated towhat extent these were moved by exchange betweenfarmers and hunter-gatherers who were alreadychanging their resource-management strategies orby immigrant farmers seeking new land as their pop-ulations expanded. Different scholars espouse differ-ent views, but it is widely accepted that the firstfarmers in Greece, the Balkans, southern Italy, andcentral Europe were mainly immigrants, while thoseelsewhere may have included immigrant farmers butwere largely native hunter-gatherers who turned toagriculture as local economic or social conditionsmade it desirable to do so.

Mesolithic populations in many of the areasoriginally colonized by farmers, such as southernGreece and much of Southeast Europe, seem tohave been low. Although in a few places Mesolithic


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Map 4. Postglacial hunter-gatherers and the spread of farming to 4500 B.C.

and Neolithic communities came into contact, fre-quently the environments favored by each were notattractive to the other. Hunter-gatherers preferredcoasts, lake shores, river estuaries, and othereconiches with a wide range of easily accessible wildresources, while farmers often chose locations thatcombined access to water with well-watered stretchesof open ground suitable for growing crops, such asriver floodplains, where there was only limited diver-sity of wild resources. For instance, the loess soilsfavored by the first farmers in central Europe wereavoided by hunter-gatherers.

In general, the first farming settlements in aregion were small and few in number, and the asso-ciated culture often uniform over a wide area, suchas the whole zone of the LBK (the first farmers incentral Europe, from the western Carpathian basinto northern France and the Ukraine). Later settle-

ments in a region were often larger and reflectedsome infilling of the landscape, giving greater den-sity of occupation in the places first colonized andexpansion into other ecological zones within theregion. This internal expansion was often coupledwith the development of regional variations in mate-rial culture, particularly apparent in styles of pottery.Some kind of defense or demarcation of the settle-ment, for example, by surrounding it with a ditch,developed in some regions, and in some cases wascoupled with evidence for violence and conflict.

Sedentism, associated with farming but also withmany later Mesolithic groups, allowed greater popu-lation increase than before; despite this, farmingcommunities were for millennia the minority inmost of Europe, and in some areas, especiallyAtlantic regions and the north, hunting and gather-ing remained the preferred way of life. By 3000 B.C.,


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2.3 A fanciful reconstruction of early European horticulture. Such small-scale cultivation of fenced gardenplots close to the settlement is likely to have characterized Neolithic farming in many parts of Europe.(Figuier, Louis. Primitive Man. London: Chatto and Windus, 1876)

however, farming was practiced throughout Europeand hunting was largely replaced by herding, but theexploitation of wild foods, particularly marine andriverine resources, was not universally abandoned.

GREECE AND THE BALKANS

Mesolithic occupation in Southeast Europe seems tohave been sparse. Despite decades of investigation,very few Mesolithic sites are known in Greece, allbut Theopetra in Thessaly being coastal; of these thebest documented is Franchthi cave in the Argolid.Among the main resources exploited by the laterMesolithic occupants of Franchthi cave was tuna,caught by deep-sea fishing. Seaborne connectionsare therefore likely to have existed between coastalcommunities in the Aegean, providing links betweenGreece and the Near East, particularly Anatolia, aroute by which domestic plants and animals andNeolithic objects may have been transmitted.

The long-lived Mesolithic occupation in Franchthicave underwent a significant change around 7000 B.C.,when new artifacts, including polished stone tools andpottery, and domestic animals and later plantsappeared alongside the remains of wild foods andMesolithic tools, and the size of the settlementincreased. Although some scholars argue that thisshows the indigenous development of farming, usingdomesticates obtained through contacts with farmingcommunities in the Near East, more probably itreflects contacts and interactions with immigrantfarmers who had settled in the region. A similar sce-nario can be argued at Lepenski Vir in the Iron Gatesgorge of the Danube, where domestic animals appearalongside Mesolithic material around 6000 B.C.

Small numbers of farming settlements began toappear in eastern Greece and the island of Cretearound 7000 B.C., and during the seventh millen-nium spread into Thessaly (Proto-Sesklo andSesklo cultures). The farmers seem most likely tohave come from parts of the Near East and Anato-lia, probably by sea, bringing with them their fullrange of domestic animals and plants. Furtherexpansion necessitated some adjustment to moretemperate and continental conditions, with occa-sional summer rainfall and colder winters, but by6000 B.C. farming communities had spread throughthe Balkans east of the central mountain ranges into

the southeastern part of the Carpathian basin, set-tling on fertile plains and avoiding other environ-mental settings. (Starcevo-Körös-Cris-Karanovo Icomplex). These settlements were generally smallcommunities of 10 or 20 square or rectangularhouses built of mud bricks or of clay on a woodenframework. Probably accommodating singlenuclear families, they had a single room with ahearth or clay oven, a grindstone, and clay storagebins. Some of the later houses were more substan-tial, with a second story or a basement, or twointerconnected rooms at ground level. Some settle-ments, such as the long-lived tell (settlementmound) of Karanovo in the Balkans, expanded astime went on and may eventually have contained asmany as 60 houses. Although the first farming set-tlements may have been occupied only briefly, per-manent settlements seem soon to have beenestablished in many locations. Some of the settle-ments, particularly in the Balkans, were very long-lived, creating tells (mounds built up of debris fromhouses of clay repeatedly demolished and recon-structed). Where tells did not form, this was moreprobably due to the nature of the building material(wood that could be reused or burned) than toimpermanent settlement.

The inhabitants of the earliest settlements inGreece may not have had pottery, which appears inAnatolian sites early in the seventh millennium;those of slightly later settlements made plain andlater geometrically painted pottery and tools of pol-ished stone as well as flint, obsidian, and probablywood, and may have decorated themselves withstamped designs using clay stamps (pintaderas).Sheep and goat, common in southern sites, were lesscommon farther north, and their importance alsodecreased through time. Pigs and cattle were alsokept. Wild creatures of many kinds, including deer,fish, boar, aurochs, fur animals, and wildfowl, werehunted, probably partly for meat and skins andpartly to stop them eating the farmers’ crops. Theseincluded wheat, barley, and pulses such as peas andvetch. Wild fruits and nuts, available in adjacentwoodland, were collected and eaten, as other wildplants may also have been. Although the tools usedby these farmers included a few polished stone axes,there is evidence of only limited forest clearance.Households probably cultivated their own plots and


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cared for their own animals, but cooking facilitiesplaced outside the houses suggest that householdsate together and shared food.

Spondylus shells from the Aegean and obsidianfrom the Aegean island of Melos found in Greek andBalkan sites, as much as 280 miles (450 kilometers)distant from their source, mark the existence ofexchange networks throughout the region, probablythough not certainly involving transactions overshort distances in the context of kinship or otherintercommunity ties. It is possible that some individ-uals specialized in obtaining such materials fromtheir sources; there may also have been someexchange between farmers and hunter-gatherers inthe areas in which they came into contact, withgrain being exchanged not only for game but alsoperhaps for materials like obsidian obtained byhunter-gatherers on fishing expeditions. Obsidianand flint were used to make knives and other edgetools. In addition to pottery, which showed bothoverall stylistic similarities throughout the regionand more localized variations, clay was used to makefigurines depicting people and animals. These mayhave served some religious purpose. Although someare associated with possible shrines, such as a largecentrally placed building in the Greek village of NeaNikomedeia, most were found in ordinary houses,probably reflecting the domestic practice of ritualactivities. Some burials were made within the settle-ment, but it is possible that most of the dead werecremated and interred outside the settlement.

THE EAST

To the east, the regions along the Bug and DnestrRivers were inhabited by communities living byhunting, gathering, and fishing. Some of their largersettlements in the river estuaries may have beeninhabited year round and used as a base for seasonalexpeditions, for example, into the Crimean moun-tains, where they occupied caves and rock shelters.Animals living in the grassland and forests, includingantelope, bear, and deer, were among their prey. Byabout 6000 B.C., the inhabitants of some hunter-gatherer settlements on river terraces in this region,such as Soroki (Bug-Dnestr culture), began toinclude some domestic animals in their diet, keepingsome cattle and pigs while still relying mainly on

wild resources. They also made distinctive comb-decorated or incised pots, often with pointed bases.These people probably acquired domestic animalsand later cereals by trading with or raiding theirfarming neighbors on the northern shores of theBlack Sea, where farming communities related tothe Cris culture of the Balkans were established bythe late seventh millennium. Other hunter-gatherergroups to their east also gradually acquired domesticanimals and began to make pottery. Recently, anumber of cemeteries have been found in the Dneprrapids region of the Ukraine: Ranging in age acrossseveral millennia, some of these belonged to the latehunter-gatherer inhabitants of this region.

THE MEDITERRANEAN

Impressed Ware Cultures During the seventhmillennium farming settlements also began to appearin southern Italy and eastern Sicily, areas with littleMesolithic population; these settlements becamemore numerous here during the sixth millenniumand spread northward east of the Apennines, reach-ing northern Italy and thence spreading into thewestern Alps. The Po plain, occupied by hunter-gatherers, was not settled by Impressed Ware groups.After a short initial phase, settlements surrounded byone or several enclosure ditches were established inItaly; these are best known in the Tavoliere region ofthe south. Smaller circular ditched compoundswithin the settlement contained individual timber-framed houses. Settlements of various sizes areknown, larger ones particularly in later phases. As inSoutheast Europe, their inhabitants raised sheep,goats, cattle, and pigs and cultivated cereals. Thetrend of opinion is to regard these farmers ascolonists from the eastern Mediterranean.

Native communities nevertheless played a majorpart in the gradual adoption of agriculture aroundthe Mediterranean. Between 7000 and 6000 B.C.Mesolithic communities were coming under increas-ing pressure as their coastal land was progressivelyreduced by sea-level rises and as environmentalchanges deprived them of important resources.One response was an increased reliance on marineresources, including fish such as tuna whose ex-ploitation required offshore navigation. Mediter-ranean islands were gradually colonized: Corsica


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and Sardinia during the ninth or eighth millennium,the Balearics during the later sixth millennium;Malta, which seems to have been devoid of nativefauna, was probably not settled much before 5000B.C. Seafaring encouraged interaction between com-munities the length and breadth of the Mediter-ranean and thus both ideas and goods from thefarming communities of the Aegean made theirappearance among coastal Mesolithic communities.These included pottery: From the seventh millen-nium B.C. a distinctive style of pottery decorated withimpressions, particularly of seashells, (Cardial)Impressed Ware, began to be made by Mesolithicpeople from the Adriatic coasts of the Balkansthrough the islands and coastal regions of Italy andsouthern France to the southern shores of Iberia andnorth coast of Morocco and Algeria. Impressedwares were also used by the earliest farming commu-nities in southern Italy, who were also makingpainted pottery by around 6000 B.C. Variations in thestyle and decoration of these impressed wares proba-bly expressed the distinct identity of regional groups.Between 6000 and 4500 this pottery style also spreadalong the Atlantic coast from Portugal to France;networks of communication stretching from theMediterranean coast of France to the Massif Centraland to the Atlantic via the Garonne also spreadknowledge of Neolithic technology and domesticanimals to Mesolithic communities in the west.

Between 6000 and 5500 B.C. sheep and goatsbegan to appear in Mesolithic caves and open settle-ments in the Mediterranean, their meat and hidessupplementing those from hunted animals. Theywere known, for instance, in the long-establishedMesolithic settlement of Grotta del’Uzzo in north-west Sicily, along with pigs, which may have beenlocally domesticated. The growing importance ofdomestic stock coincides in Sardinia and Corsicawith a decline in the numbers of the native speciesProlagus sardus (a kind of rabbit) and Megacerus cazi-oti (a deer), which eventually became extinct. Settle-ments with domestic sheep and goat and wild gameand plant foods are known on the coast and in theinterior of the Adriatic region of the Balkans(Danilo-Smilcic), where ditches enclosed settle-ments with houses and open areas for herding live-stock; in southern France and southern Spain sheep,goats, and sometimes pigs appear alongside wild

resources. By the late sixth millennium domesticcereals, particularly barley, were also being adoptedby hunter-gatherers from their farming neighbors.Pulses may also have been introduced, but it is atleast as likely that local wild pulses, such as chick-peas, peas, and lentils, were taken into cultivation.Similarly, stocks of domestic animals were probablysupplemented from local wild boar and aurochs.

Opinions are divided whether actual colonistswere responsible for the spread of the Neolithic wayof life into central and northern Italy and the west-ern Mediterranean or whether all the farming com-munities that developed here grew out of localhunter-gatherer communities that had graduallyadopted animal husbandry and cereal cultivation,reducing their reliance on wild resources throughtime; the latter seems more likely in many cases, butthere is also some evidence of colonization. Forexample, in southern Portugal settlements withImpressed Ware, domestic animals, polished stonetools, and cereals appeared between 6000 and 5500in areas (notably northern Estremadura) withoutprevious Mesolithic settlement, while communitiesliving by hunting, fishing, and collecting were con-centrated in the valleys of the Tagus, Sado, andMira: this could support the theory that farmingcommunities in the region were incomers.

The distribution of sites where mixed agriculturaland Mesolithic resources were exploited was largelyconfined to islands and coastal regions, reflecting theimportance of seaborne communication; only laterdid domesticates begin to appear in inland sites in thecentral and western Mediterranean such as centralSpain, southern France, and the Pyrenees.

Expansion and Development5500–5000 B.C.

CENTRAL EUROPE

Linearbandkeramik (LBK also known as Danu-bian I). By 5500 B.C. farming settlements werebeginning to appear in the western Carpathian basinand to spread into areas to the north and west of theCarpathian Mountains. Colonization of this region


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and beyond involved a number of adjustments sinceboth climate and environment were significantly dif-ferent from those of the southeast. Hot summersand mild winters were progressively replaced bymild summers and long, severe winters, low rainfallmainly in the winter by heavy precipitation overmuch of the year, including snow, and open wood-land and scrub by dense forests. Once seen simply asan expansion by farming settlers from the Starcevo-Körös culture of Serbia and eastern Hungary, thesecolonists are now alternatively suggested to havebeen descendants of the Mesolithic natives of theCarpathian region who had adopted animals, crops,and agricultural practices from their Balkan neigh-bors. Whatever their origins, the rate of their spreadwas rapid, similar farming settlements appearingwithin 500 years in the Low Countries and northernFrance as far as the Paris basin and up to the south-ern edge of the North European Plain and themouth of the Oder River. They also spread east intoMoldavia and the western Ukraine during the fifthmillennium. Rapid population growth seems likelyto have fueled the progressive expansion into pro-ductive virgin territory where native hunter-gather-ers were probably rarely encountered.

These settlements were confined to river valleysand particularly to loess soils, which occurred exten-sively across the region. Easily worked, well drained,and fertile, these windblown soils were also rela-tively free from forest, reducing the task involved inclearing the land before cultivation. Nevertheless,the artifacts used by the inhabitants of these settle-ments included many axes and woodworking tools,since these people relied heavily on timber from theadjacent forests for construction and tools, and forfirewood.

Thousands of small settlements are known, gen-erally with no more than six houses, and occurringabout every one to two miles (one to three kilome-ters); in some regions settlement was composed ofcontinuous ribbons of single houses, spaced at inter-vals of around 55–110 yards (50–100 meters). Thesedwellings were long, single-story houses withpitched roofs and overhanging eaves to deal with therain and snow. The construction of these buildingsmust have been a matter for community coopera-tion; closeness to kin upon whom one could rely atneed was one of the factors structuring the pattern

of dispersal in the new landscape, acting as a checkon the otherwise relatively unlimited opportunitiesfor expansion.

Distinctive unpainted pottery decorated withincised curvilinear lines and dots gives this cultureits name: Linearbandkeramik (LBK). Polished stoneaxes and adzes were also characteristic LBK arti-facts, designed for felling trees and woodworking,and perhaps as hoes for cultivation. Suitable fine-grained stone for making such tools, such as amphi-bolite, was exchanged over long distances, as wereother goods and materials, including flint, pottery,and obsidian. Spondylus shells from the Aegean orthe Black Sea show that exchanges took place notonly between LBK communities but also with farm-ing communities farther afield, with rivers providingtransport routes.

Erosion of the surfaces of most LBK sites hasseverely limited the information available on housesand other aspects of life: Often all that remain arethe stubs of the deep postholes of the houses’ timberframework and of pits dug to provide clay for thewalls. Some of the smaller structures may have beenworkshops or farm buildings. Many of the housesprobably accommodated a single nuclear familywhile others may have been occupied by a largerfamily group. Alternatively, the larger structures,which might be as long as 145 feet (45 meters), mayhave served a different purpose, for example, as ashrine or community meeting house. Although mostsettlements were within easy reach of rivers orstreams, some were not but had wood-lined wells toprovide water.

The house walls were constructed of substantialwooden posts infilled with wattle and daub. Threerows of posts ran through the interior, supportingthe gable roof. The central portion of the house wasprobably the area in which most daily activities tookplace, with hearths and working areas. One end ofthe house may have contained sleeping quarters andstorage space, or may alternatively have been used tostall livestock. Above the other end of the housethere was often a loft in which grain and other per-ishables could be stored. Cattle were now the maindomestic animal, providing the bulk of the meat andpossibly also being used to provide milk; pigs alsoincreased in number, thriving on forage in the adja-cent woodland. As well as the earlier staples, wheat,


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barley, and pulses, LBK farmers may have growngoosefoot (chenopodium) and opium poppy, thoughthese may just have been weeds of cultivation. Smallplots were probably permanently cleared of their

primary vegetation, in at least some cases by burn-ing, and fertility maintained by crop rotation andmanuring. At this stage the small numbers of farm-ers and the abundant land available meant that only


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2.4 Neolithic polished stone axes from Ireland; that on the right, from Co. Monaghan, was found still in itshaft, which was made of pine wood. These were not only woodworking tools but also served other purposes,including working the land for cultivation and killing opponents with blows to the head. (Lubbock, John.Prehistoric Times. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1890)

a small amount was brought into cultivation, in gen-eral no more than that within a kilometer of the set-tlement. Domestic animals could have beenpastured in fields or let to forage in adjacent wood-land. Wild resources were also exploited: fish andwildfowl, deer, boar, and aurochs; fruit, nuts, andother plant foods, as well as leaves and other foragefor the domestic animals. Some of these were proba-bly stored for use over the winter.

In the west of the LBK zone, and to a lesserextent farther east, the dead were buried in smallcemeteries of single graves; these were locatedbeside larger settlements, or a central cemeteryserved a number of houses or hamlets in the areas ofdispersed ribbon settlement. Both inhumation andcremation were practiced. The small number ofgraves and the distribution of different types ofgrave goods within them paints a picture of somedifferential access to resources, perhaps reflectingstatus differences, or different degrees of successamong families or communities.

The loess of central Europe was an area largelyshunned by hunter-gatherers, but when the LBKfarmers reached the Atlantic and North Sea regionsof the northwest they came into contact withMesolithic communities, particularly on the coastand in river estuaries. Both conflicts and peacefulinteractions must have taken place within this con-tact zone. Competition for land and resources mayhave encouraged the defense and demarcation ofterritory: Some LBK settlements in this region aresurrounded by a defensive ditch, whereas elsewheresettlements were usually not enclosed. Food andother resources were probably exchanged betweenthe communities, along with knowledge and exper-tise: Mesolithic groups acquired domestic plants andanimals, pottery and ceramic technology, whilesome farmers adopted Mesolithic techniques of flintworking or gained access to wild resources. The LaHoguette culture on the northwest edge of LBKmay represent Mesolithic groups that had adoptedpottery and domestic animals from LBK farmers.

GREECE AND THE BALKANS

Later Sesklo-Vadastra-Vinca-Karanovo III-Dudesti By 5500 B.C. farming communities inSoutheast Europe were very numerous and often

large, reflecting a successful way of life and consid-erable population growth. Some were earlier settle-ments, such as the tell at Karanovo; others were newfoundations in areas that had not previously beenexploited. While the inhabitants of many communi-ties were the descendants of the original farmingcolonists, others may have been people of hunter-gatherer stock who had adopted agriculture. Theflooding of the Black Sea shores when the Mediter-ranean broke through around 5500 B.C. may alsohave driven many coastal farming communities tosettle inland, for instance, in the previously sparselysettled lower Danube region. Although farmingcontinued earlier practices, cattle were becomingmore important, their numbers probably swelled bydomesticating wild aurochs.

Desirable raw materials continued to circulateover considerable distances through exchange; inaddition, some manufactured goods were alsoexchanged between groups, including local styles ofpottery. Some pottery vessels were decorated withhuman features or even made in the form of people,and distinctive anthropomorphic figurines were alsomanufactured; these may have had some ritual pur-pose. Copper made its first appearance, initiallybeing worked by cold hammering to produce smallobjects such as beads.

Settlements were for the most part undifferenti-ated, with no indication of any differences in status.A few, such as Sesklo in northern Greece, had a largestructure in the center of the settlement. Some set-tlements were enclosed by ditches, perhaps fordefense, although there is no evidence of conflict. Inmost areas the inhabitants continued to bury theirdead within the settlement, generally in pits along-side or beneath their houses; however, in someregions, including the coastal region of Dobrogeaon the Black Sea, an area where there is likely tohave been acculturation of the local Mesolithic pop-ulation, and on the Hungarian plain, some settle-ments began to have attached separate cemeteries inwhich some members of the community wereburied.

THE ATLANTIC AND THE NORTH

The later Mesolithic period (from 6000/5500 B.C.)was a time of some stress for many hunter-gatherer


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communities, including those of western and north-ern Europe. By now the substantial plains of thenorth (Doggerland) had been drowned by the NorthSea, the English Channel had separated Britain fromthe European mainland, and along the Atlanticcoasts land continued to be lost. Around this timethe Scandinavian land bridge that separated theNorth Sea from the Ancylus Lake was breached,converting the latter into the Litorina Sea, whicheventually became the Baltic. In the interior risingrainfall and higher temperatures encouraged vegeta-tion growth, resulting in forests that were larger,denser, and less penetrable, supporting fewer largeanimals as browsing became less easy: a less usefulenvironment than the more open forests of earliertimes. The development of lethal trapeze- or rhom-boid-shaped arrowheads may reflect the need forgreater hunting efficiency in the forest environmentto counteract reduced visibility and penetrability;the growing importance of dogs may also have beenrelated to this. In some sites dogs were accordedseparate burial with associated grave goods. Forestalso spread onto higher slopes of the mountains,reducing the area that provided upland summergrazing for herbivores.

The communities of the north and west re-sponded to changing conditions by making moreintensive use of established resources and incorpo-rating new foods into their diet, in particularincreasing their use of marine resources throughcoastal and deep-sea fishing and the hunting of seamammals. The importance of fishing was reflectedin the proliferation of devices for trapping or catch-ing fish, such as weirs, nets, and leisters. Analysis ofthe human and dog bones at the inland huntingcamp of Agernaes in Denmark shows that the inhab-itants’ diet was largely based on marine resources.Population increased overall, and in some areas set-tlements increased in size and permanence anddecreased in number. For instance, in Portugal therewas a shift from the earlier pattern of many smallsites on the coast, in the estuaries of many rivers, andin inland limestone caves, to a concentration of set-tlement in the estuaries only of major rivers, espe-cially the Tagus, Sado, and Mira, marked by massiveshell middens. Most were probably occupied formost or all of the year, though some seem to havebeen short-occupation camps established to exploit

particular resources. Chemical analyses of remainsfrom the shell middens here show that half or moreof the inhabitants’ diet came from marine sourcesthough land resources were also exploited. Farthernorth in Armorica there were also well-establishedcoastal Mesolithic groups known archaeologicallyfrom their shell middens and burials at sites such asHoëdic and Téviec. Remains from the middensshow that fish and shellfish bulked large in the diet,but game, birds, and sea mammals were also eaten,as probably were plants though the evidence is veryslim. Fur animals were also taken. In general, settle-ment in northern and western Europe was concen-trated on the coasts although estuaries and lakemargins where the produce of a range of environ-ments was available were also favored for settlement.

Sites like these were probably occupied for all ormost of the year. The well-studied later Mesolithicsites of Denmark (Ertebølle) show a pattern of siz-able communities that spent much of the year in alarge base camp usually located near the sea andgenerally marked by a large shell midden (e.g., Erte-bølle itself). From here expeditions would be madeby some members of the community to places whereparticular desirable resources were available at cer-tain times of year, such as swans (e.g., Aggersund),piglets and pinemartens (e.g., Ringkloster), other furanimals (e.g., Agernaes), or eels (e.g., Dyrholm), butalso to flint outcrops and other sites where materialfor tools could be obtained. Not all permanent set-tlements were coastal, however; for example,Auneau in the Paris Basin may have been occupiedthroughout the year.

As communities traveled smaller distances intheir seasonal round, interaction between them grewin importance, and some commodities were movedfar greater distances than before, up to 375 miles(600 kilometers). Substantial canoes were used fortravel both by sea and by river. To this period alsobelong the first skis and sledges, found in the north.Stable isotope bone analysis from Téviec andHoëdic also show the movement of women frominland communities to the coast as marriage part-ners. The widespread distribution of materials fromdistant areas shows that mechanisms existed to regu-late intergroup relations peacefully; however, com-petition may well have spilled over into violencefrom time to time, and it has been suggested that the


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large formal cemeteries that appeared during thisperiod, at coastal sites from Portugal and Brittany toOleneostrovski Mogilnik in Russia, were created asan attempt to mark territorial ownership. Cemeter-ies of single burials are known at a number of largesettlements along the Atlantic facade; those atHoëdic and Téviec in Armorica differ in being com-munal graves in which individuals were buried overa period of time.

NEOLITHICCONSOLIDATION (FIFTHMILLENNIUM B.C.)

Deciduous forests were continuing to spread north-ward, reaching Scandinavia and eastern Europe after5000 B.C. Tundra became confined to the far north,now largely deglaciated, still home to reindeer,though many cold-loving animals had by nowbecome locally or globally extinct. The productivityof lakes was beginning to decline as they became pro-gressively infilled by organic material and soil, aprocess completed in many lakes by 4000 B.C. In theMediterranean drier conditions brought the gradualreplacement of deciduous forest by maquis and scrubvegetation, a process accelerated by the destructiveeffects of grazing animals.

Farming was established across much of Europeby 5000 B.C., but, except in the southeast and theMediterranean, the numbers of farmers were stillsmall. While some regions, such as dense forests,were virtually free of human occupation except attheir margins, Mesolithic communities continued tothrive in many areas and still made up the bulk of theEuropean population. In the west, along most of theAtlantic facade, in the north, and in the northeast,there was as yet no direct contact between hunter-gatherers and farmers, while in much of the rest ofEurope, it was limited to the restricted areas selectedfor settlement by farmers. Where contact occurred,hunter-gatherers selectively adopted innovations asit suited them, acquiring polished stone axes by

exchange, taking up pottery making, and obtainingdomestic plants and animals. The well-establishedexchange networks operated by the Mesolithic peo-ple and the contacts facilitated by their partiallymobile lifestyle meant that these innovations couldspread widely, well beyond the zone of actual con-tact between farmers and hunter-gatherers. Envi-ronmental changes and the expansion of the farmingcommunities put pressure on the Mesolithic lifestylein some areas, and Mesolithic communities came torely on domestic resources to supplement wild ones,the balance finally tipping over into a mainly agri-cultural economy in most areas by 4000 B.C.

The interaction and hybridization betweenMesolithic and Neolithic traditions in many areascontributed to the growing trend of regionalizationand the development of regional cultures. Anotherfactor was adaptation to the specific conditions ofdifferent regions, contrasting with the relativelyundifferentiated practices of the earliest farmingcolonists; in this, too, the contribution of the nativehunter-gatherers, with millennia of knowledge oftheir local regions, was significant. Often farmingcommunities that had previously ignored wildresources began to make some use of them, huntingand then eating animals that threatened their crops,augmenting their herds from wild stock, and usingwild plants for fodder, food, and other uses such asdyes and medicines. The expansion of farmingbrought the colonization of land that was less easyto work than the soils such as loess that had firstattracted farmers, and of less accessible areas such asuplands. Forests were progressively cleared, both tocreate new agricultural land and to provide woodfor building and other purposes. The fifth millen-nium saw a considerable increase in farming popu-lation in temperate Europe as settlement expandedinto new zones. The highest areas of populationdensity, however, were most probably the coastallocations favored by Mesolithic communities, par-ticularly in river estuaries. Here abundant and var-ied resources permitted sedentary settlement andallowed large and socially complex communities todevelop. It is in this context that the acquisition ofexotic goods such as polished stone axes may havegained importance. The growth of formal burials,often in cemeteries, may also be a reflection ofdeveloping complexity.


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Population growth, the continuing erosion ofthe Mesolithic resource base, and interaction andcompetition between Mesolithic and Neolithicgroups led in some areas to a more marked and self-conscious definition of group identity, shown forexample in the development of megalithic tombs.Competition may also have developed into openconflict, both between hunter-gatherers and farm-ers and between communities of each. Mesolithiccemeteries include individuals who had sufferedinjuries inflicted by weapons. Some farming settle-ments may have been fortified, and there is evi-dence among these farming groups, too, ofindividuals or even whole groups that had met aviolent end.

In the southeast, however, where agriculturalcommunities had been established for well over a mil-lennium, there is little trace of conflict. Settlementsgrew in size, and occupation expanded into new areas.Crafts flourished, and new technologies were devel-oped. Native copper and gold had for many centuriesbeen worked by cold-hammering in the areas wherethey were found, producing small objects such asbeads. From around 4500 B.C., however, copperbegan to be smelted, at first in the Balkans and then inSpain, both areas rich in easily worked ores. Theproducts of this early metallurgy continued to beobjects of prestige value, such as ornaments, and tooktheir place alongside other status symbols.

The Southeast

GREECE

Tsangli Then Dimini The fifth millennium sawan expansion of settlement in Greece, villages beingfounded both in Thessaly, where settlement wasalready well established, and in new areas such asparts of Thrace and Macedonia and a number ofAegean islands including the Cyclades. Some housesnow had stone foundations. A few settlements had alarge central building; at Dimini, a settlementfounded in this period, this building was surroundedby a courtyard and a substantial stone wall.

Impressions of woven textiles at Sitagroi inThrace around 5000 B.C. are the earliest direct evi-

dence of cloth manufacture in Europe, althoughmats and baskets had been made from earlier times.Spindle whorls and loom weights appeared withincreasing frequency in Greece and elsewhere.

THE BALKANS

Early Eneolithic (Karanovo IV-Vinca-Boian-Hamangia) In the earlier fifth millennium telland flat settlements in the Balkans continued togrow and prosper, exploiting the easily worked andfertile soils of river valleys and dried-up lake basins.Copper and gold were still worked by cold-ham-mering and annealing, producing small objectssuch as fishhooks and beads. These were depositedamong the grave goods in the separate cemeteriesthat were beginning to be created outside settle-ments in some areas such as Bulgaria.

Gumelnitsa-Karanovo V/VI-Vinca-Varna By4500 B.C. tell settlements were often substantialand carefully planned, with houses laid out in rows,concentric circles, or blocks. Defensive ditches andpalisades, with entrances placed at cardinal points,surrounded the settlements, which were oftenlocated in defensible situations on river terraces.Houses were often divided into several rooms, andin some cases they may have had a second story.Some structures were dwellings, while others wereprobably used for storage or other purposes. Therewas also some variation in the size of houses, sug-gesting differentials in status, though the largerstructures might have been used for communitypurposes. The settlements were associated with arich material culture, including fine painted pot-tery and many figurines.

It also included fine graphite-painted waresthat were fired at a high temperature. Such com-mand of pyrotechnology led to the smelting andcasting of copper. Easily worked copper ores werewidely available in the Carpathian and BalkanMountains, often not far distant from farming set-tlements. The importance of copper is emphasizedby the impressive mines at Rudna Glava andAibunar. Copper and gold (obtained from rivers)were used to make ornaments and other objectssuch as axes and spearheads, reflecting growingmetallurgical skills. The use of the new technology


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is most vividly displayed in the cemetery at Varnaon the Black Sea, dated around 4500–4000 B.C.Here some 60 graves, around a fifth of the ceme-tery, contained ornaments and other objects ofgold and copper, as well as others of spondylusshell and fine flint blades. The majority of thesewere buried in graves without bodies, where indi-viduals were sometimes represented by clay masks,though a few of the richly furnished graves didcontain skeletons. Most of the burials in the ceme-tery had some grave goods, their quantity andrichness varying considerably.

Copper and gold objects probably enhanced anddisplayed the status of their owners. Metal ores wereonly one of the materials that were now sought bycommunities and widely traded; others includedboth prestige and everyday materials such as high-quality flint, pigments such as graphite for decorat-ing pottery, stone for axes and grindstones, andprobably many perishable materials such as furs.Manufactured goods also circulated, including pot-tery (perhaps traded for its contents) and stone tools.Analysis of the gold in the Varna cemetery showsthat much of it came from distant sources in Arme-nia and the Caucasus, emphasizing the wide extentof contemporary trade networks.

THE EAST

North and east of the Balkans in the forest steppevillages of similar houses were built on promon-tories and other easily defensible locations, sur-rounded by ditches. From around 5000 B.C.,Cucuteni-Tripolye farming communities werebecoming established on the steppes of EuropeanRussia and the Ukraine, herding cattle, sheep, andgoats and raising crops. LBK (Notenkopf) farmersalso settled in this region during the fifth millen-nium, pressing gradually eastward. Their settle-ments appeared in the upper valleys of the Dnestrand Prut Rivers at the end of the fifth millennium;these had a fully Neolithic economy, with domesticanimals, cereals, and other cultivated plants. Horsesare among the animals represented in faunal remainsin the forest steppe during the fifth millennium;these may have been wild or domestic or both andwere killed or reared for meat. The culture of theregion was predominantly pastoralist, and it is possi-

ble that horses began to be ridden for use in herdingdomestic stock and hunting or rounding up wild cat-tle and horses.

Away from the farming settlements the regionwas also inhabited by Mesolithic groups that com-bined hunting, fishing, and gathering with somestockraising, and probably followed a mobilelifestyle; similar communities stretched far to theeast. In the region between the Dnepr and the Donsettled communities with a mixture of hunting, fish-ing, and livestock rearing developed from the latesixth millennium, practicing a little cereal cultiva-tion and using pointed-based pottery, microliths,and polished stone tools (Dnepr-Donets culture).Distinctive cemeteries (Mariupol complex) havebeen found in this region and areas to the east; thesecontain collective inhumation burials scattered withochre and furnished with stone tools, boar’s tuskblades, and a variety of ornaments; some cemeteriesalso contained piles of skulls.

THE CARPATHIAN BASIN

Tisza In the earlier fifth millennium settlementsin the Carpathian basin grew in size and decreasedin number. Cattle were now the main domesticanimals raised, possibly for milk, and wild cattleand other animals were hunted. Some settlementsincluded buildings that may have served as ashrine, furnished with unusual material such as fig-urines, clay animal heads, and anthropomorphicvessels.

Tiszapolgár By 4500, however, settlements werebecoming smaller and more dispersed, often placedin elevated locations in the floodplains of the rivers.Emphasis turned to burial, with the appearance oflarge cemeteries as the probable focus of a numberof settlements, replacing earlier practices of burialwithin the settlement or in small associated ceme-teries. Within the cemeteries, the graves were care-fully laid out, often in rows and never overlapping,showing that they were marked in some way. As inthe Balkans, grave goods became more important,including prestige goods such as gold and copperornaments, long flint blades, and stone or coppershafthole axes.


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Mediterranean

WESTERN NEOLITHIC

During the sixth millennium in sites in southernFrance as far as the Loire valley and during the fifthmillennium in other inland regions of the central andwestern Mediterranean, domestic animals and plantsbegan to appear, often associated with Mesolithic-style flint tools and wild resources. The use of thelatter declined, and by 4500 in most regions hunter-gatherer communities had been replaced by settle-ments dependent mainly on farming, such as the largevillages in southern France and parts of Spainenclosed by ditches and palisades; ditched enclosurescontaining settlements continued in Italy. In southernSpain small hilltop settlements appeared, some sur-rounded by walls, with oval or rectangular huts. TheIberian interior was largely virgin territory whenfarming communities settled there, having apparentlybeen unoccupied since the end of the Glacial period.In contrast, the Po plain was home to conservativehunter-gatherers (Castelnovian) who hunted deer andwild boar and exploited aquatic resources; this wasone of the last regions to adopt agriculture. Here andin a number of other areas, some hunting and use ofother wild resources continued alongside agriculture.Moving with domestic herds and flocks between sea-sonal pastures (transhumance) replaced seasonalmovement to hunt wild herbivores.

In parts of northern Italy and in Alpine regions,lakeside villages of timber-framed houses developed,built on piles to counteract flooding; probably inhab-ited by descendants of Mesolithic people, these oftenshowed continuing exploitation of many wildresources as well as farming. Villagers in the eastwere influenced by their LBK neighbors, while thosein the west formed part of the Western Neolithicwith its ancestry in the Impressed Ware cultures ofthe Mediterranean. Exceptional preservation ofwooden objects and other perishable materials givesan unusually full picture of their lives; these objectsincluded canoes and fishing equipment, bows andharpoons for hunting, and agricultural tools, as wellas linen clothing, containers of birch bark and wood,food, fodder, and manure. Such settlements becamemore common in the fourth millennium.

Obsidian from four Italian island sources wasextracted and exchanged on an increasing scale.High-quality flint and stone were also exchanged aswas pottery, the latter probably as containers forsome desirable commodity. Many regional styles ofpottery developed, such as Chasseen in France andCortaillod in Switzerland, but these styles shared anumber of features, such as handles and round bases,and often they were undecorated. Copper began tobe smelted in southeast Spain (Almerian).

Temperate Europe

ATLANTIC ZONE AND NORTHERNEUROPE

Mesolithic Society In various regions of theAtlantic facade and northern Europe, such as south-ern Portugal and Armorica, the marked shift to con-centration on marine resources, initiated in the sixthmillennium, became more intensive in the fifth.Favorable locations, particularly in river estuarieswhere coastal and riverine resources intersected andcould often be combined with those of marsh and for-est edge, were home to often large sedentary commu-nities, their settlements marked by the vast shellmiddens that resulted from the exploitation of shell-fish. In Denmark (Ertebølle culture), where Meso-lithic settlement patterns have been intensivelystudied, the inhabitants lived for much of the year inthese large camps, and from them were able to obtaina rich variety of foodstuffs and other resources withina few hours’ walking distance. At some times of year,however, smaller groups from the community visitedmore distant locations, both elsewhere along thecoast and inland, to obtain resources such as stone fortools and furs for clothing. These were not only usedby the community that obtained them but alsoexchanged with neighboring groups; goods traveledlong distances as a result of many such exchanges.Offshore islands also provided resources, and the seayielded not only a great diversity of fish accessiblefrom inshore fishing but also sea mammals and seabirds and deep-sea fish such as cod. On the Atlanticfacade, deep-sea fishing promoted connectionsamong communities right along the coastline. This


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was reflected in the appearance of shared practices,for example, the placement of deer antlers in somegraves in Brittany and Scandinavia, and later probablyin the rapid development of similar variations on thecommon theme of funerary monuments. Ritual prac-tices may also have been developing in this period: anumber of Ertebølle objects, including polished stoneaxes, have been found in bogs, and it is assumed thatthese were votive deposits.

Group identity was probably of considerableimportance, and variations in the form of someeveryday items may have been used to denote andemphasize membership of a particular communityor regional group. In Denmark, for instance, suchgroupings have been detected at two levels: large-scale divisions on the basis of styles of combs, har-poons, and antler axes, possibly defining theterritory of a related group of communities, andsmaller scale variations in the shape of stone axesthat may correspond to individual territories. Aspopulation rose, the necessity of demonstratinggroup identity and territorial affiliation increased.This may be reflected in the large cemeteriesattached to a number of settlements. Distinct clus-ters of burials may represent separate clans orextended families. Practices varied: In Brittany onegrave at Hoëdic was lined with stones as were anumber at Téviec, where they were covered by smallmounds; at Vedbaek in Denmark some of the bodieshad been cremated, and there is evidence that mayalso represent exposure of the dead on a woodenstructure before final disposal. Bones seem to havebeen rearranged in some graves, and in some casesbones were separated from the rest of the skeletonand treated differently, kept in the settlement orburied in ritual deposits, for instance. The nests ofskulls at Ofnet in Germany may be an extremeexample of this practice.

Grave goods, generally tools, weapons, and par-ticularly ornaments, show some distinctions thatmay relate to status within the community; thisseems to have been largely on the basis of genderand age. Young adult males were frequently the mostrichly furnished, with weapons and personal orna-ments such as bear-tooth pendants. A few individu-als who were accorded special treatment may haveheld a special position such as that of shaman. Insome cases dogs were also buried, complete with

grave goods, an indication of the degree to whichthey were integrated into community life.

Cemeteries also provide evidence of apparentlywidespread violence and conflict. A number of indi-viduals buried in Mesolithic cemeteries had arrow-heads embedded in their bones. Burials at Skateholmin Sweden and at other sites also included many indi-viduals whose skulls had been fractured by heavyblows. Spanish rock engravings include some scenesthat can be interpreted as battles between two groupsarmed with bows and arrows.

Hunter-Gatherers and Farmers As farming be-came established as the main way of life in southernEurope, Mesolithic communities along the Atlanticcoasts of Iberia and France gradually adopted domes-tic animals and Neolithic artifacts such as polishedstone axes, grindstones, and pottery. Farther norththe Mesolithic communities of the North Sea coastalregions and the North European Plain similarlyacquired goods and technology from their farmingneighbors (LBK and Danubian II). Interconnectionsbetween Mesolithic groups (Ellerbek, Swifterbant) indirect contact with farmers in the south of the NorthEuropean Plain and those at a greater distance meantthat, although geographically isolated from the farm-ing settlements, by 4700 B.C. Ertebølle people werefamiliar with pottery and were making their own, inthe form of coarse vessels with a pointed base.

Between 5000 and 4500 the prosperous Mesolithiccommunities that had occupied the Tagus, Sado, andMira estuaries of southern Portugal abandoned theirtraditional way of life in favor of farming, a changereflected in their bones, analysis of which shows asteep decline in shellfish consumption. Mesolithicgroups in the mountainous regions of northernIberia, however, acquired animals, grain, and potteryfrom the farming communities with whom theycame into contact but continued their traditionalhunter-gatherer economy until the late fifth millen-nium. A similar picture holds good for other areas ofdense Mesolithic settlement along the Atlanticfacade and in northern Europe. Commodities andideas, and probably also some individuals as marriagepartners, were exchanged between Mesolithic andNeolithic communities, but food production was notadopted by the hunter-gatherers to any significantextent before 4000 B.C.


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BRITAIN

Late Mesolithic settlements in Britain, best knownfrom Scotland and Ireland, show a similar pattern toother areas of the Atlantic region, with a preferencefor coastal or estuarine locations and a mixed econ-omy in which both aquatic and land resources wereexploited, and there was movement to exploitresources in various locations at different times ofthe year. Woodlands were managed to create clear-ings attractive to hunted animals and to promote thegrowth of desirable vegetation such as hazel.

During the fifth millennium small numbers offarmers from the continent probably visited and set-tled in southern Britain, although traces of theirpresence are slight and their settlements elusive.Pottery, agricultural tools, domestic animals, andgrain were present in Britain in the later fifth millen-nium, however, and by 3900 B.C. farming communi-ties had spread widely in Britain, being establishedwell inland and as far north as the Shetland Islands.Often they had a mixed economy, growing crops,raising animals, hunting, and fishing. While thecrops and domestic animals were introduced fromthe European mainland and there seem likely tohave been some immigrants, many of the farmersmay have been Mesolithic people who had adoptedthe practices of agriculture.

CENTRAL EUROPE

Danubian II By 5000 or 4800 B.C. LBK settle-ments extended right across central Europe from theCarpathian basin in the south to the Paris Basin inthe west and into the forest-steppe east of theCarpathians. During the fifth millennium LBK set-tlements in northern France increased in numberand expanded over a wider area, including parts ofBrittany and Normandy, where contacts and proba-bly competition and conflict with the indigenouscoastal hunter-gatherer communities must haveoccurred, as well as the development of hybridgroups. Farming communities also appeared in theLow Countries. Although some further outwardexpansion took place into parts of the North Euro-pean Plain, high population densities of hunter-gath-erers in Scandinavia and the east Baltic regionprobably discouraged or prevented any farthernorthward expansion by LBK farmers, and ecologi-

cal factors such as poor soils and the northern cli-matic conditions may have been equally important indeterring them from advancing farther. Productivecontacts between farmers and hunter-gatherers canbe seen in the appearance of Neolithic stone axes inthe north and a unique find of a bow of Mesolithictype in a Danubian settlement. Furs and skins mayalso have been traded by the hunter-gatherers. Inaddition, hunting seems to have been of some impor-tance to the Danubian farmers, with an increase inthe bones of wild animals in many settlements.

After the rapid initial spread of LBK farmersacross Europe, expansion in this region in the fifthmillennium largely turned inward. While LBKfarming had been largely confined to loess soil andalong rivers, later farmers in the region also movedonto less easily worked soils and away from the rivervalleys, progressively filling in the huge region ofcentral Europe from northern France to theCarpathians. Settlements were now often located onhigher ground overlooking the valleys. The expan-sion of agriculture necessitated further forest clear-ance, although still only on a small scale.

While LBK had shown remarkable uniformity inits artifacts, the successor cultures, known collectivelyas Danubian II, developed different styles in their pot-tery (especially those known as Stichbandkeramik,Rössen, and Lengyel), and probably in other lessdurable artifacts, that must reflect the growth ofregional traditions as communities became well estab-lished, adapted to the local conditions, and developedtheir own distinctive identity in ever more populousregions. Influences from neighboring cultures werealso important in shaping these regional groups: in thesouth, the cultures of the Balkans, from whom theyacquired some copper objects; elsewhere the localMesolithic communities, including those of the Alpineregions. Skeletons showing signs of violent death pre-sent growing evidence of conflict toward the end ofthe LBK period when settlements were becomingmore numerous and areas more densely occupied.Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that settlement densityhad reached the point of putting pressure on land andresources by this stage. Fighting may have occurredbetween LBK and Mesolithic groups, or betweencommunities for reasons that remain a mystery.

Whereas the early settlers had built rectangularlonghouses, Danubian II longhouses now tended to


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be trapezoidal in shape, with the entrance in thewider end. Often this opened into an outer room,behind which was the main part of the house, sug-gesting notions of privacy were developing. In someregions the previously open and often dispersedLBK settlements began to be nucleated and sur-rounded by palisades, possibly suggesting a need fordefense, but also possibly to protect the crops grownin gardens attached to the houses from domesticand wild animals. Ditched enclosures, which nowbecame widespread, may also relate to conflict, espe-cially in the case of those, like Darion in southernBelgium, which contained longhouses. The major-ity, however, did not: it is thought that these mayhave been used to pen cattle or acted as meetingplaces for those living in the area, where activitiessuch as dancing or ceremonies may have taken place.Communal gatherings in such enclosures may havehad some ritual function, as is suggested by a rangeof deposits in their ditches, such as broken figurinesand fragmentary human remains.

EARLY MEGALITHS AND FUNERARYMONUMENTS

During the fifth millennium substantial burial mon-uments appeared in several areas of western Europe.

The earliest examples seem to have been in Brittany,a region where both communal burial and the use ofstone in grave construction had been known forsome centuries. In the west of Brittany passagegraves, consisting of a stone mound covering one orseveral burial chambers with an access passage, werebeing built by 4800–4500 B.C. Similarly early mega-liths were constructed in Iberia, mostly passagegraves in the southern regions of Alentejo andEstremadura, and simpler chambers in Galicia in thenorth. From the mid fifth millennium onward thepractice of erecting stone funerary monumentsgradually became widespread among communitiesalong the Atlantic facade, from southeastern Spainand southern Portugal to Scandinavia, beginning,for example, in northern Iberia around 4000 B.C., atthe time when farming communities developed hereout of local Mesolithic roots.

A geographically overlapping tradition of build-ing earthen funerary monuments (long barrows andlong mounds) began around 4700–4000 B.C. innorthern Europe. The mounds strongly resembleLBK longhouses in plan and details of constructionand may have originated in Kujavia in Poland. Onthe other hand, they may have arisen first in theCarnac region of Brittany, a region impinged uponto the east by later LBK settlers, where sometime


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2.5 An early megalith from Plauharmel in Brittany, France, which consists of a long mound covering aseries of passage graves (Figuier, Louis. Primitive Man. London: Chatto and Windus, 1876)

between 4700 and 4400 B.C. long mounds of earthor stone began to be constructed, some coveringsmall stone cists (stone boxes) with burials, and inti-mately associated with large menhirs (standingstones).

LATE NEOLITHIC(4200/4000–3000 B.C.)

During the fourth millennium important innova-tions brought major changes to the economy andway of life of prehistoric Europeans, promoting eco-nomic diversification, encouraging the exploitationof new terrain, intensifying international exchangenetworks, and in some areas supporting growingsocial inequalities.

The close of the fifth millennium saw furtherdevelopment of the process begun with the firstfarming settlements in the seventh millennium: thetransformation of Europe from a continent ofhunter-gatherers to one of farmers. From around4000 B.C. there was a marked change in northernand eastern Europe. Mesolithic communities thathad long been familiar with the products of farmingwhile pursuing their traditional hunter-gatherereconomy rapidly shifted to economies dominated byfarming. Agriculture also became the dominant wayof life in Britain from southern England to the Shet-lands in the far north.

Farming now also dominated the economies ofmore southerly regions of the Atlantic facade andthe interior of western and central Europe, whereforest clearance was beginning to make a significantimpact on the landscape, opening up land both forarable cultivation and for grazing domestic animals.From this period onward, farming became themainstay of the European economy, though wildresources, such as marine fish and lake plants, con-tinued to be important in some regions. In thenortheast, covered by boreal forest, Mesolithic lifecontinued little changed, although the people of theregion gradually adopted the idea of making pot-tery, manufacturing a coarse ware decorated with

comb and pitted designs; related groups occupiedan area stretching east to the Urals. While therewere now few purely hunter-gatherer communities,many farmers exploited some wild resources, andthe picture of European economies was a patchworkof different adaptations.

Across much of Europe, cemeteries, funerary mon-uments, and nondomestic enclosures came to play amore prominent role in society, often acting as territo-rial markers or foci for communities that were oftensmall and dispersed and whose settlements are elusive.In the north and west, megalithic tombs were becom-ing abundant, widespread, and extremely varied intheir forms and associated rites, though collective bur-ial was most common. In the southeast, a progressivetrend toward social complexity was reflected in grow-ing inequalities in the treatment of the dead, and someindividuals were buried with prestige goods.

While the personality and distinctiveness of dif-ferent regions and their cultures continued todevelop, contacts between groups both within andbetween regions ensured that innovations spreadwidely, being adopted and adapted as appropriate.Major Near Eastern innovations, including the plow,wheeled transport, possibly woolly sheep, and the useof animals for traction and transport, reachedEurope during the fourth millennium, some proba-bly via the Balkans while others may have been intro-duced by people from the steppe, where nomadicpastoralism was now becoming an established way oflife. Steppe incursions, marked by the appearance ofcharacteristic burials as far west as the HungarianPlain and by the introduction of the domestic horseto western regions, may have been partly responsiblefor the growth of defended settlements.

Population growth in areas that had been settledfor millennia led to the colonization of new terrain,including considerable forest clearance, and intensi-fied exploitation of lands already under cultivation.The plow (more accurately an ard, which broke thesoil but did not turn the sod), allowed more difficultsoils to be brought under cultivation, but moreimportant, enabled forest soils that had been perma-nently cleared, and therefore colonized by grasses,to be broken for cultivation. Larger herds, theirnumbers made possible by their secondary uses, pro-vided manure, which returned fertility to perma-nently cultivated ground. Oxen were used as draught


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Map 5. The further spread of farming to 3500 B.C.

animals for pulling carts and plows. Cattle, sheep,and goats were now being kept partly for their milk,a practice that may have originated earlier.

Increased reliance on cereals at the expense of meatmade it necessary to supplement the salt naturallyoccurring in the diet, and a number of sites started toproduce salt by evaporating saline water; blocks of saltwere among the goods that moved along the tradenetworks. Flint mining was also becoming a majorindustry to supply the growing demand for axes toclear woodland. Suitable stone was quarried or minedin many places such as England (e.g., Great Langdalestone ax factory) and their products widely traded.Highly prized attractive stone such as the banded flintfrom Krzemionki in Poland was exchanged over hun-dreds of miles. Such fine objects were often not usedfor functional purposes but as prestige goods, alongwith other prized goods and materials. Several majorcommunications networks were in operation, such asthe seaways of the Atlantic facade.

Metal objects were becoming more abundant andmore widespread, although metalwork was still usedgenerally for prestige items, including larger piecessuch as shafthole axes. The growing importance ofmetallurgy, dependent on ores that were not uni-formly distributed across the landscape, introduced anew element of inequality of opportunity betweencommunities, allowing some to grow more powerfulthan others on the basis of mining, trading, or workingcopper. An independent center of metalworkingdeveloped in Spain, and copper also began to beworked in Italy. Metal objects were widely traded fromthe Balkan-Carpathian region into other parts ofEurope, and the technology of extracting and workingmetal also gradually spread outward from the Balkans.

The Southeast

STEPPE PASTORALISTS

In the forest steppe groups of settled farmers raisingstock, fishing, and hunting (Sredny Stog) were nowwell established, using cord-decorated pottery andburying their dead in flat graves with a few gravegoods. Other groups in the same region constructedmore substantial graves lined with stone slabs and

furnished their dead with a richer array of gravegoods. Farther east between the lower Dnepr andthe Crimea similar mixed farmers and hunters(Lower Mikhailovka-Kemi Oba culture) built lowmounds over their dead; small pottery censers asso-ciated with these people may have been used forheating cannabis, a custom known in the region inlater times. All these groups shared the custom ofscattering ochre over their burials. Imports from themetallurgical centers in the Caucasus and theBalkans early in the fourth millennium stimulatedthe development of a local metallurgical industry inthe forest steppe during the later fourth millennium.

By around 3500 B.C. the inhabitants of the stepperegion seem to have adopted a largely mobilelifestyle: Settlements were rare and burials are theirbest-known remains. The few known settlements,such as Mikhailovka, were fortified with ditches andstone walls. The potential for cereal agriculture inthe steppe was limited, being restricted to river val-leys, whereas its grasslands, stretching far to the east,offered abundant grazing for animals. While agri-culture was practiced to some extent, stockbreeding,especially of caprines (including woolly sheep),seems to have been the mainstay of the economy.The horse, domesticated here during the fifth mil-lennium, enabled pastoralists and hunters in thisregion to access the steppe pastures, at first onlythose on the fringes of the forest steppe, but with theadvent of wheeled transport gradually beginning tomake use of the pastures of central Asia, transport-ing their possessions in wagons drawn by oxen; latefourth-millennium burials sometimes contain theremains of such wagons.

These steppe nomads (Yamnaya) buried theirdead in pits in the ground, often floored or lined withwood. Often these were covered by substantial bar-rows known as kurgans; ochre was often sprinkled onthe bodies, and in the most impressive male burialsthe grave goods included weapons, animal bones,sometimes sacrificed women, and horse-headedscepters, taken to be a symbol of authority and status.

THE SOUTHEAST AND THECARPATHIAN BASIN

Later Eneolithic Small groups of steppe pastoral-ists seem to have infiltrated the lands of their settled


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neighbors in the Balkans and the Carpathian basin.They are identified by their characteristic burials ofbodies in a flexed position scattered with ochre,sometimes with horse-headed stone scepters; somegraves were also marked by mounds. Steppe pas-toralists may have been responsible for introducingto Southeast and central Europe a number of inno-vations, including wheeled transport and the prac-tice of horse domestication; domestic horses hadspread from the steppe as far as central Europe by4000 B.C. Interactions between the nomads and set-tled farmers in the western Carpathian basin con-tributed to the rise of the Baden culture in southerncentral Europe from around 3500 B.C.

Relations between settled farmers and the intru-sive steppe pastoralists may have been less thanfriendly; local population growth may also havebeen putting pressure on resources and creating theneed for defense against neighbors, for fortified ordefensible settlements developed in the southeastfrom around 4200–4000 B.C. Promontories and hillsbecame favored places for settlement, and sites weregenerally smaller and more dispersed than before.Many tell settlements on the lower Danube wereabandoned, and in the eastern part of the region,particularly along its border with the forest stepperegion, the need for defense probably promoted thenucleation of regional settlement. Here some settle-ments, such as Dobrovody in Ukraine, were of mas-sive proportions, perhaps housing several thousandpeople, though it is not certain whether all thehouses within the settlement were simultaneouslyoccupied. These settlements were not apparentlyfortified, but it is thought that the continuous ring ofhouses themselves acted as a barrier to aggressors.Abundant artifacts that could be used as weapons,such as arrowheads, axes, and spears, underline thesuggestion of increased conflict.

The introduction of the ard allowed new land tobe opened up on river terraces and in the foothillsaway from the river plains where earlier settlementhad concentrated. Cultivation was extended ontopreviously uncultivated soils such as the plains andlower hillslopes of the Argolid. This process ofexpansion accelerated toward the end of the fourthmillennium, with increased forest clearance.

Growing distinctions were apparent in the ceme-teries. Grave goods differentiated men, with weapons,

tools, and copper objects, from women, with potteryand ornaments, but also some individuals were sin-gled out for more lavish provision of grave goods.Copper metallurgy was becoming more developedand more widespread, spreading into Greece, andproducts of the region were traded into areas farbeyond, such as those occupied by the makers of TRBpottery to the north. Pottery jugs and cups with straphandles, known right across the region in the laterfourth millennium, from the Carpathian basin to theAegean, also reflect the breadth of communications atthis time: They resemble silver and gold vessels in useat Troy in Anatolia.

The MediterraneanBy 4000 B.C. agricultural communities were wellestablished throughout the central and westernMediterranean, although much of the interiorplateau of Spain (meseta) was not settled until after3000 B.C. Settlements were found in a variety of ter-rains, on fertile plains, beside lakes or in marshland,and in uplands. As in other parts of Europe, this mil-lennium saw the adoption of the ard by manyMediterranean farming communities, allowing thespread of farming settlement, for example, in south-ern France. It also boosted occupation in the islandsof the western Mediterranean. In Italy and southernFrance animal husbandry was becoming increasinglyimportant, and the appearance of simple megalithsin the Pyrenees may reflect the development of pas-toralist communities in the region practicing trans-humance (the seasonal movement of livestockbetween different climatic regions).

In southern and central Italy and Malta plain pot-tery replaced the earlier painted wares (Diana cul-ture), while across the region from northern Italythrough France into Spain interrelated culturesmade a variety of generally undecorated wares withlug-handles (Lagozza, Cortaillod, Chasseen, Sepul-cros de Fosa). Trade increased in commodities suchas obsidian, fine flint, and stone for axes. Burials insome Spanish and Breton sites included beads of anattractive greenish mineral, callais (variscite), whichwas intensively mined at Spanish sites such as CanTintorer and perhaps in Brittany. The distributionof stone from various sources shows that routes


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through the Alps were in use, linking Italy withtransalpine Europe. From one Alpine pass betweenmodern Italy and Austria comes the frozen body ofone of Europe’s most famous inhabitants, the Ice-man “Ötzi,” who died here sometime around3300–3200 B.C. Possibly a pastoralist tending hisflocks in their summer pastures, he was wounded byan arrow and probably died while fleeing hisattacker. He was fully clad when found, giving a rarepicture of clothing, and was equipped with tools ofwood, stone, and copper; his preserved body givesan insight into contemporary health and diet.

In Spain, as in the Balkans, copper metallurgyhad begun before 4000 B.C. Italy and eastern Alpineregions now also saw the beginnings of copper met-allurgy, perhaps based on technology acquired fromthe adjacent Balkan region though perhaps indepen-dently developed. Here and in other regions, arsenicwas deliberately added to copper, or copper ore con-taining arsenic was selected, to produce an alloyharder than pure copper and therefore more usefulfor tools. The fact that the Iceman carried a metal axmay show that copper was not entirely reserved forprestige objects but was coming into use in daily life.

Burial practices became more diverse in thefourth millennium Mediterranean. In Italy someregions had simple graves containing single bodies;some preferred stone cists or graves surrounded by astone circle, while others in southern Italy createdrock-cut tombs (hypogea), a practice also followed inSardinia, Malta, and parts of France and Iberia. Themost elaborate were those of Malta, including thelabyrinthine Hal Saflieni Hypogeum, which seemslikely to have had a religious as well as a funeraryfunction. Burial in cists or trenches and cave burialswere popular in parts of Spain. Megalithic tombs,already widespread in the Atlantic regions of Europe,were also constructed in southern Spain, the Pyre-nees, central France, and the western Mediterraneanislands, as well as North Africa. These were often dif-ferent in form from the (also very diverse) Atlanticmegaliths: They included gallery graves in centralFrance and cists surrounded by stone circles in Sar-dinia and Corsica. Others, particularly in southernSpain, were clearly related to Atlantic styles, com-prising passage graves of various forms. In Maltaaboveground temples constructed of huge stoneblocks and with elaborate facades mirrored the struc-

ture of the subterranean hypogea. Many of thesetombs or graves held collective burials.

Temperate Europe

NORTHERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE

TRB From around 4200–4100 B.C. a new style ofwell-made pottery appeared, probably first in Poland,and rapidly gained popularity across a wide area, fromthe earliest farming communities in Scandinavia andthe North European Plain through the northern partof the region earlier occupied by Danubian farmers,from the Netherlands to the northern Ukraine.Known as TRB (Trichterrandbecherkultur—Funnel-Necked Beaker culture) from the shape of its mostcharacteristic form, it included a range of vesselsprobably for drinking mead or beer: funnel-neckedbeakers, collared flasks, and funnel-necked amphorae.TRB assemblages also generally included flint andstone axes, including some whose fineness or func-tionally impractical shape suggests they were likely tohave been prestige objects rather than merely tools.United by their characteristic artifacts, the peopleusing TRB material, however, also had regional dif-ferences in many aspects of their culture, such as bur-ial customs.

In the north they were acculturated Mesolithicpeople. Around 4200–4000 B.C. coastal communitiesin northern Europe shifted from a hunter-gathererway of life to one in which farming was growing inimportance, often using an ard in cultivation,though some groups inland seem likely to have con-tinued for some time to rely mainly on wildresources. Domestic cattle were kept, probablymainly for milk, with oxen as draught animals. Bylate TRB times domestic horses from the steppe hadmade their appearance here. Polished stone axes fortree felling and woodworking were widely distrib-uted in settlements and burial sites in Scandinaviaand the North European Plain and seem to be asso-ciated with an increase in grass pollen and a decreasein tree pollen, suggesting extensive forest clearance.Nevertheless fishing and hunting or trapping gameand fur animals were still practiced. Bog offerings,already known in Ertebølle times, continued: Pol-


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ished flint axes, amber jewelry, and pottery, presum-ably containing food offerings, were deposited.

Elsewhere in the TRB zone coastal and riverinesites were also preferred by the users of TRB pot-tery, as were well-drained sandy soils. Settlementswere now found not only in the main river valleysbut also in those of smaller tributary rivers. Theywere quite often large and rather dispersed, contain-ing a loose scatter of houses, pits, and working areas;there were also numerous small settlements. In someregions, such as Scandinavia, few settlements havebeen found. Round huts characterized some areaswhile others had long houses. The larger settle-ments were placed on higher ground, on theplateaus between rivers, and smaller settlementswere found both in river valleys and in upland loca-tions; the latter may have been camps occupied forhunting expeditions or during the summer monthswhen herds were taken to upland pastures. Theclearance of forest opened up grazing, allowing agreater emphasis on stock rearing.

Causewayed enclosures, large areas surroundedby interrupted ditches and probably palisades, whichhad appeared earlier in the Danubian area, nowbecame widespread; some were settlement sites,probably the focus of local regional settlement, whileothers probably served some communal purpose.Similar enclosures were built by Neolithic groups inEngland, France, and the Rhineland. Communalfeasting may well have been one of the functions ofthese enclosures, which seem to have served a cere-monial or ritual purpose as well as perhaps being thefocus for social gatherings of the people of a region.

Some TRB groups, including those in the previ-ous Ertebølle area, began to bury their dead inmegalithic tombs from about 3700 B.C., while thosein parts of Jutland and on the North European Plainfrom the Elbe to the Vistula practiced inhumationwithin a long earthen mound. Both frequently con-tained the collected bones of a number of individualswhose bodies had previously been exposed, thoughthere were many different funerary practices. Themegaliths here included dolmens (dysser) and pas-sage graves.

Good-quality flint for making axes and othertools was quite abundant in the North EuropeanPlain and Scandinavia and was extensively mined.The highest quality flint, for example, from the Pol-

ish site of Krzemionki, was traded over several hun-dred miles. Similar distances were traveled by otherprized materials, both within the TRB region andbetween it and adjacent cultural zones, such asMichelsberg to the west. Flint had been mined ear-lier, but production greatly increased to satisfyincreased demand. Stone and other commoditiescirculated in the form of raw materials, roughed-outobjects, and some finished goods. Perishable materi-als and goods must also have been exchanged. Cop-per from areas to the south beyond the Carpathiansalso entered the TRB exchange network; thisincluded shafthole axes. Trade and other communi-cations probably followed rivers, but over shorterdistances wheeled carts drawn by oxen were nowbeing used as is shown by the discovery of a carttrack beneath a TRB long mound.

Globular Amphora While TRB continued inScandinavia, around 3500 in much of central andeastern Europe TRB pottery was replaced by a typeknown as Globular Amphora after its characteristicbaggy spherical jars with suspension loops; decora-tion on these and other vessels sometimes includedcord impressions. Although like TRB GlobularAmphora pottery was associated with mixed farm-ing, pastoralism seems to have become increasinglyimportant; a number of seasonal camps have beenfound. Settlements tended to be smaller and, thoughthey were more numerous than before, overall pop-ulation density seems to have decreased.

The importance of cattle was emphasized by anumber of burials of cattle, a practice also found in afew late TRB contexts and in the Baden culture tothe south. Globular Amphora funerary practicesusually involved burials in twos, threes, or more, andoften the bodies were incomplete. They were gener-ally placed in cists or in flat graves, but in easternGermany many were also inserted into the earlierTRB passage graves. Burials were accompanied bypottery, flint axes, and animal bones (especially pigs)which may represent a funeral feast.

Mining of flint at sites such as Krzemionki con-tinued, and their products were distributed over afar wider area, Krzemionki flint now reachingaround 370 miles (600 kilometers) from its sourcecompared with around 110 miles (180 kilometers) inTRB times.


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SOUTHERN CENTRAL EUROPE

In the region to the south of TRB, the introductionof the ard greatly facilitated the task of bringing for-est soils under permanent cultivation. Forest clear-ance required an increasing number of stone andflint axes, procured mainly from TRB and Michels-berg mines and quarries to the north and west. Someof the stone axes may have been used in conflict;intercommunity violence became more common,with settlements more frequently located in defensi-ble situations such as plateaus between river valleysand furnished with defensive ditches and palisades.The strength of the defenses also increased throughtime, with more ditches and palisades being added.Some of the fortified settlements probably served asplaces of refuge or ceremonial sites for the inhabi-tants of the surrounding area. Long mounds coveredthe remains of some individuals, but often little traceof burial practices survives.

By around 3500 B.C. this region saw the emer-gence of the Baden culture, which spread north intosoutherly TRB regions and south into the Carpathianbasin. Houses become hard to detect, and it isthought that they were constructed with floor joistsinstead of posts, leaving little trace; such structuressurvive in the waterlogged lakeshore sites of theAlpine regions. Large-scale enclosures surrounded bysubstantial ditches and palisades sometimes with bas-tions may well have been settlements made up of suchhouses, now vanished; in parts of Bohemia this is con-firmed since here the house floors were sunk into theground, leaving evidence of densely packed villages.Influences from the contemporary cultures to thesoutheast promoted the continuing use of cemeteriesin the Baden region. Cups in the form of four-wheeled carts are known from burials.

WESTERN EUROPE

In northern France and the Rhineland a culturerelated to TRB flourished, characterized by the styleof pottery known as Michelsberg. This was alsoinfluenced by the cultures now established in west-ern Europe, such as Cortaillod in Switzerland andChasseen in France. In eastern Switzerland the Pfynculture and other TRB-related groups developed.There was a considerable expansion of settlement in

Alpine regions, where lakeside settlements werecommon. Michelsberg sites are found on rivers andlakes. The occurrence of sites at different elevationsindicates pastoral transhumance, with summermovements to higher pastures and winters in vil-lages at lower levels; evidence from the Swiss lakevillages indicates that the animals were stall-fed overthe winter. Like TRB, Michelsberg people exploitedboth domestic and wild resources: The Swiss Lakevillages give a particularly rich picture of the rangeof foods in use. Also like TRB, flint mines and stonequarries were becoming increasingly important.

The most complete information on domestic lifein the Neolithic period comes from a number oflakeshore sites, particularly in Switzerland but alsoin France, where waterlogging has preservedorganic material, including many linen textiles. Vil-lages consisted of a number of small rectangularwooden houses, sometimes built on piles to raisethem above flood level, which probably housednuclear families. Food remains show that the inhab-itants raised cereals, pulses, and some legumes, keptanimals, fished and fowled on the lake, and gatheredlocal wild plants foods such as apples and waterchestnuts. They made clothing from woven cloth ofreeds, linen, and, from around 3000 B.C., probablyof wool, and tools of wood, bone, stone, and pottery.

ATLANTIC EUROPE

By the early fourth millennium farming becameestablished as the main way of life in the regionaround the Atlantic coast, from Portugal andnorthwest Spain via France and western Britain toScandinavia, but the people in this region fre-quently continued to exploit marine resources,thus also maintaining and intensifying seabornelinks between communities. The diversity of theirpottery and other artifacts and the variationswithin their economies were offset by shared prac-tices of which the most obvious was the building ofmegalithic monuments. This had begun in thefifth millennium in Brittany and Iberia, and itbecame widespread along the Atlantic facade inthe fourth and early third millennia, apparentlyacting as a very concrete and visible statement of acommunity’s identity and ancestral rights to theirterritory, and probably reflecting reverence for the


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ancestors. The majority of these were tombs,although there were some megalithic structureslacking a funerary purpose.

While a variety of funerary practices were associ-ated with these monuments, they were generally com-munal graves in which funerary remains accumulated;


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Map 6. Neolithic monumental tombs

different local practices governed whether all mem-bers of the community were interred in these mon-uments, and if not, who were selected for burial;how their bodies or excarnated bones werearranged; and what, if any, grave goods were alsoplaced there. Often the megaliths were enlarged orrestructured at various times in the course of theirperiod of use, and the practices associated withthem changed.

Major concentrations of megalithic tombs werebuilt in the earlier fourth millennium in southernSpain, southern Portugal around the Tagus estuary,Brittany, Ireland, Wales, western England, westernand northern Scotland, and Denmark. Many ofthese were varieties of passage grave: a chamberedtomb with an access passage, generally within a largestone or earthen mound. Many of the monumentshad geometric or other designs carved on theirstones or on associated objects, standing stones, orplaques. Stone plaques and small standing stonesalso sometimes bore anthropomorphic carvings.Axes were a common design in many areas, tying inwith their symbolic or prestige use. The trade instone axes reached considerable proportions: Forexample, the Sélèdin quarry in Brittany may havebeen producing around 5,000 axes per year, whichwere traded for several hundred miles along thecoasts and inland along the Loire.

From around 3800 B.C. long mounds were super-seded in Brittany by passage graves, and a number ofthe menhirs that had accompanied the long moundswere reused in the construction of these tombs,sometimes being broken into pieces before reuse. Byaround 3500 B.C. passage graves had ceased to beconstructed in Brittany, although their use for burialoften continued for centuries.

BRITAIN

Communal burial practices were followed in Britain,with considerable regional variation. In the east andin lowland Britain wooden mortuary chambershoused the remains of the dead, under earthen bar-rows that were generally rectangular or trapezoidalin form, though in some regions a round barrow wasused. In contrast in western Britain, including Ire-land, stone chamber tombs were constructed as partof the Atlantic tradition. The two modes of burial

were both found in the southwest. The differentmonuments, of which there were a variety of forms,generally contained the remains of many individuals,often deposited in the tomb after the bodies hadbeen defleshed, probably by exposure. In someplaces this may have taken place on wooden struc-tures within timber enclosures; in other cases thedead were probably exposed within earthworks suchas the long ditched and fenced mortuary enclosuresof Scotland.

Funerary monuments were often modified dur-ing the course of their use; other nonfunerary mon-uments were also constructed, such as cursuses (seepage 262) and bank barrows. The construction ofboth funerary and nonfunerary monuments was afocus of communal effort, reflecting the status andpower of a community; the ritual activity involved inconstructing a monument or an addition to it mayhave had as much as or more significance than thefinished monument.

Parts of Britain (England, Northern Ireland,probably Scotland) also saw the construction fromaround 4000 B.C. of causewayed enclosures, circularareas demarcated by rings of ditches interrupted bycauseways, for various purposes, including the peri-odic congregation of communities who perhapsspent most of the year in small groups scatteredacross the landscape. At Hambledon in Dorset aseries of causewayed enclosures included one thatprobably contained a permanent settlement. Of theother enclosures at Hambledon one was a necropolisin which the dead were exposed prior to burialwithin the associated chambered tomb. In the third,communal activities seem to have taken place andlarge numbers of cattle may have been periodicallycorralled or protected.

Early settlement sites are far less well known thanthe monuments, being constructed of perishablematerials and difficult to discover; often traces ofthese buildings are likely to have been removed byintensive later agricultural activity. Most knownhouses were small; one exception was the substantialstructure at Balbridie in Scotland, which resembleda Danubian longhouse in its layout. Later settle-ments, after c. 3500 B.C., became more substantialand show an expansion of farming onto soils such asgravel river terraces, a development facilitated bythe introduction of the ard. Occasionally traces sur-


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vive of land divisions: for instance, walls demarcat-ing areas of land on Shetland, dated 3200–2800, anddry-stone walls enclosing fields in Ireland, datedaround 3500 B.C. The use of stone instead of woodin Orkney has meant the preservation of several lateNeolithic settlements such as Barnhouse and SkaraBrae. Here dwelt a community of a few dozen peo-ple, living on agriculture and marine resources, andfurnishing their intercommunicating houses withstone-built hearths, beds, and dressers.

From the Somerset Levels in western Englandcomes uniquely preserved evidence of the Neolithicpeople’s skillful management of woodland, includingcoppicing, a glimpse of practices that must havebeen far more widespread at the time. Among otherthings, the timber was used to build a sophisticatedtrackway across boggy ground around 3800 B.C.

A stone ax deposited as an offering beside the trackwas made of jadeite from Switzerland. Contactsbetween groups by sea and by river enabled suchdesirable materials to be exchanged over a wide area.Flint was mined, stone quarried, and potter’s clay dug,poor material being used only locally while better-quality materials were exchanged. Prominent amongthe stone tools were those used for felling trees andworking wood, including flint axes. Nevertheless,many of the tools were too fine or fragile for actual useand must have had a symbolic or prestige function.

CHALCOLITHIC(C. 3200/3000–2200 B.C.)

Permanent forest clearance in the fourth millenniumled in many areas to soil degradation, particularly byerosion, and the replacement of regenerating sec-ondary forest by permanent grassland. This wasreflected in the third millennium in the decline, inmany areas, of pigs, which required forest browse,and an increase in cattle, sheep, and goats, whichcould take advantage of the increased pasturage.While most earlier garments had been made from

leather, the introduction of woolly sheep increasedthe production of textiles, previously made in smallquantities from flax or other plant fibers. Spindlewhorls and loom weights became common domesticartifacts. Pastoralism may have become of increasedimportance in mixed farming economies, and theremay have been a shift to animal husbandry at theexpense of arable agriculture. In many areas settle-ments are hardly known, suggesting impermanentoccupation and possibly a mobile economy.

Population growth, coupled with land differen-tials and the limited distribution of key resources,promoted competition within and among communi-ties and the need for resource management. Morewidespread signs began to appear of ranking withincommunities and within regions, and of intercom-munity conflict and defense. These were reflectedparticularly in the different funerary treatment ofindividuals, with single burial progressively displac-ing the earlier rite of collective burial across west-ern, central, and Mediterranean Europe, and thedevelopment of defended settlements, though com-petition was probably largely expressed by accumu-lating and displaying prestige objects and creatingmonuments rather than by armed conflict.

The practice of single burial reflects a consider-able ideological shift, emphasizing the individualrather than the community as had been the case inearlier collective burials. This may well reflect amajor socioeconomic change, with ties to land(place) becoming less important than ties to prop-erty (possessions), which were more susceptible tobecome vested in individuals. Property includedboth prestige goods, such as imported finestonework and copper artifacts, and cattle, whichcould be built up into large herds but could also berustled, giving plentiful scope for intercommunityconflict.

The need for prestige goods probably underliesthe widespread adoption of new styles of pottery,particularly Corded Ware and Beakers, which wereassociated with other distinctive artifacts, such as bat-tle-axes, archery equipment, and ornaments of metaland other exotic materials. Metal artifacts spread tomost parts of the continent during the third millen-nium and copper and gold metallurgy were widelyadopted; some Corded Ware groups may have prac-ticed a limited amount of copper metallurgy, but in


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Map 7a. Later farming communities


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Map 7b. Flint mining and the spread of metallurgy

western Europe the spread of metalworking wasoften associated with Beaker pottery. Horses, origi-nally domesticated in the east and introduced intoSoutheast Europe by steppe people, were now beingdomesticated from local wild herds by the people insouthern central Europe. From there they spreadwidely within the rest of Europe, being found, forinstance, in Scandinavia in the late TRB or earlyCorded Ware period and in western Europe and theMediterranean in Beaker contexts.

Before 3000 B.C. regional networks had operated,for example, by sea along the Atlantic facade, linkingcommunities within a region, but with relatively fewlinks to other regions; although a considerable vol-ume of some goods, such as stone and flint axes, hadcirculated within these regions, the range of materi-als being traded had been relatively small. The thirdmillennium saw a transformation in the scale andspread of trading networks across Europe and in therange of materials and goods that were exchanged.

Southeast

GREECE

The third millennium saw a great expansion of set-tlement in southern Greece. Here the introductionof woolly sheep brought significant changes to thepattern of agriculture, where the keeping of sheephad previously been limited and mainly for meat.Their use for wool and for milk, from which cheesecould be made, increased their importance; land pre-viously used for growing flax could now be used forother crops, while sheep made more extensive use ofthe rough grazing areas unsuitable for cultivation.Grapevines and olives may also now have beengrown (although some scholars believe these werenot cultivated until the second millennium); thesecrops used hillside land unsuitable for cereals orpulses, and their labor requirements did not conflictwith those of arable agriculture. They provided oil,dried fruits, and wine, commodities that could bestored and traded, as could wool and woollen textiles.

Some larger settlements began to emerge, thefocus of their immediate region. While the sur-rounding settlements were farms and agricultural

villages, these centers also served other functions:They were the home of local leaders and places ofstorage for wool, grain, and other agricultural pro-duce; they offered facilities for processing grain andprovided an outlet for trade, reflected in the greatincrease in imported material. By the later thirdmillennium these centers were becoming smalltowns of substantial well-built houses, sometimesfortified; often they included a large building orpalace, such as the House of Tiles at Lerna insouthern Greece. Industry, such as the productionof obsidian blades, was focused in these settlements.The majority were near the coast, reflecting theincreasing importance of sea contacts. At the sametime many unoccupied or sparsely settled islandswere colonized and others, such as Crete, saw aconsiderable population increase.

Metallurgy developed, flourishing particularly inthe Cyclades, where copper and silver ores were avail-able. The Cycladic Islands at this time also producedsculptured stone figures of sophisticated simplicity.Seaborne contacts were already well developed in ear-lier times, but the need for metal ores coupled withthe topography of southern Greece, where land travelwas far more difficult than communications by seaand where harbors and anchorages were plentiful,further promoted sea travel and the building of shipsduring the third millennium. Western Anatolia(including Troy), the islands of the Aegean, andsouthern Greece became a closely linked region inwhich innovations and materials circulated; throughAnatolia this region was in contact with the civilizedworld of the Near East. The Cyclades, strategicallylocated between Anatolia and the Greek mainland,benefited particularly from the international trade.

THE BALKANS AND CARPATHIANS

Toward the end of the fourth millennium there wasa decline in metalworking in Southeast Europe thatprobably reflects pressure on the supplies of easilyworked ores, which eventually became exhausted.Some late fourth-millennium artifacts from theBaden culture of the Carpathian region were madeof the more difficult-to-work sulfide ores, whichwere relatively abundant in central Europe andwhich began to be worked in some quantity in theearly Bronze Age.


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In the early third millennium small numbers ofsteppe pastoralists (Pit Grave culture) settled in theBalkans and the Carpathian basin, creating hybridcultures in some cases. Their presence was markedby the appearance of their characteristic burials inpits, often containing a wooden chamber, under kur-gans (barrows); these often contained horses andwarrior equipment. The use of round barrows andwooden mortuary chambers was adopted by localpeople and gradually spread from there into otherparts of Europe. Incursions from the steppeoccurred periodically and may have caused the aban-donment of settlements in some parts of SoutheastEurope, the strong fortification of others, and amove toward greater emphasis on pastoralism in theeconomy of the local communities (Ezero, Cotofeni,Vucedol, Schneckenberg, Karanovo VII).

Temperate Europe

CENTRAL AND NORTHERN EUROPE

Corded Ware and Battle-Axes In the last cen-turies of the fourth millennium a new complexemerged somewhere in the old TRB region fromJutland to eastern Poland and spread widely in theearly third millennium, eventually extending fromFinland in the north to Switzerland in the south andfrom the Netherlands in the west as far east asMoscow. This complex, known as the Corded Wareculture (Single Grave culture in Scandinavia; PFB orProtruding Foot Beaker culture in the Netherlands),is seen by some scholars as intrusive and is linked bythem to movements of pastoralists ultimately fromthe steppe. Others point to local antecedents formany features of the culture and see the adoption ofinnovations as a reflection of new social demands.Few Corded Ware settlements have been found, andthe culture is best known from burials, especially ofmales, under round barrows, furnished with beakersand amphorae decorated with cord impressions andsometimes small objects of copper, arrowheads,boar’s tooth pendants, and stone “battle-axes.” Thebodies were placed in a flexed position, men gener-ally on their right side, women on their left, alsoaccompanied by cord-decorated pottery and some-

times ornaments. Not all burials were covered bymounds; in some cases the original mounds havebeen removed by later agriculture, but some mayhave been flat graves from the start.

The battle-axes are heavy stone shafthole axeswith a flared blade, seemingly imitating the coppershafthole axes of the adjacent Carpathian and South-east European zone; it is uncertain whether they weresuitable for wielding in battle, but they were likely tohave been prestige items. Cord-decorated pottery wasa characteristic of the steppe region, as was singleburial under a mound; such burials were known as farnorthwest as the Carpathian basin, where they proba-bly represent the remains of small numbers of steppeinvaders or settlers. Single burial was also the long-standing means of disposal among the farming com-munities of Southeast Europe and had for somecenturies been associated there with status differen-tials expressed in associated grave goods. In northernand central Europe the rite of single burial is likely tohave been adopted as a way of signifying the authorityand status of the leaders who were emerging inincreasingly hierarchical societies. The beakers, han-dleless vessels holding about a liter of liquid, may alsohave played a part in the distinction of the elite mem-bers of society; they may have held alcoholic drinks orpossibly a brew containing cannabis, which was prob-ably already being used by steppe communities.

The burials also contained the remains of ani-mals. From these and the rare settlements it is clearthat cattle and sheep and goats were increasinglyimportant and pigs far less so; horses were also kept.The paucity of settlements has been interpreted bysome as an indication that mobile pastoralism wasthe way of life of the Corded Ware communities,another possible link with the steppe communities.Although a shift toward pastoralism may have takenplace in some areas, mixed farming was probablypracticed in many areas, and there was considerableregional variation: For instance, Corded Ware isknown from some of the Swiss lakeside villages, withtheir mixed farming economy in which wildresources still played an important part; was madeby farmers in Lithuania; and was also used by othercommunities along the Baltic coasts for whommarine mammals were a major part of the economy.The few known settlements contained square or rec-tangular houses; in some areas settlements were


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smaller and more scattered than previously, while inother regions such as southeast Poland the popula-tion, which was declining overall, was concentratedin a smaller number of settlements that were largerthan before. For example, Bronocice in southernPoland housed half the population of its region.

Corded Ware continued to be popular in Scandi-navia when areas farther south adopted Beaker pot-tery. It also continued on the North European Plainand eastward into the edge of the steppe region.

WESTERN EUROPE

Iberia and Southern France The Tagus estuaryin southern Portugal was able to support a densepopulation since it combined extensive fertile soilsfor agriculture with access to abundant marineresources. From around 3200 B.C. this region sawthe building of a number of large fortified settle-ments such as Zambujal and Vila Nova de São Pedro(VNSP culture) with massive stone walls with bas-tions. Defense seems unlikely to have been the mainreason for constructing these substantial forti-fications, which were periodically enhanced by theaddition of further layers of stone; status and inter-community competition in ostentation seems amore likely explanation. Megalithic passage graveswere constructed by these communities around thesettlements. These housed collective burials andrich funerary offerings, including decorated plaquesmade of schist.

Similar fortified settlements were also built inAlmeria, another region with substantial passagegraves, notably at Los Millares, the most substantialsettlement of the region (Millaran culture). A widevariety of native metals and metal ores, copper, sil-ver, alluvial gold, and tin, were available in Iberia.During the later fourth and earlier third millen-nium, considerable amounts of copper were in usein southern Iberia, used for small objects like flataxes, chisels, daggers, and arrowheads. Tradethroughout the third millennium along the Atlanticfacade brought prestige materials such as metals,ivory, ostrich eggshells, and callais to centers ofprosperity such as the Tagus estuary, Almeria, andBrittany.

At much the same time, what were perhaps forti-fied settlements began to be built in parts of south-

ern France at sites such as Lébous and Boussargues.These consisted of drystone enclosures of wallsincorporating circular or apsidal structures with cor-belled roofs. These have been interpreted as bas-tions on a defensive wall, but are perhaps moreconvincingly seen as huts around the periphery of anenclosure in which animals were kept. These proba-bly provided seasonal housing for shepherds grazingtheir flocks in upland summer pastures. Other,unenclosed, settlements were also known as well ascave dwellings. Caves might also house collectionsof burials, and many dolmens simples (stone cists cov-ered by round cairns) were built on the limestoneplateaus of southern France.

Beakers The fashion for cord-decorated potteryseen in the Corded Ware culture was matchedslightly later and farther west by the spread ofBeaker wares, possibly developed from or inspiredby Corded Ware vessels and first appearing in thelower Rhine delta. Beakers had a rounded body anda long, slightly outward-sloping neck (inverted bell-shaped) and were decorated with horizontal zones ofincised or impressed geometric designs, includingcord impressions. Analyses of residues within thebeakers suggest they were used for drinking alcohol,probably a form of mead with a flavoring of herbs orfruit, perhaps a socially significant ritual at the time.Beakers are known particularly from single burials,especially of males. As well as the beaker itself, theseburials contained a package of other distinctive arti-facts, including equipment related to archery, suchas barbed and tanged flint arrowheads and stonewristguards; personal ornaments of exotic materials,such as sheet gold appliqués for clothing, belt buck-les, and V-perforated buttons, often of jet; tangeddaggers of flint or copper; and other small copperobjects including awls.

The earliest Beakers, which had decoration overthe whole vessel (AOO—All-Over Ornamented),began to be made in the lower Rhine region around2800 B.C. These were often found with battle-axes,fine daggers of Grand Pressigny flint, and amberbeads. AOO beakers became common in the north-ern part of western Europe, in the Rhine valley, theNetherlands, and parts of Britain and France. Ataround the same time a distinctively different type ofBeaker vessel, known as the Maritime Bell Beaker,


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decorated with thin horizontal bands often of her-ringbone combed designs, began to be made, possi-bly evolving in the Tagus region in southern Iberia.Maritime Beakers subsequently became popularalong the Atlantic seaboard, especially in Iberia andFrance, but were known as far as the middle Rhineand reached the Netherlands by 2500. Both AOO

and Maritime Beakers were widely used in theperiod c. 2600–2300 B.C. Within a few centuries,various styles of Beaker vessels, along with the restof the Beaker package of single burial and distinctivegrave goods, were in use over a wide region includ-ing much of Britain, western and southern France,Iberia, and parts of North Africa, as well as Sicily,Sardinia, Switzerland, and parts of north and centralItaly, where some burials contained horse remains,and eastern regions as far as the Carpathians. TheBeaker assemblages were spread via both sea andland routes.

Some scholars believe that the Beaker packagewas spread by actual immigrants or by traders insearch of desired materials, while others argue thatthey represent an ideology and set of status symbolsthat were readily taken up by the emerging leadersof increasingly hierarchical communities. Adoptionof the package was eclectic: For instance, in Irelanda few Beaker pots were associated with the begin-ning of copper-working, but Beaker burial practiceswere not adopted; in Brittany, early Beaker vesselswere succeeded by status symbols developed out oflocal traditions; while in Britain, the Beaker packagewas initially adopted in eastern England (an areawith links to the Low Countries) and only laterspread to other parts of the country where other tra-ditions had been developing. In some regionsBeaker practices were adopted wholesale andmarked a sharp break with earlier traditions. In oth-ers there was some continuity: For example, finalburials in some megalithic tombs contained Beakermaterial. Settlements belonging to the makers ofBeaker pottery are elusive, and it has been suggestedthat they led a relatively mobile way of life, probablyassociated with pastoralism, though probably, likeCorded Ware, Beaker material was used by commu-nities practicing many economic strategies.

Metallurgy, Elites, and Trade Although the earli-est Beaker burials in the Rhineland lacked metal-work, in many areas, such as Britain, Beaker potswere associated with the introduction of copper met-allurgy. In southern Iberia a well-established metalindustry existed before the appearance of Beakers,and this region may have been the source of the met-allurgical technology that spread through westernEurope during the third millennium. The massive


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2.6 The contents of a Beaker grave from Cul-duthel, Invernessshire, Scotland. The burial wasaccompanied by a beaker, an archer’s wristguard,eight barbed and tanged flint arrowheads, a stonestrike-a-light, an amber bead, and a belt ring.(Drawing by Audrey McIntosh, from material inthe National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

Iberian fortified sites such as Zambujal continued inuse, perhaps as the home of the evolving local elite,whose rich burials were still to be found in the localmegalithic tombs. The Millaran culture in southeast-ern Spain may have begun cultivating vines andolives at this time and may also have constructed sim-ple dams for floodwater farming. The supply ofimported luxury materials such as gold, copper, ivory,and callais increased in the Beaker period as demandby local elites grew to feed their need for prestigegoods to display their status; power was demon-strated by the ability to control and manipulate thesupply of such materials and competition betweencommunities was expressed and achieved by suchimports. Increased use of gold was reflected in theappearance of new Beaker jewelry such as basket-shaped earrings and sheet gold ornaments for cloth-ing. Some regions such as the Tagus estuary andBrittany were centers supported by extensive fertileland; others such as Galicia benefited from theirposition on the communications routes to acquireprestige materials. The extent of international tradeis shown by the fact that the products of a Breton axfactory around Quimper imitated the stone battle-axes made in northern Europe at this time. Theattractive honey-colored flint from the Grand Pres-signy mines was used to make long blades and dag-gers and was also traded in the form of cores, beingdistributed deep into northern and central Europeand being buried in single graves with AOO beakersor battle-axes. The sea and rivers such as the Loireprovided the main arteries for trade. Brittany was atrade crossroads, where the Loire route from theRhineland and the Low Countries intersected withthe Atlantic sea routes. The first appearance ofhorses in Iberia and Britain was also associated withthe Beaker complex.

Copper metallurgy was by now well establishedin Sicily and the Italian mainland. Tuscany, whichhad good local sources of copper ore, saw the devel-opment of a metal industry whose productsappeared in the local Gaudo graves. Copper wasused particularly for daggers and jewelry. Othermaterial in circulation in Italy reflects contacts withthe Aegean; in Sicily this included strap-handledpottery vessels imitating Aegean metal cups, and inthe Gaudo region these contacts may have beenbehind the beginning of vine and olive cultivation.

Megalithic Developments In the later fourthmillennium a new type of megalithic tomb, thegallery grave (allée couvert), began to be built in Brit-tany, and the practice spread along the Loire andGaronne into other parts of France, including theParis Basin (SOM—Seine-Oise-Marne—culture).Gallery graves and their variants were megalithicchambers of rectangular form, where chamber andentrance passage were merged. Some were coveredby a mound; others may not have been. They stillcontained collective burials, but in general the asso-ciated material was less impressive than that foundin the passage graves. The inland areas of France,which had neither large areas of agricultural landnor mineral wealth, remained outside the area thatadopted the Beaker package.

Rockcut tombs (hypogea), characteristic of someMediterranean regions, were also constructed in theChampagne region of France, and these and otherburial types known in the fourth millennium contin-ued in use in many regions of the Mediterranean.Now, however, there were richly furnished individ-ual burials, such as one of a man in the Italian(Rinaldone) hypogeum of Ponte San Pietro who wasaccompanied by the apparently sacrificed body of awoman and numerous grave goods, suggestinggrowing social inequalities. The striking Maltesetemples and hypogea continued in use until around2500 B.C.

By the late third millennium collective burial inmegaliths was coming to an end over much of west-ern Europe, ceasing in most French passage andgallery graves around 2200 B.C., when single burialcame into vogue. Well before this, however, a num-ber of megalithic tombs had been deliberately putout of commission, for instance, by blocking theirentrances with rubble. In much of Britain and Ire-land single graves became the norm from the laterthird millennium, associated with various styles ofdecorated pottery, including Beakers.

In Britain new monuments began to be con-structed from the late fourth millennium, largelythough not completely replacing megalithic tombsas the focus for community ritual. Henges, circularsettings of wood or stone enclosed by a bank andinternal ditch, began to be built, apparently first innorthern Scotland, whence they spread throughmuch of Britain, culminating in the elaborate stone


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version at Stonehenge, which went through a num-ber of reconstructions along increasingly elaboratelines. Their purpose is still unknown, but it is likelythat ceremonies of some nature, probably religious,were conducted there. Henges were associated witha new type of pottery, elaborately decorated, knownas Grooved Ware, which was associated with ritualsites throughout the third millennium. A substancefound in one vessel, black henbane, may have beenused to induce trances. Grooved Ware is also associ-ated with a few elaborate passage graves constructedfrom around 3300 B.C., after most passage graveshad gone out of use. These had a substantial roundmound covering a very long passage leading to acentral chamber of sophisticated construction. Theywere confined to eastern Ireland, northern Wales,and Orkney. Late in the millennium western Irelandalso saw the construction of wedge tombs, a simpletype of gallery grave; these continued in use until atleast 1200 B.C.

Circles of standing stones were erected in someparts of Britain. Recumbent stone circles, known inparts of Scotland, had a distribution that contrastedwith that of henges. Alignments and avenues ofstones were constructed in Britain and in Brittany,particularly at Carnac. Various studies suggest thatthe standing stones may have had an astronomicalconnection; the rare developed passage graves, suchas Maes Howe and Newgrange, also have links withkey astronomical events, such as the rising of the sunat the midwinter or midsummer solstice.

In some places a variety of monuments were con-structed in association, forming a “ritual landscape,”of which Stonehenge and Carnac are probably thebest known. While megalithic tombs had belongedto individual communities, the ritual landscapesbeing created from the late fourth millennium wereon a larger scale and less numerous, and must haveunited the efforts of a number of communities,reflecting a change in the organization of society.This can be seen clearly in Mainland, Orkney, wherefor the majority of the fourth millennium the islandwas divided into small territories, each with its ownmegalithic tomb; in the early third millennium thesewere replaced as the focus of communal building bya large and centrally located complex, including theimpressive developed passage grave of Maes Howe,stone circles, henges, and standing stones. Other rit-

ual landscapes included those of Stonehenge andAvebury. These remained the focus for ritual andcommunal activity for centuries despite changingpractices: For instance, there are many Bronze Agemounds around Stonehenge.

THE BRONZE AGE(C. 2300/2200–1000/700 B.C.)

Early Bronze Age2200–1800 B.C.The technology of alloying copper with tin to makebronze was introduced to Greece, via Anatolia, fromthe Near Eastern world, where bronze had been inuse since around 3000 B.C. Bronze manufacture,however, was probably developed independently incentral Europe in the mid-third millennium, usingBohemian tin, and in Britain using tin from Corn-wall. Use of the new alloy gradually spread acrossEurope, reflecting its strength and versatility com-pared to pure copper or copper-arsenic alloy. Manyregions, however, continued to use copper alloyedwith arsenic, a type of bronze that was stronger andmore easily cast than pure copper.

By the end of the third millennium the growingdemand for metal ores throughout Europe was hav-ing a marked effect on both the directions and inten-sity of trading networks. These were influenced bythe rarity of tin and by changes in the types of cop-per ore exploited; easily smelted oxide and carbonateores were in short supply by the Early Bronze Age,and attention was being turned to more difficult sul-fide ores. The principal European sources of tin layalong the Atlantic facade, an area also rich in othermetals; tin was also available from the Erzgebirge(Ore Mountains), and copper sources in the moun-tains of central Europe were exploited. The south-east probably had access to Near Eastern or steppesources of tin. The bronze-using cultures of Europe


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Map 8a. Bronze Age trade and industry


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Map 8b. Bronze Age Europe

came to depend to a considerable extent on Atlanticmetals, creating closer and more organized tiesbetween the different regions of Europe.

A marked contrast had developed between theway of life in the southeast, where farming had beenestablished for many millennia—large settlementswere numerous, and land ownership was probablythe main reflection of prosperity—and the areas tothe north and west of the Carpathians, where,although arable agriculture was economically impor-tant, settlements were generally small, stock rearingwas a major focus, and livestock may have beenregarded as the main repository of wealth. Forestclearance continued, with many regions becomingpermanently deforested. These included uplandsthat had begun to be settled during the third millen-nium. In some areas, such as Dartmoor in southwestEngland, traces of extensive field systems and landdivisions marked by ditches, walls, fences, andhedges survive, with patterns of small cultivatedfields set around small settlements and larger enclo-sures for pasturing animals.

Social and economic divisions in society werebecoming more marked. New materials and increas-ing social complexity promoted the developmentof some economic specialization. Some individuals,particularly metallurgists, now engaged at leastpart-time in craft activities, and mining and trademay now also have been conducted by specialists.In addition, some specialist groups may have begunto emerge, notably pastoralists who adopted a moremobile lifestyle, whether exploiting seasonal pas-tures at different altitudes around and in mountainsor the abundant grazing available in the steppe.Wealth and power were becoming concentrated inthe hands of a few individuals in the community,and their status was expressed through visible andostentatious use of valuable materials and conspic-uous consumption, creating a substantial and con-tinuing demand for the movement of exotic goodsand materials. This is particularly reflected infunerary practices. Single burial was adopted overmost of Europe, in some areas generally covered bya barrow while in others flat graves were usual andbarrows reserved for a small number of elite indi-viduals who were buried with personal finery andgoods of fine craftsmanship and prized materialssuch as copper, gold, fine stone, jet, amber, and

faience, as well, originally, probably with perish-able valuables such as furs.

International trade was stimulated by the increas-ing demands for prestige materials. Both the volumeand the variety of goods and materials circulatingincreased, linking together many networks that hadpreviously served the individual regions of the conti-nent, allowing the circulation over vast distances notonly of goods and materials but also of ideas, fash-ions, and belief systems. New communicationsroutes were opened up and older ones more inten-sively used. As well as sea and river traffic, landroutes through mountain passes were now moreused, partly as a result of increased pastoral transhu-mance, making use of upland summer pastures.

Votive hoards became more common and some-times very large. Originally thought to have beenmetallurgists’ stock-in-trade, deposited for safe-keeping in troubled times, hoards of metalworkseem more likely to have been votive offerings to thegods. Many such offerings were buried in theground, while many others were deposited in partic-ular places in rivers or lakes. The practice had begunin earlier times—as early as the Ertebølle period inScandinavia—but now became more common andwidespread; it continued not only throughout theBronze and Iron Ages but into the post-Romanperiod in pagan regions. As well as serving religion,the ostentatious deposition of large amounts of valu-able material must have demonstrated the power ofindividuals or communities to obtain supplies ofsuch commodities, enhancing their prestige and sta-tus; this has been compared with the NorthwestPacific Coast Native American practice of potlatch,where a leader displayed his wealth and power bythe deliberate destruction of foodstuffs and goods.

While flourishing trade shows that peaceful rela-tions could exist among communities, the develop-ment of many defended settlements and theappearance of purposeful weapons indicates thatconflicts now often led to real warfare. Bronze Agerock art from Scandinavia and the Italian Alps rein-forces this impression by depicting scenes of armedconfrontation. Bronze was made particularly intoweapons. These included short ogival blades, eitherfurnished with a hilt and used as a dagger, ormounted sideways on a pole for use as a halberd. Flatand shafthole axes were also made. All these indicate


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that Early Bronze Age people saw themselves aswarriors. However, these weapons would not havebeen effective except at close quarters, suggestingthat conflict may have taken place as single combatbetween champions. Other weapons were probablyalso used, particularly arrows.

THE AEGEAN

Small palace-centered economies had been develop-ing in the later third millennium in the Aegean.Around 2200 B.C. the palaces on the mainland weredestroyed by fire, the result of internal conflicts orinvaders; those of the Cyclades declined; but onCrete development continued unchecked. Theisland’s population lived mainly in villages and ham-lets, but there were also a number of towns and a fewsubstantial settlements. Mountain caves and highplaces were venerated, and a number of peak sanctu-aries were constructed. Already Crete was in tradingcontact with Egypt.

Palaces developed on Crete within the substan-tial towns at Knossos, Mallia, and Phaestos and per-haps others from around 1950 B.C. (First Palaceperiod) and came to dominate substantial territories.Here princes controlled the agricultural revenue ofthe surrounding countryside, which was stored inhuge jars and storage pits, and supported artisanspracticing a variety of crafts, including metallurgyand textile production. The palaces were adminis-trative centers and home to the royal family. Thedemands of recording and organizing the revenuesled to the development of Cretan Hieroglyphicwriting. While the palaces themselves had a reli-gious function, each palace was also associated witha sacred cave or a peak sanctuary located at the sum-mit of an adjacent hill where votive offerings weremade. The shrine at Anemospila on Mount Juktaswas destroyed by an earthquake at the very momentwhen a human sacrifice was taking place there. Thismay have been the earthquake that destroyed manyof the palaces around 1700 B.C.

THE STEPPE

In the steppe region the custom of pit burial contin-ued to develop in the second millennium; bodieswere now interred in chambers in the side of pits

covered by tumuli (Catacomb Grave culture). Thisregion was in close contact with the flourishing Cau-casian metalworking culture of the eastern Black Seaand from there adopted many metallurgical innova-tions and styles of artifact, such as lugged chisels andaxes of arsenical copper made in two-piece molds.From the steppe people these innovations alsospread into Southeast Europe.

SOUTHEAST EUROPE

Settlements in this region of long-established agri-cultural communities were often long-lived and sub-stantial, many forming tells where occupationcontinued unbroken from the fourth millenniumwhile others were nucleated villages, surrounded bybanks and ditches. In the south and east, however,many tells were abandoned in favor of hilltop loca-tions. A few settlements, such as Vucedol, wereheavily fortified. River floodplains, river terraces,and foothills were occupied, and communities livedby mixed arable farming and stockbreeding. Com-munity members were buried in cemeteries associ-ated with the settlements, usually in flat graves; insome areas these included richly furnished burials,and variations in the treatment of individualsseemed to reflect social differentiation.

Metallurgy included sophisticated casting tech-niques: Some developments took place locally; oth-ers were adopted from the Únetice industry incentral Europe; and the region was also permeableto ideas and innovations from the Near East andfrom the adjacent steppe through which ideas weretransmitted from the Caucasian metallurgical cen-ters. Caucasian types included a distinctive battle-ax with a shafthole at one end and a deepfan-shaped blade, made by casting in a two-piecemold, with a clay core to produce the shafthole;this came into use in the Carpathian region in thelater third millennium, along with other Caucasianmetalwork. At the same time, however, there was adecline in the quantity of metalwork being pro-duced, due to the exhaustion of the supply of easilyworked local copper ores. Metal was now importedfrom central Europe, probably as ösenringe, andused sparingly for small pieces of jewelry. TheDanube was probably the main route along whichmetal and other goods traveled, and other rivers


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were also important; settlements located at impor-tant nodes in the exchange network were able toacquire more substantial quantities of imported

material, producing localized centers of wealth.These settlements also functioned as industrial andreligious centers for their region.


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2.7 A copper ax (left), a bronze palstave or winged celt (center), and a bronze socketed ax (right), all fromIreland, illustrating the development of different methods of hafting metal tools (Lubbock, John. PrehistoricTimes. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1890)

CENTRAL AND NORTHERN EUROPE

Únetice The first alloying of copper and tin incentral Europe probably took place around 2500,and by around 2200 B.C. bronze-working was estab-lished among groups north of the Danube, knowncollectively as Únetice; related cultures occupied thewestern Carpathian basin and the eastern Alpineregion. Skilled metallurgists, the Únetice peopledeveloped the technique of casting-on to join piecesof metal, which they used to create daggers withsolid hilts. They also became skillful at workingsheet metal, producing fine beaten gold cups. OtherÚnetice products included massive bronze armrings. One of the most characteristic products of theÚnetice zone was the ösenring, made of copper frommines probably in the Austrian Alps, particularlyMitterberg. Ösenringe were cast copper rods ham-mered into rings and widely traded as ingots, to bealloyed with tin and made into other artifacts bythose who acquired them.

Metalwork and technology from the Úneticearea influenced regions farther to the west. Forexample, the technique of casting-on sparked imita-tions in the Atlantic zone, such as the Breton dag-gers with decorated hilts. The tin used by theÚnetice groups to produce bronze probably camefrom alluvial sources in the Ore Mountains (Erzge-birge), but Atlantic metals, possibly including Cor-nish tin, were also in demand in central Europe andtrade became more developed.

Many bronze objects were deposited in hoards,probably votive offerings but also reflecting conspic-uous consumption to enhance prestige: Some hoardsin Moravia contained 500 or more ösenringe. Most ofthe magnificent Únetice hoards were depositedaround 2000 B.C., and the practice then ceased incentral Europe until the Late Bronze Age.

The most magnificent arrays of metalwork comefrom barrow burials. Most people were buried in flatcemeteries, generally of inhumation burials (exceptin Hungary, where cremation was the norm), but asin western Europe barrows were erected over theremains of some elite individuals. A few exception-ally rich burials are known, notably Leubingen andHelmsdorf in Saxo-Thuringia and ⁄Leki Mal⁄e inPoland; these were dated around 2000–1800 B.C. Ineach case an enormous barrow covered a woodenchamber in which the body of a man was laid sur-

rounded by weapons and jewelry. The Leubingenman was accompanied by a young woman. Thegrave goods in his tomb included tools for carpentryand metalworking, and metalworking tools areknown from other barrow burials, suggesting thatcraftsmen of the time could enjoy high status.

Scandinavian Late Neolithic/Dagger Period Byc. 2200 the people of Scandinavia were burying theirdead in stone cists, the men accompanied by flintdaggers. Although not yet making their own metal-work, the influence of their bronze-using neighborsto the south and west, to whom they supplied amber,was seen in the skillful imitations of metal objects infinely worked flint and occasional imports ofÚnetice daggers and Irish axes.

WESTERN EUROPE

Atlantic The Atlantic region was rich in metals,with copper, silver, tin, and some gold in Iberia, tinand gold in Brittany, copper, tin, and gold in Ireland,copper in Wales, and tin in Cornwall. From theearly second millennium these rich metal resourceswere increasingly exploited, both for local use andfor export, often in the form of finished goods suchas the gold lunulae (crescentic collars) made around2000 B.C. in Ireland and traded along the Atlanticcoast of France. Substantial copper mines devel-oped; these included the Ross Island mines in Ire-land, exploited 2400–2000 B.C. Amber, anotherhighly valued material, was available in the Balticregion and on Jutland and was occasionally washedup on British coasts. Demand for these materials,rare or absent in much of continental Europe, drewthe Atlantic into active trade relations with theEuropean interior on a far larger scale than before.

Single burial was now the norm for the disposalof the dead, under round barrows in some areas suchas southern Britain while in northern Britain, pits orcists were more usual, and there were some crema-tions. Often the barrow was defined or surroundedby a ditch or a circle of stones or posts. Success andprosperity was reflected in some areas, such as Brit-tany and the Wessex region of southern England, inthe appearance of barrow burials furnished with arich array of prestige goods. Cemeteries of thesebarrows developed over the centuries, probably rep-resenting chiefly lineages; those in Wessex fall into


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two series, from 2000 to 1700 and 1700 to 1400 B.C.(Wessex Culture I and II). Wessex was an area also ofgreat agricultural wealth, with good chalk soils pro-viding not only arable land but also abundant pas-tures. The ritual landscape of Wessex had long beenexceptional, and the continued elaboration of Stone-henge shows its enduring preeminence. Both Wes-sex and Brittany were situated at important nodes intrade routes, Wessex being linked by rivers to Ire-land, the Atlantic seaboard, and the east coast ofEngland and thence to the Low Countries andnorthern and central Europe. Brittany combined itsstrategic situation for trade with considerable min-eral wealth. Here rich burials were placed in stonecists under small barrows.

Elsewhere the elite dead were also often placedunder barrows with fine grave goods, though not inthe same impressive concentration as those in Wessexand Brittany. Such prestige objects were made of Irishgold, bronze, amber from the Baltic, jet, shale, occa-sionally silver, and fine stone, and included a range ofjewelry and ornaments for clothing, such as goldlunulae and jet necklaces, gold cups, and weaponssuch as metal daggers and flint arrowheads. Manyitems displayed exceptional craftsmanship, and it islikely that the craftsmen themselves enjoyed high sta-tus. A characteristic product of Brittany, traded intoWessex, was the copper or bronze dagger with a hiltdecorated with gold pins, possibly inspired byÚnetice daggers with organic hilts attached withmetal nails. Handled cups in copper, gold, silver,shale, and amber made in various Atlantic regionsmay have been inspired by pottery vessels from Iberiaor by beaten gold cups made in central Europe.

While in areas such as Wessex and Brittany thepower of communities to obtain a supply of exoticgoods was demonstrated by placing these in theburials of leaders, in other areas such as Ireland the


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2.8 A flint dagger from Late Neolithic Denmark,made in imitation of the metal daggers that were inuse at the time in areas farther to the south. Thesurface of this fine dagger was skillfully finished bypressure-flaking. (Worsaae, J. J. A. The IndustrialArts of Denmark. London: Chapman and Hall, 1882)

conspicuous consumption of wealth was in the formof rich votive offerings, particularly of metalwork,deposited as hoards in the ground or in wateryplaces. Among the pieces chosen for this were goldcollars. The type known as lunulae were probably allproduced in Ireland, of gold from the WicklowMountains; they reached parts of Britain and wereburied as votive deposits in Brittany. They resemblethe collars depicted around the necks of stone statuemenhirs and may have been worn by images of gods.Southwest Iberia produced a different style of goldcollars, which were mainly distributed in Iberia butreached as far north as northwest England.

In contrast to the abundant graves, settlements inBronze Age western Europe are poorly known.Some of those identified in Britain, such as Black-patch, comprised a number of small round huts.Each family probably used a group of these huts fordifferent purposes within normal domestic life.Groups of huts were often surrounded by a wall andhad a large open space in the center where livestockmight be penned.

Mediterranean In the Tagus region of AtlanticIberia Beaker pottery was succeeded by decoratedbowls associated with tanged bronze points, tangeddaggers, and V-perforated buttons, as well as the riteof single burial (Palmela complex); similar materialwas associated with single burials in central Iberia(Ciempozuelas). From around 2200 B.C. settlementin southeast Spain, though still focused on Almeria,was concentrated in heavily defended hilltop loca-tions (Argaric Bronze Age). With these were associ-ated cemeteries of single burials in cists or largestorage vessels furnished with fine dark undecoratedpottery resembling metal forms, weapons includingarsenical copper daggers and axes, silver rings anddiadems, and sometimes small pieces of gold jewelry.Differences between graves in the wealth of associ-ated material reflect developing social hierarchy inthe region. Their metal objects, however, remainedtechnologically simple, flat axes cast in one-piecemolds being characteristic products.

Beaker material continued in use into the secondmillennium in parts of the western Mediterranean,including southern France and the Iberian interior,where megalithic tombs were also still used for buri-als. In southwest Iberia, however, single graves

became the norm during the second millennium.These might be placed in stone cists or pits with asurrounding stone curb. In contrast to Almeria, fewimpressive grave goods were associated with theseburials, the richest being furnished with little morethan riveted daggers or small ornaments of gold.Settlement shifted away from the Tagus region,where it had been concentrated for millennia, focus-ing now on areas farther south where copper oreswere available.

Individual burials were now general in the centralMediterranean as well; in Malta these were crema-tions. In northern Italy (Polada) many settlementswere built in lakeside locations. Material from thesesites show that the region was in contact withtransalpine Europe and linked into the exchange net-works across the continent, for example, receivingamber beads. In central Italy (Proto-Apennine) thecentral mountain spine of the Apennines, long amajor barrier dividing east from west, was nowbecoming integrated into the mixed farming econ-omy, providing summer pastures. The high elevationsof the Alps, previously unsettled, also now began toprovide summer pastures for the flocks of transhu-mant pastoralists who spent the winter at lower alti-tudes. These individuals may have combined theirherding with mining, obtaining copper ores.

Middle Bronze Age1800–1300 B.C.Across much of Europe this period saw the replace-ment of burial in flat cemeteries by burial underround mounds (tumuli), a practice that already had along history in parts of Atlantic Europe. Cremationbegan to be the preferred practice, however, inmuch of the latter region.

The Middle Bronze Age saw a marked increasein the scale and extent of bronze working. Prestigegoods continued to dominate the use to which bothbronze and other metals were put. For men thesewere weapons in particular, indicating the status ofwarrior was a key role in society. For women therewas now an increased variety of ornaments, manyelaborate and finely crafted, including pendantsand bracelets. Pins with a head in the form of a


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four-spoked wheel reflect the high value attachedto the chariot—the ultimate status symbol of thetime, introduced to Southeast Europe from thesteppe region and spreading thereafter into manyparts of Europe. The ritual chariot of the sun,known from a bronze and gold example, completewith horse, from a votive deposit in a bog at Trund-holm in Zealand, shows that this innovation hadalso found its way into religious symbolism.

International trade gained momentum, directlinks developing across great distances, for example,between the elite of Scandinavian society and that ofthe Carpathian region. With the goods traveledideas: knowledge of new techniques of working met-als and other materials; new fashions in elite display,including weaponry, drinking vessels, and personalornaments; and possibly new belief systems reflectedin changing practices for the disposal of the deadand new religious symbolism like the spoked wheel.

The opening of the second millennium had seenthe emergence of civilization in the Aegean. Thedemands of the Minoans and Mycenaeans for rawmaterials contributed to the volume of goods in cir-

culation, though the civilizations themselves proba-bly only influenced their neighbors in the Balkansand the central Mediterranean; internal Europeantrade had its own momentum, to which the Aegeanworld added little. Though the trade mechanisms inthe rest of Europe are unknown, they are likely tohave depended on agreements or alliances betweenthe leaders of relatively small communities whosesituation gave them control of the source or move-ments of desired commodities. These prestige goodsenhanced the status of the leader within the commu-nity and the community within its local region, butwere not the basis for the development of a signifi-cantly stratified society. The settlement evidenceover much of Europe gives no hint of elite resi-dences differentiated from those of the rest of soci-ety, display of status being reserved for burial.

A need for defense is shown by the growth of for-tified settlements in Southeast Europe and elsewhere,including the tower houses of the Mediterraneanislands. Their distribution across the landscape oftensuggests that they acted as a place of refuge for theinhabitants of small territorial units, probably duringraids in which livestock were the main target. Con-flict is also reflected in the development of newweapons, including spears with bronze heads. Dag-gers were now lengthened into swords, which madeit possible to engage the enemy at arm’s length ratherthan at the close quarters necessitated by daggers.Swords also became a vehicle for extensive innova-tion throughout the remaining centuries of theBronze Age, reflecting both functional developmentsand fashion.

THE AEGEAN

Minoan Crete After the destructions around1700 B.C., the major Minoan palaces were quicklyreconstructed, generally on a larger scale (SecondPalace period). Knossos became the dominant cen-ter, its king or priestly ruler exercising some author-ity over the whole island, and perhaps beyond. Theisland of Santorini (Thera), largely destroyed by amassive earthquake, probably around 1628 B.C., pre-serves in Akrotiri its ash-engulfed principal settle-ment, many two- or even three-storeyed houses withvivid wall paintings in the Minoan style. One depictsa scene of life on the island, with towns, substantial


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2.9 A bronze disc with fine spiral decoration wornby a woman found in a Danish tree-trunk coffin(Worsaae, J. J. A. The Industrial Arts of Denmark.London: Chapman and Hall, 1882)

decorated ships, and soldiers bearing Cretan-stylefigure-of-eight shields.

While the Minoan royal family and theirentourage resided in the palaces, the surroundingtowns contained a number of large houses, probablyhome to the elite, and more modest structuresincluding houses and workshops. Other smallertowns, like Gournia, also developed, as did villaestates in the countryside.

A full-fledged writing system, Linear A, was now inuse for keeping records; from this it is clear that theMinoans were not Greek speakers. International seatrade flourished with Greece, Anatolia, and the south-ern Mediterranean as far west as Egypt, and Minoansare depicted in Egyptian paintings. This trade washighly organized and under the control of the palaces;the Minoans imported metal ores and other raw mate-rials such as semi-precious stones, as well as foreignluxuries, and exported agricultural produce, particu-larly wine and olive oil, fine pottery, and other craftproducts. Minoan frescoes and other art includescenes of bull-dancing and the capture of bulls, as wellas many creatures and scenes with animals, sea crea-tures being a particularly popular theme on paintedpottery. Fine ivory carving and gold and silver work-ing, especially manufacturing vessels and jewelry, werealso among the crafts practiced in the Minoan palaces.

Around 1450 B.C. the Minoan palaces fell, possiblydue to earthquakes or internal unrest, and at somestage Crete was taken over by the Mycenaeans frommainland southern Greece. The palace of Knossoswas finally destroyed sometime in the early to mid-14th century B.C., and Chania in the west of Cretebecame the major center. With the 12th-centurytroubles associated with the Sea Peoples, the Cretansretreated to refuge settlements in the mountains.

Mycenaean Greece Southern Greece saw the riseof a warrior aristocracy in the mid-16th century B.C.,best known from the rich burials in the slab-linedShaft Graves at Mycenae. Here a number of peoplewere buried with gold masks and other finery,including a number of Minoan imports. Beads ofBaltic amber as well as horse gear decorated withcompass designs show that already links existedbetween this region and the societies of the Balkans,which had access to goods from the central Euro-pean Tumulus culture and its trading partners in

Scandinavia. The metalwork in the Shaft Graves,which included bronze daggers inlaid with designsin gold, silver, and niello, was the work of extremelygifted and skilled craftsmen, working under the con-trol of local leaders.

Later rulers were buried in tholoi (corbel-vaultedchamber tombs) and lesser members of the elite inrock-cut chamber tombs, associated with the majorcenters such as Mycenae and Tiryns. These were for-tified citadels with walls made of massive irregulardressed stones (Cyclopean architecture) enclosing aroyal palace, storerooms, shrines, and housing. Out-side the walls lay further houses and workshops. Theconflicts suggested by the massive fortifications areborne out by the associated evidence of warfare,including weaponry, armor, chariots, and, from Pylos,records of the organization of coastal defense forces.

Minoan influences in 15th-century B.C. Greecewere strongly felt and continued after Crete cameunder Mycenaean control. The Mycenaeans devel-oped their own script, Linear B; being written in anearly form of Greek, Linear B texts can be read butare mainly administrative documents, showingdetailed control of agricultural production, industry,military equipment, and the distribution of rations.Crafts such as metalworking, ivory carving, textileproduction, and pottery making flourished.

While the Minoans had largely confined theirtrading activities to the eastern basin of the Mediter-ranean, the Mycenaeans ranged farther afield, seek-ing metal ores as far west as Sardinia and perhapseven Spain, where a few Mycenaean pots are known;Mycenaean pottery is more common in Cyprus,southern Italy, and Sicily, as well as the Levant, theentry point for participation in the extensive NearEastern trade networks. Trade with their Europeanneighbors gave the Mycenaeans indirect access tomore distant materials, including amber from theBaltic. A wrecked ship, probably from Canaan in theLevant, which went down around 1300 B.C. at UluBurun off Anatolia, bore many goods probably des-tined for the Mycenaean world, such as tin, copper,and glass ingots, and plant materials for manufactur-ing perfumed oils, a Mycenaean export. Personalobjects among the materials in the wreck suggestsome of the crew were Mycenaeans. Copper was car-ried in the form of distinctive oxhide ingots; potterywas used to transport perfumes, oil, and spices, and


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large jars might also be used as containers for con-signments of fine pottery vessels.

In the 13th and 12th centuries many culturesaround the eastern Mediterranean, probably includ-ing the Mycenaeans, suffered attacks by seaborneraiders, known to their Egyptian victims as the SeaPeoples, who probably derived from a number ofregions including Anatolia and Italy. Around 1200many of the palaces fell, whether to these raiders orthrough internal conflicts is uncertain; others sur-vived but with considerable loss of wealth and poweras well as the cessation of written records. For sev-eral centuries, Greece underwent a dark age whenoverseas links were restricted and people lived insmall communities with regional differences, forexample, in pottery styles, that contrast with the cul-tural uniformity of the Mycenaean world.

THE STEPPE

Much information about the way of life of steppe pas-toralists comes from their elite burials in catacombgraves. By the mid-second millennium these gravesbecame more elaborate: They were now substantialbarrows covering timber chambers that resembledhouses (Timber grave culture). Some included chari-ots and horses among the grave offerings, a practicethat was to become the hallmark of rich steppe burials.

Horses were essential to the maintenance of thesteppe economy and by now were being used bothfor riding and for pulling light chariots with twospoked wheels, an innovation of the early secondmillennium that gave speed and mobility. Heavierfour-wheeled wagons were still used to carry posses-sions and families as they moved across the steppe.By the mid-second millennium, the steppe regionwas being fully exploited, with nomadic pastoralistsmoving deep into central Asia to graze their animalsin the scattered pastures of the steppe. This gavethem access to new ore sources, copper from theUrals and copper and tin from the Altai, giving anew impetus to steppe metallurgy.

THE SOUTHEAST

By the early second millennium the substantial cop-per and gold resources of the Transylvanian Moun-tains were beginning to be exploited, leading to amajor new Carpathian metal industry. Incised deco-

ration was a characteristic feature of the metalwork,which included both local innovations and metallur-gical and decorative techniques and designs bor-rowed from neighboring groups in central Europeand the steppe, such as casting-on, used for solid-hilted swords, and two-piece molds. Much of theCarpathian metalwork is known from votive hoardslike that from Hajdúsámson in northeastern Hun-gary. This contained a sword with a solid hilt, acrosswhich had been laid 12 battle-axes. Decorative tech-niques such as compasswork, used to decorate met-alwork, were also applied to pottery and horse gearin antler and bone. The people of the Carpathianbasin traded widely, their metalwork reaching intoDenmark (from which they received amber andprobably furs), Italy and Greece, the Alpine fore-land, and the Atlantic region.

As well as metallurgical innovations, the south-east continued to receive other ideas and goods fromthe east. These included horses, imported in consid-erable numbers, the harness elements for control-ling them, including antler cheekpieces, and chariotswith spoked wheels. Clay models of spoked wheelsare known from the Carpathian region. The chariotrapidly became an important elite prestige posses-sion, spreading across Europe.

Some substantial fortified settlements began tospring up, reflecting the prosperity of the Carpathianregion, which now produced the finest metalwork inEurope. Many of those located in key places on thetrade routes along the region’s rivers were fortifiedwith box ramparts. An outstanding example is SpisskyStvrtok in Slovakia, a site whose wealth is shown by ahoard of goldwork deposited in its interior. Most set-tlements had a surrounding bank and ditch and con-tained densely packed houses of wattle and daub.

The flourishing metalworking communities of thewestern Carpathian basin eventually became absorbedinto the Tumulus culture, while those of the eastturned their focus southward toward the developingMycenaean warrior society in southern Greece andthe cultures around the northern Black Sea.

Central EuropeTumulus Culture After 1800 B.C. across much ofcentral Europe the old tradition of burial in flat-


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grave cemeteries, which had operated for all but themost exalted members of society, was replaced byburial under round barrows (tumuli), often in awooden coffin. The western Carpathian basin alsobecame part of the Tumulus zone, which eventuallystretched as far west as eastern France.

The Tumulus metal industry grew to rival that ofthe Carpathian basin in its trade network. Typicalproducts of the industry included many types of jew-elry and of weapons, including swords, socketedspearheads, palstaves, and armor to protect arms andlegs. Some men were buried with a sword, whilewomen were accompanied by jewelry.

Open-plan settlements of large post-built rectan-gular houses were usual across most of centralEurope, from Holland to Hungary. Some settle-ments, however, were fortified, including a numberof sites in Croatia with stone ramparts, such asMonkodonja, which had an elaborate gateway. Thesite of Velim in Bohemia, fortified with ramparts andditches, contained a number of hoards of bronzesand goldwork, echoing the coincidence of hoardsand fortifications seen at Spissky Stvrtok and perhapssuggesting that fortifications were to protect sites ofritual importance rather than people. Human bones,many with cut marks, were also interred in Velim’spits and ditches.

SCANDINAVIA

The Tumulus period saw the growth of direct linksbetween central Europe and the north, Denmarktrading via the Rhine and Oder with the Danuberegion and the Carpathian basin. The inhabitants ofScandinavia, a region without local sources of tin oraccessible copper, now no longer merely importedmetalwork and imitated it in other materials butactively sought to acquire metal from which to pro-duce their own weapons and ornaments such as beltdiscs. Their metalwork shows strong central Euro-pean influences, and they also imported fine metalobjects such as swords, spears, and decorated axes.These weapons were among the prestige goodsplaced in hoards, along with local products, as offer-ings to the gods.

This period also saw the beginning of tumulusburial in this region for the elite of society, presum-ably the leaders who were able to organize the trade

in exotic goods and materials and their families.Bodies were wrapped in an ox hide or a blanket andplaced in a well-made tree-trunk coffin, over whichan earth-and-turf mound was erected. In a numberof cases waterlogging has preserved these coffins andtheir contents, which included the woollen clothingand bronze jewelry worn by the deceased, personalpossessions, and vessels and other objects of woodand birch bark. Some also contained goldwork.Long-distance trade links are emphasized by the dis-covery of Mycenaean folding stools in some of thesecoffins; while in Mycenaean graves as early as themid-16th century Baltic amber beads were found.Dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) has shownthat many of these coffins were buried between 1410and 1360 B.C.

Later graves contained cremated remains insteadof inhumations, often associated with miniature ver-sions of appropriate grave goods such as swords andwith small personal objects such as razors, but stillplaced within a tree-trunk coffin.

A further insight into life in Bronze Age Scandi-navia comes from rock art, particularly common inSweden. Although the context and content of thisart is likely to have been religious, it provides someglimpses of life, such as men apparently engaged insingle combat, armed with axes or swords; ships,often apparently manned by rowers; and men plow-ing with teams of oxen. The ships depicted wereprobably made of a wooden framework covered withskins.

WESTERN EUROPE

The Atlantic Zone Barrow burials continued inmany areas but none with the exceptional wealth ofthe earlier Wessex I and Armorican burials. Laterburials were often inserted into earlier mounds ormegalithic tombs or placed in cemeteries aroundthem. In Britain, the Netherlands, and northwestFrance cremation became the norm, the ashes beinginterred in urns or large pottery vessels, generallywith few grave goods. Much of northern and easternFrance, however, became part of the central Euro-pean Tumulus zone, with inhumation under bar-rows. Trade along the northern Atlantic coastcontinued to flourish, as did trade with the neigh-boring Tumulus region and Scandinavia, but Iberia


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was at this time relatively isolated: Tin bronze wasnot in use here, the local arsenic-rich copper pro-ducing a satisfactory form of bronze.

Metallurgy grew in importance, and new mineswere opened in a number of areas such as the exten-sive Irish mines of Mount Gabriel, worked1700–1500 B.C. Bronze was now being used for agreat variety of tools and weapons, such as flangedaxes, palstaves, sickles, chisels, socketed spears, andswords. Goldworking also flourished, particularly inIreland, which produced a range of ornaments ofsheet gold and of gold rods, some of them skillfullytwisted into large torcs.

In northern France and Britain the organizationof agriculture is apparent in some areas in the cre-ation of land divisions, using lines of boulders orwalls of stone or earth to demarcate field systemsand grazing land. Dartmoor in England, for exam-ple, was divided up into a series of territorial unitseach containing arable, pastureland, and settlementareas. Here stone boundary walls (reaves) replacedearlier fences and hedgerows; the change from woodto stone reflects the completion during the secondmillennium of the process of deforestation acrossmuch of Europe.

Stone was also used for domestic construction insome areas such as upland Scotland, resulting in thesurvival there of many visible houses. These weresubstantial round houses with stone lower walls onwhich a superstructure of turf, timber, and thatchwas constructed. In most areas houses were built oftimber; in Britain these were large circular huts ofposts with wattle and daub walls and thatched roofs;some were dwellings while others may have beenused for weaving, cooking, and storage.

The Mediterranean and the Western EuropeanInterior Over much of the continent, houses wererectangular timber post-built structures, while lake-side settlements in Switzerland, France, and north-ern Italy often had log cabins, and in high Alpinevalleys there were substantial plank-built houseswith several rooms, including storage areas. Terra-mare settlements flourished in the Po valley; thosebeside lakes and rivers included houses supported onpiles. In the high Apennines, which had previouslybeen visited by people bringing their animals tosummer pastures, permanent mixed-farming settle-

ments appeared by the mid-second millennium(Apennine Bronze Age), and there was also anincrease in lowland settlements in central Italy.Southern Italy and the Aeolian Islands had small set-tlements of round huts, which were probablygrouped to make up the living and working quartersof individual families. Built close together, some-times in defensible locations such as the promontorysettlement of Milazzese on Panarea, these small vil-lages did not include space for animals, which musthave been kept outside.

On Sardinia tower houses (nuraghi) began to bebuilt. Initially these may have been the homes of sin-gle extended families of farmers, or places of refugeduring armed raids. They consisted of a stone toweron two or three floors, with stairs and access corri-dors built into the thickness of the wall. Towerlikestone dwellings or places of refuge were also con-structed in other Mediterranean islands: torre inCorsica and talayots on the Balearics. Megalithictombs continued in use in the islands of the westernMediterranean, and highly distinctive forms weredeveloped, including the navetas of the Balearics andthe Sardinian “giants’ tombs.” Sardinia and theBalearics also had holy places with votive wells andofferings.

Trade through the Alpine passes into France andcentral Europe brought the central Mediterraneaninto the communications networks that crisscrossedtransalpine Europe, their extent demonstrated by thepresence of amber beads in the north Italian terramare.

Seaborne contacts between the islands and main-land promoted the circulation of goods, with Mal-tese pottery being traded to Sicily and Sicilianpottery to Lipari. Mycenaean trade brought Aegeanluxuries, particularly perfumes, spices, and oil, car-ried in pottery, to southern Italy and the islands ofSicily and Sardinia, probably in exchange for copperand other raw materials. More than a hundredMycenaean vessels were found in the NuragheAntigori on Sardinia. The technology of finepainted wheel-thrown pottery was introduced to theregion by the Mycenaeans. At Thapsos on Sicily alarge building with an extensive suite of rooms wasbuilt, perhaps reflecting the power developed by alocal ruler as a result of contacts with the Myce-naeans. Impressive collective tombs of the Thapsosperiod were richly furnished with imported Myce-


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naean pottery as well as locally made bronzes. Thetraffic was not one-way: An Italian-style mold foundat Mycenae suggests the presence there of a metal-worker from Italy.

Late Bronze Age1300–1000/700

SETTLEMENT, ECONOMY, AND SOCIETY

After around 1300 B.C. farming practices graduallychanged across Europe, becoming more intensive.In Britain, where there is good surviving evidence ofland divisions, the pattern of small fields was in someareas replaced by much larger scale arrangements ofbanks and ditches (ranch boundaries) dividing thelandscape into large blocks. Less is known about thepartitioning of land in continental Europe. There isevidence for increasing rainfall after around 1100B.C., causing many areas to become waterlogged.Trackways were constructed to enable people totravel over boggy areas, but the impact on farmingwas more drastic, leading to the abandonment ofmany fragile or marginal areas that had beenbrought under cultivation earlier in the Bronze Age.Overexploitation and deforestation also played apart in the transformation of these areas into blanketbog, acid soils, and barren heath.

Fortified settlements became widespread overmost of Europe, though not in the north. Some tookadvantage of and enhanced the natural defenses ofhilltops (hillforts). Others (stockades) were located onlow-lying land, often on or by lakes, and weredefended by substantial wooden palisades or elabo-rate ramparts of wood, stone, and earth. Late BronzeAge settlements were often larger than those of ear-lier times and contained a larger number of houses,often densely packed within the settlement defenses.Some settlements seem to have had their layoutplanned, while others show a haphazard internalarrangement. These forts were presumably the placeof residence of the local leader and his immediate cir-cle. The majority of the population, however, stilllived in small farming settlements scattered across thecountryside where one or a few families lived sur-

rounded by their fields and pastures. Farming was themain occupation of most people, only a few beingengaged in other activities such as metallurgy. Veryprobably the fortified settlements would act as a placeof refuge for the rural population during raids; theycould accommodate larger numbers than in earliertimes, suggesting that leaders now dominated moreextensive territories. Even so, the scale of conflict wasstill small, raiding parties being unlikely to numbermore than 100 and probably far fewer. Armed expedi-tions were often successful, since few fortified settle-ments managed to last more than a century beforebeing destroyed and usually abandoned.

The emphasis on weaponry among bronze workin hoards and graves right across Europe supportsthe importance that seems to have been placed onwarriors and warfare, as do Mediterranean bronzesculptures and carved standing stones depictingweapons or individuals as warriors. Much of theexpertise of metallurgists was invested in producingparade armor, including shields, cuirasses of beatenmetal, and elaborately decorated horned helmets,whose function was to impress rather than protect.Swords combined function with ostentation, newdesigns constantly being developed, offering greaterefficiency or a more impressive appearance or both,and these were rapidly adopted across Europe.Chariots pulled by horses were still the ultimate sta-tus symbol, and horse gear was increasingly made inbronze.

METALLURGY

Despite the scarcity and uneven distribution of tin,by the Late Bronze Age almost every region madesubstantial use of bronze. New technology devel-oped, including the working of sheet bronze fromwhich were produced a wide range of objects suchas armor, buckets, and cauldrons, frequently deco-rated by methods such as repoussé work. Thearmor, while it must have served to finely displaystatus, did not offer much real protection, and inbattle, leather armor and shields of wood or boiledleather must more commonly have been used togive protection. The exploitation of Europeanmetal sources had now become so well developedthat bronze was common enough to be used foreveryday tools. Most of this was tin bronze, but


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copper was also alloyed with lead, for reasonsunknown. One possible explanation is that leadmade it possible to increase the quantity of bronzeavailable, given the rarity of tin; another is that thesoft lead alloy facilitated the casting of complexshapes. The occurrence in hoards of some objectsmade largely or entirely of lead also suggests thepossibility that lead was used for items made fordeposition as offerings, a context in which strengthand functionality would be irrelevant. Techniquesin use now included cire perdue (lost-wax) casting,which could produce elaborate objects, such as fig-urines and objects with complex surface decoration.Single-use clay molds and elaborate multiple-piecemolds were now in common use, producing sophis-ticated shapes such as the lur of Scandinavia; moldsimpressed in firm sand were probably also used forcasting. Ireland and Scandinavia were centers of par-ticularly fine gold working, where complex and elab-orate cast objects included vessels and ornamentssuch as bracelets and gorgets. Improved pyrotech-nology also made it possible to begin producing trueglass, which was made in small quantities acrossEurope from northern Italy and Switzerland to Ire-land and was used for beads.

Copper circulated in the form of the plano-convexingots that formed at the bottom of the bowl-shapedfurnaces after smelting. Occasional shipwrecks showthat there was extensive movement not only of rawmaterials but also of scrap metal around the Atlanticfacade. Similarly extensive trade in metal and othergoods flourished on the continent, carrying consider-able quantities of materials over long distances. Forexample, whereas in earlier times, British bronzes hadbeen made mainly with local ores, such as those fromGreat Orme, the majority in the Late Bronze Ageused metal from continental sources, especially fromthe Alps. Particular weapon types, such as flange-hilted swords, are known right across Europe.Weapons were among the most common artifactsexchanged; others included amber, glass, and salt.This began to be mined at Hallstatt in the AustrianAlps, which continued as a major center of salt pro-duction in the Iron Age. The rich grave goods in thecemetery here reflect the wealth that exploitation ofthe salt mines brought to its community. At a numberof other places in Europe where salt springs occurred,salt was produced by evaporation, either by heating

brine in coarse clay vessels or by allowing naturalevaporation in clay-lined pools.

Metal smiths enjoyed considerable status andwere probably few in number. Larger communitiesmay have had resident smiths, but smaller ones mayhave had to rely on itinerant metalworkers. Thateven small communities had access to metalworkingskills and bronze tools and weapons is shown by thediscovery of crucibles and broken clay molds insmall settlements such as Dún Aonghasa in Irelandand Jarlshof on Shetland.

From around 1000 B.C. iron also began to beworked, though its impact was not at first widelyfelt. Iron ores occur far more widely than those ofcopper and particularly tin, making iron a metalwithin the reach of ordinary people for everydaytools once it came into widespread use. At first it wasonly worked in the south, where it was made intoweapons that are known from tombs in parts of theBalkans and Italy.

DEATH AND RELIGION

The Late Bronze Age saw a major transformation infunerary practices with the spread across much ofEurope of the practice of cremation. The ashes wereplaced in urns of various distinctive types, whichwere buried in vast urnfields. Whether this repre-sents a significant change in belief or merely achange in fashions is uncertain.

While burials were generally poorly furnishedwith grave goods, much metalwork survives inhoards, which became common and widespread.Unlike earlier hoards, which mainly contained fineobjects, these Late Bronze Age hoards were oftencollections of broken or recycled tools or sometimesweapons. Their meaning is disputed, some scholarsseeing them as the stock-in-trade of metalsmiths,while others consider that they continued earliervotive practices. Votive offerings of more impressiveobjects accumulated in lakes and rivers such as theRhine and Thames. A particularly lavish hoard, ofsome 400 objects including many swords and spears,comes from the estuary of the River Odiel at Huelvain Spain (although some scholars interpret this as ashipwreck). Certain caves and rock fissures alsoattracted offerings and were perhaps imitated in theshafts and wells in which an accumulation of small


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offerings have been found. Other probable ritualsites included unusual and as yet unexplainedwooden structures such as that at Bargeroosterveldin Holland. Rock art, also likely to have a ritual con-text, continued in Scandinavia and was also found inother areas, including Val Camonica and MonteBego in the Alps where representations includescenes of plowing and housebuilding, textile manu-facture, and metalworking, as well as warfare.

A number of Late Bronze Age artifacts seemlikely to have had a religious function or meaning.These included the magnificent Scandinavian lur, atype of horn or trumpet that may have been soundedduring rituals, and bronze model carts bearing sym-bols such as birds, discs, and spoked wheels. Birdsand particularly ducks were a widespread and com-mon symbol, occurring as figurines in pottery andmetal, as attachments on cauldrons, and as motifs onceramic and metal objects.

URNFIELDS

Considerable population growth had taken placealong the middle and lower Danube, an area charac-terized by flat cemeteries and fortified settlements.By the 14th century this area saw the beginnings of apractice that was to become widespread. Cremationhad been the usual method of disposing of the deadin Hungary in the Early Bronze Age and had beenadopted by some areas to its north and west in theMiddle Bronze Age. Now cremation became thenorm throughout the central Danube region. Theashes of the dead were collected and placed in urns,which were buried in large cemeteries (Urnfields).The practice spread from there into mainland Italy,and eastern and central Europe in subsequent cen-turies. By the ninth century B.C. cremation hadspread farther, being adopted in much of westernEurope as far as northern Iberia, where close cul-tural ties with southern France may reflect limitedpopulation movement across the Pyrenees. Britainand the Atlantic regions, the Low Countries andnorthern Europe, however, remained outside theUrnfield zone, although cremation was a commonpractice in these regions. Despite the widespreadpopularity of cremation, inhumation was notentirely abandoned; some cemeteries contained afew inhumations, while a few had more inhumations

than cremations. In some areas cremations might becovered by a small barrow, while in western regionsburials were often placed within ditched enclosures.The cremation burials were generally poorly fur-nished with grave goods, which usually comprisedonly pottery and sometimes small metal objects suchas razors or pins, fibulae (safety-pin brooches), andother jewelry. In the area north of the Alps, however,a few rich burials were furnished with fine tablewarefor feasting, a sword, and a wagon that was burnedon the funeral pyre.

NORDIC ZONE

Although the Bronze Age inhabitants of Scandinaviarelied entirely on imported copper and tin ore, nev-ertheless by the Late Bronze Age bronze artifactswere in common use here. Some have been recov-ered from votive deposits in bogs, including objectswhose use seems most likely to have been religious,such as lurs.

As cremation became the standard rite over mostof Europe, it also became much more common inScandinavia. Here, however, the ashes were buriedas bodies had been previously, in full-sized graves.Many were now surrounded by a setting of lowstones in the shape of a boat; similar boat burialscome from northern Germany. A few massive bar-row burials also date from this period in Scandinaviaand northern Germany, for example at Lusehøj onthe island of Funen in Denmark and Uppsala inSweden. At Seddin in northeast Germany themound was 420 feet (130 meters) in diameter andcovered a vaulted stone chamber in which rich gravegoods had been placed. Here and in other large bar-row burials the grave goods reflect the deceased’selite status as a warrior, including in some cases awagon.

Although there are a number of rich burials,probably of individuals able to engage profitably ininternational trade, society in the north remainedsmall scale. The basic unit of settlement was thesmall farm or hamlet, housing one or a few families;this region did not see the development of fortifiedsettlements. The exceptional barrow burials lie atimportant nodes in the routes linking the north withthe Urnfield region; trade seems to have been man-aged by a few chiefs able to enhance their position


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through the acquisition of prestige goods and tomanipulate other leaders by controlling the supplyof such goods to them.

MEDITERRANEAN

By the 12th century the nuraghi (tower houses) inSardinia were becoming more substantial, with extralobes or bastions added to the original tower; somemay now have housed entire villages, while othershad associated villages of round houses, also con-structed of stone. Among the products of the localbronze industry were distinctive human and animalfigurines, made by cire perdue casting. Warriorswere a common subject, as they were on Iberiangrave stelae and Corsican statue menhirs.

On Sicily a substantial stone building, the anak-toron (palace), was constructed at Pantalica, a set-tlement of several hundred people. AlthoughMycenaean imports were far less common than inthe earlier Thapsos culture, much of the material,such as the wheel-made pottery, showed Aegeaninspiration.

After the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization,trade contracted and Greece no longer exploited themetal sources of the central Mediterranean. Italy’slong-standing trade links across the Alps nowbecame more important. Much of mainland Italysaw the adoption of Urnfield practices and artifactsduring the 12th century (Protovillanovan culture),as did southern France. Nevertheless, trade withinthe Mediterranean did not cease. According to tradi-tion, Phoenician traders from the Levant werebeginning to explore the central and westernMediterranean in search of metal ores. For somecenturies there were close interconnections betweenthe east and west Mediterranean, between theMediterranean and the Atlantic, and across the Alpsand along the Danube into temperate Europe,shown by the distribution of distinctive objects: forexample, carp’s-tongue swords, of Breton origin orinspiration, in Sardinia and northern Italy; Cypriotfibulae in France and Iberia.

THE ATLANTIC ZONE

Atlantic Europe also lay outside the Urnfield cul-tural area, though closely linked to it by trade.While cremation was still practiced here, other rites,

which left no archaeological trace, were also wide-spread. Hoards were abundant and so were fortifiedsites. Many earlier open settlements were nowenclosed within a wall, suggesting an increased needfor defense.

Technological advances in metallurgy, such as theworking of sheet bronze, and fashions in swordstyles and other artifact types spread from the Urn-field region to the west, where local styles of metal-work, producing such objects as bronze cauldronsand socketed axes, also developed and spread. Thesubstantial movement of goods is highlighted byfinds of ships wrecked on the Atlantic coast, such asthat at Langdon Bay off the south coast of England,which carried a cargo of continental, mainly French,swords, axes and palstaves, mostly broken and soapparently scrap metal. Britain lay at the interfacebetween the three major provinces of Late BronzeAge Europe: the Urnfield zone, whose axis was theRhine-Danube corridor, the Nordic zone, and theAtlantic region; it was also a conduit for material andideas to and from Ireland.

THE IRON AGE(C. 1000/700–100 B.C.)

By the end of the second millennium B.C., iron work-ing was becoming established over much of the NearEast, and it spread rapidly through Europe in subse-quent centuries: Beginning in Greece and the BlackSea region in the 11th century, between 1000 and800 B.C. it spread into the Balkans and eastern cen-tral Europe and was introduced into Italy and coastalIberia by the Greeks and Phoenicians; iron workingspread through central and western Europe as far asBritain by 700 B.C. By the late second millenniumB.C. Scandinavia had a flourishing bronze-workingindustry based entirely on imported metals. Wheniron-working technology spread through Europe,the curious situation arose that iron-rich Scandinaviafor some time resisted its adoption, preferring toretain the older bronze-working traditions: Ironworking did not begin here until 600–500 B.C.


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Iron working required different techniques tobronze working, objects being forged by hammeringrather than being cast (casting required pyrotech-nology beyond the skills of Europe until much latertimes, although the Chinese had mastered this tech-nology by the seventh century B.C.). Some objectswere made from steel, produced by heating iron inthe presence of carbon. When properly quenchedand tempered, iron has greater hardness and a

keener edge than bronze, making it preferable fortools and weapons, and by 400 B.C. iron was in com-mon use for everyday objects across Europe.

As iron became more common for mundaneobjects, bronze was channeled into the production oflavish prestige objects, such as luxury tableware,parade armor, horse gear, and jewelry, all made byskilled craftsmen. These were vehicles for the dis-tinctive and vigorous Celtic art style that developed


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Map 9. Early Iron Age Europe

in the later first millennium, also seen in stone sculp-tures and objects of other materials such as gold, sil-ver, and jet. Among the techniques employed wereglass inlay work, enameling, and the use of com-passes to produce geometric designs.

Deteriorating conditions, with lower tempera-tures and a marked increase in rainfall, around theend of the second millennium, brought an end tocultivation in many areas, fragile lands becomingheath or bog, suitable only for grazing or abandonedaltogether. However, the development in the laterIron Age of the true plow, furnished with an ironplowshare and coulter, allowed heavier but highlyproductive soils to be taken into cultivation. Irontools also improved productivity: These includedspades and hoes as well as scythes for mowing thehay used for overwintering domestic stock.

Iron ores were widely available and abundant,making iron more accessible than copper and tin.The change from bronze to iron had a significanteffect on trade and international relations, sincethe local availability of iron allowed communitiesand regional groups to be more independent thanbefore. Nevertheless, trade networks were main-tained and continued to develop, carrying both lux-ury goods and materials and necessities such as salt.Patterns of trade reflected the distribution ofresources: As iron working became more impor-tant, for example, areas with rich iron depositsflourished. Salt was mined in the Alps and pro-duced from seawater in some regions. Trade fol-lowed the rivers and sea lanes; land transport washarder but still important, including traffic throughthe Alpine passes.

Mediterranean Europe saw the rise of the city-states of the Greeks, Etruscans, and Phoenicians, andthe empires of Carthage and Rome, and theinevitable development of competition among them.These states gradually spread their influences overmuch of Europe through trade, peaceful contact,conflict, and conquest. The Mediterranean powerssought land for settlement and raw materials such asmetal ores and furs, as well as slaves, offering inexchange luxury goods, particularly wine, which wereused by native chieftains to enhance and emphasizetheir status. The traffic was not one-way: Celtic war-riors invaded both Greece and Italy and sought theirfortunes as mercenaries.

Conflict was an important feature of life withintemperate Europe, too. Population growth andenvironmental problems put pressure on resources,which brought conflict: warfare was common andhillforts continued to develop in many areas. Thesewere home to the tribal chief and often a consider-able community, a place of storage for tribal wealthin grain, a center of industry, and a refuge for thelocal farmers and their livestock when they werethreatened by enemies. Numerous weapons reflectthe warlike nature of the society, and in the laterIron Age the burials of chiefs often included a char-iot, used in war either as a transport or as a mobilefighting platform. Classical references to the inhabi-tants of transalpine Europe emphasize the impor-tance of warfare in their societies, and the braveryand ferocity of their warriors. Warfare was an hon-ored way of life; warriors enjoyed high status andsuccessful war leaders could attract an ever-growingband of followers. Feasting and drinking played amajor part in the lives of the warriors, and fightsoften broke out between individuals. War bandsraided their neighbors not only for booty but alsofor glory, and battles probably often took the formof single combat between champions. The majorityof members of society, however, were farmers,although there were also craftsmen and priests.

Funerary practices were very varied: Theyincluded burial in flat-grave cemeteries, under mas-sive tumuli or under smaller barrows, cremation andsubsequent burial in urns or chambers, and practicesthat have left no trace. Some individuals were sacri-ficed, their bodies deposited in lakes and rivers; votiveofferings of metalwork and other valued items werealso placed in such watery locations. Offerings werealso deposited in deep shafts and severed heads weredisplayed in occasional shrines. Religion played amajor role in society. Although some worship tookplace in built shrines, particularly in late centuries,much of it was conducted in holy sites such as grovesor by water such as lakes, springs, and rivers. Accord-ing to classical writers Celtic (Gallic and British) reli-gion was conducted by Druids, whose most sacredbase was the island of Anglesey (Mona to theRomans); these were not only priests but also teach-ers, the repository of tribal knowledge, and lawgivers.

Classical authors in their writings for the firsttime provide literary evidence of the societies of


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temperate Europe, inhabited in the west by groupsthey knew as Celts and in the north and east by Ger-manic peoples, while in the southeast dwelt theThracians and farther east in the steppe, Scythiansand other nomad groups. Often the names of tribes(or confederacies, often known by the name of theleaders’ tribe) are given; the presence of groups ofthe same name in different areas or different groupsin an area at different times reflects the fluidity ofpolitical organization and the loose ties betweengroups and territory. As well as shedding additionallight on the way of life of these peoples, classicalsources provide some historical information, notablyabout the migrations of the Celts. A few individualsemerge from the generally anonymous canvas, suchas Brennus, who led the Celts into Greece, Burebistaking of the Dacians, and Vercingetorix, whom Cae-sar defeated.

Mediterranean States

PHOENICIANS AND CARTHAGINIANS

The Phoenicians inhabited a number of coastal citystates in the Levant such as Tyre and Sidon and werefine seafarers and traders. By ancient tradition theybegan to prospect for metals and establish coloniesin the west by around 1100 B.C., although the earli-est secure archaeological evidence of their presencedates from the ninth century, at Nora on Sardinia.Thereafter they settled on the Mediterranean andAtlantic coasts of Iberia and North Africa, coming todominate the southern half of the western Mediter-ranean. Major colonies included Gadir (Cádiz) onthe Atlantic coast of Spain and Carthage in Tunisia;established in 814 B.C., the latter gained control ofthe Phoenician colonies after the mother cities inthe Levant were conquered by the Babylonians in573 B.C. The Carthaginians held land in Sicily,North Africa, and Spain and had colonies down thewest African coast at least as far as Mogador. Theirexpansion brought them into conflict first with theGreeks and then with the Romans, by whom theywere narrowly defeated in the First Punic War(264–241 B.C.). This led them to strengthen theirhold on southern Iberia, but renewed hostilities

with Rome (218–202 B.C.) resulted in the loss oftheir Iberian territories, despite the brilliant gener-alship of Hannibal. After its conclusive defeat in theThird Punic War Carthage was sacked in 146 B.C.

GREECE

Greece In the ninth century Greek city-statesbegan to emerge in Greece and Asia Minor: smallcities controlling an agricultural hinterland and gov-erned by aristocracies, and later oligarchies or democ-racies. Over the centuries competition between statesmade warfare a regular part of life, and most statesraised citizen armies at need; in Sparta, where the cit-izens controlled and oppressed a subject people(Helots), whom they had to keep from rebellion, mil-itarism was a central feature of life and was carried toextremes. Trade, shared religion, and shared cultureacted as counterweights to conflict, and the pan-Hel-lenic games held at regular intervals (of which theOlympic games were the most important) served tosublimate interstate aggression.

Trade with the Levant introduced alphabeticwriting, which the Greeks modified to create analphabet that fully recorded all the sounds of theirspeech. Literacy rapidly developed, writing beingused to record not only economic and politicalaffairs but also history and literature and the ethnog-raphy of neighboring societies. Arts and crafts flour-ished, reaching their peak in fifth-century Athens.After the Greeks’ success in repulsing two invasionsby the mighty Persian Empire in 490 and 480 B.C.,Athens became the foremost power in Greece, com-bining democracy at home with high-handed impe-rialism in the states with which it was in principleallied. By the 430s its actions and attitudes had pro-voked war with Sparta, into which much of Greecewas drawn, to the detriment of all. In the tragicaftermath, when Sparta, Thebes, and Athens viedfor power, the barbaric northern state of Macedoniawas able to seize control progressively of all ofGreece and under Alexander conquered most of theknown world, spreading Greek culture from Egyptto the borders of India, in Hellenistic kingdoms con-solidated by Alexander’s successors.

Greek Colonies In the eighth century growingpopulations and limited agricultural land in Greece


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encouraged expanding city-states to look overseasfor land to settle; the earliest known colony wasestablished by Euboea at Pithecussae in central Italyaround 775 B.C., and others were founded in easternSpain, southern France, central and southern Italyand Sicily, and around the shores of the Black Seaduring the eighth to sixth centuries. These coloniestook the overflow of population from their homestates and sent home grain and other produce, butthey also acted as trading stations that could tap theresources of the European interior and the Atlanticcoast. The Greeks also established a warm tradingrelationship with the Tartessians on the southernAtlantic coast of Iberia, but after a major confronta-tion in 537 (battle of Alalia), in which Greeks foughtEtruscans and their Carthaginian allies, the south-ern Iberian route to the Atlantic metal sources wasclosed to the Greeks, who turned instead to routesthrough France. A key settlement here was Massalia(modern Marseilles), founded by Phocaea around600 B.C., which gave access via the Rhône to centralFrance and Germany and to the trading networksleading on from there.

Greek colonies in Italy and particularly Sicilybecame involved in power struggles against theEtruscans and Carthaginians, as well as sometimestaking sides in the internal conflicts of Greece.Allied for a time with the rising Roman state againstthe Carthaginians, they were eventually swallowedup by its expansion. By 146 B.C. even the Greekmainland had fallen to the Romans.

ETRUSCANS

In the ninth century a number of substantial settle-ments developed in central Italy (Villanovan cul-ture), surrounded by sizable cemeteries of cremationburials, sometimes placed in urns shaped like huts,with grave goods including fibulae (brooches). TheVillanovans controlled substantial supplies of cop-per, tin, and lead from the Colline Metallifere, andthe abundant iron deposits of Elba. Iron began to beworked here occasionally in the 10th century andbecame more common from the eighth century. Theregion’s mineral wealth attracted trade from theGreeks and Phoenicians through the eighth century;this introduced luxury goods, such as Greek pottery,sparking the rapid development of local imitations.

At this time richer burials suggest the emergence ofa ranked society.

The Etruscans, who developed a civilized societyin this region from around 700 B.C., were descen-dants of the Villanovans. Twelve city-states emergedby the seventh century B.C., allied in a religiousleague and sharing a vivid and distinctive cultureinto which they wove ideas and innovations adoptedfrom their Greek neighbors and from farther afieldin West Asia. They enhanced the high agriculturalpotential of the region by innovations in farmingmanagement, increasing productivity. They builtroads and bridges, elaborate water systems, and mas-sive city walls and gates, as well as a variety of cham-ber tombs, sometimes painted with scenes of life,including feasting and dancing.

Trade and industry were key elements in theEtruscan city-states. Exploitation of the local metalores enabled the Etruscans not only to satisfy localdemand but also to supply considerable amounts ofmetal ore and finished goods to their Greek neigh-bors in central and southern Italy and Sicily. In thesixth century the Greeks came to dominate thenorthern part of the western Mediterranean basin.Squeezed out of trading in the western Mediter-ranean seas, the Etruscans expanded to the northand sought new markets across the Alps and throughtheir eastern ports of Spina and Adria, which gavethem direct access down the Adriatic to Greece.

Expansion beyond their heartland by 500 B.C.brought the Etruscans control of much of northernItaly, and of areas of Italy to their south, includingRome, then a small town. Within a century of theRomans’ expulsion of their Etruscan kings, however,the Roman state had grown strong enough to chal-lenge and then defeat the individual city-states ofthe Etruscan league, climaxing in the capture of Veiiin 396; the process was complete by the second cen-tury. While Etruscan culture underlay much of thatof the Romans, the Etruscan states and Etruscanidentity were obliterated.

ROME

Traditionally founded in 753 B.C., Rome was a seriesof linked villages that gradually coalesced into atown when it was part of the Etruscan ecumene inthe sixth century. In 509 B.C. the Romans expelled


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their Etruscan king and founded the Republic. Thesack of Rome by a band of Celtic freebooters around387 B.C. dealt a serious blow to Roman pride andself-confidence, making them for centuries oversen-sitive to renewed Celtic threats and exaggerated intheir responses. Expansion in the late fourth andthird centuries brought the Romans up againstEtruscans and central and southern Italians, whoseterritories they were able to absorb. For a while theGreek states in Italy were their allies against theCarthaginians, but eventually they too were takenover. Their crushing defeat of the Carthaginians bythe mid-second century brought the Romans con-trol of the former Carthaginian empire in NorthAfrica, Iberia, and Sicily, and left them without anopponent in the western Mediterranean. At thesame time they conquered Greece. Over the follow-ing century the Romans continued to expand, gain-ing control of the rest of Iberia, whose metal ores inparticular were a major attraction, southern France,parts of North Africa, western Anatolia and the Lev-ant, and the Adriatic coast of the Balkans. By thesecond century A.D. they had also conquered the restof Europe west of the Rhine-Danube line and ruleda significant part of West Asia.

Southeastern Europe

THRACE

Macedonia straddled the region between civilizedGreece and the societies that the Greeks knew asbarbarians. The inhabitants of the Balkans from thewestern Black Sea up into the Carpathian basin werereferred to by Herodotus and other Greek authorsas Thracians and were said to be related to the Tro-jans. Although they farmed the region, their mainsettlements were strongly fortified sites in uplandregions, where they practiced pastoralism andexploited iron sources. Like the steppe nomads withwhom they had close ties, they were warriors andhorse riders, as well as cattle rustlers. Hoards buriedwhen trouble loomed, for example, when hugebands of Celts invaded the region in the third cen-tury, contained numerous vessels of gold and silver,elaborately decorated with designs that reflect both

local traditions and styles and ideas adopted not onlyfrom their neighbors, the Greeks and Persians, butalso from distant India, central Asia, and evenChina. Similarly, what is known of their religionfrom classical sources and archaeology indicates thatthe Thracians shared some beliefs and practices withZoroastrianism and Tantrism.

While the majority of the population were proba-bly cremated and their ashes buried in flat-gravecemeteries, the Thracian elite were buried in rock-cuttombs or under barrows, sometimes accompanied bya sacrificed wife, and furnished with impressive goldand silver vessels and jewelry; the monumental royaltombs were modeled on Macedonian tholoi. Theestablishment of Greek colonies on the Thraciancoast allowed local elites to enhance their prestige byacquiring luxury goods such as wine and wine-drink-ing vessels. Thracians were also employed by the Per-sians as mercenaries. By the fourth century B.C. theThracians were using silver coinage. NumerousThracian tribes are referred to by classical authors;while many remained politically fluid, some strongleaders were able to carve out tribal states, such asthat of the Odysai between Macedonia and the BlackSea, with its capital at Seuthopolis. This stateexpanded and contracted, depending on the strengthof its kings, eventually becoming a client kingdom ofthe Romans, who annexed it in A.D. 46.

STEPPE CULTURES

Beyond the Thracian lands lay the steppe, stretchingacross Asia to the borders of China and inhabited bypastoral nomads and horse-riding elite warriorsarmed with swords, spears, and efficient compositebows and armor-piercing arrows, whose movementsand conflicts sometimes impinged upon Europe. Inthe early centuries of the first millennium the Cim-merians were active both as raiders and as mercenar-ies in the northern regions of the Near East and inAsia Minor, and they or related groups may havemade incursions into eastern Europe. Close relationsbetween steppe nomads and the more settled inhabi-tants of the Balkans provided one of the routes bywhich Europe acquired steppe-bred horses, used forriding in Europe from around 800 B.C.

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the Cimmerians had been displaced and the Cauca-sus and adjacent steppe region were home to theScythians, a name that covers both elite warriorhorsemen and steppe pastoralists, and farmers set-tled in the river valleys, whom they dominated.The Scythians buried their dead kings in woodenchambers under substantial barrows, accompaniedby sacrificed horses and retainers, often in largenumbers, and with lavish grave goods. Frozentombs of similar steppe groups found at Pazyryk inthe Altai region of central Asia have preservedwonderful clothing, cushions, saddles, horse gear,wall hangings and other textiles of woven or feltedwool, leather, and fur, as well as imported NearEastern carpets and Chinese silk; extraordinarycarved wooden objects; and tattooed bodies.Scythian burials lack the preserved organic materi-als but have yielded a treasury of gold work thatshares their decorative themes and exuberant style,in which animals are prominent. Gold objects,including vessels, combs, and other personal orna-ments, also depict scenes of life, including milking,hunting, and preparing sheepskins; some of thesepieces show artistic influences from their Greekneighbors with whom the Scythians had a livelytrade, exchanging grain and slaves for luxurygoods, including wine and drinking sets. By themid-sixth century strongholds were developing inthe forest steppe, of which the largest was Belsk(probably ancient Gelonus), a vast site enclosed bya rampart 20 miles (33 kilometers) long; it con-tained villages, industrial areas, and granaries, butwas probably mainly a seasonal meeting place fornomadic groups with their animals. By the thirdcentury the Scythians had settled in the Crimeaand had been replaced on the steppe by anothernomad group, the Sarmatians.

Temperate EuropeWhen classical writers began to refer to the inhabi-tants of western and central Europe, they calledthem Celts (Keltoi, Celti), Gauls (Galli), or Gala-tians (Galatae). These people spoke a number ofrelated languages, from which modern languagessuch as Welsh descend, and were organized in tribesthat often acknowledged interrelationships. By the

second century Celtic-speaking tribes occupiedmost of the area from Iberia to the Carpathian basin,mixed in some areas with other tribal groups, such asthe Iberians. How far back in time one can use thelabel “Celt,” however, is debated, and it is customaryto apply the term only in the later Iron Age (LaTène period, from c. 500 B.C.). Celtic speakers werealso present in Britain by the time of Roman con-tact; whether they settled there during the laterfirst millennium or were descended from the ear-lier indigenous inhabitants is hotly debated. TheAtlantic coastal region, including Britain, was cul-turally distinct from the La Tène zone for most ofthe pre-Roman Iron Age, as it had been for millen-nia, although trading relations made it open to influ-ences and ideas from the continental interior. LaTène metalwork, for example, was imported intoBritain, and its decoration inspired new native artstyles.

The demands of the Mediterranean powers forraw materials, such as metals, and slaves had a majorimpact on the scale of trade and production in tem-perate Europe, bringing the two systems into a closerelationship, which culminated by the first centuryA.D. in the Roman conquest of Europe up to theRhine. By this time many Celtic tribes had becomepartially urbanized, with substantial fortified settle-ments that were the political, religious, economic,and industrial foci of their area.

In the north and in the east societies remainedsmaller in scale. The tribes of this area, like theCelts, were warriors as well as farmers; they hadmany religious practices and other aspects of culturein common with the Celts, and enjoyed both tradingand warring relations with them. The Romans knewthese tribes as Germani and considered them dis-tinct from the Celts, a distinction reinforced by thelater frontier of the Roman Empire at the Rhine,with the Celts inside and the Germans outside, butin reality the boundary and tribal identities wereprobably rather fluid until crystallized by Romanrealpolitik.

IBERIA

The long-established metalworking traditions ofIberia were given a new stimulus by the arrival of for-eign traders in search of metal. Traditionally, the


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Phoenicians founded a port-of-trade at Gadir (Cádiz),an island near the estuary of the Guadalquivir, around1100 B.C., and certainly by the eighth centuryPhoenician trading settlements were establishedalong the Atlantic coast of southern Iberia, situated atthe mouths of rivers to gain access to the region’smetal ores, particularly silver, gold, and tin, whileother colonies were founded on the Mediterraneancoast. The major native settlement of Tartessos,which is probably to be identified with modernHuelva at the mouth of the Río Tinto, channeledsome of the material from the interior to the Phoeni-cians, and in exchange the Tartessians acquired jew-elry, ivories, bronze vessels, and other items of superbPhoenician craftsmanship, as well as goods from else-where in the Mediterranean carried by Phoeniciantraders, such as amphorae of Greek oil and fine Greekpottery. Many of these items, acquired by the localelite, were deposited in rich burials, such as those atCarmona, or found their way far inland through tradeor social networks.

Additional colonies were established farther northon the Atlantic coast of Iberia in the eighth century,again giving the Phoenicians access to metal ores.Mediterranean demand for these stimulated nativemining and production and trade along the Atlanticfacade. By 550 southern coastal Iberia was part of theCarthaginian sphere, while farther north the Greekshad established a colony at Emporion (Ampurias).The Greeks also traded directly with the Tartessiansin the sixth century despite the presence of the long-established Phoenician port-of-trade at Gadir; hos-tile relations with Carthage would have barred themfrom the region from the fifth century. Around thetrading settlements and in the Tartessian hinterlandthe native Iberians developed an increasingly civi-lized way of life, with emerging towns and an artstyle that blended native traditions with ideas bor-rowed from their Mediterranean trading partners.Farther north in the interior were tribes known col-lectively as the Celtiberians, who from the sixth cen-tury were burying their warrior elite with weaponsand sometimes horse trappings. They maintainedclose links with communities across the Pyrenees insouthern France. By the fourth century they toowere becoming urbanized, living in heavily defendedhilltop strongholds and developing their own writtenlanguage.

THE ATLANTIC

The inhabitants of Atlantic Iberia were distinct fromthose farther east, forming part of the still activeAtlantic trading network. By the fourth or third cen-tury Carthaginian traders probably reached thecoast of Galicia, from which they could access addi-tional metal sources. It is possible this region was thearea known as the Cassiterides or Oestrymnis, fromwhich the Carthaginians and later the Romansobtained tin; the Greeks also derived tin from here,either via the Phoenicians or by direct involvementin Atlantic trade via the rivers of France. Alterna-tively, these names may refer to Cornwall, which wasalso trading tin to foreigners and which was knownto the literate Mediterranean world. Cornish tin wastraded across the Channel to Gaul and thence byriver to the Mediterranean.

The mineral resources of the Atlantic continuedto be in demand in the European interior, and thegrowing requirements of the distant Mediterraneanstates increased the quantities of raw materials thatentered the trading networks, although Mediter-ranean luxuries only rarely reached the northernareas of the Atlantic system, western France, Britain,and Ireland. Southern England was a crossroadswhere the Atlantic network intersected with that ofthe continental interior. At times it was more closelylinked to the one than the other. In the eighth andseventh centuries Britain and Ireland were closelyintegrated into the continental trade network at theexpense of their involvement with Atlantic trade, butfrom the sixth century onward the European inte-rior accessed Atlantic resources, including those ofBritain and Ireland, along the Loire from Brittany,which now became the main middleman betweenthe two networks, also trading its own metals andother resources. By the fourth century Britain wasalso enjoying access to continental trade across theNorth Sea again. The routes by which goods movedalso spread the designs and techniques of Celtic art,which were enthusiastically adopted and built on bycommunities in Brittany, Britain, and Ireland.

During the first millennium a variety of defendedsettlements characterized western regions within theAtlantic zone. The castros of Galicia varied in size;these were nucleated settlements of stone housesinside stone defenses on hilltops. Their inhabitants


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used decorated pottery, and their leaders wore dis-tinctive gold torcs. They created stone sculpturesof warriors and bulls, and their rituals involved theuse of stone sauna baths. In Brittany most peoplelived in farmsteads defended by a bank and some-times a ditch. Souterrains, underground chambersaccessed by tunnels, were associated with the set-tlements and may have been used for storage.Banks and ditches were also used to cut off head-lands, forming cliff castles in which people couldtake refuge but which may also have had a ritualfunction. The people of coastal Brittany alsoerected dressed stone stelae, sometimes decorated,which may have been territorial markers. In south-west England and Wales the situation was similar:the landscape was densely settled with defendedfarmsteads (“rounds” and “raths”), and in Cornwallthese had fogous, stone-built subterranean cham-bers probably used for storage; there were manycliff castles, too. Cliff castles were also built inwestern Ireland, where stone forts surroundedfarmsteads and larger settlements. In western andnorthern Scotland various forms of impressive cir-cular stone cellular houses and towers, the brochs,wheelhouses, and duns, were constructed, home toindividual families or larger communities; thesemay have been built more to impress the neighborsthan to ward off their aggression. Other settle-ments were defended by being located on artificialor natural islands within lakes (crannogs).

CENTRAL AND WESTERN EUROPE

Hallstatt C: Eighth and Seventh CenturiesInfluences and possibly incursions from the steppearound 800 B.C. introduced the practice of horse rid-ing. Horses themselves may have been importedfrom the steppe region, where nomadic pastoralistsburied important individuals in wooden chambersunder mounds, accompanied by weapons, horses,and sometimes vehicles. This practice may haveinspired the appearance in central Europe, in theprosperous region between southern Germany andBohemia, of a number of wealthy burials in whichthe body was laid on a wagon for a bier and wasaccompanied by a set of weapons, bronze horse trap-pings, and other fine goods. Other well-endowedburials had similar grave goods but lacked the high-

est status symbol of the wagon. These burials reflectgrowing differentiation in society and the statusaccorded to warriors.

The salt mines at Hallstatt entered their periodof greatest prosperity in the seventh and sixth cen-turies, reflected in the rich array of artifacts placedin burials here, including bronze buckets and jew-elry, swords and daggers of bronze and iron, somewith gilded hilts, and fine pottery. The salt in themines has preserved many of the organic objectsused by the miners, including leather backpacksin which they carried out the lumps of salt. By thefifth century, however, Hallstatt had been eclipsedby new mines at Dürrnberg bei Hallein farthernorth.


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2.10 A burial from the Iron Age cemetery at Hall-statt. This individual was partially cremated, historso being reduced to ashes that were deposited inthe pots placed within the grave. (Figuier, Louis.Primitive Man. London: Chatto and Windus, 1876)

Hallstatt D: 600–450 B.C. The establishment of aGreek colony at Massalia around 600 B.C. had a sig-nificant impact on the patterns of trade and powerwithin transalpine Europe. Expeditions by Greektraders in search of raw materials brought them upthe Rhône and Saône to the Burgundy region ofFrance. From here it was a short distance to theSeine, which linked central France to the North Seacoast and by a short sea crossing to Britain. Bur-gundy also gave access to routes into southern Ger-many, significantly west of the area where the richestHallstatt C burials had taken place. In both Bur-gundy and southern Germany the preexisting nativechiefdoms, focused on a few substantial hillforts,gained symbols of power and prestige through trad-ing as middlemen with the Greeks, receiving wineand luxury goods, some, like the enormous Vix krater(wine-mixing bowl), made to cater to barbarian tastesfor ostentation. Wine amphorae, Etruscan bronzeflagons, and fine Greek Attic pottery were prominentamong the imports in exchange for which the Greeksreceived gold and other metals, furs, amber, andslaves. Many imports ended up as grave goods in theburials of chiefs who, as in the preceding Hallstatt Cperiod, were often placed on wagons in woodenchambers under large earthen mounds: Prominentexamples include the Hohmichele barrow at Heune-berg and the Hochdorf barrow; in the latter thewagon was loaded with grave goods while the chiefwas laid out on a bronze couch. Now, however,among the grave goods weaponry came second toequipment for drinking, not only imported vesselsbut also local items such as drinking horns; feastinghad become the means by which a chief demon-strated his status. Smaller barrows set around thechief’s tomb housed the remains of the local elite.

The chiefs and their entourage dwelt in fortifiedhillforts, but the majority of the tribe farmed withinthe surrounding countryside, a pattern repeatedacross Europe at this time. The German hillfort ofHeuneberg gives a striking illustration of the valueplaced on exotica: While for the most part the hill-fort’s ramparts were, like others of the time, timber-framed constructions of wood, stone, and earth, at onestage these were replaced by Mediterranean-style wallswith bastions, built of clay-brick on a stone footing.

Over much of the rest of western Europe a simi-lar but less prosperous society flourished, consisting

of small tribes mainly of farmers living in villages orfarmsteads, giving allegiance to a chief based in ahillfort. The latter maintained an entourage of elitewarriors who spent much of their time in hunting orin raiding their neighbors.

La Tène A: 500–400 In the sixth century the Etrus-cans expanded into northern Italy, where theyencountered Celts, who were beginning to settlethere. This and the loss to the Greeks of their westernMediterranean trade encouraged the Etruscans todevelop trade across the Alps. The importance ofroutes through the Alpine passes is underlined byoccasional finds of hoards, such as a collection of goldtorcs and armlets deposited at Erstfeld along theroute through the St. Gotthard pass. Trade to theBurgundy–south Germany region that had been themain sixth-century beneficiary of Mediterraneantrade declined in the fifth century when Greek inter-est in the Rhône corridor decreased in favor of otherroutes between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

Mediterranean goods such as Etruscan beakedflagons now began to appear in the regions farther tothe north, east, and west, with particular concentra-tions of wealth appearing in Bohemia and theMarne/Champagne and Moselle/middle Rhineregions. The growing importance of iron con-tributed to the rise in importance of the Hunsrück-Eifel area (middle Rhine) since the region hadabundant iron deposits. Some of the Mediterraneangoods were moved through trade, while others wereprobably booty from raiding expeditions into Italy oraccumulated by Celtic mercenaries who had foughtfor the Etruscans. This is reflected in the distributionof imported luxuries, which occurred more widelybut in smaller concentrations than before. Thegrowing prosperity of these regions was marked by aseries of wealthy burials placed on two-wheeled char-iots, for example, at Somme-Bionne in Champagne.

The trade in Mediterranean luxuries contributedto the emergence of La Tène (“Celtic”) art, whichdrew on Greek, Etruscan, and Phoenician designs,motifs, and shapes and reworked them with nativetraditions to produce a vibrant style of decorated met-alwork, particularly concentrated on weapons, ves-sels, and ornaments. Some of the designs wererepeated on pottery and presumably on perishablematerials such as wood and textiles. Geometric and


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abstract designs were combined with symbols such asthe duck that harked back to the artwork of theBronze Age. Celtic craftsmen exercised a range ofmetalworking skills, casting elaborate shapes, deco-rating bronze and gold objects with engraved, cut-out, and repoussé designs, inlaying objects with glassor coral, and adding small animal figures or grotesquehuman heads. Beginning on the middle Rhine, Celticart styles were adopted widely across transalpine

Europe, although they made little impression onIberia, which had its own styles of artwork.

Substantial settlements with many urban fea-tures, such as Vace, were developing at the head ofthe Adriatic, but, in contrast to western and centralEurope, Mediterranean luxury goods played littlepart here. Instead, the elite used local products suchas glass beads, sheet bronze goods, and decoratedbronze buckets (situlae). The latter were also popular


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Map 10. Europe in the Early La Tène period

in northern Italy, an area where native culturesreceived influences from the Mediterranean world atsecond hand via the Etruscans.

Outside the regions that developed direct trad-ing relations with the Mediterranean, many com-munities continued to live in hillforts or lowlandstockades, which increased in number in the sixthand fifth centuries. These fortified settlementsacted as local chiefly centers and refuges in times ofattack, and often contained storage facilities forlarge stocks of grain. Some of these fortified settle-ments housed sizable communities—Biskupin inPoland, for example, contained more than 100houses—and were centers of considerable craftactivity, such as Závist in the Czech Republic. FewMediterranean luxury goods entered the systems bywhich goods circulated in these areas, but trade in

the regional products of transalpine Europe contin-ued, carrying raw materials, such as coral and metalores, and manufactured goods such as swords. InBritain many hillforts were abandoned after around400 B.C., but those that survived in many casesendured for centuries.

La Tène B: 400–275 Migrations After about 400B.C. Mediterranean trade into transalpine Europeseems to have ceased. Trade across the Alps mayhave been disrupted by the Celtic migrations thatbegan in earnest around 400, while in southernFrance the Greek colony at Massalia had ceased totrade up the Rhône, instead becoming involved inlocal power struggles.

As populations rose in western and centralEurope, some groups, attracted by the wealth of theMediterranean world or because resources in theirhomeland were under pressure, left to seek their for-tune, either as individual tribal bands or as largerconfederations of groups from a number of tribes. Insome cases these were bands of young warriors look-ing for booty and adventure; in others cases they alsoincluded women and children and were seeking newlands to settle. Some Celts had settled in northernItaly in the sixth century B.C. Around 400 B.C. theirnumbers were swelled by a substantial influx of Celts,known to the Romans as Gauls; these includedInsubres and Boii, who settled around Milan and inthe Po plain, respectively. An army of freebootersdescended on the Etruscan cities, defeated a Romanarmy at Allia, and swept south, sacking Rome around387; the Romans paid a large bribe to induce them toreturn to the Celtic settlements of Gallia Cisalpina.Regarding them thereafter as a significant threat, theRomans eventually conquered the Cisalpine Celtsbetween 232 and 190 B.C.; the Boii resettled inBohemia.

During the late fifth and early fourth centuries,Celtic groups also moved eastward, settling along theDanube and in the Carpathian basin, and raidinginto Illyria. Alexander the Great, on a punitive raid inThrace, encountered a group of these Celts, knownto the Greeks as Galatians. In 281–279 a huge Gala-tian confederation swept south into MacedonianGreece. Here the army quarreled and split, onegroup continuing southeast into Asia Minor, wherethey established a Galatian warrior aristocracy; this


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2.11 The chamfrein or pony-cap found in a peatbog at Torrs, Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland, a fineexample of the decorative bronzework owned by theelite of the later Iron Age. The two bronze drink-ing horns found with the pony-cap were added to itin recent times. (Drawing by Audrey McIntosh,from material in the National Museums of Scot-land, Edinburgh)

lasted until the Romans conquered the region in thefirst century B.C. The other group under Brennuscontinued south into Greece, intending to loot thetreasuries of the shrine at Delphi. A Greek armystoutly defended the shrine and eventually the Celtswere driven off, with the loss of Brennus and 26,000men, according to Greek sources, though they mayhave succeeded first in plundering the shrine.

Partly as a result of the migrations, by the thirdcentury Celtic tribes and La Tène culture werespread over a huge area from France to the Balkans,with the related Celtiberians over much of Iberia.There was a substantial area settled by Galatians inAnatolia, and the inhabitants of much of Britain andIreland may also have been Celts.

In northern Europe and Scandinavia, small settle-ments accommodating only a few families continuedto be the norm. These contained houses, in some casesincluding stalled shelter for the family’s livestock, andother buildings for agricultural or domestic use.

The abundance of bogs in Denmark, the LowCountries, and Britain have made them particularlyfertile regions for recovering evidence of the wide-spread European practice of offering sacrifices inwatery places. These included not only valued posses-sions but also people who were ritually killed, oftenusing several methods in conjunction. Offerings fre-quently accumulated over long periods in the same,hallowed, place; they included fine jewelry, weaponsand parade armor, metal vessels, and other objectsincluding slave chains. Among the objects thusdeposited at Gundestrup in Denmark was a fine sil-ver-gilt cauldron decorated with a number of scenesfeaturing ritual practices and gods. Although it endedits life in Scandinavia, it was probably manufacturedin Thrace and incorporated ideas from much fartherafield, including India, as well as Celtic Europe.

An exceptional votive deposit at Hjortspring offJutland contained a boat and a considerable quan-tity of weapons. It is thought that this was a thanks-offering for victory, comprising the arms of adefeated army of at least 80 men.

LA TÈNE C-D 275 B.C. TO THE ROMANCONQUEST

Iberia and Southern France Around the Mediter-ranean coast of France some native tribes responded

to the presence of Greek colonies by developingdefended settlements with Greek features, such asstreet planning and construction in dressed stone, butretaining markedly nonclassical aspects, such as thereligious preoccupation with severed heads. Othersettlements, particularly Montlaures, Carcaso (Car-cassonne), and Tolosa (Toulouse) on the Aude-Garonne route, developed at strategic points on theroutes that linked the Greek colonies with AtlanticFrance. Silver coins copied from Greek prototypesbegan to circulate among the tribes of southernFrance. By the third century B.C. Roman traders werealso active in the coastal region, trading with Greeksettlements. When in 154 B.C. the Greek towns werethreatened by hostile hill tribes, Massalia sought mil-itary help from the Romans.

Victory in the Second Punic War in 206 B.C. wonthe Romans the Carthaginian territories in southernand eastern Iberia, giving them control of the gold,silver, and copper mines as well as extremely pro-ductive agricultural land. While some Iberians wel-comed the Romans as liberators from Carthaginianrule, others rose against them. Native resistanceescalated in 154, when the Lusitanians in the south-west rose in revolt and the Celtiberians in the centerof the peninsula were drawn in as their allies. It wasnot until 133 B.C. that the Romans succeeded in sub-duing these regions, treating conquered towns withextreme brutality. When the Celtiberian strongholdof Numantia fell after a long siege, most of its inhab-itants were sold into slavery.

The Romans accessed their Iberian possessionsoverland along the coast, a route that was threatenedby hostile tribes, including the Saluvii, who alsoposed a threat to the Greek and friendly nativetowns of southern Gaul. The Romans mounted acampaign against the Saluvii, Allobroges, andArverni in 125–121 B.C., savagely sacking the Salu-vii’s oppidum (tribal center) at Entremont; theythereafter decided to annex the region to safeguardtheir interests, creating the province of GalliaTransalpina, stretching inland up the Aude andGaronne. In succeeding years they founded a port atNarbo (Narbonne) and seized Tolosa, gaining con-trol of the Garonne route to the Atlantic and thusdirect access to the Atlantic trade network and itsmineral resources; their participation increased thevolume of goods in circulation.


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Eastern Europe The eastern Alps, source of cop-per, iron, and salt, saw the emergence of a smallstate, the kingdom of Noricum, with its capital atNoreia (Magdalensberg). This became a center of

iron working, producing, among other goods,welded swords that were in considerable demandamong neighboring communities. After an initialconfrontation over settlement in the Aquileia region


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Map 11. Europe in the Late Iron Age

(at the head of the Adriatic) around 180 B.C., theRomans and the people of Noricum establishedfriendly relations.

Around 120 B.C. a confederation of tribes fromJutland and the North European Plain, under theleadership of the Cimbri and Teutones, started tomigrate south, moving first into the middle Danube,whence they expelled the Celtic Scordisci tribe.They then attacked Noricum and defeated a Romanarmy that was sent against them. Moving on to raidsouthern Gaul, they reignited opposition to theRomans among the tribes the latter had subdued adecade before. After further defeats, in 109, 107, and105, the Romans at last won decisive victories againstthe Cimbri in 102 and the Teutones in 101. The bar-barian threat was averted, but the Romans remainedsensitive to potential trouble from Celtic Europe.

Noricum continued to flourish as a state in thefirst century, trading with both Celtic Europe andthe Romans; in 70 B.C. the Noricans started to issuetheir own coinage. The importance of Roman tradeis emphasized by the establishment around 100 B.C.of a Roman trading colony outside the oppidum ofNoreia. By the end of the first century B.C. Romanadvances into the Balkans, bringing the lands up tothe Danube under Roman control, made it expedi-ent for the Romans to annex Noricum, too.

To the southeast of the Roman provinces alongthe Danube lay Thrace. This was left as a clientkingdom by Augustus but was annexed by theRomans in A.D. 46, giving them control of all thelands on the west side of the Danube, which with theRhine formed a natural frontier.

North of the Danube the Dacians, a group relatedto the people of Thrace, inhabited the uplands ofTransylvania. Around 60 B.C. they expanded, form-ing a large state known as Dacia in the Carpathianbasin and the areas beyond to the south, under therule of King Burebista and his priest Deceneus,although it contracted again after Burebista’s murderin 40 B.C. The Dacians attacked the Black Sea townsbut imported grain and sold slaves for silver coin tosettlements on the Adriatic, becoming increasinglyinfluenced by Mediterranean culture. The state wasstrengthened by King Decebalus from the 80s A.D.;raids on the adjacent Roman provinces provokedconfrontation, and between A.D. 105 and 107 theRomans defeated the Dacians and annexed their ter-

ritory, sacking the complex of fortified settlementsand sanctuaries at Sarmizegethusa, where they foundhuge quantities of gold and silver. Many of theinhabitants of Dacia fled, leaving the Romans in con-trol of the mineral wealth of a depopulated area. Thisextension of Roman territory beyond the naturalfrontier of the Danube proved too costly to maintain,and around A.D. 250 it was abandoned.

Oppida Control of southern France and its routesinto central Europe and the Atlantic network gavethe Romans access to European markets for theirwine and the tableware for drinking it in style. Inexchange they obtained metals and other raw mate-rials, furs, hides and hunting dogs, grain, and espe-cially slaves, needed in increasing numbers to workon Italian farming estates.

The territories adjacent to areas now under Romancontrol began to reflect Roman influences. Romanstyles of architecture appeared in the developing tribalcenters (oppida), and it is possible that Mediterraneaninfluences played some part in the emergence of theseCeltic towns. Mediterranean luxuries were in demand,and a softer lifestyle began to develop among thetribes of central Gaul, a factor in the ease with whichthese were bought under Roman control in the mid-first century. Roman institutions were also adopted bysome of the tribes in the Roman sphere of influence:The Helvetii in Switzerland, for example, replacedkingship with rule by elected magistrates.

From the later second century onward, fortifiedtribal centers began to emerge in France and else-where. Known as oppida, they had many features oftowns, acting as the administrative, political, andindustrial center for tribal groups farming the sur-rounding countryside. They replaced the earlierhillforts, sometimes being located in the same place,but generally not, though they were usually strategi-cally placed for defense. Strongly fortified with ram-parts of stone, timber, and earth, they might haveadditional defenses such as a glacis, dikes, and thornhedges, and the gateways were often complex defen-sive structures with outworks.

Within the fortifications of an oppidum were res-idential areas, often laid out as a planned settlementwith streets. The houses could be small or more sub-stantial rectangular wooden structures, sometimeswith stone foundations. In many cases the influence


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of Roman architecture could be seen in the design ofthe houses, especially those of the elite and the tribalchief or king. Many craftsmen lived and workedwithin the oppidum, bringing industry under thecontrol of the tribal leader. Industrial activitiesincluded working in bronze, glass, gold, and otherfine materials, as well as creating more everydayobjects such as iron tools and weapons and pottery.The introduction of the potter’s wheel now made itpossible for Celtic craftsmen to mass-produce finevessels such as pedestalled jars and other luxurytableware associated with wine drinking.

Many oppida also contained a mint as tribal kingsadopted the idea of coinage. High denominationcoins may have been used to reward royal followers oras a medium of exchange with other tribal leaders,while lower ones facilitated ordinary transactions,indicating the beginnings of a market economy.Coinage also served as a vehicle for royal propaganda.One part of the oppidum was set aside for religiousinstallations; these could include built shrines but alsoritual pits and other Celtic sanctuaries.

While many continental oppida were relativelycompact settlements, often strategically located onelevated ground, those in southeast England oftenenclosed huge areas: Camulodunon, for instance,was more than 10 square miles (16 square kilome-ters) in extent, enclosing a royal residence, separatesettled areas, burials, a sanctuary, and a great deal ofopen ground.

Outside the southeast, and in other backwardareas of the Celtic world, as in much of the Ger-manic lands, territories were smaller and centeredon hillforts or other defended sites, which provideda focus for the tribe and a defense in time of needbut housed only the chief and his entourage.

Gaul In the first century B.C. the personal ambi-tions of individual Roman leaders began to affecttheir policies toward the barbarians. In 58 B.C. theHelvetii, a tribe in Switzerland, decided to movewest to settle in central Gaul. Seeing this as both anindirect threat to the Roman province of GalliaTransalpina and an opportunity for glory, JuliusCaesar turned them back by force, causing thedeaths of several hundred thousand of them. In thesame year intertribal conflict in Gaul and the activi-ties of a band of Germanic mercenaries under Ario-

vistus gave Caesar further opportunities for involve-ment in Gaulish affairs and justification at home fora policy of annexation. Over the period 58 to 53 B.C.he successfully attacked a number of Gallic tribes,bringing the whole of France and Belgium up to theRhine under Roman rule and mounting two expedi-tions against British tribes that had given support totheir colleagues, the Veneti of Brittany, a majorplayer in the Atlantic trade network whose fleetCaesar destroyed. The Romans dealt brutally withtheir opponents, virtually wiping out the Belgae andEburones, who had resisted strongly. Opposition tothe Romans became united in the winter of 53–52B.C., and almost all Gaul rose against them, suckingin Caesar’s Gallic allies. The Gallic forces were ledby the chief of the Arverni tribe, Vercingetorix, whoenjoyed considerable success until his army wasbesieged at Alesia in 52 B.C. The Romans’ superiordiscipline and siegecraft brought them victory andVercingetorix surrendered. The fall of anotherstronghold, Uxellodunum, the following year endedGallic resistance. Gaul lay devastated, with morethan a million of its inhabitants slain or enslaved, thecountryside ravaged by the military campaigns andVercingetorix’s scorched earth policy, and its wealthseized by the conqueror. It was not until after theRoman civil war ended in the victory of Octavian(Augustus) in 31 B.C. that steps began to be taken toorganize Gaul within the empire. At this time, too,the Romans conquered the remaining, northwest,corner of Iberia.

Britain Though unconquered, the southeast ofBritain now became more strongly focused on theRoman world, importing wine, Roman and Gallicluxury tableware, and exotic foods such as olive oiland fish sauce for feasting; these also appeared intheir burials. The Atlantic sea trade now became lessimportant than cross-Channel trade, moving thecenter of prosperity from the south coast to thesoutheast and the Thames estuary.

Tribes in the adjacent regions who were in trad-ing relations with the southeast received limitedquantities of such imports, but people continued tolive in farmsteads and small villages, with hillforts astheir tribal centers. Craftsmanship displayed ingoods such as jewelry and weaponry was of a highstandard but reflected native Celtic traditions rather


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than Mediterranean stylistic influences. The regionsto the north and west, the Atlantic zone, were unaf-fected, continuing their traditional way of life.

The Catuvellauni, previously based at Verlamion(St. Albans), became the most powerful tribe, con-quering the Trinovantes of the east and seizing con-trol of their center at Camulodunon (Colchester),which became the major focus for trade with thecontinent. Their rivals in the south, the Atrebates,allied themselves with the Romans and wererewarded when the Romans under the emperorClaudius invaded and conquered Britain in A.D. 43.The Romans rapidly gained control of the alreadypartially civilized south and east half of England andwent on to pacify the north and west, including a

massive attack on Mona (Anglesey) to destroy thepower of the Druids. Despite the setback of the ris-ing under Boudicca in A.D. 60, by the early secondcentury the Romans were firmly in control of En-gland and part of southern Scotland. The empire inEurope had now reached its maximum extent, withIreland and most of Scotland outside it; these areasretained their traditional way of life.

AFTER THE ROMANCONQUEST

BarbariansGermanic tribesmen had often become involved inCeltic tribal conflict, and on several occasions duringhis campaigns Caesar had crossed the Rhine on puni-tive expeditions against them. The Rhine provided anatural frontier, beyond which dwelt Germanictribes with whom the Romans engaged in a long-running and ultimately unsuccessful conflict. Unlikethe Celts, who by the second-first century B.C. weredeveloping a form of urban society, in which theyhad acquired a taste for the trappings of civilization,the Germani were still organized in small tribes withfluid boundaries and no higher authority. This meantthat, whereas the Celts could be subdued by the cap-ture of their oppida and leaders, the Germaniengaged in endless guerrilla warfare against whichthe Romans could make no enduring headway. Thelowest moment for the Romans came when Germaniled by Arminius, who had served in the Roman army,destroyed three Roman legions.

Conflict did not, however, prevent the exchangeof materials, objects, and ideas between the Romanand the barbarian worlds, and Roman glassware, forexample, has been found in pagan burials well to thenorth in Scandinavia. Huge quantities of silver aswell as Mediterranean luxury goods and wine wereexchanged for materials such as furs and for slaves forwhich the Romans had an inexhaustible need—cal-culated at 140,000 per year. Within a radius ofaround 120 miles (200 kilometers) of the frontier,


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2.12 Pacifying the natives: A detail from theRoman distance slab found at Bridgeness on theAntonine Wall in Scotland, briefly held as theRoman frontier in Britain (Drawing by AudreyMcIntosh, from material in the National Museumsof Scotland, Edinburgh)

gold and particularly silver coins were valued, sug-gesting that a market economy was developing inareas adjacent to the empire. Beyond this, wine andthe tableware to drink it from were popular andreached far north into Scandinavia. Rivalry and con-flict among Germanic tribes allowed the Romans toforge alliances with some against others, as had ear-lier been the case with Celtic tribes, and Germanicmercenaries were often recruited into the Romanarmy as auxiliaries; this offered them both the oppor-tunity to engage in warfare, their preferred way oflife, and far greater material rewards than were avail-able through local warfare. By the late fourth centuryA.D. barbarian recruits formed the bulk of the Romanarmy due to a shortage of manpower in the empire.

Population growth, pressure from neighbors, andother factors meant that migrations frequently tookplace within the barbarian territories, and on occasionthese spilled over into Roman territory and wererepulsed with varying degrees of difficulty. The prob-lem was particularly acute in the mid-third century.By the fourth century A.D. political and economictroubles were plaguing much of the Roman Empire,and agreements were made with friendly Germanictribes that allowed them to settle in depopulatedareas, in some cases acting as a military buffer againsthostile tribes. In A.D. 406 the Rhine froze, allowinghordes of Germanic tribesmen to cross into Gaul.Pressure from the Huns, steppe nomads who hadswept west from their original home on the bordersof China, pushed some tribes into the Balkans in thelate fourth century, threatening Byzantium, now theprincipal capital of the Roman Empire. During thefollowing century, the Western Roman Empire,including Rome itself, gradually fell to these tribalgroups, while the Eastern Empire retained controlonly of the southeastern remnant of its European ter-ritory, along with parts of West Asia. The extent towhich Roman institutions and culture were preservedin these overrun territories depended on a number offactors, such as the attitude of local dignitaries, thedegree to which the barbarian group had alreadyabsorbed Roman ways from prolonged contact andinteraction, and the speed at which resistance col-lapsed. In Britain, which put up a strong fight againstthe Angles, Saxons, and other invaders, Roman cul-ture was all but lost, while in Gaul, which was quicklyoverrun, it remained strong.

Within the EmpireRoman policy toward conquered areas favoredRomanization. Towns were founded to replace tribalcenters, often at or near existing oppida, such asVerulamium (St. Albans), or developed out ofRoman forts placed at militarily strategic places,such as Eboracum (York). Deliberate Roman foun-dations were intended to set a civic example to thenatives and were structured around a forum, with itsadministrative and public buildings, including atemple to the imperial cult; other important build-ings intended to inculcate the Roman way of lifemight include a bathhouse, a theater, or anamphitheater. Local chiefs or princes and their elitefollowers were encouraged to reside within thetown, though they might also have country estates,and to take up civic duties, which included fundingthe provision of some amenities and offices.

Town houses and country villas often followedRoman models in their layout, décor, and facilities,and their owners adopted aspects of Roman dress andculture. Roman luxury goods, such as Samian potteryand classical jewelry, were used to display wealth andimportance. Many Roman industries were establishedin conquered territories, and native industries adoptedRoman methods of production and distribution. Amarket economy became established, and many busi-nesses and estates became the property of absenteeowners who lived in Italy or other central parts of theempire. Recruitment to the army and the granting ofland to veterans in the area in which they spent theirfinal service created conditions for considerable mix-ing of ethnic groups throughout the empire.

Nevertheless, being part of the Roman Empiredid not entirely change the way of life of its newsubjects, particularly those of lowly status andthose dwelling on its periphery, in areas such asWales. Small farmers continued as they had donefor millennia, and there were few innovations inagriculture outside the large industrialized villaestates. Native crafts, such as making domestic pot-tery and textiles, continued as before, while Celticart styles and traditions still flourished, exemplifiedby the fine metalwork that was produced. Newmedia were embraced and blended with traditionalstyles, such as the decidedly unclassical designs ofsome mosaics.


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Despite the Romans’ suppression of the Druids,they preferred to tolerate or assimilate rather thandestroy the religions of their subject peoples, attimes embracing them themselves, as long as thesedid not conflict with the imperial cult, which wasalso an avowal of allegiance to the emperor. ManyCeltic sacred places continued to be venerated; insome cases in their original form, in others replacedby Roman temples dedicated to the Celtic deity orto the latter alongside a Roman equivalent. When inthe fourth century Christianity was adopted as theempire’s official religion, many earlier pagan shrineswere converted to churches, but earlier traditionslingered, becoming in some cases woven into localChristian belief and practice.

Earlier traditions in many other aspects of lifealso endured or resurfaced after the fall of theRoman Empire and made a significant contributionto later life in Europe. Subsistence farming in manyareas such as highland Scotland changed littlebetween prehistoric and recent times. The socialstructure of chief, warriors, and peasants familiarfrom the Iron Age was echoed in later times, forexample, in Ireland, and the mythology of gods andheroes survived in later folk tales and oral literatureand has inspired literature, music, and even politicaldoctrines down the ages. The exuberant art of CelticEurope continued to develop not only in the metal-work of later times but also in illuminated manu-scripts, textiles, and other craft products. Europe’slanguages have hardly been added to since prehis-toric times, and have spread across the globe, whileDNA studies now reveal that the majority of Euro-peans today are descended from people who inhab-ited the continent more than 20,000 years ago.

READING

PalaeolithicRenfrew and Bahn 2004: dating; Barton 1997,Jochim 2002a, 2002b, Stringer and Andrews 2005:general survey; Scarre 1998: Terra Amata; Gamble1994: ice ages, colonization of Europe, Nean-

derthals; Barton 1997: Boxgrove; Barton 1997,Jochim 2002b, Mellars 1994, Van Andel and Davies,eds. 2004: modern humans; Mithen 1996, 2005: pre-historic cognition.

Early PostglacialMilisauskas, ed. 2002, Whittle 1994, 1996, Mithen1994, 2003, Champion et al. 1984, Barker 1985,Thorpe 1996, Price, ed. 2000: general survey;Jochim 2002c, Dennell 1983: Mesolithic; Uscinow-icz 2000, Mitchell 2004, Dolukhanov 2003: post-glacial climate and environment changes; Clarke1976: environment and Mesolithic economy; Noe-Nygaard and Richter 2003: Mesolithic huntingtechniques; Zohary and Hopf 2000: cultivatedplants; Shwarz 2001: tuna; Van Andel and Runnels1987, Halstead 1996, Perles 2001, Doumas 1994:Greece; Bailey 2000, Garasanin 1994: Balkans; Mer-pert 1994: east/steppe region; Luning 1994, Bogucki2000: LBK; Fontana and Guerreschi 2003:Mesolithic in Alpine regions; Guilaine 1994, Barnett2000, Binder 2000, Zilhao 2000: western Mediter-ranean; Straus and Morales 2003: Mesolithic Iberia;Cunliffe 2001a, Araujo et al. 2003, Bradley 1998:Atlantic facade; Verjux 2003, Scarre, ed. 1987:France; Barclay 1998, Finlayson 1998, Darvill 1987,1996: Britain; Thomas 1996, Verhart 2003, LouweKooijmans 2003: northern Europe.

Neolithic ConsolidationMilisauskas and Kruk 2002a, Whittle 1994, 1996,Sherratt 1994a, 1997, Champion et al. 1984, Barker1985, Thorpe 1996, Price, ed. 2000: general survey;Jochim 2002c, Dennell 1983: Mesolithic; Clarke1976: environment and Mesolithic economy; VanAndel and Runnels 1987, Halstead 1996, Perles2001: Greece; Bailey 2000, Garasanin 1994:Balkans; Merpert 1994, Lillie 2003, Dolukhanov2004: east/steppe region; Guilaine 1994, Binder2000, Zilhao 2000: western Mediterranean; Strausand Morales 2003: Mesolithic Iberia; Cunliffe2001a, Schulting 2003, Araujo et al. 2003, Bradley1998: Atlantic facade; Verjux 2003, Scarre, ed. 1987:


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France; Barclay 1998, Darvill 1987, 1996: Britain;Thomas 1996, Kaelas 1994a, Zvelebil 1996, Petersen2003, Noe-Nygaard and Richter 2003, Louwe Kooi-jmans 2003, Fischer and Kristiansen, ed. 2002, Fis-cher 2003, Price 2000: northern Europe.

Later Neolithic andChalcolithicChampion et al. 1984, Whittle 1996, Cunliffe 2001a,Sherratt 1994a, 1997, Milisauskas and Kruk 2002b:general survey; Halstead 1996, Van Andel and Run-nels 1987: Greece; Harmatta 1992, Garasanin 1994,Merpert 1994, Mallory 1989: steppe cultures; Lun-ing 1994: central Europe; Barclay 1998, Bewley2003, Pryor 2003, Ashmore 1996, Darvill 1987,1996, Budd 2000: Britain; Cunliffe 2001a: Atlantic.

Bronze AgeChampion et al. 1984, Sherratt 1994b, Harding1994, 2000, 2002, Kristiansen 1998, Cunliffe 2001a,Mohen 1996, Demakopoulou et al. 1999: generalsurvey; Sherratt 1997, Budd 2000: metallurgy; Hal-

stead 1996, Van Andel and Runnels 1987: Greece;Fitton 2002: Minoans; Taylour 1983, Chadwick1976: Mycenaeans; Peroni 1996, Jorge 1999a:Mediterranean; Dolukhanov 1999a: steppe; Kovacs1999: Southeast Europe; Jockenhovel 1999, Vand-kilde 1999, Pare 1999: central Europe; Jensen 1999,Christensen 1999: Scandinavia; Hingley 1998, Bar-clay 1998, Bewley 2003, Ashmore 1996, Darvill1987, 1996: Britain.

Iron AgeCunliffe 1994b, 1994c, 1997, 2001a, Kristiansen1998, Collis 1984a, Wells 2002, James 1993, Twist2001, Berresford Ellis 1988, Green, ed. 1995: gen-eral survey; Taylor 1994, Kristiansen 1998: steppecultures; Taylor 1994, Marazov 1998: Thracians andDacians; Spivey and Stoddart 1990, Barker and Ras-mussen 1998: Etruscans; Cornell and Matthews1982: Romans; Sacks 1995: Greeks; Cunliffe 2001a,Harrison 1988: Iberia, Cunliffe 2001a: Atlantic;Wells 1980, Collis 1984a: Hallstatt D/La Tène Atrade; James 1993: Celtic migrations; James 1993,Caesar 1951: conquest of Gaul; Armit 1997, Hingley1998, Bewley 2003, Darvill 1987, 1996, Cunliffe1995: Britain.


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ECONOMY

3

AGRICULTURE

Early European agriculture was conducted on asmall scale, often using the land immediately adja-cent to houses. Only with the introduction of the ard(simple plow) were larger fields opened up; forestclearance now began to increase, and more areaswere brought under cultivation, gradually trans-forming the landscape. New crops, notably grapesand olives, and the beginnings of irrigation andwater control brought greater productivity to theMediterranean from the third millennium, along-side greater economic and sociopolitical complexity.Much of the marginal or fragile land taken into cul-tivation during the second millennium turned to bogor moorland in the less favorable conditions of theIron Age and has not been cultivated since then; butthe first millennium also saw the beginning of culti-vation on heavier soils using iron-shod ards withcoulters. Many aspects of agriculture, however, didnot change, some practices and tools continuing inuse even to the present day.

CropsPrehistoric European agriculture was based on cere-als and pulses, supplemented by a number of otherdomestic and wild plant foods. Fields of cereals wereusually invaded by weeds, which were often har-vested along with the cultivated grain; sometimesthese were separated from the grain and discarded,but frequently they were eaten with it. The mixtureof plants identified as forming the last meal of sev-eral Iron Age bog bodies probably owed much to thepresence of such weeds of cultivation among thewheat or barley crop. Some of these weeds, such asoats and gold-of-pleasure, were deliberately grownas crops in their own right in later prehistory. Therange of plants under cultivation increased throughtime, with species domesticated in Europe beingadded to those initially introduced from the NearEast; there was, in particular, a substantial increasein the Late Bronze Age (Urnfield period) in therange of crops regularly grown; and the introduction

of olive and vine cultivation in the Bronze AgeMediterranean eventually significantly changed thepattern of cultivation across much of the region.

CEREALS

Cereals were brought into cultivation in the NearEast early in the Holocene period and from therewere introduced into Europe, where they providedthe main carbohydrate component of the diet as wellas some protein; cereals were served as cooked grainor ground into flour from which bread and gruel orporridge could be made. Some cereals were alsogrown for fodder, and their straw could be used formany purposes, such as feeding animals, thatching,and weaving containers.

Wheat Wheat has been the main staple of mostEuropean farming communities since the begin-nings of European agriculture. The earliest culti-vated wheats in the Near East were emmer andeinkorn, hulled varieties that have to be pounded torelease the grain. These were the wheats introducedinto Europe by the first farmers in the southeast, andthey spread throughout Europe. Ovens identified insome settlements may have been used to parch thegrain to loosen the husk before pounding.

Most other cultivated wheats are free-threshing,shedding their naked grains when threshed, and soare easier to process. Emmer and its descendantdurum (or macaroni) wheat are hard wheats withlow gluten content, unsuitable for making leavenedbread but with great elasticity so better for makinggruel, sauces, and pasta; they can also be cooked aswhole grains. Free-threshing wheats spread acrossthe Mediterranean alongside emmer in the EarlyNeolithic (Impressed Ware culture) and into Alpineregions by the Middle Neolithic. Durum wheatbecame the main variety cultivated in southernEurope by the Late Bronze Age.

A cross between emmer and a wild cereal, goat-faced grass, gave rise to spelt, a hulled wheat high ingluten, which probably arose in Transcaucasia, fromwhere it reached eastern Europe by the fifth millen-nium B.C., being cultivated in the northeastern halfof Europe throughout later prehistory. Spelt was par-ticularly useful in the north as it was tolerant of coldand wet conditions and had a short growing season.


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Free-threshing varieties of high-gluten wheat,breadwheat and club wheat, also spread widely fromthe Early Neolithic period onward. These wheats,particularly breadwheat, are suitable for making leav-ened bread. Except in the Mediterranean region,however, emmer and spelt remained the principalwheats under cultivation into the Roman period. Theimportance of breadwheat and clubwheat increased inthe Bronze Age as they could be grown on the heaviersoils that were being taken into cultivation.

Wheat straw could be used for making mats, bas-kets, and thatch and was probably also strewn as ani-mal bedding; however, it did not make good fodder.

Barley Barley, two-row and six-row hulled andnaked varieties, was brought to Europe by the firstfarming settlers and was grown along with wheat. Aless popular crop than the latter, it nevertheless hadthe advantage of tolerating poorer or more salinesoils and drier or colder growing conditions, making

it particularly suitable for cultivation in the Mediter-ranean and allowing it to be grown in northern areasbeyond the range of wheat. Barley became a majorcrop in the Mediterranean and in parts of the rest ofEurope, its importance increasing in the laterNeolithic and Bronze Ages. This may reflect its usefor making beer, one of the alcoholic beveragesthought to have been a socially significant drinkamong cultures such as TRB.

Barley was also grown as animal feed; both thehusks and the straw could be used as fodder as wellas the grains.

Oats Native to the Mediterranean basin, oats ini-tially occurred as a weed growing among wheat andbarley; it began to be deliberately cultivated in partsof northern and western Europe only toward theend of the second millennium B.C., when it offeredthe advantage of being suitable for growing on theacid soils that were developing in some areas and in

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3.1 A 19th-century view of Iron Age agriculture. Though, as shown here, cereals were indeed the maincrop, Iron Age landscapes were divided into much smaller fields. (Figuier, Louis. Primitive Man. London:Chatto and Windus, 1876)

the wetter conditions of the period. Oats was grownboth as a food for humans, made into porridge orgriddle cakes, and as fodder, its straw also being usedto feed animals.

Rye Rye was introduced as a weed of cultivation,probably from the east since it was not presentamong the cereals on Early Neolithic sites in Greeceand the Balkans. Its deliberate cultivation began bythe later fifth millennium in the Balkans (Gumelnitsaculture). Its earliest occurrence elsewhere in Europeis in a number of TRB settlements where small quan-tities of rye were found mixed in with wheat and bar-ley. Being very tolerant of prolonged cold, rye wasgrown particularly in Britain and in northern andeastern Europe, and was cultivated in the Iron Age tomake use of acid soils. Deep plowing from the IronAge onward also assisted the growth of rye.

Millet Probably domesticated in central Asia,broomcorn millet (Panicum) was present in a num-ber of LBK and other Neolithic settlements in east-ern Europe. By the Early Bronze Age millet, whichcould be grown quickly and withstood drought andhigh temperatures, began to be cultivated in north-ern Italy and in the Late Bronze Age in northernGreece, and spread to northern and central Europeearly in the Iron Age, in later times becoming amajor subsistence crop for poor farmers. During theBronze Age foxtail millet (Setaria) also came undercultivation in parts of Europe, becoming more wide-spread in the Iron Age.

PULSES

A number of pulses (legumes) were introduced toEurope at the same time as wheat and barley, towhich they were an important complement, provid-ing protein and renewing soil fertility by fixingnitrogen: They were therefore often grown in rota-tion with cereals, a practice that may date back tothe Early Neolithic. Although highly nutritious,pulses often contain toxins that need to be removedby soaking or rendered harmless by cooking. Theywere mostly served boiled whole or in pottage, butcould also be ground into flour.

The early introductions included pea, bittervetch, and lentil, which were grown by the first

farmers in the southeast, the Mediterranean, andcentral Europe. Chickpeas may also have beenintroduced but were rare. Pulses continued to bestaple crops alongside wheat and barley throughoutEuropean prehistory. Peas were particularly popularin LBK and other Neolithic cultures but declined infavor of lentils and beans in the Bronze Age.Although unpopular in post-Roman times, when itbecame regarded as a famine food and was generallygrown only as a fodder crop, bitter vetch was culti-vated in large quantities in Neolithic SoutheastEurope; elsewhere in Europe, however, it was rareor absent. Neolithic and Bronze Age communities inGreece and the Balkans also grew considerableamounts of grass pea (chickling vetch); elsewherethis pulse, which is dangerous if consumed in largequantities, was not popular, though it is known fromsome Neolithic French sites. Spanish vetchling, arelated species, was cultivated by the Minoans andtheir contemporaries in the Aegean Islands, andlupins may also have been brought into cultivationin the Bronze Age Aegean.

Chickpeas, native to parts of the Mediterranean,may have been brought into cultivation by the earlyfarming communities of the region (ImpressedWare culture); vetch and peas also grew wild in theMediterranean and were gathered by the Mesolithicpopulation before being cultivated by ImpressedWare groups.

Broad beans were added to the range of culti-vated pulses during the late Neolithic in the westernand central Mediterranean and in central Europe.Their cultivation spread to other parts of Europeduring the Bronze Age, occurring, for example, atBlackpatch in southern England and Biskupin inPoland. Being salt-tolerant, beans were grown inpreference to other pulses by farmers exploiting thesalt marshes that developed on the North Sea coastduring the first millennium B.C.

VEGETABLES

Familiar Varieties Since most vegetables leavelittle archaeological trace, it is difficult to constructa complete picture of what was grown in prehistoricEurope. Many of those recorded in classical litera-ture are likely to have been grown in earlier times,and green and root vegetables native to Europe


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were gathered long before they were brought intocultivation.

Occasional discoveries of seeds show that cab-bages were grown in southern England in the BronzeAge and oil-seed rape, turnips, and carrots in theIron Age; celery, carrots, cabbages, and turnips werealso among the plants used by the Neolithic andBronze Age inhabitants of the Swiss lake villages; ascelery does not grow wild in this region it mayalready have been cultivated. Although wild Euro-pean radishes were probably eaten, the cultivatedvariety was probably domesticated from a differentspecies in the eastern Mediterranean. Members ofthe cabbage family are native to both Mediterraneanand Atlantic Europe; they were probably broughtunder cultivation in the latter region since cultivatedvarieties are descended from Atlantic wild cabbages.Several varieties are referred to in Roman literature,possibly including broccoli, but the great diversity ofbrassicas, including cauliflower and Brussels sprouts,was a much later development.

Lettuces were popular with the ancient Egyp-tians and were cultivated by the Greeks and Romansbut did not spread beyond the Mediterranean untilmedieval times. The Greeks knew cucumbers, acrop that ultimately derived from India. Musk mel-ons, domesticated in the Near East or Egypt, weregrown in the Aegean in the Late Bronze Age andclassical times.

Chenopodium Chenopodium, known also asGood King Henry, fat-hen, or goosefoot, occurred asa weed of cultivation and was also deliberatelygrown, for example at the LBK site of Lamersdorfand by Neolithic and Bronze Age Swiss lake vil-lagers. It was used both as a leafy vegetable and as asource of seeds that could be cooked in gruel orground into flour for making bread. Dried plants alsomade good winter fodder for animals. In addition, itwas sown late in the spring and could therefore beplanted as a catch crop if a field of cereal failed.

Oil-Bearing Plants One of the crops introducedby the first farmers in Southeast Europe, linseed(flax) was probably grown both for its fibers and forits oil-rich seeds. Gold-of-pleasure (Camelina, falseflax) was grown initially as a weed of cultivation, butby the third millennium it was being deliberately

cultivated for its oil-bearing seeds in eastern, south-eastern, and central Europe. It became more com-mon in the second millennium, being found in largequantities, for example, in Middle Bronze Age cen-tral European sites. By the Iron Age it was cultivatedparticularly in coastal northern Europe, being wellsuited to poor sandy soils. Members of the mustardfamily native to Europe, such as turnip, mustard,rape, and radish, probably also provided oil thoughthe evidence is scanty.

FRUITS

A variety of fruits were brought under cultivation inthe Near East and China in antiquity, but acrossmuch of Europe, fruits were generally gathered wildby farmers as well as hunter-gatherers for much ofthe prehistoric period. Since the fruit of trees grownfrom seed can differ greatly in taste, size, and otherimportant characteristics from those of the parenttree, cultivated trees are generally clones, grownfrom cuttings, suckers, or grafts. Many types of nut,however, such as hazel and walnut, can successfullybe produced from trees grown from seed.

Mediterranean Crops Of the fruits native to theMediterranean, grapes, olives, pomegranates, andfigs, which can easily be propagated from cuttings,began to be cultivated during the Bronze Age, whilecarobs, which require grafting, were certainly grownby Roman times. Nonnative fruits were a late intro-duction: Peaches and apricots, which are native tocentral and East Asia, quinces, which derive fromIran and the Caucasus, and citrons, which are nativeto India, were all introduced to classical Europe viathe Near East during the first millennium B.C., andother citrus fruits did not arrive until Islamic timesor later.

Cultivation of the grape, olive, and fig began atsome point in the Bronze Age in the Aegean; all hadpreviously been domesticated in the Levant and hadlong been gathered as wild fruits in the Mediter-ranean. They are well adapted to the arid summersof the region and grow well on poor soils on hill-slopes. Vines tolerate a wider range of conditions,and grapes probably grew wild well into centralEurope. Grapes could be used as fresh fruit, driedfor storage as raisins and sultanas, or made into

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wine, which could not only be stored but alsotraded; Mediterranean wine became a lucrativeexport of the Greeks and later the Romans to theelites of Iron Age temperate Europe. Olives werealso useful for both storage and trade; they werepicked unripe and preserved to be eaten as fruit, orleft till ripe and pressed for oil. Figs, like grapes,could be eaten fresh or dried and stored.

Olives require little attention once the trees areestablished, but the tender young plants need pro-tection against the summer drought and carefultending, including regular pruning. Grape vines alsoneed considerable attention when young andrepeated annual pruning. Cultivated figs benefitfrom being grown alongside wild figs to allow cross-pollination; wild fruits attached to cultivated trees (aprocess called caprification, known to have beenpracticed by the Romans) encourage pollination bythe fig wasp. The cultivation of these crops there-fore required an intensification of the agriculturalregime to integrate field crops with vine and olivecultivation (Mediterranean polyculture), and somescholars link this to the emergence of greater socialcomplexity in the regions where it was adopted.

Wild grapes can be used for wine making anddespite their acidity were widely gathered in prehis-toric Europe, so the appearance of large quantitiesof grape seeds in Late Neolithic northern Greeceneed not indicate cultivation; by the late third mil-lennium, however, grapes were almost certainlybeing grown in southern Greece. At a similar timethey may also have been brought under cultivationin southeast Spain by the Millaran culture. Althoughthey were also grown by the Argaric culture of thisregion, it was apparently not until the first millen-nium B.C. when the Phoenicians and later theGreeks began to colonize the western Mediter-ranean that grapes and olives began to be cultivatedin other parts of Iberia and in southern France.Expansion of settlement in Dalmatia onto the stonykarst area and the construction there of terracesprobably related to the introduction of polyculturehere in the second millennium. Southern Italy mayhave seen some cultivation of grapes and olives inareas influenced by the Mycenaeans; ApennineBronze Age sites may have produced wine, sincethey have yielded abundant grape pips and finedrinking vessels; and grapes, figs, or olives may have

been cultivated at some Bronze Age sites (such asMonte Leoni in northern Italy). The Etruscans,however, were the first Italian culture to establish anintegrated regime of Mediterranean polyculture, inthe eighth century B.C., followed by the Romans,who introduced olives into the remaining parts ofthe Mediterranean and grapes both there and intosuitable regions of temperate Europe.

Fruit Trees Other varieties of fruit trees, notablyapple, pear, plum, and cherry, which grew wild acrossmost of Europe and were extensively exploited inprehistory, require grafting for satisfactory propaga-tion, a technique practiced by the Chinese and prob-ably not known in Europe until classical times; theRomans were probably responsible for the spread ofthe practice into other parts of Europe. However,some apples recovered from Late Neolithic lake vil-lages had some characteristics found only in culti-vated varieties. These settlements also yielded pearsand plums that may have been cultivated. This evi-dence suggests arboriculture had been developed bythis time in Europe, but what form this might havetaken is unclear, since trees grown from seed areextremely variable in the qualities of their fruit, andapples, pears, and plums cannot usually successfullybe propagated from cuttings or suckers.

Berries Raspberries, strawberries, elderberries,and other berries were gathered wild, as blackber-ries are still today; they were probably not broughtinto cultivation in prehistoric times in Europe,although strawberries may have been grown by theMycenaeans.

Nuts Like fruit, nuts were gathered by both farm-ers and hunter-gatherers. Hazelnuts were parti-cularly popular; its growth was encouraged byhunter-gatherers and early farmers, and it was laterplanted. Both walnuts and sweet chestnuts may havegrown wild in parts of postglacial Europe though theevidence is thin; chestnuts were cultivated in laterBronze Age Spain and walnuts by the later Iron Ageand classical times; the Romans were probablyresponsible for the spread of their cultivation outsidethe Mediterranean. Almonds, native to the Mediter-ranean, can be grown from seed or grafted. Cultiva-tion was mainly designed to select against the bitter


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variety of almond containing deadly prussic acid,which can, however, be removed by leaching. It islikely that almonds came under cultivation aroundthe same time as vines and olives.

OTHER CROPS

Fibers Flax was grown both for its oil-producingseeds and for its fibers, which were made into linen.It was among the crops first introduced into Europefrom the Near East, was cultivated by LBK farmers,and spread widely both in temperate Europe and inthe Mediterranean. Nettles were also used for mak-ing cloth; a fine white textile recovered from a LateBronze Age site at Voldtofte in Denmark proved tohave been made from nettle fibers. The develop-ment of wool for textiles from the Late Neolithicperiod onward reduced the reliance on plant fibers,though these still continued in use.

Hemp (cannabis) was also used for making clothin temperate Europe, although its fibers and theresulting textiles are coarser than linen. Since it wasresistant to seawater, it was particularly useful formaking sails. Hemp seeds occur in a few Europeansites from LBK onward, and possible hemp clothwas found in a Late Neolithic French site; hemp tex-tiles were certainly in production by the Iron Age inThrace and Greece. Hemp fibers were also used tomake rope.

Bark fibers were used for making nets andcordage from Mesolithic times onward; exampleshave been identified as coming from willow and lin-den trees. Reeds, grasses, and other wild plant fiberswere also used in various ways, particularly for mak-ing baskets, bags, and rope. Esparto grass basketsand bags, sandals, and even clothing were foundwith Late Neolithic burials in Cueva de los Mur-ciélagos in Spain, a cave whose aridity has allowedthe preservation of many organic remains. The useof esparto grass was probably confined to Iberia, butother grasses may have been more widely used. Ötzithe Iceman (late fourth millennium) wore a cloakthat had been made from grass, and his shoes werestuffed with grass to keep his feet warm.

Drugs Various narcotic substances were probablyin use in prehistoric Europe. Poppy, a native Medi-terranean species, was already present in central

Europe in LBK settlements and in western Europe,Swiss lake villages, and northern Italy by the fourthmillennium. A basket of poppy heads was found withthe burials in Cueva de los Murciélagos. Poppy was asource of oil, and its seeds were eaten, but their mostprobable use was for producing opium. Cannabis,grown for its hemp fibers, was also employed as anarcotic by people of the steppe, perhaps by the ear-lier fourth millennium, and this use may also havebeen adopted in Europe, for instance, by the CordedWare culture. Other drugs included black henbane,found in Grooved Ware pottery in ChalcolithicScotland and probably used to induce trances.

Herbs and Spices The evidence of these is patchy,and it is often difficult to determine whether theywere collected or cultivated. Coriander was used inBronze Age Greece; dill and cumin are known fromthe Late Neolithic in the Swiss lake villages. Saffron,made from crocus flowers, was probably used widelyin prehistoric Europe as both a food flavoring and adye, but the first evidence of this comes from BronzeAge Aegean art, such as the famous fresco fromThera (Santorini) in which ladies are shown gather-ing saffron.

Dyes A number of plants were used for dyes,including saffron. Safflower was under cultivation bythe early second millennium at the Balkan site ofFeudvar. Literary sources show that madder anddyer’s rocket were cultivated by classical times, butthey were probably used much earlier. Woad wasused in Europe by the first millennium B.C. as a dyefor cloth, but recent work on preserved bodies sug-gests that apparent classical references to woad as abody paint have been misinterpreted; azurite (cop-per sulfate) was more probably used.

Domestic AnimalsDomestic sheep, goat, and probably cattle and pigwere introduced into Europe from the Near East atthe same time as the first cultivated plants, and ani-mal husbandry remained an integral part of Euro-pean agriculture as it was gradually adopted acrossthe continent. As forests were progressively cleared,

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many communities increased the size of theirdomestic herds, particularly of cattle, for example,the TRB inhabitants of central Europe. Somegroups also developed specialist pastoral economies.Hunter-gatherer groups in contact with early farm-ers often acquired domestic animals from theirfarming neighbors or domesticated animals them-selves from local stock: For example, groups in Bel-gium contemporary with LBK farmers keptdomestic pigs and cattle, the latter domesticatedfrom local wild cattle and larger than LBK cattle.

Kept at first for meat, animals later becameimportant also for their secondary products: milk,wool, and traction, as well as leather and manure.Horses were domesticated later but rapidly becameimportant, particularly in warfare. The range ofdomestic animals increased through time, thoughmany animals that contributed significantly to theEuropean diet were never domesticated.

The relative importance of crops and domesticanimals varied both regionally and more locally, asdid the relative proportions of the different domesticanimals. Wild stock were often important in boost-ing the supply of domesticates or introducing newblood by interbreeding with them.

PIGS

Although pigs were domesticated in the Near Eastand were probably introduced into SoutheastEurope, wild boar were widespread across prehis-toric Europe, and wild stocks must have provided asignificant proportion of European domestic pigs. Inmedieval Europe domestic sows were tied up in thewoods to encourage them to interbreed with wildboars, and deliberate or serendipitous interbreedingbetween wild and domestic stock must have takenplace in antiquity. This might account for the largeand savage breed of pigs said by the Roman authorStrabo to be kept by the Celts, although excavatedpig bones indicate that Celtic farmers usually hadquite small pigs.

The preferred environment of pigs was shadywoodland, where they could forage for a range ofplants such as nuts. As Europe’s forests were pro-gressively reduced by clearance and the extension ofagriculture, in some areas the importance of pigsdeclined in favor of cattle and caprines, though this

was not universally so. Pigs are omnivorous so theycan be fed on domestic waste and can find food in awide range of environments. They also breed prolif-ically and grow fast so they are a good source ofmeat; they were therefore always an important com-ponent of the mixed farming economy of prehistoricEurope, kept by permanently settled groups andprobably generally left to forage around the marginsof the settlement and farmed area rather thanpenned, although some Iron Age settlements havesmall structures that might have been pig sties.

While pigs were kept mainly for meat, lard, andleather, they could also be used for preparing groundfor cultivation by trampling it and thoroughly grub-bing up the surface, destroying weeds and turningthe soil, and at the same time manuring it.

CATTLE

Cattle were domesticated in ancient Anatolia andmay have been introduced to Europe, but it is likelythat many European cattle were domesticated inEurope itself, from the massive and ferociousaurochs (Bos primigenius) that remained part of thenative fauna until its extinction in recent times.

Initially cattle were kept for their meat and theirskins used for leather. Later they were also kept formilk, which became a major resource, probably gen-erally in the form of cheese. Although it is not clearat what time milk began to be exploited for food, thepresence of some older animals among the LBK cat-tle and of pottery sieves that may have been used inmaking cheese, suggest the possibility that someLBK cattle were kept for milking. By the laterNeolithic such evidence was widespread, and milkand milk products had became an important part ofthe economy for many communities. PrehistoricEuropean cows could probably each produce around800–2,400 pints (500–1,500 liters) of milk per year.On many Celtic settlements about a third of the cat-tle bones come from juveniles killed for meat whilethe rest were mostly cows kept for milk and for pro-ducing calves; these went together as prehistoricbreeds of cow would only let down their milk in thepresence of their calf.

By the later fourth millennium cattle, usuallyoxen (castrated bulls) but sometimes cows on smallfarms, were also being used as beasts of burden and


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for traction, pulling carts and ards, although skeletalevidence from fifth-millennium Greece suggeststhey were being used to pull heavy loads even ear-lier. They attained adequate strength for these tasksat around three to four years old. Castrated beastswere more docile and so easier to handle; they alsoput on more weight and so many communities alsocastrated the male cattle intended for meat produc-tion. A number of fourth-millennium cattle fig-urines from northern Greece depict them withbaskets or panniers on their backs.

Many representations of carts and plows, forexample, on TRB and Baden culture pottery, inBronze Age rock art, and as figurines of pottery andbronze, show they were drawn by pairs of oxen,although some seem to have required teams of four.These representations, along with wooden yokesrecovered from waterlogged sites, such as Fiave inItaly and Loch Nell in Scotland, show that twomethods of harnessing were used. In one the yokewas attached to the animals’ horns, while in theother the yoke was molded to fit across their withers.One horncore from TRB period Bronocice inPoland bore the marks of the cord with which thehorn had been attached to the yoke.

Cattle required regular access to water, whichplaced some constraints on where they could be kept.They could generally find adequate grazing on theforest edge and, as woodland was cleared, in the grassthat grew up to replace it, as well as on the river flood-plains, marshy ground, and other areas unsuitable forcultivation. Causewayed enclosures, known fromNeolithic Britain, France, and parts of the Danubiancultural region, may have been used for corrallinglarge numbers of cattle, among other functions.

In the dry summers of the Mediterranean cattleneeded to be fed stored food such as grain andpulses, except in the few areas, such as the flood-plains of large rivers, where pastures were available,so in southern Europe their numbers were rela-tively low. In contrast they were generally the mostimportant domestic animal in much of temperateEurope, from LBK times onward. In cold regionsthey had to be kept inside during the winter, wherethey were stall fed. Longhouses in LBK and latersettlements might have a part set aside for stallinganimals, often with stall partitions, or cattle mightbe kept in separate byres, as they were elsewhere,

for example, in Switzerland. Much of the fodderneeded to keep them during the winter monthscould be obtained from the wild, forests and wet-lands providing leaves, ivy, twigs, shoots, and otherplant material. Fodder could also be grown: Manyof the legumes used to restore soil fertility could befed to animals, as could rape and other leafy crops.In later periods meadows to provide hay could bepart of the field system, and the straw from cerealcrops also provided some cattle feed. The introduc-tion of the iron scythe in the Iron Age made themowing of hay easier than it had been with the sick-les previously in use.

One building in the Cortaillod settlement ofEgolzwil had been used to stall cattle that had beenfed on leaves, mistletoe, and hay. The pupae ofhouseflies were among the debris on the floor of thebuilding, evidence that dung had accumulated there.In central and western Holland, Neolithic cattlewere not stalled, but the practice developed in theBronze Age and was common thereafter. It is sug-gested that this reflected a need to collect dung formanuring fields to increase productivity; and thisseems to have been true in other regions, too. Stallsand byres might also reflect the increased impor-tance of milking, since it was more comfortable forthe milker to operate indoors in winter.

Where grazing and fodder were limited, milchcows and oxen would be kept year round, other ani-mals being slaughtered in the autumn and their meatpreserved by smoking, drying, or salting. Oxen,which provided neither meat nor milk but only trac-tion, were an expensive commodity. A team mightbe kept as the communal property of a communityor owned by the elite; smaller communities probablycontinued to rely on human labor for preparing theground for cultivation, or used cows to draw theirards. Special treatment was accorded to the plowteam to ensure that they were fit for their heavy task;this might include extra feeding or special fodder(such as grain). They were also likely to be kept inthe settlement and treated as individuals like pets,since docility was essential in ensuring their cooper-ation in plowing.

As well as meat and milk, cattle yielded hides forleather, fat for tallow, and bones and horns for mak-ing tools. They were also popular as sacrificial vic-tims among the Celts.

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CAPRINES

Caprines, domesticated in the Near East, wereintroduced into Europe in the seventh millenniumB.C. Both sheep and goats can find food in a widerange of environments, including rough or moun-tainous terrain; goats are both more agile and able toeat a wider range of plants, but they are more diffi-cult to manage, and their hair is less useful than thesheep’s wool, so there has generally been a strongpreference for keeping sheep.

Wild caprines move seasonally between lowlandwinter and upland summer pastures and this trans-humant seasonal movement has been a regular fea-ture of domestic caprine herding, too, althoughsmall numbers could be maintained year round onvegetation available near the settlement. In much oftemperate Europe the numbers of caprines that werekept increased as forests were cleared, opening upareas for grazing.

Both sheep and goats were milked; althoughevidence of this is elusive, milking of caprinesprobably began around the same time as that ofcattle. In the Mediterranean, where caprines werethe main domestic animals, they were also the mainproviders of milk, probably usually used to makecheese; in temperate Europe cattle were probablythe main milk providers, but sheep and goat milkwas also used.

Sheep Sheep were originally hairy like goats, theirwool being a short winter undercoat shed in thespring. Woolly sheep, which were originally bred inthe Near East, were introduced into Europe duringthe fourth or third millennium, and by the BronzeAge wool was in widespread use for manufacturingclothing and other textiles. From the primitivebreeds of sheep kept in prehistoric Europe the yieldof wool may have been around 2 pounds (a kilo-gram) per animal.

There is evidence from many sites of a change inthe age and sex structure of flocks with the develop-ment of wool production, with an increase in thenumbers of adult sheep and particularly wethers(castrated rams), which provide the best and mostabundant wool. Sheep could continue to producewool until they were seven or eight years old. Meat,milk, and wool production could be combined, as at

the third millennium Swiss site of Ledro, wheremany of the sheep were killed young for meat; halfthe adults were ewes kept for their milk and to pro-duce lambs, and most of the rest were wethers thatwere kept until they had produced two or threefleeces and were then slaughtered.

Specialist sheep herding became increasinglyimportant with the advent of wool production. Forexample, in southern Greece the Minoan andMycenaean palace economies depended signifi-cantly on the production of large quantities of woolfor domestic use and export. From the laterNeolithic period onward some alpine communitiesdeveloped a strong pastoral bias, making use of highpastures for summer grazing. The people of theMichelsberg culture of Switzerland, for example,kept their animals around their villages in winter,while in the summer the flocks were driven toupland pastures where the herdsmen lived in tem-porary camps.

Bronze Age sheep were similar to the modernprimitive Soay sheep, which are small, agile, andintelligent, bearing wool that is plucked rather thanshorn. Bone combs, known from many Iron Agesites, may have been used to collect their wool dur-ing the spring molt. Other larger varieties were alsokept by the Celts; these were shorn using ironshears. Some ewes had small horns, others werehornless, as were some of the rams, while some hadfour horns.

As sheep are hardy, they were generally kept out-side throughout the year, although in harsh winterconditions they might require fodder, such as hay.They were susceptible to foot-rot and liver fluke,both prevalent in damp pastures; evidence of themollusk host of liver fluke has been found in somesites such as the Late Bronze Age Dutch settlementof Hoogkarspel.

Goats Although sheep were generally preferredto goats, it was usual to keep a small number ofgoats in every flock, as they are said to calm sheepand are frequently used to lead the flock to andfrom pastures. Some Celtic farmers kept largernumbers of goats for meat, though still in consider-ably smaller numbers than sheep. Goatskin makesgood leather, and the hair can be used for rope andtextiles.


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DOMESTIC FOWL

Ducks and Geese Geese were kept by the Celtsand exported to the Roman world by the Gauls,though no archaeological evidence of them surviveson Celtic sites. Both ducks and geese are likely tohave been kept in earlier times, too, but the evidenceis lacking, although ducks featured prominently inreligious symbolism.

Chickens The domestic chicken was bred fromthe Indian jungle fowl and eventually reached theWest; it was known from Bronze Age contextsonward in Europe. The Greeks and Romans kept alarger breed of chicken, some of which wereimported into Celtic Europe. Chickens were gener-ally kept only in small numbers, providing mainlymeat but also eggs in the spring.

HORSES

Horses were domesticated in the European steppebefore 4000 B.C. and rapidly spread from the eastinto the Balkans and central Europe, and thence towestern Europe, reaching Spain and Italy by thelater third millennium as one element of the Beaker“package.” From the second millennium B.C. horseswere used to draw war chariots, a perquisite of theelite. Horses were particularly important in thesteppe, where they were used by pastoralists herdingtheir flocks. Steppe peoples also milked their horses;the milk could be fermented into an alcoholic drink(kumiss). Horses were widely valued by Europeansocieties, particularly for their role in warfare, andhorses or horsetrappings were deposited in elitegraves in many areas and periods. Although origi-nally used by people on the steppe margins to pro-vide meat, horses were generally kept for riding ortraction, though they might also be used as beasts ofburden. A line of hoofprints found beneath a BronzeAge house at Ullunda in Sweden shows that thehorse that made them had been carrying a load, per-haps in panniers.

Celtic horses were a small breed, around 1.2 to1.4 meters high at the withers. It is therefore notsurprising that Celtic tribes like the Veneti of north-ern Italy set store by the taller horses of the Scythi-ans, which they obtained by trade and on occasion

buried with their chieftains. The Celts probably didnot generally eat horse meat, although at Daneburyhillfort in England there is evidence that old horseswere killed and butchered. From Celtic religious artand the presence of horses in elite graves and inshrines as sacrificial victims it is clear that horsesenjoyed a special status in Celtic society, associatedwith elite cavalry and chariot-riding warriors andwith the important fertility goddess Epona.

Studies from Iron Age settlements show horseswere often kept in loosely controlled breeding herdsthat were periodically rounded up to take out two-and three-year-old male colts, which were then bro-ken in for riding or traction. Alternatively, theymight be more closely managed.

Riding It is a subject of much debate when horsesbegan to be ridden; some scholars argue this hap-pened at the time of their first domestication in thefifth millennium B.C., while others consider this wasnot much before the later third millennium, whenhorse riding was firmly attested in Mesopotamia.

The control of ridden horses was at first entirelydependent upon the rider’s use of knees and hands,perhaps with the addition of a rope noseband. Noserings to which reins were attached were used forcontrol in the third and second millennia in theNear East; finely decorated antler cheek pieces areknown from the Balkans and the Carpathian basinby around 1800 B.C., but it is unknown whether theharness from which these came was for riding or forpulling a vehicle. Bronze bits were developed in theNear East before the mid-second millennium butwere not employed in Europe until around 1300B.C.; these were generally in the form of a bar. Acloth might be spread on the horse’s back; saddles,invented in the steppe, were used in Europe duringthe later first millennium and had pommels at thefour corners to keep the rider secure. Stirrups, how-ever, were not invented until the sixth century A.D.

Other Equids Donkeys were domesticated in theNear East and appeared in the Aegean in the EarlyBronze Age and somewhat later in other parts of theMediterranean. Thereafter donkeys and mules (adonkey-horse cross) became the main pack animalsof southern Europe, though they could also be usedfor pulling small carts or plowing light soils. They

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were probably introduced into Celtic Europe byRoman troops.

DOGS

Dogs were the first animals to be domesticated,from wolves, which are animals whose social organi-zation and nature made it easy for them to integrateinto human communities. Dogs were kept byhunter-gatherers in many parts of the world by theearly postglacial period. They were used particularlyin hunting, for tracking, running down, and retriev-ing game. They were also useful for guarding peopleand livestock. Rock art scenes indicate that dogswere also used for herding, though, as today, thismay not have been a widespread practice.

By the Iron Age there were a number of differentbreeds of dog in Europe. The most common Celticdog resembled a greyhound. Large dogs were bredfor hunting, a sport of the elite, and were highlyprized by the Romans, who listed them among thedesirable commodities that they imported fromBritain.

On the evidence of bones showing signs ofbutchery, it would seem that some Celts also atedogs, but this is unlikely to have been a commonpractice. Dog skins were also used.

CATS

Although domestic cats had been present in Egyptfor millennia, they are thought not to have beenintroduced into Mediterranean Europe until thefirst century B.C. However, cats were foundthroughout the occupation of the Iron Age hillfortof Danebury in England; these may have been wildcats scavenging in the settlement where stored grainwould have attracted rats and mice, but they mayequally have been domestic.

WILD RESOURCES

Until the seventh millennium B.C. exploitation ofwild resources was the only way of life in Europe,and it continued to be that of the majority of theEuropean population long after the introduction ofagriculture. In the far north game, sea mammals, andfish remained the main sources of food, supple-mented by limited animal husbandry. Many farmingcommunities made extensive use of wild resources,and most took some things from the wild, such asfodder, wild fruits, fish or herbal remedies, as peopledo even today. Fishing has continued to supply themain livelihood of many coastal communities, whileby the Iron Age hunting had for some been trans-formed into a pastime, though for others trappinggame remained a necessity. Farmers continued tomanage woodland for many purposes, as theirMesolithic predecessors had done. Few wildresources useful to humans were neglected: Honey,for example, was gathered, as rock paintings fromLate Glacial Spain attest. Beeswax was collected foruse in the cire perdue casting of bronze, and by theIron Age domestic bees were kept for honey and wax.

While many later Mesolithic sites show year-round occupation, many resources were availableonly at certain times of year in certain environments:


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3.2 A detail from a reconstruction of prehistoriclife. Dogs were the first domestic animals in manyparts of the globe and were regular residents ofhuman settlements, where bones have been foundbearing their teeth marks. (Figuier, Louis. Primi-tive Man. London: Chatto and Windus, 1876)

Some large mammals such as red deer movedbetween summer upland and winter lowland pas-tures; certain fish species migrated to annual spawn-ing grounds; different plants ripened at differentseasons in different areas; seabirds’ eggs were avail-able in the spring on seaside islands and cliffs. ManyMesolithic groups, therefore, moved seasonally toexploit the full diversity of their landscape, whileother occupied a base camp from which seasonalexpeditions were made by part of the community.Sedentary Ertebølle hunter-gatherers on the Danishcoasts, for example, sent parties out at differenttimes of year, inland to hunt piglets, migratory wild-fowl, and fur animals, and to other coastal locationsand offshore islands to take eels, swans, and seals.Pastoralists also moved between pastures and weretherefore in a position to hunt and collect seasonallyavailable resources.

PlantsMany of the plants that were undoubtedly exploitedin prehistory have left little trace in the archaeologi-cal record. Only exceptional environments such aswaterlogged settlements (particularly Swiss andother lake villages), arid caves, and the guts of bogbodies have yielded direct evidence, while otherclues have been extracted from such indirect sourcesas pollen profiles. Of plants known to have beeneaten or used in other ways, some are cultivatedtoday but we do not know when they were domesti-cated, while some are not grown today but were cul-tivated in the past.

A huge range of wild plants from many differentenvironments were exploited by prehistoric Euro-peans. Deciduous woodland was particularly rich inspecies edible to humans. It seems probable that theMesolithic inhabitants of Europe took full advantageof the diversity of plant resources offered by the wild,even where evidence is lacking. Many of these plantswere also used by farmers, and in much of westernand northern Europe the situation was for a longtime reversed, cultivated plants being used by peoplelargely dependent on wild resources, such as theNeolithic Fiorano and Cortaillod communities set-tled around lakes in northern Italy and Switzerland.

TREES

Wild fruit and nuts were harvested for food, andmany could be stored for the winter. Those known tohave been exploited included apples, crab apples,pears, cherries, cornelian cherries, olives, plums, figs,and sloes; acorns, chestnuts, walnuts, almonds,beechnuts, hazelnuts, stone-pine kernels, and pista-chio. As well as being stored whole, apples weredried, as were other fruits such as figs, and nuts wereroasted to aid their preservation. Hazelnuts wereparticularly popular, turning up in considerablequantities all over Europe—in a pot beside theNeolithic Sweet Track in the Somerset Levels, aspart of the last meal of one of the Iron Age men sac-rificed in Lindow Moss, in Mesolithic caves in theJura and Bronze Age settlements in Italy and Britain,for example. Mesolithic people probably deliberatelyencouraged the growth of hazel trees by clearingpatches of forest, since hazel was one of the first andmost vigorous trees to colonize such clearings.Acorns and chestnuts could be ground into flour; theywere also very palatable to animals and so were usedas fodder or forage, for example, in the managed dehe-sas of later prehistoric southern Europe. Leaves alsoprovided fodder, preferred by animals to hay.

Bark was collected from many trees. Birch barkhad many uses, including decorative strips on someCortaillod pottery vessels; it was frequently madeinto containers. Bark fibers (bast) were used to makecords and textiles: Cloth woven from lime, oak, andwillow bast was found in the Swiss lake villages.Birch wood or birch bark when carbonized pro-duced pitch, which was used as an adhesive: Thiswas identified as the means used to attach flintpoints to arrows carried by the Iceman, for instance.

OTHER PLANTS

Berries are one of the few wild plant foods that haveleft traces of their consumption, mainly from theSwiss and north Italian lake settlements: Theseincluded bilberries, strawberries, raspberries, rose-hips, dewberries, haws, and elderberries. A numberof settlements have also yielded evidence of wildgrapes, which could have been fermented into wine.Juniper berries are known from the CardialImpressed Ware site of Le Baratin in France, while

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seeds from settlements such as Iron Age Glaston-bury in England, TRB Swifterbant in Holland, andEarly Neolithic Chevdar in the Balkans show thatblackberries were widely enjoyed. As well as beingeaten as they were, berries could be made intodrinks; native American Indians used to poundberries and meat together to make the long-lastingfood staple, pemmican, and something of this sortmight have been produced in Europe also.

Among the possessions found with the Iceman (c.3300/3200 B.C.) were two pieces of birch fungusthreaded onto strips of fur: these may have been afolk remedy. Mushrooms were recovered from Cor-taillod sites in Switzerland as were water chestnuts;at the contemporary Italian site of Molino Casarottothe latter were of far more importance in the dietthan cereals. Other water plants likely to have beeneaten included watercress, wild rice, and club rush.Various wild seeds were gathered while buds, flow-ers, shoots, and leaves, such as nettles, plantain,knotweed, and sorrel, must also have been eaten andused in other ways. Plants could supply flavorings,medicines, dyes, and even poisons for use in hunt-ing. Those that grew in the fields alongside crops(weeds of cultivation), such as common cleavers andchess, were often gathered and eaten, either alongwith the crop or harvested separately. Others such asoats, chenopodium and gold-of-pleasure were even-tually cultivated as crops in their own right. Plantsmore familiar as domesticates, such as lentils, werealso gathered from the wild.

Considerable use was made of wild plants for for-age, animals being turned loose to graze at the forestedge or in the rough ground bordering fields andbeyond. Grass was one of the main such plants, butmany shrubs and bushes and other plants were alsoeaten, particularly by goats. Managed resources,such as coppiced woodland and water meadows, hadto be fenced or bounded with ditches, banks, hedges,or walls to protect them from grazing animals.

Reeds, rushes, sedges, and osiers were gatheredfor making cords, mats, baskets, and thatch, as wellas floor coverings and bedding for people and ani-mals. Reeds grew best if managed by being har-vested annually. Cords could also be made of vinessuch as wild clematis (old man’s beard), an exampleof which is known from Bronze Age Bad Franken-hausen. Nettles were also a source of fibers.

Roots, tubers, rhizomes, and bulbs, such asbracken rhizomes, wild garlic, and lily bulbs, mustalso have been enjoyed, despite the lack of evidence.

GATHERING

Tools such as sickles and knives of flint, bronze, oriron were used to harvest wild plants, while nets,baskets, and bags would be used for carrying whathad been gathered. Querns could be used to grindwild seeds and other plants as well as cultivatedgrain. Some of the flint microliths characteristic ofMesolithic technology may have been set in woodenboards to form graters for preparing roots and othersuch foods.

AnimalsThe use of wild fauna is better attested than wildflora since bones preserve well in many soil types(though not in acid bogs), but the bones of smallercreatures may often have been missed in excavations.Animals were hunted not only for food but also fortheir hides and fur, their bones, horns, and antlersfrom which tools were made, and their sinews,which were used for fastenings. Shed antlers werealso collected, to make tools like mattocks and ham-mers. Farmers also killed animals to protect theircrops. In later prehistory hunting became a sport,though pursuing dangerous game like aurochs andboar had presumably always been viewed as a maledemonstration of courage and skill.

LARGE MAMMALS

The deciduous forests of Europe were home to anumber of large mammals that played an importantpart in the diet of Mesolithic people: These includedroe deer, red deer, wild boar, aurochs, elk, and horse.In the more open terrain of the steppe horses wereparticularly important as a source of food, while inthe far north the large prey were mainly reindeerand elk. These all continued to be exploited by thefarming inhabitants of their regions, horses beingdomesticated in the fifth millennium and subse-quently used for herding in the steppe. In theBalearic Islands of the western Mediterranean the


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myotragus, a creature resembling a chamois, and onCorsica the deerlike megacerus were important totheir Mesolithic inhabitants. Chamois and ibex werehunted in the mountains from Mesolithic timesonward.

SMALL MAMMALS

Rabbits, hares, and squirrels were among the crea-tures caught for food both by the Mesolithic peopleand by farmers. Foxes, wolves, beavers, wild cats,badgers, bears, otters, lynx, and martens may alsohave been eaten but were mainly taken for their fursor hides. Blunt-headed wooden arrows were used byhunters to stun these animals in order not to damagetheir pelts, and smoke and traps were also used.

OTHER CREATURES

Wildfowl and other birds such as swans, cranes, andmallards taken in marshes and on rivers and lakes

were an important source of food for bothMesolithic and farming communities, while seabirdssuch as cormorants, gulls, and puffins were alsoeaten. Songbirds and game birds such as grousewere snared or stunned with blunt arrows. One LateNeolithic megalithic tomb in Orkney at Isbistercontained the remains of eight sea eagles, which mayhave had some symbolic significance for the com-munity. A similar interpretation seems likely for theMesolithic burial at Vedbaek in Denmark, where astillborn baby was laid on a swan’s wing beside hismother.

Other small creatures that were eaten includedsnails and tortoises, and lizards, frogs, snakes, andperhaps beetles must also have been caught.

HUNTING

Early hunters had used spears, either attacking ani-mals directly or using spearthrowers to propel thespear from a distance. They also used throwing

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3.3 A fanciful picture of hunting in the Iron Age, a period when hunting was an elite sport as well as away of supplementing domestic food supplies. Wild boar were among the most dangerous prey in postglacialEurope. (Figuier, Louis. Primitive Man. London: Chatto and Windus, 1876)

sticks or boomerangs. Bows and arrows came intouse late in the last glacial period and were particu-larly effective in the Holocene woodlands, where itwas difficult to get close to game; several fineMesolithic and later bows have been recovered fromwaterlogged sites. Slings, nets, snares, and trapswere also used, including an ingenious spring-loaded wooden trap used to catch deer.

Late Glacial or Mesolithic Spanish rock art sug-gests the possibility of communal game drives,though there is no direct evidence of this practice asthere had been in earlier times. In general it seemslikely that hunters operated alone or in small num-bers, aided by dogs. Horses also helped in hunting,giving the hunter speed to match that of his prey.

While big game were hunted by men, many ofthe smaller creatures were pursued or trapped bywomen and children, who were also largely respon-sible for the collection of plant foods.

Aquatic ResourcesRivers, lakes, and marshes provided a rich harvestfor hunter-gatherer groups, and many chose to settlein the vicinity of water. Here they had access tomany water plants, small mammals like water rats,turtles, and wildfowl, as well as larger game comingto drink or graze on wetland vegetation. Equallyattractive was the seashore, where plants such assamphire and sea kale could be gathered and therewere seabirds and their eggs to be had. Some sea-weeds were edible, and coastal farming communitiessuch as those of Orkney also used seaweed asmanure, while in northern Scandinavia it was used asfodder. Freshwater and marine fish and shellfishwere a major resource, while the seas also offeredmarine mammals.

When farming was adopted by Atlantic andMediterranean communities, the central importanceof marine resources declined, but these were notabandoned, and many coastal communities contin-ued to fish; similarities between the artifacts of dif-ferent regions and the movement of raw materialsimply interregional connections in the Atlantic thatmay have been maintained by groups pursuingschools of seasonally migrating fish, and deep-sea

fishing similarly encouraged interregional contactsin the Mediterranean.

Like the meat of land animals, that of marinemammals could be dried, smoked or salted, as couldfish. Fish could also be used as a fertilizer for culti-vated ground.

FISHING

The rich cold waters of the Atlantic and North Seateemed with fish, including cod, saithe, herring,haddock, sardine, mackerel, conger eel, whiting,flounder, and turbot. Many of these came inshore atcertain seasons to breed, when they could be caughtwith lines or spears, but they were also caught off-shore from seagoing boats.

The Mediterranean offered smaller and less var-ied stocks, but the annual arrival of spawning tunaoffered an abundant spring harvest to fishers able topursue them offshore with boats and nets; this hadbegun by 9000 B.C. if not earlier.

Salmon, sturgeon, and eels were most easilycaught when they came into rivers to breed, offeringseasonal plenty (for comparison, native Americans ofthe northwest dependent on seasonal salmon runswere able to evolve a prosperous sedentary way oflife). Other palatable fish in the rivers includedtrout, pike, perch, carp, bream, roach, catfish, bar-bel, and grayling.

Rods and lines were used to catch inshore andfreshwater fish; fish hooks were found on many pre-historic sites. Limpets in Neolithic settlements inOrkney were probably collected for bait, and thestone watertight boxes in the houses at Skara Braemay have used for soaking limpets to soften them forthis purpose. Spears and harpoons were also used,including leisters (fish spears). Fishing nets areknown from a few waterlogged sites, including partof a large seine net of willow bast with pine floatsfrom Antrea in Finland; the widespread use of nets isimplied by the discovery of many of the weights thatwere used to hold them down. Net sinkers of smallstones wrapped in bark and bark net floats wererecovered from the Swiss Neolithic settlement ofTwann, while fish traps of basketry and fish weirshave been found in some rivers, such as a Mesolithicexample from Tybrind Vig in Denmark. In somecases prey were captured and kept alive until


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required: For example, bell-shaped pits in the LBKsettlement of Brzesc Kujawski were used for keepingfish and turtles.

SHELLFISH

Huge mounds of discarded shells show the wide-spread importance of shellfish such as limpets, mus-sels, oysters, whelks, razorfish, clams, and cockles tothe Mesolithic inhabitants of Europe, particularly ofthe Atlantic. Though the calorific contribution ofshellfish was small, they could provide a criticalresource at times of the year when other sources offood were limited. Freshwater mollusks were alsoeaten, for example, in the Italian Neolithic site ofMolino Casarotto. Crustacea such as crabs, shrimps,lobsters, and crayfish were caught and in theMediterranean octopuses and squid.

MARINE MAMMALS

Grey, Greenland, ringed, and common seals, caughtwhen they came inshore to breed or pursued at sea,became important as a food source in northernAtlantic regions by the early postglacial; dolphinsand porpoises were also taken. Sperm, blue, andkiller whales were also eaten: these were probablybeached animals in most cases, but by the later

Mesolithic it seems they may also have been huntedin the open seas of the North Atlantic, a dangerousand difficult undertaking. Harpoons were used forhunting marine mammals.

In addition to their meat, marine mammals wererich in blubber, providing not only a vital source ofdietary fat but also oil for cooking and lighting. Sealswere also hunted for their skins.

ECONOMICSTRATEGIES

Early European arable agriculture was largely con-fined to light, easily worked, and well-drained soilssuch as the loess of central Europe, the patches ofcrosta soil around Tavoliere settlements in Italy, thelight loams favored by the Egolzwil culture of thecentral Swiss plateau, or the chalk and gravels ofsouthern England. Preferred locations often lay inthe zone between the edges of alluvial plains and thesurrounding hillslopes, areas that offered grazing fordomestic animals.

As the number of farming settlements increased,settlement and cultivation spread onto other lightsoils that were poorer or harder to cultivate, such assandy interfluves, dry plateaus, alluvium, forest soilsrequiring clearance, and upland regions. The culti-vation of these areas was often facilitated by the useof the ard, introduced in the fourth millennium.

Progressive forest clearance greatly increasedthe area under cultivation through time. Floodingcould pose a problem on alluvial plains, which weregradually settled by farmers: those of northernGreece during the late fourth and early third mil-lennia, for example, the difficult Po plain only dur-ing the second millennium. Hillslopes, widely usedfor pasture, came under cultivation in parts of theMediterranean from the third millennium onwardwith the domestication of the vine, olive, and fig.Warmer and drier conditions in the earlier secondmillennium allowed the extension of cultivationonto marginal soils, many of which subsequentlybecame permanently degraded, suffering erosion or

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3.4 Bronze fishhooks found in Swiss lakeside settle-ments. Fishing remained an important source offood for many communities throughout prehistory.(Figuier, Louis. Primitive Man. London: Chatto andWindus, 1876)

podsolisation or becoming heathland or blanketbog. The introduction of the iron plowshare andcoulter brought a further extension of arable agri-culture onto deep heavy soils such as clays andheavy valley bottom soils.

Many environments initially avoided by farmerswere attractive to hunter-gatherers for the abun-dant and varied wild resources that they offered:These included coastal land, marshes, river estuar-ies, lake shores, and mountains. As farming becamemore widespread, these saw the development ofcommunities in whose economic life wild resourcesplayed a major part: coastal farmers and fishers;lake dwellers relying both on wild and domesticanimals and plants; farmers keeping livestock inwetlands; pastoral communities moving seasonallywith their herds into alpine pastures; and manyother strategies that mixed arable agriculture, pas-toralism, and the exploitation of wild resources indifferent ways to make use of all Europe’s diversityof environments.

While early farming communities were largelyself-sufficient in food, in later times farmers orcommunities often specialized in some aspects offarming, producing surpluses of grain, livestock,and secondary products to trade with their neigh-bors or more distant communities. For example, theIron Age tribes of Illyria traded cattle and horseswith the Greeks in return for wine, and Strabo listsgrain, cattle, hides, and hunting dogs among thecommodities exported by Britain to the Romanworld in the first century B.C. As society becamemore complex, farmers might also be required toproduce food and other commodities such as woolto support the leaders on whom they depended forphysical and spiritual protection. Some communi-ties or groups emphasized particular animals orcrops, producing large numbers as part of an inte-grated system or in order to trade. For example, thepeople of the hillfort of Eldon’s Seat in southernEngland seem to have concentrated on raisingsheep on downland, while horses predominated atanother hillfort, Bury Hill; in Late Bronze Age Tus-cany, certain sites specialized in raising sheep, whileothers concentrated on cattle or pigs. Nevertheless,in many parts of Europe, small communities prac-ticing subsistence farming continued to exist intoRoman times and after.

Mixed Farming

FIELDS

Temporary or Permanent Fields? It used to bethought that farming in much of temperate Europe,particularly in the region of the Danubian cultures,involved swidden agriculture: clearance of virgin for-est, a few years of cultivation, then abandonment for adecade or two to allow forest to regenerate and fertil-ity to be restored. It is now thought more likely thatplots were permanently cleared and cultivated contin-uously. Fixed fields also seem likely in the EarlyNeolithic of other areas such as Greece and theBalkans, and were probably the norm throughout pre-history. Experiments show that the fertility of perma-nently cultivated fields would decline gradually over along period, but it could be maintained by crop rota-tion, fallowing, and manuring. Rotating legumes withother crops would have been particularly effective.Manure was applied to the land directly, by pasturinganimals in fallow or harvested stubble fields. Dung wasalso collected from stalled animals and spread onfields; in Late Bronze Age and Iron Age Holland andGermany this was collected in muck heaps and peri-odically mixed with soil from pits before being applied(plaggen cultivation). As well as using animal manure,fields close to the settlement could be fertilized withnight soil and domestic waste, evidenced by scatters infields of small pieces of domestic debris such as pot-sherds. Seaweed was used for manure in the Orkneysand probably in other areas with access to the sea.

Field Systems In LBK there was limited clear-ance of ground around the settlement, extendingless that a mile from it, and in many cases the fieldswere more like gardens, covering part of the groundimmediately adjacent to the houses. In the ItalianTavoliere, early cultivation was similarly confined tosmall patches of suitable soil adjacent to the settle-ments, a pattern repeated in other regions ofEurope. Later settlements made use of wider areasof cultivated land.

Good evidence of the layout of fields comes fromoccasional finds of field boundaries made of stonesor banks and ditches, or traces of fences. An earlyexample is the 2,500-acre (1,000-hectare) fourth-


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millennium B.C. field system traced at Ceide in Ire-land, which had stone walls and cross walls enclosingrectangular fields of various sizes. Extensive landdivisions of a similar age are known from Orkney,Arran, and other British islands. Surviving field sys-tems are known mainly from Britain, but examplesalso come from Scandinavia and the Low Countries.Boundaries may have originated in the practice ofleaving a thin strip of uncleared ground around theedge of cultivated plots on which hedges, includingsuch vegetation as brambles, thorn bushes, androses, would have acted as a natural barrier to wildanimals. Others may have begun as accumulations ofstones removed from farmland during groundpreparation and dumped along the field edges.

Square and rectangular fields such as those knownfrom Bronze Age Wessex seem likely to have beenused for cultivation, while systems of long, narrowstrips like those from Bronze Age Dartmoor (markedby low walls known locally as reaves) may have beenused to graze animals, their shape perhaps allowingthe animals to be confined to selected areas usingtemporary, movable, barriers. Fields generallyremained small throughout prehistory. Bronze andIron Age Celtic field systems were made up of a seriesof small fields, each one probably the size that couldbe dealt with in one day, for plowing, sowing, weed-ing, or harvesting. For example, settlements in Hol-land on sandy soils were associated with fields around165 by 165 feet (50 by 50 meters) in size, separated bylow ditches, which also provided limited drainage,while those in Denmark were delimited by banks.Lynchets that show the outline of fields cultivated onsloping ground, for example, at Blackpatch in south-ern England, again emphasize their small size.

Blocks of such fields clustered around settle-ments; land farther from the habitation was notdelimited. Farming settlements in later first-millen-nium Scandinavia were often associated with aninfield-outfield system, with fenced hay meadowsand arable fields fertilized with manure adjacent tothe settlement and more distant pastures linked tothe settlement by a droveway. Similar arrangementsare known in Iron Age Britain. A number of larger-scale boundaries formed of banks and ditches (ranchboundaries) occur in later Bronze Age and Iron AgeBritain, frequently crosscutting earlier field systems,indicating a change in the arrangement of local land

use or land tenure. Larger hillforts and oppida oftenincluded fields within their defenses, for example, atManching.

While land boundaries may have been designedto indicate land ownership, particularly in later peri-ods, a principal function must always have been tokeep animals, wild and domestic, away from growingcrops and managed woodland.

GROUND PREPARATION

Various tools were used to break new ground or pre-pare previously cultivated ground for sowing. Inaddition, animals could be used to prepare ground:The use of pigs to trample the surface and grub it upis attested ethnographically in both recent times andantiquity.

Hand Tools The small fields of early farmerswere cultivated using hand tools; these included dig-ging sticks. The ground could be broken up with ahoe or mattock or dug with a spade, all of which arestill used in horticulture. The marks of a heart-shaped spade have been found in the second-millen-nium settlement of Gwithian in southern England,and a spade made of maplewood was found in a wellin the LBK settlement of Erkelenz-Kückhoven. Theabundant shoelast celts, a particular form of polishedstone ax or adz associated with LBK settlements,have also been interpreted as hoe or mattock blades;these would have been bound to the short arm of anL-shaped haft of wood or antler. Even after theintroduction of ards, peasant farmers are likely tohave continued to use hand tools to prepare theground in their small fields, given the high cost ofmaintaining a plow team; and they had other uses,hoes, for example, being used to break up clods ofearth after plowing. Double-ended spades thatresemble paddles have been found in Danish bogs,as have spades designed for cutting peat. The use ofiron in the first millennium greatly increased theefficiency of such hand tools, producing spades, forexample, that cut more cleanly and easily and deeperinto the ground.

Ard and Plow The earliest plows, introduced intoEurope in the fourth millennium B.C., were actuallyards. These consisted of a pointed wooden share to

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gouge through the ground surface, attached to along shaft by which it was drawn along, generally bya pair of oxen harnessed to an attached yoke. Theplowman followed behind holding an upright stiltattached to the share to guide the direction in whichthe ard traveled through the ground. Marks made byards have been uncovered under a number of laterNeolithic and Bronze Age barrows, from Britain andDenmark to Switzerland; they often run crisscross,probably in order to break the ground more thor-oughly. Examples of the ards themselves have beenrecovered from bogs in northern Europe and Alpinelake villages, while representations of plowing, withteams of two or sometimes four oxen, are foundamong the Bronze Age rock engravings in Scandi-navia and northern Italy.

Several varieties of ard seem to have been in usefor different purposes. The rip ard (or sod-buster),which penetrated deeply and probably needed ateam of four oxen, was the only type suited to break-ing ground that had lain fallow or had not previouslybeen cultivated: no examples have been found, butexperiments suggest that the plow marks discoveredunder barrows must have been made with such atool. Two other types, the bow ard and the crookard, are exemplified by the actual examples recov-ered from the bogs at Donnerupland and Hvorslev,respectively; the former, which has a wider under-share behind its tip, was used to stir up ground thathad been cultivated in the previous year, uprootingany remaining weeds and aerating the soil; the latterwas drawn through prepared ground to make drillsfor sowing. A related tool found in a Danish bog atSatrup Moor is known as a rope traction ard: thiswas like a heart-shaped spade with a very long han-dle. Two perforations near the back of the bladeallowed a rope to be passed through by which theard could be drawn through the ground by one man,while another used the handle to force the ard bladeinto the ground.

Ards allowed the ground to be tilled to a greaterdepth than was possible with hand tools and greatlyincreased the area that could efficiently be culti-vated. Regular use of the ard would have been effec-tive in keeping down weeds. It facilitated theexpansion of settlement, allowing new soils to bebrought under cultivation, such as the sandy soils ofcentral Europe, of which use began to be made in

the third millennium B.C. Sowing seed in furrows ordrills greatly increased the seed-to-harvest ratio:The wastage rate with broadcast seed could be asmuch as three-quarters, whereas drilled seed almostall germinated.

Whereas hand tools could be used by either sex,and ethnographic evidence shows that hoe cultiva-tion is frequently the task of women worldwide,plowing required male strength, and so the begin-ning of plow agriculture may have seen a revolutionin gender relations.

Equipping ards with shoes or tips of stone, bone,antler, or bronze improved their efficiency and abil-ity to penetrate the ground and protected themfrom rapid wear. By the Late Iron Age, ards wereequipped with iron plowshares and coulters, mak-ing it possible to break much heavier ground thanhad previously been possible, such as clays. Theseards also penetrated more deeply into the soil,encouraging the growth of deep-rooted crops suchas rye. Some may have been true plows with a mold-board, able to turn the sod; Pliny recorded thatthese were used by the peasants of the kingdom ofNoricum.

OTHER AGRICULTURAL TOOLS

Grain may have been harvested with sickles, those ofthe Neolithic period being made of flint blades, heldin the hand or set into wooden or bone handles.Later sickles were also made of bronze and, from thefirst millennium B.C., of iron. Evidence shows thatLBK farmers harvested only the ears of grain, possi-bly picking them by hand, leaving most of the stalkin the fields, whereas Bronze Age farmers in thesame region, using metal sickles, cut the crop closerto the ground. Sickles could also be used for othertasks, such as harvesting straw, cutting reeds for var-ious purposes, or gathering grass or bushy plants likegorse for fodder. Iron scythes, which also appearedin the Iron Age, used to mow hay for fodder, were agreat improvement on the sickles that had previ-ously been used for this purpose.

Other iron tools included pruning knives, bill-hooks, and reaping hooks, probably used to cut avariety of plants. Stone tools used in earlier timesincluded unretouched flint flakes for cutting reedsand axes for felling timber.


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CULTIVATION

Mediterranean farmers planted their cereal crops inthe autumn to take advantage of winter rains, thenharvested them in the spring or early summer. Incontrast, in much of temperate Europe wheat andbarley were sown in the spring and harvested in thelate summer, avoiding the winter cold, taking advan-tage of year-round rainfall, and waiting for summersun to complete ripening. The increased range ofcereals grown in the first millennium allowed thedevelopment of a rotation system, for which there isevidence in central Europe, with winter-sown cropssuch as rye, oats, and winter wheat alternating withwinter fallow and spring-sown millets. In regionswhere the risk of severe frosts was lower, such asBritain, wheat and barley could also be autumnsown, extending the growing season and increasingthe yield (although also risking crop failure if thewinter was very severe). Cereal straw was importantin its own right and might be harvested with or afterthe grain. Legumes and many others of the fruit andvegetables would not be harvested at one time butgathered as they ripened.

Growing crops had to be protected against ani-mals, probably a major reason for surrounding fieldswith ditches, fences, hedges or walls; wild animalswere also killed to discourage their predation, inci-dentally providing extra meat. Weeding would haveincreased crop yield, so the presence of many weedsof cultivation among harvested grain suggests thatcertain plants were considered a desirable additionto the sown crop, increasing its palatability andreducing the risk of total crop failure. Such plantscould be gathered with or before the grain harvest.

AFTER THE HARVEST

Except for that portion set aside for planting the fol-lowing year, grain, nuts, and pulses were oftenparched in ovens to remove moisture, inhibiting

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3.5 An unusual flint sickle or curved knife fromLate Neolithic Denmark, perhaps imitating exam-ples in bronze (Worsaae, J. J. A. The Industrial Artsof Denmark. London: Chapman and Hall, 1882)

germination in storage; carbonized remains showthat sometimes the parching was overenthusiastic.Fruit was also dried as well as stored fresh. Parchinggrain made it easier to remove the husks from hulledcereals; the grain was then pounded to break thehusks before winnowing. In the wetter conditions ofthe Iron Age corn dryers were also developed intemperate Europe. Simpler methods were used inthe small Iron Age settlement of Poswietne inPoland, where hay was dried on wooden frames anda shed with a central hearth was used to dry sheavesof grain. Drying beans and peas, grain and leaves,other crops and particularly hay all required consid-erable labor.

Harvested grain was probably threshed on athreshing floor in a windy spot in or adjacent to thesettlement, either by driving cattle over it or bybeating it with flails. A possible threshing floor isknown from the Neolithic Swiss settlement ofThayngen Weier. The threshed grain was then win-nowed with baskets or sieves to remove the husks.Some farmers were careful to separate weeds of cul-tivation from the crop before threshing, but oftenthese were allowed to remain and were eaten withthe grain. Some of the rock engravings in ValCamonica and Monte Bego in northern Italy havebeen interpreted as representations (as seen from thehillside above) of fields, corn stacks, and threshingfloors. A ring of postholes at Twisk and circulardrainage ditches at Bovenkarspel in Holland, associ-ated with carbonized grain, have been interpreted asthe remains of such corn stacks. Hay was also builtinto stacks for storage, protected from the rain withthatching; single posts within a circular depressionmay be the remains of these. A pitchfork recoveredfrom the Somerset Levels may have been used forhandling stalks of grain, hay, or other plant materialsuch as reeds.

STORAGE

Various methods of storing of grain and other food-stuffs were employed in different areas and at differ-ent times. Pits were often used initially for storageand turned over to rubbish disposal at a later stage.Surprisingly, experiments have demonstrated thatpits store grain well, even in wet countries likeBritain, as long as they were covered with an airtight

seal, using clay, for example, covered by soil: A crustof germinated grain quickly forms around the edgesin contact with the ground, using up the oxygen andreleasing carbon dioxide, creating an environmentthat preserves the rest. However, once the pit wasopened, it could not be resealed, so it was not suit-able for storing grain for daily use.

Wooden granaries consisting of a roofed plat-form raised on posts were widely used, particularlyin the Iron Age, for storing grain, pulses, and otherplant material, out of reach of domestic pigs androdents; examples included the four-post structuresassociated with each house on the Urnfield settle-ment of Zedau and a six-poster from Late BronzeAge Elp in Holland. Such granaries were particu-larly used on wet sites such as the Swiss lake villages,where they were combined with storage vessels; indrier environments sacks or baskets may have beenused instead of pots. The ground plan of LBK long-houses suggest the use of loft space for storage. Suchraised storage buildings gave protection against ani-mals such as domestic pigs and rodents. Pottery ves-sels and bins were also used. Liquids such as wineand oil could be stored and transported in vessels ofstone, leather, or pottery. A well-preserved EarlyNeolithic house at Slatina in Bulgaria had 14 clay-lined pins arranged beside a domed oven; six of themstill contained a considerable quantity of carbonizedgrain and pulses.

ANIMAL HUSBANDRY

Livestock were generally reared as part of a mixedeconomy. The relative proportions of the differentanimals kept depended to a considerable degree onthe nature of the environment, with sheep and goatspredominating in most of the Mediterranean, whilecattle were the principal domestic animals in most oftemperate Europe. Local conditions were alsoimportant, different crops and animals being suitedto various types of terrain. For example, cattle werethe main domestic animals in Bronze Age settle-ments on the Po plain, while caprines predominatedin villages in the surrounding mountainous regions.Pigs were kept only by sedentary communities asthey cannot be herded over any great distance.

The purposes for which animals were raised alsodetermined their relative importance. The begin-


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ning of milking saw an increase in many regions inthe numbers of cattle or caprines or both that werekept, while a number of cultures, such as those ofBronze Age Greece, greatly increased the size oftheir flocks after woolly sheep were introduced.

Other, more localized, considerations mightdetermine which animals were kept. For example,on the Bronze Age site at Runnymede in Englandit is thought that pigs were in the majority becauseof the local presence of liver fluke to which cattleand caprines were more vulnerable than wereswine.

Providing food for livestock was a major concern.In the early Neolithic when settlements were smalland most land was uncleared, pigs could forage in theneighboring woods or scrub, while cattle and caprinesgrazed on the forest edge or on nearby hillslopes.Later, when much of Europe’s forest cover had beencleared, pigs could forage around the settlement andin remaining patches of woodland, but could also findfood in most types of terrain. Areas of uncleared scrubvegetation were suitable for caprines, and grasslandand wetland for cattle, horses, and sheep. Trackways,such as those in the Somerset Levels, were con-structed from the Neolithic period onward, to giveaccess to islands of solid ground within wetlands thatcould be used for grazing.

Animals could be turned into the fields to grazethe stubble and remaining weeds of cultivation afterthe harvest, at the same time enriching the soil withtheir dung. Fodder crops were also grown, includ-ing oats, some pulses, and leafy vegetables; strawfrom cereals provided animal feed and surplus grainand other crops could be used. In some areas barleywas grown specially for animal feed. In the field sys-tems of Celtic Europe meadows were oftenincluded to provide hay for winter fodder. Wildplants, such as leaves, reeds, sedges, and ivy, werealso gathered for fodder. The need to provide ade-quate supplies of food set some limits on the num-bers of animals that could be supported by afarming family or community, and involved makingdecisions: in particular, balancing the increased areathat could be cultivated using an ard against theamount of land that had to be cultivated just to raiseand maintain plow oxen.

The meat of animals killed in the autumn tospare the need for overwintering them was pre-

served, by smoking, drying, or salting. Livestock aswell as providing meat and secondary products werealso a means of managing fluctuations in conditions.Surplus agricultural produce in good years could beused to build up and maintain larger herds or flocks,which could then be used for trade or as reserve foodsupplies for leaner years. In temperate Europe, bythe Bronze Age and probably earlier, stock, particu-larly cattle, were probably the main form of wealth,herd size reflecting the prestige and status of indi-viduals or communities. They were also vulnerable,however, and cattle rustling was probably a majorform of Bronze Age and Iron Age conflict, as it wasin post-Roman Europe. Enclosures within hillfortsand oppida may have been used for penning cattlewhen danger threatened.

Woodland ManagementAreas of woodland were carefully managed fromMesolithic times onward. Dense impenetrableforests were attractive neither to people nor togame; traces of carbon and pollen profiles show thatMesolithic groups created clearings by controlledburning of trees or by ringing the bark to cause thetrees to die. Such clearings were quickly colonizedby hazel and other plants, attracting game such asred deer as well as providing nuts, fruits, and otherhuman food. Fruit and nut trees were also pruned toimprove their productivity. Later, domestic animals,particularly pigs and goats, contributed to the clear-ance of forest by eating young shoots and saplingsand thus preventing the regeneration of woodland incleared plots.

Farming communities that required large quanti-ties of wood for building houses, fences, and track-ways and making tools, carts, and many otherwooden objects, also managed adjacent woods tocontrol the types, sizes, and shapes of timber avail-able. This might involve planting, pruning, andthinning trees, tasks whose benefits might be reapedonly decades or even centuries later. In the shorterterm oak, ash, and elm were coppiced, their trunkscut down to leave a low stool from which shootsgrew up to form straight poles up to 8 inches (20centimeters) in diameter. These were harvestedwhen they reached the desired size and were used as

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stakes for fencing and posts for construction. Hazeland alder were also coppiced to produce thin rodscut after about seven to 11 years and used for mak-ing baskets, wattle, hurdles, and fish traps. As thetender young shoots of coppiced trees grew low,areas of managed woodland had to be fenced toexclude browsing animals, both wild and domestic.Trees such as willow could also be pollarded, thetop of the tree trunk being cut off, encouraging thegrowth of a mass of small straight branches. Cop-picing and pollarding seem likely to have beenpracticed from Mesolithic times onward. Cop-piced wood was used in the Sweet Track in theSomerset Levels in England, dated to the winter of3807–6 B.C.

The properties of different timbers were wellappreciated, and woodland was managed to ensurethat a regular supply of appropriate timber wasavailable for every purpose. For example, trackwaysin the Somerset Levels were built of oak or ashplanks, alder corduroy or brushwood paths, or hur-dles of hazel or alder rods. At Mesolithic TybrindVig a dugout canoe was made of lime, with paddlesof ash; at a number of sites pine was used for arrows.

Tools that required curved or angled compo-nents, such as ards, could be created by soaking andbending or joining pieces of wood, but timbersgrown to the desired shape were stronger. Thesemight be selected from naturally distorted branches,but growing branches were also trained into shape.

In addition to timber, woodlands were managedto provide fodder and fuel. Acorns and other nutscould be collected for feed or the animals driven intowoodland to forage for them. Leaves for fodderwere gathered in the summer and dried on racks.Since stripping leaves in quantity would be injuriousto the tree, it is likely that they were preferentiallygathered from trees already earmarked to be felledfor timber. Fallen twigs and bark were gathered forkindling; bracket fungi were also useful for this, andtree and vine prunings and fruit kernels could alsobe burned. Felled timber and fallen branches weresawed into logs and stored for winter use. The pro-duction of charcoal was also important since it pro-vided the huge quantities of fuel needed formetalworking, an important industry for much ofprehistory: It is estimated that it took around 300

pounds (140 kilograms) of timber to produce 2pounds (1 kilogram) of copper.

Intensification andSpecialization

IRRIGATION AND WETLANDS

From the late fourth millennium B.C. Millaranfarmers and their Argaric successors in the aridregion of southeast Spain may have constructedsimple dams and ditches for floodwater farming,channeling winter or spring floodwaters from adja-cent streams onto arable land. This is disputed,however, and there is no supporting evidence fromthe plant remains that irrigation was practiced untilthe Argaric Bronze Age, when flax and other cropsbegan to be grown here.

While floodwater farming was a strategy thatallowed cultivation in arid regions, in temperatelands seasonally flooded land could be used at othertimes of year as water meadows for pasturing ani-mals; these were made use of particularly in the IronAge. Marshes also provided grazing and fodder aswell as a rich variety of wild resources.

MEDITERRANEAN POLYCULTURE

The intensive system of agriculture that developed inparts of the Mediterranean during the third and sec-ond millennia B.C. integrated the cultivation of cere-als and pulses on plain and valley soils with theraising of grapes, olives, and figs on the poorer soilsof the hillslopes. Crops could also be interplanted,vegetables, and other crops benefiting from theshade and increased soil warmth of land beneath thetrees. Since these crops needed attention at differenttimes of the year, this system made it possible to raiseoverall productivity, but at the expense of increasingthe amount of labor required by agriculture.

TREES AND ANIMALS

From the mid-third to mid-second millennia partsof southwest Spain were exploited as dehesas: man-


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aged oak woodlands. Parkland with holm and corkoaks and other trees were used to provide pasturagefor pigs, which grew fat on acorns and chestnuts;cattle, horses, sheep, and geese could also find foodthere, including acorns, leaves, and tree prunings.The trees were planted, pruned, and protected whileyoung, and were also used to make charcoal and pro-vide fuel. Similar pastoral regimes may have beenpracticed in other regions of the Mediterranean.

PASTORALISM

Settled communities could increase the numbersof livestock they owned by sending them with partof the community, generally young men, to sea-sonal pastures outside the farmland; for example,taking sheep and goats into the uplands wheresummer grazing was available. It has been sug-gested that stock from Neolithic tell settlements inThessaly and the Balkans were taken in the sum-mer to graze on nearby river floodplains. Flood-plains might also provide winter grazing, as hasbeen suggested for the Neolithic farmers of theTavoliere in Italy, while fens and marshes might beused for summer grazing, for example, by Chasseyfarmers in Provence or prehistoric villagers in EastAnglia. In third-millennium southern Francefarming settlements on the Garrigues Plateau werelinked to small enclosed structures away from thefarms, interpreted as shepherds’ huts, as well astranshumant use of higher pastures in the GrandCausses. Upland caves in southern France andelsewhere seem to have been seasonally occupiedby shepherds and their flocks. Summer transhu-mance into the high pastures of the Apennines alsodeveloped as part of the Bronze Age expansion ofland use in Italy.

Pastoralism was one way of increasing productiv-ity when the land suitable for arable agriculture wasfully settled or when overexploitation or climaticchange had reduced its fertility: This, for example,may account for the shift to pastoralism in the third-millennium Balkans. It also allowed the exploitationof regions where arable land was rare or absent. Inregions such as the steppe and the Alps, communi-ties developed that devoted themselves largely orentirely to pastoralism, raising large herds of cattleor flocks of sheep and moving either seasonally or

when local grazing became depleted. Steppe pas-toralists also kept horses on which they could moverapidly and easily when herding their flocks. Inalpine regions pockets of hillside land could be culti-vated by largely pastoral communities to raise a fewcrops, their fertility enhanced by applying liberalquantities of manure.

Pastoral groups in modern times are often alsoinvolved in trade, carrying materials between settledcommunities, and other activities, and it is likely thatin prehistoric Europe the same was true: For exam-ple, it is thought that pastoralists exploiting the highpastures of the Alps were involved in the beginningof metal-ore extraction in this zone.

Pastoral groups often have and had a range ofsymbiotic arrangements with settled communities,contracting to take villagers’ animals along withtheir own to summer pastures or trading animalproducts such as wool, leather, cheese, and manurefor grain. This seems likely to have been the rela-tionship between the inhabitants of the Bronze Ageterramare settlements on the Po plain, who practicedmixed farming, raising wheat, cattle, and pigs, andsettlements in the adjacent mountains, such as AreneCandide and Castellaro di Uscio, who were herdingsheep and goats, and using imported grain and pot-tery that they had exchanged for wool.

READING

AgricultureBarker 1985, 1999, Whittle 1996, Harding 2000,2002, James 1993, Milisauskas and Kruk 2002a,Reynolds 1987, 1995, Thorpe 1996: general; Mil-isauskas 2002b, Wells 2002, Noble 2003: arableagriculture; Zohary and Hopf 2000, Kiple andOrnelas 2000, Zeuner 1954: crops; Barber 1991:fibers; Forbes 1954a, Pyatt et al. 1995: dyes; Midge-ley 1992: TRB; Sherratt 1997, Cunliffe 1993, Mer-cer, ed. 1984: animal husbandry; Bökönyi 1991: IronAge; Cunliffe 1993: cats; Mercer 1990: causewayedenclosures; Bailey 2000: Balkans.

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Wild ResourcesClarke 1976, Barker 1985, Mithen 1994: general;Midgeley 1992: TRB; Cunliffe 2001a: Atlantic; Fin-layson 1998: Scotland; Spindler 1995: Iceman;Hodges 1971: traps; Wickham-Jones 2003, Rowley-Conwy 2002a: shellfish.

Economic StrategiesColes, B. 1987, Coles and Coles 1986, Reynolds1995: woodland management; Harrison 1996,Barker 1999: dehesas; Gilman and Thornes 1985,Barker 1999: irrigation; Reynolds 1995, Bailey 2000:storage; Kuster 1991: Manching; Arca 1999: fields inrock art; Bowen 1961: fields.


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SETTLEMENT

4

The picture of European communities recoveredby archaeologists is quite patchy. In the south-

east where mudbrick was used in construction andtells often formed, housing is well known; in lake-side settlements where organic materials are pre-served, including parts of timber houses, the pictureis very full; in some areas stone was used for buildingimpressive structures that still stand, such as thebrochs of Scotland and the nuraghi of Sardinia; butin much of Europe where houses were of wood andsettlements often small and difficult to locate, muchof the evidence for the presence of farmers comesfrom funerary contexts rather than settlements, andthe picture is worse for hunter-gatherer and pastoralcommunities, whose settlements were often occu-pied only for short periods and whose housing wasoften made largely of perishable materials. Aerialreconnaissance and landscape surveys, coupled withartifact and burial distribution studies, have achievedsome success in reconstructing the pattern of settle-ment in some areas, but the picture of settlement inmany eras and regions, particularly rural and small-scale occupation, is still significantly dependent onchance discoveries, and there are many gaps in ourknowledge.

CONSTRUCTION

Domestic structures in prehistoric Europe weregenerally constructed of local building materials,and where necessary the style of traditional architec-ture was modified in line with what could beachieved with the materials available—in prehistoricOrkney, for instance, where timber, the traditionalbuilding material, was scarce, houses were built oflocal stone and an appropriate style of constructionwas developed.

Architecture also related to the local environ-mental and climatic conditions, taking into accountsuch factors as shelter from summer heat or wintercold, and the volume and severity of precipitation.The needs of animals might also be taken intoaccount in house designs, providing stalls for themeither within the house or in separate outbuildings.

Social and cultural factors also influenced archi-tectural design and the choice of materials: Theseincluded the size of the domestic unit, ranging fromnuclear families through extended families to com-munities, the relative importance given to individualor household privacy and interaction, gender andage-related organization, and the arrangement ofdomestic and industrial activities. Status was alsoimportant in determining the form of structures andtheir material: An extreme example is the wall sur-rounding the hillfort at Heuneberg, part of which inone period was reconstructed in mud brick, aMediterranean building material unsuited to thecentral European climate but adopted here forostentation during the period of trade between thelocal chief and the Greeks.

Building Materials

MUD AND CLAY

Mud, particularly clay, was important as a buildingmaterial in the Aegean and Balkans and later in theMediterranean. It was generally mixed with straw,dung, animal hair, grass, or another temper to rein-force it and prevent cracking. The mixture was usedas pisé (packed mud) or shaped into mud bricks.Clay was also used to mold internal features ofhouses such as hearths, storage bins, shelves, andbenches, as well as ovens inside or outside the house.The use of mud, mud brick, and daub in settlementsthat were occupied continuously for many centuriesor even millennia, such as Karanovo, resulted in theformation of tells, mounds that gradually developedas new houses were constructed over the leveleddebris of their predecessors.

Mud was also used as the mortar between coursesof mud brick. House floors throughout Europe wereoften made of beaten earth or covered with clay. Mudwas widely employed as the main constituent of daub,in some areas a mixture of 60 percent soil, 30 percentclay, and 10 percent temper, in others just clay andtemper. This was used to create a strong, hard, weath-erproof surface covering walls made of wattle or tim-ber, and could be further protected by applying a limewash, which gave an attractive and durable finish.


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WOOD

Roundwood The ubiquity of postholes as theremaining trace of buildings attests the importanceof timber posts in construction throughout Europe.These might form the framework of a timber build-ing with the spaces between them filled with otherwalling material such as wattle or planks. Poles orsplit posts could also be used themselves to form thewalls of houses, set vertically side by side or arrangedhorizontally in log cabins. Posts formed the frame-work of subsidiary structures such as small storagebuildings, and were used for some of the internal fit-tings of a house, such as loom uprights. Corduroyfloors and paths of poles or logs were built in somesettlements. Pairs of uprights with a lintel were alsoneeded to frame and reinforce doorways; somehouses had an additional pair of posts forming aporch in front of the door.

A few prehistoric European houses had a secondstory, its floor constructed of planks or poles coveredwith wattle and plaster, supported by internal posts.More commonly, these were used to create a loftover part of the house, used for storing grain andother produce and perhaps as sleeping quarters.

Substantial posts were chiefly used as roof sup-ports, arranged in various ways. In some houses theywere part of the wall framework, while in othersthey formed internal rows or rings, often with a tim-ber rail fastened to their tops using a carpentry jointsuch as mortise and tenon.

Posts were usually set in postholes and packedwith stones. Less commonly, the posts could be setinto sole plates or sleeper beams laid on theground surface or slightly sunk into it; this methodwas used particularly in damp settings where theground was not firm. Experiments have shown,however, that the strength of the overall design ofpost-built structures kept the posts vertical andthat they could therefore be erected directly on theground surface, without postholes (making themarchaeologically invisible). In settings such as lakemargins and land liable to occasional flooding,posts were also used as piles to support a solid plat-form upon which houses were constructed. Theseare better known than most constructional ele-ments, being preserved in a number of water-logged sites.

Planks Planks, split or sawed, were used for build-ing the walls of some houses and smaller buildings,for internal fittings, and for other domestic struc-tures, such as the lining of wells. Floors could also bemade of planks, though beaten earth was more com-mon, and planks were also used to construct plat-forms as the base for houses in wet conditions.

Wattle Wattle was one of the main constructionmaterials of prehistoric European houses and otherstructures. It consisted of two components: a seriesof upright stakes driven into the ground and a num-ber of rods, often of coppiced hazel, alder, or willow,interwoven between the stakes. Wattle was used forthe walls of small roundhouses and to fill in thespaces between the posts of timber-framed houses.In some Greek Neolithic houses bundles of reedsstood on end between the posts were used instead ofinterwoven rods.

This arrangement of wattle and posts on their ownwas adequate for fencing and the internal partitions ofhouses, but the exterior walls of houses for people andanimals and of buildings for storing perishable mate-rials required the protection of daub, probably gener-ally applied inside and out in a thick layer.

Brushwood Brushwood was employed to coverdamp ground, for example, forming a platform onmarshy ground in the early Mesolithic camp site atStar Carr in England. Brushwood tied in bundles orpulled together could also have been used to makethe frame of temporary structures, over which a cov-ering of hides or cloth could be stretched. Sometrackways were constructed of brushwood, and it wascombined with piles to make artificial platforms forsettlement, such as the crannogs of Iron Age Britain.

Roof Timbers Poles or beams provided the mainframework for house roofs. In the Aegean somehouses had flat roofs of poles laid as horizontalrafters across the tops of the walls and covered withbrushwood or wattle and packed earth or mud plas-ter. Flat roofs were also common in the Mediter-ranean in later periods. Many early Aegean houses,however, like those of the rest of Europe, hadpitched roofs. The lower ends of the roof beamswere supported on the tops of wall posts or by

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transverse or ring beams running between them; insome cases the ends of the roof beams rested on theground itself. At the apex of roofs in rectangularhouses the rafters could be supported on a ridgepole running between the main upright posts of thehouse. The framework could be strengthened withtransverse rods or beams.

In roundhouses the roof poles had to be relativelyfew in number, to avoid congestion at the apex.Shorter rafters, supported at the bottom but notreaching to the top, were added and the whole struc-ture fastened together with rings of rods tied to therafters or woven in to form a basketry framework.

STONE

Stone was used for construction in areas where tim-ber was scarce and stone abundant, such as upland

areas of Britain and France. In the Orkneys the localstone was gray flagstone, which naturally breaks intoflat straight-edged slabs that were easily built up indrystone layers to form walls. Drystone masonrycould also be built of other types of stone, skillfullyslotted together by experienced builders to create agreat variety of houses as well as walls along fieldboundaries and around settlements, and other struc-tures. The roof on stone houses could be supportedon wooden timbers (or in Orkney whalebone) orconstructed as a corbelled dome of stone.

More elaborate constructions were frequentlybuilt of stone: These included defensive structures,such as settlement walls in some areas, and religiousand funerary monuments such as megaliths andstone circles, as well as fortified domestic buildingssuch as brochs and nuraghi.

Stone was also sometimes used for the founda-tion courses of houses built mainly of wood or mudbrick. In addition, there were elements of domesticstructures that were often of stone, such as hearthsand door pivots. Cobbled or stone-flagged floorsinside houses and covering courtyards are alsoknown in some places.

ROOFING MATERIALS

Roofs do not generally survive, and their form andbuilding materials are generally reconstructed onthe basis of structural clues from the remains ofwalls and foundations, debris from fallen or burntroofs, experimental data, and ethnographic informa-tion on more recent European houses. In some casesstone-built houses were roofed in stone by cor-belling, but most roofs were constructed upon a tim-ber framework, using a variety of roofing materials.Often the roof timbers were interwoven with rods toform a wattle base, but an alternative was a mesh ofstrong cord strung between the beams in both direc-tions. A layer of brushwood was another alternative.In southern Europe the wattle or brushwood couldbe covered with earth or plaster; elsewhere turf,peat, and thatch were generally used.

Thatch Straw, reed, seaweed, or heather thatchingis suitable for use on both round and rectangularhouses. The timber framework for thatched roofsneeded to be pitched at an angle between 45 and 55


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4.1 The interior of one house in the Neolithic set-tlement of Skara Brae in Orkney. The shortage ofwood on the island meant that stone was used tobuild both the houses and their fittings, such asbeds and shelves. (TopFoto.co.uk, photo RichardHarding / Uppa.co.uk)

degrees. The thatching material was probably tied inbundles, laid across the timber framework, and fas-tened together. Tough cords with stones tied at eachend could be placed over the thatch to weight itdown and help keep it in place.

Turf and Peat Turfs were a common roofingmaterial and were also built up around the outside ofhouses in cold areas such as Scotland to strengthenand insulate them. The turfs were cut and laid grassside down over the roof framework. Another layer,grass side up, was laid on top. This created a solidcovering that was both warm and weatherproof butwhich also allowed smoke to seep out. Peat blockswere used in the same way. Alternatively, a singlelayer of turfs laid facedown could be covered with alayer of straw or other thatching material.

Other Branches covered with leaves were alsosuitable for roofing. Temporary structures, such astents and huts in short-lived camps, were probablycovered with hides, though textiles such as felt andwoollen or linen cloth might also be used, as mightbark, stripped from the tree in sheets. Stones andbranches were often used to anchor the lower edgeof these nonrigid materials; in eastern Europe somePalaeolithic communities used mammoth bones andtusks for this purpose and for the framework of theirhouses.

HOLES

Many structures in the settlements of prehistoricEurope were cut into the ground. The most ubiqui-tous were pits, used for storage and the disposal ofrubbish. Other holes were dug to deposit votiveofferings, to increase space beneath the loom forlong pieces of weaving, to make wells, as graves, andfor many other purposes. Some pits were lined withclay, wood, or stone, but most were simply holes.

Pit houses have been reported from sites acrossEurope; in many cases these are likely to have beenholes dug for other purposes, particularly as quarriesfor the large quantities of clay needed for daub.Some circular or irregularly shaped pits formed thelower part of small huts.

On a larger scale ditches and their complemen-tary banks also played an important part in construc-

tion. Many British roundhouses were surrounded bya bank-and-ditch enclosure, demarcating thedomestic space attached to the house; similar houseplots were found in other settlements such as theImpressed Ware settlements on the Tavoliere inItaly. Ditches and banks were also used as fieldboundaries and to enclose settlements, probablywith a hedge or palisade on the top of the bank, andwere used to mark the perimeters of a number ofmonuments, such as the British henges and cursuses,but also the many types of barrow constructed byvarious European societies.

In Iron Age Atlantic Europe more elaborate sub-terranean structures were created for storage, per-haps with a religious dimension. These souterrainswere essentially underground tunnels and chambers,though each region had its own form.

Life Expectancy of HousesThe wood from buildings preserved in waterloggedsites can often be dated precisely, using den-drochronology. This has provided unexpected infor-mation on the lifespan of wooden buildings, at leaston wetland sites. A number of Neolithic settlements,including Hauterive-Champréveyres in Switzerlandand Charavines-les-Baigneurs in France, are madeup of buildings that were abandoned after 10 to 25years, and that had often undergone repairs duringtheir lifetime. An even clearer picture comes fromaround the shores of Lake Constance (Bodensee),where between c. 3940 and 3825 B.C. a number ofvillages were constructed within an area around fivemiles (8 kilometers) across. The dendrochronologi-cal dates of these villages show that they were builtconsecutively, each being occupied for 10 to 15 yearsbefore a new village was built a short distance awayand the old one abandoned.

The short life expectancy of these buildings mayhave resulted from their damp location; studies ondry-land settlements suggest that timber buildingscould last for 50 to 100 years before they needed tobe renewed. Here the rebuilding also often involveda change of location, although this might be over adistance of feet rather than miles. The formation oftells in Southeast Europe demonstrates that in someareas the same settlement site might be occupied for

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hundreds and even thousands of years; but here alsoexperiments and ethnographic observation haveshown that the individual mud-walled buildingsprobably had a life expectancy of only around 15 to20 years.

DOMESTICARCHITECTURE

Although a few complete or largely intact houseshave survived, in most cases the houses of prehis-toric Europe are known only from the few tracesthey have left at ground level: the lowest courses ofstone walls, floors with scattered domestic debrissurrounded by the postholes and stakeholes of thehouse walls, and at worst, as in some LBK houses,little apart from the bottom portion of the post-holes. From these traces many different conjecturalforms of houses have been reconstructed. Some-times these have been tested in experiments thathave provided many insights into structural require-ments and possibilities. Other information can begleaned from contemporary house models and fromburial structures thought to imitate houses, thoughthese cannot be uncritically accepted as replicas ofreal houses.

Houses built of wood and other perishable mate-rials are difficult to find; although some may berevealed by aerial reconnaissance and others bychance discoveries, for example, during modernground clearance for construction, such houses areusually found when sites are examined that havebeen identified on the basis of other material, suchas scatters of pottery or associated earthworks. Thismeans that the more numerous and substantial theartifacts and other remains left by a settlement’sinhabitants, the better the chance of their buildingsbeing identified. Thus the homes of settled farmers,with their stone querns and pottery vessels, are farmore frequently found than those of mobile hunter-gatherers and pastoralists whose seasonal or periodicmovements made it imperative that they were notburdened with many material possessions.

The majority of European houses were eitherround or rectilinear, ranging from square toextremely elongated, though a few were trape-zoidal or other shapes. Many of the few Mesolithicstructures that have been traced were round, aswere those of many later communities in theMediterranean and Atlantic Europe. Square andrectangular houses were the norm in SoutheastEurope, while through central Europe and into thenorth, west, and northeast longhouses were built.The pattern was by no means so clear-cut, how-ever: early houses in Britain were square or rectan-gular, later ones round; roundhouses occurred inthe Balkans and rectangular ones in the Mediter-ranean; Scandinavia had both round and rectangu-lar houses; and in later times rectangular houseswere sometimes the choice of the elite in areas likesouthern England, where roundhouses were thenorm. Some houses fell into neither category: thewedge-shaped houses of Mesolithic Lepenski Vir,for example.

Ephemeral HousingMany of the homes of prehistoric Europeans, partic-ularly mobile hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, haveleft little or no trace since they were made of perish-able materials and lacked substantial foundations.Often the only clues are the remains of hearths andthe patterns made by the material that people dis-carded inside and outside their dwellings. Even per-manent settlements, however, such as those of theearly farmers of western Europe, have often left lit-tle structural evidence.

A number of temporary or even permanent campsare known largely from platforms constructed to pro-tect the inhabitants from the damp in river- or lake-side locations. For example, at ninth-millennium StarCarr in England a simple platform beside a lakeshorewas made by laying branches, brushwood, stones, andmoss on the boggy ground beside the lake. Theinhabitants of Molino Casarotto, a Neolithic settle-ment in northern Italy, built small wooden platformsalong the lake margin, one with a substantial hearth.In neither case do traces survive of the shelters con-structed on the platforms: At Star Carr these may


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have been tents or other flimsy temporary shelters,but at Molino they were probably huts.

MIDDENS

Shell middens, great mounds of discarded shells ofmarine and sometimes freshwater mollusks, are themost visible remains of sites occupied by coastalMesolithic communities, but excavations of suchmounds have yielded little trace of structures apartfrom hearths. Recent excavations of a midden atWest Voe in Shetland, however, identified theremains of a possible structure beside the shell mid-den, and it is likely that more extensive explorationof the area around shell middens would lead to thediscovery of camp sites and shelters.

TENTS AND TEMPORARY HUTS

Despite the difficulties of identifying temporarystructures, a number have been found. Often thesehad a sunken floor, sometimes covered with clay orbark. The hearth was often surrounded by stonesand sometimes set over a patch of sand, to reducethe risk of the fire damaging the hut. Sometimesstones were used as the foundation for these shel-ters, but usually they were made of wood, generallyin the form of stakes that supported a covering ofhides, bark, or reeds.

Terra Amata Supposedly the earliest houses inEurope, dated around 380,000 B.C., were excavatedat Terra Amata in France, shelters constructed byearly humans for a short stay. Sharpened stakes werepushed into the ground in a rough oval and fastenedat the top. Two larger branches were erected insideas tent poles to support the roof. The shelter mayhave been covered with skins, held down by a ring ofstones around the outside. Inside, a hollow held thefire, protected from the wind with a screen of stones,and scatters of discarded material marked where theoccupants had undertaken various activities such asmaking stone tools.

Staosnaig (Scotland) A circular pit 13 feet (4meters) wide was packed with charred hazelnutshells and domestic debris. This is believed to havebeen the lower part of a house before it was turned

over to rubbish by its Mesolithic owners. A numberof smaller pits surrounding it had been used forroasting the hazelnuts.

Timmeras (Bohuslan, Sweden) A pit was dug intosloping ground in a Mesolithic winter camp here,and four posts were erected in a square to supportsome kind of roof. Inside was a hearth containingcharred food debris.

Le Baratin (southern France) This was an Im-pressed Ware open-air camp site where people livedin huts or tents. These had a central post and a seriesof posts around the outside, with river pebbles laidto form circular floors.

Divostin IA (Serbia) Around 6000 B.C. three tem-porary shelters were erected near the Divostinskistream, each consisting of an irregular hollow with asuperstructure of branches and twigs covered withmud and clay. In the center of the floor was a hearthbuilt of clay over a foundation of stones.

CAVES

From Palaeolithic times up to the present day, cavesand rock shelters have been used to provide a ready-made place to camp or live permanently, shelteredfrom the weather and from predators. Often theseoffered adequate accommodation as they were, butin many cases some modifications and improve-ments were made to increase their comfort. Theseincluded hearths, windbreaks constructed of stakesor wattle and hides, and partitions of similar con-struction, used, for example, by pastoralists to pentheir flocks at night. These simple structures couldbe built inside the cave or on the surroundingground, extending the area of shelter provided bythe cave. A number of caves in Bulgaria occupiedduring the Bronze Age contained wattle-and-daubstructures.

Mesolithic HousesAlthough details of most Mesolithic houses are elu-sive, in the Iron Gates gorge of the Danube in

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Southeast Europe where a number of fishing com-munities existed in the eighth to sixth millennia B.C.,well-defined house plans have been recovered. Lep-enski Vir is the best known site, but others such asVlasac had similar structures.

Wetland sites in Scandinavia, Latvia, and Estoniahave also yielded the remains of substantial houses;these may have been exceptional in their solid con-struction and the carpentry skills they display, butmore probably they represent the rare preservation,due to waterlogging, of building practices that weremore widespread among later Mesolithic communi-ties. These were rectangular huts, 7 to 20 feet (2 to 6meters) long, built of posts and bark, with a centralhearth placed on a layer of sand.

Lepenski Vir (Serbia) The settlement here con-sisted of about 25 huts set in natural and excavatedhollows in the ground. These huts were trapezoidalin plan with their entrance in the wider, roundedend. Their walls were built of posts set diagonallyinto the ground, sloping to form the roof, and per-haps covered with hides. The floors were plasteredwith a crushed limestone and gravel mixture andpainted red or white. Within each was a central pitlined with limestone blocks that held the hearth.Limestone slabs placed on end surrounded thehearth. Others laid flat may have been used as tablesor work surfaces. Near the hearth in many of thehouses was a carved limestone block depicting a fish-faced individual. Carved stones laid flat near thehearth are thought to have been offering tables oraltars. A number of individuals were buried beneaththe house floor at the back of the hearth.

Eyni (Estonia) Wooden beams were sunk intoboggy ground as the foundations for rectangularhouses of wooden uprights with two or four internalposts supporting the roof. The floor in one housewas of wooden boards laid on a grid of beams; othershad a covering of pine or birch bark.

Square and RectangularHousesRectangular houses of various shapes and sizes,including square, were built in most parts of prehis-toric Europe. Ancillary buildings such as granaries

were also generally square. The majority were builtof timber, with a post frame, walls of wattle and daub,and a pitched roof. In some regions, such as theAlpine lake villages, the walls might alternatively bebuilt of planks. Some rectangular houses had stonefoundations. Mud brick and pisé were also used, par-ticularly in Southeast Europe. Floors were generallyof beaten earth, but in some houses, particularly inlakeside settlements, the floors were built of planks,laid directly on the ground or raised above it.

The posts and stakes forming the framework ofthe house were generally driven into the ground, butin some Alpine villages and in the Baden culturesleeper beams with a hole at each end were laid onthe ground surface and the corner posts were driventhrough the holes. Above this a wooden floor waslaid and the house constructed above it, using soleplates (perforated planks) or joists to hold theuprights of the walls. Houses of this type in Bohemiahad sunken floors.

SOUTHEAST EUROPE

Early houses in Greece were square or rectangular,constructed of mud brick or with a timber post andwattle framework plastered with clay. They rangedin size from 20 feet by 26 feet (6–8 meters) to almosttwice these dimensions. Houses were similar in theBalkans, their walls built of timber posts and wattlecovered with daub made of chaff and clay obtainedfrom quarry pits along the sides of the house; thesepits were subsequently filled with domestic rubbishor used as graves. Sometimes the inside walls of thehouses were painted. The house floor might be ofbeaten earth or covered with clay or wooden planks.

Most early houses had a single room with ahearth with a clay surround, though some weredivided into two. Some houses had a clay oven insidethe house, while in other cases the ovens were builtoutside the houses. Clay was also used to constructstorage bins and benches, while stone grindstonesand clay-lined basins were also regular features.Some houses in the Balkans contained clay “altars.”

Later, by the mid fifth millennium, houses in theregion were similar but often larger, and in somecases their walls were built of substantial woodenplanks, while others were still of posts with wattleand daub; some now also had stone foundations.Some houses were subdivided into two or sometimes


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three rooms, while others had a basement. In somecases there may have been an upper story or loftover some of the rooms, accessed by ladder.

Nea Nikomedeia (Greece) A two-roomed post-built house was among those in the Early Neolithicsettlement of Nea Nikomedeia. The smaller roommay have been the kitchen; it had a plaster benchalong one side with a hearth and a storage bin setinto it. The house also had a porch.

Slatina (Bulgaria) The well-preserved plan of asixth-millennium house was excavated at Slatina. Itwas 42 feet by 33 feet (13 x 10 meters), constructedof posts, wattle, and daub, with three large posts inthe center supporting the apex of the roof. The floorwas of wooden planks covered with clay, probablyrenewed annually. There was one large room with asmall room partitioned off at the back for storage;here were found tools and a clay box on feet (possi-bly a house model, interpreted as a shrine). Thehearth was just inside the house’s doorway, and ineach of the front corners was a large wooden struc-ture, probably a bed. One of the back corners wasthe kitchen area, with 14 clay-lined storage binscontaining wheat, barley, and beans, a quern, and alarge domed oven. Two more containers stood nearthe other corner. Between the kitchen and the bedwas a loom, while against the opposite wall was awooden platform. A four-post screen stood in thecenter of the floor between the beds; this shieldedthe interior of the house from view through thedoorway.

OTHER AREAS

The houses of the first farmers in southern Italy arebest known from the Tavoliere region. They weresmall rectangular timber-framed buildings, the moresubstantial examples with stone footings, and eachwas set within a small horseshoe-shaped ditchedcompound.

Some houses in hamlets and villages in the Alpsand other upland areas were small rectangular orsquare huts, while others were longhouses. Lake-shore houses were originally thought to have beenbuilt over open water, an idea largely disproved bylater investigations. These have shown that thehouses were generally erected on the margins of

lakes where the ground was often boggy and wherethere might be occasional flooding. To raise themabove the damp, the houses were therefore con-structed on plank platforms supported by timberpiles, or the ground level was artificially raised. Afew north Italian settlements of the Bronze Age,however, were indeed constructed over open water;surviving piles from these settlements are as much as30 feet (9 meters) long. In high Alpine valleys therewere substantial plank-built houses with severalrooms, including storage areas. Some had stonefoundations and occasionally stone-paved floors.One at Padnal contained a rectangular cistern oflarch posts and planks sunk into the ground.

The earliest houses in Britain were square or rec-tangular, though few are known. Most were small,although a growing number of larger halls haverecently been found. The majority of later houses inBritain were circular, but some Iron Age houseswere also rectangular, for example, those from sixth-century Crickley Hill.

In many other regions the earliest houses weresmall rectangular structures. Those in Scandinaviahad round corners and their roofs were supportedon a central row of posts. Later houses were oftenmore substantial.

Knap of Howar (Orkney, Scotland) At Knap ofHowar two rectangular houses with rounded cor-ners, 25 feet (7.5 meters) and 31 feet (9.5 meters)long, respectively, were constructed in the fourthmillennium. They had thick walls of drystonemasonry, surmounted by a timber-framed turf roof.Several internal posts helped support the roof.Upright slabs divided the interior into two rooms inone case, three in the other. The furnishingsincluded wooden and stone benches, hearths, stone-lined storage pits set into the floor, which in somerooms were paved with stone, and shelves and cup-boards built into the thickness of the walls. Similarhouses in timber or stone are known from otherparts of Neolithic Britain.

LOG CABINS

In the Alpine regions, both in lakeside villages andon upland plateaus, houses were often built of logs.For their foundations poles were laid horizontallyon the ground and held in place by vertical posts at

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the corners, sometimes set in sole plates. The wallsabove were made from further poles arranged hori-zontally. Log cabins were also built in other parts ofEurope, for example, in the large EBA stockaded vil-lage of Biskupin.

Biskupin (Poland) The tightly packed houses in thefour-acre (1.5-hectare) fortified settlement of Biskupinwere built to a standardized design, in rows thatshared a common roof. The walls and floor were con-structed of split timbers set horizontally into groovescut in the posts framing the house. The roof wasthatched with reeds, and gaps in the wall timbersplugged with clay and moss. The house was dividedinto a small room for sleeping, with a communal bed,and a larger room for domestic activities, with a cen-tral hearth constructed of stone to protect the timberfrom fire. A loft, accessed by ladder, was used for stor-age. A porch or entrance hall ran the length of the out-side at the front; here the domestic pigs were kept.

LonghousesLonghouses were a particular design of timber-framed rectangular house in which the width wasgenerally far less than the length. First appearing inEurope in LBK settlements, various types of long-house became common from the Neolithic periodonward in areas as far apart as Switzerland, theCarpathian basin, the Low Countries, northernFrance, Poland, and parts of Scandinavia; they werestill in use in Germanic regions in post-Romantimes. Some longhouses, such as those in Scandi-navia, had stone footings.

RECTANGULAR LONGHOUSES

LBK longhouses were long single-story rectangularstructures with a substantial timber-post frameworkinfilled with wattle or in some cases wholly or partlywith planks. The walls were covered with clay dugfrom large pits alongside the houses. The roofs weresteeply pitched to shed rain and snow; they hadgable ends and overhanging eaves to protect thewalls from the wet.

The houses varied in length, some being a suit-able size for a single family, others probably accom-

modating the separate households of an extendedfamily, probably each with their own hearth. Thelonghouses were generally 33 to 100 feet (10 to 30meters) long by 16 to 23 feet (5 to 7 meters) wide.Three internal rows of substantial posts ran longitu-dinally through the house, supporting the roof anddividing the house into aisles. Internal partitionswere often used to divide the aisles into separaterooms. Some would have been sleeping places, oth-ers places for storing tools and equipment or food orundertaking various activities. In some houses oneend was reserved for stalling livestock. At the oppo-site end there may have been a loft where grain andother perishables could be stored in the dry. Thehearth or hearths were centrally placed and sur-rounded by working areas where food preparationand other domestic activities took place. Apart fromthe hearths, however, few of the fittings and furnish-ings of the houses survive.

TRAPEZOIDAL LONGHOUSES

Danubian II longhouses, particularly those of theRössen and Lengyel groups, were similar to those ofLBK, but were now trapezoidal in shape, with theirentrance in the wider end wall. In some this openedinto an outer room, suggested to have been a recep-tion area in which residents could interact with visi-tors while domestic activities took place in the mainpart of the house, behind a partition wall. In Polandin settlements such as Brzesc Kujawski, these houseshad walls of close-set posts or planks. Many trape-zoidal longhouses had no internal posts, others hadfewer than before, and the roof was carried by addi-tional posts in the walls. Often there were internalpartitions, separating the house into two or threerooms.

TERPEN

Longhouses built on the terpen of the North Seacoast in the late centuries B.C. and early centuriesA.D. were constructed of wattle and daub, buttressedexternally with sloping timbers. An internal timberframe of posts and beams supported the roof poles,which were covered with thatch or turf. The floorswere of beaten earth. Internal partitions of wattleseparated the domestic quarters from the byre anddivided the latter into stalls.


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HALLS

A large fourth-millennium building similar to alonghouse but wider in proportion to its length wasfound at Balbridie in Scotland. This was a buildingof exceptional size, 43 by 85 feet (13 by 26 meters),rectangular with rounded corners, walls built of sub-stantial posts, and internal partitions. The purposeof this structure was uncertain, its size suggestingthat it was a communal hall rather than a domestichouse. A number of similar buildings, however, havebeen found in various parts of Britain in recentyears; one was excavated at Callander in Scotland in2001 and this had internal partitions and seems, likemany longhouses, to have been designed to housedomestic stock at one end and the household at theother. Houses of similar form are known fromnorthwest France and the Netherlands.

Circular HousesThe rare Mesolithic houses that have been identifiedwere frequently round or elliptical and in AtlanticEurope and parts of the Mediterranean circularhouses were also the more common form. Circularhouses varied in size from small huts used for singlepurposes such as cooking or storage to houses asmuch as 70 feet (22 meters) in diameter that couldaccommodate a large extended family. Most round-houses were of timber, though some had stone walls.It would also have been possible to build houses ofturf, as occurred in historical times, but this wouldhave left no trace.

PIT HOUSES

A few Mesolithic and early Neolithic pits have beenidentified as pit dwellings. In general these took theform of a shallow wide pit of approximately circularshape, often quite irregular, surrounded by walls ofposts or stakes with wattle and daub. In some cases acentral post held up the pitched roof.

Divostin Ib (Serbia) A number of early Starcevohuts here were formed of deep elliptical hollows 12to 16 feet (4 to 5 meters) in diameter, surrounded bywattle-and-daub walls. A central post supported by

stones held up the roof. The huts contained hearths,and in one a niche had been cut into the hut wall.

Howick (Northumberland, England) A largeMesolithic coastal house, apparently occupied for atleast a century around 7800 B.C., was around 20 feet(6 meters) across with a sunken floor. A ring of postsinside the house and a ring of stakes stuck at an anglearound the edge of the pit supported some form ofroof covering, probably of turf or thatch. A numberof hearths and debris from stone tool working werefound inside the house.

TIMBER ROUNDHOUSES

Most roundhouses were built of wood. In some casesroundhouses had walls of timbers placed in a circularslot. More commonly they were built of wattle.Small houses had walls of stake-framed wattle anddaub, forming an upright circular basketlike struc-ture broken by an opening for the doorway, whichwas reinforced by strong timber doorposts and a lin-tel. Larger roundhouses required an additionalframework of an internal ring of posts with a ringbeam to prevent the roof poles sagging. The roofswere of timber and wattle covered with thatch orturf. In some cases, for example, in many Iron AgeBritish houses, two posts outside the door formed aporch, with a separate pitched roof. Many round-houses had a pair of large postholes opposite thedoorway; these held the uprights of a warp-weightedloom placed to give good light for weaving.

Roundhouses in Britain were often surroundedby a small bank and ditch, forming a courtyardaround the house.

STONE ROUNDHOUSES

In some regions, such as upland Britain, round-houses were constructed of stone, usually built up asdrystone walls with an inner and outer face. Many ofthese houses were quite small. Their roofs, likethose of timber roundhouses, were of timber cov-ered with turfs or thatch.

In Bronze Age Scotland houses known as hut cir-cles were constructed with low stone walls built upwith turfs or soil. The roof was the usual timberframework supporting heather or straw thatch; in

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some cases the roof poles rested on the ground.These houses were often a substantial size, some asmuch as 50 feet (15 meters) in diameter. Timberpartitions often divided the outer part of the houseinto bays with timber-planked floors; these might beused for sleeping or working. In some a ring ofinternal posts probably supported an upper floor. Inthe Iron Age some hut circles became more elabo-rate, with features typical of broch architecture suchas an entrance passage and double walls with cells orpassages between them.

ELABORATE TIMBER ROUNDHOUSES

Various types of large timber roundhouses con-structed in Iron Age Scotland also had internal divi-sions. In ring-ditch houses the outer part of theinterior was often dug out slightly and paved withstone; it is thought that this part of the house was abyre for sheltering livestock. The central part of thehouse was raised and may have been used for stor-age. A ring of posts supported an upper flooraccessed by ladder, which provided living quartersfor the family.

Domestic StrongholdsIn Britain during the first millennium defensivestructures were built to house families or small com-munities and protect them against raids by theirneighbors; they were probably also designed toimpress. These were stone-built houses of variousforms, sometimes with a surrounding stone wall, ofwhich the towering brochs were the most elaborate.The majority housed single or extended families;only in Orkney at a late date did they include moresizable communities.

BROCHS

Numerous brochs were constructed in Skye, north-east Scotland, Orkney, and Shetland, and a few else-where in Scotland, mainly in the first century B.C.and the first century A.D. They were round towers,constructed of drystone masonry forming an outerwalled ring, 15 feet (4.5 meters) or more thick, sur-rounding an open interior 30 to 40 feet (9 to 12

meters) in diameter. The outer ring consisted of twowalls, one inside the other, the outer wall taperingmarkedly inward so that the gap between the twowalls narrowed with height. Cross slabs joined thetwo walls at regular intervals upward, giving struc-tural reinforcement and forming the floor of pas-sages. The double-wall construction also providedvaluable insulation. Frequently the lowest part of thewalls was built as a single solid wall, while in othercases (known as ground-galleried brochs) the hol-low-wall construction started at the base. A massiveentrance passage with an enormous lintel led fromthe outside into the broch’s interior. A short waydown the passage was a heavy wooden door thatcould be closed and fastened with substantial woodendrawbars; behind this was a guard chamber built intothe wall. A staircase in the wall often led up to thegalleries, which were probably used for storage.

Timber housing was built in the open interior,sometimes with posts set into the ground. A ledge(scarcement) of stones projecting from or set backinto the inside wall at various levels provided sup-port for the cross timbers, roof beams, and a turf orthatch roof. Brochs on Orkney generally had inter-nal structures built of stone slabs or masonry, andsometimes they formed part of a larger complex,with an adjoining or surrounding walled courtyard.A developed form of roundhouse, found at Bu onMainland, Orkney, and dated around 600 B.C., mayhave been ancestral to the broch; it consisted of asubstantial wall, later thickened by adding an outerskin, pierced by an entrance passage, which sur-rounded an internal space of about 30 feet (9 meters)in diameter divided into chambers by stone parti-tions, which may also have helped support a roof.

It has been suggested that the brochs, which arestrongly similar, were constructed by specialistbroch builders who traveled around accepting com-missions from any household or community thatcould afford to employ them.

Mousa (Shetland) The best-preserved broch, stillstanding to a height of 43 feet, six inches (13.3meters), with an 18-foot (5.5 meter)-thick wallaround an 18-foot (5.5 meter)-wide interior space.Three large cells were built into the solid base of thewall, with cupboards in their sides and windowsthrough into the broch’s interior. A stair ran contin-


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uously from the first gallery through four highergalleries to what is today the top of the walls. Thisbroch was probably exceptional in its height, a fea-ture made possible by its relatively narrow diameter.

AISLED ROUNDHOUSES ANDWHEELHOUSES

Two types of fortified farmhouse were constructed inthe Western Isles of Scotland and on Shetland, Scot-land. The wheelhouse was a round drystone structurewith a series of roof-height radiating piers built outfrom the wall, resembling the spokes of a wheel inplan. These supported the roof and divided the houseinterior into chambers. The center, free of piers, con-tained the hearth, often built of stone and with a stonecooking tank beside it. A stone-lined passage gaveaccess to the interior. The aisled roundhouse was sim-ilar, but the interior was divided by free-standingrather than integral piers; these gave support to theradiating beams on which the thatched or turf-builtroof was constructed. Both were developments fromthe earlier roundhouses, and most date from the lastcenturies B.C. and first two centuries A.D.

Cnip (Isle of Lewis, Scotland) A wheelhouse wasbuilt at Cnip within a coastal sand dune. A passageand a large pit excavated in the dune were lined with

drystone walling. The cells formed by constructingthe pillars of the wheel were roofed with stone cor-belling and covered with turf, and a timber-and-turfroof was erected over the center of the house, whilestone slabs were used to roof the passage, also cov-ered over with turf.

DUNS

In southwestern Scotland, particularly in coastalareas but also in the interior of central Scotland,numerous duns were constructed in the late firstmillennium B.C. These were drystone fortifiedroundhouses of somewhat irregular shape with adefended entrance and guard cell behind. They hadroofs of timber and thatch and were similar tobrochs but on one story only. Frequently they werelocated on hilltops.

COURTYARD HOUSES

In the late second century B.C. courtyard houses wereconstructed in Cornwall. In these a strong stone wallenclosed a paved courtyard with stone-built roomsaround it, some residential, others for keeping ani-mals or for storage. Fogous (underground chambers)were often associated with these houses.

MansionsA number of prehistoric settlements contained ahouse distinguished in some way from the rest, forinstance, by its size, its location in a separate enclo-sure, or the number and variety of ancillary buildingsassociated with it; these are interpreted as the resi-dence of the local leader. Qualitatively differenthouses, however, are rare. Two are known fromBronze Age Sicily, the anaktora at Thapsos and Pan-talica, which had stone foundations, an entrancevestibule, and an extensive suite of rooms; these wereprobably inspired by contact with the Mycenaeans.Similarly, the Greeks and Romans had some influ-ence on the architectural form of the elite residencesthat appeared in some of the French and Iberiantowns in the last centuries B.C. In others, however,elite houses followed native traditions, with largehouses set in a palisaded enclosure, often with a

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4.2 The broch at Mousa on one of the ShetlandIslands, Scotland (Lubbock, John. Prehistoric Times.New York: A. Appleton and Company, 1890)

number of ancillary buildings. For example, severalEarly La Tène sites in Bohemia have court resi-dences, such as the one at Drouzkovice. Here a largesquare area enclosed by a double palisade contained asmithy and a large timber house 21 by 23 feet (6.5 by7 meters) with a stone wall on one side, while a smalladjoining enclosure contained a large sunken-floorancillary building. Recent discoveries suggest thatthe chiefs associated with some hillforts, such asZávist and Heuneberg, may have resided not in thehillfort itself but in a mansion in a settlement outside.

Storage Facilities

CLAY RECEPTACLES

Many houses in Southeast Europe had large built-inclay-lined storage bins. Pottery was also widely usedfor storage, particularly in settlements in damp loca-tions such as lake margins. In the Iron Age amphoraewere used for transporting and storing wine andother liquids such as olive oil and fish sauce.

TIMBER STRUCTURES

Small structures represented by four, six, or ninepostholes are often associated with individual housesor placed elsewhere within settlements in manyparts of Europe. These posts probably supportedtimber platforms with wattle superstructures androofs, which were used as granaries and storagefacilities for hay and other produce. Many timberhouses also had lofts for storage.

PITS

Perhaps the most common and widespread form ofstorage facility was the round pit dug in the groundand capped with clay. Even in cold, wet Britain pitswere used to store grain and other commodities, andexperiments have shown that they work efficientlywith little wastage from mold or other damp-induced conditions.

SOUTERRAINS

Underground passages and chambers were createdin the farmsteads and villages of Scotland, Ireland,Cornwall, and Brittany from the Late Bronze Age to

the early centuries A.D. They were perhaps designedto store foodstuffs that required a low temperature,such as meat, milk, and cheese. Charred grain foundin one at Red Castle in Scotland shows that grainwas also stored there. It is thought that they mayalso have had a religious significance.

The souterrains took various forms. Those ofBrittany were fully subterranean. A shaft was sunkinto the local rock, and a series of side chamberswere excavated from it. Those of Orkney and Shet-land, known also as earth houses, were also entirelyunderground. They consisted of a low undergroundpassage opening into an oval chamber at its far end,accessed via an opening from the floor inside aroundhouse. Sometimes they were cut throughbedrock, but often they were reinforced by wallsbuilt along the sides, while the passage and chamberwere generally roofed with slabs. Sometimes stonepillars reinforced the roof of the chamber.

In Cornwall, where the structures are calledfogous, a trench was dug in the ground and linedwith stone walls over which capstones were fitted.The souterrains on the Scottish mainland, some-times referred to as weems, were similarly con-structed. Like the earth houses of Orkney andShetland, they were accessed from inside the houses.

WellsMost settlements were located near water sources,but some had wells instead. These were deep pitslined with wicker, planks, or hollow tree trunks.The earliest known example, from the LBK settle-ment of Erkelenz-Kückhoven, was around 45 feet(14 meters) deep and was lined with massive oakplanks, notched to slot together. Dendrochronologyshows that it was dug in 5089 B.C., and another inthe same settlement was constructed in 5057 B.C.

SETTLEMENTS

For much of European prehistory and in manyareas the majority of the farming population lived in


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individual farmsteads or small hamlets of a fewnuclear or extended families. In the southeast, set-tlements were more nucleated from the start, andvillages soon became the norm, many of themgrowing to a substantial size. Substantial villageswere less common in other parts of Europe,although by the Late Neolithic there were someconcentrations of people within defended settle-ments. In later times larger settlements appeared inmany regions, but small communities still generallyhoused the bulk of the population. Apart from theAegean and Italy, true towns did not emerge inEurope until the Late Iron Age.

As well as houses for people, farmsteads, hamlets,and villages generally contained accommodation forlivestock, simple enclosures in many cases, though inthe more inclement areas such as central Europe andthe Alps, byres or stalls were often provided to shel-ter them in winter; stalling animals also made it easyto collect their dung for manuring the fields. Settle-ments also generally included provision for storinggrain and other produce, often in separate buildings,pits, or lofts, and some had sheds or barns to storeequipment. Farming settlements included hay andcorn stacks and areas for processing crops; these arearchaeologically elusive, but a possible threshingfloor was identified in the Neolithic Swiss settle-ment of Thayngen and possible corn stacks at Twiskin Switzerland and Bovenkarspel in Holland.

Domestic industries, such as pottery making,weaving, cooking, and making and repairing toolsgenerally took place within the home or in the openair, but in some settlements there were separatebuildings for these activities. Some villages andfarmsteads also saw the practice of specialist indus-tries (for example, Gussage All Saints, where bronzeharness and vehicle fittings were made), althoughmore commonly such production tended to be con-centrated in the major settlements. There was alsospecialist settlements housing the people working inextractive industries such as mining and salt making.

Towns and often hillforts reflected a society inwhich there was a social hierarchy and some divi-sion of labor. These settlements, therefore, hadhouses of different sizes, and sometimes of differentdesigns, belonging to the elite, artisans, and farm-ers, as well as workshops. These settlements mightalso have a shrine. Facilities for storing large quan-

tities of produce and sheltering large numbers oflivestock were also present in many major settle-ments, which were often the place of refuge for thelocal rural population.

Farmsteads and hamlets often had gardens forgrowing food within the settlement and intensivelycultivated fields immediately outside, with grazingand sometimes further fields beyond. Some of thehillforts and oppida also included fields. In nucleatedsettlements, however, the houses were closelypacked, and all the cultivated land lay outside thesettlement.

Since water was a necessity, most settlementswere located within easy reach of a spring, stream,or accessible river, although in some cases otherconsiderations, such as defense, made this impossi-ble, and their inhabitants relied on wells where thesewere possible or rainwater, caught in cisterns, bar-rels, or large jars.

Defense was often important in the siting and lay-out of settlements. Most commonly the defenses tookthe form of ditches and banks, probably topped withfences or hedges, but some settlements had more sub-stantial defenses, such as wooden palisades or walls ofwood and stone. The lie of the land might also beharnessed to protect the settlement. Perhaps the mostextreme example is the promontory fort or cliff castle,a feature of parts of Iron Age Atlantic Europe, wherethe settlement was on a spit of land defended at itsneck by banks and ditches and surrounded on allother sides by steep unclimbable cliffs.

Temporary SettlementsMany inhabitants of prehistoric Europe, such ashunter-gatherers and pastoralists, miners andtraders, led lives that involved seasonal or periodicmovement. Few of their campsites have beenlocated, however, and most are known only fromhearths and scatters of discarded material, withoccasionally traces of a hut or two.

In several periods of European prehistory fewsettlements are known in some areas, and it isthought that the people pursued a mobile way of lifein which they occupied temporary settlements withinsubstantial buildings. This has been suggested, forinstance, for the Beaker and Corded Ware periods

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and for many areas during the Bronze Age, whenburials are far better known than settlements. Whilein some cases this must reflect the reality of the situ-ation, in others it is due to chance in discovery. Forexample, the paucity of settlement evidence ledarchaeologists to believe that mobile pastoralismplayed the major role in the Neolithic British way oflife, but the discovery in recent years of many farm-steads has completely altered the picture.

Mesolithic VillagesWell-preserved remains of hunter-gatherer housesare rare, and rarer still are settlements whose layouthas been preserved and excavated. One exception isthe group of Mesolithic settlements found in theIron Gates Gorge of the Danube, dated to theeighth to sixth millennia B.C., some probably occu-pied for short periods, others permanently inhabitedby communities that relied heavily on fish and riverresources. Of these the best known is Lepenski Vir.Here some 25 trapezoidal houses were arrangedwith their wide ends facing the river. The houseswere frequently reconstructed, but in most phases ofthe occupation they seem to have been divided intotwo groups and there was one larger house. A similardivision into two clusters of houses was found atother settlements such as Vlasac. In Lepenski Virpeople were buried within the houses, whereas atVlasac the graves were arranged around the outsideof the houses.

Small Farming Settlements

OPEN SETTLEMENTS

In many parts of Europe farmsteads, hamlets, andvillages were generally unenclosed settlements oftimber buildings; this has made them harder to dis-cover than settlements defined by banks and ditchesor constructed in stone or those that created tells,all of which have left traces visible without excava-tion. Those that have been found take many differ-ent forms, depending on environmental, economic,and social conditions as well as cultural traditions.

Padnal (Grisons, Switzerland) Located in a moun-tain valley, this settlement was founded around 1700B.C. in a natural hollow that was made more suitableby leveling and terracing the ground. Five or sixhouses with walls of posts and planks and sometimesstone foundations were constructed in a row with agap in the middle. They were all small square or rec-tangular structures, 13 to 16 feet (4 to 5 meters)long, with a hearth. By the 14th century the settle-ment had grown to eight or nine houses arranged inthree rows, still with a central gap between. Theynow all had stone foundations, some had stone-paved floors, and those on the southern side werenow larger, up to 30 feet (9 meters) long, anddivided into two or three rooms. The settlement wasstill occupied in the eighth century, when there wereat least three houses.

Dampierre-sur-le-Doubs (France) A Late BronzeAge valley-bottom village of small rectangular post-built houses, abandoned due to flooding, it was laterreoccupied and new houses constructed. The latersettlement had 28 houses, three of them with woodenfloors, and one larger one with an apsidal end, per-haps the residence of the village leader. The houseswere laid out in groups of two to four, possibly repre-senting the homes of families within an extendedfamily group. Outside the village was a cremationcemetery.

LONGHOUSE SETTLEMENTS

The settlements of LBK, the first farmers in tem-perate Europe, took two forms. In some cases thehouses were grouped in hamlets of six or fewer long-houses; in other cases the longhouses were strungout in a continuous ribbon, each house separatelysited around 150 to 350 feet (50 to 100 meters) fromits nearest neighbor. In some the houses themselvesincluded stalls for the animals, while in others therewere smaller buildings of the same design, whichprobably served as barns or byres, and some settle-ments had a single, much longer roundhouse, up to145 feet (45 meters) long, which was perhaps a com-munity hall or shrine. People were often buriedwithin the settlement, but there were also some sep-arate cemeteries shared by a number of hamlets.Most LBK settlements were unenclosed, but a few


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were surrounded by one or more ditches. Aroundthe houses and within a half-mile (1-kilometer)radius were areas of cultivated ground, probablyprotected from animals by fences, in which the cropsrequired by the household were raised.

In the following period, Danubian II, these long-house settlements became more nucleated and weremore commonly surrounded by a bank and ditch orfence; some were also larger. In addition, in someareas there were sometimes associated ditchedenclosures. Similar settlements continued through-out prehistory and into Roman times and beyond inmany areas of temperate Europe, from Switzerlandto Scandinavia.

Elp (Drenthe, Netherlands) The settlement exca-vated on a sand ridge at Elp was a farmstead occu-pied in the later Bronze Age, with one largelonghouse 80 to 100 feet (25 to 30 meters) long, asmaller house or barn, and two sheds, one large andone small. A number of times during the life of thesettlement a new longhouse and subsidiary build-ings were constructed on an adjacent part of theridge and the old ones abandoned or demolished.The longhouse was divided into two parts, withhuman habitation in one and stalls for around 30head of cattle in the other. The smaller houseaccommodated another 15 or 20 cattle or was alsodivided into separate sections for people and asmaller number of cattle. The larger shed hadsturdy posts supporting a platform and was proba-bly a granary; the smaller shed may also have beenfor storage. A U-shaped enclosure at the end of thehouse perhaps surrounded haystacks to protectthem from the pigs kept in the farmstead. Smallfields must have surrounded the farmstead, fertil-ized with the manure collected from the stalled cat-tle. Those associated with similar settlements weredemarcated by ditches.

Hodde (Jutland, Denmark) A late prehistoric vil-lage was built at Hodde in the first century B.C.within a fence with gateways that gave access to thesurrounding fields. Around 20 small longhousesmade up the settlement, each including stalls for theanimals and with its own barns and other subsidiarybuildings, surrounded by its own fence; at its great-est extent there were 27 houses. In the center of the

settlement was a village green, and in one corner wasa separate enclosure within which were a muchlarger house, belonging to the village chief, andstorage buildings.

CAUSEWAYED ENCLOSURES

Circular or subcircular enclosures were constructedin the sixth to fourth or third millennia in much ofEurope, particularly southern Britain and centralEurope, where they were associated with somegroups of longhouse settlements. These enclosureswere demarcated by one or more banks and ditchesinterrupted by causeways, from which they taketheir name causewayed enclosures. Although some ofthe causeways served as entrances to the enclosure,others resulted from the method of construction, inwhich ditch segments were separately excavated,perhaps by different groups of people. The enclo-sures seem to have had many different functions.Some may have been the venue for communal cere-monial or social activities. Others, it has been sug-gested, may have served as corrals periodically usedto keep together a large number of animals. A num-ber of causewayed enclosures were defended settle-ments: Several British examples of this sort sufferedattacks.

In eastern central Europe more regular ditchedenclosures known as roundels are also associatedwith longhouse settlements; these were circular,with one or several ditches and several palisaderings, but apparently no banks, interrupted by fourentrances. None of these seem to have been occu-pied by houses, and a community function seemsmost probable.

In southern France fifth- and fourth-millenniumenclosures of various sizes, defined by interruptedditches and stretches of palisade, including largeones such as that at Saint-Michel-du-Touch, con-tained pits and hollows filled with burnt stones;these may also have been used for communal activi-ties rather than for settlement.

Stepleton Enclosure (Dorset, England) One ofthree causewayed enclosures on Hambledon Hill,the Stepleton enclosure was about 2.5 acres (1hectare) in extent. In its first phase of use it had oneditch and a bank enclosed within a timber rampart.

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Pits, domestic debris, and some fragmentary tracesof structures inside it suggest that people lived here;their wasteful use of food might imply that theywere an elite group. A stillborn baby was buried inthe side of the ditch. Later, a more massive ditch wasdug, backed by a box rampart built of oak timbers,and the enclosure was incorporated within a ditchand rampart system enclosing the whole hill; thesedefenses were later strengthened. Despite this, thesettlement was attacked and burnt to the ground;one man fleeing with a child was shot in the backwith an arrow, and others also died.

ENCLOSED VILLAGES

Settlements of various sizes were constructed inItaly from the seventh millennium onward, andthese are particularly well known in the Tavoliere inthe south, where the villages were made up of rec-tangular houses within small round ditched enclo-sures. Cobbled areas within these villages wereprobably used for various activities such as foodpreparation. The settlement was defended by one orseveral ditches, sometimes as many as eight; some-times bodies were buried in these ditches.

Ditched settlements have also been found in partsof the Mediterranean and western Europe, some con-taining square or rectangular houses, others housesthat were round or oval. Only in waterlogged settingshave these yielded good structural information. Else-where the evidence is often difficult to interpret; forexample, the Neolithic causewayed enclosure ofSaint-Michel-du-Touch in southern France con-tained hundreds of large hollows filled with burntstones. Some scholars see these as the foundations ofhuts in a populous village, while for others, more con-vincingly, these were cooking places, the result offeasting when the scattered inhabitants of a large areacame together to celebrate.

Passo di Corvo A large Early Neolithic settle-ment on the Tavoliere, Passo de Corvo was an irreg-ular 70-acre (28-hectare) enclosure bounded by acontinuous ditch; on one side there was a parallelditch and in the adjacent stretch a third. Within thiswere around 90 horseshoe-shaped ditched hut com-pounds. Attached to the enclosure was another ditchenclosing a further 100 acres (40 hectares).

ROUNDHOUSE FARMS AND HAMLETS

Small enclosed settlements of roundhouses—farm-steads, hamlets, and villages—were built in variousparts of Atlantic Europe and the Mediterranean. Insome, small roundhouses were grouped together tomake up the living and working quarters of individ-ual families. In others the household was accommo-dated in a single large roundhouse where theyperformed their daily activities together.

In second millennium southern Italy and theAeolian Islands some settlements of small round-houses were located in defensible situations such aspromontories. The houses were grouped closetogether, making it necessary to pen the domesticanimals outside the settlement.

In many settlements in Bronze and Iron AgeBritain, a bank and ditch, fence, or wall enclosedgroups of small roundhouses and an area of openground in which the animals might be penned atnight. Each house cluster contained a large residen-tial roundhouse and a group of others, of the samesize or smaller, which were used for other activitiessuch as cooking, storage, and weaving. In addition tothe huts there were small four-post structures, prob-ably granaries, drying racks, and other agriculturalstructures. Farmsteads like this could exist singly orbe grouped into hamlets of three or four householdsor larger villages. Often Iron Age farmsteads weresurrounded by banjo-shaped banked and ditchedenclosures. These probably had a fence or hedge onthe top of the bank, serving to keep livestock in orout as required but not providing serious defense. Afew similar farmsteads have been found that wereunenclosed; given the difficulty of discovering them,these may well have been common. In AtlanticBritain a variety of forms of enclosed farmstead andvillage were constructed: For instance, in Cornwallthese were small villages of courtyard houses withfogous, garden plots attached to the houses, andsmall fields around them.

Black Patch (Sussex, England) A Late Bronze Agesettlement with; four house platforms of which onewas excavated, this comprised a large domesticroundhouse thought to have been used by the malesof the household for craft activities and also used forstoring the farmstead’s grain in pits, flanked by sev-


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eral smaller roundhouses where the women livedand performed their daily tasks such as cooking andweaving. Other small houses may have been used forstalling animals. Two ponds provided the waterneeded by the people and animals of the farm. Thesettlement was surrounded by wattle fencing, andbeyond this were fields and pastures.

Industrial SettlementsRaw materials such as stone, flint, and metal oreswere often mined by groups of people who visitedthe source area periodically, camping there for sometime before returning to their homes elsewhere. Forexample, in the TRB period the people who minedflint at Krzemionki Opotowskie in Poland camefrom the settlement at Cmielów in the nearby Kami-

enna valley while those who mined copper atCwmystwyth in Wales probably lived near the coastat the mouth of the Ystwyth, some 20 miles (30 kilo-meters) away. In some cases, however, and increas-ingly from the Bronze Age, permanent settlementsdeveloped in these areas, inhabited by people whospecialized in mineral extraction. These took variousforms, depending on local conditions, but somebecame extremely wealthy, with populations in thehundreds.

Dürrnberg bei Hallein (Salzburg, Austria) Saltextraction at Dürrnberg began around 600 B.C., andby around 400 the Dürrnberg mines had eclipsedthe earlier mining complex at nearby Hallstatt, lessaccessibly located. In the sixth century the minerslived on hillslopes near to the mines. Settlementexpanded over a wider area in the fifth century, with

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4.3 A reconstruction of a small Iron Age roundhouse settlement, c. 400–c. 150 B.C., based on the settle-ment excavated at Dawley in London, England (TopFoto.co.uk., (c) Museum of London/HIP, Photogra-pher: Derek Lucas)

a concentration on the slopes of Mosterstein ofhouses, metal foundries, and workshops where pot-tery was made and glass worked. Another villagewas situated in the Ramsautal valley, with pottery,leather, bronze, and iron workshops. Above this ona high spur of the Ramsaukopf surrounded byprecipices a hillfort was built, thought to have beenthe residence of the local chief. The neck of thespur, the only access route, was defended by massivewalls of drystone construction. Each communityworking the Dürrnberg mines had its own ceme-tery, located near their houses but on high groundunsuitable for settlement. The grave goods fromthese cemeteries, both imports and local craft prod-ucts, reflect the wealth that trade in salt brought toDürrnberg.

Wetland SettlementsPreservation by waterlogging means that lakesideand other wetland settlements have yielded far moredetailed evidence of house construction, settlementorganization, and domestic life than most otherkinds of settlement.

LAKE VILLAGES

In lakeside locations in northern Italy, France, andthe Alps, settlements were built on damp lake mar-gins on platforms supported by piles, which liftedthe settlement above the level at which there wasdanger from flooding. A few Bronze Age lake settle-ments were built over open water. Many villageswere small, with around eight or 10 houses; someearly lakeside settlements were hamlets of three orfour houses or farmsteads, while others, particularlyin later periods, had considerably more houses.Larger settlements were arranged as parallel rows ofhouses separated by paths, to make best use of therestricted space. Various types of houses were built,including square or rectangular huts and log cabins.Others were timber-framed longhouses with clayfloors and wattle partitions, some containing stallsfor animals, while in other cases there were separatebyres in which the animals spent the winter, beingstall-fed on leaves and other plant material. Raisedgranaries constructed as platforms supported by

posts were commonly used for storage, to keepfoodstuffs well above any dampness, but housesmight also have storage jars. In later settlementsthere were also craft workshops. Corduroy pathwaysof timber connected the houses within the settle-ment, which was enclosed within a wooden palisade.Some villages had more substantial defenses, partic-ularly at their entrances. In many cases in whichdendrochronology has been used to study the his-tory of individual houses, it seems that the lakedwellers occupied a settlement for only a shortperiod, often no more than 20 years and rarely morethan 70, but that they then constructed a new settle-ment nearby, occupying the general area often forthousands of years.

Niederwil (Lake Bodensee, Switzerland) A Pfynvillage in which the original houses were small huts;later in its 50-year existence, longhouses with inter-nal partitions were also built here. The houses werearranged in terraced rows. The village probablyhoused around 100 to 150 people, or fewer if thehouses were not all occupied at the same time. Astrong palisade surrounded the settlement, and therewas also an area where sheep and goats were stalled.

Twann (Lake Bienne, Switzerland) This lake vil-lage was occupied periodically throughout theNeolithic period, from Cortaillod to Horgen; on 21occasions rising lake levels forced the villagers tomove elsewhere, but the site was reoccupied whenlake levels fell again. The settlement has yieldedmany artifacts made of organic materials, includingdugout canoes and even a preserved loaf of bread.

Thayngen Weier (Lake Bodensee, Switzerland)This Pfyn hamlet of eight or 10 single-roomedhouses was occupied sporadically for around twocenturies, growing eventually to around 30 houses.Part of the settlement was given over to crop pro-cessing, with a threshing floor. There were alsobarns for storing fodder and cowsheds.

Hauterive-Champréveyres (Lake Neuchâtel, Swit-zerland) Five settlements were found in this locality,the oldest a Palaeolithic campsite of the Magdalenianperiod. The site was reoccupied in the Neolithic


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period and again in Hallstatt times. Dendrochronol-ogy has provided details of the life of one Neolithicsettlement here: The first house was built with tim-bers felled in spring 3810 B.C., and in the same yearfive others were constructed. Nine years later,another house was added, and an oak fence was builtaround the settlement, which also included othersmall buildings. Repairs were periodically carried outon the houses, but around 3793 B.C. the hamlet wasabandoned.

Charavines-les-Baigneurs (Lake Paladru, France)Around 2750–2730 B.C. people constructed two rec-tangular houses and subsidiary buildings of pine woodat Charavines and added five more over the next fouryears. One house was rebuilt five years later, and allsaw repairs and maintenance over the next few years,but around 22 years after the hamlet was founded, itsinhabitants abandoned it. Thirty-six years later, peo-ple returned here and built another farming settle-

ment, using a variety of different types of timber, butafter 21 years this was flooded by rising lake levels andthe people moved away. The inhabitants of this ham-let grew wheat, barley, and flax, but also collected wildfruit, nuts and berries, and they made textiles andrope from wool and flax.

TERRAMARE

During the second millennium B.C. farmers spreadinto the Po plain, where flooding was common. Inmany cases, therefore, their settlements, known asterramare, were built on artificial mounds, raised 10to 13 feet (3 to 4 meters) above the surface of theplain. The mounds were constructed of clay, domes-tic rubbish, branches, and other organic material,sometimes packed into wicker baskets. Piles driveninto the marshy ground held these in place, andsome terramare had substantial timber revetments.Settlements varied considerably in size and were

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4.4 A 19th-century reconstruction of one of the Bronze Age Swiss lake villages (Figuier, Louis. PrimitiveMan. London: Chatto and Windus, 1876)

generally of rectangular post-built houses, thoughlog cabins, houses built on sleeper beams, androundhouses are also known. Some terramare weresurrounded by a moat or ditches, for drainage andperhaps defense.

TERPEN AND WIERDEN

In the easily flooded salt marshes that developedduring the Iron Age along the North Sea coast, arti-ficial mounds of clay, animal dung, and domesticrefuse up to 20 feet (6 meters) high were raised. Onthese mounds, known as terpen in the Netherlandsand Wierden or Wurten in Germany, settlementsranging from farmsteads and hamlets of two or threelonghouses to sizable villages were constructed. Thelonghouses included stall provision for the cattle,whose dung was collected for use as manure. A sup-ply of freshwater for drinking was assured by usingwells and cisterns to catch and store rain. The lim-ited arable land in the vicinity of these settlementswas cultivated to grow cereals and legumes, but cat-tle were the main focus of the economy, pastured onthe marshes in summer and stall-fed on hay fromthese meadows in the winter; other domestic ani-mals and fish also contributed to the food supply.

Ezinge (Friesland, Netherlands) A timber-fencedfarmstead was established on a terp at Ezinge around500 B.C., consisting of two longhouses divided intodomestic accommodation at one end and a byre atthe other, along with a solidly built large rectangularbuilding with nine rows of five posts supporting aplatform, probably a granary. The settlement grewlarger in later centuries, with five to 10 longhousesarranged radially, with the domestic accommodationfacing the center of the settlement, where there wasa pond, and the byre ends opening onto a track run-ning around the outside of the houses. Around 400A.D. the settlement was destroyed by fire.

Feddersen Wierde (Germany) This began as afarmstead in the first century B.C.; several otherswere added, each on their own mound, but in thefirst century A.D. these were combined into a singlelarge terp on which a village of around 30 long-houses was built. Around A.D. 450 flooding broughtabout its abandonment. The village had a larger

aisled house set apart within a palisade and ditch,which may have been the residence of the villagechief. Within this compound were workshops wherecraftsmen made objects of leather, wood, bone andantler, iron, and bronze. Material from the greathouse included Roman imports. Cattle were stalledin the compound, and there were also granaries,suggesting that the chief who lived here controlledlocal production. Many of the individual longhouseshad nine-post granaries or sheds, and the village alsohad a large hall for community use.

CRANNOGS

Numerous Scottish and Irish lakes, and a few else-where in Britain, contain crannogs, natural islandsbuilt up with additional material or wholly artificialislands. These were created from the Neolithicperiod onward, though most were constructed in theIron Age. Crannogs were largely built as defendedsettlements, but other methods of protecting settle-ments, such as timber palisades, would have beenless labor intensive, suggesting that the constructionof a crannog also conferred prestige. Many crannogswere the base for a single farmhouse, though someheld villages, while others were merely places forfishing or catching waterfowl, or corrals to protectdomestic stock from wild animals. Some werelocated near the shore, others well out into the lake.Access to some was via a wooden causeway, some-times with a section that could be withdrawn like adrawbridge; others could be reached only by boat.

Crannogs were built up of every kind of wood,from piles driven into the lake bed as the foundationand edging for artificial islands, to waste timber,brushwood, and discarded wooden artifacts used asthe base for a wooden platform. Stones and bouldersand layers of peat and clay or marl might also bedumped into the lake as the base on which the tim-ber island was constructed.

Milton Loch (Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland)A crannog on Milton Loch, occupied around700–300 B.C., had a single large roundhouse 42 feet(12.8 meters) in diameter, divided into rooms withinternal partitions. A wooden walkway ran aroundthe outside of the house. Linked to the mainland bya wooden causeway, the crannog also had a small


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harbor inside two extended arms of the crannogplatform that formed jetties. At least two othercrannogs were also constructed near the edge of thisloch (lake).

Glastonbury (Somerset, England) This IronAge village was constructed on an artificial islandof clay mounds and timber in what was then a lakebut is now land. The settlement began around 150B.C. with a few roundhouses and sheds set in circu-lar enclosures. Over time new houses were built,and a palisade was constructed around the crannog,with a landing stage. At its height the settlementhoused around 200 people but later declined insize. The village was composed of large round-houses with smaller ancillary buildings in whichdomestic and industrial activities took place,including cooking, spinning and weaving, metal-working, pottery making, woodworking, and bas-ket making. One larger house may have housed thevillage chief. Large numbers of sheep were grazedin the nearby sedge wasteland in summer and weredriven onto the surrounding hills in winter whenthe land around the village was waterlogged; themaking of woollen textiles was probably an impor-tant local industry. The villagers cultivated fieldson the adjacent dry land, caught fish from the lake,and killed wildfowl with clay slingstones. Severallog boats and a number of lathe-turned vessels andwheel naves were among the wooden objectsrecovered from the village.

Forts, Towers, and Fortified FarmsIn the Atlantic region, Iberia, and some islands of thewestern Mediterranean, stone-walled structures werebuilt at various times during the fourth to first mil-lennia. Some were intended to house communitiesand protect them against raids by their neighbors,others appear not to have been defensive, but inmany cases the stone structures were also designed toimpress. In some regions settlements were defendedby stone ramparts or multiple banks and ditches. Inothers the defenses included towers, which may havebeen used as a place of refuge for the inhabitants offarms scattered over the surrounding countryside, oras a place of residence or of defended storage.

CHALCOLITHIC IBERIA

A few sites surrounded by massive walls appeared inthe late fourth millennium in the Tagus estuary insouthern Portugal and Almeria in southeast Spain. Thewalls, which often had bastions, were remarkably thick.Little evidence suggests warlike activity at the time,and it is likely that the walls were built more for show,to gain local prestige, than for defense. Beside thesettlements were megalithic tombs. These sites contin-ued in use into the late third millennium, perhaps asthe home of the evolving local elite whose rich burialswere still to be found in the local megalithic tombs.Housing within these fortifications is poorly known.

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4.5 A section through a crannog in Ardakillin Lough, Roscommon, Ireland, showing how it was constructedof wooden posts driven into the lake bed, holding in place layers of stone and earth (Lubbock, John. PrehistoricTimes. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1890)

Zambujal (Portugal) Located on a peninsula,Zambujal was surrounded by a circular wall up to 13feet (4 meters) thick, with a single entrance, and out-side this two further arcs of walling, all with bas-tions. A rock-cut ditch 13 feet (4 meters) wide laybetween the inner and middle walls. The walls werefrequently modified and added to. A cemetery ofmegalithic tombs lay outside its walls.

Los Millares (Almeria, Spain) Los Millares wasconstructed on a rocky promontory that was encir-cled by three massive walls. Inside was a smallerwalled area. In its first stage the entrance to the set-tlement was through a gap in the outer wall, but thiswas embellished through time, and in its final stagewas an elaborate gateway with barbicans projectingmore that 38 feet (12 meters). A number of circularbastions lay along the outer face of the wall. Smallerwalled enclosures lay outside, along with a cemeteryof 80 passage graves.

NURAGHI, TORRE, AND TALAYOTS

Stone tower houses were built in the Mediterraneanislands during the second millennium; these areknown as nuraghi in Sardinia, torre in Corsica, andtalayots in the Balearics. They were built with a dou-ble wall enclosing stairs and passages that gave accessto chambers on two or three floors in the tower’sinterior. The top of the tower was closed with a cor-belled vault. Early towers stood alone and were prob-ably the home of small groups such as singleextended families, but they might also act as places ofrefuge for a wider community during armed raids.However, in the 12th century B.C. stone bastions orlobe-shaped extensions were added to the exterior atground level. These formed a fortified village hous-ing the entire local population, giving them protec-tion against intercommunity raids. Alternatively, avillage of stone houses might be constructed aroundthe base of the tower. Increasingly, the tower itselfcame to be the residence of the community’s chief.

MOTILLAS AND MORRAS

In the Early Bronze Age, around 2200–1500 B.C.,monumental stone towers known as motillas or mor-ras were constructed in southeast Spain, surrounded

by several circular masonry defensive walls. Thesewere locally spaced at regular intervals of around 10miles (15 kilometers) or less and provided the focusfor settlement in the meseta plains, an area where thelimited availability of drinking water was a crucialdeterminant of settlement location. These towersresembled the nuraghi and other towers of the west-ern Mediterranean islands in form and in the associ-ated way of life. The settlement around the towermight reach up to 7.5 acres (3 hectares) in extent.

These towers had a square or rectangular basewith walls three feet to four feet, six inches (1 to 1.4meters) thick and of varying heights, sometimesmore than 20 feet (6 meters). External walls wereadded through time. The area inside these walls wasdivided by partitions of wood, stone, and mud intoseparate areas used for industrial activities and forlarge-scale storage, for instance, of grain, while theinhabitants of the complex lived in the houses out-side the walls. In contrast, the contemporary cul-tures of the uplands had large complex stone-builtsettlements, but no evidence of central storage.

BROCHS

In the later first millennium the tower houses knownas brochs were erected in parts of Scotland. While inmost of the region these were elaborate farmsteads,in Orkney they became the focus of larger settle-ments. It is thought that these Orcadian brochs werethe residence of the local leader, while the surround-ing houses were the homes of his followers.

Gurness (Mainland, Orkney) A ground-galleriedbroch here was surrounded by a courtyard and amassive enclosure wall. Between the wall and thebroch a complex of closely packed semi-detachedstone houses grew up, eventually accommodating 30or 40 families. The settlement was in use for aroundthree centuries. In the broch interior stone had beenused to construct partitions, tanks, and a hearth.

Jarlshof (Shetland) A long-lived prehistoricfarmstead was founded here in the Neolithicperiod, favorably located by a natural harbor, fresh-water, arable land, and pasture. In the later IronAge a broch was constructed here, half of it nowremoved by coastal erosion. The entrance lay in


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the now vanished part, while on either side of theinterior space there was a cell built into the wall atground level. In the center of the broch interior awell 13 feet (4 meters) deep had been cut into thebedrock. A courtyard surrounded by a wall stillstanding to 10 feet (3 meters) high had been con-structed outside adjoining the broch; in this anaisled roundhouse was later built. At a later datethis was abandoned and a wheelhouse was partiallybuilt over it, along with at least one other wheel-house in the courtyard and another inside thebroch. Settlement in this favored spot continuedinto Viking and later times.

FORTS AND BLOCKHOUSES

A number of fortified farmsteads were built onpromontories on Shetland in the later first millen-nium B.C. These consisted of a walled enclosurewith farm buildings probably built as lean-towooden structures around the inside of the wall.Some had a blockhouse just inside the entrance inthe wall; these were substantially built stone struc-tures, containing small chambers, and sometimeswith an attached wooden structure at the rear. Theycreated a monumental gateway to the enclosure andmight have been the residence of the owner of thecomplex who, by analogy with similar structures inIreland in historical times, may have been the localchief, a view reinforced by a number of cases, such asat Clickhimin, where the blockhouse was laterreplaced or superseded by a broch.

D-SHAPED FORTIFICATIONS

In the second and first centuries B.C. a number of D-shaped fortifications (semibrochs) were built in Skyeand the adjacent Scottish mainland, formed of asemicircular wall or hollow double wall with thestraight side of the D along a cliff or precipice edge.Like brochs, these fortifications were enteredthrough a strongly built passage containing a stoutdoor fastened when closed with substantial woodenbars.

STONE FORTS

In western Ireland small communities occupiedhomesteads with multiple stone defensive walls

known as stone forts; some date to the first millen-nium A.D., others go back to the Late Bronze Age.Some were built on cliff edges, others inland. Themassive inner wall, in some cases as much as 18 feet(5.5 meters) high, surrounded the settlement of hutsin an unbroken ring with staircases enabling peopleto climb over.

Dun Aonghasa (Aran Island, Ireland) Occupiedfrom the late second millennium B.C. into the firstmillennium A.D., this was a small settlement on theedge of a sheer cliff, enclosed by a semicircular stonewall and later expanded with the addition of a largersubrectangular outer wall beyond which an area ofchevaux-de-frise had been constructed. Another wallenclosed an area of land beyond.

CLIFF CASTLES AND PROMONTORYFORTS

Cliff castles and promontory forts were a feature offirst-millennium Brittany, Ireland, and westernBritain, and are mentioned as places of refuge byCaesar when he was campaigning in Gaul. Head-lands with steep cliffs projecting into the sea werefortified by digging one or several sets of banks andditches across their landward end. Some were per-manently occupied, others probably used only intimes of need. They may also have served a religiouspurpose; classical authors mentioned that suchplaces were sacred to the gods. On Shetland somecliff castles had a broch built inside.

ROUNDS, RATHS, AND DUNENCLOSURES

From the late second millennium into the Romanperiod, the inhabitants of parts of western Britainwere densely settled in defended farmsteads, knownas rounds in southwest England and as raths inWales. These were settlements of a few roundhousesand storage structures built within a substantial dry-stone or bank-and-ditch enclosure with a stonerevetment. In western Scotland similar drystonemasonry enclosures were constructed, known as dunenclosures. Contemporary settlements in westernBrittany were similar: farmsteads defended by abank and sometimes a ditch.

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PASTORAL ENCLOSURES

In southern upland sites in France the late fourthand third millennia saw the construction at sitessuch as Boussargues and Lébous of polygonal walledenclosures of drystone masonry. Their corners wereformed by a series of round or apsidal buildings withcorbelled roofs, opening into the interior. Insidethese were hearths and pottery vessels; they wereprobably houses, occupied by pastoralists whopenned their animals in the center of the enclosedspace. Unenclosed settlements and cave sites in thesame area were probably also occupied during thesummer months by pastoralists.

TellsThe early settlements in the Balkans and Greecewere small villages of around 10 to 20 houses,though they grew in size as time went on, frequentlyforming tells, though these were absent in someareas. In the Balkans some villages contained asmany as 60 houses. In Greece, although the housescontained hearths, outside ovens in the settlementseem to imply that the inhabitants of the villagecooked and ate together; in Balkan villages the ovenswere generally inside the houses. Some villages alsoincluded a larger house, whose purpose is uncertain;it might have been a communal hall or perhaps areligious structure. Burials were interred in variousplaces: under the houses, around their outside, or atthe edge of the settlement.

In tell villages, known as far north as Hungary,the houses were placed close together, and in somethey were arranged in rows. As the tell rose, thehouses often became more tightly packed. By themid-fifth millennium, some of the Balkan villageshad achieved a considerable size and were oftenplanned, with the houses arranged in rows or con-centric circles or laid out in blocks. The buildingsincluded both residential houses and ones used forstorage and other purposes, including as workshopsfor people who by this time may have been specialistartisans. Some houses were larger than the rest;these were either for community use or were theresidences of an emerging elite. Villages often alsohad a house that is thought, on the basis of its con-

tents, to have been a shrine; many figurines werefound in them. The village was generally welldefended, both in its location and by building a ditchand palisade or a stone wall around it, broken bygates at the cardinal points.

By the late fourth and third millennia the needor desire for protection grew, with settlementsbeing sited in defensible locations such as promon-tories and hills, the defenses becoming more sub-stantial, and many of the earlier tell settlementsbeing abandoned, probably at least in part due tosteppe incursions. While some settlements weresmaller and more dispersed, others were very largeand were the home of the regional population, per-haps numbering several thousand. Tell settlementscontinued in lowland and upland sites well into theBronze Age.

Nea Nikomedeia (Greece) Nea Nikomedeia wasa village of rectangular houses with floors of mudover reeds, timber walls plastered with reeds andmud, and reed roofs. Clay ovens were placed outsidethe houses as were rubbish pits, while the housescontained clay-lined basins. One larger house withsix others around it may have been a shrine: It con-tained figurines instead of domestic debris. The set-tlement was occupied for around 2,000 years, beingabandoned around 5000 B.C.

Karanovo (Bulgaria) This village was occupiedalmost continuously for more than 2,500 years, fromthe sixth millennium onward, creating a lofty tell 39feet (12 meters) high and around 10 acres (4hectares) in extent. In the Early Neolithic it was avillage of around 15 to 60 houses, most with one ortwo rooms, laid out in rows. Several houses withthree rooms were separated from the rest of the set-tlement by a fence. In the fifth millennium Kara-novo had about 50 houses, extending right to theedge of the tell; some were now larger than before,in some cases with ditches around them.

Dimini (Thessaly, Greece) This settlement wasfounded in the fifth millennium. A large three-roomed building (megaron) was constructed in anelevated position in the center of the village, sur-rounded by a large courtyard and a stone wall. Otherconcentric walls and cross walls created several other


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courtyard areas, each containing a large house, areasfor preparing food and craft activity, storage facili-ties, and other buildings. The remains from some ofthe houses suggests that several households madespondylus objects on a scale beyond their immediateneeds.

Jaszdozsa-Kapolnahalom (Hungary) This 20-feet (6-meter)-high tell was defensively located ina river meander. A rampart and ditch surrounded alarge area, with ground between it and the base ofthe tell; in one part of this area were storage pitsand in the other houses. An internal rampart andditch encircled the tell, on which houses were laidout in parallel rows with alleys between. Thesehouses were rectangular, of log-cabin construc-tion, with hearths and ovens inside. During theperiod of its occupation in the earlier second mil-lennium, the settlement rose 8 feet (2.4 meters) inheight.

Hillforts and FortifiedVillagesFortified settlements situated in defensible loca-tions such as promontories and plateaus wereappearing in Southeast Europe by the fourth mil-lennium, and these became more widespread inlater times. While some were small, others werelarge nucleated settlements, which seem to havehoused the majority of the population of an area. Inthe late second millennium hillforts also began toappear over a wide area: strongly fortified hilltop orhillside fortified sites that often served mainly asplaces of refuge rather than permanent settlements,though the latter are also known, particularly in theIron Age. Some lowland fortified sites also served astemporary refuges rather than being permanentlyoccupied. Many sites took advantage of naturallydefended locations, such as promontories, steephills, or islands; these were enhanced by defensivewalls, palisades, banks, and ditches, and theirentrances were often strongly protected by gate-ways and defensive works. Many types of fortifica-tion developed, using timber, soil, and stone in avariety of ways.

FORTIFIED VILLAGES

By the Late Bronze Age fortified villages were wide-spread across Europe. Those that were not situatedto take advantage of defensible locations were heav-ily fortified with strong palisades or ramparts ofwood, stone, and earth. These settlements containedevidence of industrial activity, particularly metal-working, and often they seem to have been produc-ing quantities of goods in excess of the settlement’srequirements. A number, including Barca andSpissky Stvrtok, contained hoards of gold work, buttheir layout and domestic architecture give littleindication of social hierarchy; such distinctionstended to be reserved for expression mainly infunerary practices and grave goods.

Barca (Slovakia) A small Otomani settlement ofclosely packed rectangular houses was located on ahigh promontory overlooking the confluence of tworivers, which bounded it on two sides. The othertwo sides of the settlement were protected by a wideditch and a substantial bank topped by a palisade.

Wittnauer Horn (Argau, Germany) This LateBronze Age settlement of 26 houses was situated ona long, narrow spur. Most of the houses were builtalong the three sides of the spur, while two were inthe center. A massive rampart 33 feet (10 meters)high defended the narrow neck of land giving accessto the settlement.

Biskupin (Poland) This large village was occupiedfor about 300 years from around 730 B.C. Entirelyoccupying a peninsula in a lake, it was surrounded onthree sides by water and on the fourth by boggyground, which also underlay the settlement. Birchand alder branches and other wood, sand, clay, andstones were used to form a platform upon which thesettlement was constructed. A timber bridge linked itto the firmer ground beyond. It was further defendedby a massive timber rampart with a tower guardingits gateway, and a substantial breakwater of oak andpine stakes set at 45 degrees around the outside pro-tected the settlement from erosion by the lakewaters. Inside, the village was laid out as terracedrows of log cabins with shared roofs. Some housescontained industrial waste and were apparently the

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homes and workshops of specialist artisans makingobjects of bronze, leather, and bone. The settlementcontained more than 100 houses and would havehoused a population of around 700 to 1,000 people.Between the rows of houses and around the entiresettlement between the houses and the stockade rancorduroy causeways built of logs. The settlement wasclearly designed and built as a single operation; cal-culations show that it required the timber of around100,000 trees and around 900,000 man-hours’ workto complete; depending on the size of the workforceit could have been built in one or two years.

Spissky Stvrtok (Slovakia) This was a second-mil-lennium fortified village of 26 two-roomed houses,the larger, more substantial ones being arranged ona separately fortified central acropolis around anarea paved with stones. Hoards of gold work weredeposited beneath the floors of some of thesehouses. A stone-faced rampart and ditch lined withstone defended the settlement, with towers guardingthe gateway.

Camp Durand (Vendée, France) This was aBronze Age village of several hundred inhabitants,with craft areas and stock enclosures as well ashouses, within substantial drystone ramparts withgate towers.

CASTROS

Throughout the first millennium B.C. and into theearly centuries A.D., defended settlements knownas castros were constructed in large numbers innorthwestern Iberia, particularly in Galicia. Thesewere strategically located on high ground and hadmassive stone walls up to 20 feet (6 meters) thicksurrounding the settlement. Some were furtherfortified with chevaux-de-frise. These castros variedin size, from small settlements to large villages,generally of roundhouses built of stone with strawroofs. The villages also included stone subter-ranean saunas, perhaps intended for religious ormedicinal purposes. Castros were also located inhilly areas farther inland, where they were associ-ated with cremation cemeteries. In the valleys ofthe middle Douro there were villages of round-houses that sometimes formed tells. Under Roman

influence from the late second century B.C. somecastros became more urban in character, with regu-lar planned streets.

Citania de Sanfins (Pacos de Ferreira, Portugal)A developed castro of the early Roman period inIberia, more than 37 acres (15 hectares) in extentand housing perhaps as many as 3,000 people, thesettlement was divided into regular blocks, likeRoman insulae, each subdivided into plots contain-ing a group of four or five roundhouses, probablythe home of an extended family.

HILLFORTS

Fortified sites were built in hilltop locations fromthe late second millennium and became a commonfeature of most of Europe during the first millen-nium, although their use was not continuous or con-temporary in all areas. Some were defended villages,but in many cases they were fortified areas withinwhich only a part was given over to workshops andhouses, probably those of the local chief and hisentourage. Hillforts offered a place of refuge to thedispersed rural population and a place of safety inwhich the grain produced by the surrounding farmscould be stored; pits and granaries were often pre-sent in large numbers. Some hillforts also had provi-sion for corralling many livestock. The defenseswere generally formed of banks and ditches and tim-ber-framed ramparts.

The Breiddin (Powys, Wales) A 75-acre (30-hectare) hilltop site occupied from the Early BronzeAge was fortified in the early first millennium. Asubstantial rampart of earth and stone reinforcedwith timber was constructed, within which therewere houses, a furnace, and four-post granaries. Asquare pond in the center of the hillfort provided awater supply for those living or taking refuge in thehillfort.

The Heuneberg (Baden-Württemberg, Ger-many) A hillfort enclosing around 7.4 acres (3hectares) on the summit of a hill overlooking theDanube, the Heuneberg was occupied on and offfrom the Middle Bronze Age to around 500 B.C.,including the period in the sixth century B.C. when


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Greek traders were active in the area. The localchief benefited from the trade, and this is reflectedin the imported pottery found in the hillfort. Atimber-framed box-rampart surrounded the hill-top, except in one phase during the period ofGreek trading contact when part of the rampartwas replaced by a mud brick wall with bastions, animpractical Mediterranean novelty. Some build-ings had floors paved with clay bricks and werepossibly the houses of the elite. A house built inthe large settlement of Talhau below the hillfort,which has a number of rooms, may also havebelonged to the local chief. In the hillfort some ofthe houses were timber framed, while others wereconstructed on sleeper beams. There were alsogranaries, workshops for making glass, bone,bronze, and iron objects, textiles, and pottery, andfurnaces for smelting iron. Larger barrows in theland around the hillfort, including the hugeHohmichele barrow, housed a number of richlyfurnished burials.

Danebury (Dorset, England) This 13-acre (1.5-hectare) hillfort was located on the summit of a lowhill, and was occupied from around 1000 B.C. to A.D.100. Within the hillfort there were areas of housing,accommodating around 300 to 350 people at itsmaximum extent, and workshops where weaving andironworking took place. The greater part of theinterior, however, was given over to storage pits andfour-post granaries, thought to have provideddefended storage for the crops of the inhabitants ofthe 20 or more farming settlements in the river val-ley below. The hillfort was surrounded by a massiveearthen rampart and ditch and had two gateways;the southeastern one was greatly elaborated in thelater phase of occupation here, after 500 B.C. In thesame period an outer rampart was added, enclosingan additional area that probably provided a corralfor the livestock of the local farms in time of trouble.

VITRIFIED FORTS

Some Scottish hillforts of the last centuries B.C.were defended by stone ramparts reinforced withtimber. Many of these were subjected to fire, whichreached such a temperature that the stone becamefused into a solid, glassy form, giving rise to thename “vitrified fort” for these hillforts. It used to bethought that the firing happened during enemyaction or was undertaken by the inhabitants tostrengthen the wall, but current thinking is that itwas a deliberate and symbolic act of destruction, therazing of the fortification.

TownsTowns began to appear in the late first millenniumover much of Europe, with considerable populationsand large-scale industrial activity. Some, like those ofsouthern France and southern and eastern Iberia,became urbanized under the influence of neighbor-ing communities of settlers from the civilized soci-eties of Carthage, Greece, and Rome. In other areas,however, such as Thrace, the head of the Adriatic, orcentral Europe, urban societies owed their prosperityand emerging social complexity to other factors suchas international trade and the rise of industrial pro-duction, particularly of iron. Some towns developed

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4.6 Aerial view of the Trundle, an Iron Age hill-fort, Sussex, England (TopFoto.co.uk, English Her-itage/Heritage-I/HIP Photographer: EH/RCHMEstaff photographer)

from preexisting settlements, but most were newfoundations; in temperate Europe these are known asoppida, a term borrowed from the Romans. In west-ern and southern Europe these continued to developup to the time of the Roman conquest, whereasnorth of the Danube most were abandoned by thelate first century B.C.

CLASSICALLY INFLUENCED TOWNS

In the coastal regions of southern France andMediterranean Iberia, and into the interior alongthe Garonne and other rivers, the presence ofGreek, Carthaginian, and later Roman settlements,traders, and prospectors exercised considerableinfluence over the native population. Here by thethird century towns were developing with a numberof features inspired by their classical neighbors.Buildings often used dressed stone and mud brickand were arranged in a planned layout. In otherrespects, however, they were firmly rooted in localtradition, as, for example, in the severed heads asso-ciated with the public building in Entremont.

Entremont (France) Entremont was founded asthe capital of the Saluvii in the second century B.C.(or perhaps earlier). The region had been exposedto classical influences since the Greeks established acolony at nearby Massalia around 600 B.C., and thisis reflected in the layout of the upper town atEntremont in a grid pattern of streets lined withtwo-story houses of mud brick on stone founda-tions. Large pottery jars (dolia) were placed besidethe houses to catch rainwater. A stone wall withtowers surrounded the upper town, situated in thesouthwestern corner of the site, and another encir-cled the whole area of the settlement. A publicbuilding was situated between two towers of theinner wall. Above its open pillared portico thisbuilding had a hall whose floor was decorated withgeometric patterns in black and white stone. In con-trast to these classically inspired features, however,the facade of the building was adorned, in veryCeltic style, with severed heads attached to it withnails. The northern and eastern portions of theoppidum may represent areas into which the settle-ment expanded as the population grew. Workshopsand industrial facilities such as furnaces were also

located in the lower town, whose layout was lessformal. Olive presses reflect the local production ofoil. The town fell to a Roman assault in either 123or 90 B.C.

Numantia (Spain) A fortified settlement wasfounded in the seventh century on a flat-topped hillat the confluence of three rivers. According toStrabo, the settlement was taken over, probably inthe third century B.C., by a Celtiberian tribe, theArevaci, who drove out the native inhabitants andconstructed a town of around 60 acres (23 hectares).This town reflected classical influences in its layout,having two wide main streets paved with roundstones intersected by others to form a grid aroundwhich the rectangular houses were built. These wereconstructed of wooden uprights, walls of mud brickor compressed earth and straw, and roofs ofbranches on timber beams. They were divided intothree rooms: The central one contained the hearth,while a stair from the outer room led down to a cel-lar. An inner patrol wall ran along the west side ofthe town’s defensive wall. The latter was at itsstrongest in the stretches where the natural defenseswere limited; it was built of stones and had bastionsat intervals. The town was besieged and captured in133 B.C. by the Romans, who razed it to the ground.

OPPIDA

Native towns, known as oppida, began to appearacross temperate Europe from France to Slovakiaduring the second and first centuries B.C., possiblyinspired to some extent by growing familiarity withthe towns of the Mediterranean world. Generally,oppida were founded on a new site, in a prominentlocation on high ground, a prime situation for com-manding communication routes, and for physicallyand psychologically dominating the surroundingregion. Occasionally, they were built over an earliersettlement, and some were situated on a river plain:both are true of Manching. They were generallysurrounded by impressive ramparts with elaborategateways, but these were probably as much for showand for controlling the movement of people andgoods as for defense. Oppida were the tribal admin-istrative and political centers, places of refuge for therural population, and they also played a key eco-


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nomic and religious role. They were very muchlarger than earlier settlements.

Houses were often laid out along streets, andtheir size and style often reflected the social status oftheir owners, with stone being used by the morewealthy. Within some oppida there was a fortifiedcitadel on the highest ground, and it was generallyhere that elite housing was located. Part of the set-tlement was taken up by the workshops in which anumber of industrial activities took place such asbronze and iron working, pottery production, jew-elry manufacture, and the creation of objects inwood, bone, glass, and stone; often goods such asiron tools and pottery were mass-produced. Oppidagenerally also had a mint; the presence of weighingequipment and low-denomination coins implies theexistence of a market economy. Amphorae and otherMediterranean imports show that the inhabitants ofthese towns participated in international trade.

The larger oppida also included farms witharable and pasture land, granaries and other storagefacilities, and, when required, could accommodatethe rural population of the region: For example,when Caesar besieged the oppidum of Avaricum(modern Bourges), the capital of the Biturges, itsinhabitants, including those who had taken refugethere, numbered 40,000—of whom Caesar slaugh-tered all but 800. Some oppida, such as Bibracte,continued in use as towns after the Roman conquest,but in most cases the Romans founded a new townon the adjacent lower ground. Farther east oppidafell to local aggressors such as the Marcommani andthe Dacians.

Noreia (Austria) The kingdom of Noricum, whichowed its prosperity to control of salt and metal oresin the eastern Alps, had its capital at Noreia, nowidentified with the oppidum of Magdalensberg. Thetown, founded in the second century B.C., occupiedan area of around 865 acres (350 hectares). It was acenter of iron production; numerous furnaces andquantities of iron slag were found here. The Romanshad close trading links with Noreia from the mid-second century, and around 100 B.C. they establisheda trading colony on the low ground below the moun-tain eminence on which the oppidum stood. Com-mercial accounts scratched on the cellar walls of

some houses give details of the trade conductedthrough this outlet, with Norican iron objects suchas anvils, hooks, and cauldrons being exported.

Závist (Bohemia, Czech Republic) Founded in theearly second century B.C. over an earlier settlement,the oppidum of Závist was reputedly a town of theBoii, a Celtic tribe whose arrival in the fourth cen-tury may have brought about the abandonment of anearlier hillfort in the area. The six-mile (9-kilome-ter)-long fortified perimeter of the oppidum, madeup of several concentric ramparts, encircled an areaof more than 375 acres (150 hectares), includingboth hilltops and the valleys between them. A mas-sive gateway controlled access to the interior; thiswas restructured a number of times. Immediatelyinside the gate was an area of workshops, particu-larly focusing on working iron. Elsewhere withinthe oppidum were areas of housing, religiousprecincts, and farms, and gold and silver coinagewas also minted in the town. Three other gateswere later added to the circuit of the wall. An areato the north of the oppidum was also fortified inthe latest phase of the town’s history; this may havebeen a place of refuge. Závist was destroyed by firearound 25–20 B.C.

Manching (Bavaria, Danube valley) An undefendedvillage specializing in craft activity was replaced by orevolved into an oppidum in the late second century.The town was strategically placed for agriculture andriverborne communications, on the alluvial plain ofthe River Paar south of the Danube; its situation onlow ground necessitated the building of massivedefensive ramparts. Its five-mile (7-kilometer)-longmurus gallicus wall enclosed a huge area, some 940acres (380 hectares) in extent, and protected a numberof areas of settlement and industry, crop-processingareas and numerous fields, growing barley, some speltand emmer, legumes, and flax. In some parts of thetown, houses were arranged along streets, withnumerous pits at their rear. The houses of the elitehad cellars, prestige goods such as horse trappings,and keys to lock their doors, something unknownbefore the advent of towns. Several areas weredevoted to workshops for different crafts, producing arange of goods in bronze, iron, glass, bone and antler,

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leather, and wood, and minting coins. Pottery madehere included the graphite ware that was traded to theRhine valley and central Germany, and the oppidumimported many Mediterranean goods, particularlywine and the fine bronze and pottery tableware todrink it in style. Storage facilities for grain, probablyreceived as tribute, included barrel-shaped pits andfour-post structures. Settlement here ended in themid-first century B.C.

Bibracte (Burgundy, France) Bibracte (modernMount Beuvray) was an oppidum of around 320acres (135 hectares) covering several hilltops and thevalleys between, enclosed in a murus gallicus wallthree miles (5 kilometers) long, which had a singledefended gateway. Inside the gate was a street linedwith buildings with stone foundations; houses andworkshops where iron, bronze, and glass were madeinto tools, weapons, and jewelry; glass beads were aspecialty. Farther into the oppidum there were anumber of springs and streams for water and otherareas of housing, including elite residences on thesaddle that dominated the settlement. In the farthestcorner from the entrance gateway there was a largesquare sacred enclosure containing votive deposits.Bibracte was the capital of the Aedui, allies of theRomans; Caesar wintered here in 52 B.C. during hiscampaigns in Gaul.

TERRITORIAL OPPIDA

In Britain nascent urbanism took a different form:the creation of vast, loosely enclosed sites known asterritorial oppida, strategically placed for trade andthe control of communications. They are exempli-fied by Verlamion and Camulodunon, successivecapitals of the Catuvellauni, but less impressiveexamples were widespread in the southern and east-ern half of England. Massive earthwork defenses(dikes) surrounded a very extensive area withinwhich were concentrations of activity, including set-tlements, cemeteries, shrines, industrial areas, andcultivated land. The royal oppida in the southeastcontained mints. Both the earthwork defenses andsome of the major buildings within them were sitedto impress; this was probably the main function ofthe dikes as they did not provide effective defense.

Camulodunon (Essex, England) Camulodunon(modern Colchester) covered an area of 10 squaremiles (16 square kilometers), lying between tworivers and defended by a series of dikeworks on thewestern side. Within this there were concentrationsof settlement separated by open ground, which wasprobably cultivated or used for pasture. The mainarea of settlement, at Sheepen, contained houses andworkshops where pottery making, metalworking,enameling, salt making, and other crafts and indus-tries were practiced and coins minted. A cult enclo-sure, probably of the god Camulos, was located atGosbecks Green near the elite residential area,which was located in an enclosure on a hill: probablythe “Fort of Camulos” from which the settlementtook its name and which was probably the earliestsettlement within the oppidum. At Lexden there wasa cemetery containing a number of graves and twolarge barrows, one covering a cremation burial in alarge pit, accompanied by a rich selection of gravegoods, including a medallion of the emperor Augus-tus and a Roman ceremonial stool, both probablydiplomatic gifts from the emperor to the local king.This probably predates the foundation of theoppidum around the beginning of the first centuryA.D. Camulodunon began as the tribal center of theTrinovantes, but after their fall to the Catuvellauni,the latter made it their capital in preference to Ver-lamion; a small settlement within the oppidum sub-sequently became the capital of the Roman provinceof Britannia until sacked by Boudicca in A.D. 60.

LANDSCAPES

Marking TerritoryThe division of the landscape into territoriesexploited by different groups must date back far intothe prehistoric period. Ethnographic evidence indi-cates that mobile hunter-gatherers such as thePalaeolithic and earlier Mesolithic inhabitants ofEurope would have had well-recognized exploita-tion rights in a range of locations spread across the


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landscape (their annual territory), giving themaccess to the resources they required at differenttimes of year. Often kinship ties would give eachindividual the right to join any one of several groupsand participate in the exploitation of that group’sannual territory.

Sedentary communities, on the other hand, gen-erally had smaller territories, more distinctlymarked, and more rigidly enforced. Investment inthe alteration and maintenance of a piece of land foragriculture changed the nature of the relationshipbetween people and landscape. Instead of a systemof structured but flexible rights to the natural pro-duce of the landscape, sedentism in general andfarming in particular brought a close and possessiverelationship between people and the land they per-manently occupied and farmed: ownership of theland itself rather than rights to its produce.

An inevitable consequence of the growth of landownership was the desire and need to demarcate andmark territory. This was done in many ways. Fieldsor garden plots were surrounded by wooden fences;by walls, particularly in areas where the ground wasstony and rocks or stones had regularly to be clearedfrom the fields before cultivation; or by banks orditches and usually both together, often combinedwith a thorn hedge. These would have served notonly to identify the land of a family or communitybut also to keep out wild and domestic animals. Sim-ilar means could be used to demarcate settlements,keeping wild animals out and domestic animals inand making a statement of possession to outsiders;although they could be defensive, palisades, banksand ditches, and walls, even substantial ones, proba-bly served primarily as a community or householdstatement, demonstrating ownership and the abilityto raise and maintain such boundaries. In second-millennium Dartmoor and other areas of lateNeolithic and early Bronze Age western Europe,territorial demarcations of stone were constructedacross large tracts of landscape, used for settlement,arable agriculture, and pasture.

On this larger scale the community’s right to a sec-tion of the landscape, including not only fields butalso pastures and woodland, water supplies, and otheressentials, as well as areas of sacred or cultural signifi-cance, were often emphasized by the erection of

monuments in prominent locations where they couldbe seen and understood by those entering the terri-tory. In Atlantic Europe during the Neolithic periodtombs were used as territorial markers in this way andwere therefore placed in prominent, visible locations.In some areas these took the form of long barrows, inothers megalithic tombs. These monuments not onlyvisibly demonstrated the manpower that could bemobilized to build them, and acted as impressivemarkers, but by holding the bones of some or all ofthe community’s dead they also emphasized theancestral links between the local community and theterritory, a visible sign that ownership had beenvested in the community since time immemorial.

From the later fourth millennium in Britain andBrittany, the role of visible symbols of power andlocal ownership of territory shifted to stone circles,henges, and other impressive religious monuments,and across Europe round barrows covering the buri-als of leaders gradually took on this role.

Settlement themselves might also serve the pur-pose of marking territory. The settlement mounds(tells) that developed in Southeast Europe wereprominent features of the landscape. Other settle-ments might be made more obvious and impressiveby constructing substantial fortifications that servedmore for show than for defense: For example, theChalcolithic villages of Iberia, such as Los Millaresand Vila Nova de São Pedro, had massive walls, fre-quently made more massive by adding extra skins ofstones, although the local need for defense seems tohave been negligible. The same was probably true,for example, of the defended homesteads and settle-ments of the Atlantic region in the Iron Age; struc-tures like the brochs of Scotland were probablydesigned as much to impress outsiders as to defendagainst them. Hillforts and oppida were also locatedto be visible and impressive.

In contemporary Galicia stone animal heads wereplaced to delimit the pastureland belonging to acommunity and life-size statues of warriors by thesettlement entrance, and in other parts of westernIberia granite models of bulls and boars (verracos)were similarly used as territorial markers. Theseprobably had a religious significance as did the stonestelae raised in Brittany. In every area and periodways were found to mark territorial ownership.

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People in the LandscapeThe distribution and density of modern settlementin Europe is a poor guide to the situation in the past.For much of the postglacial prehistoric period, alarge part of the land was covered with dense unin-habited forest; although this was gradually reducedby clearance, the forest cover was still extensive inmany areas well into post-Roman times. Other areaswere also uninhabited because the land could not beexploited with the technology available at the time.In addition, the small population of Europe—per-haps 1 to 5 million in the Neolithic period andaround 30 million by the end of the Iron Age—meant that during earlier prehistory settlementcould be confined to the areas easiest to exploit, andonly later did pressure from expanding populationcause people to move into more challenging areas oradopt more labor-intensive ways of life.

MESOLITHIC

Before about 7000 B.C. Europe was inhabited exclu-sively by hunter-gatherers, whose preferred habitatsincluded coasts, the shores of lakes, rivers, and estu-aries, the vicinity of marshes, and sites with access toa range of environments. These people also oftenmoved with the seasons, following herds to uplandpastures, visiting offshore islands, and making expe-ditions into woods and other terrain where particu-lar foodstuffs and other necessary or desirableresources were available. Although the favored areasbecame densely settled and exploited, there werehuge tracts of Europe that were uninhabited andunexploited at this time.

The success of the Mesolithic lifestyle led to asubstantial growth in hunter-gatherer populationsthrough time, with many large permanent settle-ments, particularly in coastal regions, and by thelater sixth millennium there is considerable evidenceof violence, presumably between communities com-peting for the same favored areas. Forest manage-ment offered one way to increase resources, withsome forest edges being cleared by fire or by barkringing to encourage the growth of hazel and otherspecies that thrive in open woodland, and to attractprey animals; this made only minor inroads into theforest cover, however. Another means adopted by

later Mesolithic people was to expand exploitation ofthe sea; while fishing had earlier been confined toinshore waters, deep-sea fishing now took place.

Finally, there was the option of increasing eco-nomic productivity by taking up aspects of agricul-ture: keeping domestic animals and planting a fewcrops. To some extent this was possible within thepreexisting settlement pattern; many communitiesin Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe continued tooccupy coastal, lakeshore, and other favored loca-tions but practiced a mixed economy. Some commu-nities, for instance, around lakes in Switzerland andnorthern Italy, relied heavily on wild resources, sup-plemented by some farming, for millennia; andmany Atlantic communities continued to place con-siderable emphasis on fishing. By around 3000 B.C.,however, most Europeans were dependent to agreater or lesser degree on farming, and theirchoices of settlement location reflected this.

EARLY FARMING

Farming communities began to appear in Europein the seventh millennium, and at first settled onland with light, easily cultivated soils and access towater and land suitable for grazing; in some regionsthis required a limited amount of forest clearance.In Greece and the Balkans settlement was mainlyin river valleys, in dried-up lake basins, and at theedges of alluvial plains. In Italy settlements wereadjacent to patches of easily cultivated soils withinthe Tavoliere plain and other lowland areas. Fromthe later sixth millennium farmers settled on loesssoils on river terraces in central Europe and as farwest as the Paris Basin, and east of the Carpathianssimilar locations were taken up in the fifth millen-nium. The land needed for farming was still veryrestricted in extent, often little more than gardensaround the houses, and usually extending less thana mile from the settlement. Grazing for the smallnumbers of domestic stock was also availablewithin the vicinity of these settlements, thoughseasonal pastures in adjacent areas might also beused: For example, inhabitants of some Greek andBalkan villages probably grazed their animals onthe river floodplains in summer, while Italian com-munities sought pastures in the hills around theplains.


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The initial spread of farming in the seventh tomid-fifth millennia did not affect western or north-ern Europe, but these areas saw the advent of agri-culture during the following 1,500 years, as did areasfarther east. While some farming settlements werelocated to continue some exploitation of wildresources, particularly those of the coast, manyappeared in new areas: areas where, as before, soilswere well drained and easy to cultivate, such as thechalk land of southern England. At the same time, inthe regions where farming communities had previ-ously been established, settlements begun to appearin new locations as well as continuing in the old: insmaller river valleys and on the higher groundbetween rivers in temperate central Europe; on theopen plains of Thessaly and the Balkans, where pre-viously settlement had concentrated on the margins;in the interior of southern and central France;around lakes in northern Italy and Switzerland; andin previously unoccupied Mediterranean islands,including Malta and a number in the Aegean.

MOVING OUT AND FILLING IN

As populations continued to grow, the increasingneed for food and other resources was met by agri-cultural intensification, expansion into new areas,and economic diversification.

The introduction of the ard (simple plow) in thefourth millennium made it possible to take largerareas of land into cultivation and saw a shift fromgardens within or small fields close to the settlementto more extensive fields in the landscape around it.In some areas networks of small fields enclosed bywalls, hedges, or banks and ditches were laid out;these are known particularly from Britain. Newareas not previously cultivable, such as British gravelriver terraces and Jutland sands, could now also befarmed. The use of animals to pull carts and carryloads also made it feasible to cultivate land at agreater distance from the settlement than whenfarmers had had to walk to their fields and carrytools and produce themselves. The expansion of cul-tivated land necessitated an increase in forest clear-ance, but it was not until the third or secondmillennium that this began to make a significantimpact on the extent of Europe’s forest. The cultiva-tion of new plants also allowed higher productivity

from the land surrounding the settlement: Forexample, in third-millennium Greece and laterother areas of the Mediterranean these includedgrapes and olives. A greater emphasis on stock rais-ing in many areas also increased productivity andproceeded in tandem with forest clearance.

New areas continued to be colonized as the cen-turies passed and populations grew. The meseta, thedry interior plateau of Iberia, saw settlement beginduring the third millennium; settlers practicing mixedfarming also spread into upland plateaus in southernFrance, Britain, and many parts of Europe. Theswampy lands of the Po plain, previously thinly occu-pied by hunter-gatherers, saw the emergence of agri-cultural communities (the terramare) in the secondmillennium. Nomadic pastoralists, equipped withwagons for transporting their belongings and horsesfor herding their animals, were responsible for thecolonization of the steppe. In the first millennium thelow-lying lands of the North Sea’s southern coast sawthe construction of artificially raised ground to allowfarming settlements to be established there, whileartificial islands were built in some lakes in Britainand continental Europe for settlement and defense.

Some of the expansion into other regions had beenmade possible by the development of specialist pas-toral groups who traveled seasonally between settle-ments at lower elevations and camps in the upland ormountain pastures of the Alps, the French GrandCausses, and other highland regions. Some communi-ties established permanent settlements in valleys andother areas within the mountain ranges where pocketsof arable land were available; the fertility of their fieldswas maintained by large quantities of manure fromdomestic flocks that were protected from the severityof the winter climate by being housed in byres wherethey were stall-fed. These communities integratedarable and pastoral agriculture, most of the inhabitantsliving year round in the settlement while some indi-viduals took the flocks and herds to summer pastureshigher in the mountains. Pastoralists might also obtaingrain from lowland groups with whom they tradedwool and dairy produce.

EMERGING COMPLEXITY

Symbiotic relationships between pastoral and agri-cultural groups were only one aspect of growing

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specialization and interdependence. Communitieswere also emerging, by the second millennium ifnot before, that specialized in other activities suchas mining, satisfying the growing demand for stone,metal ores, salt, and other commodities. Whilesome resource procurement was by seasonal visits,in other cases a community was permanently resi-dent near the source of tradable materials, depend-ing to a varying degree on imported grain and otherfoodstuffs obtained in exchange for the commodi-ties that they extracted. By the first millenniummany such communities existed; some, like the salt-mining settlement at Hallstatt, became extremelywealthy on the proceeds of their activities, as therich burials in their cemetery attest. In tandem itbecame necessary for farming settlements toincrease agricultural production in order to have asurplus with which to trade.

Growing populations were matched by growingsocial complexity. In some areas during the fourthand third millennia, and in many during the secondand first, elites emerged who exercised some con-trol over local production and trade. This wasreflected in the second millennium in the emer-gence of settlements at nodes in the trade networksfrom which local leaders could control the move-ments of goods, and from around 1100 B.C. in thedevelopment of hillforts as centers providing lead-ership, defense, and perhaps some manufacturedgoods and a religious focus for the surroundingfarming population, as well as being involved inlong-distance trade. Hillforts became widespread inthe first millennium. Some grew in size throughtime and came to control larger areas; in some casesa single large hillfort replaced a number of smallerones in an area.

Far larger and more complex were the oppidaand other towns that emerged in the last three cen-turies B.C. An oppidum might replace a number ofhillforts or large villages, or these might survive asa lower tier in the settlement hierarchy, still centralto their own area but subordinate to the tribal cap-ital. During his campaigns in Gaul Caesar notedthat the population dwelt in farmsteads (aedificiaprivata), villages (vici), and towns (oppida), and healso mentions castelli (hillforts?). Oppida, many ofwhich had a population of several thousand, served

a wide area as centers of trade and industry, offer-ing services and a market, and a wider politicalfocus: The principal oppida were the seat of gov-ernment for a wide region.

EBB AND FLOW

Expansion into new areas continued throughoutprehistory. In parts of the Mediterranean such asAlmeria in southeastern Iberia, communities devel-oped irrigation techniques that allowed them tocultivate land that was too dry for rain-fed agricul-ture. During the second millennium higher temper-atures and lower rainfall allowed the spread offarming into areas that had previously been unsuit-able for cultivation, such as many upland areas inwestern and central Europe, and regions that hadpreviously been too wet, such as the Po plain. In thelate first millennium the development of the coulterand iron plowshare, and in some areas the mold-board plow, opened up the cultivation of clays andother soils, for instance, in valley bottoms, that hadpreviously been too heavy for agriculture. By thetime of the Roman conquest Europe was denselysettled, with a diverse pattern of settlements rang-ing from farmsteads to towns.

But the pattern of development was by no meansuniform progress. Colder, wetter conditions fromthe late second millennium turned many upland andmarginal areas into blanket bog and moorland,never again to be cultivable, and suitable only forrough grazing. Flooding and swamp growth in partsof the North European Plain caused many majorsettlements to be abandoned, leaving only farm-steads and hamlets; many lakeside settlements, inSwitzerland and elsewhere, were also abandoned.Similar patterns of advance and decline were experi-enced by other areas at different periods for variousreasons such as overexploitation; for example, over-grazing and consequent erosion may have been, atleast in part, responsible for the abandonment ofmany settlements in the Balkans in the early thirdmillennium.

Changes in the exploitation of other resourcesalso affected the patterns of regional settlement. Forinstance, the exhaustion of the easily worked car-


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bonate and oxide ores of the Balkans and the shift tomining sulfide copper ores changed the focus ofmetallurgical exploitation in southeast and centralEurope from the Balkans in the fourth millenniumto the Alps and Carpathians in the later third, whilethe spread of iron working in the first millenniumcompletely altered the pattern of mining, metal-lurgy, and trade. Regions rose and fell in impor-tance, and this had consequences in the pattern oftrade networks and the settlements dependent onthem. For example, major alterations to trade net-works and settlement hierarchies came with the pen-etration of the European interior by Mediterraneantraders from the sixth century B.C.

Political factors also played a major role in deter-mining settlement patterns. Competition betweencommunities often erupted into armed conflict,sometimes resulting in the destruction of settle-ments. Sites therefore not only began to be fortifiedbut also were often shifted to more defensible loca-tions, sometimes accompanied by a decline in popu-lation. Hillforts, domestic strongholds, and otherdefended sites are well known in the Bronze andIron Ages in western and central Europe, andstrongly fortified sites appeared in the Balkans at anearlier date. In addition to local conflict communi-ties might suffer from the attacks by external raiderssuch as periodic incursions by nomads from thesteppe and the movements of large confederacies ofCelts. In some regions such as Dacia and Gaul, theRoman conquest brought massive depopulation andeconomic collapse.

READING

ConstructionPerles 2001, Taylour 1983: Greece; Armit 1997,Turner 1998, Reynolds 1995: Britain; Whittle 1996:Neolithic; Harding 2000: Bronze Age; Coles 1973:experimental construction; Coles, J. 1973, Coles, B.1999, Audouze and Buchsenschutz 1992: lifeexpectancy of houses.

Domestic ArchitectureBarker 1985, Milisauskas, ed. 2002, Champion et al.1984: general; Mithen 2003: Mesolithic; Whittle1996, Thorpe 1996: Neolithic; Harding 2000, Kris-tiansen 1998: Bronze Age; Reynolds 1995: Iron Age;Bailey 2000: Balkans; Cunliffe 2001a: Atlanticregion; Darvill 1996: Britain; Ashmore 1996, Bar-clay 1998, Hingley 1998, Armit 1997, Ritchie 1988:Scotland; Ritchie 1995: Orkney; Turner 1998: Shet-land; Lumley 1969, Scarre 1998: Terra Amata;Hernek 2003: Timmeras; Leighton 1999: Thapsos,Pantalica; Waddington et al. 2003, Denison 2003c:Howick; Mellars and Dark 1998: Star Carr; Zvelebil1987: Eyni; Melton and Nicholson 2004: West Voe;Shepherd 2000, Scarre 1998: Skara Brae; Denison2001: Callander; Rowley-Conwy 2002b: Balbridie;Smrz 1991: Drouzkovice.

SettlementsMilisauskas, ed. 2002; Barker 1985: general; Whittle1996: Neolithic; Harding 2000, Kristiansen 1998,Audouze and Buchsenschutz 1992: Bronze Age; Cun-liffe 1997, Twist 2001, Audouze and Buchsenschutz1992, James 1993, Collis 1984a, Berresford Ellis 1998:Iron Age; Bailey 2000: Balkans; Midgeley 1992:Poland; Cunliffe 2001a: Atlantic region; Trump 1980:Mediterranean; Skeates 2002: Tavoliere; Caesar 1951:Gaul; Darvill 1996, 1987, Parker Pearson 1993:Britain; O’Brien and Harbison 1996, O’Kelly 1989:Ireland; Lenerz-de Wilde 1995, Chapman 1990:Iberia; Ritchie 1988, Hingley 1998, Armit 1997: Scot-land; Ritchie 1995: Orkney; Turner 1998: Shetland;Thrane 1999a: Scandinavia; Mercer 1990, Cizmarovaet al. 1996, Darvill and Thomas, eds. 2001, Oswald etal. 2001, Varndell and Topping, eds. 2002: causewayedenclosures; Fokkens 1998, Todd 1972, 1994, Dixon1976, Graham-Campbell, ed. 1994, Barker 1985: ter-pen, Feddersen Wierde, Ezinge; Armit 1997, O’Kelly1989, Morrison 1997, Piggott 1995, Reed 1990:crannogs; Coles and Coles 1986, Rahtz 1993, Clarke1982, Bewley 2003: Glastonbury; Grimal 1964,Barker 1999: terramare; Coles 1984, Garrison 1997,Egloff 1987: lake villages; Coles 1999: Hauterive-Champréveyres; Bocquet et al. 1987: Charavines;

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Giardino 1992, Bonzani 1992, Becker 1992: nuraghi;Pericot Garcia 1972: talayots; Moosleitner 1991: Dür-rnberg; Zvelebil 1987, Champion and Champion1982, Scarre 1998: Biskupin; Cunliffe 1993, 2003:Danebury; Martinez 1991: Numantia; Maier 1991a,Haselgrove and Millet 1997, Collis 1984b, 1995: opp-ida; Motyakova et al. 1991: Závist; Maier 1991b:Manching; Maier 1991a: Bibracte; Kurz 2005, Maier1991a: Heuneberg; Scarre 1998: Entremont; Millett1990, 1995, Darvill 1996: Camulodunon.

LandscapesBarker 1985, Milisauskas, ed. 2002, Sherratt 1997,Cunliffe ed. 1994: general; Whittle 1996: Neolithic;Harding 2000, Kristiansen 1998, Audouze andBuchsenschutz 1992, Thrane 1999a: Bronze Age;Audouze and Buchsenschutz 1992, Collis 1995,Bevan 1997: Iron Age; Renfrew 1973, Renfrew andBahn 2004: megaliths as markers.


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TRADE ANDTRANSPORT

5

TRADE

Changing PatternsEthnographic evidence gives some insight into therange of ways in which exchange may have operatedin antiquity. The distribution of materials and thepatterns of their movement provide some indicationof the mechanisms that operated at different peri-ods, and for the later first millennium literary evi-dence is also available.

DIRECT PROCUREMENT

Some materials were obtained by directly visiting theirsource. In Palaeolithic and early Mesolithic times, sea-sonal movements to obtain different food resourceswere organized also to include visits to areas providingraw materials, such as stone for tools. For instance,Mesolithic people in the eastern Mediterranean fish-ing offshore for tuna obtained obsidian from theisland of Melos during their voyages.

In later Mesolithic times, when many communi-ties were settled year round in base camps, expedi-tions were regularly made at certain times of year toobtain raw materials; many of the Ertebølle peopleof Denmark, for example, lived on the coast but vis-ited inland sites and offshore islands to obtain furs,various seasonally available foodstuffs, and stone fortools. Farming communities also obtained some oftheir resources in this way: for example, the lack ofpermanent settlements near flint mines such asGrimes Graves in England suggests that the minerswere people from communities elsewhere who vis-ited occasionally to extract the flint they required. Inlater times the movements of pastoralists enabledthem easily to continue direct resource procure-ment. For example, pastoralists taking their flocks tohigh Alpine pastures for summer grazing were prob-ably the first to extract copper ores from sources atthese elevations.

RECIPROCITY

In addition, even in Palaeolithic times, some goodsand materials circulated beyond the range of possi-

ble direct procurement. Ethnographic analogy andthe pattern of distribution indicate that in earlytimes the prime mechanism was through gift-giving,often highly structured, between kin or betweenexchange partners with whom formal relationshipswere maintained. Some of these transactions tookplace within the context of ceremonies such as mar-riages and funerals, which involved feasting (theprovision of food by the host family or community)and gift-giving. On many occasions gifts would passin one direction rather than be exchanged, butthrough time these gifts would balance out. Typi-cally, the movement of commodities by such giftexchanges created a pattern of slow falloff in quan-tity with distance from source (down-the-lineexchange) as each family or community made use ofsome of the materials they obtained and passed therest on to their kin. Since the act of giving was oftenof more significance than the gift itself, this couldresult in the movement between communities of thelocally available commodities as well as exotic ones.

UNEQUAL TRANSACTIONS

The movement of goods through gift-giving contin-ued throughout prehistory (and still continues), butby the Late Neolithic period this was overlaid byother mechanisms that circulated goods or materialsmore widely and in greater quantities, and whichallowed communities greater control over what theyreceived.

Gift exchanges served to cement family andintercommunity bonds and were not designed toprofit the participants directly. In contrast exchangesbetween individuals outside kinship relationshipswere made with the intention of profiting on thetransaction. Since the value attached to a commoditywould increase with the distance from its source,however, this could be achieved without disadvan-tage to either party.

Farmers required large quantities of stone formaking axes and other tools for forest clearance, cul-tivation, working timber for constructing houses,trackways and fences, and other purposes. Socialrelations among farmers and among the increasingcomplex hunter-gatherer communities demanded asupply of materials, such as shells, attractive stone,amber, gold, and copper, that could be made into


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personal ornaments and display goods, as well asexotic artifacts such as nonlocal pottery. During thefifth to third millennia these needs promoted thedevelopment of trading networks to ensure the reg-ular supply of these goods. Commodities stillchanged hands many times and moved over shortdistances with each exchange, but ultimately trav-eled hundreds of miles from their source. Commu-nities near the source areas of particular desirablematerials now invested time and effort in procuringthem in order to be able to participate in the tradenetworks that would in turn bring them other mate-rials that they required, and some goods were pro-duced in quantities beyond those needed by theindividual household or community, for the purposeof trading.

While metal initially served an exclusively socialfunction, for making display and prestige goods,with the development of copper alloys during thethird and second millennia, the shift to the morewidely available sulfide copper ores, and the spreadof metallurgical technology over the European con-tinent, arsenical and tin bronze began to be used alsoto make tools and particularly weapons, increasingdemand for metal in the trading networks. In thesecond millennium tin became the principal metalfor alloying with copper; its main sources wereCornwall, the Bohemian Ore Mountains, and prob-ably Galicia, although smaller amounts could beobtained from other sources such as Brittany andparts of Italy. The universal need to obtain tin forbronze, which was used to make an ever-increasingnumber of practical and prestige artifacts during thesecond millennium, stimulated the development ofmore highly organized trading networks, whichunited the earlier regional circuits that had operatedalong the Atlantic coast and through different partsof continental Europe. The developing social hier-archy of the period was due at least in part to thebenefits to be gained from active and organized par-ticipation in the trade network: leaders emerged andsettlements in key locations on the trade routes grewprosperous. It is likely that trade links now coveredmuch longer distances, with direct transactionsbetween leaders or communities in widely separatedregions to some degree replacing the earlier chainsof short-distance exchanges. Large votive hoards ofmetalwork, deposited in the ground or in watery

places, reflect the huge numbers of metal artifacts incirculation, while the presence of Baltic amber in theAegean and Mycenaean folding stools in Denmarkboth emphasizes the enormous geographical spreadof the trading networks and illustrates the circula-tion of a wide range of commodities: these includedgoods and materials for everyday practical use andones of social importance or ritual significance.

ASYMMETRIC TRADE

The Mycenaeans trading with the European interiorseem to have participated in the established tradenetworks. In contrast, in the Mediterranean theymade direct contact with their source areas, sailingto southern Italy and Sardinia to obtain copper ore.They may even have reached Spain, although theMycenaean pots found there more probably reachedthe region through the existing trade networksamong the people of the western Mediterraneanbasin. Some centuries later, the Phoenicians reachedthe Atlantic coast of Iberia, where they established atrading colony at Gadir (Cádiz), and other Phoeni-cian colonies were founded in Spain, Sicily, Sardinia,and North Africa, where the key settlement ofCarthage soon grew large enough to establish itsown colonies in the western Mediterranean. In theeighth and seventh centuries Greeks also settled onthe Mediterranean shores of Spain and in Sicily, aswell as in southern Italy and on the southern Frenchcoast. From here they traded up the Rhône intoeastern France and southern Germany.

The arrival of these eastern Mediterraneantraders, prospectors, and settlers created new pat-terns of trade, cross-cutting the networks already inexistence and diverting raw materials from theirestablished consumers. Ethnographic analogies andthe archaeological finds from the regions in whichthese civilized traders did business suggest that theyfirst made appropriate gifts (such as the massive Vixkrater) to the local rulers to secure trading agree-ments and then supplied them with prestige goodsand luxuries, such as Phoenician gold jewelry andivory work, as well as Greek wine and the vessels toserve it, in exchange for raw materials obtained fromthe local area or further afield: Tartessian silver, cen-tral European copper and gold, Cornish tin, Balticamber, and other commodities. Ominously, they

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also sought slaves, unlikely previously to have been atraded item. New prestige goods enabled local lead-ers to outcompete local rivals and provided themwith new gifts to reward their followers. The elitealso acquired a taste for wine.

When the Greeks abandoned their Rhône tradein favor of trade through their Black Sea colonies,other contacts developed between the Mediter-ranean world and barbarian Europe that ensuredthat Mediterranean wine and luxury goods contin-ued to flow into the European interior. These wereno longer so asymmetric: Many Mediterraneangoods reached transalpine Europe as pay or bootyacquired by Celtic mercenaries and raiders in Italy

and the eastern Mediterranean; Celtic settlers in thePo plain mediated exchanges between the Etruscansand other Italian communities and the Celts ofwestern and central Europe; and new trade net-works developed that included the Mediterraneancivilizations.

MARKET ECONOMIES

In the later Iron Age urban centers developed inmany parts of Europe and gradually a market econ-omy began to emerge, that is, trade that involved norelationship between the parties to a transaction,and that operated through the medium of coinage orother objects (such as currency bars), which pro-vided standardized and locally guaranteed units ofvalue to which different commodities could berelated (i.e., given a price). Production became cen-tered on the towns, which had workshops making awide range of goods. The urban centers offeredgoods and services to the farmers and other ruralpopulation of their area in return for agriculturaland other rural produce, some on the basis of long-established relationships of kinship, clientage, andtribal social hierarchy, but others on a pure mone-tary basis, and money also mediated transactionsbetween locals and outsiders. Weights, scales, andbalances also appeared at this time. There were alsoprofessional merchants and traders, operating pri-vately rather than at the behest of their leader; it isuncertain whether such freelance traders operated inearlier times, but probably unlikely before the laterBronze Age.

Coinage Although the civilizations of the NearEast had long used silver and other valuable materialsas media of exchange, and the cultures of prehistoricEurope may similarly have used objects like ösenringe,the first coins (units of metal stamped with the markof an issuing authority that guaranteed their weightand quality) were issued in Ionia around 700 B.C.Their manufacture implies both the ability to controlclosely the purity of metal and the technology forweighing accurately. Coinage became widespread inthe Greek world by the sixth century and in much ofthe Mediterranean basin thereafter. Standardizedstone weights and iron ingots were used in CelticEurope in the late first millennium B.C.


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5.1 The Vix krater, an enormous vessel for mixingwine, probably given as a diplomatic gift by Greektraders to a barbarian chief at the French hillfort ofMont Lassois, with whom they were attempting toestablish trading relations. The bronze krater waseventually placed in the grave of the “Vix princess.”(Drawing by Audrey McIntosh, from material in theNational Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

The first Celtic coins, which appeared in theearly third century, were modeled on the gold andsilver coins brought home as pay by Celts who hadworked as mercenaries in the eastern and centralMediterranean. These early coins were generally ofgold in the more northerly regions of western andcentral Europe and silver in the south and east; theywere probably used by chiefs and leaders as a conve-nient standard unit of wealth for rewarding theirfollowers or making gifts to other leaders. By theearly second century native higher denominationcoins were being minted across Europe fromFrance to Transylvania and the Balkans. Manycopied the gold staters of Philip II of Macedon andhis son, Alexander the Great. At first the copieswere quite faithful to the originals, but the designsprogressively disintegrated.

As parts of Celtic Europe began to develop townsand a more complex economy, the need for media ofexchange grew, resulting in the development oflower denomination coins, especially in easternFrance and central Europe, by the early first centuryB.C. In the later second century coins of the Belgae,settled in the Seine basin of Gaul, began to be usedin Kent, and native coins based upon them soon fol-lowed. The first British coins were struck in potin,(high-tin bronze) but by around 80–60 B.C. goldcoins were also being minted here. In the later firstcentury B.C. and the early first century A.D. thetribes of south and east England each developedtheir own coinage.

CommoditiesNo settlement can be located to give access to every-thing a community requires for daily or occasionaluse; even in the Palaeolithic period people requiredstone for making tools as well as food, water, shelter,and security from predators, and through time thelist of commodities regarded as essential or worthmaking an effort to acquire grew longer and the dis-tances over which they were obtained often grewgreater.

Tracking the movement of such commodities isfar from straightforward. Many of the materialsknown from literary sources to have been impor-

tant in trade, such as foodstuffs and furs, have longsince vanished. Others lack the characteristics thatwould allow them to be matched to particularsources. Manufactured goods may be the productof a particular community, but they may also belocal copies, implying the movement of ideasrather than goods, and it is not always possible todistinguish these. Technological innovations, how-ever sophisticated they may seem, are not necessar-ily the brainchild of a single community, so theirappearance in separate areas need not imply thatthey are derived from a single source. (The long-running debate about the Aegean or local origin ofthe faience beads in Early Bronze Age Britain, nowresolved, is a classic example of such difficulties.)Heavy reliance is therefore placed on commoditiesthat can be characterized (examined physically orchemically to identify a characteristic pattern oftrace elements or mineral inclusions) and thereforematched to precise sources, such as obsidian, orthat come from a single or restricted source, suchas amber; these act as markers for the circulation ofother goods. Commodities in circulation at anyperiod can also conjecturally be matched to sourcesshown by archaeological evidence to have beenexploited at that time, though such evidence isoften absent, and other evidence may be needed toestablish which of several potential sources actuallysupplied a particular region.

STONE

Flint Silicate stone, particularly flint, that couldeasily be knapped was used from the Palaeolithicperiod for making cutting, boring, and scraping toolsand was still in use into recent times for making gun-flints. Flint occurs widely in Europe and was at firstderived from surface outcrops, though by Mesolithictimes it was also beginning to be mined. The homo-geneous nature of flint makes it difficult to character-ize, and most flint objects can therefore not bematched to a source. Some attractive types of flint,however, can be identified on the basis of their dis-tinctive color and patterning. These were mined andwidely traded in the third millennium, and wereoften made into objects intended for display ratherthan for use as tools. The principal sources of theseflints were in parts of northern and western Europe,


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including eastern and southern England, Belgium,western France, Jutland, Zealand, and Scania, Rügenin Germany, Poland (particularly in the Holy Crossmountains), and the Ukraine. Farther south theApennines yielded a pink flint used in lowland sites,and Bulgarian flint was widely used in easternEurope. Objects made from these fine flints weretraded over great distances, that from Grand Pres-signy in France being found as much as 500 miles(800 kilometers) away.

Obsidian The attractive volcanic glass, obsidian,from which exceptionally sharp-edged tools can bemade, can be characterized on the basis of the pres-ence and relative proportions of different trace ele-ments, patterns that are unique to each volcanicformation. Obsidian on the island of Melos was beingactively sought by the inhabitants of the Aegean byaround 9000 B.C.; it is known from the Mesolithicsettlement at Franchthi cave and was important in theearly and later Neolithic settlements of Greece, insome cases being the main type of stone used formaking blades. Sources on Sardinia, Pantelleria,Lipari, and Palmarola were exploited by the Neolithicinhabitants of Italy and southern France. Obsidianfrom the Slovakian and Hungarian mountains wasalready being used in the early postglacial period bypeople living in the Danube valley and was widely cir-culated among the Neolithic inhabitants of theBalkans. It was also acquired by the inhabitants ofOlszanica in southern Poland and of other LBK set-tlements, generally in the form of cores.

Hard Stone Fine igneous and metamorphic rockwas used for making axes, chisels, and other cuttingtools from the Neolithic period onward; the stonewas ground into shape and then polished, makingtools that were more durable than those of flint. Thepattern of mineral inclusions allows the stone to bematched to a source area and often a precise source.Although suitable stone was quite widely available,particularly fine outcrops were intensively exploitedand their products exchanged or traded over consid-erable distances, particularly during the third mil-lennium B.C.; individual settlements often containedthe products of several different sources.


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5.2 A Neolithic stone ax still in its wooden han-dle, found in a bog at Shulishader on the islandof Lewis, Scotland. The ax was made of porcel-lanite, a type of stone probably traded fromAntrium in Ireland. (Drawing by Audrey McIn-tosh, from material in the National Museums ofScotland, Edinburgh)

Other Stone Many types of stone were exploitedfor making tools, figurines, and other objects, gener-ally within an area relatively close to their source.One exception was abrasive stone, which was usedfor making grindstones, important in everyday lifefor grinding grain. Such stone was relatively limitedin its occurrence, and good-quality stone, such asthe basalt from Mayen in Germany and Nieder-mendig lava from the Rhineland, was widely traded,particularly during the Iron Age.

Building Stone Stone for domestic constructionwas generally obtained from the local area, but forbuilding monuments suitable stone might be broughtby their builders from some distance, at considerableeffort. The Grand Menhir Brisé at Carnac, a vast 355short tons (348 tonnes) in weight, was dragged over2.5 miles (4 kilometers) from its source, while the 82bluestones used at Stonehenge (averaging 1.5 shorttons each) were transported over 150 miles (240 kilo-meters) from the Prescelly Mountains of Wales.

METALS

Metallurgy began in the Balkans and Spain in the fifthmillennium, and the technology was adopted anddeveloped across Europe in the following millennia,Scandinavia being the last major region to beginworking metal, its industry based entirely onimported ores. The patchy distribution of metal oreswas a major stimulus to the development of tradingnetworks and mechanisms that ensured the regularsupply of metal ores and metal objects, resulting bythe second millennium in many shared cultural fea-tures across Europe. Metal artifacts were initially rareprestige goods of social significance, but graduallyalso included many tools necessary for everyday life.

Various methods of characterization have beenused in the attempt to match metal artifacts with thesources of the ores from which they were made, andrecently lead isotope analysis has yielded usefulresults for lead, silver, and copper. But there aremajor difficulties: Many of the ore sources exploitedin antiquity were small and have been worked out orare now unknown, and the mixing of ores, particu-larly by reusing scrap metal, makes characterizationdifficult or meaningless. The picture of prehistoric

European metal extraction and trade is thereforeincompletely known.

Some metal ores such as malachite, azurite, andhaematite (red ochre) were also used as pigments,the use of red ochre going back deep into Palae-olithic times.

Gold Alluvial gold was available in the rivers of theBalkans and was worked by the fifth millennium. Notall gold used in the Balkans was obtained locally,however: a significant proportion of the gold objectsfound in the Bulgarian cemetery of Varna came frommore distant sources in Armenia and the Caucasus.

By the late third millennium local gold sourceswere being exploited in Iberia, Brittany, and Ireland,and both unworked gold and artifacts such as per-sonal ornaments were being traded in the Atlanticregion. Around the same time the Otomani andÚnetice cultures of the Carpathian basin and centralEurope were making cups of sheet gold fromsources in Transylvania and Bohemia. Gold was usedand traded in increasing quantities from the latersecond millennium onward. In the late centuriesB.C. much of the gold in use in Celtic Europe camefrom the Mediterranean as coins paid to Celtic mer-cenaries and melted down as bullion.

Copper Copper working began in the Balkans andIberia during the fifth millennium, based on nativecopper and easily worked local oxide and carbonateores. During the fourth millennium copper objectsfrom the Balkans were being traded as far as Scandi-navia, but by the late fourth millennium these oreswere running out. The Fahlerz sulfide ores of theHarz and Slovakian Mountains and the AustrianAlps, which contained arsenic and antimony, nowbegan to be mined and traded. By the later thirdmillennium copper metallurgy was also being prac-ticed in western Europe and Italy, using sulfide cop-per ores from many sources.

At the same time copper began to be alloyedwith tin to produce bronze. Ore, smelted metal, andbronze artifacts were being widely traded by thesecond millennium, both Atlantic and central Euro-pean sources being exploited, while metal fromsources outside Europe was also traded into the


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southeast. By the Late Bronze Age bronze was com-mon enough to be widely used for manufacturingtools as well as weapons and ornaments, even inScandinavia, which imported all its copper and tin.Artifacts such as axes and swords were widelytraded, and two wrecks off the English coast showthat scrap metal was also moved between regions asa raw material.

Tin The sources of tin in Europe were extremelyrestricted, and its trade was therefore of key impor-

tance in determining the patterns of communica-tions across Europe. Cornwall was perhaps the prin-cipal source, though Galicia and the Bohemian OreMountains were also important. Small quantitieswere also obtained from Brittany, parts of Italy, andIberia, and perhaps Ireland and Serbia, and probablyfrom the steppe and the Near East.

Lead and Silver The main sources of silver in pre-historic Europe were the silver-lead ores of Iberia,the relatively pure silver of the Bohemian Ore


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5.3 Two fine Bronze Age spearheads and a palstave from Denmark, skillfully decorated. All bronzework inprehistoric Scandinavia was made from imported metal ores. (Worsaae. J. J. A. The Industrial Arts of Denmark.London: Chapman and Hall, 1882)

Mountains, and the electrum (gold and silver alloy)of Transylvania. Outside these regions silver was lit-tle used, but lead was traded and in the Atlanticregion was alloyed with copper in the Late BronzeAge. In the Late Iron Age, however, a considerablequantity of silver began to circulate in transalpineEurope as a result of trade with the Romans.

Iron and Iron-Age Metalwork During the earlyfirst millennium iron came to replace bronze as themain metal for making tools and weapons, allowingbronze to be devoted to the production of personalornaments and prestige objects such as parade armor,mirrors, horse trappings, and fine tableware. Iron oreswere widespread and most regions were able to uselocal sources, although the iron from major sourcessuch as the eastern Alps, the Holy Cross Mountains ofPoland, the Hunsrück-Eifel area, and Etruria was alsoexported. Iron artifacts, particularly weapons, also cir-culated widely in the first millennium, as did objects ofbronze, including decorated vessels, jewelry such asbracelets, and bronze cauldrons.

DECORATIVE MATERIALS

Glass and Faience The technology used for pro-ducing faience was developed in the Near East in thefifth millennium but may also have been indepen-dently invented in central Europe in the early sec-ond millennium, from whence it reached Britain andFrance. Analyses of the composition and manufac-turing details of faience beads show that they werelocally made in a number of different regions, suchas Wessex and southern Scotland.

Glass began to be produced around the sametime, probably in the Bohemian Ore Mountains, andcirculated in central Europe. During the LateBronze Age glass beads made in the Aegean andItaly were traded widely, and during the first millen-nium glass production became increasingly commonacross Europe and the range of forms, colors, anddecoration diversified. Raw glass was widely tradedand worked into beads, bracelets, and other smallobjects in oppida and other major settlements, forlocal use and for export.

Amber Neolithic coastal communities such asthose that made Pitted Ware are known to have col-

lected, worked, and traded amber to their GlobularAmphora neighbors in the fourth millennium, a pat-tern that probably characterized most of prehistory.The volume of amber in circulation can be gaugedfrom the discovery at Rospond, a TRB site inPoland, of a cache of some 1,100 pounds (500 kilo-grams). Most amber came from the coasts of theBaltic or the North Sea coast of Jutland, but somewas carried by the sea to the eastern shores ofBritain and to other North Sea coasts. It was tradedas far as Iberia, Italy, and Greece, and was particu-larly popular in the Iron Age.

African Materials The prehistoric inhabitants ofIberia obtained ivory from northwest Africa. Duringthe first millennium the Phoenicians and Carthagini-ans injected supplies of both African and Indianelephant ivory into the Mediterranean trading net-works, and possibly hippopotamus ivory. Some ofthis was traded into the European interior, where itwas used mainly for small objects. Ivory sphinxes andornaments of Mediterranean manufacture are knownfrom a wealthy Hallstatt D burial at Grafenbühl, andivory chains were among the goods said by Strabo tohave been imported by the British in the late firstcentury A.D.

Trade in ostrich eggshells followed a similar pat-tern, being imported from North Africa by the peopleof southern Iberia from the late third millennium andcirculating more widely in Europe, though not in anyquantity, from the later second millennium throughthe activities of Phoenician and Aegean traders.

Other Materials Many attractive materials wereused in the areas in which they occurred, at varioustimes in prehistory, but generally did not circulateoutside these regions. Jet, lignite, and cannel-coal(all forms of coal), and shale found in various parts ofBritain were used occasionally for making jewelry inthe Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. From theEarly Bronze Age jewelry and clothing accessories ofthese materials became more common and circu-lated widely in Britain. Vessels were also made fromlignite and shale. A related stone, sapropelite, foundin Bohemia, was worked in the Iron Age to makebangles, which were traded in central Europe as faras Switzerland.


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Schist was used in the fourth millennium insouthwest Iberia to make decorated plaques and“crosiers,” objects with a probable religious signifi-cance. In the same period callais was used to makebeads in northern Iberia; this material was usedmore widely in Iberia and in Brittany during the latefourth and earlier third millennium, but its useceased thereafter.

Shells were used for making ornaments by thepeople of coastal communities who ate their contents,but some also circulated widely from Palaeolithictimes onward. During the Mesolithic period spondy-lus shells from the Aegean were traded throughoutthe Mediterranean and in the Neolithic periodreached LBK settlements of central Europe. Dental-ium shells circulated among the communities of theAegean and the Balkans during the same periods.

Decorative stones, such as jasper, chalcedony,and jadeite, were used to make ornaments and othervalued objects, particularly in the Neolithic period.Some were traded over considerable distances, suchas the jadeite polished stone ax from the Alps thatwas deposited in the Somerset Levels in England.

Mediterranean coral gained widespread popular-ity in Iron Age Europe, where it was used for inlays,jewelry, and amulets.

PERISHABLE GOODS

Timber Much of Europe was forested in antiq-uity, and in temperate Europe the wood required forbuilding houses, vehicles, and boats and for manu-facturing a range of goods was usually locally avail-able to communities. Where it was not, othermaterials were substituted: For example, houses onOrkney, as at Skara Brae, were constructed of stoneinstead of timber.

In the Mediterranean, forests and woodland weremore restricted and timber had to be obtained fromareas often far from the communities that requiredit. Timber was among the goods sought by theGreeks in the first millennium B.C. as they estab-lished trading colonies around the Mediterraneanand Black Seas.

Furs and Hides Roman authors record furs andhides among the goods they obtained from Britain,Gaul, and northern Europe. Although there is no

archaeological evidence of trade in these perishablematerials, it is likely that in prehistoric times, as inrecorded history, furs were an important exportfrom Scandinavia, and they were probably amongthe goods exchanged by north European hunter-gatherers in return for the agricultural produce offarmers such as LBK.

Slaves The classical world, particularly theRomans, had a great need for slave labor. Theyobtained many slaves directly through warfare andraiding, but others they purchased from Celtic orGermanic tribes who had themselves acquired thecaptives in wars or raids. Dramatic evidence for theBritish slave trade comes from slave chains discoveredin the hillfort of Bigbury in Kent and among thevotive offerings deposited in the Welsh lake of LlynCellig Bach: circles of iron that were fixed around thenecks of captives, fastened together in a line withchains. Transalpine Europe was probably supplyingclassical cultures with slaves by the sixth century B.C.,when the Greeks began to trade up the Rhône. TheCelts themselves made relatively little use of slaves, sothe acquisition of war captives seems to have beenlargely for export, and the existence of an export mar-ket for slaves may indeed have stimulated raiding.

Animals The appearance of domestic caprinesamong the fauna in hunter-gatherer settlementssuch as those of the Ertebølle in the north, the Bug-Dnestr culture in the east, and Impressed Waregroups in the Mediterranean implies their originalacquisition from farming groups. These animalswere probably acquired by raiding or mutually prof-itable exchanges in areas where intrusive farmingcommunities came into contact with native hunter-gatherers and by gift exchange among those hunter-gatherer communities that had no direct contactwith agricultural settlers. Trade in and exchanges ofanimals, for instance, between pastoral groups andsettled communities, must have continued through-out prehistory, but it is hard to demonstrate after theinitial appearance of nonlocal species in a region.The Roman author Strabo recorded that the Celtsexported large quantities of salted meat, particularlypork, to Italy and Rome.

Strabo also listed hunting dogs among theRoman world’s valued imports from Late Iron Age


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Britain. In the other direction the Celtic worldacquired donkeys from the Romans, probably as aresult of Rome’s conquest of Gaul. Domesticatedhorses had been introduced into Europe during thefourth millennium, initially probably by incursivesteppe nomads. Although horses were bred there-after by European communities from local stock, thelarger steppe horses continued to be prized and wereamong the goods acquired by European communi-ties from the Scythians.

Wine In the sixth century B.C., when the Greeksbegan trading up the Rhône with the chiefdoms ofFrance and southern Germany, among the maininducements they offered were wine and the luxurytableware with which to serve it: Etruscan bronzeflagons and fine Attic pottery. As a diplomatic gift tothe leader at Mont Lassois they presented the Vixkrater, theoretically a vessel for mixing wine withwater, but extravagantly large and ostentatious. Thisunique object, made to order in Sparta or MagnaGraecia, was transported in pieces and reassembledby the Greeks in situ, as Greek letters labeling itssections demonstrate.

Some centuries later, the same inducements, wineand a wine service of fine pottery, were offered, withequal success, by the Romans to the leaders of Celtictribes in Gaul and Britain. The Romans exchangedthe wine at what was for them a very favorableexchange rate, a slave for one amphora of wine, asagainst five to six amphorae in Rome, for by the latecenturies B.C. large Roman estates were producing asurplus of wine that they were very happy to unload onthe barbarians who could offer valued raw materials inexchange. The volume of trade can be deduced fromthe quantities of amphorae found on settlements insouthern Gaul in the second century and those ofnorthern Gaul and southern England in the late sec-ond and first. These were used to transport wine bysea, while for land transport it was more practical tomove wine in wooden barrels and skin bags, bothreferred to in classical texts; these have left no trace.

Salt Salt was a vital dietary supplement for prehis-toric farmers whose daily fare was cereal based, andwas also important as a preservative. It was obtainedby evaporating brine from seawater, salt springs orsalt marshes, or mined from deposits of salt crystals

or brine within rocks; sources in the Halle region ofGermany and the Salzkammergut area of Austriawere particularly important. Surface deposits of saltwere being exploited at Cardona in Catalonia duringthe fourth millennium. By the later Neolithic saltwas being produced from brine in a number of sitesin eastern and central Europe and the Alps, such asBarycz in southern Poland and Ocna Muresului inRomania. Salt production greatly increased in theLate Bronze Age, salt being mined and evaporatedfrom seawater as well as from brine springs andpools. Salt production was a major Iron Age indus-try, for instance, at Droitwich in England, Seille inFrance, and Bad Nauheim in Germany, but espe-cially from Hallstatt and Dürrnberg bei Hallein inAustria. A number of Iron Age settlements, such asCamp de Château in eastern France and Hallstattitself, became wealthy on the proceeds of salt extrac-tion, and salt was a major item of trade.

MANUFACTURED GOODS

Pottery Despite being both heavy and breakable,pottery was often traded in prehistoric Europe, pre-sumably mainly by water. In many cases pots servedas containers for perishable goods; these can some-times by identified by residues that have survivedinside the vessels, but are usually unknown. Sometypes of pottery, however, were used exclusively fortransporting specific known commodities and aretherefore very informative. In particular, Romanamphorae were used to ship wine and other food-stuffs to various regions, including Celtic Europe;variations in the form of these amphorae providevery specific information about this trade. For exam-ple, from the late second century B.C. Roman winewas transported in a type of amphora known asDressel type 1A. Considerable quantities wereshipped to Brittany and thence into southern En-gland via the port of Hengistbury Head on theSolent. After the Roman conquest of Gaul, however,around which time the style of amphora becametaller and thinner (Dressel type 1B), the focus ofRoman trade here shifted to southeast England,operating between the Seine-Rhine region and theThames. Fish sauce and olive oil were also shippedto this region, in different styles of amphora (Dres-sel types 6–11 and 20).


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Pottery was also traded for itself, usually as a lux-ury or prestige commodity. In the Iron Age fineGreek drinking vessels accompanied the winetraded into sixth-century barbarian Europe, andfine Gallic and Roman pottery was traded alongsidethe wine that reached southern England in the firstcentury. Although the quality and appearance ofpottery vessels must themselves have been attrac-tions, the circulation of different styles and forms ofpottery often related principally to their meaning:Particular pottery vessels might display wealth,demonstrate social status, or indicate participationin a religious or social activity. In some cases it wasthe pottery that circulated, in others just the style,with the pottery itself being locally made. Forexample, in third- and early second-millenniumBritain a succession of wares appeared first as pres-tige goods and gradually became more common andless valuable, until they became the commondomestic ware, and a new prestige ware appeared:these included Grooved Ware, Beakers, and FoodVessels. Each probably represented more than afashion in pottery shape and decoration when it firstappeared, being used in socially and ritually signifi-cant activities involving alcohol, drugs, and the dis-posal of the dead.

In other cases pottery was traded for utilitarianreasons. The graphite coating on Late Iron Age pot-tery made in Brittany, for example, was an effectiveheat diffuser, and thus this ware was traded for culi-nary use. Graphite-bearing clays were extracted incentral Europe during the Bronze and Iron Ages,and graphite-tempered wares made from this claywere particularly popular east of the Rhine from thesecond century B.C.; they were attractive as well aspractical.

Textiles The vast majority of textiles in prehis-toric Europe were manufactured in the home, oflocally grown flax and other plant fibers and of woolfrom domestic flocks. In the Late Iron Age somemore intensive production may have taken place;woollen garments were among the commodities thatthe Romans imported from transalpine Europe,including the sagum, a heavy cloak that could also beused as a blanket, and the byrrus, a thick hoodedcloak resembling a duffle coat, both made from thecoarse wool of Gallic sheep, which repelled rain and

insulated even when wet. Those made by the Nerviiof Belgium were most highly valued, but Britishproducts also commanded a good price.

Silk, made in distant China, occasionally reachedthe elite of Iron Age Europe, probably via thenomadic cultures of central Asia.

RoutesTopographical features, vegetation, natural hazards,and other environmental constraints and opportu-nities must always have been of major importance in


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5.4 A Beaker from Green Low, England. Thisdistinctive ware was popular over much of westernEurope; although sometimes connected with thesupposed movements of a “Beaker Folk,” the spreadof Beaker pottery probably illustrates the spread offashions and ideas. (Lubbock, John. PrehistoricTimes. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1890)

determining which routes were used, and so theseoften stayed the same down the ages. Other, human,considerations, however, dictated the choice ofroutes in use at any one time: the pattern of settle-ments across the landscape; the nature and tech-nology of the transport available at the time; thecreation or existence of constructed roads and track-ways, ferries, and bridges; the extent to whichforests had been cleared; the purpose of the jour-ney being undertaken; the relationships betweenthe traveler and his or her community and thecommunities through whose territory the travelermight pass (ranging from actively welcomingthrough neutral and placable to violently hostile ordangerous); and so on.

LAND

Routes in the interior often followed rivers. Thesecould be traveled by boat, often the most practicalmeans of transport, particularly when transportingbulky goods. Travelers on foot or with vehicles andanimals needed supplies of water, which were readilyprovided by rivers. The banks of rivers often formedeasily used pathways, relatively free of vegetation,and river valleys created routes through hills andmountains that would otherwise present an obstacle.River valleys were also frequently the best route tothe sea, especially where there were coastal cliffs.Conversely, rivers often presented a barrier separat-ing the lands on either side, and routes followedriverbanks to the places where crossings could mosteasily be made, whether by fords, ferries, causeways,stepping-stones or, in some cases, bridges (such asLa Tène).

Away from the rivers, hills and mountains playeda major role in determining the routes that were fol-lowed. Passes through major mountain barrierschanneled communications as did saddles betweenhills, and routes across and around hills and moun-tains remained unchanged for millennia unless thetopography itself changed, as a result of events suchas rockfalls or earthquakes.

In areas without significant relief such as thesteppe and the North European Plain, other con-straints operated to dictate routes, such as the avail-ability of water and the distribution of marshyground.

SEA

In coastal regions and lands with dissected or moun-tainous topography, communications were ofteneasier by sea than by land; this was true, for example,both of Greece and of Scandinavia. Most sea voy-ages were likely to have been over short distances,such as between the coastal sites or islands exploitedat various times of year by Mesolithic hunter-gath-erers like those who visited Oronsay in theHebrides, Vaengo So and Dyrholm in Denmark, orthe Greek island of Melos. Fishing expeditions alsotook people out to sea; although many fish werecaught in coastal waters, some such as ling werefished in deeper water; similarly, sea mammals couldbe taken on shores where they came to breed orwere beached, but they were also pursued andcaught out at sea.

Longer voyages may nevertheless have beenundertaken from early times. Some were by pioneerscolonizing coasts and islands, either deliberately set-ting out to reach visible or suspected land (such asShetland, visible from Orkney) or returning to placeswhere they had made unintentional landfall afterbeing driven off course by storms. Some fishing expe-ditions may also have involved longer journeys, fol-lowing the annual migration routes of fish such as cod.Familiarity with distant seas and the lands they edgedled to voyages undertaken to obtain, directly or bytrade, the materials and products of other regions. By4000 B.C., therefore, if not earlier, the sea-lanes fromAnatolia to the Shetlands and Scandinavia wereknown and being traveled, probably generally as aseries of overlapping shorter routes known to theinhabitants of each region.

Classical sources show that seafarers, wheneverpossible, followed the coasts and preferred to voyageby day, putting in to camp on shore each night; it isunlikely that prehistoric Europeans differed in thisrespect. The ability to do this, however, dependedon local conditions such as the availability of beachesor inlets where landings could be made, the currentsand depth of water along the shore, and the absenceof dangerous rocks, and some journeys inevitablyinvolved crossing open water for several days onend, without possibility of landfall. The most dra-matic example of this is the journey to Iceland,apparently familiar to Scottish seafarers by the later


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first millennium: a voyage of six days, possibly bro-ken by landing in the Faroes.

ATLANTIC SEABOARD AND THE WEST

Archaeological evidence such as the distribution ofmaterials away from their source areas, similaritiesin megalithic architecture between different regions,and the colonization of islands (including Shetlandby 3900 and possibly 5500 B.C.) shows that the sea-lanes of the Atlantic were well known to the peopleof the Atlantic facade by the fourth millennium andprobably considerably earlier. By the time that theMediterranean voyager Pytheas recorded his obser-vations of Britain and the north, Iceland was knownas a land of volcanoes and frozen seas six days’ jour-ney from Scotland; it is uncertain whether Pytheashimself visited Iceland, but it had probably beenknown to north European seafarers long before thisperiod.

Seafaring along the Atlantic coast generally oper-ated in several overlapping and interlinked sections,which also linked with overland routes into theEuropean interior along the major rivers.

The Gulf of Cádiz, centered on Huelva andCádiz, was the southernmost section of the Euro-pean Atlantic sea-lanes, from the northwest cornerof North Africa to Cape St. Vincent. Travelersbetween the Atlantic and the Mediterranean unableto pass through the Strait of Gibraltar could traveloverland, following the Guadalquivir inland fromthe Gulf of Cádiz to the pass of Despeñaperros andthence along the valley of the Segura River to theCosta Blanca. The Guadalquivir, the most impor-tant river in southern Iberia, also gave access to aregion rich in metal ores.

From Cape St. Vincent to Cabo da Roca theAtlantic seaboard was dominated by the estuary ofthe Tagus, a major focus of prehistoric settlement.The river, navigable for 120 miles (190 kilometers)gave access to the Spanish meseta. From Cabo daRoca to Finisterre was the final west Iberian sectionof the Atlantic coast, and from this region the Douroprovided access into the interior of Galicia, anothermajor area of settlement. These three maritimeregions were probably linked by regular contacts,and in the first millennium Finisterre in Galicia(Oestrymnis), a major source of tin, was probably

the northern limit of most Phoenician and Romansailing expeditions.

The northern (Cantabrian) coast of Iberia, thesouthern margin of the Bay of Biscay, presented anarrow coastal strip backed by mountains, with noeasy access to the interior. While some local ship-ping connected the inhabitants of this coast with oneanother and with the southern French Atlanticcoast, the main sea-lane from northwest Iberiacrossed the Bay of Biscay directly to Brittany, amajor node in international trade routes. From heresea routes led to Cornwall, which maintainedimportant links with Brittany throughout most ofprehistory, into the English Channel and into theIrish Sea. The latter formed a further section of theAtlantic seaways, as well as providing east-west linksbetween Ireland and the British mainland, and led toroutes along the west coast of Scotland to Orkneyand Shetland and thence to Iceland or Scandinavia.

FRANCE

While Atlantic communities traveled the Atlanticsea-lanes linking Iberia to Brittany, the main routesfor Mediterranean access to the Atlantic lay alongthe rivers of France. North of the Pyrenees, a routeran along the valley of the Aude and through theCarcassonne Gap, to link up with the Garonne,which flowed out into the Atlantic through theGironde estuary. Major settlements, includingNarbo (Narbonne), Tolosa (Toulouse), and Burdi-gala (Bordeaux), emphasize the importance of thisroute in the later first millennium, but it was a majorline of communications far earlier, for example, pro-viding the route by which the Beaker “package”spread to the Golfe du Lions and eastern Spain.Inhospitable sandbars and marshy shores stretchednorth and south from the mouth of the Gironde, buta sea crossing linked it to the Bay of Quiberon andthence to the coasts of Brittany. Farther north themouth of the Loire, another major trade artery, alsoopened into the Atlantic just south of Quiberon.

The Loire and its tributaries led into the MassifCentral and the area to its north, from which a shortoverland journey brought the traveler to the Rhône-Saône corridor. This led south into the Mediter-ranean, a route exploited by the Greeks, whoestablished a major trading settlement at Massalia


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(modern Marseilles, a major port to this day). Formuch of prehistory this was the main route linkingsouthern Brittany and the Atlantic to the Mediter-ranean. The Loire-Rhône axis also led north to theRhineland and routes into the heart of Europe. Far-ther north the Seine was also a short journey fromthe Rhône-Saône corridor; this gave access to theEnglish Channel.

THE NORTH

Short sea crossings linked Britain and northwestFrance across the English Channel: from the west-ern part of the Breton peninsula to Cornwall, andfrom the Rance estuary and the mouth of the Seineto the Solent shore of southern England, a coastlinerich in natural harbors from which five major rivers,the Frome, Stour, Avon, Test, and Itchen, led intothe English interior. This was one of the main axesof communication between Britain and continentalEurope at many times in prehistory; in the first cen-tury B.C., for example, the substantial volume oftraffic along this route is shown by the concentrationof wine amphorae from Gaul at the port of Hengist-bury Head.

East of the Solent the English Channel narrowsin the Straits of Dover, the gateway between theAtlantic and the North Sea, where the complex pat-tern of winds and tides made local knowledge essen-tial for passage. Another major route between theinterior of Britain and the continent was the cross-ing between the Thames and the Seine and theRhine; with the Roman conquest of Gaul this super-seded the Solent shore as the main trade route, lead-ing to the development first of Colchester and thenof London as major centers of international trade.

Britain’s eastern seaboard, with major rivers suchas the Humber giving access to the interior, pro-vided many further links across the North Sea withthe rivers of the Low Countries and the NorthEuropean Plain and with the coasts of Scandinavia.In the northern lands communications were mainlyby sea since the mountains and dissected terrain ofScandinavia made overland travel slow and difficult.The narrow neck of land at the base of the Danishpeninsula, however, offered an overland shortcutbetween the North Sea and the Baltic, which musthave been used in prehistory as it was in historical

times. The Baltic and the Gulf of Bothnia in turnlinked Scandinavia and Finland with northern Rus-sia and the lands of the eastern North EuropeanPlain.

CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE

The major rivers crossing the North European Plainwere the main arteries of communications betweenthe north and central Europe. The Oder and theVistula connected the Baltic with the area to thenorth and east of the Carpathians, and the Oder val-ley cut a passage through the mountain barrier,between the western end of the Carpathians and theSudetes, into the Carpathian basin and HungarianPlain. The Vistula linked to the Dnestr, providing aneastern route to the Black Sea.

Farther west, routes followed the Elbe and Wesersouth from the North Sea, but the Rhine was themajor highway, linking British and North Sea trafficwith the rivers of France in the west and the Danubeto the south.

The Danube formed the principal route southfrom the Alpine foreland, carving a passage into theCarpathian basin. Joined by the Drava, Sava,Morava, and other rivers that gave access to themountains of the western Balkans, and by the Tiszaand other rivers descending from the Carpathians,the Danube formed the Iron Gates Gorge, whichcreated an exit from the Carpathian basin betweenthe Carpathians and the Balkan Mountains, flowingfrom there into the Black Sea. The Rhine-Danubecorridor, therefore, was the major north-south routethrough the center of Europe, but it could also be abarrier to communications between east and west.

SOUTHEAST EUROPE AND THEMEDITERRANEAN

While the lands bordering the north of the BlackSea were relatively open, the mountainous terrain ofGreece and the western Balkans made land commu-nications difficult and favored travel by sea, throughthe Aegean and Adriatic Seas, the former connectingGreece with Anatolia and the seaborne trade routesof the eastern Mediterranean, the latter linking theBalkans with eastern Italy. At the head of the Adri-atic the valleys of the Drava and Sava provided a


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route around the Julian Alps into the Carpathianbasin and transalpine Europe, much used throughthe ages.

Sea routes in the Mediterranean generally stayedclose to land. European connections between theeast and west basins of the Mediterranean, there-fore, passed through the hazards of the treacherousStraits of Messina between Italy and Sicily: the loca-tion of “Scylla” and “Charybdis” of classical illrepute. The coastal lands of western Italy, France,and Spain permitted some travel, but communica-tions in the western Mediterranean basin, as in theeast, were largely by sea. For example, the distribu-tion of obsidian from the island of Lipari shows thatit was brought by sea to various locations on theCalabrian coast, from which it was traded into theinterior, rather than taken to the closest land, Sicily,and traded overland from there. From the westernbasin of the Mediterranean the Rhône gave accessto the interior of Europe. Other well-traveledroutes led from northern Italy through the Alpinepasses into France and Germany; a cache of goldtorcs and armlets hidden beneath a rock at Erstfeldprovides striking evidence of the passage of a Celtictrader along the route leading through the St. Gott-hard Pass. In contrast, passes through the Apennineswere few and difficult to negotiate, channelingsouthward travel by land or sea along the east andwest coasts of Italy.

As in the Atlantic, early travel in the Mediter-ranean involved numerous short and overlappingroutes. Most followed the coasts, but there were alsoroutes between islands and between the islands andthe mainland. These were generally used only atcertain times of year, depending particularly on sea-sonal patterns of currents, winds, and weather. Evi-dence shows that while Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, andCrete were settled and incorporated into communi-cations networks early in the postglacial period, itwas not until the late sixth millennium that theBalearics and Malta were settled. During the secondmillennium international trade linked the civiliza-tions of the eastern Mediterranean basin, includingthe Egyptians, the states of the Levant and Anatolia,and the Minoans and Mycenaeans. The Mycenaeansalso established long-distance trade routes as farwest as Sardinia by the 14th century B.C., and a fewcenturies later the Phoenicians were establishing

trading colonies in the central and western Mediter-ranean, followed in the eighth century by theGreeks; the entire length and breadth of theMediterranean was now being traversed by seabornetraders. In the absence of literary evidence it cannotbe conclusively determined whether long-distanceexpeditions were made earlier, but archaeologicalevidence indicates close links among the inhabitantsof the Tyrrhenian Sea and many contacts among thecultures of the western Mediterranean basin, illus-trated, for example, by the rapid spread of theBeaker package.

The Strait of Gibraltar formed a bottleneck thatrestricted communications between the Mediter-ranean and the Atlantic seas. Only at certain times ofyear when the wind direction was favorable was itpossible to sail from the Mediterranean into theAtlantic; a strong current made it easier to sail fromwest to east, but this was still dependent upon favor-able winds. As the winds were not always reliable,passage of the Straits could sometimes be delayedfor several months. Nevertheless, during the sixthmillennium communications or the movement ofcolonists through the Straits brought Neolithicplants and animals to Estremadura in southern Por-tugal, the first demonstrable connection betweenthe seas. Unknown numbers of prehistoric seafarersmade the journey in either direction before thePhoenicians in the 11th century established the firsthistorically recorded Mediterranean colonies on theAtlantic seaboard.

LAND TRANSPORT

FootMost travel by land was on foot: Over short dis-tances people walked between their settlement andtheir fields or pastures or visited relatives in neigh-boring settlements; traders and itinerant craftsmenwalked over longer distances, as did transhumantpastoralists, accompanied by pack animals. The Ice-man, who died in the Alps some 5,000 years ago, wasjourneying on foot, carrying his equipment in a


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backpack and on his person. Mercenaries, attested inthe Iron Age, also traveled considerable distancesfrom their native villages in western or centralEurope as far as Egypt, North Africa, and Greece,while bands of Celtic raiders penetrated Asia Minor.

From the later Mesolithic period onward, trans-port over snow was facilitated by the use of skis,sledges, and snowshoes, though the evidence is veryslim. Examples of Mesolithic sledges and skis werefound in north European bogs; a pine-wood runnerfound at Mesolithic Heinola in Finland came from alarge sledge, probably drawn by dogs; part of aBronze Age burial chamber at Pustopolje in Bosniawas made from a reused sledge runner; and a Cata-comb Grave kurgan at Novaya Kvasnikova in Vol-gograd contained a burial furnished with a sledgewith wooden runners. Sledges were also probablywidely used for carrying goods even without snow,although there is no clear evidence of this; they wereused in this way into recent times in Britain.

Vis I (Russia) At this eighth-millennium Mesolithicsite fragments of skis were found, made from substan-tial hardwood logs. One ski had an elk’s head carvedon it; this acted as a brake.

AnimalsBy the fourth millennium, if not before, animalswere being used for transport: Farmers used cattlefor localized transport; dogs probably drew sledgesin the north; pastoralists may have loaded somegoods onto their sheep and goats, as in more recenttimes (a sheep could carry loads around 22 pounds(10 kilograms) in weight); and by the second millen-nium horses were probably employed as pack ani-mals. Donkeys were used to carry goods and peoplein the Near East and the Mediterranean in theBronze Age, but they were not introduced into tem-perate Europe until Roman times. The date whenhorses began to be ridden is uncertain; people in theNear East began to ride horses by the late third mil-lennium, but this only became significant there inthe first millennium, when cavalry became impor-tant in warfare. In the steppe, however, horse ridingmay have begun earlier. It is not possible to establish

whether the antler cheek pieces that have beenfound in the steppe and the Carpathian basin in theearly second millennium formed part of a harnessfor riding or for traction. Art, literary accounts, andtrappings in graves demonstrate that horse ridingwas practiced by the Iron Age in transalpine Europe.Horses were valuable possessions and were probablyowned only by elite individuals.

VehiclesWheeled vehicles appeared in eastern and centralEurope during the fourth millennium and weredrawn initially by oxen. Analysis of ox bones from theTRB settlement of Schalkenburg shows pathologicalchanges to the hip bones, which indicates that theanimals had been used to draw heavy loads, and a pothandle from TRB Kreznica Jara depicts a pair ofyoked oxen. These animals continued to pull wagonsand plows in later times, though horses might also beused. Horses served mainly to draw chariots, used bythe warrior elite in warfare. Elite burials with wheeledvehicles as biers or grave goods demonstrate theimportance attached to them; these appeared in thesteppe from the late fourth millennium and occasion-ally in Bronze Age northern Europe, and in a numberof Iron Age chieftains’ graves.

Models and artistic representations on potterydepict the early vehicles as four-wheeled wagons


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5.5 A Bronze Age rock carving of a wagon drawnby two horses, from Scandinavia (Worsaae, J. J. A.The Industrial Arts of Denmark. London: Chapmanand Hall, 1882)

with solid wheels and frames. Wagons in the steppesometimes had an arched superstructure, making thewagons into shelters while the nomads were on themove; these are not known in Europe, where cartsand wagons were probably used mainly for trans-porting goods over short distances. The introduc-tion of lighter spoked wheels in the secondmillennium provided the impetus for the develop-ment of two-wheeled vehicles whose main use wasfor transport into battle; by the first millennium thewar chariot had further developed into a fightingplatform with a light wicker superstructure. Four-wheeled wagons continued in use for transport.

In the absence of made roads, the utility of wheeledvehicles for transport was relatively restricted. Cartruts on tracks preserved on old land surfaces, forexample, beneath barrows, show that vehicles wereused, but except in areas of flat unbroken terrain withlittle vegetation, such as the steppe, their use wasprobably generally over short distances, such as onthe well-beaten tracks between fields and settlementsand on paths giving access to water transport; some-times trackways were built to facilitate the use ofsuch paths.

Roads and TracksTravel overland generally followed paths along rivervalleys when the ground was dry. Alternative routesran along higher ground, for use when conditionswere too wet in the valley bottoms. These higherpaths also gave a good view of the landscape, allow-ing travelers to see their route clearly. The Ridge-way, running along the northern edge of theBerkshire Downs, is a well-known example of suchroutes, used continuously from remote antiquity upto the present day; it forms part of the Icknield Way,which runs from East Anglia to the south coast ofEngland. Both in valleys and on higher ground pathswere formed and fixed by constant use. Where theyran between fixed features, such as embanked fieldboundaries, continuous use might create a hollowway, the ground along the path being eroded by thepassage of people and domestic animals, especiallycattle; these are a common feature of Iron Age farm-ing landscapes in Britain. Small portions of paths

have occasionally been located, such as the 65-foot(20-meter) stretch preserved beneath the mid-fourth-millennium TRB mound at Flintbek in Ger-many, which bears the wheel ruts of carts.

TRACKWAYS

Where routes had to traverse difficult terrain such asboggy ground or shallow water, trackways might beconstructed. These are known from various areas inEurope, notably England, Ireland, the Netherlands,southern Scandinavia, and Lower Saxony, and havebeen intensively investigated in the Somerset Levelsin western England. They ranged in complexity andsubstance from handfuls of brushwood strewn overboggy patches on footpaths to carefully constructedroads of large timbers. Some substantial wide roadsin northern Germany, such as Ipfweger Moor, wereas much as 6 miles (10 kilometers) long and wereconstructed of massive split logs laid side by sideover supporting timbers, along which wheeled vehi-cles could have been driven. Tracks might also bebuilt over stretches of ground that saw intensive useby wheeled transport, such as that at Wittemoor.Some, such as Corlea in Ireland, may also have built,at least in part, as a demonstration of the power andprestige of local leaders.

Star Carr (Yorkshire, England) The oldest builttrack in Europe, a series of split trunks of poplar oraspen laid in parallel across a short stretch of boggyground, was discovered between the camp area andthe lake at the well-known ninth-millennium Meso-lithic settlement at Star Carr.

Wittemoor Trackway XLII (Lower Saxony, Ger-many) A two-mile (3-kilometer)-long corduroy roadwas constructed here around 135 B.C. and kept incareful repair. It is thought to have been built to takecarts loaded with iron ore to the River Hunte, wherethe ore was loaded onto boats for further transport tothe main highway of the Weser.

Corlea 1 (Co. Longford, Ireland) This massivetimber road, 13 feet (4 meters) wide and 1.24 miles(2 kilometers) long, is of Iron Age date, and runsacross two stretches of boggy ground. It was con-structed from at least 375 mature oak trees: Round-


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wood sleepers were laid longitudinally on theground and covered by a series of planks, each ofwhich had a hole at either end through which pegswere driven into the bog to hold them in place.

SOMERSET LEVELS

The Somerset Levels in western England is a wet-land region that in periods of heavy rainfall, as in theIron Age, has had large stretches of shallow water,reed marsh, or swamp, while at other times, whenthe climate has been drier, it has been peatbog.Access to the resources of dry islands within theLevels was by boat when the area was flooded, but inorder to cross boggy areas the people of the region,living on the surrounding higher ground, builttrackways across the Levels. The earliest, known asthe Sweet Track, was constructed of timber felled inthe winter of 3807–6 B.C.; it was used and repairedfor around 10 years and then abandoned. This sub-stantial track was built by laying a rail, made of polesof ash, alder, hazel, and elm, across the wet marshyground. Pairs of large roundwood pegs were driveninto the marsh diagonally across the rail, forming aV-shape above it into which a surface of oak and ashplanks was laid and anchored at intervals withsmaller pegs of coppiced hazel driven into the peatthrough holes in the planks.

Some later trackways in the Levels were simplepaths made of bundles of brushwood laid over thedamp surface. Others were made of hurdles of cop-piced hazel, pegged down on the bog surface. Indi-vidual panels were laid side by side and fastenedtogether with withies or the ends of the hurdle rods.The Eclipse Track, created in the second millen-nium, was made of a continuous length of hurdling,composed of individual panels that had been joinedby weaving in extra rods that ran over the breaksbetween them.

WATER TRANSPORT

Except in mountain regions, water provided the eas-iest form of transport, especially of goods in bulk.

Both inland and seagoing boats were in use by theMesolithic period. As well as fishing and carryingcargo, boats were used as ferries to take people andanimals across rivers and lakes and between islands,and to carry war bands on raiding expeditions.

BoatsBoats suitable for use on rivers and other inland watermust have been used in the earlier Mesolithic period;although none have yet been recovered a number ofpaddles have been found. From the later Mesolithiconward various river craft have been found, but therecord is very patchy; a number of sturdy dugoutcanoes have been discovered, but less substantialboats such as coracles and rafts have rarely survivedand often only fragments of plank-built vessels havebeen recovered. Boats built of planks are known fromthe late third millennium onward, but may have beenin use earlier. Boats are depicted in the rock art ofScandinavia, but it is not possible to gain muchinsight into their construction and appearance fromthese schematic representations. Rather more infor-mative are occasional models, such as the CaergwrleCastle shale bowl inlaid with gold from Bronze AgeWales, showing oars and ribs, the Iron Age sheet goldvessel from Broighter in Ireland, the fifth-centuryB.C. gold model from Dürrnberg in Germany, fittedwith pivoted oars, and the Roos Carr wooden boatmodel fitted with an animal figurehead from LateBronze Age Humberside, England, in which standfive warriors. No prehistoric European seagoing ves-sels are known; several wrecks have been found, butin every case they have been identified only from thedistribution of their surviving cargo since no struc-tural remains of them have survived. Evidence of sea-faring, therefore, comes indirectly from evidence ofthe colonization of islands such as the Hebrides dur-ing the Mesolithic period, the distribution of tradedgoods and materials, the presence of deep-sea fish andsea mammals among food remains, and literarysources of the classical period.

RAFTS

Rafts may have been used in the Mediterranean andon lakes and rivers in the European interior, but


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would not have been suitable for use on the cold seasof the Atlantic and the north. None survive beforeRoman times, but two rafts from second-centuryA.D. Strasbourg made of logs fastened together withwooden pegs and probably cord lashings recall clas-sical descriptions of vessels used by the Celts. Cae-sar, for instance, refers to the Celts’ use of log raftsto cross rivers.

DUGOUTS

Dugout canoes are the first known water craft, theearliest surviving examples, from Pesse in theNetherlands and Noyen-sur-Seine in France, dat-ing to the eighth millennium B.C., and they contin-ued in use throughout prehistory; they include amid-fourth-millennium example from the Char-ente in France, a late third-millennium examplefrom Locharbiggs in Scotland, and a number oflater boats from English and Danish rivers and

estuaries, Swiss lakes, and elsewhere. Their use ineastern Spain is mentioned by the Roman authorStrabo. Dugout canoes were heavy, not very stable,and not easily maneuverable, so they must gener-ally have been used in relatively calm waters such asrivers and lakes. Those known at present were notseaworthy; paired (joined) boats, described by Cae-sar in use by Celts on rivers, would have been sta-ble enough for use on the sea, but there is noindication that any of the known specimens werejoined in any way.

Canoes were fashioned from long straight treetrunks, the majority of oak, though lime, pine, andsometimes aspen or ash were also used. The outsidewas shaped using adzes and axes of stone or metal,while the inside was hollowed out with tools (includ-ing wedges) or fire, or both. Heart rot was commonin mature oak trunks, making it necessary to fill inthe stern end of the canoe with a transom board, fit-ted into a groove.


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5.6 A reconstruction of log boats under construction and in use. In many cases the work of hollowing out thetree trunk was made easier by heart rot, which destroyed the tree’s center. (Figuier, Louis. Primitive Man.London: Chatto and Windus, 1876)

Tybrind Vig (Fyn, Denmark) Two dugout canoesdated around 4400 B.C. were found in this laterMesolithic settlement. The larger one was 31 feet(9.5 meters) long, carved from a lime tree trunk,with a square-cut stern, and could have taken a crewof six to eight people. A hearth of clay and sand hadbeen constructed in the center of both canoes; it issuggested that this reflects their use for night fishingfor eels. Also found were 10 heart-shaped paddles ofash, two of them beautifully decorated with geomet-ric patterns.

Hasholme (North Humberside, England) A largelogboat from Hasholme was dated by den-drochronology to 322–277 B.C. Nearly 42 feet (13meters) long and 3 feet 6 inches (1.4 meters) broad,it was fashioned out of an oak trunk that was around800 years old at the time of felling. Heart rotthroughout the trunk made it easy to hollow out butalso made it necessary to close both ends, by insert-ing a transom at the stern and a sophisticatedarrangement of timbers at the bows, fastened withcleats and treenails. A steering platform was added atthe stern. A series of holes along the sides may havetaken lashings that secured covers to keep the cargodry. The vessel’s final cargo when it sank was jointsof beef.

Brigg (Lincs, England) This early first-millen-nium B.C. logboat was made from a whole oak treetrunk, with oak bottom planking and a fitted oaktransom at the stern. Repairs had been made to itby sewing or lashing on wooden patches, caulkedwith moss. The vessel was 48 feet (14.78 meters)long and its girth near its butt was 19 feet (5.9meters). Raised ridges inside may have marked thestations of three pairs of paddlers. A platform at thestern allowed steersmen to operate steering pad-dles. It could carry a crew of up to 26 paddlers or acrew of five with a cargo of around 5.6 short tons(5.5 tonnes).

Björke (Sweden) This first-century A.D. logboat,23 feet, three inches (7.16 meters) long, was modi-fied by the addition of a plank to each side to make ahigher-sided vessel; these were fastened with ironrivets and lashed to cleats in the dugout’s base.

HIDE AND BARK BOATS

Hide boats such as coracles and currachs were prob-ably used from the Mesolithic period, when deep-seafish such as ling and sea mammals such as seals andeven perhaps whales were caught at sea, and havecontinued in use into modern times; they were fre-quently mentioned by classical authors, showingtheir regular use from Iberia to Britain. Tantalizinglylittle evidence of these, however, survives: soil tracesof a wicker framework, possibly such a boat, from anEarly Bronze Age burial at Dalgety in Scotland, apossible coracle used for a burial in the Early BronzeAge cemetery at Barns Farm, also in Scotland,another from Corbridge in northern England, andone timber possibly from a currach at Ballinderry inIreland. These vessels were constructed of a wickerframework covered with hides; sometimes theymight have ribs and a keel of light timbers. Somerock engravings from Scandinavia and Russia maydepict such boats, and they are known to have beenused in the Mediterranean by the mid-first millen-nium B.C. They were very versatile, being easily con-structed, very buoyant, stable enough for seatransport, and light enough to be carried, for exam-ple, between rivers or along stretches of river toodangerous for navigation. They ranged in size fromone-man circular vessels propelled with a paddle toboats with sails and oars that could accommodate upto a dozen people.

Similar light seaworthy vessels may have beenmade from bark, carefully cut from the tree trunk asa cylinder or half-cylinder and shaped by soakingand heating. If one piece of bark was too small, theboat could be extended by sewing on extra pieces,caulking the joints with resin. The ends were alsosewn together and a wooden framework inserted.The earliest example of a bark boat from Europedates to the first millennium A.D., but such boatscould have been made from Mesolithic times whensuitable trees became available.

Broighter (Co. Derry, Ireland) A model boat ofsheet gold, dated to the first century B.C., may depicta currach. It was equipped with nine pairs of oarsand rowing thwarts but also had a stepped mast anda steering oar. The boat was also furnished with a


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four-hook anchor, boat hooks, and poles, probablyfor punting.

PLANK-BUILT BOATS

Vessels built of planks are known by the Bronze Ageand are probably depicted in rock art. The earliestsurviving evidence is one of the three boats fromFerriby, dated around 2000 B.C.; a single plank fromanother such boat, found at Caldicot in Wales, alsodated to the earlier second millennium B.C.

These boats were built of planks split from treetrunks, generally of oak, and green timber wasprobably preferred for ease of shaping. Timbers forboat building were often stored underwater to givethem the pliancy necessary for shaping the boat;heat, tension, and pressure were applied to warp thetimbers into the desired shape. Prehistoric Euro-pean boats were probably all built as a shell ofplanks to which the internal framework was added;the alternative method, constructing a frameworkover which the shell was built, appears in boats builtin Britain and on the Rhine during the Romanperiod, and may have been a local developmentinspired by the earlier technology of hide boats(essentially a skeleton covered by skins, translatedhere into planks).

Boats built with a keel were stronger and morestable than those without, which were not suitablefor use on the open sea. The keel also provided astep for a mast, which could also be stepped inshears; although none of the surviving prehistoricEuropean vessels had provision for a mast, Iron AgeEuropean sailing ships were recorded by classicalauthors, such as those of the Veneti, a sea-tradingGallic tribe in Brittany.

Prehistoric examples have been found only of theless stable vessels suitable for river and estuarine use;they were often flat-bottomed, long, and narrow.Three British seaworthy vessels are known from theRoman period, however, from Blackfriars in Lon-don, Barland’s Farm on the Severn, and St. PeterPort in Guernsey, and it is possible that the partiallypreserved Dover boat was also a seagoing craft. Cae-sar’s description of the ships of the Veneti (whichnumbered around 220, a sizable navy) indicate thatseagoing vessels had a shallow draught to allow themto operate in shoals and shallows and a high prow

and stern to allow them to ride heavy seas. Hethought that their use of leather or hide rather thancloth for sails was also designed to stand up to roughweather. The sole remnant of such a vessel so fardiscovered is an iron anchor with 22 feet (6.5meters) of iron chain, from a hillfort near PooleHarbour in southern England. Deep-hulled shipswith a mast and yardarm supported by stays and aside rudder for steering are depicted on the coins ofthe British king Cunobelin. Sails were used onMediterranean shipping by the beginning of the sec-ond millennium and may well have been adopted byAtlantic seafarers from the Phoenicians around theend of the millennium.

The earliest plank-built vessels were constructedof planks sewn together with strong thread, bastcord, or withies of yew or willow. They were eitherfastened by tying short threads through pairedholes in adjacent planks or by running a continuousthread through the timbers. Often the boats weredesigned so that the fastenings were countersunk,to prevent them being snagged or abraded.Treenails were also used to fasten together plankboats, and iron nails were beginning to be used bythe fifth century B.C. Cleats and transverse timberswere also used to hold the planks together. Thegaps between the planks were caulked using a vari-ety of materials: These included moss and well-greased wool, while seaweed (possibly reeds inactuality) was reportedly used by the Veneti. Oiland fat were used to make the boat timbers water-proof and to discourage the growth of plants.

Dover Boat (Dover, England) Part of an oakplank boat stitched with yew withies, originallyprobably around 42–49 feet (13–15 meters) long andup to 7 feet (2.2 meters) wide, dating from the 14thcentury B.C. was found at Dover. It had been par-tially dismantled, but enough remained to show thatit was of sophisticated and complex construction,and it was probably a valuable seagoing vessel usedin trade across the English Channel.

(North) Ferriby (North Humberside, England)Three plank-built boats were found here, dated tothe earlier second millennium B.C. The bottom por-tion was of four planks cut with an adze from half-


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logs of oak, two fastened end to end forming a keelthat rose in a curve at the stern, flanked by a bottomstrake on either side from which rose sides of a fur-ther three strakes. Adjacent planks were fastenedwith a tongue-and-groove joint and stitched withsingle strands of yew tied through paired holes.Transverse timbers that passed through cleats stick-ing up from the bottom planking also fastened theplanks together. All three boats were flat-bottomedand may have been propelled with paddles or polessince there was no provision for stepping a mast orshipping oars; they would have been used in rivers orestuaries but were not suitable for seagoing.

Brigg “Raft” (Lincs, England) This was the lowerpart of an early first-millennium shallow flat-bot-tomed boat built of oak planks sewn with a continu-ous thread of willow and caulked with moss.Timbers fastened at right angles to the bottomplanks through cleats reinforced them. The vesselwas probably used as a ferry to carry people and live-stock across the Ancholme River and would havebeen propelled with punt poles or paddles.

Rhine (Belgium, Netherlands, France, and Switzer-land) The Rhine has yielded a number of boats of thefirst to third centuries A.D., probably of the type thathad been used on inland waterways in the pre-Romanperiod. These were flat-bottomed vessels with lowvertical sides, their planks held together by ribs fas-tened to them with clenched iron nails.

CLINKER-BUILT

By the fourth century B.C. the forerunners of theclinker-built boats and ships that were to becometypical of northern Europe began to be made. Inthese vessels the planks overlapped. Like flush-builtplank boats these were often sewn, but they mightalso be fastened using scarf joints and treenails orclenched strake fastenings.

Hjortspring (Island of Als, Denmark) Datedaround 350–300 B.C., this is the earliest knownexample of a clinker-built boat. Around 46 feet (14meters) long, it consisted of seven limewood plankssewn together, with a keel and side strakes, thinhazel ribs lashed to cleats, and seats for 20 rowers

who propelled the boat with paddles. It had beendeposited as a votive offering, along with the arms ofaround 80 men, and was probably a vessel used by amarauding war band, perhaps offered in thanksgiv-ing by the locals who had managed to defeat them.

ROCK ART

Bronze Age rock engravings, known particularlyfrom Sweden and Norway, frequently depict boats,but so schematically that it is impossible to say whatthe vessels they represent really looked like and howthey were constructed. Features frequently showninclude massively upturned ends, both at prow andstern, a beak or projection at water level, possibly toprotect the boat against damage when beaching it,and a series of vertical dashes along the gunwales,variously interpreted as crew members, oars, orunknown structural elements. Similar depictions arefound on some of the contemporary artifacts, partic-ularly razors, and on the Nebra sky-disc.

SHIPWRECKS

Most evidence for the movement of goods comesfrom knowledge of the sources of raw materialsand manufactured goods and finds of these goodsand materials along their distribution routes and inthe settlements or burials of their final owners.Very rarely, more direct evidence has been foundwhere boats carrying traded goods founderedand have been rediscovered, though no structuralevidence of the boats themselves has survived.Even these finds are not always clear-cut evidenceof sea trade; many scholars, for example, regardthe Huelva material as a massive votive offeringrather than a wreck.

Huelva (Huelva, Portugal) Dated to the mid-10th century B.C., a collection of around 400 objectswas found in the mouth of the Odiel River oppositethe important Tartessian town of Huelva. Theobjects included swords, daggers, spearheads, someof them made in Ireland, a helmet, and a numberof fibulae (safety-pin brooches) from the easternMediterranean.

Moor Sands (Devon, England) Eight 12th-centuryB.C. bronzes, including two Breton palstaves and an


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Urnfield-style sword, were found in the sea off MoorSands at Prawle Point. Although no timbers werefound, it is thought that these bronzes came from avessel carrying scrap metal, wrecked on a voyage fromBrittany to a destination in southwest England.

Langdon Bay (Kent, England) More than 350fragmentary bronzes of continental manufacture,including median-winged axes, palstaves, rapiers,spearheads, pins, and bracelets, were found justoutside Dover harbor, a third of a mile (500 meters)from the shore. They are believed to have been thecargo of a now-vanished ship that sank around1150 B.C. while bringing scrap metal to Britain forreuse. The sole British-style artifact among the

collection was a socketed ax, probably the propertyof a crew member.

Bigbury Bay (Devon, England) Forty-four tiningots, varying widely in shape and size, were foundnear a reef in the Erme estuary. They cannot bedated, but their lack of uniformity suggests thatthey were made by small-scale independentprospectors, possibly in the Late Iron Age, whenRoman sources refer to “knuckle-shaped” tin ingotsfrom Cornwall, a description that matches two ofthe smallest ingots that were found here; these weresaid to have been transported by the locals in skinboats, a likely vessel to have been carrying thissmall cargo.


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5.7 Two Bronze Age razors from Denmark bearing designs in the form of boats (Worsaae, J. J. A. The IndustrialArts of Denmark. London: Chapman and Hall, 1882)

Water TravelSurviving boats and those described by classicalauthors had a shallow draught, which would haveallowed them to be run aground on beaches or slop-ing riverbanks or to be moored in shallow water with-out damage. This made it unnecessary to providequays for loading and unloading boats, although har-bors and sheltered anchorages were still important forsheltering vessels from stormy weather. Jetties, land-ing stages, and causeways over boggy ground werebuilt in a number of rivers and estuaries; sometimesmaking use of a superannuated boat as part of theframework. A Bronze Age barge was found at Shard-low on the River Trent in England beside a causewayunder construction; it had been carrying stones forbuilding the causeway, and it seems that it and thecauseway were destroyed at the same time, perhaps bya flash flood.

The shallow draught of these vessels also reducedthe problems of navigation in shallow waters, thoughknowledge of local hazards such as rocks and treach-erous tides or currents would have been essential forsafe seafaring and navigation in estuaries and inlandwaterways. Sounding leads to gauge the depth ofshallow water and identify the seafloor sedimentswere in use by the late centuries B.C. in the Mediter-ranean and probably the Atlantic; surviving exampleswere suitable for use in waters up to 50 fathoms (100meters) deep. Landmarks would have been used todetermine location on coastal and inland voyages, butout of sight of land the sun by day and stars by nightwere undoubtedly used; knowledge of the heavens byprehistoric Europeans is implied by features of somemegalithic monuments (See “Megalithic Astronomy,”chapter 8). Other useful indications included the pat-terns of tides, winds, sea swell, and cloud formations,the movements of birds and fish, and clues comingfrom the land such as smells and the recognizable sed-iments discharged by particular rivers. The fourth-century A.D. Roman poem Ora Maritima, whichreused material from the sixth-century B.C. MassaliotePeriplus, included details of landmarks and other fea-tures used to recognize places along the Atlantic coastduring a voyage, and undoubtedly such informationwas handed down orally by prehistoric sailors longbefore it was recorded in writing.

READING

GeneralCunliffe, ed. 1994, Mithen 2003, Milisauskas ed.2002, Whittle 1996, Harding 2000, Champion et al.1984.

TradeRenfrew and Bahn 2004: theoretical trade patterns,characterization; Cunliffe, ed. 1994, Sherratt 1997,Milisauskas ed. 2002, Champion et al. 1984: Euro-pean trade; Nash 1987, Briggs 1995, Kellner 1991,Wells 1995b, Cunliffe 1997, Champion et al. 1984:coinage; O’Brien, ed. 1999, Sherratt 1997, Scarre,ed. 1988, Darvill 1996: traded goods and materials;Klassen 2002: Ertebølle; Collis 1984a, James 1993,Wells 1995b, Cunliffe 1995, Bökönyi 1991, Sacks1995: Iron Age trade; Liversidge 1976: Roman trade;Winghart 2000, Sherratt 1997: bronze; Ammerman1985: obsidian; Cunliffe 1994c, 1995, Darvill 1987:wine; Whittle 1996, Kaelas 1994a: amber; Harrison1988, Cunliffe 2001a: Phoenician trade; Boardman1999, Cunliffe 1994c, Collis 1984a, Wells 1980:Greek trade, Biel 1986: Vix.

RoutesCunliffe 2001a, Milisauskas, ed. 2002, Scarre 1988,Black, ed.1999, McGrail 1995, Darvill 1996, Philip1991, Kristiansen 1998: general; Turner 1998: Shet-land; Cunliffe 2001b: Iceland; Giardino 1992: Sar-dinia; Pearce and De Guio 1999: North Italy.

Land TransportMilisauskas and Kruk 2002a, 2002b, Sherratt 1997:general; Mithen 1994, Jochim 2002c, Barker 1985,Harding 2000: skis, sledges, snowshoes; Pearce andDe Guio 1999: sheep; Midgeley 1992: oxen; Coles


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1984, 1987, Coles and Coles 1986, Raftery 1999,Mellars 1999: trackways.

Water TransportMcGrail 1998, 1983, 1995, Delgado, ed. 1997, Cun-liffe 2001a, 2002, Denison 2002, Harding 2000,

Fenwick and Gale 1998: boats; Denison 2003a:Shardlow; Denison 2003b: Hasholme; Coles 1984,Mithen 1994: Tybrind Vig; Whittle 1996: Noyen;Sheridan 1999: Barns Farm; McGrail 1983, 1998,Cunliffe 2001a, Finlayson 1998: sea travel; Fenwickand Gale 1998, Harding 2000, Cunliffe 2001a:wrecks.


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INDUSTRY AND CRAFTS

6

WOOD

Throughout prehistoric Europe wood was used tomake a wide range of tools, while in temperateregions timber was also the main building material.Wood was also universally important for fuel, bothfor domestic use and for industrial processes, such asfiring pottery and smelting metal. Although the pri-mary forest was extensively cleared to obtain landfor farming and provide timber, from early timeswoods were also managed by coppicing and pollard-ing to control the production of timbers suitable formany purposes. The properties of different types ofwood were well understood, and they were carefullyselected to fulfill different functions: oak, ash, andelm for planks, hazel and alder rods for wattling andhurdles, yew for bows, and pine for arrows, forexample.

Like other organic materials, wood is rarely pre-served, most examples of surviving wooden struc-tures and artifacts coming from waterlogged sitessuch as the Alpine lake villages and the bogs and fensof northern and western Europe. Other sources,however, point to the ubiquitous use of wood andyield some information on woodworking andexploitation. Pollen spectral analyses provide someclues to the growth, decline, and management offorests and the species within them. Postholes,stakeholes, and other archaeological features, suchas the discolorations sometimes left in the soil bydecayed wooden objects, provide a substantialamount of structural information, and occasionalskeuomorphs, such as the joints used at Stonehenge,reveal details of carpentry techniques and other waysin which wood was used and worked. The remaininginorganic portions of composite artifacts can also berevealing: For instance, the layout of metal fittingsin a grave may show the form of the wooden vehicleof which they were once part.

Felling and PreparationThe abundance of flint and stone axes in NeolithicEurope shows that trees were generally felled bychopping with an ax. Axes for this purpose were later

made of bronze and then iron. Trees might also bekilled by cutting a complete ring of bark from them;the wood could then be left to season before the treewas deliberately felled or was knocked down by theelements. Pollen diagrams and studies of preservedwood, particularly in the Somerset Levels, indicatethat woods were managed over the long term, treesbeing encouraged to grow by judicious thinning ofsaplings, with a view to use several hundred years later.

The major tasks of felling trees and trimmingtimber were undertaken with axes, while in theSomerset Levels flint flakes were used to performdetailed trimming. These flakes were backed by thenatural cortex and were not retouched. Woodenwedges and wooden mallets, along with stone andmetal hammers, were used for splitting felled woodinto planks.

Oak planks used to build the Sweet Track in theSomerset Levels were of two types, illustrating thetechnology in use by the early fourth millennium.Some planks were from massive trees over four cen-turies old. These had been split radially, producingwedge-shaped planks around 16–20 inches (40–50centimeters) wide. Younger, more slender trees werealso used, and in order to obtain planks of the samewidth, these were split tangentially, a far more diffi-cult and skilled operation.

Woodworking and WoodenArtifactsWood was probably used for, or formed part of, themajority of tools and weapons, from spades to plows,from arrows and spears to chariots, from the handlesof axes and hafts of daggers to pit props and boats.Occasional translations of these objects into moredurable materials and rare finds of actual woodenobjects give some clues to the range and ubiquity ofwooden artifacts in prehistoric Europe. Only certaintasks were beyond the capabilities of wood: Pointsand edges for cutting harder materials had to bemade of stone or metal, though wooden spears anddigging sticks were perfectly adequate for penetrat-ing flesh and soft soil; equipment destined for directcontact with fire, such as cooking vessels, crucibles,or tongs, had also to be of materials other than


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wood, such as pottery or metal. Probably the moststriking objects of wood are the statues, probably ofdeities, that have been recovered from a few water-logged sites, such as the Iron Age figures from Bal-lachulish in Scotland and Ipfweger Moor inGermany, where they were placed beside a trackway,and the large number of votive figurines fromSources-de-la-Seine in France; a small Mesolithicfigurine of a person was also found in Holland.Many of the finest wooden objects were made byMesolithic groups, including elaborate fish traps,skis from the Russian site of Vis, one of which wasdecorated with a carved elk’s head, and two paddlesfrom the Danish site of Tybrind Vig, which boregeometric designs. Different woods were used fordifferent purposes, in some cases within the sameobject: For example, a solid wooden Bronze Agewheel from Flag Fen was made of alder planks heldtogether with oak braces and ash dowels, while anIron Age spoked wheel from Holme Pierrepont, alsoin England, had a birch hub, oak spokes and dowels,and an ash felloe.

TOOLS

Stone tools used to trim and shape wood includedaxes, adzes, gouges, chisels, awls, small saws, spoke-shaves, burins, and knives. Small grooved sandstoneblocks through which wooden rods were drawnwere used in the Neolithic to make straight arrow-shafts. Metal allowed the development of a widerrange of woodworking tools and improvements inthe efficiency of some existing tools; metal axes, forinstance, were sharper and more durable than thoseof stone. By the sixth century B.C. the sawn planksused to construct the wooden burial chamber in theHohmichele barrow attest to the use of a large tim-ber-yard saw. From a similar date a pole-lathe beganto be used in temperate Europe to turn wooden ves-sels, wheel naves, and other suitable objects as wellas artifacts of other materials such as shale. Irondrill-bits were among the carpentry tools that werefound in the Spanish Iron Age village of La Bastida.

JOINTS AND FASTENINGS

Various ways of joining timbers were employed. Thetrilithons and circles at Stonehenge made use of

mortise-and-tenon and tongue-and-groove jointsthat must have been copied from woodworking.Structures from lake villages in the Alps, the Somer-set Levels, and other waterlogged sites show thesejoints were widely used, along with scarf joints,sockets, dovetail joints, braces, notches, grooves,dowels, and wedges. Other means of fastening usedon preserved boats also included sewing, cleats com-bined with transverse timbers, treenails, and ironnails.

CONSTRUCTION

In temperate Europe wood, and particularly oak,was the usual material for construction. Occasion-ally tree trunks were used with little or no modi-fication, most famously for the extraordinarymonument at Seahenge, a tree set upside down inthe ground, exposing its roots. Trimmed tree trunks,roundwood posts and logs, and split tree trunks werealso employed in constructing monuments such asthe British henges, palisades and gateways, houses,roads and trackways, rafts, mortuary chambers, andthe piles on which lakeside settlements were raised,as well as the strange Bronze Age shrine at Bar-geroosterveld. Some of the timbers used were mas-sive: Oak posts up to 3 feet (1 meter) in diameter and4,400 pounds (2,000 kilograms) in weight werealready in use by the Neolithic period, and even ear-lier the pine posts erected at Stonehenge in theeighth millennium B.C. measured up to 32 inches(80 centimeters) in diameter. Split tree trunks werehollowed out with fire and adzes to make dugoutcanoes and coffins. Tree trunks might also betrimmed to make beams or split into planks for mak-ing boats, buildings, vehicles, roads, coffins, sledges,and other large constructions, while branches wereused to make smaller objects such as tools, vessels,and handles. Wells were often lined with wood,ranging from wickerwork or planks to hollow treetrunks. Coppiced and pollarded trees such as hazeland alder produced straight poles, rods, and withies,which were often woven into hurdles or used as wat-tle for trackways, fences, houses, the framework ofchariots and hide boats, and other larger-scale con-struction, as well as baskets, mats, and other smaller-scale objects, including pegs and treenails. Withieswere widely used for bindings. Bark was also used

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for making objects and as twine or cordage. Brush-wood was both used for constructing trackways andcombined with piles to form artificial islands such asthe crannogs of Iron Age Britain. Waste timber wasused as fuel, probably along with timber felled forthe purpose; this was either burned as wood indomestic fires or made into charcoal for industry.

TRACKWAYS

Hurdles were probably used for many purposes suchas fencing. Preserved hurdles used to constructtrackways on the Somerset Levels were made fromslender pliable rods of coppiced hazel, alder, orbirch, with thicker rods for the sails. Sails laid outsingly or in pairs or threes formed the skeleton ofthe hurdle panel, usually as a number of short rodslaid widthwise, although occasionally, as in thethird-millennium Honeybee Track, the sails werelaid longitudinally. The smaller rods were thenwoven in and out of the sails to form the hurdle.Longer pieces of hurdling could be made by fasten-ing panels together with withies, or creating a con-tinuous strip by weaving in extra rods to cover thejoins between panels, as in the Eclipse trackway.

Other trackways in the Somerset Levels, Saxony,and elsewhere were constructed of split timbers orplanks, including the sophisticated fourth-millen-nium structure known as the Sweet Track, whichhad a plank walkway suspended above the boggysurface on a rail crossed by pairs of large pegs. Incontrast, some trackways were no more than bun-dles of brushwood laid on the ground.

DOMESTIC EQUIPMENT

One of the most basic uses of wood was to providehandles for edge and pointed tools such as axes,picks, and chisels. Flat axes of metal and polishedstone or flint axes were often mounted in an antlersleeve, which was slotted into a wooden haft or weremounted directly in the haft, using cords or sinewsfor binding. Some axes had the wooden shaft passingdirectly through a shafthole; this could be fixedmore firmly by driving in wooden wedges. Flangedaxes were mounted into the split end of a knee-shaped handle; as use would tend to wedge the axmore firmly into the handle end, risking splitting,

such axes often had a stop ridge at the base of theflange. A similarly shaped handle with a solid endwas used in socketed tools. Some metal objects werecast with side loops through which a binding couldbe passed to attach the handle more firmly or pre-vent its loss if the handle worked loose from thesocket.

Apart from cooking vessels, a large proportion ofdomestic equipment was of wood. This includedspindle whorls and loom frames, spoons, bowls, andplates for storing and serving food, and containerslike the decorated jewelry box from Late BronzeAge Gross Hafnung in Switzerland. Fine Iron Agewoodwork included a flat-bottomed bowl from theLake Village at Glastonbury. Carved from a singlepiece of ash, with a small hole at either side whichmay have held a handle, this vessel was decoratedwith elegant crosshatched swirls. The most impres-sive vessels carved from a single wood block weretubs or cauldrons such as the poplar example, onefoot (30 centimeters) in diameter, from Iron AgeAltarte Glebe in Ireland, which had lugs on itsshoulder holding movable yew handles. Woodenvessels found in the Ertebølle site of Christiansholmbear a strong resemblance to the pottery made bythe Ertebølle people and may have provided theinspiration for its form.

Furniture was probably limited but mightinclude wooden storage chests, beds, or shelves.Miniature tables and chairs are known from someBalkan Neolithic settlements, as well as woodenbeds from an Early Neolithic house at Slatina inBulgaria, while Skara Brae in Orkney had dressers,seats, and box beds of stone, in the absence locally ofwood. A folding stool with an otter-skin seat made inthe Mycenaean world was buried in a Danish treetrunk coffin at Guldhøj. Classical sources state thatthe Celts sat on the ground or on cushions, thoughthe sources do refer to low wooden tables. On theother hand, the carbonized remains of a piece orpieces of fourth-century furniture inlaid withengraved bone, carved with high relief decoration,and ornamented with cast-bronze figurines wasfound at Cancho Roano in Spain; perhaps a chest ofdrawers, it shows that furniture was not only used insome places but also could be elaborate.

Many wooden artifacts, such as ards, were madein several pieces. Iron Age buckets, barrels, and


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even tankards were often stave-built, and somewere ringed with bronze bands; they might alsohave decorative bronze handles and other fittings,and a few examples were sheathed in metal. Buck-ets from the Wilsford Shaft in England were madeof staves with a disc base slotted together andbound with withies.

ATTACK AND DEFENSE

Wood was an adequate material for arrows, spears,pronged fish spears, and other hunting equipmentand weapons used on unprotected enemies, thoughfrequently objects intended to penetrate weretipped with stone, bone, or metal, and these wouldhave been a requisite against armored foes.Weapon hilts were often of wood and so were scab-

bards. Wood was probably the usual material forshields, though boiled leather shields were alsoeffective; sometimes these materials were com-bined; wooden molds were used to form leathershields.

Wood played a major part in the construction ofdefenses, such as palisades, gateways, and the famousmurus gallicus, and was the main component of warchariots.

WHEELS

Introduced into Europe in the fourth millenniumB.C., wheels were initially constructed of solidwood, either a single piece or made up of threeplanks fastened with dowels. In the second millen-nium the spoked wheel was invented in the NearEast, and its use spread rapidly, allowing the con-struction of much lighter, faster, and more maneu-verable vehicles, including war chariots. Thesewheels were constructed of wooden spokes fastenedat the center into a hub and at the edge into awooden rim (felloe or felly) made of pieces of woodjoined together, a construction method that contin-ued into Roman times in the Mediterranean. Intemperate Europe, however, by around 600 B.C.skilled artisans had devised a more advanced wheelwhose felloe was constructed of a single coppicedpole, formed into a circle by heating and bending,its ends fastened with a scarf joint secured with aniron clamp, and the whole protected by an iron tire,held in place with iron nails. By the second centuryB.C., however, Celtic craftsmen had perfected atechnique that required no nails. The tire washeated to make it expand, allowing it to be slippedover the felloe, which it held tightly when it cooledand contracted.

TEXTILES, BASKETRY,NETS, AND MATS

Only rarely has direct evidence of prehistoricEuropean cloth, basketry, and related materials


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6.1 A wooden bowl decorated with tin pins from aBronze Age tree-trunk coffin in Denmark (Wor-saae, J. J. A. The Industrial Arts of Denmark. Lon-don: Chapman and Hall, 1882)

been preserved, being found in waterlogged sites,more rarely in arid locations, and in a few otherexceptional settings, including salt mines. Indirectevidence comes from impressions left by textileson metal, pottery, and other materials, from equip-ment used in textile manufacture, from artisticrepresentations of clothing and textile manufacture,and from literary references by classical authors.Finds from northern Europe and elsewhere showthat mats and baskets, nets and cords were beingmade in Europe from Palaeolithic or Mesolithictimes onward, and cloth was being woven fromearly in the Neolithic period in parts of Europe,eventually becoming ubiquitous. Impressions onclay from Dolni Vestonice and other Czech sitessuggest plain weaving may have begun as early as27,000 years ago. The discovery, complete with hisclothing and equipment, of the Iceman (“Ötzi”),who died around 3300 B.C., has added considerablyto our knowledge; interestingly, none of his cloth-ing was made of woven cloth.

Fibers and Other MaterialsThe majority of surviving textiles from prehistoricEurope were made of wool or flax. Most linen tex-tiles were found in Neolithic lake villages, wherethe alkali conditions do not preserve wool; mostBronze Age textiles are of wool and come fromScandinavian burials in acid environments thatdestroy vegetable fibers; it is hard, therefore, toestablish the relative importance of the two fibers,though it is thought that wool became the mainfiber for making European textiles after the adventof woolly sheep.

Some textiles were made of other plant fibers(bast), including nettles, hemp, tree bast, and grass.Animal hair was also used; for example, a BronzeAge woolen textile from Sheshader in Scotland alsoincorporated horse and cattle hair, and a fine sash ofblack horsehair was part of an Iron Age votive offer-ing recovered from a peat bog at Armoy in Ireland.Cotton cloth was probably not known in the NearEast until the first millennium B.C., and in Europe itappears first in fifth-century Athens; a rare luxury, itdid not penetrate prehistoric Europe. Silk, however,

though similarly exotic, was known to the elite ofIron Age Europe.

The fibers used for making cloth could also beused for manufacturing cord and rope, nets andbags, as could many other materials, for example, acord from Bronze Age Bad Frankenhausen wasmade of wild clematis. Mats, sandals, and basketswere also made from plant fibers such as espartograss, reeds, and rushes.

FLAX

Linum usitatissimum was one of the early cropsextensively cultivated by European farmers, but, as itwas grown also for its oil seeds, its presence does notnecessarily imply the use of its fibers. Rare remainsof textiles, however, show that linen cloth was madein the Neolithic period. From the Bronze Age itsimportance probably declined in favor of wool, butit continued in use.

Flax produces a smooth, strong fabric of a goldencolor that is easily bleached by being laid out wet ongrass, but it is difficult to dye.

Preparation Flax for making fibers was best har-vested before the seeds ripened; the later beforeripening the harvest took place, the stronger andcoarser the fibers produced. These were extractedby retting: the stalks were first dried then soaked inwater or urine to cause all but the fibers to decom-pose. They were then dried again, and the fiberswere separated from the decayed material bypounding (braking and scutching) and combing(heckling). Bronze Age pits used for retting flaxhave been found at West Row Fen and ReadingBusiness Park in England, and a heavy wooden batfor braking and two types of tool for heckling, awooden board set with thorns and a split rib bone,are known from the Swiss lake villages; theseresembled tools used in Europe in more recenttimes.

OTHER PLANT FIBERS (BAST)

Hemp was used to make coarse cloth and rope, andwas particularly useful as sailcloth. The plant wasprobably cultivated as a narcotic (cannabis), at least


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by the first millennium, but blue-dyed cloth possi-bly of hemp is known from the Neolithic site ofAdaouste in France; hemp cloth was found in a LateBronze Age hoard from Scotland; and it was madeby steppe nomads and in Southeast Europe in theIron Age.

The inner bark of certain trees, including lime,oak, and willow, contained fibers (tree bast) thatwere used to make cord, netting, and cloth, includ-ing an Early Mesolithic net of willow bast from Kor-pilahti in Finland.

Nettle fibers make a fine soft cloth and, giventheir natural abundance on disturbed ground (par-ticularly that fertilized by urine), must have beenwidely used for cloth, although the evidence is rare:a single fragment of white cloth made of nettle fiberfrom a Late Bronze Age tomb at Voldtofte.

Preparation Hemp fiber was extracted from theplant in much the same way as flax. Nettle fibercould also be separated by retting or by boilingtogether with ashes.

WOOL

Primitive sheep such as the modern Soay shed theirwool, which was collected by plucking or combing itfrom the animal; suitable combs were common onIron Age sites. Other larger breeds, known from theIron Age, had to be sheared, using iron shears. Thefleeces of these primitive breeds varied in color,from white through fawn and reddish brown to darkbrown and black; like modern Icelandic yarn thenatural colors of these wools would have allowedconsiderable patterning in the textiles producedfrom them. White wool also absorbs dyes well, mak-ing it the most suitable fiber for manufacturing col-ored cloth.

Preparation The dirty greasy wool was washed incold water, either before or after shearing or plucking,then combed to remove pieces of plant and otherdebris and to align the fibers. These were then readyto be spun into worsted thread, a strong thoughcoarse yarn.

Alternatively, after washing, the wool could becarded to produce woolen yarn, which is soft and

elastic but weaker; the textiles known from prehis-toric Europe, however, were all of worsted ratherthan woolen thread.

SILK

Silk was produced in China and probably reachedthe west via central Asian nomads whom the Chi-nese used to bribe with silks and other luxuries tobuy off their raids. A locally made woolen chemise inthe great Hohmichele barrow in Germany, dated tothe sixth century B.C., was embroidered with silk andalso used silk threads for part of the weft; thesethreads probably came from a piece of silk fabricthat had been unraveled and respun. Silk is alsoknown from the roughly contemporary Hochdorfbarrow.

ESPARTO GRASS

Native to southern Spain and North Africa, twodifferent genera of esparto grass were used in pre-historic Spain to make a variety of textiles. A greatrange of esparto-grass artifacts were found withlate third-millennium burials in the cave of Cuevade los Murciélagos. These included baskets, bags,sandals, tunics, belts, and caps, and even a necklace,made by plaiting, coiling, twining, or weaving thegrass fibers. Esparto grass could also be made intocords and ropes, particularly used for ships’ rig-ging, but was not used outside its local area in pre-history.

Preparation Esparto grass leaves were harvestedby pulling them off the living plant. These werethen dried and retted in seawater.

OTHER MATERIALS

A range of stiffer plant materials was employed tomake baskets and mats, including rushes, reeds,sedges, bark, and straw (particularly from wheat), aswell as thin pliable woody materials such as osiers.Long, unretouched flint flakes were used in theSomerset Levels to cut reeds; other cutting instru-ments such as flint and metal sickles and knives werealso used over much of Europe.


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6.2 The contents of a Danish Bronze Age tree-trunk coffin from Treenhoj in Jutland, including twowoolen caps, two nested wooden boxes, a coarse woven woolen cloak, a fringed woolen shawl, and a woolenshirt with a belt (Worsaae, J. J. A. The Industrial Arts of Denmark. London: Chapman and Hall, 1882)

SpinningYarn was spun from prepared fibers, using a dropspindle (often of wood and thus rarely preserved)weighted by a spindle whorl of wood, pottery, cut-down potsherds, metal, or stone. It has been sug-gested that the Swiss lake villagers used differentspindles for spinning flax and wool, the former witha conical whorl, the latter with a small disc. Rareexamples of wooden spindles complete with threadwere found in a Horgen site at Sipplingen-Osthafen.

The spinner also needed a distaff to hold the rawwool while she spun, but as this need only have beenan ordinary stick, none have been identified. Thespinner shown on the Iron Age pot from Sopron inHungary may be holding a distaff.

Weaving

THREAD

When spinning, the spindle is twirled in a clockwiseor anticlockwise direction, producing thread with aZ-twist or S-twist, respectively; most Europeanthread was Z-spun. Two-ply yarn was obtained bytwisting two threads together in the opposite direc-tion from that in which they were spun, producingZs and Sz plies. By combining the different threads,interesting textural differences and patterns could beintroduced into woven cloth.

LOOMS

Narrow pieces of cloth, bands, and belts were wovenon a simple band loom, probably the backstrap loomin which the warp threads were held in tensionbetween a band around the weaver’s waist and a rodattached to something else, such as the weaver’s feetor a tree. Though none have been found, the narrowstrips of cloth they produced are known from Euro-pean sites of the Neolithic period onward.

Warp-weighted (upright) looms may have beendeveloped from the band loom in Southeast Europeor Anatolia in order to weave wider and longer piecesof cloth. They consisted of a frame made of strongwooden uprights with a crossbar at the top to whichthe warp threads were attached. Weights tied to the

bottom of the warp threads held them under tension.Warp-weighted looms were in use by the EarlyNeolithic in the Körös culture of Hungary and grad-ually spread north, east, and west, being known inlater Neolithic Switzerland and Italy and becomingwidespread in the Bronze Age. Archaeological evi-dence for upright looms is often found: sometimes inthe form of a pair of postholes inside a house andmore commonly as triangular, annular, or conicalweights of baked clay or stone with a hole in the nar-rower end, sometimes found lying in a line betweenor near the postholes. Occasionally a pit was dugbetween the posts, probably to allow a longer pieceof cloth to be woven. The stylized picture of awoman weaving on the Iron Age pot from Sopronmay depict this: The weaving descends far below herfeet into a space delimited by parallel lines.

Representations of looms on rock engravingsfrom Val Camonica also show the weights as well asthe shed bar and one or several heddle bars, used toraise part of the warp. Plain weave required one hed-dle bar, twill needed three. No examples of these orof other weaving equipment such as the bars usedfor beating up the cloth and bobbins for passing thethread through have been certainly identified,although tubular clay objects with a slight waistfrom Early Neolithic Elateia in Greece are claimedto have been bobbins. In western Europe a bone orantler comb with short teeth was used for beatingdown the weft to ensure a tight weave.

Normally, cloth was woven by a single individual(a woman on the basis of known depictions), butlooms with posts set several meters apart suggest thatwomen on occasion collaborated to weave cloth up to10 feet (3 meters) wide, and this is borne out by somefinds of textiles from Danish Bronze Age coffins.

The use in Early Iron Age Denmark of a differ-ent kind of upright loom for weaving tubular clothhas been deduced from a few examples of such clothfound at Egtved and Trindhøj.

OTHER EQUIPMENT

Some bands of surviving Iron Age cloth show thecharacteristic twists produced by tablet weaving, inwhich the warps are threaded through holes in thecorners of a series of square flat tablets that act as hed-dles. Some of these tablets were found at Deibjerg in


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Denmark and some, made of boxwood, in a grave atCigarralejo in Spain, both of the La Tène period.

TYPES OF WEAVE

Although loom weights and spindle whorls showthat weaving dates back to the sixth millennium B.C.in Europe, surviving examples of the textiles them-selves are not known before around 3000 B.C. Theseshow that the cloth was generally tabby weave, aplain fabric in which the weft threads went alterna-tively over and under each warp thread in one rowand the reverse in the next; some were basket weave,similar to tabby but weaving pairs of warp and weftthreads. Variations in the appearance of the clothwere achieved by making the warp threads thickerthan the weft or vice versa (faced weave), or by mak-ing patterns using different combinations of S-spun,Z-spun, Sz-ply, and Zs-ply threads, which caughtthe light differently (shadow stripe). For example, abelt from the oak coffin at Borum Eshøj had a bandof Z-spun warp threads between two bands of S-spun warp threads. Other patterns were achievedusing extra weft threads that were floated over themain weaving; a particularly elaborate fabric fromthe Neolithic Swiss site of Irgenhausen was deco-rated with solid triangles made in this way. AnotherSwiss textile was ornamented with tiny beads madefrom perforated seeds, sewn on, and other examplesof such work are known. Often the borders of thecloth were made separately or woven with a differ-ent set of sheds to allow the patterns to be moreelaborate than the main cloth. A separately wovenband was often used as a starting border, its weftthreads being made very long to form the warps ofthe main cloth. A linen cloth from the lake village ofLedro apparently had designs stamped on it. Littleterra-cotta stamps (known as pintaderas) were foundfrom the Early Neolithic period in various parts ofEurope, assumed to have been used for stampingpeople or cloth, but this is the only example knownof the actual use of such things. Some Bronze Agetextiles were embellished with embroidery, and inScandinavia, where netting had a long history backto Mesolithic times, netting techniques were alsoused to add edges to garments.

From the Late Bronze Age twill also began to bemade. The weft threads were passed over and under

two or more warp threads, in each row moving onewarp thread along from the previous row to producea diagonal or step pattern. Other twill patternsincluded lozenges, herringbone, and zigzags. Exam-ples of twill are known from a number of Bronze andIron Age sites, including the Austrian salt mines ofHallstatt and Hallein; unlike other environments inwhich textiles have survived, the salt mines pre-served the colors of textiles, too, making it possibleto appreciate the colored plaids that were now alsobeing made. Some first-millennium textiles had aborder made by tablet weaving; the earliest exampleknown in Europe comes from Hohmichele, andthere were many from later sites, including the graveat Cigarralejo in which the tablets for weaving suchborders were found.

Additional variety was introduced by the choiceof thread. Although most cloth was made from a sin-gle type of fiber, some pieces from both Switzerlandand Denmark were made using flax for the warp andwool for the weft, and silk was used in one predomi-nantly woolen textile from Hohmichele. The wool-and-linen textiles date from the third millenniumand may reflect the period when wool was cominginto use but was not yet preferred to linen.

Other Cloth-makingTechniques

FELTING

Wool, which has a scaly surface unlike the smoothsurface of plant fibers, can be made into a strong fab-ric by felting. The woolen cloth is soaked andwarmed and then beaten or kneaded, causing thescales to interlock. Early European textiles seemoften to have been felted to make them warmer andmore weatherproof. From the Late Bronze Age thispractice declined since the new twill weave in com-mon use also had these properties and because feltingwould blur the fine colored designs now being made.

PLAITING

The ends of woven bands and belts were often fin-ished off by plaiting, in some cases ending in tassels.


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Plaiting might also be used for the closing border oflarger pieces of woven cloth.

SPRANG

A technique called sprang, rather similar to cat’s cra-dle and producing an open elastic material like a net,was practiced across prehistoric Europe and sur-vived into recent times in some regions, though itwas widely superseded by knitting (which was notknown until the third century A.D.). It was used par-ticularly to make hairnets and caps, such as a fineexample from Borum Eshøj.

TWINING

Various techniques similar to basket making weresometimes used; two have been identified fromEuropean textiles. In one, weft-wrapping, a threadwas passed around each warp thread in turn; in weft-twining a pair of threads were passed round eitherside of a warp then across each other before passingon to the next warp thread. Both produce a textileresembling netting. Neolithic examples of this tech-nique are known from Cueva de los Murciélagos inSpain, using esparto grass.

DyeingAlthough a range of muted colors, from white todark brown, was available naturally, wool (especiallywhite wool) was also dyed. Bast fibers like linen didnot take up dyes nearly so readily and required pre-treatment with tannic acid, but some basts were alsodyed. Most vegetable dyes are fugitive, requiring thetextile to be fixed by boiling or steeping in a mordant(often alum for acid dyes or tannin for basic dyes) andsometimes also in a developer, such as ammonia(urine), which enhanced or altered the color.

Dyes known to have been used include red ochre,producing a range of colors from yellow through redto brown; the fermented leaves of woad for blue andfor red the blood of the cochineal beetle, which livesin the kermes oak of the Mediterranean. Both ofthese colors were known from bast fibers in aNeolithic burial at Adaouste in France, associatedwith the remains of a paste made from kermes

insects. Madder and safflower may have been usedfor red, and saffron and the roots of dyer’s rocket foryellow. The pale green color known from a Hallstatttextile may have been achieved by using a yellow dyealong with iron as a mordant.

Baskets, Mats, Nets, andCords

CORDS AND ROPES

Twisted cord was being made in Europe during thePalaeolithic period; the cast of a three-ply cord ofplant fiber was found in the famous decorated caveof Lascaux. Later cords and ropes were made oftwisted or spun fibers, such as a flaxen rope from theNeolithic settlement of Charavines in France, ortwisted or plaited from grass and rushes. Basketswere made using a twisted or plaited cord or bundlesof grass, reeds or other materials gradually coiledfrom the center outward and secured by stitching;these are known from the Swiss lake villages andfrom Cueva de los Murciélagos in Spain, where theywere made of esparto grass; impressions of othersare known from many sites. The Iceman wore acloak made of long grasses plaited together at thetop and fastened at intervals by twining. He also hada backpack made out of a bent hazel frame, twoboards of larch, and a quantity of two-ply grass cord.

NETTING

Mesolithic and later nets were made from fibers orcords using a variety of knotted and knotless tech-niques. The Iceman had a loose-mesh net made oftwo-ply grass strings, perhaps for catching birds.Netting inside his shoes held in place grass stuffingto keep his feet warm.

MATTING AND TWINING

Stiff grasses, reeds, rushes, and similar materialswere interwoven in a manner similar to weavingbut without need of a loom. Impressions of suchmats are known from many prehistoric sites,including Early Neolithic Nea Nikomedeia in


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Greece, showing basket weave, faced weave, andvarious twill patterns.

To produce a thicker and less rigid mat or a con-tainer, bundles of rushes laid side by side werebound together by threads interlaced between themin a variety of ways, producing a range of patterns. ANeolithic bag of coiled wood slivers bound withgrass twine was found in a peat bog at Twyford inIreland. It was made in two pieces fastened togetherand had handles of plaited straw. Many differenttypes of twining were used in the Swiss lake villagesand on baskets, bags, and sandals from Cueva de losMurciélagos. A flint dagger worn by the Iceman waskept in a scabbard of lime-tree bast fibers fastened atintervals with twined grass cords.

WICKERWORK

Rods such as birch twigs and small branches wereused to create a framework for wickerwork construc-tions, which ranged from small baskets to substantialfish traps. Bindings of other materials, such as splitroots, osiers, bark fibers, and rushes, were used tosecure the framework by twining. Many of the surviv-ing examples come from Mesolithic sites; later exam-ples include many from Swiss and other lake villages.

BARK

Containers made of folded birch bark are known onMesolithic sites, and other bark containers werefound in LBK wells at Erkelenz-Kückhoven. Ötzithe Iceman also had two containers made of foldedbirch bark, stitched with strips of bast. Net sinkersof pebbles wrapped in bark and tied with thin barkstrips were recovered from the Swiss village ofTwann. An early second-millennium sewn bark cof-fin cover was found at Dalrigh in Scotland. The manburied in the richly furnished Hochdorf barrowwore a conical hat of bark.

LEATHER AND FURS

The use of leather for artifacts and clothing can gen-erally only be guessed since in the majority of situa-

tions leather decays. The rare examples that survive,however, from the Danish tree-trunk coffins, bogs,and a few other unusual contexts, provide clues tothe widespread importance of leather for containers,garments, and other artifacts. Much of the clothingof the recently discovered Iceman, who died around3300/3200 B.C., was made of leather and none of itof woven textiles. The salt mines of the Early IronAge have preserved leather backpacks, bags, andshoes. Shields were made of wood or leather, andboiled leather would have made effective bodyarmor. Hides and furs were also probably used asrugs and covers.

Furs were known as exports from Celtic Europeand the north during the Iron Age and must havebeen traded in earlier times. They were probablyamong the goods exchanged by the Mesolithic Erte-bølle groups among themselves and with their LBKneighbors; the Ertebølle site of Ringkloster was aninland camp for hunting wild piglets and pine-martens, while people camped at Agernaes to huntother fur animals.

SourcesDomestic and wild animals whose hides were fre-quently used included cattle, goat, sheep, and deer.Fur-bearing animals hunted by Mesolithic peopleand probably exploited in later prehistoric Europeincluded polecat, badgers, pinemartens, wild cats,lynx, beavers, otters, wolves, and foxes. The pelts ofdomestic dogs were probably also used. The Ice-man’s clothing was made from the leather and fur ofcattle and goat, red deer, mountain goat, and bear.

TreatmentIn warm regions raw hides could be shaped and thendried, for use as bags, coverings, and bindings, but inthe damp conditions of most of Europe they had tobe converted into leather. Hides were soaked orallowed to putrefy slightly to loosen the epidermisand hair, which were removed by scraping while fatand other tissue were scraped away from the inside.Tools of stone and bone used for scraping hides are


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known from the Palaeolithic period onward, andmetal ones in later times. The simplest way of curinghides was by smoking; this seems to have been themethod used to prepare the leather from which theIceman’s clothing was made. A more effectivemethod was to work a tanning agent into the skin toprevent putrefaction and to make it water-resistant.The skin was stretched and rubbed with fat, or itcould be treated with alum (tawed) or salt or a mix-ture of both, or soaked in tannin, derived from oak-galls or oak, chestnut or pine bark, then stretchedand worked with a blunt instrument to soften it. Sev-eral of these methods might be used in conjunction.Leather could be made hard by boiling it. Lumps ofhaematite were used in Neolithic Orkney for buffingthe surface of leather to give it a glossy finish.

Leather ObjectsDepending on the degree of working and the choiceof tanning agents, leather could be made extremelysoft and pliable or hard and tough enough to be cutwith a saw, making it suitable for a wide range of arti-facts, including armor, containers, shoes, and cloth-ing, as well as coverings for wooden shields and boats.

Leather bags were probably made from Palae-olithic times onward, and early Neolithic potteryoften seems to imitate the form and details of leathervessels or bags, some, for instance, indicating awooden hoop at the neck and shoulder of a bag tokeep it rigidly open, and stitching to hold the hoopsin place, imitated as decorative lines. Leather vesselsfilled with water were used for cooking by droppingin heated stones; this is attested to in MesolithicScandinavia and was probably still taking place inBronze Age Britain. A few molded leather bowls andbeakers are known from Neolithic Europe. Leatherbackpacks with a wooden framework were preservedin the salt mines at Hallstatt. A bag from the Dürrn-berg salt mine had a leather drawstring.

Pieces of leather were often fastened together tomake garments and other objects, either by lacingwith sinews or thin leather thongs or by sewing.Bone awls were used to make holes; these are knownfrom Neolithic Orkney, and in the Bronze Agecemetery of Singen in Germany awls were placed in

female graves, suggesting that some leatherworking,at least, was undertaken by women. A Neolithic dag-ger sheath from Stade in Germany was made of asingle piece of cowhide fastened up the back withvery fine leather thongs and lined with a piece oftawed sheepskin to cushion the edges of the dagger.Other leather sheaths and scabbards are also known,


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6.3 The Iceman, showing his grass cloak; leathercoat, shoes, quiver, and belt; fur cap and leggings;and wooden backpack. In his hand he is carrying ayew bow stave and a copper ax. (Drawing byAudrey McIntosh, after drawings and informationin Spindler, Konrad. The Man in the Ice. London:Orion, 1995)

and the Iceman carried a quiver of deerskin. Tawedleather was said by Caesar to have been used for sailsby the Veneti, a seafaring Breton tribe.

Although most surviving prehistoric shields areof metal, these were probably in the minority intheir time, being intended for display more thanfor defense, while those used in battle were proba-bly generally of wood or boiled leather. A surviv-ing example from Cloonbrin in Ireland was in theform, well known from bronze examples, of a cir-cle with a V-shaped notch, strengthened with apattern of ribs and bosses. A leather cap wasstitched over the central boss, and a handle waslaced onto the back behind it. Also from Irelandcome examples of wooden shield molds into whichleather, softened with water, was beaten withround-headed punches. Armor such as breastplatesand greaves may also have been made of boiledleather; Sardinian Bronze Age art shows figureswearing leather tunics and kilts, perhaps rein-forced with small bronze bosses.

Various items of leather and fur clothing havesurvived. The Iceman wore a deerskin coat, calfskinshoes, a fur cap with a chin strap, fur leggings, acalfskin belt with a pouch, and a loincloth of leather.Fur and leather were used for sewn caps and hoods,including some of leather with a fur lining or trim.Calfskin shoes from the Dürrnberg salt mines weremade of a single piece of leather bent into shape andstitched at the heel, while a shoe from the tree-trunk coffin at Guldhøj had a leather sole and acloth upper. Dressed skins varied in color depend-ing on the tanning agent used, going from white(alum) and buff (fat) to reddish brown (tannin), butthey could be dyed to give a greater range of colors,either all over or selectively to produce patterns.Designs might also be added by embossing the sur-face; tools for doing this have been found inNeolithic Orkney.

Harness and other horse equipment were oftenof leather with some metal components. A leatherbag found in the Iron Age settlement of La Tènecontained the tools used by a leatherworker; theseincluded half-moon knives and awls for cutting andpiercing the leather as well as chisels, punches, andgouges for shaping and decorating saddles and otherharness.

BONE, HORN,ANTLER, AND IVORY

Bone, horn, and antler were widely used to madetools and ornaments, both in their natural state orslightly modified, and as the raw material fromwhich a variety of objects were fashioned. The use ofthese materials began in the Palaeolithic period, asdid that of ivory, and they were still important in theIron Age.

Bone, Horn, and Antler

SOURCES

Shed antler was collected and antler taken fromhunted deer. Red deer antler was the most generallyused, though elk antler was made into mattocks in theearly postglacial period. Domestic animals provideda supply of horn and bones, of which longbones,metapodia, and shoulder blades were particularlyused; the bones of hunted animals were also em-ployed, including teeth. Coastal communities alsoused the bones of marine mammals such as whales,while fish vertebrae and bird bones were also used.

WORKING

Flint and later metal knives and saws were used towork the material. Pieces of antler for making pointsand other small tools were removed by cutting twoparallel grooves along the length of the antler andundercutting the piece between them, which wasthen levered out (groove-and-splinter technique).Antler could be made easier to work by soaking tosoften it temporarily. Horn is relatively soft andcould be easily cut; if soaked and boiled, it can besplit into layers that are translucent. It is also a flexi-ble material; this property was exploited in the man-ufacture of composite bows where horn waslaminated with wood and sinew to produce a bowwith a greatly increased range. Fish hooks wereshaped by drilling a hole in a disc of bone, then cut-


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ting away one segment to form a curved and pointedhook. Pumice washed up on the beaches of Orkneywas used to work bone by rubbing, shaping the bonetools and creating sharpened points.

ARTIFACTS

Heavy Work Antler tools were widely used inmining flint and metal ores, particularly as picks andwedges; the strength and springiness of antler makeit an ideal material for the job. Picks were made byremoving all the tines except the lowest; theremoved tines were then used as wedges, as wereanimal metapodia. Antler tools left with two tinesprobably served as rakes. On occasion, antler wasalso used for pit props. Cattle shoulder blades foundin mines were probably used as shovels or rakes;they were not strong enough to have been used toshovel up flint nodules or smashed ore, but may havebeen used to clear the remaining small debris. Smallunmodified bones in the Great Orme copper minemay have been used as scoops to extract the copperore from its soft limestone matrix.

Antler hammers and mattocks, perforated to takea wooden haft, were in use by Mesolithic times;longbones and whalebone were also used as ham-mers. In Neolithic Britain antler was also carvedinto mace heads, which may have been prestige orceremonial objects.

Whale ribs and jawbones were employed assledge runners and as building material by coastalcommunities where wood was scarce, as at SkaraBrae, where they formed roof beams.

Lighter Work A large range of small tools wasmade of these materials by Mesolithic hunter-gath-erers, and many of these continued in use into theIron Age, along with new types. Stone chisels andaxes were often set into an antler sleeve, which wasthen mounted in a wooden haft. Handles, hafts,and weapon pommels might also be made of boneor antler, while antler awls and chisels were alsoused from the Mesolithic period onward; sealbones were also made into awls. Other artifactsincluded fishing equipment such as fishhooks, fishgorges, harpoons, and leisters; points and arrow-heads; antler cheek pieces for horse harness, oftendecorated; spoons for eating; polishing tools made

of animal metapodia for working leather; spatulasfor modeling clay; and small combs and bird bonesfor decorating pottery. Spindle whorls were oftencut from discs of bone or antler. Threaders forweaving were made from small bones and needlesfrom bone slivers, while weaving combs werecarved from animal bone, whalebone, or antler. Inthe Iron Age dice were also among the wide rangeof bone and antler objects. Boars’ tusks were some-times modified for use as blades or fishhooks. Agrave of the Wessex culture at Wilsford contained abone whistle. A few surviving horn objects includea ladle from a Beaker burial at Broomend in Scot-land and some dagger pommels. In the Iron Age, ifnot before, horns were used as drinking vessels; inthe Hochdorf chieftain’s burial chamber, datedaround 550 B.C., nine drinking horns bound withbands of gold and bronze were hung on the wall.

Among his equipment Ötzi the Iceman carried afine bone awl for punching holes in fur or leather orperhaps for use as a tattooing needle; some pieces ofantler from which to make arrowheads; an antlerspike in a lime-branch sleeve, which was probablyused for sharpening flint tools by fine retouching;and an antler point among whose many uses wereskinning animals and splicing cord.

Ornaments and Clothing Accessories Boneand antler were used for pendants, pins, and beadsin Mesolithic sites, as were fox canines and fishteeth and vertebrae. Beads and pendants continuedto be made throughout prehistory, including perfo-rated beaver incisors, boars’ tusks, and deer teeth,and the later repertoire also included pins withelaborate heads, rings, toggles, spacer beads, belthooks, and belt fastening rings. The grave goods inthe Bush Barrow from Early Bronze Age Wessexincluded a wooden staff decorated with a series ofbone rings with zigzag edges. Figurines and deco-rated objects were also on occasion carved of boneor antler: For example, the fifth-millenniumRomanian site of Cascioarele yielded a female fig-urine decorated with carved dots and holes; anantler beam from the Mesolithic site of Sjöholmenin southern Sweden was intricately decorated withgeometric patterns; and bone idols carved orpainted with eyes and geometric patterns weremade in Chalcolithic Spain.


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IvoryMammoth ivory was used for making tools, orna-ments, and figurines in the Palaeolithic period, butwith the extinction of the mammoth Europe ceasedto have a native source of ivory. The Neolithicinhabitants of Iberia imported elephant ivory fromthe Maghreb and made it into small objects such aswands, combs, and figurines, while in the Beaker andsucceeding periods it was made into V-perforatedbuttons. In the Iron Age ivory was imported fromAfrica or South Asia via the Near East and theMediterranean world. Phoenician traders broughtivory to their trading posts in Iberia, where they, orlocal people to whom they had taught their skills inivory working, made the ivory into fine elaborateobjects such as the decorated combs found in theelite tombs at Carmona. An ivory-carving workshophas been identified in the native Iberian settlementof El Castillo de Dona Blanca, opposite the Phoeni-cian settlement of Gadir. Being an extremely hardmaterial, ivory was more difficult to work thanantler, and drills were generally used. This and itsrarity meant that it was used mainly as a decorativeinlay on metalwork or for small ornaments.

STONE

Stone was used for making tools from the earliesttimes and continued in use even after the introduc-tion of metal tools, both as a cheaper alternative andto perform tasks for which metal was less suitable,such as grinding. Stone was also used in construc-tion. Attractive kinds of stone such as agate andjadeite were made into jewelry and other displayobjects; stone imitations of metal axes and daggerswere also made by groups with limited or no accessto metal ores or artifacts.

FlintFrom early in the Palaeolithic period onward, peo-ple used flint and other easily fractured silicate stone

(such as chert, jasper, and chalcedony) to make stonetools for a wide range of purposes. In the postglacialperiod these included axes, scrapers, knives, daggers,and arrowheads, as well as microliths used to createthe cutting edge for many different tools. Toolsmade of exceptional types of material, such as obsid-ian (volcanic glass) or the honey-colored flint fromGrand Pressigny, were highly prized for use or dis-play; and a high value was also placed on objectswhose manufacture required great skill, such asexceedingly long blades. Where flint was limited orunavailable, other types of stone such as quartz orlimestone might be flaked into tools, although thesematerials were less easily worked and often pro-duced inferior results.

FLINT MINING

Flint occurs as seams of nodules in chalk, some-times exposed at the surface by weathering or othernatural action. Flint for making everyday toolscould be widely obtained, but the finer materialneeded for exceptional objects was mined in a fewlocations and widely traded in the third millennium.Fine chocolate-colored flint was quarried in theHoly Cross Mountains as early as Mesolithic times,although most Mesolithic flint came from surfaceoutcrops.

Early flint mines were shallow pits cut into thechalk to follow flint located at the surface. Thesewere succeeded by more substantial trenches thatcould be as much as 13 feet (4 meters) deep and 33feet (10 meters) long. Underground seams werelater mined by excavating a shaft. Some were wideat the top, tapering to a narrow waist and continu-ing down, sometimes as much as 33 feet (10meters), till the flint seam was struck. The lowershaft was then widened as the flint and chalk werequarried away as far as was safe, forming a bell-shaped pit. More complex mines were created bysinking a shaft to the level of the seam of flint andfollowing the seam with narrow galleries, leavingpillars of chalk between them to support the roof.The galleries were pursued until they became toopoorly ventilated for work to continue. Shafts asdeep as 52 feet (16 meters) are known and galleriesas much as 100 feet (30 meters) long. Poor-qualityseams might be ignored, and the shaft continued


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downward until a good seam was located. Once ashaft was abandoned, it became a dump for thewaste material; abandoned galleries were also back-filled with the quarried chalk.

In wider shafts access from the surface was prob-ably via a wooden ladder, while in narrower shafts aseries of wooden struts was probably set across theshaft for the miners to climb. Wood may have beenused to reinforce shafts and galleries, and occasionalnotches found in the sides of galleries may have heldroof beams; however, the evidence is limited and ingeneral flint mines relied on chalk pillars for sup-port. Sometimes extra supports were built of chalkor antlers were rammed into place as props.

The flint was mined using antler picks, whichwere effective in prising the nodules out from thesoft chalk; picks were also made of animal longbones or flint. Stone axes and hammers were alsoused, as were wedges of antler tine or pieces ofbone. Occasionally in hard rock fire-setting was alsoused. Shovels made of wood or animal scapulaewere used to gather up the excavated material, usingantler rakes. The work was probably conductedmainly by natural light, but in some cases chalklamps burning animal fat were used to give extralight. The flint was placed in baskets or leatherbags, which were taken to the surface, probablyusually by hauling them up with a rope run over abeam at the top.

Cissbury (Sussex, England) Mining began before3000 B.C. at Cissbury, where some 200 circular andrectangular shafts were dug with galleries, someinterconnecting. Sump holes to collect rainwaterand prevent it running into the galleries have beenfound at the base of some of the shafts. Small win-dows were cut in some of the supporting chalk pil-lars between galleries to allow daylight through.

Grand Pressigny (Indre-et-Loire, France) GrandPressigny was the source of an attractive honey-col-ored iron-rich flint resembling copper, which wasused to make long blades from cores known locally aslivres de beurre (“pounds of butter”). The GrandPressigny mines were worked over a long period,from the Palaeolithic to the Bronze Age, but theirpeak of production was from around 3000 to 2400

B.C. Their products reached as far as Jersey, theNetherlands, and western Switzerland, more than200 miles (350 kilometers) from their source, andoccasionally pieces traveled as far as 500 miles (800kilometers). The flint was extracted from shallow pitsdug into the hillsides and valley floor of an area sev-eral miles in extent.

Grimes Graves (Norfolk, England) The minesextend over an area of around 22 acres (9 hectares).At least 366 shafts are known, ranging from openpits three to seven feet (1 or 2 meters) in diameterand 10–13 feet (3–4 meters) deep, to bell-shapedpits and deep shafts with galleries, up to 40 feet (12meters) deep. Three seams of flint were mined, ofwhich the lowest (“floorstone”) was the best. Bone,mainly of sheep and goat, may be the remains ofminers’ feasts. An arrangement of a polished ax ofCornish greenstone, two antler picks, and the skullof a rare bird, the phalarope, in one gallery mayhave been a votive offering. While mining herebegan around 3000 B.C., the majority of the minesdate from the Late Neolithic and Early BronzeAges, around 2000 B.C.

Krzemionki Opatowskie (Poland) Attractivebanded flint was mined here. More than 1,000 shaftswere dug over a narrow area around 2.5 miles (4kilometers) long. Shallow pits were excavated herein early TRB times, while in the later TRB andGlobular Amphora periods shafts up to 50 feet (15meters) deep were dug with galleries up to 100 feet(30 meters) long. Although a number of other minesoffered attractive flint, which was used by the TRBand Globular Amphora cultures (for example, white-speckled flint from Swiechiehów, chocolate-coloredflint from the Radom area, banded Jurassic flintfrom the Craców area, all in Poland, and flint fromVolhynia in Ukraine), their preferred material formaking axes was the striking banded flint fromKrzemionki Opatowskie, which was traded as far as370 miles (600 kilometers) from the mines.

Obourg (Belgium) This was a mine worked byopen trenches, occasionally linked by galleries. Inone the skeleton of a miner was found, holding anantler pick; he had been killed by a roof fall.


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Spiennes (Belgium) A mining site worked particu-larly by the Michelsberg culture, it extends over anarea of about 150 acres (60 hectares) and included

both early open pits and a systematic network of nar-row shafts and interconnecting galleries, whichexploited an inclined seam of flint. Most of the shafts


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6.4 Section through a flint mine at Grimes Graves, Norfolk, England, showing the main shaft and gal-leries (TopFoto.co.uk, ©2004 English Heritage, Photographer: Terry Ball. Reproduced by permission ofEnglish Heritage/HIP/TopFoto)

were vertical, but some were inclined. Several inferiorseams were rejected, and the shafts sunk to a betterseam, between 16 and 50 feet (5–16 meters) below theground surface. In one inclined shaft the mined mate-rial was hauled to the surface up a wooden chute.

Thisted (Jutland, Denmark) Source of high-qual-ity Senon flint, mining began here in the fifth mil-lennium. Conical pits 13–16 feet (4–5 meters) widewere dug to the flint seams, which lay around 13–16feet (4–5 meters) deep, and from here galleries up to16 feet (5 meters) long were cut. Working floorswhere the material was roughly shaped lay on thesurface between the pits.

TOOL MAKING

Various types of flint were suited to manufacturingdifferent tools. For example, the banded flint fromKrzemionki Opatowskie was excellent for makingaxes but not suitable for blades; the reverse was trueof the flint from Obourg, which was used to makelong knives and scrapers; Swiechiehów spotted flintcould be used for axes but was particularly good formaking blades, as was the honey-colored flint fromGrand Pressigny.

Blades and flakes, used as knives and as blanks fordaggers, arrowheads, scrapers, and other tools, werestruck from a prepared core and were finely retouchedor pressure-flaked. Cores were also knapped to makeaxes.

The flint nodules were frequently roughed outinto axes at or near the mining site, a task that couldhave taken as little as 10 minutes to perform. Largeobjects, such as thin-butted axes up to 20 inches (0.5meters) long, could be shaped only from freshlyexposed flint and therefore had to be roughed out atthe mine. Working floors were located at many min-ing sites, but in the TRB period the flint mined atKrzemionki Opatowskie was taken to Cmielów inthe adjacent Kamienna valley, where both rough-outs and finished axes were made.

ObsidianObsidian is a natural volcanic glass, which has anattractive translucent appearance and ranges in colorfrom black to green; it also flakes to produce the

sharpest edges on any man-made object. It hastherefore, not surprisingly, been highly prized wher-ever it has been found. The European sources ofobsidian were on the Aegean island of Melos, thecentral Mediterranean islands of Lipari, Pantelleria,Palmarola, and Sardinia, and the Slovakian andHungarian mountains.

WORKING

Obsidian was knapped using the same methods asfor flint. It was probably worked into blade cores ator near its source. These were then used in settle-ments to produce long, slender blades that mightthen travel to more distant settlements.

Polished Stone ToolsFine igneous and metamorphic rock such asdolerite, greenstone, and tuff were used for makingpolished stone tools such as axes and chisels. Thesetools were less fragile than those made of flint, andthe polished edge retained its sharpness for a longertime.

SOURCES AND QUARRYING

Local outcrops of suitable stone were exploitedwhere available, but fine outcrops were activelysought and their rock quarried and carried overlong distances; thin section analysis of the compo-sition of different rocks allows them to be matchedto their source, enabling a picture of the movementof hard stone to be built up. In Britain, for example,more than 30 sources were exploited, includingGreat Langdale, Tievebulliagh (porcellanite),Mynydd Prescelly, and Graig Lwyd (greenstone),and material from farther afield such as jadeitefrom France and the Alps was also occasionallyobtained.

Often suitable stone had been subjected toweathering and pieces of various sizes spread overthe area around the outcrop, from which they couldeasily be picked up. Where this was not the case therock face was quarried, on occasion being followedinto the hillside in a small tunnel (adit). Horizontalor inclined rockfaces were also quarried, formingsmall open pits.


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Sélèdin (Brittany, France) A mining complexextending over a third of a square mile (1 squarekilometer), which was in operation for more than amillennium, it probably produced around 6 milliondolerite axes. These supplied around half the axesused in Brittany, and were traded along the Loireand the coasts throughout northwest France andoccasionally beyond.

Great Langdale (Cumbria, England) The moun-tains above Great Langdale contain a gray green vol-canic tuff highly suitable for making tools, and thiswas mined by Neolithic groups who probably visited

on many occasions. Some of the stone was hewnfrom vertical faces, some quarried in open pits orsmall adits. In addition, some stone was available onthe screes below, due to weathering. The stone wasroughed out into ax blanks on working floors on thescrees or the valley floor below. Stone was obtainedfrom Great Langdale by visiting groups throughoutthe earlier Neolithic, but after around 3300 B.C. thequarrying became more organized and on a largerscale. In this later period axes from Great Langdalewere traded to almost every part of Britain.

Mynydd Prescelly (Wales, Great Britain) Theigneous rocks of the Mynydd Prescelly mountainridge included rhyolites and dolerites attractive formaking axes and other tools, among which was thebluestone (spotted dolerite) from which some of thestanding stones at Stonehenge were also made. Therock is strongly weathered, so stone for toolmakingcould readily be obtained without quarrying, whilethe larger blocks could be levered out.

WORKING

Generally, the raw material for axes and other pol-ished stone tools was roughly shaped at source byflaking or pecking with a hammerstone. Theserough-outs were then often traded or exchangedover long distances before reaching a settlementwhere they were ground and polished into their finalshape using grinding stones or polishers of abrasivematerials such as sandstone. Felsite was used in Shet-land to produce beautiful thin “Shetland knives,” flatoval discs with highly polished faces and sharp edges,which were probably for show rather than use.

Axes and other tools were hafted in handles orsleeves generally of wood or antler and were boundin place with rawhide, sinew, or bast. Some tools,however, such as the battle-axes of Neolithic north-ern Europe as well as hammers and mace heads, hada shafthole through which the haft was passed. Thiswas made by drilling, probably using a bow drill, orby abrasion with a stone, sand, and water. Otherstone objects in which holes were made includedloomweights and spindle whorls.

Beorgs of Uyea (Shetland, Britain) A stone toolworking site where felsite was roughed out into axand knife blanks before being taken elsewhere for


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6.5 Three stone shafthole ax-hammers or battle-axes from Denmark (Worsaae, J. J. A. The Indus-trial Arts of Denmark. London: Chapman and Hall,1882)

finishing. A hollow from which felsite had been quar-ried was roofed with stone slabs to form a shelter inwhich some of the working was done. Broken rough-outs and working debris were scattered around. Thefelsite was used to produce maces and axes, whichwere distributed as far as northern England, andShetland knives, which circulated only locally.

Other StoneAbrasive stone and stone with a pitted surface weresought for grindstones and querns; these includedgood sandstone, conglomerates, and volcanic stonesuch as basalt. Such stone was not generally availablelocally so suitable stone was mined and widelyexchanged, particularly in the Iron Age. Basalt formaking querns was mined at Mayen in the Eifelregion of Germany by the fifth millennium, and thissource continued to be worked into Roman times.Niedermendig Lava quernstones imported from theRhineland occur in several Early Bronze Age sites insouthern England. Other such quarries also existedin the Neolithic and increased in number and outputin the Late Iron Age when the rotary quern cameinto use and a substantial trade in millstones devel-oped, using rivers for transport.

Tools of sandstone, pumice, and other abrasivestones were used to produce the polished surface onaxes and other stone tools. Pebbles of local stone foruse as hammers or anvils and for other purposeswere collected from beaches and screes and oftenrequired no modification before use. In Orkney andShetland sandstone cobbles from the beach wereflaked to make cutting tools known as “Skaillknives.” In Shetland slate was used for knives, chop-pers, and lids; it occurs in layers that were easy toquarry and split. Slate was also used for Mesolithictools in the Baltic region.

Various types of stone were used to make fig-urines, stelae, vessels, and other carved stoneobjects. These included the curious decoratedballs of igneous camptonite found in Orkney andnortheast Scotland. In the Chalcolithic whetstonesmade of hard, fine-grained stone began to appearalongside the metal tools that they were used tosharpen.

Building StoneBuilding stone was obtained locally and used fordomestic construction in some parts of Europe suchas Orkney, where, in the absence of timber, it wasthe main building material. Monuments, however,in some cases were constructed from materialsbrought in from a considerable distance. Stone-henge, an outstanding example, was constructed ofmassive sarsens from the Marlborough Downs,some 18 miles (30 kilometers) away, and of blue-stones from the Prescelly Mountains in Wales. Insome cases stone for building was available as glacialerratics or fallen rocks and boulders. In other cases ithad to be quarried. The gray flagstone used inOrkney occurred in horizontal beds and split natu-rally into flat straight-edged slabs, which were easyto lever off if not already detached.

SALT

Meat consumption provided enough salt to keephunter-gatherers healthy, but as people came to relyincreasingly on cereal-based agriculture, salt to sup-plement that available in their diet became necessaryas well as being desirable to impart flavor to food.Salt was also used for preserving meat and fish, andin making cheese and tanning hides. Two mainsources of salt were available: deposits of salt crystalsand brine within rocks, particularly in parts of cen-tral Europe, which could be mined; and the sea, saltsprings, and salt marshes, where salt was extractedby evaporation.

Salt MiningThe earliest evidence of salt mining comes from Cat-alonia in Spain, where the Muntanya de Sal salt domeat Cardona seems to have been exploited by the Sepul-cros de Fosa culture during the fourth millenniumB.C. They extracted the salt from open pits using stonepicks and hammers, many broken examples of whichhave been found around the mountain. Such surface


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deposits are rare, the only other being in Romania,and most salt deposits are within mountains, fromwhich they were mined by excavating adits (tunnelssunk into the side of a hill) and shafts with galleries,some as much as 1,000 feet (300 meters) deep.

Salt mining probably began in the Late BronzeAge and is best known from the Early Iron Agewhen the mines at Hallstatt and Dürrnberg beiHallein were most active. Salt being a preservative,not only the stone, metal, and antler tools of theminers but even their perishable clothing and equip-ment have been recovered. These included basketsand wood-framed leather backpacks for carryingblocks of salt. The salt was mined with picks, thoseat Hallstatt being elegant long bronze blades with asleeve fitting an L-shaped wooden handle. The pickwas placed against the salt deposit, and the base ofthe handle was tapped with a wooden mallet, cuttinga groove that allowed blocks of salt to be levered out.These were gathered up with wooden shovels. Bun-dles of sticks bound together as torches were used toprovide light in the Hallstatt mines. Wooden sup-ports were used to brace the walls and roofs of thetunnels, but accidents did happen and several bodiesof miners killed by rock falls were found at Hallstatt.

Hallstatt A mining complex in the Salzkammergut,where rock salt was extracted from the mid-secondmillennium onward; previously the inhabitants of thearea had used brine from natural springs. Its time ofgreatest production was around 1000–600 B.C. Themines are concentrated in three areas, the easterngroup, worked from the eighth century, being themost productive. Here deep shafts gave access to thesalt deposits, which were followed in a series of sidetunnels running up to the surface. The wealth gener-ated by the mining operations is reflected in thecemetery attached to the settlement of Hallstatt,which contains many burials, particularly of the sev-enth and sixth centuries, with fine pottery, bronzevessels and jewelry, and weaponry, including manybronze swords. After a decline in the fifth century, adevastating landslide in the fourth brought an end tooperations in the eastern mines.

Dürrnberg bei Hallein This mining complex,which was close to Hallstatt but better situated forcommunications, rose to prominence in the fifth

century and was probably responsible for Hallstatt’sdecline; mining probably began here in the late sec-ond millennium B.C. Two of the graves in the ceme-tery here contained chariot burials, and many hadrich grave goods, including local Celtic and importedMediterranean pottery and bronze vessels.

Salt ProductionSalt extraction from seawater became an importantindustry in the Iron Age. Shallow tanks or ditcheswere dug along the seashore where high tide wouldfill them, with barriers to stop the water drainingback into the sea. Impurities and debris in the watersettled to the bottom of these tanks as the seawatergradually evaporated, leaving a concentrated brine.This was drawn off and heated in thick-walledcoarse pottery vessels so that the remaining waterevaporated, leaving salt crystals, which were oftenpressed in molds to form briquettes of salt. Oftenthese vessels were deep rounded or conical bowlsthat were supported over the fire on pedestals orfirebars. The debris from this process, known collec-tively as briquetage, has been found in many coastalsites where people probably camped for limitedperiods to make the salt; there are no associated set-tlements. Saltmaking sites in eastern England havemounds known as “red hills,” made up of briquetageand burnt earth.

Briquetage has also been found on inland sitesexploiting salt springs in some regions, dating fromthe Neolithic onward. In other areas the brine fromsalt springs was left in large shallow clay-lined holesto evaporate naturally.

METALLURGY

Nuggets of naturally occurring (native) copper andgold must have been regarded as stones with unusualproperties from remote antiquity; by the sixth mil-lennium they were being cold-hammered into simpleobjects such as beads. Annealing (heating) metal tomake it more malleable allowed a greater range of


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simple shapes to be made, such as fishhooks and pins;it also countered the brittleness produced byrepeated hammering. By the mid-fifth millennium inthe Balkans and a little later in Spain, copper oreswere also being mined and smelted and more sub-stantial objects such as axes, spearheads, and chiselswere being made by casting in open molds. Thistechnology gradually became widespread acrossEurope over the following millennia, and more com-plex molds came into use, producing tools andweapons with shaftholes and other more elaborateobjects. Techniques for working gold also becamemore varied and sophisticated. Copper began to bealloyed with various metals, of which tin was themost important, producing bronze, which wasstronger than copper; during the second millenniumbronze came into use in most of Europe. Silver-leadore was also used in the few areas where it was avail-able, notably Spain. Silver objects began to appear inthe Beaker period, and by the later second millen-nium lead was used for many purposes, includingalloying with copper. From the early first millenniumiron began to take the place of bronze as the metalfrom which tools were made, while bronze and othermetals were used for a wide range of ornamental andprestige goods. A number of Iron Age decorativeobjects involved the combined use of several metalsto give contrasting color and surface appearance orto eke out precious metals with base ones; iron andbronze, copper and brass, gold and silver, or a leadcore covered by sheet bronze or gold, for instance.

The distribution of different ores and metals tosome extent dictated the pattern of development,but contacts between regions enabled technologicalinnovations in metallurgy to spread across the conti-nent and gave rise to major metalworking industrieseven in areas that had to import all their metal.

Mining and ProspectingMetal ore that had eroded from metalliferous lodesoccurred in some areas in river alluvium (placerdeposits) and could be recovered by panning. Thiswas done by mixing alluvial gravel with water in adish and swirling the contents to separate the lightersoil from the heavier grains of metal ore; the formerwas allowed to wash over the edge of the dish while

the metal ore settled in the bottom. The rare metalsgold and tin were often obtained by panning. Insome cases the eroded ore was deposited as eluvialdeposits on the hillside below the parent lode; elu-vial gold, tin, and galena could be recovered byground sluicing.

By tracing the source of alluvial metal, peoplecould locate rocks containing metal ore. Weatheredores on the surface could often be recognized bytheir bright colors: reddish iron deposits, bluish orgreenish copper, for example. The location of oresmight also be marked by the presence of particularplants that tolerated metal-rich soils toxic to mostvegetation.

As the most common metal among the Earth’sminerals, iron was present in many ore deposits bear-ing other metals, and in some cases both iron andother metals were mined at the same site at differenttimes, as at Rudna Glava in the Balkans, where copperwas mined in the fifth millennium and iron in Romantimes. The shape and extent of metalliferous veinsdepended on their conditions of formation and thesubsequent history of the rock: For example, someformed narrow but deep veins following rock fissures,while others were broken into discontinuous andwell-separated sections by extensive faulting; somehad been subjected to erosion and redeposition.

THE PRINCIPAL ORES AND METALSEXPLOITED

Native metals Naturally occurring pure metals:gold, copper, silver

Azurite Blue copper carbonate

Malachite Green copper hydroxy-carbonate

Fahlerz Chalcocite and other sulfide copper orecontaining trace elements of many other mineralsincluding arsenic, antimony, silver, lead, cobalt, andnickel

Chalcopyrite Double sulfide of copper and iron

Cassiterite Stannic dioxide, a black-colored tin ore

Galena Lead sulfide, generally containing a smallproportion of silver sulfide


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Magnetite Magnetic oxide of iron

Haematite Red to reddish black iron oxide

Pyrite Iron sulfide

MINING METALS

The character of the ore deposit to some extent dic-tated the form of mining that took place. Wherelodes were identified at the ground surface, theywere mined by digging open pits and by cuttingadits and trenches following the lode. Depositsoccurring at some depth were mined by sinking ashaft and excavating radiating galleries. Evidence oftimber supports has been found in copper mines.Ventilation must have been a concern in ancientmines, since it is calculated that stale air would makeit impossible to work more than 13 feet (4 meters)along an unventilated gallery. Interconnecting gal-leries and paired shafts may have been a deliberateattempt to deal with this problem; fires may alsohave been used to draw air through the network ofshafts and galleries.

The principal method used for mining metal orefrom the hard rock in which it was found was by firesetting, which could be used very precisely. A pile ofbrushwood and sticks or logs was built against therock face and was lit and left to burn, probably forseveral hours. The poisonous fumes meant that thearea had to be evacuated while the fire burned.Water (or vinegar, according to Roman sources) wasoften poured over the hot rock to aid cracking,though this was unnecessary as the fire alone waseffective in causing the rock to fracture. However,the water cooled the rock, making it easier to beginwork.

Stone hammers, antler picks and levers, andwood and antler wedges and spikes were then usedto break off the fractured rock. Bronze or bronze-shod tools such as chisels and wedges may also havebeen used sometimes, though the evidence is thin;when iron became common, however, chisels, ham-mers, adzes, and spikes of iron were regularlyemployed as were iron or iron-shod shovels. Theantler and bone tools have decayed away in the usu-ally acid environment of metal mines, though a fewmines have conditions that have allowed their

preservation in large numbers, and marks on thewalls of mines show they were widely used. Thehammerstones were rounded cobbles, often with acentral groove for hafting. Most, weighing a fewpounds, were swung by hand against the loosenedrock face, but much larger ones were probably sus-pended in a cradle, while very small ones were prob-ably held in the hand for use in small or awkwardspaces. In soft rock fire setting was unnecessary, andmining was undertaken with just stone and antlertools, as in the Bronze Age copper mines at AlderleyEdge in England.

The quarried rock was crushed using stone anvilsand hammers. Even after bronze and iron toolscame into use, stone was still often used for crush-ing. This took place either outside the mine shafts orpits or, particularly in the case of deep mines, adja-cent to the working face so as to minimize theweight of material that had to be carried out. Theore fragments were picked out of the crushed rockby hand. Short-handled wooden shovels or animalscapulae were used to shovel the ore into baskets,wooden troughs, or leather bags that were hauledwith leather ropes along the floor to the entrance ofthe adit or the base of the shaft, from which theywere carried to the surface. Outside the mine therock could be crushed more finely and the ore rinsedout by panning; this seems to have happened atMount Gabriel, where stone-crushing tools andstone slabs for finely grinding the rock have beenfound.

Both mining and metalworking required consid-erable quantities of timber, and it has even been sug-gested that the increased deforestation to supply theneeds of the mines in regions such as Wales andsouthwest Ireland contributed significantly to theenvironmental degradation from forest to blanketbog in the earlier second millennium B.C.

Río Tinto (Spain) The rich metal deposits of RíoTinto and Chinflon in Huelva (ancient Tartessos)were worked in the Bronze and Iron Ages and inten-sively by the Romans, who constructed a remarkableladder of waterwheels for mine drainage. Continu-ous veins of malachite at Chinflon were mined in theChalcolithic period by digging trenches along them,and the surface deposits of copper oxide ores at RíoTinto were probably also mined but rapidly worked


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out. Wooden beams and rock shelves across theChinflon trenches were used as the base for equip-ment to lift out the ore. Later prehistoric mining atRío Tinto concentrated on the minerally enricheddeposits below the substantial iron gossan layers, inwhich gold, arsenic- and antimony-rich sulfidic cop-per, and argentiferrous jarosite ores were found.The latter were lead sulfide ores with an exception-ally high silver content, now completely worked out.As the gossan was impenetrable, access to these oresdepended on locating surface exposures of theenriched layer, which could be followed under thegossan. Cueva del Lago may have been one such wayin, now destroyed by modern mining; Late BronzeAge silver-smelting slag was found here. Shafts dugat Chinflon in the Late Bronze Age with steps cutinto their sides would have given access to a majorchalcopyrite ore lode, but may have been purelyexploratory. Traces of the miners’ camp were foundnearby.

Copper and Copper AlloysNative copper was made into beads and other smallobjects by cold-hammering, grinding, or annealingand hammering, but around 5000 B.C. copper wasbeing smelted at Anza in Macedonia, and by themid-fifth millennium in many Balkan sites, fromeasily worked oxide or carbonate ores. Around thesame time casting was made possible by the develop-ment in the Balkans of high-temperature kilns forfiring fine graphite-coated pottery.

The Fahlerz ores that began to be used from thelate fourth millennium often contained a significantamount of arsenic or antimony, and the smelted oreproduced a type of bronze that was harder andtherefore more useful than pure copper and that hada lower melting point. Arsenic- or antimony-richores were deliberately selected. In the mid-thirdmillennium tin came into use and began to bealloyed with copper, at first in Bohemia and sepa-rately in Britain; an early second-millennium burialat Buxheim in Bavaria contained a necklace of seg-mented tin beads. Despite its rarity tin became themain alloying metal. Bronzes usually containedaround 5–10 percent tin and were generally madeusing chalcopyrite copper ores. In the Late Bronze

Age lead was also alloyed with copper, though it pro-duced a softer metal.

SOURCES

Copper Ores The weathered upper levels of thecopper ore body contain oxide and carbonate copperores such as malachite and azurite, with native (pure)copper on the surface. At the base of the weatheredlevels is found the pale clayey sulfide copper oreknown as Fahlerz, which often contains high con-centrations of impurities such as arsenic and anti-mony. Below these are unaltered copper sulfidessuch as chalcopyrites. In areas that have been subjectto glaciation, such as the Alps, the weathered upperlayers may be absent.


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6.6 Two elaborately decorated bronze axes found ina Danish bog, where they were probably placed asvotive offerings (Worsaae, J. J. A. The Industrial Artsof Denmark. London: Chapman and Hall, 1882)

Native copper occurs as small particles or some-times nuggets. It was known and exploited fromearly times in areas where it occurred, includingparts of the Balkans, such as the Tisza valley. Theearliest European metallurgy developed in settle-ments adjacent to sources of easily worked oxide andcarbonate ores in the mountains of the Balkans andsouthern Spain. Copper mines began to be workedat Rudna Glava, Aibunar, and other Balkan sites.When the Balkan sources began to fail in the latefourth millennium, attention shifted to the Fahlerzores of the Harz and Slovakian mountains of centralEurope and particularly the Austrian Alps; thesewere harder to work and often occurred at higheraltitudes and were therefore less accessible. Fahlerzores often contained arsenic or antimony; the result-ing alloy was significantly stronger than pure cop-per, and it is clear that these ores were deliberatelyselected. The proportion of arsenic or antimony inthe finished objects was carefully controlled; in somecases the ore contained around 30 percent arsenic,but the copper objects never contained more than 7percent. It seems therefore that arsenic was added tocopper ore or pure copper to the arsenic-rich copperore, as required. Sulfide ores were far more abun-dant than carbonate and oxide ores, being found inmany parts of western and central Europe, includingmajor sources in the mountains of Bohemia andTransylvania and along the Atlantic facade; many ofthese began to be worked in the later third millen-nium B.C. Ring ingots (ösenringe) of very pure copperprobably from Alpine sources circulated widelyacross Europe around 2000 B.C.

Tin Tin was extremely rare, and when tin bronzebegan to be widely used in Europe, the adjustment ofnetworks to obtain tin made a very significant differ-ence to the pattern of trade in Europe. The mainsources exploited in prehistoric times were Cornwall,Galicia, and the Bohemian Ore Mountains (Erzge-birge), where copper was also available; other sourcesoccurred in Brittany, other parts of Iberia, Tuscany,Sardinia, and possibly Serbia and Ireland. Tin fromsteppe sources may have been available to people inSoutheast Europe, while those of the Aegean mayalso have had access to tin from Anatolia.

Tin was generally obtained from alluvial (placer)deposits in rivers, in the form of black pebbles of

cassiterite (tin oxide), though in some cases it wasrecovered from eluvial deposits by ground sluicing.Tin mines in Spain were worked before Romantimes, and tin may also have been mined in Corn-wall, though no ancient mines have been locatedthere.

Rudna Glava (Serbia) Malachite ore was minedhere from the later fifth millennium, using funnel-shaped pits 50–65 feet (15–20 meters) deep, ofwhich around 40 are known, though more recentiron working has destroyed much of the early evi-dence. Sometimes the top of the pit, which cutthrough loose material, was reinforced with stonewalls. The shafts were stepped above the ore vein toprotect the miners from debris falling from themouth of the shaft. The ore was mined with stonehammers and antler picks, probably without usingfire setting. Finds of fine Vinca pottery in the minesmay have been votive offerings.

Aibunar (Bulgaria) From this source of malachite,mined in the fifth millennium and exchangedthroughout the Balkans and beyond, the ore wasobtained by cutting narrow trenches up to 260 feet(80 meters) long and 33–65 feet (10–20 meters)deep. Antler picks, two heavily used copper tools, anax-adz and a hammer-ax, large hammerstones, andthe bones of three miners were found here.

Ross Island (Ireland) The arsenic-rich sulfidiccopper ores at Ross Island were exploited around2400–2000 B.C. by people using Beaker pottery.Tools recovered from the mines include ox-scapulashovels. The ore was broken up at the mine site andtaken to the nearby hut encampment, where it wasroasted and smelted in bowl furnaces. Flat axes madefrom Ross Island ore were widely distributed in theBritish mainland.

Mitterberg (Austria) Chalcopyrite ore was minedat Mitterberg during the Bronze Age from wide pitsthat were often extended into adits and shafts withgalleries up to 330 feet (100 meters) long, forming anextensive network. Mining was discontinued in themain shaft around 1020 B.C. due to the depletion ofthe ore. Ladders made of notched tree trunks wereused to give access to the galleries, some of which


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were exploratory, searching for veins that had runout. Fire setting was used as the main method ofmining, and water to cool the rock was brought in inbronze buckets or wooden troughs made of hollowedsplit tree trunks. The rock was crushed in the mine,using bronze hammers, and was graded usingwooden sieves with a hazel twig mesh. A windlass wasused to draw bags of ore to the surface. Outside themines the crushed ore was separated by hand or inwooden water-separating devices built alongside astream. Roasting beds and smelting furnaces havealso been found. Many of the miners may have livedin the small nearby settlement of St. Veit-Klinglberg.

Cwmystwyth (Wales, Britain) Here a substantialopen mining pit was extensively worked fromaround 2000 to 1400 B.C. and continued in use intothe Iron Age. It was dug to exploit the visible toppart of an extensive deposit of chalcopyrite, CometLode, 3–20 feet (1–6 meters) wide, which ran downthe side of the valley. The pit is around 80 feet (25meters) long and at least 23 feet (7 meters) deep,with some small galleries cut in its sides to followore-filled fissures (vugs). Iron carbonate and galenaalso occurred there, and the latter was exploited bythe prehistoric miners. Beach cobbles used as ham-merstones here had been brought from the mouth ofthe Ystwyth River, some 20 miles (30 kilometers)away; many were found in the waste material tippeddown the hillside, along with oak charcoal from thefire setting. As the mines increased in depth, flood-ing began to be a problem; this was dealt with byinstalling guttering made of alder logs, whichdrained the water into a sump from which it couldbe bailed out. Waterlogged remains found hereincluded baskets of hazel withies and ropes.

Mount Gabriel (Ireland) Malachite ore, alongwith some copper sulfide ore, occurred here as manysmall discontinuous veins, which were mined in theperiod 1700–1500 B.C. by digging numerous smallpits, of which around 30 are known. As the rock washard, all the mining was by fire setting. Tools foundhere include a shovel made of alder wood, a numberof sharpened oak sticks used to prize off flakes ofrock, and a handle for a hammerstone made oftwisted hazel withies, as well as pine splints that hadbeen burnt as torches. It is estimated that around

20–28 short tons (20–27 tonnes) of ore were takenfrom the mine over the two centuries of its use.

Great Orme’s Head (Wales, Britain) A veryextensive underground network of mines, one of thelargest in prehistoric Europe, with shafts up to 230feet (70 meters) deep and galleries as much as 1,000feet (300 meters) long, was worked at Great Ormefrom around 1700 to 700 B.C. Early work hereexploited surface deposits, but the mines soonexpanded underground, following the ore deposits.The ores mined here were chalcopyrites; arsenic wasadded when the ore was worked, to produce arseni-cal bronze. The parent rock was limestone, giving analkaline environment that allowed the preservationof numerous bone and antler tools, includingunmodified bones used as scoops to gouge out cop-per ore. Very large stones weighing up to 65 pounds(30 kilograms) that had clearly been used for pound-ing the rock were probably operated using a cradlesuspended from timber uprights. Fire setting wasprobably unnecessary, given the softness of the rock.Work began here with large open pits to mine thesurface outcrops of ore. Veins of ore were then fol-lowed underground. Many of the animal bonesfound in the mines seem likely to have come fromthe meals eaten there by the miners. The ore wascrushed at the site, using mortar stones, and washedin a spring before being taken to Pen Trwyn, about amile (1.5 kilometers) from the mine, where it wassmelted.

Galicia (Spain) Cassiterite ore was available in therivers of Galicia and was probably exploited fromthe Bronze Age onward. The classical world knewthe region as the Cassiterides or Tin Islands, fromwhich the Phoenicians and their successors obtainedconsiderable quantities of tin.

Cornwall (Britain) This was possibly the chiefsource of tin in antiquity. Analyses of the first bronzeartifacts in Britain, made around 2000 B.C., haveshown that they include tin that chemically matchesthat from Cornwall. No ancient mines have beenlocated here, since extensive later mining and ero-sion have probably obliterated all trace of ancientworking, but these analyses have demonstrated thatCornish tin was being worked by 2000 B.C. Classical


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references show that Cornwall was one of Europe’smain sources of tin in the later Iron Age. DiodorusSiculus refers to the mining of surface deposits of tinand the manufacture of astragalus-shaped ingots inBelerion (Cornwall); ingots in this shape have beenrecovered from an undated ancient wreck off theDevon coast at Bigbury Bay. Tin-smelting slag wasfound in barrows at Caerloggas in Cornwall.

SMELTING

Copper Oxide and carbonate ores could besmelted simply by heating them with charcoal in areducing environment, but sulfide ore had first to beroasted in an open bonfire to drive off the sulfur andsome of the trace elements and to oxidize the ore.The copper ore was mixed with charcoal for fuel,and iron oxide or sand could be added as a flux. Theore was smelted in a bowl furnace covered by claywalls with a hole at its base to tap the slag and toforce in a draught using bellows; a temperature of1,470 degrees Fahrenheit (800 degrees Centigrade)was required. A base possibly of such a furnace wasfound at Muhlbach in the eastern Alps. Iron, a com-mon element of sulfide copper ores, and other impu-rities were removed as gas, or settled in the slag,while the copper produced by the smelting processsettled in the furnace base, forming a bun-shaped(plano-convex) ingot. In the eastern Mediterranean“oxhide” copper ingots were made, some of whichwere traded into Europe, where they are knownfrom Sardinia and Sicily and fragments from a hoardin Germany.

Tin The ore was roasted and ground to a powder.At first this was probably mixed with copper ore andthe two smelted together to produce bronze in oneoperation. Later, it was smelted separately to pro-duce pure tin and then mixed with copper, givinggreater control over the relative proportions of thetwo metals.

WORKING

Native or smelted copper could be worked intosimple shapes by cold-hammering, or by hammer-ing and annealing; working by hammering andannealing was also necessary to remove the blister-ing and unevenness of the smelted copper. Cold-

hammering was also used to sharpen the edge ofcast copper tools.

Copper required a temperature of 1,981 degreesFahrenheit (1,083 degrees Centigrade) to melt; thetechnology for achieving this was available in theBalkans by the fifth millennium. The smelted cop-per was placed in a clay crucible and heated withcharcoal inside a clay-lined furnace with a chimney.A forced draught was necessary to achieve therequired temperature, so a tuyere to take a blow pipeor bellows was inserted at the base of the furnace.Hot crucibles were probably handled using tongs orpaired poles of green wood.

Once copper could be melted, it was used forcasting. At first open molds were employed; theshape of the desired object was carved into a stoneblock, but simpler molds were also made by pressinga shape into firm sand and pouring metal into theresulting impression. Common objects in the fifth-millennium Balkans included flat axes and awls, butalso heavier objects such as shafthole axes and ham-mers. Open molds produced objects shaped on thelower side and flat on top, probably generally treatedas blanks that were then worked into their finishedform by grinding, hammering, and annealing.

Two-piece molds are known in Europe in thelater third millennium, though they may also havebeen used earlier in the Balkans to cast shaftholeaxes. These molds were often made of clay, whichcould be formed around a reusable wooden pattern,or of stone or metal; in the case of metal molds, theinside was coated with graphite to prevent themolten metal sticking to it. Metal was poured intothe mold, and when the object cooled the mold wasremoved. The remnants of the casting process,notably the slight seam formed at the junction of themold pieces and the flashes from the mold’s ventsand filling hole, were then removed by hammeringand the blade might be sharpened or the objectheated to allow it to be bent. The metal was alsooften polished to give the object a smooth surface.Two-piece molds enabled more complex shapes tobe made, such as flanged axes, daggers and halberdswith a midrib, and ax heads with a side loop bywhich they could be bound more securely to theirhandle.

A clay core might be inserted to create a shaft-hole in the finished object. The most characteristic


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early product of this technique was the battle-axe,made in the Carpathian region and widely imitatedin stone. Bronze was easier to cast than copper,encouraging the development of more complexshapes. Únetice metallurgists developed a techniqueof surface enrichment of tin in bronze objects to givea silvery finish. Other Únetice innovations includedcasting-on, in which a cast object was partiallyinserted into the mold for an additional part beforethe molten metal was poured into the mold; solidmetal hilts were added to daggers using this tech-nique, which also enabled larger objects to be cre-ated and broken objects to be repaired.

The Únetice metallurgists also made small vesselsand ornaments from beaten metal sheets. By the latersecond millennium bronze bars hammered out intosheets were being used to create much larger objectssuch as buckets, cauldrons, shields, and body armor.

These were hammered into shape over a woodenform and decorated with repoussé bosses and ribs,which also gave extra strength. Sections were heldtogether with rivets, often arranged in patterns, andhandles were added by casting-on. Objects made intwo-piece molds now included swords, socketedspearheads, pins with decorated heads, and socketedaxes. They were often decorated, using a variety oftechniques, including engraving, chasing, andrepoussé, with chisels, punches, and gravers. Elabo-rate designs were drawn with compasses. Some IronAge bone plaques from Loughcrew in Ireland mayhave been used as test pieces on which to design thesecompass patterns before executing them on the metalitself. Several pairs of Iron Age compasses were foundin the Spanish settlement of La Bastida. Red-hotbronze was drawn through holes in a drawbar orhammered into a swage (groove) on the stone anvil to


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6.7 Reconstruction of a bronze founder’s workshop (Figuier, Louis. Primitive Man. London: Chatto andWindus, 1876)

create wire; this was used to make applied decorationor twisted singly or in strands to form pins, bracelets,and neck rings.

More complex objects were made in reusablestone or bronze multiple-piece molds or by lost-wax(cire perdue) casting. For the latter a model of thedesired object was created in wax, with or without aclay core, and sometimes with elaborate surface dec-oration. This was encased in clay and fired. The waxran out, leaving a hollow interior or a thin spacebetween the outer mold and inner core (held inplace by pins) into which the metal was poured.When the metal had cooled, the clay mold wassmashed. The alloying of lead with copper in theLate Bronze Age would have facilitated casting inthese elaborate molds as the lead-copper alloy runsmore easily than tin-bronze when molten. Cire per-due was used to create elaborate shapes such as Irishhorns or the figurines from the Nuraghic culture of

Sardinia. Some complex objects such as the Scandi-navian lurer were cast in separate pieces with lockingjoints that were fixed together. Tin was sometimesmade into small objects like beads; it was also used asa solder for joining pieces of bronze.

In the first millennium, when tools were more usu-ally made of iron, bronze was mainly used to manufac-ture ornaments and other prestigious objects. Theseincluded horse harness, parade armor, vessels, andjewelry such as pins, torcs, and fibulae. Bronze evenmore than before became a vehicle for displayingartistic and technological versatility, skill, and inven-tiveness. Objects of sheet bronze became both morecommon and more elaborate; these included excep-tional creations such as the bronze wheeled couch inthe Hochdorf barrow. Sheet bronze was also used forcladding on objects such as wooden buckets and fordecoration. Some bronze cauldrons had a base of iron,producing an attractive bichrome heat-resistant vessel.Copper, tin, and bronze were also combined withother metals for decorative effect. Bronze was some-times used to plate iron, while bronze or copper wereoccasionally plated with tin or silver or gilded.

Other decoration was achieved by inlayingbronze with coral and glass, held in cells of metal(cloisonné). By the late centuries B.C. the art ofenameling had been mastered. Finished bronzeobjects were often polished, using sand or a stone togrind the surface smooth and oil and wax to create asheen, using a piece of wool.

Brass was probably not manufactured in prehis-toric Europe, although some bronzes contained zincfrom impurities in the copper ore. Some Late IronAge objects also contained zinc derived from Romanbrass used as scrap metal and a few late objects weremade of brass, for example, a number of sheet brassobjects in a hoard found at Tal-y-llyn in Wales.

Gussage All Saints This second-century B.C.British Iron Age farmstead was also a specialistbronze industrial site where horse harness and vehi-cle fittings were produced by cire perdue casting.Debris left here included small bone tools used tomodel the objects in wax, iron punches and chisels,triangular crucibles, a small billet of bronze, andbroken clay molds for various harness elements suchas bits, terret rings, strap ends, and linchpins. Ironwas also separately worked here.


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6.8 Two mold halves, for casting a bronze palstave(left) and a bronze ax (right), as well as the plug ofmetal that formed at the top of the mold when themolten metal was poured (Worsaae, J. J. A. TheIndustrial Arts of Denmark. London: Chapman andHall, 1882)

GoldThe appearance, rarity, and incorruptibility of goldhave caused it to be regarded as a precious materialalmost everywhere it is known. A great proportionof gold work from ancient Europe comes from buri-als where it was used as the material for many pres-tige grave goods.

SOURCES

Gold occurs generally in its native (pure metal)form, which often includes some other metals suchas silver, copper, platinum, iron, or tin as impurities;electrum, a natural alloy of gold with larger amountsof silver, was also known. Gold is often found in elu-vial and alluvial (placer) deposits. In rocks gold isfound in the upper, oxidized levels. Importantsources of gold in prehistoric Europe were knownin Ireland, Iberia, and Transylvania, and smallersources in Bohemia, parts of the Balkans, Wales, andFrance. Gold used at Varna in the fifth millenniumalso came from more distant sources in Armenia andthe Caucasus.

Though some was mined, much of the goldobtained in antiquity was recovered by panning allu-vial deposits. A third-century B.C. panning operationwas found at Modlesovice in Bohemia, where thewooden troughs used were preserved. Gold was oftenpresent in minute amounts in the placer depositsfrom which tin ore was panned; in historical timesthis was carefully collected by tin miners and stored ina quill. Mined gold-bearing rock was crushed to a finepowder and the gold separated from the rock dust bypanning or washing over a collecting medium such asheather or a sheepskin to which the gold adheredwhile the lighter rock particles were washed away.

Wicklow Mountains (Ireland) Alluvial gold andpossibly alluvial tin were panned in the WicklowMountains, where gold was probably also minedfrom the late third millennium, providing the basisfor a magnificent gold-working industry.

WORKING

As gold is soft and easily worked, gold objects weregenerally produced by cold-hammering or heating

and hammering; at first simple shapes such as beads,pendants, and rings were made. By the fifth millen-nium B.C. at Varna, however, gold was being madeinto more ambitious shapes that probably involvedcasting as well as hammering. An exceptional piecefrom Moigrad in Romania was a sheet-gold discweighing 26 ounces (750 grams) and measuring 10by 12 inches (24 by 31 centimeters).

In the Bronze Age gold may have circulated inthe form of small “bullet” ingots from which it couldbe cold-hammered into sheet gold. Small pieces ofgold could be welded together by burnishing,enabling larger objects to be made. Many of thegreat variety of techniques used for working copperand bronze were also applied to gold, such as shap-ing thin sheet gold over a form, casting in simpleor multiple-piece molds, making wire, and decorat-ing with repoussé, chased, engraved, stamped, andcompass-drawn designs. Ornate gold cups and elab-orate ornaments were made by many Bronze Agegroups. In the Iron Age gold work was sometimesinlaid with coral or glass.

Gold was also worked by its own particular tech-niques, including granulation and filigree, andobjects of other metals were sometimes gilded.Many gold artifacts were extremely fine and elabo-rate, and some involved substantial quantities ofgold. Artifacts made in several pieces were joined bysewing with gold wire or by soldering using an alloyof copper and gold. This alloy was also commonlyused in the later Bronze Age and in the La Tèneperiod to make artifacts, saving on gold and giving aricher color; in the Iron Age silver was often alsoadded, making a ternary alloy. The appearance ofobjects made of the latter was sometimes enhancedby depletion gilding. Gold was also used to decorateobjects made of other materials, such as Chalcol-ithic buttons covered with gold foil, Early BronzeAge daggers decorated with tiny gold nails, andIron Age bowls, helmets, and other objects withsolid or openwork sheet-gold cladding or appliqués.At Varna and a few other early Balkan sites somepottery vessels were decorated with gold paint.

Varna (Bulgaria) At this cemetery dated around4500–4000 B.C. 61 out of some 300 graves containedgold objects, totaling around 13 pounds (6 kilograms)


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of gold. These included discs and sheet-gold appliquésto decorate clothing, amulets, decorations on claymasks, a tube that may have been a penis sheath, andeven a solid gold model astragalus, as well as beads,bracelets, and rings. Hollow tubes to cover thewooden shafts of stone hammer-axes may have beencast. The abundance and variety of gold objects herecontrasts with the small numbers of beads and ringsfound elsewhere at this time.

Wessex (Britain) A series of rich barrow burials inthe region around Stonehenge, dated around 2000to 1700 B.C., included some with objects of finesheet gold that were apparently the work of a singlecraftsman. His products included a lozenge-shapedchest ornament and a smaller lozenge, a belt hookand gold-wire inlay for the handle of a copper dag-ger, associated with the man buried in the Bush Bar-row; a lozenge plate and button- and pendant-coversburied with a cremation in the same barrow ceme-tery at Wilsford; and a rectangular plate, button-covers, cones, and cylindrical beads with a secondarycremation at Upton Lovell.

Ireland (Britain) Irish gold working, using goldfrom the Wicklow Mountains, began around 2200B.C., producing sheet-gold discs, basket-shapedearrings, and lunulae (crescentic collars), elabo-rately decorated with incised or punched geometricpatterns. A greater range of objects was made in thesecond millennium, including torcs, tress rings,and other objects made using twisted strips or rodsof gold, and sheet-gold armlets with chased orrepoussé ribbed decoration. Even greater versatil-ity was displayed in the first millennium; productsincluded small objects such as earrings and amuletscovered with intricately decorated gold foil, mas-sive solid gold dress-fasteners, and gorgets. Thelatter were great collars of fine sheet gold deco-rated with ribs and ropes of fine twisted wire towhich gold disc terminals had been stitched withgold wire. The decoration of the discs and body ofthe gorgets used many techniques, includingrepoussé, raising, chasing, and stamping.

Thrace (Bulgaria) Grave goods buried in Thracianroyal tombs in the later first millennium B.C. demon-strate remarkable mastery of metalworking, using gold

and silver from the Apuseni Mountains in Transylva-nia. The ornaments include necklaces of gold beadsand pendants decorated by granulation, repoussé, fili-gree, and soldering on patterns in fine gold wire; goldbrooches with cloisonné enamel; necklaces made ofchains of silver wire; and silver, gilded silver, and goldappliqués for sewing onto clothing. Silver dishes,bowls, and jugs had gilded and finely decorated bandsand bosses, while other silver vessels, pieces of harness,and armor bore gilded relief figures and scenes such ashorsemen hunting. A hoard known as the Panagyur-ishte treasure comprised nine gold vessels decoratedwith solid and hollow figures and relief scenes.

Torcs Bronze Age gold torcs (neck rings) weremade from skillfully twisted flanged metal bars orwire, with knob or rod terminals. Similar torcs wereproduced in the Iron Age along with torcs andbracelets of tubular gold sheet or cast solid gold,sometimes with elaborate relief decoration. The


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6.9 A gold torc from Clonmacnoise in Ireland,made from a loosely twisted flat strip of gold withexpanded terminals that loop together (Lubbock,John. Prehistoric Times. New York: D. Appleton andCompany, 1890)

sixth-century B.C. “princess’s” grave at Vix includeda torc of thick sheet gold with elaborate terminalswhose decoration included tiny cast figures of awinged horse, chased and punched designs, and del-icate filigree work. The terminals of torcs often boreelaborate decoration, including figures and geomet-ric designs. Among the most impressive exampleswere the torcs found at Snettisham in England,which included some made of gold wires twisted instrands that were then twisted together and attachedby casting-on to massive cire perdue cast terminals.

Silver and LeadSilver was not widely available in Europe, but occa-sional silver pins and other ornaments and a fewweapons are known from eastern and central Europeand Italy from the third millennium onward, someof them Aegean or Anatolian imports. Chalcolithicand Bronze Age Spain was an exception, producing anumber of diadems, beads, and rings, while a few sil-ver cups are known from France in the same period.Its use became more widespread in the Iron Age.

Lead had many uses, from the humble functionsof mending metal objects, filling holes in them oradding weight to improve their balance, throughproviding small parts and attachments on bronzes,to occasionally being made into small objectsentirely of lead, such as weights or beads. Gold wassometimes eked out by making objects with a leadcore. Lead was used in the Late Bronze Age in west-ern Europe to alloy with copper, producing a metalthat was easier to cast.

SOURCES

In the Erzgebirge (Bohemian Ore Mountains) nativesilver and veins of a very pure silver ore containingcobalt, nickel, and arsenic occurred. Silver-lead sul-fide (galena) deposits known as jarosites, whichformed at the base of the weathered horizon in somemetalliferous rock, were favored as the source of sil-ver and lead in antiquity. These were composedmostly of lead with a variable amount of silver, usu-ally small. The most important source of silver wasthe silver-rich jarosite of the Huelva area of Spain,worked by the Late Bronze Age if not earlier.

Silver also occurred in a natural alloy with gold,known as electrum. The proportions of the twometals varied, giving in different regions a metal thatmore closely resembled either gold or silver. Theelectrum of the Apuseni Mountains in Transylvaniawas extensively used in the Iron Age.

SMELTING AND WORKING

Silver-lead sulfide ore was first roasted to drive offsome of the sulfur it contained, producing litharge(lead oxide). This could be used as it was or could bereduced to lead by heating in a furnace with char-coal, a process that drove off the remaining sulfur assulfur dioxide. At every stage the lead still containedthe silver and trace elements that had been presentin the ore. The smelted metal could be used as leador the silver could be extracted by cupellation.

Impurities in silver could also be removed bycupellation; in this case the silver was mixed withlead before the process began. The metal was heatedto red heat in an open crucible and air was blownacross the surface, driving the lead off as lead oxidegas. This was the method used to extract silver at theRío Tinto mines in Spain, where an extensivedeposit of silver-smelting slag has been found. In thefirst millennium much of the silver from here, whichwas mined and smelted by local people, was tradedwith the Phoenicians established on the coast. It wasalso extensively used locally for small vessels andornaments, such as fibulae, bracelets, and torcs,which were often made of twisted wires or bars,sometimes with knots, loops, and other decorativefeatures worked in. Another major center of IronAge silver working was in Thrace, where silver wasused alongside gold. A silver-plated iron torc withcow’s-head terminals from Trichtingen in Germanymay also have been of Thracian workmanship.

Gundestrup Cauldron (Denmark) This famousIron Age gilded silver cauldron was constructed of13 panels of silver sheet decorated with repousséhigh-relief designs with engraved and chased detail.These were soldered together with tin to form aninterior and an exterior frieze, and were attached toa sheet-silver bowl with a gilded central disc and acircular iron rim. Many of the scenes shown andartifacts depicted, such as torcs and carnyxes, seem


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purely Celtic, but others show features from regionsas distant as India, such as elephants, and the work-manship suggests it was of Thracian manufacture.

IronRed ochre, hydrated iron oxide, was known and usedas a pigment from the Palaeolithic period onward,iron pyrites were often employed as strike-a-lights,and meteoritic iron was occasionally gathered andused. Iron ore was not worked, however, until rela-tively late. Iron was known in the Near East by thelate third millennium, and in Greece in the late sec-ond millennium, becoming widespread by 700 B.C.However, some later Bronze Age bronzes in temper-ate Europe have decorations that seem to have beenmade with iron punches, and one such punch wasfound in Holland; iron drill bits are also implied byholes drilled in some Late Bronze Age metalwork,so it seems likely that a limited amount of iron wasin circulation at this time. It probably was first pro-

duced as a by-product of smelting sulfide copperores, which often contain iron.

The technology of iron working differedmarkedly from that of other metals. In the ancientworld only the Chinese achieved the technologynecessary for the manufacture of cast iron, Euro-peans being confined to making wrought iron. Sinceiron was inferior to bronze in strength, until thepractice of carburization was mastered in the earlycenturies of the first millennium B.C. its earlieradoption may have been linked to the difficulties ofobtaining a sufficient supply of tin or good-qualitycopper to satisfy contemporary demand for metaltools and weapons. By the later first millennium ironwas being used to make a great range of everydaytools accessible to most people, and iron-smithingwas practiced in most settlements of any size.

SOURCES AND EXTRACTION

Iron occurred as meteoritic iron, but most iron camefrom ore in rocks. The weathered upper layers ofiron-bearing rock oxidized to form a range of ironoxides, including haematite and magnetite in rockforming a reddish crust known as iron-hat or gossan;these were the ores most commonly exploited, by dig-ging open pits or by collecting nodules from the sur-face, though some deeper mines were also worked.At the base of the weathered horizon, iron potas-sium sulfates formed, and below this were unalteredsulfides such as iron pyrites. In some regions erodedmagnetite formed placer deposits of black sand, whichwas recovered by ground sluicing and exploited as ironore, for example, by the Etruscans in Elba and Popu-lonia. Bog iron (limonite, a type of brown haematitefound in bogs) was used in some parts of Europe.

Unlike other metals, particularly tin, iron ore waswidely available and plentiful, local supplies servingthe needs of most areas. Sources of iron of widerimportance included the eastern Alps, the HolyCross Mountains of Poland, the Hunsrück-Eifelarea, and Etruria. Most iron could be obtained fromthe surface by open pit mining.

SMELTING AND WORKING

Iron ore was usually smelted close to its source as itsbulk made it difficult to transport. The ore was lay-


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6.10 Iron pincers and shears found at La Tène inLake Neuchâtel, Switzerland (Figuier, Louis.Primitive Man. London: Chatto and Windus, 1876)

ered with charcoal and heated in an enclosed shaftfurnace with a steady forced draught created withbellows to a temperature that had to be maintainedbetween 2,000 and 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100and 1,200 degrees Centigrade). The furnace wasthen often smashed to remove the resultant spongymass of impure iron, known as the bloom. This hadto be repeatedly worked by heating to red-hot in aforging fire and hammering, to separate the ironfrom the slag. Iron production was often on a largescale and was an expensive process, 2 pounds (1 kilo-gram) of useable iron being the end product of asmelt whose firing used 20 pounds (10 kilograms) ofcharcoal and involved around 25 man-hours’ work,in addition to that required for mining, charcoal-burning, and other associated tasks. The wroughtiron was often forged into ingots of various shapesthat were probably designed to demonstrate thequality and consistency of the iron; common formswere a square-sectioned bar with tapering ends and aflat bar with a flanged end. These are also known ascurrency bars since they were probably used as amedium of exchange.

The iron ingots were traded widely, to beworked into artifacts on settlements; scrap ironrecycled from broken artifacts was also used. Thesmiths produced the required shape by repeatedheating in a hearth and hammering on an anvil.Use of charcoal in the smithing process caused car-bon to combine with the iron to produce steel, aharder metal than wrought iron; repeated workingincreased the proportion of steel present. Carbur-ization could also be achieved by spreading a layerof fine charcoal particles across the anvil beforeforging the iron object on it, producing a case-hard-ened artifact that had a steel shell and an iron inte-rior. By the later Iron Age the technique ofquenching the steel had also been mastered; thisinvolved plunging the white-hot object into waterto cool it rapidly, increasing its hardness but alsomaking it brittle. Objects were then often temperedby being heated and slowly cooled. This reducedtheir brittleness at the expense of reducing theirhardness; skill was required to achieve the right bal-ance between quenching and tempering. Case-hardened objects, however, required no temperingsince the brittleness of the quenched steel was offsetby the softness of the iron. Pieces of iron could be

welded together by heating them to red heat andhammering them together. Wrought iron was usedfor many different artifacts, steel generally only foredged tools, including swords. The earliest ironobjects imitated those in bronze, but graduallyshapes more suited to the methods of iron workingwere produced. Some of the finest swords weremade from strips of wrought iron and steel weldedtogether, combining the flexibility of the iron withthe hard edge of steel, or were case-hardened toproduce a thick steel shell. Another exceptionalproduct was iron mail, a Celtic invention around300 B.C. This was made by forging iron rings andindividually interlocking them.

Noricum The iron ore of the kingdom of Nori-cum in the eastern Alps was particularly good since itcontained a considerable amount of manganese, anelement that increased the malleability of iron. Nor-eia (Magdalensberg), its principal oppidum, there-fore became a major center of iron working, wherenumerous furnaces and quantities of slag have beenfound. Its iron was famed in the Roman world, whereit was known as ferrum noricum.

Coin ProductionCoinage of gold and silver began to be used inmuch of Europe during the third century B.C.Lower-value denominations began to appear in thefirst century: small silver coins and coins of bronzeand potin.

Coin blanks (flans) were produced in molds, themetal for each having been exactly weighed out orthe molds carefully made to produce flans of exactlythe same size. Large molds with 50 or more holeswere used for mass-production. The flans wereplaced between two engraved bronze or iron dies,and the upper one was struck a single hard blow,impressing the design from both dies onto the facesof the flan. As the designs were cut into the dies,they appeared in relief on the coins.

Occasionally, coins were cast in clay molds. Thismethod was used for making potin coins in Kent inBritain: a two-piece mold was made using a strip ofpapyrus to form the coin blanks. The design wasscratched into the fired clay with a stylus before the


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coins were cast. As the holes in the mold ran intoeach other, this produced a strip of coins that werethen cut apart.

CERAMICS

The world’s first pottery was made in Japan before10,000 B.C., and deliberately fired clay objects werebeing produced even earlier in various parts of thePalaeolithic world. The Near East saw the develop-ment of pottery before 7000 B.C., and sometimeduring the seventh millennium pottery began toappear on Greek farming settlements. The idea ortechnology of pottery production spread acrossEurope with the spread of farming, being taken upby sedentary hunter-gatherer communities in areassuch as the forest steppe of eastern Europe andScandinavia.

Pottery served two main purposes: storage andcooking. Other containers, such as skins and baskets,could also perform these functions, but pottery wasmore efficient and more versatile. On the other handit was both more fragile and heavier than the alterna-tives and was therefore not suited to a mobile lifestyle,being used almost exclusively by sedentary communi-ties, although it was also traded or used as containersfor traded goods, mainly moved by water transport.

In addition, pottery was attractive and capable ofbeing made into many shapes and decorated in an

almost infinite variety of ways, so it rapidly became avehicle for making cultural statements, for instance,as status symbols or demonstrations of participationin a religious or social practice, such as that associ-ated with the widespread Beaker pottery.

Pottery ProductionDifferent clay and filler mixes, surface treatments,and firing conditions were used to make pottery fordifferent purposes, such as watertight wares for heat-ing liquids and porous fabrics to keep liquids cool.

CLAYS

Clay suitable for making pottery was widely avail-able, particularly red clays that contain iron oxides,and most communities were able to dig potter’s clayfrom sources nearby. Nevertheless, fine or unusualclays were prized and vessels manufactured fromthem were widely traded; these included potterymade from the gabbroitic clay of the Lizard inCornwall, which was transported throughout south-west England.

CLAY PREPARATION

Raw clay was often spread out to weather and period-ically turned and knocked about, breaking down anylumps. The clay was worked to make it smooth andeven so that it would not distort during drying andfiring. Large impurities were removed by hand, andthe clay might be washed and settled or strained toobtain fine particles. If necessary a filler (temper) wasadded to reduce the clay’s stickiness; this was particu-larly necessary for the very plastic red clays. Someclay already contained mineral particles that couldact as a filler, but others that might be added includedground shell, calcined flint, chopped straw, fine sand,or grog (ground-up pottery). The clay and filler werethoroughly mixed with water and kneaded to obtaina plastic, well-blended material free of air bubbles.

POTTERY MAKING

The simplest method of forming pottery is by press-ing a hollow into a ball of clay and thinning the sides


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6.11 A Celtic bronze coin found at La Tène inLake Neuchâtel, Switzerland (Figuier, Louis.Primitive Man. London: Chatto and Windus, 1876)

between finger and thumb; this may have been themethod by which some of the earliest pottery wasmade. Most European pottery, however, was built upof coils or rings of rolled strips of clay; the surfacewas then smoothed with a rib bone, a wooden beaterand anvil, or a damp cloth. The base of the vesselmight be made by pressing clay into a mold, and thenthe body of the vessel would be built up in coils; largestorage vessels often were made this way. Pots mightbe made in several separate pieces, such as body andneck, often with a carination at the point of attach-ment. They might also be built up of slabs of clay, aswas some of the Greek Early Neolithic pottery. Lugswere pinched out from the side of the vessel orattached and smoothed on, as were footrings, feet,and handles, though these might also be attachedthrough holes poked into the vessel’s side. Lips andspouts were usually pinched out. Curved incised dec-oration had to be executed at this stage as onlystraight lines were practicable when the pottery haddried to leather hard; impressed or rusticated decora-tion was also applied at this stage.

Pots were often formed on a flat stone, mat, orsherd that could be turned during their manufacture.It is possible that the turntable (tournette), a flat discseated on a pivot, was used in prehistoric Europe. Inthe second millennium B.C. the potter’s wheel wasadopted by the Minoans from the Near East andgradually spread through the Mediterranean. It wasintroduced into temperate Europe during the secondhalf of the first millennium B.C., reaching Britain bythe first century B.C. Wheel-thrown vessels usuallyhad flat bases, while those formed in other waysmight have round, flat, or pointed bases.

After shaping, the vessels were left to dry slowlyand evenly, in the air in warm regions or near thehearth or in a drying oven in cooler lands. When thevessel was leather hard, portions of its walls might beshaved with a knife to reduce their thickness.Incised, excised, or impressed decoration could beadded at this stage, and the surface was frequentlyslipped and burnished with a stone, bone, or piece ofshell to reduce its porosity. Greek Early Neolithicpottery, for example, was very highly burnished andglossy. Lugs and other additions could be luted on tothe leather-hard vessel, using slip as an adhesive;applied decoration such as knobs, bosses, or bands ofclay or clay pellets could also be added. The vessels

were then allowed to dry further; when they werewhite-hard, with almost no remaining water, theywere ready for firing. At this stage they could bedecorated by painting.

FIRING

The temperature to which pottery was fired deter-mined its final state. Firing to a temperature aboveabout 840 degrees Fahrenheit (450 degrees Centi-grade) would drive off the water from the clay, pro-ducing terra-cotta, a usable but porous and friablepottery. At a certain temperature (the sinter point)the surfaces of the clay particles fused, producing ahard impermeable fabric known as earthenware.However, at a certain higher temperature, the clayparticles would melt, causing the pottery to col-lapse. These temperatures varied, depending onthe mineral composition of the clay, but the sinterpoint generally lay between 1,800 and 2,200degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 and 1,200 degreesCentigrade). In some clays the sinter point andmelting temperatures were very close, while inother, more suitable, clays they were widely sepa-rated.

Bonfires The simplest method of firing was in thedomestic hearth, the vessel being turned periodicallyto ensure even, overall firing. A related method,widely employed even in the Iron Age, was bonfire(clamp) firing. The pottery was stacked on theground or in a pit, with fast-burning fuel such asbrushwood arranged below and above it and mixedin, and the whole heap was often covered with earth,turf, or dung to damp the fire and conserve the heat,allowing it to burn under control for around threedays, a technique similar to charcoal burning. Thefired pots were allowed to cool naturally, probablyfor as long as a week. Temperatures in a bonfire fir-ing could rise as high as 1,740 degrees Fahrenheit(950 degrees Centigrade), but the firing was oftenuneven and the level of wastage could be high. Theuse of poorer fuels such as peat, for example, in pre-historic Orkney, resulted in the production of softer,less durable pottery.

Kilns Simple updraught (vertical) kilns consistedof a hearth enclosed in a stone, clay, or brick


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chamber, with a perforated clay floor above thehearth on which the pots were stacked. The kilnwas sealed by a dome of clay, stone, or even dungwith a hole left for a chimney; this was removed orsmashed after each firing in order to take out thefired pots. These kilns allowed higher tempera-tures to be achieved and gave better control of theconditions of firing, allowing unblemished poly-chrome pottery to be produced. However, thenumber of vessels that could be fired at one timewas smaller, and kilns required pieces of wood orcharcoal for fuel rather than the more readilyavailable brushwood, dung, straw, or peat thatcould be used in a bonfire firing. Horizontal kilnsin which the pottery was stacked beside the hearthand the air drawn through the chamber by a flueprovided better firing conditions, with higher tem-peratures being possible.

Firing in an oxidizing environment resulted inthe production of pottery with a red surface, whilefiring in a reducing atmosphere (with little or nooxygen coming into contact with the pottery)would produce a gray or black surface. Potterymight also be blackened by smoking over a fire,allowing soot particles to fill the pores in the pot-tery, or by applying a magnetite slip to the vesselbefore firing.

The graphite-painted wares of the Balkans implythat the ability to produce controlled high-firingtemperatures had been achieved by the fifth millen-nium. Updraught and horizontal kilns are knownfrom prehistoric sites in various parts of Europe, butbonfire firing also continued into the Late Iron Age.

Eilean an Tighe A potter’s workshop was foundin this second-millennium Hebridean site. Claywas available locally and was tempered with gritfrom the shores of the adjacent loch, ground on sitewith heavy stone pestles. Pieces of pumice wereused for smoothing the surface of vessels and a bur-nisher was also found. The pottery was fired inhorizontal kilns built of stone blocks packed withturf and roofed with stone slabs. The kilns had apaved hearth, and stone slabs acted as baffles pro-tecting the pots in the firing chamber from directcontact with the fire. A narrow flue led away fromthe firing chamber. Birch and willow wood wereused as fuel.

Pottery Vessels

SHAPES

The earliest pottery was made in simple shapes,often imitating the containers of such materials asleather and basketry that were already in use.Although forms suited to the ceramic medium werequick to develop, imitations of vessels in other mediaalso continued to be produced on occasion. Finemetal vessels, for example, were reproduced in pot-tery, presumably for those without access to themetal prototypes. Pottery vessels were developed forparticular purposes: For example, a range of vesselsincluding strainers and large open bowls appeared inthe fourth millennium across much of Europe,probably connected with milking and processingmilk for making cheese. Jars for storage, bowls forcooking and serving food, cups and beakers for


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6.12 A collared flask, one of the distinctive range ofvessels made by the TRB culture in Neolithic north-ern Europe (Worsaae, J. J. A. The Industrial Arts ofDenmark. London: Chapman and Hall, 1882)

drinking, and urns for burying the dead were amongthe shapes regularly used. The introduction of thepotter’s wheel greatly facilitated the shaping of ves-sels, giving rise to forms with many changes ofdirection in their profile.

From the beginning, European pottery had avariety of different base forms: round, pointed, andflat, with ring bases or feet; some later vessels alsohad pedestals. Vessels might have spouts or lips forpouring; handles or lugs for lifting or suspension,such as the unusual Flute-de-Pan handles of FrenchNeolithic Chassey Ware; necks or collars, such asthe range of urns from Late Neolithic and EarlyBronze Age Britain; rounded, straight-sided or cari-nated profiles; and many other variations in shape.

Many cultures also experimented with moreunusual or fantastic designs: TRB flasks with a thinclay disc collar around their long necks; Danish LateNeolithic bowls with eye motifs; Otomani jars withlarge spiky bosses; Eastern European jars withpainted or modeled human faces on their necks; orthe tiny Early Bronze Age British “grape cups”whose surface was covered with small balls of clayresembling a bunch of grapes. Some cultures pro-duced pottery in the form of people, animals, orobjects, such as the cups made by the Baden culturein the shape of wheeled vehicles.

DECORATION

Many methods were available to give an attractiveappearance to pottery. Clay and slip selection pro-vided a range of possibilities for the color andappearance of the finished vessels. Decoration couldbe applied over the whole surface or part of it, invarious patterns. Zones of decoration were commonand were perhaps related to the introduction of thetournette (turntable).

Surface Deformation The surface of the newlyformed or leather-hard vessel could be decoratedwith incised lines (e.g., LBK) or impressions using afingernail, a bird bone, a stick, a shell (e.g., CardialImpressed Ware), or a twisted cord (e.g., CordedWare, Beakers), or the surface could be stamped(e.g., some Iron Age wares), combed (e.g., someMesolithic wares) or rusticated. Surface rougheningin these ways improved the user’s grip on the vessel.

Appliqués Clay pellets, bands or rolls of clay, andeven figures were added to some vessels at theleather-hard stage and might themselves be deco-rated by impressing or incising. For example, theEncrusted Urns of Early Bronze Age Britain weredecorated with applied rosettes, swags, and zigzagbands of clay, often bearing slashed incisions. SomeHungarian Iron Age pottery had human or animalheads molded on the handles.

Slips and Glazes Further color and textural dif-ferences could be achieved with a surface coating.The simplest form was a slip, made from a wash offine clay, either that used in making the pottery (self-slip) or a contrasting clay. The slip might be appliedto the whole of one or both surfaces or painted on asdesigns. Patterns might also be produced on vesselsdipped into or washed with slip, by previously cover-ing parts of the vessel’s surface with a material suchas wax or grease that would repel the slip but whichwould burn off during firing to reveal the unslippedsurface (reserved slip decoration).

Other minerals such as haematite, graphite, andmica could also be applied by burnishing, slipping,or painting. Some of these permitted the surface tobe burnished to a lustrous finish or metallic sheen,such as the Iron Age Black-Burnished wares.

Painting Designs could be applied to part or all ofthe white-hard vessel’s surface by painting, using avariety of mineral pigments such as ochre and othernatural earths. These could be mixed to produce arange of colors. Although the first pottery in Greecewas undecorated, it was not long before the farmingcommunities in Southeast Europe began to makepottery painted with red or white geometric designs.A great range of such designs was popular in manyareas and at many times, but occasionally represen-tational art was also applied to vessels, such as thoseof the Hallstatt period from Sopron in Hungary,which show scenes from everyday life.

Other CeramicsClay was also used to produce a range of otherobjects. These included many domestic tools, such


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as spindle whorls and loomweights, fishing-netweights, beads and pendants, molds for castingmetal objects, coin molds, pintaderas for stampingdesigns on cloth or people, and Vinca cultureinscribed tablets. In construction clay was used asdaub for wooden structures in temperate Europeand made into mud bricks or used as pisé in thesoutheast. Clay was also used to build kilns and fur-naces for firing pottery or smelting metals. Traceson some Mesolithic baskets show that they werelined with unfired clay to render them watertight.

FIGURINES

Many cultures also used clay to manufacture fig-urines and other models, for a variety of purposes ofwhich ritual is likely to have been the most common.Some figurines were in the shape of animals. Themajority, however, were human, ranging from clayrods with a few facial and sexual features to carefullymodeled naturalistic figures. These figurines mightalso bear geometric designs. In some cases wholescenes were modeled in clay: For example, anarrangement of miniature people seated on chairsand tables with pots from Ovcharovo in Bulgaria.Miniature models of houses were common in the tellsettlements of the fifth-millennium Balkans. Manyof the cenotaphs in the Varna cemetery containedclay masks.

VITREOUS MATERIALS

Glassy materials were produced from a mixture ofgrains of silica such as sand, or ground quartz, flintor rock crystal, with lime (calcium oxide) and analkali such as soda or potash; these acted as fluxes.Small amounts of metallic oxides were also oftenadded to give color. Heating the mixture caused thegrains to adhere (sinter), producing frit. If the sur-face melted to produce a glaze, the material isknown as faience; this could have a core of frit or ofpowdered quartz containing little or no flux. It isoften difficult to distinguish archaeological finds offrit and faience, since the thin glazed surface offaience objects can easily be weathered away. Frit

and faience were being produced in the Near Eastby the mid-fifth millennium B.C., along with glazedstone beads, and the technology had reached Creteby the third millennium. True glass requires a con-siderably higher temperature in order to melt thesilica-alkali-lime mixture completely. While glassbeads were occasionally produced in the third mil-lennium, it was not until around 1600 B.C. that glasswas being made regularly in the Near East; bothglass vessels and glazed pottery appeared around thistime. A vitreous glaze could also be applied to metal,forming enamel; this was developed in the later firstmillennium.

Faience and glass were made into vessels in theNear East and the Mediterranean, but generally onlyornaments, inlays, and small figurines were producedin the rest of Europe, though some small glass vesselswere made in the earlier Iron Age. Roman blown andsophisticated molded glass objects were imported asvalued luxuries by Iron Age communities, but thetechnology to produce them was not adopted.

FaienceBlue or turquoise faience beads found in early sec-ond-millennium central Europe, Britain, and France,and occasionally elsewhere, were originally thoughtto have been imported from the eastern Mediter-ranean. While those found with Mycenaean beads onthe Aeolian island of Salina are likely to have beenAegean imports, analyses of other European exam-ples have shown that they were made of local materi-als, though it is still a matter of dispute whether thetechnology was derived from the Near East or inde-pendently invented in Europe. Britain probablyacquired the knowledge of faience manufacture fromcentral Europe through the trading contacts thattook Cornish tin into continental Europe.

Faience beads were produced in a number ofplaces, probably in small quantities as required, anecklace at a time, from a paste made with water andground quartz or a sand-alkali-lime mixture. Thealkali used in some Scottish faience beads was foundto be derived from seaweed ash, while the composi-tion of some of the English beads resembled that ofearly glass beads in central Europe, with a highpotash content.


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Various methods were used to shape the beads,which included spherical and ring beads, stars,quoits and segmented beads, barrel and biconicalbeads. Often the paste was wrapped round a strawand then cut into beads. Segmented beads in Wessexwere often made by rolling a cylinder of pasteagainst a ridged surface, whereas in Scottish exam-ples a sharp tool was used to indent segments on thepaste cylinder. The glazed surface was in some casesproduced by dipping the paste bead into a semi-liq-uid glazing mixture (sand-alkali-lime and copperoxide), while in others it was made by mixing thepowdered glazing material into the paste, whence itmigrated to the surface as the body paste dried.

GlassGlass was produced by slowly heating a sand-soda-lime mixture until it melted; the temperaturesachieved in prehistoric Europe did not eliminate allthe gas present, so the glass that formed was opaque.Clear glass requires a higher temperature and slowcooling in an annealing oven.

True glass may have been produced in BronzeAge Europe in the Ore Mountains (Erzgebirge),where the silver ore contained cobalt among itsimpurities. Experiments have shown that cobalt-blueglass was probably produced as a natural by-productof the smelting of this silver; the glass was unlikely tohave been discarded but was probably used like gem-stone. Cobalt-blue glass beads have been recoveredfrom the nearby early Únetice cemetery at Nitra inSlovakia, dated around 1800 B.C. Many glass beadsare known from Urnfield burials in central Europe,and a few glass beads from other second-millenniumEuropean sites, probably of central European manu-facture; these were various shades of blue and green,colors derived mainly from cupric oxide combinedwith firing in oxidizing conditions.

In the Late Bronze Age glass with a high magne-sium content was imported from the Mediterraneanand used in various parts of Europe to manufactureglass beads. In contrast, glass made in temperateEurope was low in magnesium but high in potassium(from potash). Evidence of its production is knownfrom Frattesina in the Po plain in Italy, while finds ofthis glass come from a number of sites, including

Hauterive-Champréveyres in Switzerland and Rath-gall in Ireland. Most regions, however, did not makeglass until the Early Iron Age; the presence of 20,500glass beads in six graves at Sticna in Slovenia givessome idea of the quantities being made by this time.

The Urnfield beads were ring- or torus-shaped,and some were decorated with trails of molten glassin a contrasting color, such as yellow (from anti-mony) or white (from tin oxide), wound round thebead in a spiral or arranged as “eyes” made of con-centric circles of different colored glass, sometimesaround a boss. These designs continued into theIron Age when eye-beads became increasingly pop-ular; many such beads and brooch decorations weremade in Aquileia, around the head of the Adriatic. InHallstatt, Istria, and some other settlements in thesixth or fifth century small bowl-shaped glass vesselswith vertical ribs and handles were found; these wereprobably locally made. Glass was also treated likegemstone and cut or ground to produce cloisonnéinlays for many metal objects such as bronze jugs,bracelets, and fibulae. The glass used for this wasusually colored sealing-wax red with cuprous oxideand lead fired under reducing conditions; this isthought to have been a Celtic invention around thefifth century B.C. Glass inlays also provided the eyesof statues like the bronze seated figure from Bouray,France, which has one surviving blue and white glasseye. No furnaces for manufacturing raw glass have


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6.13 Four of the glass gaming counters that wereamong the grave goods in the late first-century B.C.grave at Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire,England (TopFoto.co.uk, © The British Museum/HIP, Photographer: Unknown)

been discovered, but many oppida and other largesettlements contained workshops where raw glasswas remelted and made into a range of ornaments,including beads, rings, pendants, the heads of pins,and parts of fibulae; these were generally shades ofblue or blue green. Bracelets, which were made fromthe mid-third century B.C., were a product particularto Celtic Europe. From the second century B.C.massive ring beads and occasionally small figurineswere made, and glass was manufactured in a range ofcolors, including blue, green, turquoise, yellow,white, amber color (from iron oxide), violet or pur-ple (from manganese), and colorless, the latter beingtechnically the hardest to produce since it requiredthe selection of iron-free sand or the addition ofmanganese dioxide to neutralize the yellowish colorimparted by the iron oxide often present in sand.

Enamel Enameling, in which glass was fused tothe surface of metal objects, replaced glass inlay inthe Late Iron Age. Glass was ground with water to avery fine paste, which was packed tightly into raised(cloisonné) or cut-away (champlevé) cells in themetal object. After drying, the object was heated in afurnace until the glass fused. Finally, the enamel sur-face was ground and polished. Many Late Iron Agemetal objects such as pieces of jewelry, horse har-ness, and parade armor were decorated with enamelwork; although a variety of colors were sometimesused, red was the favorite.

Frattesina (Po valley, Italy) This settlement hadan extensive range of industries producing objects ofmetal, bone, horn, ivory, amber, ostrich eggshell,and glass. While Mycenaean sherds show that theinhabitants of Frattesina were in trading communi-cations with the eastern Mediterranean, the compo-sition of the glass shows that it was locallymanufactured. Among the finds here were cruciblescontaining traces of glass, partly fused glass, lumpsof blue and red glass, the raw material from whichbeads would have been made, along with finishedand partially formed beads.

Meare (Somerset, Britain) A workshop for mak-ing glass beads was among the industrial remains inthe Iron Age wetland village of Meare, probably thesite of a seasonal trading fair. Finds here included a

mold for making beads (this was originally identi-fied as a broken bead). Among the workshop’s prod-ucts were white beads with yellow spiral decoration,known as “Meare spirals,” which were traded intoIreland.

OTHER MATERIALS

Many other materials were exploited particularly formaking jewelry or decorating weapons and fine met-alwork. These included shell, jet, and amber. Somematerials might be made into larger objects, such aslathe-turned shale bowls.

Coal and ShaleVarious kinds of coal were prized for making orna-ments and other small objects; of these the finest isjet, which takes a high polish and has electrostaticproperties that were probably considered magical inantiquity. Lignite (brown coal) and cannel-coal werealso used. Shale, an argillaceous rock often foundassociated with coal, and sapropelite, a related stone,were often used in the same ways as jet and othercoals.

SOURCES AND EXTRACTION

Jet was mined from the cliffs of Whitby in Englandand used from Neolithic times onward for makingjewelry. This was widely circulated, but local substi-tutes were also used; these included lignite, Kim-meridge shale in southern England, and cannel-coalin Scotland and Derbyshire. Shale, which occurs inlarge blocks, was also made into handled cups in theEarly Bronze Age, and in the Iron Age lignite andshale were made into vessels. Kimmeridge shalefrom the Isle of Purbeck region of the Dorset coastwas dug from the cliffs where it outcropped andexported over much of southern England as rough-outs or finished bangles. Sapropelite was found inBohemia, where it was worked in major settlementssuch as Msecké Zehrovice and exported as far asSwitzerland.


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WORKING AND ARTIFACTS

Lignite was made into beads by Mesolithic people atStar Carr in the earlier Mesolithic. In the Chalcol-ithic and Bronze Age Whitby produced finishedobjects of jet that were widely circulated, especiallyspacer-bead necklaces and bracelets, V-perforatedbuttons, sometimes carved with geometric designs,and other clothing accessories such as belt fasteners,large rings that were perhaps cloak fasteners, andnecklaces of beads and spacer beads; some of thebeads were covered with sheet gold. Other types ofjewelry were made in various places of the localmaterials, such as necklaces of cannel-coal disc beadsin Scotland. Local materials were probably used par-ticularly to replace broken elements in necklaces andbracelets of jet beads, but also for whole imitationnecklaces: these might have more strands than theWhitby examples. More unusual objects included apolished mace head inlaid with gold studs, a shalecup, and a later bowl in the shape of a boat found at

Caergwrle Castle in Wales, of shale inlaid with goldshowing the ribs of the boat, the oars and shields ofthe rowers, and the waves of the sea. Later BronzeAge jewelry included rings and bracelets of Kim-meridge shale, worked at Eldon’s seat and otherDorset coastal sites. Cannel-coal was worked inDerbyshire at Swine Sty.

Jet, shale, and lignite continued in use for orna-ments such as rings, bracelets, pendants, and beadsin the Iron Age, along with sapropelite, which waswidely used in Europe for making bangles. Shaleobjects also included spindle whorls and decorateddiscs. In the Late Iron Age shale was worked byturning on a lathe to fashion vessels and bracelets.Sapropelite, in contrast, was carved into braceletsfrom slabs of the material, cutting out a disc fromthe center, which was then discarded.

Hengistbury Head (Dorset, England) An exten-sive settlement occupied from around 800 B.C., its


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6.14 A collection of conical shale buttons decorated with ladder patterns and a shale belt ring (center) froma later-third-millennium cairn burial from Harehope in southern Scotland (Drawing by Audrey McIntosh,from material in the National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

industrial activity included the working of Kim-meridge shale and possibly salt production. At itspeak in the first century B.C.–early first century A.D.,it was an important industrial and trading centerextracting silver, and producing and exporting lathe-turned shale amulets and bracelets, bronze work,salt, and glass.

SchistSchist was used in southwest Iberia for makingplaques and crosiers during the fourth millennium;they are known particularly from megaliths. Theplaques, flat subrectangular sheets of schist, werehighly decorated with geometric patterns and wereoften anthropomorphic in a stylized way, the designsarranged to suggest clothing while two holes at thetop formed eyes; it has been suggested they wereintended as idols. The crosiers were curved objectsdecorated with similar geometric designs.

GraphiteBlocks of graphite on early postglacial sites in theBalkans attest to its early use as a decorative material.In the fifth millennium graphite from the Rhodopeand Stara Planina Mountains began to be used in thisregion to decorate the interior and exterior surfacesof pottery, either by painting or by drawing with alump of graphite. A high temperature, in excess of1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Centi-grade), was required to fire graphite-decorated pot-tery. Graphite was also later used in the manufactureof metal objects as a coating on the inside of molds toprevent the molten metal sticking to them.

Graphite-bearing clays, found, for example, nearTrísov in Bohemia, were extracted in several parts ofEurope in the Bronze and Iron Ages to make potterywith a fine black appearance. Graphite-temperedwares were manufactured on a large scale in the latercenturies B.C. in the eastern part of Celtic Europeand graphite-coated wares in Brittany, wheregraphitic schists occurred in a number of places; thispottery was effective at spreading heat and was there-fore favored for the manufacture of cooking vessels.

CoralCoral was imported from the Mediterranean in theIron Age and used particularly for inlayed decora-tion in metal vessels and jewelry, such as the Basse-Yutz flagon, particularly in the period 600–300 B.C.It was also made into beads and rings, includingspacer beads. Unworked pieces of coral were alsocarried as amulets: Classical sources indicate thatcoral was supposed to ward off the evil eye.

AmberAmber is fossilized resin and particularly that of thenow-extinct pine, Pinus succinifera. It was highlyprized for its appearance and for its electrostaticproperties, which were probably regarded as magi-cal. Its regular association with other exotic andprestigious materials, such as gold or jet, underlinesits value in antiquity.

SOURCES

The shores of the Baltic in Latvia, Lithuania, andPoland, and the North Sea coast of Jutland were themain source of amber in prehistoric Europe, butsome amber from this region also washed up on theNorth Sea coasts of Britain and the continent. Alongwith furs it was one of the main products of thenorth, exchanged throughout prehistory and laterfor goods and materials from farther south.

WORKING AND ARTIFACTS

Amber was widely circulated in the north from thePalaeolithic period onward, when it was used formaking beads. Mesolithic amber artifacts includedbeads and pendants from Denmark and England, acarved elk’s head from Denmark, and other fig-urines. Workshops and hoards of unused amber andamber ornaments are known from Neolithic timesonward in Poland. In addition to beads, the TRBinhabitants of Poland made pendants in the form ofminiature axes.

By the third millennium amber was being tradedover a much wider area, reaching as far afield as LosMillares in Spain, where it was placed in a few elite


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burials in passage graves. Amber was among thematerials used for beads by the makers of Beakerpottery. Amber V-perforated buttons and necklacesof amber beads and spacer-plates replaced those ofjet as key prestige apparel around 1800 B.C. inBritain with the rise of the Wessex culture; these areknown also in Scotland, Brittany, central Europe,southern France, southern Italy, and Greece. In theMycenaean Shaft Graves in the latter region spacerbeads identical to those of southern England werefound. Spacer beads were a very distinctive product,used to separate and hold together strings of beadsin a necklace. A spacer bead was made by carving arectangular plaque of amber and cutting perfora-tions through its width; these were often extended atthe ends into V-shaped holes joining adjacent perfo-rations. Amber discs and pendants mounted in goldare also known from Wessex burials; a contemporaryBreton grave at Saint-Fiacre contained an archer’swrist guard of amber, while an amber cup was foundin a grave at Hove in Sussex, England.

Amber beads continued to be made in the laterBronze Age, and in Jutland and England amber wasalso used for sword-hilt decorations. From the latesecond millennium until the sixth century B.C. theItalians and especially the Etruscans were major con-sumers of the supply of amber, and amber was amongthe materials worked in the settlement of Frattesina innorthern Italy. Italy was a major producer of amber

artifacts during the Hallstatt period; these were tradedeven into the Baltic region. Amber was a frequentmaterial for Iron Age pendants, rings, and beads, butalso for inlays on bronze ornaments. A number of IronAge settlements have evidence of amber working,including large quantities of unworked amber, forexample 3,100 pounds (1,400 kilograms) stored in pitsin the Polish settlement of Wroclaw-Partynice. Largeamber beads were lathe-turned in the later Iron Age.

Upton Lovell In this richly furnished burial of aWessex-culture woman, the accompanying gravegoods included a gold plaque with geometric decora-tions, a gold-plated shale cone, gold beads and studs,a grape cup, and a pottery jar. The woman also worea five-string amber necklace held together by anarrangement of two-, three-, and five-hole spacerbeads.

CallaïsAlso known as variscite, callaïs is an attractive greenor turquoise-colored stone (hydrated phosphate ofaluminum) that takes a high polish; it resemblesturquoise but is considerably softer. It was used par-ticularly to make beads and was popular with thepeople of the Neolithic and Beaker periods in Iberiaand Brittany. By the later third millennium, how-ever, it was no longer in use, perhaps suggesting thatsupplies had run out. A related material, kaolinite(hydrated aluminum silicate), was used in theBalkans to make beads during the Neolithic period.

No source of callaïs has been identified in Brit-tany, but the nature of the local rock suggests that itmay have been located in the Morbihan region, in apart of the coast that is now submerged. In Iberia itwas mined at a number of sites, particularly CanTintorer in northeast Spain, where mineshafts up to165 feet (50 meters) long have been found.

Many graves of the fourth-millennium Sepulcrosde Fosa culture in northern Iberia contain beadsmade from callaïs. In the late fourth and earlier thirdmillennium callaïs was popular in the Tagus andAlentejo regions of Iberia, and callaïs beads were alsofound in a tomb at Monte da Mora in northwesternIberia on the Mino River. Contemporary French


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6.15 Amber ornaments in the form of a miniaturehammer and a miniature ax, from Late NeolithicDenmark (Worsaae, J. J. A. The Industrial Arts ofDenmark. London: Chapman and Hall, 1882)

chamber tombs also contain necklaces made of callaïsbeads and pendants, and large pendant rings.

Decorative MineralsMany attractive materials, including such gemstonesas carnelian, jasper, and chalcedony, metal ores suchas malachite, azurite, and haematite, and other min-erals such as marble, quartz, and steatite, were usedfor making beads and other ornaments, particularlyin the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. Nodules orlumps of these materials were treasured as preciousobjects or ground for use as pigments; red ochre wasparticularly widely used, and had been included ingraves from the later Palaeolithic, presumably with aritual or apotropaic purpose. These materials mightalso be used to make other objects, such as marblefigurines and bowls in the Balkans and Aegean, thewidely exchanged Late Neolithic stone axes made ofAlpine jadeite, and the steatite urns at Linga Fold insecond-millennium Orkney, made from materialimported from Shetland.

ShellShells were among the exotic materials that circulatedin Europe from Late Glacial times onward, valued fortheir appearance and ease of use as ornaments. Coastalcommunities that gathered and ate shellfish also usedthe shells for ornaments: For example, Mesolithicnecklaces including perforated cowrie-shell beadswere found on Oronsay in Scotland, while the EarlyNeolithic inhabitants of Franchthi cave in Greecemade substantial numbers of cockleshell beads, chip-ping out discs from the shells, which they then perfo-rated with drills and ground down into rings. Theyalso used dentalium, a shell popular and abundant inthe Aegean and Balkans throughout the Mesolithicand Neolithic periods; one Varna cenotaph contained2,200 dentalium beads. On inland sites snail shellswere used, for instance, in a Mesolithic bead braceletat Vlasac in the Danube Gorges.

Spondylus shells from the Aegean were amongthe imported materials used in Mesolithic andNeolithic sites in the Mediterranean basin and theBalkans and as far north as the LBK settlements of

central Europe. As well as beads, spondylus wasmade into buttons, pendants, appliqués, rings, andbracelets. The Neolithic settlement at Dimini innorthern Greece may have had several householdsspecializing in the manufacture of spondylus objects.

Ostrich EggshellThe Millaran inhabitants of southern Spainobtained ostrich eggshells from North Africa for useas prestige goods. Ostrich eggshells continued tocirculate as an exotic and valuable material in latertimes, traded into Europe by the Phoenicians, whoobtained them directly from source, or by the Myce-naeans and Greeks, who acquired them through theMediterranean trading networks. The materialsworked in the workshops of the late second-millen-nium settlement of Frattesina in northern Italyincluded ostrich eggshell.

ChalkChalk, the waste product of flint mining, was carvedby miners into cups for use as oil lamps. It was alsoused in the Neolithic period to make pendants and anumber of possibly ritual objects including phalli,figurines, miniature axes, and balls. The most mys-terious objects of chalk are the “Folkton drums,”three decorated cylinders found in a barrow at Folk-ton in northern England. In the Iron Age chalk wasused for pendants, loomweights and spindle whorls,and figurines.

READING

GeneralChampion et al. 1984: general; Hodges 1988, 1971:technology; Jochim 2002c, Mithen 1994: Mesolithic;Whittle 1994, 1996, Sherratt 1994a, Milisauskas2002b, Milisauskas and Kruk 2002a, 2002b: Neolithic;Harding 1994, 2000, 2002, Demakopoulou et al., eds.


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1999: Bronze Age; Cunliffe 1994c, 1997, Sievers et al.1991, Wells 1995a, 1995b, 2002, James 1993, Collis1984a: Iron Age; Spindler 1995: Iceman; Darvill 1987,Adkins and Adkins 1982: Britain; O’Kelly 1989: Ire-land; Cunliffe 2001a: Atlantic; Perles 2001: NeolithicGreece; Bailey 2000: Balkans.

WoodPiggott 1995, Leakey 1954: general; Midgeley 1992:Christiansholm; Hingley 1998: Ballachulish; Coles1984: waterlogged finds; Coles 1987, Coles andColes 1986: Somerset Levels; McGrail 1995, 1998:boats; O’Kelly 1989: Ireland; Manning 1995, Stead1981: wheels; Jensen 1999a: Danish coffins; Harri-son 1988: Spain.

Textiles, Leather, Basketry,Nets, and MatsBarber 1991: textiles; Forbes 1954a: dyes; Zoharyand Hopf 2000: plant fibers and dyes; Harding 2000,Perles 2001, Crowfoot 1954, Grant 1954: basketryand mats; Gilbert 1954: ropes; Wallace andO’Floinn 2002: Twyford; Sheridan 1999: bark coffincover; Denison 2000a: Palaeolithic.

Leather and FursHarding 2000, Waterer 1956, Spindler 1995: gen-eral; Ritchie 1995: Orkney; Coles 1973: experiments;Barth 1991: clothing; Leitner 1999, Whittle 1996,Spindler 1995: Iceman; Noe-Nygaard and Richter2003: Agernaes; O’Kelly 1989: shields.

Bone, Horn, Antler, andIvoryWells 2002, Guilaine 1994, Champion, S. 1995: gen-eral; Cole 1954: antler and bone; Craddock 1995:bone and antler mining tools; Hodges 1988, Cunliffe2001a, Wells 2002: ivory; Sheridan 1999: Scotland;Ritchie 1995: Orkney; Scarre 1998: Hochdorf.

StoneSherratt 1997, Shepherd 1980, 1994, Bromehead1954: mining; Shepherd 1980: Spiennes; Brome-head 1954: Obourg; Whittle 1996: KrzemionkiOpatowskie; Kaelas 1994a: Thisted; Mercer 1981,Darvill 1996, Topping 2003: Grimes Graves; Darvill1996: Great Langdale, Mynydd Prescelly; Ritchie1995: Orkney; Turner 1998: Shetland; Leakey 1954,Oakley 1975, O’Kelly 1989: stone working; Cunliffe1993: Iron Age.

SaltDe Roche 1997, Adkins and Adkins 1982: evaporat-ing seawater; Barth 1991, Kristiansen 1998, Brome-head 1954, Weller 2002: salt mining; Harding 1978,Cunliffe 1997, Moosleitner 1991: Dürrnberg.

MetallurgyCraddock 1995, Tylecote 1987: general; Shepherd1980, Bromehead 1954: mining; Forbes 1954b,Maryon and Plenderleith 1954: metallurgy; Budd2000, Timberlake 2001, Pare 2000, Sperber 1999,Dayton 1993, Dungworth 1997, Denison 2000b, Ixerand Pattrick 2004: ores; Harrison 1988: tools;Rothenberg and Blanco-Freijero 1981, Harrison1988: Río Tinto/Chinflon; Darvill 1996, Denison2001b: Great Orme’s Head; Denison 2001a: lead atCymystwyth; Bailey 2000: Varna; Wallace andO’Floinn 2002: Ireland; Marazov 1998: Thrace;Northover 1995, Manning 1995: Iron Age metal-lurgy; Biel 1986, Wallace and O’Floinn 2002,Northover 1995, Sheridan 1999: torcs; Taylor 1999:Wessex; Berresford Ellis 1988, Cunliffe 1997, Darvill1987, Grierson 1956, Adkins and Adkins 1982: coinproduction.

CeramicsGibson and Woods 1997: general; Scott 1954: pot-tery production, Eilean an Tighe; Childe 1954: pot-ter’s wheel; Midgeley 1992: TRB; De Roche 1997,


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Gibson 1995: Iron Age; Harrison 1988: Spain; Cun-liffe and De Jersey 1997, Gibson 1986, 2002: Britain.

Vitreous MaterialsRenfrew and Bahn 2004, Freestone 1997, Harden1956: technology; Dayton 1993: glass; Maryon1956: enamelling; Harding 1994, Angelini et al.2003: Frattesina; Berresford Ellis 1988: Iron Age;Sheridan 1999, 2003, Shortland 2003: faience; Tay-lour 1983: Mycenaeans.

Other MaterialsWells 2002, Guilaine 1994, Champion, S. 1995:general; Sheridan 1999: Scotland; Darvill 1996,Cunliffe 2001a: Hengistbury; Collis 1984a: sapro-pelite; Ritchie 1995: Orkney; Beck and Bouzek, eds.1993, Wallace and O’Floinn 2002: amber; Cunliffe2001a, Guilaine 1994: callaïs; Turner 1998, Wick-ham-Jones 2001: steatite; Sheridan 1999, O’Kelly1989, Wallace and O’Floinn 2002: jet.


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RELIGION

7

The religious monuments of prehistoric Europeare the most impressive and enduring remains

of their makers. While in many periods and areasthe houses of the living are hard to trace, the peo-ple’s presence is clearly manifest in the stone monu-ments they created. Many of these were tombs,while others, such as the Maltese temples and theBritish stone circles, were sacred places. In general,however, the latter are also elusive, since natural fea-tures rather than built shrines were often the mainfocus of European worship. Not all burials were inimpressive stone or earthen structures, but manycemeteries have also been uncovered, a major sourceof information about life in prehistoric Europe. Onthe other hand, in some areas and periods the ritesfor disposing of the dead have also left little trace.

The prominence of the monuments contrastswith the paucity of knowledge about the belief sys-tems that they reflect. Conjectures on the basis ofthe iconography and the practices that can be recon-structed combine with classical references and laterCeltic, Germanic, and Nordic beliefs and practicesto shed some light on Iron Age religion and informspeculation on that of earlier times, but there ismuch that can never be known.

Many objects are interpreted, on the basis of theiriconography or context and associations, as havingritual or religious significance, and this is true also ofmany structures and practices that can be recon-structed. The compartmentalization of religion andother aspects of life, however, is a modern construct.In antiquity it is likely that every aspect of life wasimbued with some ritual or religious significance,and it is therefore difficult to consider religion sepa-rately from the daily lives of prehistoric Europeans.

RELIGIOUS BELIEFAND PRACTICE

Reconstructing Religion

CLASSICAL SOURCES

Classical observers of the religion of barbarianEurope found much to fascinate and repel them,

particularly the practice of human sacrifice, thoughthey themselves had only recently abandoned this.While they seized upon certain attributes of Celticdeities by which they might identify them with theirown gods, notably Jupiter, Mars, and Mercury, therewas superficially little common ground betweenRoman and Celtic religion, and much of what theywrote is tainted by incomprehension and sensation-alism. Nevertheless, it is to Roman authors that weare indebted for much of what is known of Celticand Germanic religion and particularly for knowl-edge of Druidism.

LATER RELIGION

The Romans suppressed Druidism, which theyregarded as the source of abominable practices but,perhaps more important, also as a focus of politicalopposition. Under Roman rule, however, manyaspects of Celtic religion continued to flourish. InIreland and other areas outside the empire tradi-tional religious practices and beliefs endured.Knowledge of later religion in Europe, therefore,can shed considerable light on Iron Age beliefs andpractices. Religions nevertheless evolve and so laterbeliefs and practices cannot be assumed to be a faith-ful reflection of those of the Iron Age.

ARCHAEOLOGY

Many of the religious symbols and artifacts familiarfrom later religion and classical sources are knownfrom Iron Age art and from the objects themselves,and some of these, such as the wheel of the sun, canbe traced back into the Bronze Age. Similarly, manyarchaeological sites have yielded evidence of prac-tices that are described in classical and later litera-ture, such as human sacrifice and the veneration ofwatery places; some, like the latter, seem to havebeen present from Mesolithic times. Where artifactsand sites show continuity back into deeper prehis-tory in this way, it may be suggested that the beliefsand practices to which they related also originatedearlier.

There is much that is known only from archaeol-ogy. For example, classical sources refer to sacredgroves, lakes, and rivers, but it is archaeology thatreveals the similar importance of placing offerings inthe ground. For the greater part of prehistoryarchaeological findings are the only source of infor-


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mation on religion: Little can be deduced about thebeliefs held through this long time span, and onlycertain of the practices can be reconstructed. Eventhe artifacts and locations pertaining to religion can-not always be identified with certainty, thoughmany, such as stone circles, relate more plausibly toreligion than to other aspects of life. Ethnographicobservation, however, makes it clear that theattempt to divorce religion from other aspects ofdaily experience is misguided; in most societies theyare inextricably entwined.

BeliefsWhat is known of the religion of the Celts, and oftheir Germanic neighbors, shows that divine powerwas perceived to lie within the natural world,embodied in locations such as lakes, rivers andsprings, hills, woods, and the sky, in animals andbirds, in the Sun and the thunder, in creation anddestruction within nature. Some man-made objectscould also be invested with power, the hammer, forexample. Some divinities were benevolent, but ingeneral they were unpredictable and potentiallydangerous. It was necessary to make offerings andsacrifices and perform prescribed rituals in order toobtain their goodwill, avert their wrath, and rewardtheir beneficence. Their will could be determinedthrough divination.

PriestsClassical writers provide some information on thepriests of Iron Age communities; their observationsmainly concerned the Druids, the chief religiousauthorities and keepers of knowledge, but they alsomention several classes of lesser priests. The Vates,Ouateis, or Manteis were diviners who interpretednatural phenomena and the results of sacrifices; theirtraining lasted 12 years, and they were skilled inpoetry. Bards, who trained for seven years, weremasters of poetry through which they were believedto be able to bring misfortune, injury, and evendeath, as well as good fortune. Other kinds ofpriests, such as gutuatri and antistes, were mentionedthough little was said of their roles. There were also

priestesses, though no female Druids; priestessesshared the Druids’ defense of Mona, unnerving theRoman soldiers sent against them.

Little can be said of priests in the prehistoricperiod, though the evidence of religious practicesimplies their existence. It is probable that, like theDruids, they conducted sacrifices, studied and inter-preted natural phenomena, and might exercise sometemporal authority. The occasional discovery of evi-dence of hallucinogenic substances, such as hen-bane, and of other substances that induced alteredstates of consciousness, such as cannabis and alco-hol, suggests that these may have been used bypriests or shamans in the performance of rites; thegeometric patterns of megalithic art are said tomatch the visions experienced under the influence ofhallucinogens. Paraphernalia used by religious prac-titioners, such as conical headdresses of sheet gold,have sometimes been identified. Some unusual buri-als may be those of shamans or priests: For example,in the Mesolithic cemetery of OleneostrovskiMogalnik four individuals were buried in an uprightposition, accompanied by a considerable quantity ofgrave goods.

DRUIDS

According to the classical sources, the Druids werethe religious leaders of the Celtic tribes of Britainand Gaul, an order that may have originated inBritain. Druidical training took 20 years andinvolved the oral transmission of knowledge of theheavens, natural phenomena, medicine, law, andother branches of learning; classical authorsreported a prohibition on committing any of thisinformation to writing. The Druids conducted sacri-fices, interpreted the omens revealed by these and bythe heavens, as well as interceding with the gods.The Druids were said to meet annually in the terri-tory of the Carnutes, where they elected a leader.Among their reported rites was the gathering ofmistletoe from an oak tree, cut with a golden sickleand collected in a white cloak on the sixth day of themoon, accompanied by the sacrifice of two whitebulls.

Druids were probably of elite birth and might bepolitical as well as religious leaders; rival factions inthe Aedui, a tribe allied with Caesar, were led by thechief magistrate and a Druid who was his brother. It

R E L I G I O N

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was more their hostility to the Romans than thestated reason of their abhorrent sacrificial practicesthat made the Druids the target of Roman cam-paigns aimed at their eradication. Despite thedestruction of their base on Anglesey, the Druidscontinued to practice within and outside the RomanEmpire and were on occasion consulted as soothsay-ers by the Romans themselves.

Deities

CELTIC DEITIES

Many Celtic deities are named in inscriptions or inclassical writings. Often, on the basis of some of theirattributes, these were identified with Roman godsand goddesses, and the worship of the two might becombined in a Roman shrine. Celtic deities contin-ued to be venerated in Roman times in Celticregions, and some became popular farther afield: Forexample, altars to Epona are known in North Africa.

Those deities that are known about in any detailwere generally associated with particular featuresof the natural world, such as lakes or rocks, withsuch phenomena as thunder, and with animals; theywere also often linked to aspects of the humanworld, such as warfare. Frequently, they were cred-ited with the power to change shape, assuminganimal forms particularly. They were often wor-shipped as the numen (divine essence or spirit) of anatural phenomenon and represented by symbols,such as the wheel of the sun; it was not until theperiod when the Celts were in regular contact withthe classical world that the deities began to be per-sonified. Earlier the Celtic leader Brennus is said tohave viewed with contempt the stone and woodenGreek gods in human form set up by the Greeks inthe temples at Delphi that were attacked by theCeltic army in 279 B.C.

The Celts did not have a universally acceptedpantheon. Some known deities were local to a par-ticular location or tribe, while others were morewidely worshipped; across Europe, however, amongCeltic, Germanic, and neighboring communitiessimilar deities were worshipped who were associatedwith natural phenomena and could be readily

equated with one another. For example, the famousGundestrup cauldron, found in Denmark north ofthe Celtic realms and probably made in Thrace tothe east, is decorated with symbols, deities, and rit-ual scenes that are at home within the Celtic tradi-tion, but which also have links as far afield as India.(Although it was not made by the Celts, it is themost frequently reproduced exemplar of Celtic reli-gious iconography.)

Some deities appeared in pairs; more common,however, were the gods thought of as triads sincethree was a sacred number. These might be a singledeity with three heads, such as Cernunnos, or a setof three deities making up three aspects of a singlepower, such as the triple mother goddesses.

Camulos A war god known from a number oflocations in Britain and Gaul and equated by theRomans with Mars. Camulodunon, the Fort ofCamulos, the Catuvellaunian capital, took its namefrom a shrine to Camulos at the heart of theoppidum.

Cernunnos God of fertility and living things,whose name meant “horned one.” He is generallydepicted with antlers and wearing a torc around hisneck and his horns, and sometimes also has threeheads. He is shown, for example, in Val Camonicaand on the Gundestrup cauldron seated cross-leggedsurrounded by animals such as a stag, a symbol offertility, and a snake with ram’s horns, a symbol ofregeneration. He also often holds a cornucopia orbowl overflowing with grain.

Coventina A goddess of water and healing, partic-ularly associated with Britain but known also fromGaul and northwest Iberia. A spring and associatedshrine dedicated to Coventina was located onHadrian’s Wall in northern England, where itreceived many offerings from Roman soldiers ofCeltic or Germanic extraction.

Epona Goddess of fertility, generally depictedwith horses, particularly mares and foals, or as ahorsewoman; her name comes from the Celtic wordfor horse. She was worshipped widely, from Britainto the Balkans, but particularly in the Rhineland andGaul, where the Aedui and Lingones were famous


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horse breeders, and was adopted by the Romans,who incorporated a festival to her in their sacred cal-endar. Epona seems to have been associated withhealing and with death as well as fertility: the pas-sage into, through, and out of life.

Esus A title meaning Good Master, applied to adeity associated with woods. He was mentioned bythe Roman author Lucan as one of the gods encoun-tered by Caesar in Gaul, whose cult involved humansacrifice. Victims were apparently suspended fromtrees and wounded, the pattern of their blood flowbeing used in divination.

Hammer God A popular nature deity in Gaul,sometimes named as Sucellus. He was generallydepicted in Roman times holding a hammer and apot; he was also associated with wine, represented bya barrel, and sometimes with the Sun. The hammergod’s associations seem to have been with naturalbounty and regeneration, as were those of his consort.

Hunter God A frequently represented deity wasrelated to both the pursuit and the protection of wildanimals and was particularly associated with thehunting dog and with the hunted stag and boar. Aswell as reflecting the close relationship between theCelts and the natural world, the hunter god and thedivine hunt may have been connected to the passagebetween life, death, and rebirth.

Lug (Lugh) A god of light (Irish lugh: “shininglight”) and perhaps of the Sun, whose symbolsincluded the raven, Lug was widely worshipped inwestern Europe. He was identified with Mercury bythe Romans.

Mother Goddess A mother goddess figure waswidespread in the Celtic world and beyond, and mayhave been present in European religions fromNeolithic times. A goddess concerned with humanprocreation and fertility is common to many reli-gions, but whether it is legitimate to identify femalefigurines from prehistory as mother goddesses isdebatable. The Celtic mother goddess was depictedholding a baby or with symbols of fertility such asbread and fruit. She was often represented as a triad,either of three young goddesses or of two matrons

and a younger woman. In inscriptions of the Romanperiod they were often referred to as Deae Matres orMatronae.

Nantosuelta A goddess known in Gaul andBritain whose symbols of a dish or pot and a houseon a pole suggest a concern with domestic life andwell-being. She was also associated with the raven, acreature linked with the battlefield and symbolizingwar, and was the protector of souls in the Other-world. She was the consort of the hammer godSucellus.

Nehalennia A goddess associated with the NorthSea and venerated in two shrines on the Dutchcoast, Domburg and Colijnsplaat. Her name maymean “Steerswoman,” and she was worshipped byseafarers, including traders and sea captains whodedicated altars to her in the Roman period. Theseoften depict the goddess with part of a ship or othersea motifs, and usually with a dog.

Nerthus A Germanic earth goddess who rodearound in a wagon, probably bringing fertility tothe land. She may be the goddess represented on aseventh-century bronze model cart from Strettwegin Austria; here a goddess holds a bowl above herhead while around her are smaller figures of armedmen, with a stag with huge antlers at each end.

Sequana A goddess of healing and the numen ofthe Seine River. A shrine to Sequana at the source ofthe river contained a statue of the goddess andnumerous votive models of body parts and wood andstone images of pilgrims, generally depicted as peas-ants wearing the characteristic Celtic hooded cloak.

Sky God Equated with the Roman sky god Jupiterin later times, the Celtic sky god was symbolicallyrepresented by the wheel of the sun and the thun-derbolt or as a figure holding these. He was alsoshown as a horseman using a thunderbolt to fight aserpentine monster, which represented evil. He wasmaster of all the celestial elements and their effects,including the Sun, rain, thunder, storms, lightning,drought, and floods; he also represented day, life andlight, battling with the evils of night, death, anddarkness.

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Sucellus A name given to the hammer god, mean-ing the “good striker.” He seems to have been asso-ciated with fertility, and the purpose of his hammermay have been to ward off disease or famine. Inmany cases he was shown as half of a divine couplewith Nantosuelta.

Sulis An important British goddess of water andhealing, known also in continental Europe. She wasassociated particularly with the mineral springs atBath, which became a major spa in Roman times butwhich must have been a place of pilgrimage in Celtictimes also. Sulis also had a connection with the Sun.The Romans identified Sulis with Minerva, a god-dess who also included healing among her attributes;votive body parts were among the offerings throwninto the waters of the springs in Roman times, ingratitude for successful cures.

Sun God The Sun was worshipped as a life-givingdeity, symbolically represented by a sun disc orwheel. A Bronze Age model chariot in gilded bronzebearing a sun disc from Trundholm in Denmarkshows that the cult went back at least to the 13thcentury B.C., and the sun disc or wheel was fre-quently depicted in Scandinavian rock art. The sungod was also associated with fertility and healing.Another sun symbol was the swastika, widely used asa symbol of good fortune.

Taranis The Thunderer, the numen of thunder,whose cult was said by the writer Lucan to have beenexceptionally cruel, involving human sacrifice byburning. Taranis was widely worshipped but was nota major deity. His cult may have been linked to war.The Romans equated him with Jupiter, who was alsolinked with thunder.

Teutates (Toutatis) Teutates seems to have beena title given to the deity who protected a tribe andwas probably given to different gods in differentregions. The Teutates encountered by Caesar inGaul seems to have been a god of war and was lateridentified with the Roman god Mars. He wasdescribed by Lucan as a god to whom people weresacrificed by drowning; a figure on the Gundestrupcauldron may show this god drowning a victim in abucket.


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7.1 A bronze figurine of a deity wearing a hornedhelmet and a torc, from Grevensvaenge, Zealand,Denmark. The right arm, now missing, held an axor hammer, suggesting that the figure representedthe god of thunder. (Worsaae, J. J. A. The IndustrialArts of Denmark. London: Chapman and Hall, 1882)

War God Figures of warriors, sometimes nude butalways bearing weapons, were widespread both inCeltic Europe and in earlier times. Given the impor-tance of warfare in Bronze and Iron Age Europe, it isassumed that at least some of these figures repre-sented war deities, probably protectors of their indi-vidual tribes. Some of these figures were shownriding a horse, the perquisite of the elite, and carry-ing a severed head, the symbol par excellence of thesuccessful warrior.

Cult Objects andIconographyA variety of cult objects and sacred symbols areknown from Celtic contexts, and some of these areattested to in earlier times: mainly from the BronzeAge but occasionally as far back as the Mesolithic.These included animals and birds, trees and othernatural phenomena, as well as manufactured objectssuch as wheels and axes. In some cases their signifi-cance is known from classical and later writings; inothers it is more speculatively derived from the con-texts in which they are known.

Some of these objects and symbols are shown inart as the attributes of various deities, but in manycases they were also used in other ways: in the per-formance of rituals, as votive offerings, as rituallysignificant elements in funerary contexts, and asitems of ritual dress.

SYMBOLS AND CULT OBJECTS

Musical Instruments The carnyx, a trumpetblown on the battlefield to instill fear in the hearts ofthe enemy, was a long pipe with a trumpet end in theform of a boar’s head, a powerful symbol of ferocity.Warriors blowing carnyxes are depicted among theritual scenes on the Gundestrup cauldron, and a fineexample is known from Deskford in Scotland. Thelur, an enormous horn in the form of a curved pipewith a disc-shaped end, was probably used in reli-gious ceremonies; figures blowing lurer appear reg-ularly in Bronze Age Scandinavian rock art and invotive deposits in bogs. Other instruments possiblyused in religious rites included rattles.

Cauldron Sheet bronze cauldrons were manufac-tured from the Bronze Age onward as vessels forpreparing and serving food and drink at feasts. Bythe Urnfield period they were also used as recepta-cles for cremations and votive deposits. They appearin art and sculpture as cult vessels. In later mythol-ogy they were associated with the Otherworld, feast-ing, abundance, and regeneration: For example, inWelsh literature dead warriors were reborn from amagical cauldron.

Gundestrup Cauldron Discovered in a Danishbog at Gundestrup, this magnificent silver-gilt caul-dron was probably made in Thrace. Among the cultscenes shown on its decorated panels were a pro-cession of warriors, some blowing boar’s-headedcarnyxes; a deity (possibly Teutates) apparently push-ing a man headfirst into a bucket or pit; a horneddeity surrounded by animals, probably Cernunnos;and a deity with a wheel, probably the sky god.

Wheel and Circle By the mid-second millen-nium, the spoked wheel was a common iconographicelement, probably representing the Sun. Examplesof wooden wheels and model wheels in bronze areknown from votive deposits in bogs, rivers, shrines,and other ritual contexts, and from burials. Minia-ture wheels were worn as amulets. Circles or soliddiscs also represented the Sun.

Nebra Sky-Disc (Germany) A hoard depositedaround 1600 B.C. within a hilltop enclosure at Nebranear Mittelberg in central Germany allegedlyincluded not only two swords, two axes, a chisel, andarm rings but also an extraordinary bronze disc, 1foot (30 centimeters) wide, inlaid with gold in theshape of the Sun, the crescent Moon, and 32 dotspresumably representing stars, some of which havebeen tentatively identified as the Pleiades. Twostrips of gold lie along either side of the disc, and athin gold crescent along the bottom resembles theboats shown in Bronze Age rock art, with notchessuggesting oars. A series of holes around its rim sug-gest that the disc was originally nailed up some-where, perhaps in a shrine. Not all scholars acceptthe authenticity of the disc: The hoard was found byillegal metal detectorists who attempted (unsuccess-fully) to sell it on the black market. Nevertheless,

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chemical tests on its degree of corrosion do supportthe date suggested by the other artifacts in thehoard, and other analyses have shown that the discwas made of copper from Mitterberg and Carpathiangold, both consistent with the metal in circulation atthat date.

Neck and Chest Ornaments Beautifully deco-rated lunulae, sheet-gold flat oval pectoral orna-ments, were among the finest products of BronzeAge craftsmanship. They are known mainly fromvotive hoards in the ground or in water, in Ireland,Iberia, and Brittany. Other types of gold pectorals

and collars were made in other parts of AtlanticEurope such as Iberia. They may have been worn,but it is likely that they were also used to decoratethe images of gods, which were probably mademainly from wood.

In the Iron Age the torc (neck ring) was similarlyused as a symbol of elite, royal, or divine status.Torcs of bronze and gold were major vehicles ofBronze and Iron Age decorative craftsmanship.Many are known from elite burials, including that ofthe Vix “princess” and from votive contexts. Repre-sentations of both warriors and gods frequentlyshow them with a torc around the neck, and some


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7.2 Two of the huge horns known as lurer, which are believed to have been used in religious ceremonies(Worsaae, J. J. A. The Industrial Arts of Denmark. London: Chapman and Hall, 1882)

deities also wear them in other places, such as onCernunnos’s horns, or hold one in their hand. Someknown examples were too heavy for wear and wereprobably regalia, to be borne for a limited time onceremonial occasions.

Ax A symbol that is known from the Neolithicperiod when fine polished stone axes were depositedas ritual hoards. Axes were prominent symbols in theart engraved on megalithic monuments, includingStonehenge. Model axes of pottery or bronze wereamong the grave goods in Urnfields and later burialsand were common as votive offerings. They wereprobably also worn as good luck charms.

Mask Hollow metal masks known from a fewCeltic ritual sites were perhaps worn by priests per-forming certain ceremonies or fastened to cult stat-ues. The use of masks goes back to the Mesolithicperiod, when deer antlers still attached to part of theskull were worn by the people of eighth-millenniumStar Carr and other Mesolithic sites, perhaps for usein ritual dances.

Clay masks deposited in some cenotaphs in theVarna cemetery in Bulgaria may have served a differ-ent purpose, perhaps symbolizing a person whosebody could not be placed in a grave.

Cones Four tall cones of sheet gold have beenfound on Bronze Age sites in Germany (Etzelsdorf,Schifferstadt) and France (Avanton). They were dec-orated with bands of repoussé designs, particularlycircles, but also stars, eyes, triangles, and wheels.Residues inside the Schifferstadt example indicatethat aromatic resins were placed inside, and thedesign and the presence of a brim in some examplessuggest that they were worn as hats, with some formof padding, by individuals who stood in an elevatedposition (where the designs inside the brim would bevisible). Some individuals depicted in rock art appearto be wearing headdresses of this type.

Other Symbols Other motifs and symbols thatalso frequently appeared on Celtic and earlierobjects included an equal-armed cross, often associ-ated with the wheel; the swastika, symbolic of goodluck over an area extending as far as India and asso-ciated with the Sun in Celtic contexts; double spi-

rals, often called S-symbols, associated particularlywith the Sky god and perhaps representing his thun-derbolt; and the rosette, a symbol of death and theotherworld, also associated with the Sun god.

RITUAL VEHICLES

A number of bronze models of vehicles with reli-gious scenes or symbols are known. Most appearedon carts or chariots: For example, the Trundholmsun cart, the Late Bronze Age cart from Orastie inRomania bearing a cauldron and a number of birds,and the seventh-century Strettweg cart, which bearsa hunt scene and a goddess possibly to be identifiedas Nerthus, whose cult involved being drawn in pro-cession in a wagon. There were also a few on boats,notably the boat from Roos Carr in England, awooden model on which stood five large warrior fig-ures, presumably gods. Model boats without passen-gers are also known from votive deposits such asthose at Broighter in Ireland, which yielded anexquisite detailed model in sheet gold, and at Nors

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7.3 Two pieces from a cauldron found in a bog atRynkeby in Fünen, Denmark. Like the morefamous Gundestrup cauldron, this bears religioussymbols, including here a god wearing a torc, bulls,a wild boar, a wolf, and a triskele. (Worsaae, J. J.A. The Industrial Arts of Denmark. London: Chap-man and Hall, 1882)

Thy in Denmark, where 100 tiny vessels of leaf goldwere found.

Boats and chariots also figured prominently inrock art, which is thought to have had a ritual con-text. European mythology links the boat as a symbolwith the Sun’s movements during the night.

Trundholm Sun Cart (Zealand, Denmark) Abronze model cart drawn by a single horse datedaround 1400–1300 B.C. It bears a disc decoratedwith concentric circles of geometric patterns,including many circles. The disc is gilded on oneside, thought to represent the Sun by day, while theother side is ungilded bronze, interpreted as the Sunby night.

BIRDS AND ANIMALS

Celtic and later deities were often attributed thepower of shape-shifting, generally assuming an ani-mal form. A number of deities also had animal fea-tures, such as hooves, goats’ and rams’ horns, orantlers; a number of images of horned deities seemto have been associated with war. Animals associatedwith the gods might also have elements of other ani-mals, as, for example, with the ram-headed snake ofCernunnos. Animals themselves played an impor-tant role in Celtic mythology and religious practice.Birds were important in Celtic and earlier iconogra-phy, representing the liberated souls of the dead, andother supernatural roles. Some creatures were con-sidered taboo by the Celts: For example, Caesarreported that certain British tribes would not eatgeese, hares, or chickens.

Ducks Figures of ducks and duck motifs in art arecommon from the Bronze Age, for example, as plasticdecoration on cauldrons, jugs, and flesh hooks andalternating with wheels or discs in the hammered dec-oration on sheet metalwork. The association of ducksand other waterbirds with both the air and the water,two sacred realms, gave it particular significance. Thestatue of the water goddess Sequana at Sources-de-la-Seine shows her in a duck-shaped boat.

Eagle The religious association of eagles datesback into Neolithic times, when eight sea-eagleswere placed in a megalithic tomb at Isbister in

Orkney. Later, the eagle was an attribute of the Skygod, although this may be a late borrowing fromclassical mythology in which the eagle is associatedwith Jupiter.

Ravens and Crows Celtic deities, including Lugand Nantosuelta, were frequently depicted withcrows and ravens, which were sometimes regardedas prophetic birds. Their presence on the battlefieldgave them an association with war and death andhence with the Otherworld.

Swan In a Mesolithic burial at Vedbaek a stillbornbaby was laid on a swan’s wing in the grave beside hismother. Swans were frequently represented onBronze Age and Hallstatt bronzes, and they oftenappeared in later mythology as people who had beenenchanted to change shape.

Cattle The formidable native European wild cat-tle (aurochs, Bos primigenius) must always have beenregarded as the epitome of ferocity and strength andthe bulls of virility, qualities they symbolized inCeltic religion, where they were associated withCernunnos. Representations of bulls on vessels suchas the Gundestrup cauldron and as figurines are wellknown in the Iron Age, and cattle are well repre-sented among sacrificial victims in Celtic shrines.That at Gournay-sur-Aronde contained the burialsof old cattle that may have died naturally. Cattle andparticularly bulls were part of ritual practices fromthe Neolithic onward; shrines associated with cattleare known in the seventh millennium B.C. at ÇatalHüyük in Anatolia and in the Bronze Age Aegean,and some cattle were buried by the TRB culture.

Horse From the time of their introduction horseswere generally associated with the elite and particu-larly with warriors. As well as the prestige attachedto them horses were seen as embodying virility, mas-culinity, fertility, speed, beauty, and aggression.Horses therefore played an important role in reli-gion, with particular rites associated with them.Some gods and goddesses were regularly shown withhorses or as horse riders, notably Epona, the Skygod, and war deities. Horses were important sacrifi-cial victims within some sacred places, for example,at Gournay-sur-Aronde. In a number of Iron Age


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hillforts horse skulls or jawbones were placed instorage pits. Horses were often used as a symbol onCeltic coinage. The magnificent hill figure at Uffing-ton in England depicts a horse.

Dog Many Celtic deities were accompanied by adog; gods associated with hunting had dogs to aidthem in the chase, but dogs also seem to have beenassociated with healing, as, for example, in the shrineof Nodens at Lydney in Britain in the Romano-British period and in the shrine of Sequana. Dogswere also commonly buried in ritual pits and shrines.

Snake Snakes were represented with a number ofCeltic deities and seem to have symbolized regener-ation, fertility, and healing. Cernunnos was oftenaccompanied by a snake with rams’ horns.

Stag Deer and particularly stags may have hadsome ritual significance as early as Mesolithic times.Bronze Age rock art frequently shows stags, andthey are also common in Iron Age art, such as thestags with enormous antlers on the bronze cartmodel from Strettweg. They probably symbolizedfertility, while antlers were a symbol of regeneration.

Boar The ferocious and dangerous wild boar was afrequent symbol in Celtic art, associated particularlywith war; the trumpet end of carnyxes (war trum-pets) were usually in the form of a boar’s head, andTacitus commented that boar-shaped amulets wereworn by Germanic warriors. Classical and vernacu-lar literature refers to wild boar as the food regularlyserved at feasts in the world of the dead, and manypig bones have been found in Iron Age shrines andritual pits.

Other Creatures Many other animals were alsoassociated with Celtic deities or venerated in localcults. These included bears, rams, and dolphins,cocks, cranes, doves, and geese. A dolphin is shownon the Gundestrup cauldron, and they were associ-ated with several water deities. The bones of hares,lambs, pigs, and birds, as well as those of cattle, deer,and dogs, were deposited in ritual pits and withinsacred enclosures. Geese were placed as grave goodsin a number of Iron Age burials, and a large sculp-ture of one was placed on the lintel of the skull por-

tico at Roquepertuse in France. Artistic representa-tions of rams as decoration on objects such as drink-ing horns and flagons may have had some ritualsignificance.

Monster As well as real animals, fantastical andhybrid beasts feature in Celtic iconography. Theseare generally predators and are often shown devour-ing people or holding human heads. The Tarasque ofNoves (Provence, France), a third-century stonestatue of one such monster, resembles a lion or wolfand has an arm in his jaws and his clawed forepawsupon two severed heads. The Linsdorf monster,from Alsace in France, is similar.

VEGETATION

Plant motifs were common in Celtic art, includingsacred objects such as pillars.

Trees Classical references to the Druids and toCeltic religion emphasize the importance of trees,particularly the oak tree, though others, includingyew, ash, hazel, beech, and elm, were also veneratedin various places. A model tree from Manching withivy leaves and fruit made out of wood, sheet bronze,and gold is presumed to have had a ritual purpose.Groves in the forest were among the sacred places ofthe Celts, where Druids met and sacrificial victimswere hanged in trees. The Galatians, Celtic settlersin Anatolia, had a sacred oak grove known asDrunemeton.

The use of trees as sacred objects and for creatingplaces of worship probably dates back to the Meso-lithic period, when a series of four massive treetrunks were erected at Stonehenge, and it is under-scored by the Neolithic monument known as Sea-henge, an enormous tree erected upside downwithin a ring of posts. Tree trunks were also erectedin some Iron Age sacred sites.

Mistletoe According to Pliny, the Druids cutmistletoe from a sacred oak tree, using a goldensickle. Mistletoe was thought to give fertility, and adrink prepared from mistletoe was given to animalsto treat barrenness. Pollen from mistletoe was pre-sent in the last meal consumed by the man sacrificedat Lindow Moss.

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SEVERED HEADS AND SKULLS

Common among the images of Celtic art is the sev-ered head. These were often represented on carvedpillars, and skulls have been found in many shrines.Classical literature describes the Celtic practice ofdecapitating fallen enemies and nailing up the headson their houses as trophies, with particularly presti-gious heads being embalmed in oil. Severed headswere also impaled on the poles at the gateways of hill-forts and oppida in Britain and Spain. The entranceto the shrines at Roquepertuse and Entremont inFrance had niches holding skulls, and classical sourcesrecord the offering of enemy heads in Celtic shrines.A carving at Entremont shows a mounted warriorwith a trophy head hanging from his horse’s neck,another practice described by classical authors. Onebroken sculpture at Entremont seems originally tohave depicted a seated warrior or deity holding a heapof six severed heads. As the seat of the soul the headsof enemies may have been regarded as a means ofcontrolling their spirits. The cult probably had veryancient roots: A nest of skulls dating to the seventhmillennium B.C. was found in a rock shelter at Ofnet(Germany); at the opposite end of Europe collectionsof skulls were found in some cemeteries of the fifth-millennium Dnepr-Donets culture in the Ukraine;and skulls were often placed in the ditches ofNeolithic causewayed enclosures.

MEGALITHIC ART AND SYMBOLS

A number of fifth-millennium Breton standing stones,often broken up and reused in later megalithic tombs,were decorated with symbols, such as plows, axes, andcattle. The crook, a line bent into a tight L-shape, wasvery common. Some passage graves in Brittany anddeveloped passage graves in Britain were decoratedwith motifs on the stones of their passage, chamber, orfacade or on associated objects, including recumbentor free-standing stones. Many of these designs weregeometric, particularly spirals, concentric arcs, zig-zags, boxed rectangles, cup marks, and lozenges. Therewere also daggers and axes. The crook motif wasechoed in fourth-millennium southwest Iberia in theschist crosiers, L-shaped objects that were coveredwith zigzag geometric decorations mirroring those onthe associated schist plaques. These bore zones of geo-

metric patterns, but two holes near the top and thelayout of the design gave them an anthropomorphicappearance; some also had breasts.

ROCK ART

Engravings and paintings on rocks, in caves and rockshelters, and in open-air sites are known from manyparts of Europe from Palaeolithic times onward.Mesolithic rock art comes particularly from theSpanish Levante and Galicia, the Alps, Norway, andSweden, areas where later rock art is also abundant,but rock art is also known in other regions such asBulgaria and Britain. In many cases the engravingsare geometric symbols such as cup marks, but insome places, notably Val Camonica in Italy andBohuslän in Sweden, the engravings include numer-ous depictions of people, animals, and artifacts.Ships also feature in Scandinavian rock art. Much ofthe art is located in situations far from human habi-tation, and it has been suggested that these wereplaces of sanctity and pilgrimage; some art wasclosely associated with settlements, such as cupmarks in Scandinavia. Although the rock imagesprobably had many purposes and meanings, it islikely that religion and ritual were among them.

Figurines and StatuesFigurines were made in stone, pottery, metal, andwood, though few of the latter have survived, andthere were also larger figures in stone and wood.Although some represented animals, most were inthe form of humans who were often schematicallydepicted. The making of images in human formgoes back to the Upper Palaeolithic period, whenthe famous Venus figurines and other human andpart-human figures were made of ivory, wood, stone,and fired earth. The contexts in which later figurinesand statues have been found, including watery placesand shrines, burials and megaliths, suggest that theygenerally had a ritual significance.

POTTERY FIGURINES

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Greece and the Balkans in the Neolithic period.Many of the figurines were female and veryschematic, with faces, exaggerated hips and but-tocks, and sometimes small arms and breasts; somescholars interpret these as evidence of a MotherGoddess cult. These figurines were frequentlyplaced together in buildings that were probablyshrines. For example, a large building at NeaNikomedeia contained several pottery sheep andgoat figurines, and three stone carvings of frogs,and a number of pottery figurines of stylizedwomen. Some figurines were worn as pendants.Others were found in ordinary houses and may havebeen used in domestic rituals. Some hollow fig-urines of the Tripolye culture were filled with grain,suggesting their use in rituals relating to agricul-tural productivity. Later Neolithic cultures inSoutheast Europe also made pottery vessels withhuman faces, and others are known from Iron Ageeastern Europe. Pots in the form of ovens, wagons,and other objects were also made, though in theBalkans figurines ceased after around 4000 B.C.,reappearing around the 14th century B.C.

WOODEN FIGURES

Wooden statues of deities were probably common inCeltic shrines, though they survive only in water-logged contexts. One from Broddenbjerg in Jutlandwas a naturally forked piece of wood, slightly modifiedto create a figure with two legs tapering up to a headcarved with a face, and an enormous phallus. Such fig-ures were also erected beside trackways; a number offigures with a head and a schematic body were foundbeside the turf and wood path at Ipfweger Moor inGermany. Some were also known from earlier times.

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7.4 The near-lifesize figure of a goddess, made ofoak with eyes of quartz, found in the 19th centuryunder layers of peat at Ballachulish Moss in Scotlandand now badly distorted by drying out. Made around600 B.C., the figure originally stood in a wickerstructure, probably a small shrine, which was deliber-ately dismantled and buried with the figure beneathit. (Drawing by Audrey McIntosh, from material inthe National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

In the Iron Age figures the emphasis was on thehead, usually shown with eyes and nose and oftenwith a mouth. Some figures had legs or sexual fea-tures and sometimes arms. Others, however, such asthe figures from the Late Iron Age shrine at Sources-de-la-Seine, were shown with clothing. Around 200figures of oak wood were found here, generallydepicting people clad in thick hooded cloaks.

BRONZES

A number of bronze figurines of animals from ritualcontexts included a Hallstatt-period bull from thecave of Byci Skála in Moravia made of bronze withinlays of iron on its shoulders and forehead andinlaid eyes, now missing but probably originally ofglass. Later figures of boars are known from sitesacross Europe; these were usually shown with araised crest along their backs. Small examples mayhave been worn on helmets, but at least one, fromNeuvy-en-Sullias in France, was nearly life size.Other Celtic bronze figures included birds, stags,and bulls. Bronze was also used in the second andfirst millennia to model scenes such as the cult vehi-cle from Strettweg, which included human and ani-mal figures. The people of Bronze Age Sardiniamade distinctive human figures of bronze, some inthe form of warriors armed with bows, swords, dag-gers, and shields, and wearing tunics, bossed belts,and helmets; these were often placed as votive offer-ings in sanctuaries and sacred springs.

STONE FIGURES

Divine Images? Stone figures that may representgods are known in the Mesolithic period, when riverboulders were set up in the houses at Lepenski Vir inSerbia. These were carved with goggle eyes, droop-ing fishy mouths, and patterns like scales, and it isthought that they represented fishy deities.

Human Figures Many stone figures were foundin the Maltese temples and hypogea, including vastobese figures with enormous legs and tiny feet whoare generally referred to as goddesses, although inmany cases their gender is unclear. Figurines ofwhite marble were produced in the Cyclades in theEarly Bronze Age. Elsewhere standing stones andstelae were carved with human features, often

extremely schematic or stylized, by many Neolithicand later communities; some were probably divinefigures, while others may have been gravestones.

Stone statues were more widespread in the IronAge. A broken head with a torc around its neckfound in the ritual enclosure at Msecké Zehrovice inthe Czech Republic may have come from the statueof a god. A complete naked male figure carved ofsandstone, wearing a conical cap, a torc, and a beltwith a dagger, and with his arms across his chest, wasassociated with the sixth-century princely barrowburial at Hirschlanden in Germany. It was four feet,11 inches (1.5 meters) high and had originally stoodon the summit of the barrow. In northwest Iberialife-size statues of warriors (guerreros galaicos) wereerected at the entrance to castros (fortified villages);they were clad in shirts and kilts and carried a circu-lar shield and a dagger.

Landscape Statues During the Iron Age in partsof western Iberia verracos, granite models of bullsand boars, creatures with great religious significancefor the Celts, were erected as markers of pasture-land, while in the northwest statues of animal headswere similarly placed.

HILL FIGURES

A number of hillsides in England were carved withfigures that must have had some ritual significance,though they were probably also territorial markers.These were made by cutting away the turf to exposethe chalk beneath, or by digging trenches that werethen filled with chalk, creating a figure whose con-trasting white color stood out well from the green ofthe surrounding grass or soil. Although these figureshave been constantly renewed down the ages, stylis-tic features indicate that some were created in theIron Age.

Uffington White Horse (Oxfordshire, England)The powerful figure of a horse shown in motion,depicted in a series of elegant curving lines. It mea-sures 360 feet (111 meters) from head to tail. Inves-tigations of this figure using a recently developedtechnique, optical simulated luminescence dating(OSL), have demonstrated that the figure was cre-ated sometime between 1400 and 600 B.C.


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SHRINES AND SACREDPLACES

In Southeast Europe from the Neolithic periodonward, villages often included a building that wasprobably a shrine, and houses may also have con-tained domestic shrines. Sacred buildings alsoappeared in other parts of Europe at various times,but in general the ritual emphasis was on natural fea-tures, such as trees, rivers, and caves, or on areas ofthe landscape enclosed or defined by man-made fea-tures, ranging from small ditched enclosures to thefamous circular structure at Stonehenge. Landscapefeatures were also venerated in parts of SoutheastEurope, such as the peak sanctuaries and sacred cavesof the Minoans. Watery places such as bogs, lakes,and rivers attracted many offerings from Mesolithictimes onward, some of them very lavish. Many othervotive deposits were placed in pits in the ground,probably reflecting the worship of chthonic deities. Ithas been suggested that souterrains, undergroundtunnels and chambers used in Iron Age Brittany andwestern Britain for storage, may also have had a reli-gious dimension: the entrusting of stored food to therealm of the earth deities for safekeeping and partic-ularly the placing of the seed corn here in order toensure its fertility by divine intervention.

Sacred Places

CLASSICAL EVIDENCE

A number of classical authors describe the venera-tion of natural places throughout barbarian Europe,from Iberia to the Galatian realm in Anatolia. Theseincluded capes and promontories, lakes, rivers, andislands, all locations for which there is also archaeo-logical evidence of veneration. Of particular interestare these writers’ horrified descriptions of sacredgroves: ghastly places where the trees dripped withblood and even the Druids were afraid to visit afterdark. Hanging from many of the trees were humanvictims subjected to ritual wounding for the purposeof divination.

The classical world itself, though generally wor-shipping in built shrines, also had sacred places innatural locations, such as the cave on Crete whereZeus was born, Mount Olympus, home of the Greekgods, and Lake Avernus in Italy, reputedly theentrance to the Underworld. After the Roman con-quest many native sacred places continued to bevenerated, and in some cases Roman shrines werebuilt there. Inscribed offerings from the Romanperiod, such as altars, provide information about thenames of deities associated with these locations andtheir significance. From this it is known, for exam-ple, that many rivers were regarded as female deities:These included the Marne (the goddess Matronameaning Mother), the Severn (the goddess Sabrina),and the Seine (the goddess Sequana).

Sources-de-la-Seine (Burgundy, France) TheFontes Sequanae at the source of the river Seine wasa Celtic sacred place dating back to the first centuryB.C. where many pilgrims, male and female, offeredvotive wooden figures of themselves. In the Romanperiod two temples and a colonnaded precinct wereadded, along with a bronze statue of the goddessSequana, the spirit of the river, and votive figures ofstone, shown carrying gifts of fruit or animals, wereoffered to the deity. Other offerings in the shrineincluded a pot filled with models of human bodyparts in silver and bronze, reflecting Sequana’s rolein healing, and numerous others in oak were throwninto the spring pool here.

Drunemeton (Anatolia) Strabo refers to a sacredgrove known as Drunemeton (“oak sanctuary”),where 300 men elected by the three tribes of theGalatians met in council. (The Galatians were Celtswho had migrated in the third century and settled inAnatolia.)

Mona (Anglesey, Wales) The island of Angleseywas said to be a major center of Druidism. As such itwas targeted by the Romans when they attempted tosuppress the Druids. The Roman governor of Britain,Suetonius Paulinus, led an assault on the island in A.D.60. According to Tacitus, the Druids and “black-robed women with disheveled hair like Furies” para-lyzed the superstitious Roman soldiers with theirappearance and screamed curses, though the Roman

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officers shamed their men into attacking and defeat-ing the defenders, and razing the sacred groves.

Loire (France) Strabo, quoting Poseidonius, des-cribes an island off the mouth of the Loire, wheredwelt a community of priestesses dedicated to a fer-tility cult, whose rites included human sacrifice andcannibalism.

VIERECKSCHANZEN (SACREDENCLOSURES)

Many Iron Age shrines took the form of a square orrectangular space enclosed by a bank and a ditch inwhich offerings were placed, and often by a palisade.Offerings were also buried inside the enclosed space;these might include the bones and flesh of peopleand animals, wooden figurines, and artifacts. Some-times these were arranged in zones. In some casesthe enclosure contained a built structure, but inmany the focus of worship was a single large post ortree trunk or a deep shaft, sometimes with a post setin it. Alternatively, the shrine might contain a num-ber of posts or a series of pits; in the enclosure atBliesbruck in Germany there were 100 pits in whichofferings and tree trunks or living trees were placed.Classical authors reported that a Celtic open-airshrine was called a nemeton; this may have referredto such ritual enclosures as well as to groves andother natural features. Shrines were often placed inliminal situations, such as the boggy areas betweenland and water or at the boundary between territo-ries as was the case of the Gallic shrine at Gournay.

Libenice (Bohemia, Czech Republic) This enclo-sure with sides 300 feet (90 meters) long contained asunken area at one end. Within this were a standingstone and two wooden posts, possibly carved inhuman form wearing the two bronze torcs foundbeside them. Offerings had been placed in pits in thefloor, which had then been filled in. Human and ani-mal bones from the shrine were probably theremains of sacrifices, while the burial of a woman ina coffin with many items of jewelry may have beenthat of a priestess.

Gournay-sur-Aronde (France) This banked andditched enclosure, founded in the fourth century

B.C., was situated on the border of three Celtic tribesand close to that of another. Initially a pit was dug inwhich the corpses of elderly cattle were exposed;these may have been sacrificed or reverently placedhere after their death. After exposure for somemonths the bones were removed and buried in theditches. Elsewhere in the ditches were buried thebodies of dead horses and the bones of sacrificedlambs, calves, and pigs, each in a separate zone. Dis-membered human bodies were also buried in theditches; these may have been sacrifices or individualswho had died heroically in battle. In the late thirdcentury a structure of posts and a roof was built overthe pit. Numerous ritual pits were dug in the inte-rior. More than 2,000 deliberately broken ironweapons were placed as offerings in the ditches. Theshrine was burnt down in the first century B.C., but aRomano-Celtic temple was constructed on the sitesome centuries later, showing that its sanctity hadcontinued.

Lowbury (Oxfordshire, England) In this shrine,enclosed by a bank and ditch, a number of trees wereplanted in the first century A.D. The enclosure alsocontained offerings of spears and coins and the bur-ial of a woman with a mutilated face.

Roquepertuse (Bouches-du-Rhône, France) Thisenclosure in the hills near Entremont had an entranceportico formed of three uprights spanned by lintelsand originally painted with bands of color, geometricpatterns, and horses. Niches in the uprights heldskulls (probably placed there as severed heads). Otherarchitectural remains from the sanctuary included astone engraved with horses’ heads and a stone carvingof two heads placed back to back; these had originallybeen painted, the faces red and the hair black.

WELLS AND SHAFTS

Deep shafts were the focus of worship in some rit-ual enclosures, but there were also others withoutan enclosure ditch or palisade. Some may havebegun life as wells, others were probably dug pri-marily as ritual features, but, given the sanctity ofwatery places in prehistoric Europe, the distinctionbetween functional wells and ritual shafts may inany case have been blurred. Such deep shafts are


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known from the Late Bronze Age onward, but it isworth noting that wells in which offerings weredeposited were dug around 8000 B.C. by the earliestinhabitants of the island of Cyprus, part of the NearEastern world but also within the Mediterranean.The ritual shafts, which were often more than 100feet (30 meters) deep, contained many offerings,particularly of animals. Human body parts were alsoincluded, as were a range of artifacts.

Wilsford (Wiltshire, England) This MiddleBronze Age shaft, 108 feet (33 meters) deep, was duginto solid chalk. Offerings deposited in it includedmany wooden objects, pottery, beads, and other jew-elry, as well as animal bones.

Holzhausen (Bavaria, Germany) This ritual sitebegan life as a palisaded enclosure in which a shaftwas dug; a second pit was added, and the site furtherenclosed by a ditch and bank. A timber building waserected in one corner, and then a third shaft wasdug. Excavations in one of these shafts revealed thatit had held a post around the base of which traces offlesh and blood were detected.

Fellbach Schmiden (Germany) A timber-linedwell with a ladder made of projecting pegs was exca-vated inside an enclosure: it has been dated to 123B.C. by dendrochronology. Offerings within itincluded pottery, a wooden sword, two wooden fig-urines of goats, and one of a stag.

ROUTES AND TRACKWAYS

Although trackways were generally laid to giveaccess from one place to another across wet ormarshy ground, they probably also had a ritualdimension, perhaps because of their association withthe wetland environment. The massive corduroytimber track at Ipfweger Moor in Germany hadwooden posts and wooden figures set along it, andofferings were placed along others, such as theSweet Track in the Somerset Levels, England.

Flag Fen (East Anglia, England) An artificial islandconstructed in the second millennium in the EastAnglian Fens near Whittlesea was connected to thefen edge by alignments of oak posts with a brush-

wood causeway between them. Over more than amillennium, from around 1600 to 200 B.C., peoplevisiting the island, which may itself have been a ritualsite, threw more than 300 objects among the piles oralong the southern side of the barrier; these includedmany pieces of metalwork, from small humbledomestic objects to swords and other prestige objectssuch as a pair of shears in a purpose-made woodenbox. A tin workshop at the landward end of thecauseway may have specialized in making objects fordeposition. While these offerings were confined tothe south side, several dogs, a complete human skele-ton, and parts of several other people were laid in thewater on the north side of the barrier.

CAVES AND ROCK FISSURES

In many parts of Europe votive offerings wereplaced in caves or rock fissures, places that may havebeen seen as a way into the sacred realms of theearth and the mountains, or a link with the Other-world of the dead. Offerings of food and drink werefrequent, as were those of artifacts, which might beplaced as hoards. In some cases human sacrificestook place in caves, while in others these places wereused as tombs for those who had died naturally.

Byci Skála (Moravia, Czech Republic) During theHallstatt period and into the later Iron Age some 40people, mainly women, were sacrificed in this lime-stone cave, and their heads and sometimes hands orfeet were cut off. One skull was placed in a cauldron,and another had been modified to form a drinkingvessel. Two horses were cut into quarters anddeposited here along with many pots, objects ofbronze including a bronze bull figurine, and a wagonsheathed in bronze. The cave also contained a num-ber of funeral pyres.

CLIFF CASTLES

Cliff castles, which were headlands and promontoriescut off from the mainland by banks and ditches, mayhave served a religious purpose as well as being usedfor defense. Classical authors writing of Iberia men-tioned that such places were sacred to the gods, and inmany parts of the Atlantic region evidence suggeststhat capes and headlands had some special, probably

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religious, significance back into the Neolithic period;this may have been bound up with their importanceas landmarks for seafarers but related also to theirliminal situation, between land and sea.

Votive Deposits andSacrificesThe deposition of votive offerings was practicedthroughout European prehistory, from Mesolithictimes onward. These offerings were placed in theground, in caves, and in a variety of watery places, aswell as in shrines and other sacred locations. Classical

literature also refers to offerings in places that haveleft no archaeological trace, such as groves in forests.Offerings included fine stone tools in the Mesolithicand Neolithic periods and a great variety of metal-work in later times, as well as pottery, animals, andwooden vehicles. Objects were often dismantled ordeliberately damaged before deposition; swordsmight be bent or broken into pieces, for example.Human bones might also be deposited, and in theIron Age in particular human sacrifices were made inthese locations. Food was likely to have been com-mon among the offerings made to the gods, thoughthis is harder to demonstrate. For example, in Scot-land pots or packages of “bog-butter” have beenfound, probably placed in bogs or lakes in the Bronzeor Iron Age. These may have been votive offerings orsimply butter placed in water to keep cool in summermonths and never retrieved.

The practice of making votive offerings was notcontinuous either in space or time, but related tofactors of which we can have no knowledge. Forexample, in central Europe it was common around2000 B.C. to place votive hoards of metalwork inthe ground, but the practice was then abandonedfor about a millennium. In Ireland and Brittanyaround the same time gold lunulae and otherobjects were placed as votive hoards in the groundor in water, whereas in mainland Britain goldobjects were placed as grave goods in elite graves.While funerary offerings are generally interpretedin social terms, they would also have had a religioussignificance and should perhaps be consideredequivalent in some ways to votive offerings made inother contexts. These also had a social dimension,since the sacrifice of expensive objects will haveconferred considerable prestige on their donors.

DEPOSITS IN WATERY LOCATIONS

The European practice of depositing votive offer-ings in water dates back as far as the later Mesolithicperiod, when the Ertebølle people placed polishedstone axes, pots, and probably antlers in bogs. TheirTRB successors also made ritual deposits in bogs,their offerings including polished stone axes, amberjewelry, and pottery vessels that may have heldfood. A number of objects placed beside the fourth-millennium Sweet Track in the Somerset Levels,


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7.5 A small hoard of bronzes found in a bog atSma’Glen, Corrymuckloch, in Perthshire, Scotland,comprising a sword blade, deliberately snapped intwo; three socketed axes; and a unique ladle. Thiscollection of objects was probably buried as a votiveoffering around 800 B.C. (Drawing by AudreyMcIntosh, from material in the National Museumsof Scotland, Edinburgh)

England, may also have been votive offerings ratherthan objects lost by people walking across the track-way; these included pots of hazelnuts and a very finejadeite ax imported from Switzerland.

From the Bronze Age onward the practice waswidespread in temperate Europe, with fine metal-work, particularly jewelry and weapons, being throwninto many rivers, lakes, and bogs. The date range ofmaterial found in some locations indicates that somespots were venerated for long periods, during whichmany offerings were made there. The practice con-tinued through the Roman period and into post-Roman times. Rivers, lakes, springs, bogs, and otherwatery places seem to have attracted particularly lav-ish offerings, which included many fine pieces ofparade armor, bronze cauldrons, wooden vehicles,and in one case a boat containing many weapons. Thelatter shows that very substantial numbers of objectsmight be deposited as a single offering, somethingthat seems to have occurred in a number of sites.

Llyn Cerrig Bach (Anglesey, Wales) The island ofAnglesey, known to the Romans as a Druid strong-hold, was an important religious center in the laterIron Age. A high cliff overlooking the lake of LlynCerrig Bach was used as a prominent place fromwhich offerings could be thrown into its sacredwaters. These numbered around 150 pieces andincluded two cauldrons, slave chains, horse trap-pings, swords, spears, shields, and other valuableprestige goods that seem to have come from sourcesover a wide area, including Ireland. Although thesewere probably thrown into the lake on a successionof occasions over the course of three centuries, it ispossible that these were the offerings accumulatedover that period in a shrine and that all of them wereconsigned to the lake when the Romans attackedAnglesey in A.D. 60.

Duchcov (Czech Republic) “Giant’s Springs,” anatural spring where in the third or second centuryB.C. a huge bronze cauldron was deposited contain-ing around 2,000 pieces of bronze jewelry includingbracelets, fibulae, and rings.

Thames (England) A number of votive objectshave been recovered from the River Thames. Theseinclude the Battersea shield, a fine piece of parade

armor, a horned helmet from Waterloo Bridge inLondon, and hundreds of skulls of young men.

La Tène (Lake Neuchâtel, Switzerland) A woodenbridge or pier was used as a platform from whichmany offerings were thrown into the lake. Theseincluded more than 165 iron swords, 295 spears,shields, razors, pottery, bronze jewelry, particularly385 fibulae, coins, tools, iron ingots, cauldrons, andwooden objects, including a wheel, yokes, and partsof vehicles, as well as numerous skulls and someother human bones. Dendrochronology dates thestructure to 251 B.C. and the wooden objectsbetween then and 38 B.C.

Huelva (Huelva, Portugal) Some 400 10th-cen-tury bronze objects, including 78 swords, 88 spear-heads, a helmet, 22 daggers, and many brooches,were found in the estuary of the Odiel River near theTartessian town of Huelva. This may have been thecargo of a wrecked ship, but the composition of thecollection, weapons and jewelry, mirrors that ofmany votive hoards, suggesting that this may havebeen a votive offering of exceptional munificence.

Broighter (Co. Derry, Ireland) A small hoard ofgoldwork deposited close to the shores of LoughFoyle in the first century B.C. included an elaborateand massive torc, two lighter torcs made of twistedgold bars, a model boat of sheet gold, a model caul-dron, and two neck chains of gold wire. Lough Foylewas connected in Irish mythology with the sea godManannan Mac Lir, the protector of Ireland, andthe presence of a model seagoing boat in the hoardemphasizes the possibility that the gold work was anoffering to this deity.

Boats Occasionally whole boats were sacrificed asvotive deposits; the earliest of these was at Hjort-spring in Denmark in the fourth century B.C., butthere are a number from Roman and later times.The Hjortspring boat was packed with more than300 weapons, including spears, swords, shields, andchain mail, and several sacrificed animals and wasthen dragged out into a bog and sunk, using stonesto weigh it down. It has been surmised that this wasa thank offering by those who had defeated the war-band that had owned the weapons.

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BURIED AND HIDDEN OFFERINGS

From the Mesolithic period onward, and particu-larly in the Bronze Age, votive offerings wereplaced in holes in the ground or hidden understones, in rock crevices and caves, or other placesthat transferred them to the keeping of the gods.From the later Bronze Age they were also depositedin deep shafts. Offerings were also placed in ditches,from the Neolithic causewayed enclosures to theditched sacred enclosures of the Iron Age. Thefoundations of buildings sometimes included offer-ings of artifacts, animals or joints of meat, andsometimes people. Offerings were probably alsodeposited in the open air in places of sanctity,including in trees but also on the ground; rarelyhave circumstances allowed the discovery of these,but the famous Gundestrup cauldron was disman-tled and the pieces placed among the grass on dryland (this ground became part of a bog that formedlater, where the cauldron was found).

The stone, metal, and salt mines of prehistoricEurope have revealed a number of votive deposits,often placed in shafts that proved unexpectedlyunproductive or in which the roof had collapsed,presumably to placate the spirit of the place andobtain future safety and prosperity. For example, inthe flint mine at Grimes Graves in England twoantler picks, a polished greenstone ax, and the skullof a phalarope, a bird rarely found in Britain, hadbeen arranged in one gallery.

A study of Danish Bronze Age hoards shows thatmany small offerings, containing domestic itemssuch as knives, axes, and jewelry, were deposited nearsettlements and were probably offerings made byindividuals or small communities, whereas largerhoards were found in places well away from settle-ments, these probably representing regional sacredplaces. In addition to objects, these sacred sitessometimes had evidence of large-scale feasting, suchas the hundreds of cooking pits at Rønninge Søgard.

In the later Neolithic period hoards of beautifulpolished stone axes were placed in the ground inparts of western Europe. These were generally com-pletely pristine, suggesting that they were created asofferings. Axes, now made of bronze, were also com-mon votive offerings in Bronze Age hoards, as werevarious kinds of weapon, particularly swords. InÚnetice central Europe, ösenringe were frequent

offerings; some hoards contained 500 or more.Hoards of gold lunulae were deposited in contem-porary Ireland and Brittany. In the Late Bronze Agehoards became very numerous; while earlier hoardshad generally been composed of fine objects, manyof these were made up of broken tools. These mayhave been collections of scrap metal intended forrecycling, but other hoards, particularly those con-taining weapons, probably continued the practice ofvotive deposition. In the Iron Age ritual shafts andpits within settlements and sacred enclosures oftenhad offerings placed within them, and in the latterthe offerings might also be laid on the ground sur-face. Bronze and gold jewelry and weaponry werecommon offerings, as were animals, and humanbones were also often included.

Hajdúsámson (Hungary) In a Carpathian BronzeAge hoard carefully arranged in the ground, a swordwith a solid hilt was placed with its blade pointingdue north and across it were laid 12 shafthole battle-axes with their blades to the west. Each of these hadbeen separately made and was unique, unlike themass-produced axes characteristic of the period.

Snettisham (East Anglia, England) In this area ofaround 3 acres (1.2 hectares) at least a dozen smallpits were dug, probably in the mid-first century B.C.,and were tightly packed with valuables. The majorityof these were torcs of gold, silver, or electrum, thoughbronze torcs, other pieces of jewelry, and coins werealso deposited. In some cases the objects were placedin two layers, separated by a layer of soil. The area ofthe hoards lay within a 20-acre (8-hectare) ditchedenclosure; finds from the ditch gave a date in the firstcentury A.D., and an illicitly excavated hoard of silverand gold coins and ingots in a silver bowl, dated to theearly first century A.D., is reputed to have been foundnear the ditch. Opinions on these hoards are divided;were they votive offerings or a tribal treasury, buriedfor safekeeping? Perhaps they were both: wealthentrusted to the protection of the gods.

HUMAN SACRIFICES

Classical authors were both fascinated and appalledby the Celtic and Germanic practice of human sacri-fice, and their more extravagant claims may be exag-


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gerated. For example, Strabo reported that theDruids sacrificed large numbers of people by burn-ing them alive in a huge model of a man made ofwicker. The classical authors linked death by drown-ing to the worship of Teutates. They describedgroves in which human victims were suspendedfrom trees and wounded, and referred to a Druidicpractice of divination by observing the struggles ofstabbed individuals. The Druids were also said tohave divined the future by cutting the throats of vic-tims and studying their blood; it is probably signifi-cant that a number of the bog bodies had had theirthroats cut. In the case of Lindow Man, the cutwould have drawn blood but not killed him.

It is impossible to distinguish between sacrificesand the ritual disposal of human remains after deathand particularly death by violence (such as murder,execution, and death in battle). Many Iron Age ritualenclosures and pits contained human skeletalremains from people who were either sacrificed orburied there after death. Similarly, it is usuallyimpossible to ascertain whether graves that containmore than one burial represent the sacrifice of indi-viduals such as slaves, followers, or wives to accom-pany an important person into death; such sacrificesare attested to in Thracian, Scythian, and othersteppe burials but may not have been practiced else-where. The fortuitous preservation of Iron Age bod-ies in bogs, however, confirms the classical referencesto human sacrifice. Such bog bodies were rare inother periods but not entirely absent: For example,the bodies of two fourth-millennium individuals whohad suffered an unnatural death were found in a bogat Stoney Island in Ireland, and a few others areknown from Denmark. Since the deposition of votiveofferings goes back to Mesolithic times, it is possiblethat some of the early collections of human remains,such as the Ofnet skull nest and the Talheim mas-sacre, may also be evidence of human sacrifice.

BOG BODIES

Many hundreds of sacrificed people have been dis-covered in the bogs of northern Europe (mainlyDenmark but also Germany, the Netherlands, andBritain), mostly dating to the late centuries B.C. andearly centuries A.D. They are often intact, depend-ing on the conditions of preservation and discovery,

though in very acid bogs the bones are destroyed,leaving the hair, nails, and tanned skin. Textiles havealso preserved well, but most of the bog bodies werenaked, so these are generally restricted to smallitems such as caps, belts, and blindfolds. They alsoinclude the ropes used to garotte the victim.

In many cases the bog people were killed usingseveral methods in conjunction, presumably for rit-ual reasons. These methods did not usually includedecapitation, a striking contrast to the Iron Agetreatment of enemies; the few decapitated bog indi-viduals may have been deposited for other reasons.Examination of the victims’ hands has generallyrevealed that they had been exempted from manuallabor, suggesting that they were marked for sacrificeand treated in special ways in advance of theirdeaths. Comments by Caesar indicate that at leastsome sacrificial victims were criminals, condemnedbut not executed until a sacrifice was required, per-haps years after their crime. The stomach contentsof some of the bog bodies have been examined,revealing details of their last meal. This was often agruel or porridge made with a variety of plants; theseindicate that the victims were often slain in the win-ter, suggesting their sacrifice may have related torites for the return of spring.

Not all bodies found in bogs were those of sacrifi-cial victims. Others may have been people who acci-dentally drowned or who were murder victims. Awoman found at Juthe Fen in Denmark and a manfrom Datgen in Germany had both been pinneddown in the bog with pieces of wood, and the Datgenman decapitated; these unusual arrangements suggestthat these were not normal sacrificial victims but per-haps individuals feared in life, held down to preventtheir spirits returning to haunt the living. The Romanwriter Tacitus reported that unnaturally wicked indi-viduals were drowned in bogs under a wooden hurdle.

Borremose (Denmark) Three bog bodies werefound in the large raised bog at Borremose: a manwho was garotted and hit on the head, and twowomen. One of the women was covered by a woolenskirt, while a drape and a shawl were placed over thenaked body of the other. The famous Gundestrupcauldron was found 2 miles (3 kilometers) away inwhat is now an adjacent bog, Raevemose, which wasdry land at the time of its deposition.

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Grauballe (Denmark) The man found at Grauballehad been hit on the head and his throat had been cut.His last meal had been a gruel containing a smallamount of meat and many seeds.

Lindow Moss (Cheshire, England) A man,dubbed “Pete Marsh,” was found during mechanicalpeat cutting in Lindow Moss in 1984. He had beenstunned by two blows to the head and garotted witha knotted cord, and his throat had been cut before hewas placed facedown in a pool. He was dressed onlyin a fox-fur band around his forearm, and traces ofcopper on his skin suggest that his body was painted.Among the remains of his last meal, of bread madewith a variety of different grains, was mistletoepollen, probably included for ritual reasons. Parts ofat least one other body have been recovered fromthe same peat deposit: a man who had been decapi-tated and his head deposited separately.

Rappendam (Denmark) A peat bog containing anumber of offerings including a man, parts of anumber of animals, and many wooden wheels.

Tollund (Denmark) Discovered in 1950, TollundMan was the first bog body to be scientifically stud-ied. He was clad only in a leather cap and belt andhad been killed by garotting before being placed inthe bog around 200 B.C.

ShrinesBuildings within which ritual activities occurredwere less common than other kinds of sacred place,except in Southeast Europe from early times andlater in parts of the Mediterranean. These rangedfrom the house shrines of the Neolithic Balkans tothe monumental temples of Malta.

HOUSE SHRINES

From the time of the first farmers onward in Greeceand the Balkans, buildings within the settlementwere the focus of religious practices. In some villagesone building was set apart, containing no domesticmaterial but a large number of other objects such ashuman and animal figurines. Domestic houses might

also contain such figurines as well as model housesthat are thought to have been shrines. In somehouses one area was set aside for religious obser-vances: For example, at Slatina a small strip at theback of the building was partitioned off and con-tained a box on feet, which could have been one suchhouse model. Tools and food were also stored here.The association between stored produce and ritualparaphernalia was not uncommon; since the familyand community depended on stored food to getthrough the time between harvests, a ritual connec-tion between food and the gods was one way toattempt to ensure its safety during the course of theyear. Later villages in Southeast Europe often had aseparate shrine among the buildings of the settle-ment, containing figurines, animal heads, and pot-tery vessels with human faces. A model fromCascioarele on the lower Danube suggests that therewere two-story temples in the Gumelnitsa period.

Nea Nikomedeia (Greece) A large building in thecenter of this Early Neolithic village contained anumber of human figures and three model frogs ofpolished stone.


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7.6 “Pete Marsh,” the bog body discovered in Lin-dow Moss in England, a man in his mid 20s whowas sacrificed in the Late Iron Age or possibly inthe Early Roman period (TopFoto.co.uk, © TheBritish Museum/HIP, Photographer: Unknown)

Ovcharovo (Bulgaria) A house shrine here con-tained a cult scene made up of three figurines seatedon model chairs, a number of other chairs, a stand-ing figurine, and three model tables bearing minia-ture pots, as well as screens and three cylinders thatmay have represented drums.

Platia Magoula Zarkou (Greece) A model houserecovered from a pit beneath a house at PlatiaMagoula Zarkou contained eight human figures ofvarious sizes, including a man with four legs, as wellas an oven and a raised platform.

OTHER SHRINES

Although the greater number of Iron Age shrineswere enclosures without structures, in some caseswooden buildings have been identified, in somecases inspired by Greek, Etruscan, or Roman archi-tecture. However, the discovery of the Bronze Agestructure at Bargeroosveld shows that religiousbuildings also existed in earlier times, althoughnothing is known of the rites associated with thisstructure. The survival of evidence of this buildingin a remote waterlogged setting illustrates the verylimited chances of discovering such shrines.

Bargeroosterveld (Drenthe, Netherlands) In thisBronze Age shrine, constructed on boggy ground, aring of stones surrounded a construction of twosleeper beams each holding two pairs of stout posts,surmounted by four beams with their ends carved intohorns. In each pair of posts one had a round section,the other square. The structure was later dismantled.

Závist (Bohemia, Czech Republic) The highestpart of this sixth-century hillfort was enclosed by apalisade, within which a succession of ritual structureswere constructed of timber and stone. These seem tohave included a wooden temple, a ritual pit, stoneplatforms, and a triangular stone altar. A stone walland rock-cut ditch were also constructed around thesanctuary. Along the road leading up to the enclo-sure’s entrance were workshops in which objects weremanufactured for visitors to offer in the shrine.

Entremont (France) A large public building with apillared portico occupied a prominent position in the

town of Entremont, between two towers of the town’sinner wall. Its first-floor hall was decorated insidewith stone laid in geometric patterns and containedslabs decorated with severed heads and skulls. Sev-ered heads were nailed to the front of the building.

MALTESE TEMPLES

From around 3600 to 2500 B.C. monumental stonetemples were constructed in Malta, with walls ofearth and rubble faced with huge dressed limestoneblocks, some of which were decorated with spiralmotifs. Stone balls found in the temples were proba-bly used in the transport of the stones from quarriesthat were often several miles away. The structuresresembled a clover leaf in plan, with a central pas-sage surrounded by three to six semicircular apses,which may have been partially roofed with timberbeams and clay. Crushed limestone plaster or stoneslabs were used to make the floor. A monumentalentrance doorway was surmounted by a huge stonelintel; sometimes the facade was two stories high.Inside these temples were a number of altars andcult statues, including enormous obese figures wear-ing ribbed and fringed skirts. The temples wereoften built in pairs or groups, and in two cases wereassociated with hypogea.

Tarxien (Malta) Three or four adjoining templeswere built here, the largest group on Malta. Thestones used to construct the eastern temple werecarefully dressed so that they fitted preciselytogether. An altar at the back of the southern shrinewas decorated with a procession of animals. A pair ofconnected holes in the floor before the altar mayhave been used for tethering sacrificial animals; ani-mal bone was found in various parts of the templecomplex. The central shrine, unusually, has six lobesin its plan, and was the latest to be built, squashedbetween the southern and eastern temples andaccessible only through the southern temple. A stairmay have led from here to the roof. A basin in thecentral temple had held a fire.

Ggantija (Gozo) Of two adjoining temples on theisland of Gozo, known as Ggantija or Giant’s House,the first was built around 3700 B.C., and the secondadded some four centuries later. The interior walls

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were made smooth with a wash of lime plaster,painted red.

OTHER

Galician saunas (Galicia, Spain) The first-millen-nium B.C. castros of northwest Spain included amongtheir buildings structures that seem to have beenused as saunas, it is presumed for ritual purposes.These were sunken rectangular buildings with astone entranceway decorated with designs that, it isthought, represented fire, water, and wind. TheRoman author Strabo may have been referring tothese when he described vapor baths that used coldwater and heated stones.

MonumentsA great variety of religious monuments were con-structed in prehistoric Europe. These included avariety of enclosures defined by ditches and banks,mounds, megaliths, stone orthostats, and woodenposts. In some cases the ritual significance of the actof construction was of as much importance as thesubsequent existence of the finished monument.Many in the Neolithic period were linked withfunerary practices, including long barrows, mega-lithic tombs, and mortuary enclosures. While funer-ary monuments, mostly in the form of round barrowsand stelae, continued to be erected down the ages,from the late fourth millennium onward, new typesof monument reflected religious preoccupationsapparently involving observation of the heavens andparticularly the movements of the Sun and Moon.


During the Neolithic period in parts of northern,western, and cenral Europe, sites enclosed by inter-rupted ditches and banks or palisades were con-structed, apparently for a variety of purposes. Somewere defended settlements, but in many cases theyseem likely to have served some ritual purpose, per-haps defining a sacred space separate from the nor-mal world. Groups from a wide area may have met atthe causewayed enclosure periodically to celebrate afestival or a ceremonial occasion by feasting. This is

suggested by the presence in many of the ditches ofanimal bones, broken pottery, and smashed stonetools; often these were prestige objects, obtainedfrom distant sources. The ritual aspect is empha-sized by the presence in many of some human bones,such as skulls set upright on the bottom of the ditch,or sometimes complete inhumations. In the water-logged ditch of the causewayed enclosure at Etton ineastern England, a pot set on a reed mat and heapsof particular bones and other material were arrangedwithin the ditch. The ditches seem often to havebeen backfilled after the deposits were placed inthem, and some were repeatedly recut or cleanedout and refilled.

Windmill Hill (Wiltshire, England) Three con-centric rings of interrupted ditches enclosed an areaof around 24 acres (9.6 hectares). Numerous pits hadbeen dug in the interior, stone blocks had beenplaced within them, and the pits backfilled. Thecrouched inhumation of a man lay under the outerbank. The pottery and stone tools deposited in theditches derived from a wide area, including Corn-wall, Wales, and Cumbria.

CURSUSES

A cursus was an exceptionally long monument, a typeprobably confined to Britain, comprising a strip ofground defined by two parallel ditches and internalbanks or lines of pits that, at least in some cases, onceheld timbers. The Dorset cursus, the longest known,was 6 miles (10 kilometers) long, with ditches 300feet (90 meters) apart. Generally, they seem to havebeen constructed in stages. Cursuses often enclosedearlier long barrows within their length.

BANK BARROWS

Bank barrows, also known as long mounds, were nar-row earthen mounds more than 330 feet (100 meters)long. Some were constructed partially over earliercausewayed enclosures. They seem generally to havebeen constructed in stages. An example at Crickleywas found to have had offerings of animal boneunder flat stones placed at intervals along its length.

Cleaven Dyke (Perthshire, Scotland) This monu-ment began as an oval burial mound over which a


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long barrow was constructed. The mound and paral-lel ditches of the long barrow were then extendedaround 3300 B.C. in a series of 34 stages, creating astructure around 1.25 miles (2 kilometers) long, across between a bank barrow and a cursus.

OTHER

Mesolithic Stonehenge (Wessex, England) Theearliest known wooden monument, three postholesthat had held massive pine tree trunks arranged in aline and another nearby, dated to the eighth millen-nium and was therefore erected by Mesolithic peo-ple. This alignment was discovered at the famousand extensively investigated site of Stonehengewhen an area was stripped to build a car park; thereare probably many other Mesolithic monumentslying undiscovered in less well studied areas of theEuropean landscape.

Silbury Hill (Wessex, England) An enormousmound 131 feet (40 meters) high and covering 5.5acres (2.2 hectares) was constructed at Silbury Hillnear Avebury during the third millennium B.C. Around mound of turf and gravel was covered withchalk rubble and earth and an outer layer of chalkrubble, quarried from the huge surrounding ditch.Despite numerous exploratory excavations of themound, no funerary or ritual remains have beenfound associated with this artificial hill, the largestman-made mound in Europe, whose purpose is stilltotally unknown. It is calculated that it would havetaken nearly 2 million man-days to build.

HENGES

Henges, which began to appear in Britain in the latefourth millennium, consisted of a circular ditchedenclosure with an external bank interrupted by one,two, or four entrances. The arrangement of bankand ditch, the opposite of that used for practicaldefense, has provoked considerable speculation as toits function, with a popular suggestion that the ditchdelimited a sacred area in which rites were per-formed that could be observed by spectators seatedon the bank. Another view is that the bank effec-tively hid from profane view the activities takingplace in the interior. A number of henges contained

one or several concentric circles of standing stonesor wooden posts, either freestanding or roofed.Henges were often associated with elaborately deco-rated Grooved Ware pottery that may have beenused for preparing drugs used in rituals. Hengescould be 150–650 feet (50–200 meters) in diameter,though there were also small henges (hengiformmonuments). A number of henges were reused inlater times as enclosures for cremation burials.

Stonehenge (Wessex, England) Although it is thesite from which henge monuments take their name,Stonehenge is atypical in having its bank insiderather than outside the ditch. The monumentunderwent several stages of construction and re-modeling during its long history. Around 3100 B.C. aditch and internal bank were created, and a circle of56 wooden posts was erected just inside the bank.Around 2500 B.C. 82 bluestones were brought the130 miles (210 kilometers) from the PrescellyMountains of South Wales, probably by raft acrossthe sea and up the River Avon. From there they weredragged to Stonehenge, where they were erected intwo arcs. The work was abandoned before it wascompleted, but around 2300 B.C. the bluestoneswere shifted to their current layout along with 30sandstone sarsen stones hauled to Stonehenge fromthe Marlborough Downs 20 miles (32 kilometers)away. The sarsens were huge, each up to 30 feet (9meters) long and 45 short tons (40 tonnes) inweight. The stones were linked by lintel stones, fas-tened by mortise-and-tenon joints between the lin-tels and the stone uprights and tongue-and-groovejoints between the lintel stones. The raising of theorthostats and in particular the placing of the lintelsmust have required great technical ingenuity as wellas considerable manpower; it is probable that rampsof sand, rollers, and ropes pulled by a large numberof people were used. The Avenue, a path defined bytwo parallel banks with internal ditches, ran fromthe entrance to Stonehenge northeast for two miles(3 kilometers). Within it, just outside the enclosure,stands the Heelstone, a sarsen, and nearby is a largehole that had, it seems, originally held a similarstone. These were placed so that at midsummer sun-rise the Sun would shine exactly between them intothe center of the monument.

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Woodhenge (Wessex, England) At the oppositeend of the Avenue from Stonehenge is Woodhenge,a small henge that originally held a timber buildingconsisting of six concentric rings of wooden posts,probably with a wooden roof. A pit in the floor atthe center of the henge contained the body of athree-year-old child, apparently sacrificed.

Avebury (Wessex, England) The largest hengemonument, its enclosure has an internal diameter of1,140 feet (347 meters) and an area of 28.5 acres(11.5 hectares). The enormous ditch was as much as33 feet (10 meters) deep and the bank originally 55feet (16.7 meters) high. A great circle of 98 hugestones was erected around the inside of the ditch, andwithin the enclosure two smaller circles, the north-ern one containing a setting of three massiveorthostats (known as the Cove) and the one in thesouth a single huge stone (the Obelisk), 21 feet (6.4meters) high. The West Kennet Avenue, a routemarked by 100 pairs of standing stones, led fromAvebury’s south entrance two miles (3 kilometers) tothe Sanctuary, a circular monument built of concen-tric rings of timber posts and one of standing stones,enclosed within a stone circle. The stones of the Ave-bury circles and avenue were of two forms, one talland rectilinear, the other shorter, wider, and dia-mond-shaped; these are often referred to as male andfemale stones, although the original significance isunknown. A number of human skulls and longboneswere buried within the ditch, and in the terminal enda complete female dwarf, possibly sacrificed.

CIRCLES

Rings of wooden posts or standing stones were erectedas religious monuments in parts of Britain and Brittanyin the third and second millennia B.C., stone oftenreplacing earlier timber circles. After they had ceasedto be used for their original purpose, many were reusedas cemetery enclosures, indicating their continuedsanctity. Circles of wooden posts were also a commonfeature of Bronze Age burials, erected around the gravebefore the mound was heaped up.

Wooden Circles Single or concentric rings ofposts are known from a number of sites; theseincluded the interior of henges and monuments

where the wooden posts were later supplemented orreplaced by standing stones. For example, Stone-henge had a ring of wooden posts set inside the bankin its first stage of construction; a number of stonecircles on Machrie Moor on Arran, Scotland,replaced earlier timber circles. Rings of posts alsocreated enclosures within which one or a number ofburials were placed.

Stone Circles Circles of standing stones wereerected in various parts of Britain, particularly Scot-land and eastern England. Circles of closely spacedstones generally had a wider space between twostones, forming an entrance, and in some thesestones were taller than the rest. Some circles wereplaced within preexisting henges, while others werebuilt in new locations. A few contained a horseshoesetting of stones (a “cove”). Stone circles were oftenassociated with avenues and alignments.

Recumbent Stone Circles Contemporary withthe henges in other parts of Britain, recumbentstone circles were being built in northeast Scotland.A large stone was laid horizontal on the ground inthe south or southwest arc of a circle of standingstones, usually flanked by a pair of taller stones. Thestones were arranged so that the midsummer moonrose between the uprights over the recumbent stone,shedding light into the interior of the circle.

Seahenge (East Anglia, England) Discovered onthe Norfolk seashore at Holme-next-the-Sea in 1998,this surprising structure was immediately dubbed“Seahenge,” although it lacks the characteristic ditchand external bank of henge monuments. It consists ofa massive oak tree, removed from the ground in 2050or 2049 B.C. and erected upside down, with its rootssticking into the air. A circle of 55 wooden posts wasconstructed around it. Subsequently, a second, larger,post circle was also found nearby. Ax marks in thetimbers of Seahenge show that at least 51 differentaxes were used, indicating the minimum number ofindividuals involved in the construction.

MENHIRS AND ALIGNMENTS

In Brittany the megalithic tradition began in the fifthmillennium with the erection of a number of massive


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orthostats, some of which were carved, associatedwith long chambered mounds. The largest of these isthe Grand Menhir Brisé. After a few hundred years,however, these standing stones were taken down.Some of them were broken up and the pieces incor-porated into passage graves. One example was bro-ken into three pieces, of which two were used ascapstones in the passage graves of La Table desMarchand and Gavrinis, while the third was perhapsbuilt into the chamber of a long mound at Er-Grah.

The practice of erecting standing stones in Brit-tany was revived later, probably in the third millen-nium, when numerous alignments of many menhirswere created in the Carnac region. The menhirswere arranged in parallel rows or in lines that fanned

out, often associated with rectangles or circles ofstanding stones. At least six such fields of menhirswere raised, probably over a long period, each con-taining from several hundred to more than 1,000stones.

Standing stones also formed part of a number oflate fourth- and third-millennium ritual monumentsin Britain. They were arranged in pairs, or as singleor multiple rows; some formed avenues (doublerows of stones attached to henges or stone circles),while others were part of the same landscape as cir-cles or tombs but were not directly associated withthem. Alignments were erected in northern Scot-land, western Wales, and Ireland, and isolated exam-ples are known in a few other parts of Britain;

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7.7 A view of the alignments at Carnac, Brittany, France. This group consisted of 11 parallel rows of menhirs,running for 3,300 feet (1,015 meters). (Figuier, Louis. Primitive Man. London: Chatto and Windus, 1876)

avenues were found mainly in southern and north-western England. The Avenue attached to Stone-henge was flanked by a pair of standing stones andthe West Kennet Avenue at Avebury was lined by100 pairs of orthostats. Other single or groupedorthostats occur elsewhere in both monuments.

Grand Menhir Brisé (Carnac, Brittany, France)This huge stone, now broken into four pieces,would have stood 66 feet (20 meters) high. Thestone was quarried and roughly shaped 7.5 miles(12 kilometers) to the northwest of its currentlocation, to which it was dragged. It would haveformed the largest of a row of 18 standing stones,erected around 4500 B.C. A design carved on itmay represent an ax or a plow; a similar sign wascarved on the former standing stone that was bro-ken into three pieces, two of which were reused ascapstones in the Gavrinis and La Table des Marc-hand passage graves.

Kerlescan (Carnac, Brittany, France) This is oneof the fields of stone rows at Carnac running east-west. Eight rows of standing stones start closetogether in the east but steadily diverge andincrease in number to end as 13 rows, fanned outalong one long side of a U-shaped arrangement ofclosely placed standing stones, 260 by 300 feet (80by 90 meters), that forms a courtyard in front of along mound. There are 514 extant stones in thesealignments.

Callanish (Hebrides, Scotland) At Callanish onthe island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides a circle oftall stones was erected with a cruciform arrangementof stone rows running away from it in the cardinaldirections, an alignment on the south, east, and westsides and on the north an avenue. The avenue seemsto have been arranged to define the midsummer set-ting of both the Moon and the Sun.

Stanton Drew (Somerset, England) Located inthe Severn region, an area where megalithic andnonmegalithic traditions overlapped, Stanton Drewsurvives as three massive stone circles, up to 370 feet(113 meters) in diameter. Avenues were attached totwo of the circles.

STELAE AND ANTHROPOMORPHICSTONES

Stones carved with a few human features wereerected in various parts of prehistoric Europe. Inmany cases these probably represented deities,erected in open-air sanctuaries, while others mayhave been grave markers or stelae commemoratingthe dead. Some fourth-millennium barrow graves inSoutheast Europe had stelae erected on their sum-mits decorated with people holding or wearinghafted axes. Funerary stelae might also take the formof stones bearing scenes or images of artifacts andpeople. Standing stones were used as boundarymarkers, and many had a ritual significance.

Statue Menhirs Standing stones engraved orcarved in relief to represent schematic human fig-ures are known from the fourth to third millenniaand sometimes later, in parts of Italy, Sardinia, Cor-sica, Iberia, southern France, and the ChannelIslands. Known as statue menhirs, they depict heav-ily armed men and women wearing jewelry. Somewear lunulae or neck rings (gargantillas) of typesfamiliar from Ireland and Iberia. If these figures rep-resent deities, it may be that lunulae, which havebeen recovered from a number of votive hoards,were made to be worn by divine images carved inwood. In the Alpine fringes of northern Italy andSwitzerland the statue menhirs bore stylized repre-sentations of people wearing clearly depicted neck-laces and equipment such as bows, daggers, axes, andbelts with pouches. In Corsica anthropomorphicmenhirs wore a neck ring and a sword or dagger in asheath, and plain menhirs arranged in rows werealso erected.

Cabeço da Mina (Vila Flor, Portugal) This sanc-tuary took the form of a hill that was probablyentirely surrounded by stelae of granite and schist inthe fourth or third millennium B.C. Among the 50surviving stones are 21 carved to represent schematicpeople with faces, necklaces, and belts; the rest areundecorated.

Saint-Martin-de-Corléans (Aosta, Italy) This sac-red place had several phases of different activity. In the


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Neolithic period postholes were dug and ox and ramskulls placed in some. A row of ritual pits were laterdug to contain offerings of millstones and grain. Anarea of ground was plowed and sown with humanteeth. Later, two stone platforms were constructedand 40 anthropomorphic stelae erected in three rows.In the Beaker period the stelae were taken down andused in the construction of megalithic tombs. Cistswere later erected there, again reusing stelae, and thesite continued in use into the Early Bronze Age.

Funerary Stelae Stone stelae carved with weapons,particularly short swords, hafted axes, and doubleaxes, were erected in southwest Iberia during the sec-ond millennium. In the early first millennium thesebecame more widespread, bearing depictions ofswords, spears, shields, and sometimes warriors andchariots.

Markers In Iron Age Brittany stone stelae wereerected as territorial markers but also as religioussymbols; these were sometimes decorated with geo-metric designs. Many of these stelae were tallcolumns, some of them fluted, while others were lowand rounded. Ones similar to the latter are alsoknown from Ireland.

Pillars A number of stone pillars carved withhuman heads and often decorated with heads andfloral motifs have been found in Iron Age sites,probably including Pfalzfeld in Germany; althoughthe top of this pillar had broken off, it had probablyoriginally had a head. Conversely, a broken headfound at Heidelberg in Germany may have comefrom one such pillar. In some cases these pillars wereerected in shrines where they may have been a focusof worship analogous to the trees or wooden postsfrom which human heads might be hung. A stonepillar from the oppidum of Entremont was carvedwith skulls. One from Euffigneix in France had arudimentary face and arms and wore a torc aroundits neck, but also had the figure of a boar carved overits front and a large eye on its left side. Other pillarfigures were carved with two heads, back to back,like the Roman god Janus; one such paired head wasfound at Roquepertuse. An example from Holzger-lingen in Germany was carved down to the waist and

had arms. This and many of the Iron Age heads hada headdress of two large balloonlike leaves or petals.

RITUAL LANDSCAPES

Prehistoric Europeans had an intimate relationshipwith the landscape, which was imbued with religioussignificance. From the earliest times natural featureswere the subject of veneration. This is most clearlyseen in the Iron Age, when many votive deposits andhuman sacrifices were placed in bogs, lakes, rivers,the ground, caves, forest groves, and the sea, butofferings had been made, probably in all these dif-ferent locations, since the Mesolithic period.

In addition, monuments were built that wereclosely linked to natural features of the landscape,while others created artificial landscape features.These functioned partly as territorial markers, defin-ing the area belonging to a community, but they alsoserved an important religious function. Differenttypes of monuments were constructed in differentperiods, but these were often closely integrated, creat-ing a ritual landscape of monuments and natural fea-tures whose arrangement would have had religious(and social) significance for the region’s inhabitants.These included megalithic tombs, standing stones andwooden posts or tree trunks set in postholes, circles ofstone or wood, earthen barrows and stone cairns, anda great variety of enclosures demarcated by ditches,banks, pits, wooden palisades, and stone walls. Thesanctity of particular locations survived changes in theforms taken by ritual or funerary structures. Somelocations in particular functioned as sacred foci formillennia, accumulating monuments of different peri-ods. The length of time that this might endure isbrought home by the discovery at Stonehenge of aMesolithic monument of four enormous posts datedto the eighth millennium, thousands of years beforethe erection of the famous stone monument. TheWessex area of Britain and the Carnac area of Brittanyhave the most spectacular built ritual landscapes; inmany other areas monuments were less prominent orwere absent altogether, features of the ritual landscapebeing marked in different ways, including some delin-eated only in the minds of the worshippers.

Carnac (Brittany, France) The siting of themonuments in the Carnac area emphasizes the

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importance of the sea to the prehistoric inhabi-tants of the area around the Bay of Quiberon.The important Mesolithic coastal settlements ofHoëdic and Téviec with their cist burials lie withinthe adjacent Morbihan region. It was in theCarnac area that the first megalithic tombs, cham-bers under long mounds, were erected in the fifthmillennium, along with a number of menhirs,including the Grand Menhir Brisé. After somecenturies the menhirs were taken down, and bro-ken sections from them were incorporated intopassage graves such as La Table des Marchand,which appeared in the region in the mid-fourthmillennium. At some time, probably later, huge

numbers of menhirs were erected in alignmentsand other arrangements.

Wessex (England) The Wessex region was afavorable area for agriculture and pastoralism andwell placed for trade from the Atlantic west andlands across the North Sea and the English Channel.In the Neolithic period monuments built hereincluded long barrows, other tombs, a small cursus,and causewayed enclosures. In the third millenniumthe area saw the construction of Stonehenge, a num-ber of henges including four of exceptional size(Avebury, Marden, Mount Pleasant, and DurringtonWalls), a large cursus, several avenues, a large num-


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7.8 A plan of the ritual landscape at Avebury, Wessex, England. The earliest monuments here are theNeolithic long barrows of West and East Kennet and the causewayed enclosure of Windmill Hill to thenorthwest, just outside the area covered by the map. Later in the Neolithic the Sanctuary was erected onOverton Hill, in the southeast of the map, and the great mound of Silbury Hill, followed shortly by thegreat henge of Avebury with its stone circles. The West Kennet Avenue, lined with orthostats, was builtjoining Avebury and the Sanctuary; the western (Beckhampton) avenue may be imaginary. Later con-structions here included Bronze Age round barrows. Also marked is the Ridgeway (“British Trackway”),an ancient route. (Lubbock, John. Prehistoric Times. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1890, after Dr.Thurnam’s plan in Archaeologia, Vol. 38)

ber of Beaker burials, including that of the Ames-bury Archer, and the unique mound of Silbury Hill.The area, and particularly the Salisbury Plain, whereStonehenge stands, was a focus for the constructionof Bronze Age barrow cemeteries during the secondmillennium, including a number of wealthy burialsbelonging to the Wessex culture, and in the LateBronze Age many cremation cemeteries developedin the area. The Wilsford shaft, a Bronze Age ritualshaft, also lay within the Stonehenge area. Wessexwas divided into a number of ritual landscapes, someof them focused on the four exceptional henges.

Stenness (Orkney, Scotland) A narrow strip ofland between two lochs on Mainland, Orkney, andthe adjacent ground was chosen as the area in whichto erect a large number of monuments, includingthree henges (the Rings of Brodgar, the Stones ofStenness, and the Ring of Bookan), the passagegrave of Maes Howe, a number of standing stones,and numerous small barrows.

AstronomyKnowledge of the annual calendar of the heavenswas of major importance to farming communitiesthat needed this information to determine when toperform key activities such as sowing their crops.Although the extent of prehistoric European knowl-edge of the heavens is still controversial, there is agrowing body of evidence to suggest that by thethird millennium B.C., if not earlier, the movementsof the Sun and Moon were well known.

MEGALITHIC ASTRONOMY

The purpose of Stonehenge and other stone monu-ments has been much debated, though there hasbeen a considerable consensus that they were reli-gious structures. One view that has gatheredmomentum since the 1960s is that some at least ofthe monuments were designed to record keymoments in the movements of the heavens. Manyscholars, and notably the engineer Alexander Thom,surveyed a number of monuments to determinewhether they recorded astronomical phenomena.

While the more extravagant claims have not beensupported, the frequent coincidence between a majorevent, such as sunrise at the summer or winter sol-stice, and features of a number of stone circles anddeveloped passage graves has led many people toaccept that these monuments were designed torecord key annual astronomical events. For example,the hole above the lintel over the entrance to theNewgrange passage grave directs the Sun at the mid-winter solstice into the central chamber; sunrise onmidsummer’s day is visible between two of theorthostats at Stonehenge, and the Avenue followsthis alignment.

LATER ASTRONOMY

Nebra Sky-Disc The recently discovered Nebrasky-disc, from second-millennium central Germany,may indicate that detailed knowledge of the heavenswas widespread in later prehistoric Europe. The discshows the Moon and the Sun, and between them anumber of stars, among which scholars think theyhave identified the constellation of the Pleiades. Thelatter was visible in the night sky between Marchand October, important dates in the agriculturalyear. In addition, on each side a strip of gold covers82 degrees of the disc’s circumference, this being thedistance traveled by the Sun between the solstices inthe latitude from which the disc came. Furthermore,the disc was (probably) found within an enclosureorientated so that at the equinoxes the Sun viewedfrom here would set behind the highest peak of theHarz Mountains. Like the British monuments, theNebra sky-disc and its enclosure must therefore havebeen used in recording astronomical movements.

Coligny Calendar The Druids were said by classi-cal authors to have knowledge of the heavens, and thiswas confirmed by the find at Coligny, Bourg-en-Bresse, France, of a fragmentary sheet bronze calen-dar with holes for pegs to mark the days. This waswritten in the Gallic Celtic language, using theRoman script and dated to the first century B.C. or thefirst century A.D. It recorded five years, composed of62 lunar months of 29 or 30 lunar nights, with twointercalary months to rectify the difference betweenthe solar and lunar years; the insertion of these extradays was probably staggered over the whole five-year

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period. Major festivals were marked, and each monthwas divided into auspicious and inauspicious nights,vital information for organizing important activities.

READING

GeneralCunliffe, ed. 1994, Milisauskas, ed. 2002, Championet al. 1984.

Religious Beliefs andPracticesWhitehouse 1992: development of religion; Bradley1998: Mesolithic religion; Harding 2000, Demako-poulou et al., eds. 1999: Bronze Age religion; James1993, Green 1992, Cunliffe 1997: Celtic religion;Green 1992, Bökönyi 1991, MacKillop 1998: deities;Piggott 1970, Green 1992: cult objects and iconogra-phy; Durrani 2000, Catling 2005a, 2005b, Anon.2005: Nebra sky-disc; Maier 1991b: Manching tree;Green 1997, Ross 1995, 1999, Piggott 1975: Druidsand other priests; Kruta 2004: Gundestrup cauldron;Eluère 1999a, Wallace and O’Floinn 2002: torcs andlunulae; Menghin 1999, Springer 1999: cones;Bradley 1997, Anati 1999, Capelle 1999, Thrane1999a, Eluère 1999a, Harding 2002: rock art; Mil-isauskas 2002b, Marthari 1999, Todorova 1999: fig-urines; Darvill 1996: hillside figures.

Shrines and Sacred PlacesWhittle 1996, Bradley 1998: Neolithic; Harding2000: Bronze Age; Caesar 1951, Tacitus 1970,1971, James 1993, Piggott 1970, Cunliffe 1997,Kruta 2004: Iron Age; Woodward 1992: BritishIron Age; Darvill 1987, 1996, Parker Pearson 1993:Britain; Hingley 1998, Armit 1997, Barclay 1998,Ashmore 1996: Scotland; Cunliffe 2001a: Atlanticregion; Whitehouse 1992: Italy; Thrane 1999a:Scandinavia; Coles 1984: waterlogged remains;Brothwell 1986, Turner and Scaife, eds. 1995, Glob1969: bog bodies; James 1993, Green 1992, 1997,MacKillop 1998, Webster 1995: Celtic sacredplaces; Planck 1991: Fellbach-Schmiden; Pryor1991, 2003: Flag Fen; Motykova et al. 1991: Závist;Scarre 1999: Bargeroosterveld; Hunter 1997:hoards; Kelly 2002, Wallace and O’Floinn 2002:Broighter; Delgado 1997: Hjortspring; Garrison1997: La Tène; Scarre 1998: Entremont, Borre-mose; Stead 1998: Snettisham; Trump 1980, 2002,Scarre 1998: Maltese temples; Mercer 1990,Oswald et al. 2001, Darvill and Thomas, eds. 2001,Varndell and Topping eds. 2002: causewayed enclo-sures; Mercer 1980: Hambledon; Barclay andHarding, eds. 1999: cursuses; Clarke et al. 1985:megalithic monuments; Wainwright 1989: henges;English Heritage 2005, Chippendale 1994, Rich-ards 1991, Scarre 1998: Stonehenge; Malone 1989:Avebury; Pryor 2001, 2003: Seahenge; Burl 1985,1993, Scarre 1998: Carnac; Burl 1993: standingstones; Jorge 1999b, 1999c, Lenerz-de Wilde 1995,Lo Schiavo 1999, De Marinis 1999, Eluère 1999b:stelae; Ross 1995, Green 1997, Kruta 2004: Col-igny calendar.


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DEATH AND BURIAL

8

FUNERARY PRACTICES

Funerary BeliefsCemeteries may have played some part in reinforc-ing group identity and integration, and the selec-tion of people and objects for interment may haverelated to social practices and beliefs, for example,expressing continuity between the living and theirancestors.

Red ochre had been scattered on burials in thePalaeolithic period, and this continued in manyMesolithic graves, as well as later, for instance, insteppe burials. It is widely considered that thisreflects a symbolic identification with blood and

hence life, perhaps giving the deceased new life inthe Otherworld.

A number of Mesolithic cemeteries in the northwere located on islands. It is possible that thisreflects a desire to separate the spirits of the deadfrom the world of the living, to prevent them bring-ing misfortune. The Saami people, who inhabitednorthern Russia in recent historical times, believedthat the spirits of the dead could carry off the livingor disturb their fishing and hunting grounds and soalso buried their dead on islands.

The Celts believed in the transmigration of souls.The dead passed first to the Otherworld, a happyplace similar to the world of the living, in whichwarriors passed their time in combat and feasting,and there was peace and prosperity. Eventually, thesoul was reborn in a new body.


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8.1 An imaginative reconstruction of a funeral procession to bury an individual in a tomb resembling thepassage grave at Röddinge in Denmark. In some cases people were buried directly within megalithic tombs,but it was more common for bodies to be exposed before their bones were interred. (Figuier, Louis. PrimitiveMan. London: Chatto and Windus, 1876)

Burials

TREATMENT OF THE BODY

Various methods were used for disposing of the deadin ancient Europe. Inhumation of the whole bodyhad the most enduring and widespread popularity,but cremation was also known from Mesolithictimes onward and was the predominant rite in thelater Bronze Age over much of Europe. During theNeolithic, exposure and the burial of defleshedbones was associated with megalithic tombs, andthroughout prehistory there seem also to have beenpractices in which the dead were not buried at all.

PLACES OF BURIAL

Bodies were often laid in graves; cremations were alsoburied directly in the ground or placed in urns withingraves or pits. Burial containers such as coffins,wooden chambers, stone cists, and monumentaltombs were also widely used, and some burials weremade in natural features such as caves. It is possiblethat bodies, bones, or ashes were also disposed of inother places such as trees, rivers, and the sea. In somecases burials were placed within earlier monuments;some Beaker burials, for example, were inserted intoearlier megalithic tombs, and the interiors of stonecircles and henges were sometimes used as BronzeAge funerary enclosures. Some bodies or bones, how-ever, were disposed of in settlements, beneath housefloors or in pits. The bones of the dead were alsotreated in other ways; the heads of enemies were dis-played or carefully preserved by Iron Age warriors,and some groups removed the skulls or other bones offamily members for curation in various ways.

GRAVE MARKERS

Many burials were marked by the erection of longbarrows, round barrows, cairns, or tumuli over thegrave or funerary chamber. In some cases these hadadditional markers, such as standing stones, woodenposts, or sculptures erected nearby or on the mound.In flat grave cemeteries small mounds may havebeen raised that have since been eroded or plowedaway, while in other cases the graves were originallyflush with the ground. Sometimes these graves were

delineated by a surrounding ditch, bank, or low wall.Funerary stelae were erected by some cultures, par-ticularly in southern Europe. Other burials wereprobably also marked in some way since in manydensely packed cemeteries the graves do not overlap.

SOCIAL CONTEXT

Two contrasting types of disposal were practiced atvarious times, single burial and communal disposal,and these are thought to reflect differences in socialattitudes and the role of the dead in the society ofthe living. Single burial was more common, witheach body treated as an individual whose place insociety was often reflected in the practices involvedin his or her disposal, including the arrangement ofthe body, the choice of inhumation, cremation orother rite, the form of grave or funerary structure,and the accompanying grave goods.

In contrast, communal burial subsumed the indi-vidual within the society. After death the body wasplaced with others in situations where the bonessoon became intermingled, by exposure leading toexcarnation or insertion within a communal tombwhere the earlier skeletons were pushed to one sideor sorted into collections of particular bones such asskulls or long bones. Though grave goods weresometimes placed within these tombs, they did notaccompany and relate to an individual, but had somesignificance for the community. This was the char-acteristic practice in megalithic tombs, but commu-nal burials also characterized parts of theMediterranean and perhaps go back 300,000 yearswhen the people of Atapuerca in Spain disposed oftheir dead by dropping them into a natural rockshaft.

GRAVE FURNISHINGS

The majority of burials were furnished with gravegoods of some kind, though they were not generallyassociated with individuals in megalithic tombs. Inmany cases the grave goods were simply the clothesand personal ornaments in which the deceased wasclad. Sometimes the body was wrapped in a shroudor textile. Food and drink might also be placed withthe dead. Often small personal objects were alsoincluded; these were frequently related to age and

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gender, adult males having weapons and womenjewelry, for example. Objects such as metalworkingtools might also reflect the occupation of thedeceased. Individuals of a higher status often hadboth a larger quantity of grave goods and objectsthat were more valuable, in terms of their material,rarity, or expense, or the craftsmanship of their man-ufacture, including gold work, swords, horse har-ness, and sometimes a vehicle, or goods associatedwith elite activities such as luxury tableware andwine. Horses sometimes accompanied vehicle buri-als, particularly in the steppe. On occasion dogs orother animals were also buried, either with theirowners or in separate graves. Animal bones oftenrepresented joints of meat offered as food, but insome cases related to rituals or beliefs. For example,a Mesolithic baby buried at Vedbaek was placed on aswan’s wing, and a megalithic tomb at Isbister innorthern Scotland contained a number of sea eagles.

ACCOMPANYING RITES

While the remains of the dead in their final restingplace provide evidence of the means of disposal andaccompanying practices, far less is known of whattook place between the death and the final disposal.Animal bones from the forecourts of megalithictombs suggest funerary feasting and perhaps latercommemorative feasts, and these are likely to havebeen a frequent feature of funerary rites. A rareglimpse of funerary rites comes from a Bronze Agecist burial at Bredadör, Kivik, in Sweden, whosestone walls were carved with a funeral procession.Mourners, some blowing lurer (horns) and beatingdrums, followed a chariot drawn by two horses.Other slabs bore images of ships, axes, and wheels,symbols with religious meaning.

BarrowsFrom the Mesolithic period onward, barrows of var-ious sizes were often erected over graves. Smallmounds were probably very widespread but haveoften been removed by cultivation. The largermounds covering megalithic tombs have survivedbetter, as have the substantial mounds built in theBronze Age in many parts of Europe. Large mounds

continued to be constructed through the Iron Ageand Roman periods into later times. These substan-tial barrows were often associated with elite burials;in some periods cemeteries of smaller barrowserected over the graves of ordinary people have alsosurvived.

LONG BARROWS

Long barrows were characteristic of the Neolithicperiod in western, northern, and central Europewhen mounds of earth, stones, or both were erectedover megalithic tombs and similar mounds coveredwooden mortuary structures. These mounds weregenerally rectangular or trapezoidal in shape, taper-ing downward toward the narrower end, with thefunerary chamber taking up a small area under onepart of it, usually one end (the wider end in the caseof trapezoidal mounds). Some megalithic tombs hadan elaborate entrance court with the moundextended-round it in two pincerlike arms. Generallythe barrow was covered with turf and frequentlyedged with curbstones or revetted with wood andsome had a facade of orthostats. The two long sidesof the barrow were often edged by ditches; thesemay have been an important part of the design ormay just have been quarry ditches for the soil tobuild the mound.

ROUND BARROWS

Throughout prehistory and into later times themajority of funerary mounds were hemispherical inform. Small round mounds were raised over someburials in the Mesolithic period. In the Neolithicperiod round barrows were erected over megalithicburials or mortuary chambers in some areas, and thedeveloped passage graves of the late third millen-nium were covered by huge round mounds with astone curb. Barrows were a regular feature of steppeburials. From the later third millennium onwardround barrows were raised over inhumation and cre-mation graves over much of Europe, in some casescreating barrow cemeteries.

In the Bronze Age a few larger mounds wereerected over wooden chambers containing the richburials of important individuals. Different forms ofthis combination of large barrow and elite burial


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were found in later times, such as the barrows withwooden chambers of Hallstatt chiefs, the massivebarrows covering the lavish burials of the steppeelite, complete with sacrificed horses and people,and the tholoi of Southeast Europe. In some periodsand regions the graves of less important people wereinserted into the mound, or arranged around themin flat graves or under smaller mounds. A moundmight also be raised over a cemetery of flat graves asa final ritual act.

Round barrows were generally of earth, but stonecairns also occurred, and stone and earth might becombined. Turf often covered the mound, and insome cases, such as the Neolithic mounds over mega-liths and the Hallstatt mounds, a curb of uprightstone slabs revetted the mound. An encircling ditchwas common, perhaps originally incorporated as aquarry for earth for the mound. Some Bronze Agebarrows in the Wessex region of England used vari-ous forms of mound, berm, and ditch to create arange of barrow forms such as disc, saucer, and pondbarrows. Round barrows might be combined with avariety of other structures, such as wooden mortuarychambers or rings of wooden posts.

North Mains (Tayside, Scotland) Excavation ofthe 130-feet (40-meter)-wide mound at North Mainshas given a detailed picture of its construction. First asmall pear-shaped timber enclosure was erected atthe center of the site. Panels of wattle fencing wereput up radiating out from this, and the bays betweenthem filled with soil taken from a ditch that was dugaround the outside. A fenced passage was left open togive access to the central enclosure, in which one ortwo burials were placed around 2000 B.C. before theremaining areas were filled with earth. A bonfire waslit on the top of the mound, which was then coveredwith turf and stone. Two further burials and eightcremations, most of several individuals, were placedin cists in the mound’s surface.

STEPPE CULTURES AND SOUTHEASTEUROPE

Round barrows were built over the wooden burialchambers or pit burials of steppe cultures, and thisform of burial spread through Southeast Europe asfar as the Carpathian basin. Often the complete

body or cremated remains were placed at the bottomof a pit, sometimes placed on a mat, and scatteredwith ochre. Wooden beams were placed over the topof the pit and a mound of stones and earth raisedover it. Sometimes a stone anthropomorphic stelewas erected on top of the mound. Later burials wereoften dug into the mound or around its base andwere themselves covered by a mound.

Plachidol II (Bulgaria) This mound was morethan 10 feet (3 meters) high and 136 feet (42 meters)in diameter, with a grave under its center containingan inhumation burial orientated northeast-south-west. Eight other burials, all oriented in the samedirection, were added to the mound later, and moresoil was heaped over them, expanding the mound toits present extent. These burials, which includedmen, women, and children, often had red ochreplaced on them, and some had a pot or a few smallcopper objects as grave goods.

CORDED WARE CULTURE

Corded Ware men were buried in a flexed positionon their right side, with cord-decorated pots, andsometimes copper objects, battle-axes, arrowheads,and boar’s-tooth pendants, while the women wereplaced on their left side with pots and sometimesornaments. Although many of the graves were cov-ered by a small barrow, some may have been flatgraves.

WESSEX CULTURE

In the second millennium a number of well-fur-nished graves beneath barrows were constructed insouthern England, probably the burials of chiefs orother elite members of society. The Wessex areaincluded a number of “fancy” forms, often con-structed largely of turfs: bell barrows, which had aberm (a flat area between ditch and mound); saucerbarrows, which had a bank around the outside of theditch; pond barrows, where a hollow was substitutedfor the mound; and many others. Cemeteries ofthese barrows developed over the centuries, withlater burials placed around the major burials in flatgraves or under small mounds. Many were located inthe vicinity of henges and other earlier monuments.


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The graves included both inhumations and crema-tions; those of the early second millennium (WessexI) included some very rich burials, furnished withobjects of gold, copper, faience, and amber.

Bush Barrow (Wessex, England) One of a groupof barrows on Normanton Down near Stonehenge,the Bush Barrow covered the burial of an adult manburied with three bronze daggers and several piecesof gold work. These comprised two sheet-goldlozenges that had probably decorated his clothing, agold belthook cover, and a large number of goldnails that had been set in a pattern in the handle ofone of the daggers. A stone mace head whose haftwas ornamented with zigzag bone rings is consid-ered to have been a symbol of authority.

TUMULUS CULTURE

During the early to mid-second millennium singleburials under round mounds (tumuli) became com-mon from the western Carpathian region to easternFrance, an area where flat-grave cemeteries had pre-viously been the norm. Tumulus burials were oftenplaced in a wooden coffin beneath the mound; themajority were contracted inhumations, though cre-mations are also known.

URNFIELD PERIOD

Although the majority of burials in the Late BronzeAge were simple cremations with few grave goods, inScandinavia and northern Germany there were a fewexceptional burials under massive barrows. The gravegoods in these burials, in some cases including awagon, reflect the deceased’s elite status as a warrior.

Håga (Near Uppsala, Uppland, Sweden) A moundknown locally as King Björn’s Mound was con-structed over a cremation burial that had probablybeen placed in an oak coffin, now decayed away. Themiddle-aged individual was accompanied by a gold-plated sword with a gold pommel, a gold-platedfibula, bronze buttons, pendants, razors, and tweez-ers. Over the coffin a layered mound of oak boles,stones, and earth was erected, 26 feet (8 meters) highand 150 feet (45 meters) in diameter, incorporatingthe bones of three other individuals, two women and

a man, as well as the bones of oxen, pigs, and sheepthat are presumed to be the remains of a funeralfeast.

Seddin (northeast Germany) Known as the King’sGrave, a mound 420 feet (130 meters) in diameterand 36 feet (11 meters) high covered a vaulted stonechamber whose walls had been plastered withdesigns in red, white, and black. Within this werethe remains of two women and an amphora contain-ing the bones of a man, accompanied by a sword, aminiature spear, a decorated knife, metal vessels,razors, tweezers, and unique pottery vessels. Severalother urn burials were placed within the mound butoutside the chamber. The mound was part of acemetery also containing a few other rich cist gravesand many ordinary urn graves.

ExposureIn many areas and for long periods it seems to havebeen the usual practice to expose the dead to allowthe flesh to rot away or to be removed by carrion-eating birds or animals. Bodies exposed to the ele-ments would rot and eventually be reduced tobones. Those exposed at ground level would bevulnerable to scavenging animals who could carryaway any part of the skeleton: Placing the bodieswithin a securely fenced or walled enclosure or anunroofed wooden chamber or on a platform wellabove the ground would prevent this, but somesmall bones might be carried off by carrion birds;bodies placed within closed wooden chamberswould be protected from scavenging birds and ani-mals, but excarnation would take longer. Evidencefrom different sites shows that all these strategieswere adopted. In some cases the bones were subse-quently buried, while in others they may just havebeen left for the elements and wild life to destroycompletely.

Some of the fifth-millennium burials in Mesolithiccemeteries in northern Europe seem to have been ofcollected bones from bodies that had probably previ-ously been exposed on wooden structures before thebones were arranged anatomically in the grave.Sometimes bones were not buried but were kept apart


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in the settlement or were buried in ritual contexts:this was particularly true of skulls.

During the Neolithic period many of the peopleburied in megalithic tombs were exposed first andtheir bones then collected and placed within themegalithic chamber. Earthen long barrows, generallyfound in different areas from megalithic tombs butoverlapping with their distribution in Britain, werealso communal burial places. The bodies of the deadwere apparently exposed on or in a mortuary struc-ture that was eventually covered by a long barrow.Whereas a long barrow erected over a mortuarychamber signaled the end of the use of the mortuarystructure, megalithic tombs could be entered onmany occasions to place bodies or bones withinthem, and may have been used in this way for hun-dreds of years. In many communities only somebones were accorded burial within the chamberedtomb or long barrow, and it is possible that otherbodies were left permanently in the place of exposureor deposited elsewhere; for instance, some skullswere placed in the ditches of causewayed enclosures.

In the Bronze and Iron Ages many people wereinterred or cremated, but it is likely that exposurewas also practiced; occasional human bones in IronAge rubbish pits may have derived from exposedbodies. Some excarnated bones may have been giventheir final resting place in rivers or lakes, the foci ofIron Age religious activities.

MORTUARY ENCLOSURES

Ditched and fenced enclosures similar in plan tolong barrows were used as places to expose the deadin the Neolithic period; the bodies were probablyplaced on platforms erected within them. The evi-dence from at least one such enclosure at Inchtuthilin Scotland, dated around 3900 B.C., indicates thatthe enclosure fence was eventually set on fire, theposts pushed over, and the whole enclosure coveredwith earth. Some causewayed enclosures also servedas places to expose the dead.

Hambledon Main Enclosure (Dorset, England)The main causewayed enclosure at Hambledon inEngland served as a necropolis where the dead wereleft exposed to the elements and carrion eatersbefore their defleshed remains were collected and

placed either in the two associated long barrows oras single skulls or groups of bones within the sur-rounding ditch, where they were associated withpottery, stone tools, and animal bone. The bodiesmust have been exposed on the ground surface, as inone ditch the central part of a body (thigh bones andlower trunk) was found, evidently dragged there bydogs or other scavenging animals before the corpsehad fully disintegrated. Pits dug in the interior of theenclosure had been used to hold offerings of exoticpottery and stone axes.

MORTUARY STRUCTURES

Platforms or other raised structures were probablybuilt within Neolithic mortuary enclosures. Some ofthe unfenced two- and four-post structures in IronAge settlements were probably also used as plat-forms for exposing the dead.

Stone pavements, wooden posts, rubble banks,and stone slabs were used to create various forms ofmortuary house, often with a facade of wooden postsor of stone. These were used as burial chambersaccessible over a period of time before being sealedunder a barrow. In many cases the chamber was seton fire before the earth was heaped over the top.

Haddenham (East Anglia, England) A mortuaryhouse constructed of massive oak planks, with alarge post at each end and with a wooden vestibule,in which five bodies were buried. Later, the chamberwas covered by a long barrow.

Street House Farm (Cleveland, England) Thismortuary structure, dated around 3500 B.C., wasbuilt of stone and wood and contained burnt humanbones and a partially articulated skeleton. To oneside of this was a rectangular curbed area with twoentrances, within which were two areas of pavingthat may have been used for exposing the dead. Onthe other side of the structure was a forecourtdefined by a semicircle of large wooden posts with ahuge one at the center. Eventually, the mortuarystructure was burnt down and a cairn erected overthe complex, leaving the forecourt visible.

Balfarg (Fife, Scotland) This was focus of ritualactivity for millennia, from the late fifth millennium


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when ritual pits were dug, in one of which burntpottery was carefully deposited, to the Bronze Agewhen cremations were deposited here within anEarly Bronze Age ring cairn and stone circle. Tworectangular mortuary enclosures were constructedbetween 3700 and 3300 B.C.; these had an enclosurewall of wooden posts filled in with wickerwork.Inside them two-post structures supported timberplatforms on which the dead were exposed. Around3100 B.C. one of these enclosures was covered by alow mound of earth; the other may have been simi-larly treated. Later, a ring cairn was built partiallyover one, and the other was enclosed within a henge.

Containers and ChambersWhile in many areas and periods burials were placeddirectly in the ground, in others they were placedwithin a coffin or pottery vessel. These included theurns and other types of pot in which cremationswere placed. The grave might be lined with stones,or a stone cist or wooden chamber might be builtwithin it to house the burial. Burials might also bemade in caves.

STONE-LINED GRAVES AND CISTS

Burial chambers built out of stones or graves linedwith stone slabs were created from the Mesolithicperiod onward. These included fifth-millenniumgraves in Brittany and stone-lined graves con-structed in the fourth millennium by hunter-gath-erer and farming groups in the forest steppe ofSoutheast Europe. In the same period cist burialssurrounded by stone circles were constructed inCorsica and Sardinia, while cist burials without cir-cles were made in Spain. On the limestone plateausof southern France in the third millennium burialswere placed in stone cists covered by round cairns,known locally as dolmens simples. In the Bronze Agewhen single burials, often under small roundmounds, came into vogue across much of Europe,some burials were placed in cists beneath themound. These included richly furnished Armoricanburials in Brittany around 2200–1800 and the cistburials beneath mounds that were common in Scot-land. In Scandinavia cist burial was the norm, male

burials being accompanied by flint daggers skillfullyimitating Únetice bronze daggers. In southwestIberia some single burials were placed in cists; otherswere placed in pits that were furnished with stoneslabs and a curb of stone uprights. The Iberian buri-als were accompanied by few grave goods, the mostimpressive being riveted daggers and small goldornaments.

Hoëdic and Téviec (Brittany, France) These twoMesolithic cemeteries were within coastal settle-ments, Téviec dating around 4500 B.C. and Hoëdicaround 4600. The dead were placed in cists built ofstone slabs, earlier burials being pushed aside when anew one was added. Bone daggers, flint blades, bonecloak pins, and jewelry made of animal teeth andshells were placed with the bodies, which werestrewn with red ochre. A few individuals were buriedwith antlers. Fires were lit above the roof slabs, andhearths beside the graves were probably used tocook meat for a funeral feast. Some graves at Téviecwere covered by a small mound.

Kernonen (Brittany, France) The burial wasplaced on the wooden floor of a stone chamberaccompanied by two bronze axes, two bronze dag-gers, and a short sword, the hilts of all three deco-rated with gold pins, a bronze dagger with a bonepommel, 12 amber pendants, and 60 flint arrow-heads. Some of the grave goods had been placed inthree oak boxes within the chamber. A cairn andmound 20 feet (6 meters) high and 160 feet (50meters) in diameter covered the cist.

COFFINS

Wooden coffins were used by a number of groups,including the widespread Tumulus culture, whoburied their dead under round mounds (tumuli).Only a few have survived, due to waterlogging,notably from 14th-century B.C. Scandinavia, whereturf mounds covered coffins made of oak tree trunks,split in half lengthwise and hollowed out in the sameway that dugout canoes were made. Some moundscontained several coffins. The deceased, presumedto be members of the elite, were buried in theirwoolen clothing and bronze jewelry and wrapped inan oxhide or a blanket. Along with the corpse some


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personal possessions and other objects of wood andbark were interred. A few graves contained Myce-naean folding stools with otter-fur seats. In the LateBronze Age tree-trunk coffins were used to hold cre-mation burials. A few Bronze Age tree-trunk coffinshave also survived in Scotland.

Egtved (Jutland, Denmark) A coffin 8.5 feet (2.5meters) long made from a tree felled in the sum-mer of 1370 B.C. contained the burial of a girl inher late teens. She wore a skirt and blouse, a beltwith a bronze disc, and bracelets on her arms. Herbody was wrapped in a coarse woolen blanket anda cowhide. Also placed in the coffin were a con-tainer made of birch bark that had held mead, abronze dagger, and a little cloth bundle containingthe cremated remains of a girl aged six to eightyears.

POTS

Pottery vessels were often placed in graves as funer-ary offerings, in many instances containing food ordrink. In southeast Spain from around 2200 B.C. sin-gle burials were often placed in large pottery storagevessels. More widespread was the use of pottery ves-sels to house the calcined bones and ashes of individ-uals who had been cremated. Some cremations wereplaced in purpose-made cinerary urns, others indomestic pots. In Villanovan Italy the crematedremains were placed within hut urns, models in pot-tery of houses with pitched roofs, with a removabledoor or front panel through which the ashes andgrave goods were inserted.

WOODEN CHAMBERS

In the Neolithic period long barrows often con-tained the remains of a wooden mortuary chamberor other wooden structure that had been used forthe exposure of the dead. These were communalburial facilities. In contrast, in later times woodenchambers were unusual and generally housed a sin-gle principal burial of an elite individual. Thisbecame a common practice in the steppe region inthe early third millennium and spread from thereinto other parts of Europe. Rather different woodenchambers under enormous barrows were occasion-ally built in central Europe in the Early Bronze Age

to house particularly important burials. Exceptionalburials in some areas during the Iron Age were alsoplaced in wooden chambers, notably in the Hallstattperiod in western and central Europe.

Kurgans Wooden chambers housed burials of theearly third-millennium steppe people (Pit GraveCulture), placed in pits under round barrows known


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8.2 A Danish tree-trunk coffin containing the bur-ial of an individual with a woolen hat and cloak,several pottery vessels, and a sword (Lubbock, John.Prehistoric Times. New York: D. Appleton and Com-pany, 1890)

as kurgans: some contained sacrificed horses. A fewkurgan burials were found as far west as theCarpathian basin. Similar burials continued in thesteppe region and through central Asia, becomingmore elaborate in the mid-second millennium, whenburials were placed in timber chambers resemblinghouses (Timber grave culture). Some Iron Ageexamples were lavishly furnished with large numbersof sacrificed horses and people as well as gold work,textiles, and fine objects of wood, many of whichwere preserved in the frozen tombs of the Altairegion of central Asia.

Leubingen (Saxo-Thuringia, Germany) Thisearthen mound 28 feet (8.5 meters) high and 110feet (34 meters) wide covered a cairn of stone slabsunder which was a large triangular (tent-shaped)wooden chamber, made of timbers felled between1942 and 1900 B.C. A man was laid on the floor ofthe chamber, facing its open end, and across hislegs was placed the body of a young woman. Thegrave goods, which included weapons (a halberd,three daggers, and two axes), tools for carpentryand metalworking (three chisels, a serpentinepickax, and a whetstone), and jewelry (two spiralrings, two gold dress pins, a massive arm ring, and aspiral bead) all seem to belong to the man, and ithas been suggested that the young woman was sac-rificed to accompany him, although there is no evi-dence of this.

L⁄ eki Mal⁄e (Poznan, Poland) In this cemetery of11 mounds set in a row in a valley, one mound cov-ered a chamber of wood, stones, and clay in which aman and a woman were buried. He was accompa-nied by jewelry and an array of weapons: a dagger, aflanged ax, and a halberd of bronze, a bronze pin,and a gold spiral. The woman wore two massivebronze anklets. Five pots and a number of woodenobjects were also placed in the grave. Elsewhere inthe mound another individual was buried with achisel, a dagger, a flanged ax, three spiral goldrings, two amber beads, two dress pins, and fivepots.

Vix (Burgundy, France) This sixth-century B.C.burial was associated with the hillfort of Mont Las-sois, probable residence of a chief who benefited

from trade with the Greeks. This is reflected in thegrave goods, which included the famous Vix krater,probably a diplomatic gift, and other vessels forserving wine: an Etruscan bronze flagon and twoAttic Greek cups (kylixes). The Vix “princess,” agedaround 35 and wearing a heavy gold torc, was laidout on a vehicle as a bier; its wheels were removedand stacked against the side of the plank-builtwooden burial chamber, whose walls were hung withtextiles. A stone cairn covered the chamber. Nearbywas a large rectangular enclosure in which somefuneral rites may have taken place. Pottery and ani-mal bones in the ditches suggest feasting. A pair oflife-size statues flanked the entrance to the enclo-sure; they represented a man with weapons and awoman wearing a neck ring.

CAVES

Natural caves were widely though infrequently usedfor burial chambers, though in some regions theywere more common: For example, they were used insouthern France and parts of Iberia in the fourthmillennium and in the third millennium in northernCrete.

Margaux (Belgium) In this cave nine Early Meso-lithic individuals were buried, with stones over andaround them. Some were accompanied by stonetools.

Cueva de los Murciélagos (Almería, Spain) Inthis cave located high in the side of a gorge, a num-ber of people were laid to rest around 4000 B.C. Thearid environment has preserved the clothes in whichthey were clad and the artifacts of organic materialplaced with them: These included hats, tunics, belts,sandals, bags, and coiled baskets of esparto grass.Some baskets were filled with poppy heads, perhapsused as a drug.

Sculptor’s Cave (Moray Firth, Scotland) Thisnatural rock cleft was used between 800 B.C. and 700A.D. as an ossuary, in which the bones of more than2,000 people, particularly children, were deposited.Some had been decapitated. With them were offer-ings of bronze objects and exotic items such as imi-tation Roman coins.


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Settlement BurialsIn some of the Mesolithic settlements in the IronGates Gorge, such as Lepenski Vir, children wereinterred in the center of the house near the hearthand adults between the houses with their headspointing downstream.

Human bones found in some Mesolithic shellmiddens suggest that graves were sometimes duginto these accumulations of domestic rubbish,although more frequently burials were placed incemeteries. Middens in the Tagus estuary in Portu-gal covered burials in graves, sometimes lined withstones.

In Southeast Europe in the Neolithic peoplewere often buried beneath the floors of houses, apractice common in the Near East. Burials mightalso be placed inside the oven or outside the housewithin or on the outskirts of the settlement. Someburials were cremations, though the majority wereinhumations. A few grave goods, such as pottery,ornaments of bone and shell, tools such as boneawls, animal bones, and, later, small copper objectswere placed with some of these individuals. Someburial within settlements continued after 4000 B.C.,but by then burials were more commonly placedwithin an external cemetery.

In some Iron Age settlements human bones andon occasion complete corpses were placed in disusedstorage pits or settlement ditches; these may havebeen burials or sacrifices.

Inhumation Burials andCemeteriesInhumation of complete bodies was the predomi-nant rite for the disposal of the dead in SoutheastEurope throughout prehistory, though other ritesalso occurred, and was practiced in other areas fromMesolithic times onward. LBK burials were placedin small flat-grave cemeteries, some with inhuma-tion, some cremation; the cemeteries were attachedto individual hamlets or shared between a number ofhomesteads. Axes, arrowheads, and shell ornamentsaccompanied the men, and the women were fur-nished with grindstones and awls. In various parts of

Iberia and Italy individual burials were placed in flatgraves in the fourth millennium, but in both theMediterranean and western Europe communal bur-ial was the more usual method of disposal until thelater third millennium, when single-grave burial wasgradually adopted. Individual inhumations, with orwithout a barrow, became the norm throughout thewestern half of Europe from the late third millen-nium, although cremation was practiced in someareas. After an interval in the Late Bronze Age whencremation was the predominant rite, inhumationagain became a common practice from the early firstmillennium, although throughout the Iron Agepractices were quite varied.

MESOLITHIC CEMETERIES

Cemeteries were widespread in the later Mesolithicperiod in coastal regions of northern and westernEurope, from Russia to Portugal; some were locatedbeside the settlement, though in the north islandcemeteries apart from the settlement were also com-mon. The majority of these cemeteries containedinhumations of single individuals, though occasion-ally two or more people were buried together, and insome cases the graves contained cremations or col-lected bones. The associated grave goods were gen-erally personal ornaments such as necklaces ofperforated shells. Red ochre was widely used, andmany graves contained antlers that often framed thebody in the grave.

Mesolithic inhumation cemeteries are alsoknown from other parts of Europe. In the IronGates Gorge of the Danube, settlements such asVlasac had an attached cemetery of flat graves.Large cemeteries that began in the Mesolithicperiod and continued in use for millennia were cre-ated by the inhabitants of the Dnestr and Dneprregion of eastern Europe, such as the cemeteries inthe Dnepr Rapids region of the Ukraine.

Oleneostrovski Mogilnik (Russia) This islandwas used by Mesolithic people as a cemetery duringthe seventh millennium B.C. The dead were buriedwith their heads toward the east; men with bonepoints, pins, and harpoons, and knives and daggersof slate; old men just with bone points; and womenoften with beaver-teeth beads. Pendants of beaver,


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elk, and bear teeth were also buried with some of thedead, the latter exclusively with young men. Nineindividuals were accompanied by effigies of snakes,humans, or elks. In four of the 170 graves the bodieshad been placed upright with a large number ofgrave goods; it has been suggested that these wereshamans.

Skateholm (Sweden) This Mesolithic settlementat the head of a lagoon, which was inhabited in thewinter, was associated with cemeteries placed ontwo small nearby islands. The great variety of dif-ferent funerary rites practiced here suggests that thesettlement and cemeteries were used by a numberof separate family groups, each with their own prac-tices, which included orientation in different direc-tions, extended and flexed burials, inhumations,cremations, and partial burials, single and doubleburials, and burials with dogs. Other grave goodsincluded jewelry of animal bone with women andflint blades and axes with men, and there were alsoseparate burials of dogs, complete with their owngrave goods.

Vedbaek (Denmark) This lagoon had a scatter ofMesolithic settlements around it. A cemetery atBøgebakken serving one of these communitiesaround 4800 B.C. had a number of graves neatlyarranged in rows. Within these the bodies had beenlaid on their backs with their arms by their sides. Inone grave a young woman was laid with her head ona folded garment, wearing a dress decorated withsnail-shell beads and a number of pendants. Besideher, placed on a swan’s wing, was her newborn son,accompanied by a flint blade like the other males inthe cemetery. Red ochre was scattered over the babyand over his mother’s pelvis and face. An adult malein another grave was placed on two antlers, with redochre under his head and stones around his feet.

Vlasac (Serbia) Burials were concentrated in areason the borders of the settlement, beyond the houses.More than 100 burials have been uncovered,arranged in several clusters. Some were accompa-nied by personal ornaments or materials such asochre and graphite that could have been used in per-sonal decoration. There were also a few cremations.

SOUTHEAST EUROPE

Inhumations within the settlement or on its outskirtswas usual in Southeast Europe during the Neolithicperiod, but by the fifth millennium these were oftenplaced in deserted parts of the settlement. Separatecemeteries began to be created in the late sixth millen-nium in some areas such as Bulgaria, and by the mid-fifth millennium such cemeteries were widespread inthe southeast. The graves were often laid out in rowsand did not overlap, showing that they were marked.People were placed in the grave in a crouched posi-tion, with their personal possessions, such as pottery,jewelry, and bronze tools and weapons, and sometimesgold work. Some graves contained two or three indi-viduals. Inhumation in large flat-grave cemeteriescontinued to be the most common method of disposalin the southeast throughout prehistory, althoughother practices also appeared, such as communal bur-ial in third-millennium Crete, and elite cremationburial in tholoi in Iron Age Macedonia.

Cernavoda (Romania) In this fifth-millenniumcemetery of around 400 burials, divided into twoareas, people were buried with jewelry made of cop-per, spondylus and dentalium shells, and marble,pottery figurines, animal bones, and stone axes andchisels.

Varna (Bulgaria) This exceptional cemetery on theBlack Sea coast dated around 4500–4000 B.C., con-tained some 300 graves. Around 60 of these containedornaments and other objects of gold, copper, andspondylus shell, and fine flint blades, but in most casesno associated body. Some of these cenotaphs also heldclay masks, perhaps representing deceased individualswhose bodies had not been recovered. A few of therichly furnished graves did contain bodies; some indi-viduals in other graves were buried with no gravegoods, some with only a few, and others with morethan 10 objects, of which pottery was the most com-mon; shell and copper ornaments and flint tools werealso included.

Tiszapolgár-Basatanya (Hungary) In this largecemetery of the late fifth millennium women wereburied on their left side, accompanied by stone orshell necklaces, bone awls, pots, and sometimes cop-


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per rings and bangles, while men were laid on theirright side with copper daggers, axes, pins, and awls.Some graves contained no grave goods, others hadmany; one man aged around 25 was buried with adog at his feet, bones and antler from wild animals, acopper bracelet, four flint blades, eight pots, anantler hammer-ax, and a boar’s tusk pendant.

BEAKER BURIALS

In the third millennium single burial became quitewidespread in temperate Europe and the Mediter-ranean, often associated with Beakers: Althoughsome Beaker burials occurred within megalithictombs, most were in flat graves or graves undermounds; in some areas such as Scotland the gravemight be lined with stones. Small cemeteries mightbe enclosed within a ring ditch or stone curb; insome a central burial furnished with numerous gravegoods were surrounded by other graves with few orno objects. A mound might eventually be erectedover the cemetery. In other cases an individual burialmight have its own mound.

Male Beaker inhumations were usually accompa-nied by a Beaker vessel, and often weapons andarchery equipment including barbed and tangedarrowheads and a stone wristguard. Both men andwomen might be buried with personal ornamentssuch as V-perforated buttons of jet or schist and cop-per pins.

Barnack (East Anglia, England) The burial of aman with a fine beaker, a copper dagger, a wrist-guard, and a bone pendant was surrounded by thegraves of 15 other individuals, 12 of them withoutgrave goods. All were placed within a ring ditch, andthe cemetery was covered by a large barrow.

Amesbury Archer (Wiltshire, England) Therichest Bronze Age burial in Britain was found nearStonehenge in A.D. 2002. The man, aged 35–45when he died, was crippled by a serious knee injury.He was buried in a grave lined with wood, probablyunder a barrow, and was accompanied by more than100 objects. These included three copper knives,five beakers, two archer’s wristguards, 16 flintarrowheads, a bone pin, flint- and metalworkingtools, and personal ornaments including boar’s tusks

and a pair of gold earrings or hair tresses. The dateof this burial, around 2400–2200 B.C., coincideswith the period during which the bluestones andthe sarsens were brought to Stonehenge, promptingspeculation that this man may have been the leaderresponsible for one of these major feats of engineer-ing and organization. Adjacent to his grave was theburial of a younger man, also furnished with a pairof gold earrings and a boar’s tusk. A bone abnormal-ity shared by the two indicates that they wererelated, perhaps father and son. Examination of theolder man’s tooth enamel shows that he had spenthis childhood in a colder environment than Britain,probably in central Europe or the Alps: the “Kingof Stonehenge” was therefore an immigrant. Theyounger man, however, had grown up in Britain,spending his childhood in the south and his adoles-cence farther north.

IRON AGE BURIALS AND CEMETERIES

Inhumation was a common method of disposal inthe first millennium, with cemeteries such as that atHallstatt emerging early in the period. Burials of theelite often contained weapons, fine pottery, and met-alwork, and sometimes horse harness. In some elitegraves the body or the grave goods were laid on awagon or chariot.

Hallstatt (Austria) The long-lived cemetery atHallstatt contained more than 2,500 burials of indi-viduals who had been involved in the salt-extractionindustry. Wealthy women were buried with goldjewelry, while the richest male burials containedbronze daggers or swords of bronze or iron, severalwith gilded hilts. Other parade weaponry, bronzevessels, bronze helmets, and fine jewelry also accom-panied elite burials, which were located in a secludedpart of the cemetery. At the opposite end of therange were poor individuals buried without anygrave goods.

Somme-Bionne (Marne, France) In this latefifth-century burial the man’s body was placed on atwo-wheeled vehicle, along with weapons includ-ing a sword in an engraved bronze scabbard, horse-trappings, and feasting gear, including a GreekAttic cup.


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CremationCremation was the custom of some groups in parts ofEurope at various times throughout prehistory. Forexample, some of the graves in the cemetery atMesolithic Skateholm in Denmark contained cre-mated remains; cremation as well as inhumation waspracticed by Southeast European and LBK farmers;cremation was the custom in Hungary in the EarlyBronze Age, when inhumation was the norm in therest of central Europe; and in Britain, northwestFrance, and the Netherlands cremation was commonthroughout the second millennium, the ashes beingdeposited in urns or large pots, accompanied by fewgrave goods.

Cremation became the predominant rite across alarge part of Europe (Urnfield Culture) in the latersecond millennium and early first. Thereafter, inhu-mation again became more common, but cremationwas popular in some regions at some times, such as inthe later Iron Age. Flat-grave cemeteries of crema-tion burials were the norm in Thrace in the Iron Agefor ordinary people, while the elite were accordedmore elaborate burials.

URNFIELDS

Urn burial was the principal method of disposal overmost of Europe in the Late Bronze Age. The bodieswere cremated, and the ashes and calcined boneswere collected into urns of various forms, which wereburied in vast urnfields. In the western part of theUrnfield zone some urn burials were surrounded byditched enclosures; some of these were circular,while others took various forms, including keyhole-shaped. Small barrows were erected over the burialpits in some areas.

The fashion for inurned cremation burial probablyoriginated in the middle Danube region, where crema-tion had been the usual rite in the earlier Bronze Age.It spread into Italy, through central and easternEurope, and then western Europe, reaching Iberia bythe ninth century. Urnfield burial was not adopted inthe Atlantic region or the north, though other forms ofcremation burial were common in these regions. Someurnfields also included a number of inhumations, rang-ing from a few to more than the number of cremations.

The grave goods associated with Urnfield burialswere usually confined to a few small ornaments,

such as fibulae and pins, and other small personalpossessions such as razors, along with pottery. A fewelite individuals were placed on a wagon on thefuneral pyre, and their grave goods included finetableware and a sword.

SCANDINAVIA

In Scandinavia tree-trunk coffins had earlier beenused for inhumation burials. In the Urnfield periodthese were still used, but now held the calcinedbones and ashes of the deceased, along with unburntgrave goods, usually personal possessions but alsominiature swords. Often the graves in which thesewere placed were surrounded by a low stone settingin the shape of a boat.

IRON AGE

Cremation was practiced in some regions during theIron Age, including southeast England in the last


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8.3 A cinerary urn and lid. In the later Bronze Agecremation was widespread across Europe, and theashes and calcined bones were collected and placedwithin an urn, which was deposited in the ground orin a tomb. (Worsaae, J. J. A. The Industrial Arts ofDenmark. London: Chapman and Hall, 1882)

century B.C. where a number of rich cremation buri-als are known.

Welwyn Garden City (Hertfordshire, England)A deep pit contained the cremated remains of ayoung man surrounded by five wine amphorae, anumber of silver, bronze and wooden vessels forserving and drinking the wine and other food,including a bronze strainer, a bronze nail cleaner, anumber of other small personal objects, and variouspieces of jewelry made of bronze, glass, and amber,24 glass gaming pieces, and a wooden board.

Other Ways of Disposal

BODY PARTS

Burial was not always complete or final. Body parts,and particularly skulls, were kept back or removedfrom burials by Mesolithic people and treated incertain ways. On Oronsay in Scotland finger boneswere inserted into middens, in some cases placed onseal flippers. The Mesolithic collection of skullsfrom Ofnet in Germany may be an extreme exampleof this practice. The Neolithic people of the westernhalf of Europe also moved bones around, placingsome in ritually significant places such as the ditchesof causewayed enclosures and others in tombs, orga-nized in various ways. Bones might be sorted intodifferent types, which were stacked separately. Fin-ger bones were pushed between the stones of oneBritish tomb. In the Iron Age particular attentionwas paid to severed enemy heads and skulls, whichwere nailed up on houses or impaled on gatewayposts, or carefully preserved in oil as trophies.Human body parts or bones were placed in a varietyof ritual contexts, including shafts and enclosures.

ABSENT RITES

In many periods and places the number of burialsthat have been found seem far too few to accountfor all the dead. It is probable that cremation wasfar more widespread than can be demonstrated,given the difficulties of discovering or identifyingunmarked graves containing calcined bone or ashand few grave goods; cremated remains might also be

scattered to the wind or deposited in rivers and lakes,leaving no trace. For example, in Southeast Europein the Neolithic period when the number of bodiesfound in the settlement is too small to represent theentire population it has been suggested that crema-tion was also practiced.

In other cases cremation was not the answer. Forexample, in the Iron Age funerary rites wereextremely varied, changing with fashion or beliefsthrough time and from region to region; for much ofthe time, burial seems to have been eschewed, per-haps in favor of exposure since human body parts turnup in excavated rubbish pits. Some of the commontwo- and four-post structures on settlements mayhave been excarnation platforms. Other possibilitiesinclude the consignment of bodies to rivers, the air,and the sea. A cluster of material found in a dried-upchannel of the Thames confirms this suggestion: Itshows that between 1300 and 200 B.C. human bodiesand defleshed bones were placed in the river beside anisland, weighed down to prevent them being carriedaway by the river. Finds of first-millennium skulls in anumber of British rivers also support the suggestion.

CANNIBALISM?

A number of instances of butchery marks on humanbones show that sometimes the flesh was cut fromthe skeleton; this might have been part of a ritualthat reduced a corpse to bones, since burial of excar-nated bones was a practice of many prehistoricEuropean groups. Usually, however, bones treatedin this way were defleshed by exposure.

More controversially, butchery marks may beevidence of cannibalism, and this is supported by thediscovery of human long bones broken in the waythat would allow the marrow to be extracted. Canni-balism has been suggested by finds, for example, insome Mesolithic settlements, including Vedbaek andDyrholm in Denmark, transitional Mesolithic-Neolithic Fontbrégoua in France, and in Iron Agedeposits in rivers in Britain. Cannibalism was gener-ally a ritual rather than a survival practice inrecorded ethnographic and historical cultures, andthis was probably true also of prehistoric Europe.Often cannibalistic practices revolved around thetransfer of the spirit or powers of the deceased to theliving, and so relatives and enemies might both betreated in this way by different groups.


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MONUMENTALTOMBS

In the Mesolithic period some burials were placedin stone-lined graves, and during the Neolithicperiod substantial chambered tombs were con-structed, including megaliths in the western part ofEurope and hypogea in the Mediterranean. Massivebarrows covered wooden chambers in many areas ofEurope, a tradition that began in the Neolithicperiod and continued in different forms into post-Roman times; in contrast, megalithic chamberedtombs gradually went out of use during the thirdand second millennia though massive stone tholoiand smaller stone cists were built in some circum-stances in later times.

Monumental tombs acted as a very visible state-ment of ownership, signaling a community’s ances-tral rights to its territory or a leader’s control overit. The size of these monuments reflected the com-munity or ruler’s ability to mobilize an appropriatelabor force for the task of construction, whetherdrawn from the community itself and undertakenas a pious communal task, or from neighboringcommunities induced to contribute labor, forexample, in the context of a feast. It is likely thatcommunities competed to make their own monu-mental tombs more impressive than those of theirneighbors.

Megalithic TombsFrom the early fifth century funerary monumentsconstructed of stone began to appear in Brittanyand Iberia; they spread along the Atlantic facadefrom Iberia through Brittany and western Britainto Scandinavia, and into parts of the interior ofwestern Europe and the Mediterranean, notablysouthern Spain, the Pyrenees, central France, andthe western Mediterranean islands, during thefourth millennium. Although they generally sharedsome features, such as the use of large stones intheir construction and the practice of communalburial rites, the forms that they took were extremely

diverse. Not only were the megalithic tombs of dif-ferent regions distinct from one another, but tombswere frequently added to and changed throughtime and new forms adopted. Megalith buildingcame to an end in most areas by the late third mil-lennium, although some tombs were constructedeven in the second millennium. Some megalithictombs continued to be used for burial, often spo-radically, long after the practice of erecting themhad ceased, although many others were put out ofcommission by having their entrances sealed withstone rubble.

MEGALITHIC ARCHITECTURE

The megalithic tombs of Europe took a bewilderingdiversity of forms, depending in part on the materi-als locally available and in part on other considera-tions of which we have no knowledge. Each regiondeveloped its own characteristic forms of thesemegalithic monuments, variations on the theme of acircular, rectangular, or polygonal burial chamberconstructed of massive, largely undressed, stones,often with drystone walling between them.

Some had a separate passage opening into awider chamber or chambers (passage graves), whileothers were rectangular, with or without internaldivisions (gallery graves). Often the tomb had anelaborate facade and entrance and a forecourt. Manytombs were roofed with stone slabs laid horizontally,but others had corbel vaulting.

The tombs varied considerably in size, from smallcists to large passage graves with side chambers. Insome cases the megaliths were freestanding, but gen-erally they were covered by a mound often manytimes the size of the tomb and frequently delimitedby a stone curb or wooden revetment and ditches.Most mounds covered a single chambered tomb, butunder some there were two or more chambers. Insome regions similar long barrows covered woodenmortuary structures. These also might have stoneforecourts or facades. Pits, hearths, and human bonesin the forecourts of chambered tombs were probablythe result of rituals performed there.

MEGALITHIC BURIALS

Many rites were associated with megalithic tombs,including cremation, complete inhumation, and the


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interment of bones from corpses that had been excar-nated, while some contained no funerary remains. Insome cases many excarnated bones were burnt on acommunal pyre. Within the tomb the bones wereoften arranged and rearranged in various ways, suchas placing skulls in one area and long bones inanother. In some cases it is possible that the tombscontained the bones of all the people of the localcommunity, but frequently this was not so, certainindividuals or a selection of bones being used as rep-resentatives. Although in some megalithic burialsindividuals were furnished with grave goods, in gen-eral the offerings placed in the tombs were not associ-ated with individuals but with the community of thedead in general.

In contrast, some megalithic tombs were reusedby later groups who practiced single burial, placingcomplete bodies and associated grave goods withinthe tomb, generally near its entrance.

EARLY MEGALITHS

The earliest megaliths were constructed in coastalBrittany and Iberia in the early fifth millennium. Inwestern Brittany these took the form of one or sev-eral small chambers, each accessed by a passage,under a stone mound. In the Carnac region longmounds known as tertres tumulaires were erected,covering hearths, post settings, and small cists withhuman bones. Single standing stones or arrange-ments of menhirs were often associated with thesemounds. In the Alentejo and Estremadura region ofIberia the earliest megalithic tombs were passagegraves.

PASSAGE GRAVES

Around 3800 B.C. the chambered mounds ofcoastal Brittany were replaced by passage graves,under round or elongated mounds; some moundscovered more than one tomb. In a number of casesthe menhirs that had accompanied the earliergraves were broken into pieces and reused as cap-stones in the passage graves. These were built untilaround 3500 B.C. but continued in use for a longtime thereafter.

A great variety of forms of passage grave were con-structed during the fourth millennium, from Sardinia,southern Spain, and Portugal, through Brittany and

western Britain to Scandinavia and northern Ger-many, where TRB tombs were erected from around3700 B.C. These tombs all had an entrance passagethat led into one or several rectangular or polygonalchambers, constructed of orthostats and roofed withstone slabs or by corbelling. Generally, the tomb wascovered by a large mound of stones or earth. The pas-sage gave access to the tomb chamber, allowing buri-als or bones to be placed inside or reorganized,something not possible with cists or wooden mortu-ary chambers sealed inside their mound.

Swedish passage graves, generally erected in theperiod 3600–3300 B.C., had a large oval or rectangu-lar chamber at right angles to the passage, coveredby a round mound of stones, burnt flint, and turfwith a stone curb. The Danish passage graves,known as jaettestuer (“giants’ tombs”), had a low pas-sage leading into a high chamber roofed by an enor-mous capstone, which generally protruded from thetop of the round mound that covered the tomb.

In Britain early simple passage graves had a smallround or oval mound covering the tomb; later thiswas often incorporated into a much larger long bar-row. In some cases the original tomb was at one endand still accessible; in others it was entirely coveredand a new tomb was built at one end. At the sametime entirely new passage graves in long barrowswere also constructed.

Although megalithic tombs in Britain generallywent out of use in the later third millennium, ineastern and northern Ireland, northern Wales, andOrkney a new form developed from around 3300B.C., known as the developed passage grave. Thishad a very long entrance passage leading to a circu-lar or polygonal central chamber often with sidechambers creating a cruciform plan. The passagewas roofed with slabs and the chamber usually cor-bel-vaulted. These passage graves were containedwithin a massive round cairn with a curb of stoneorthostats and sometimes a stone revetment at thetomb entrance; some mounds covered one tomb, asat Newgrange, while others covered several, forexample, Knowth, which had two. In Ireland theburials within these tombs were usually cremations,though excarnated bones were also included; thesebelonged to many individuals. The funerary remainswere often placed in the side chambers or in stonebasins within the tomb. The Orkney passage graves


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contained communal inhumations; that at Quanter-ness held the remains of more than 150 men,women, and children. Features of these tombs wereconnected with megalithic astronomy. These tombswere often decorated with spirals and other mega-lithic motifs. The tombs often occurred in closelygrouped cemeteries of passage graves, often withassociated standing stones or stone circles, dolmens,or other megalithic tombs, and Bronze and Iron Ageburials in or around the tombs show the continuedsanctity of the cemetery area.

In the Almeria region of southern Spain burialswere made by the Millaran culture in similarly elabo-rate passage graves with side chambers and capstonesor corbelled roofs, entered through portholes. Thesewere covered by round barrows with stone curbs and

a great semicircular forecourt, surrounded by a circleof one or several rows of stones. Stelae (baetyls) wereassociated with some.


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8.4 A round mound covering two passage graves,from Röddinge in Denmark, and a plan of thesame mound. (Lubbock, John. Prehistoric Times.New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1890)

Hunebedden “Giants’ beds,” the passage graves ofthe TRB culture in the Netherlands, had a veryshort passage, generally constructed of a single pairof orthostats, and a long rectangular chamber set atright angles to it, under an oval mound edged withorthostats.

Clava Cairns (Inverness, Scotland) A round cairncovered a central passage grave opening to thesouthwest, sometimes housing a single inhumation.A stone circle might surround the cairn. The Clavacairns are confined to northeast Scotland and proba-bly date to the late third millennium.

Entrance Graves A variant form of passage gravewas found in Ireland, Cornwall, and the Scilly Isles,

in which the sides of the passage diverge from theentrance to form a wedge-shaped chamber undiffer-entiated from the passage, under a round cairn.

Wayland’s Smithy (Oxfordshire, England) Astone pavement with a low stone bank and six postsaround it was used as the burial place for 14 individ-uals. Later, this mortuary house was incorporatedinto the center of a trapezoidal long barrow with apassage grave and a stone facade at the east end.

Boyne Valley (Ireland) The Boyne Valley ceme-tery area included the tombs of Newgrange, Dowth,and Knowth, and a number of smaller passagegraves, some of them earlier, within an area ofaround 2 by 3 miles (3 by 4 kilometers), in which


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8.5 A detail of the entrance to the great passage grave at Newgrange (Boyne Valley, Ireland), showing themassive carved entrance stone and the roofbox through which the sun shines at the midwinter solstice (© 2003Charles Walker/Topfoto)

there were also standing stones, enclosures, and aritual pond. Three other similar cemeteries areknown in a band across Ireland, at Loughcrew, Car-rowkeel, and Carrowmore. The passage graves werealways built on hilltops or elevated ground.

Newgrange (Boyne valley, Ireland) A moundaround 260/275 feet (80/85 meters) in diameter and50 feet (15 meters) high was built of earth, stone,clay, and turf, enclosed in a ring of decorated curb-stones above which a retaining wall 10 feet (3meters) high had originally stood. By the entrance tothe chamber this wall was constructed of boulders ofwhite quartz and gray granite. A passage grave withan elaborate facade lay under a small part of themound. A stone “roof-box” above the lintel allowedlight to shine down the passage to the back of thechamber at the midwinter solstice, lighting up thetomb’s interior for about 15 minutes. Great engi-neering skill was involved in building the tomb inthe correct alignment to create this effect. Many ofthe stones of the structure, including the boulderlying across the entrance, some of the curbstones,and other stones outside and within the chamberwere decorated with spiral and geometric patterns.Several of the stones also bore surveyor’s marks usedin the original layout of the monument. The tombcontained cremation burials, unburnt bones, antlerpins, pottery, and stone pendants, though mosttraces of these had been removed or destroyed bythe stream of visitors since the tomb was opened in1699; it is likely that both bones and grave goodshad originally been placed in the stone basins in therecesses.

Maes Howe (Orkney, Scotland) A stone and claymound originally 125 feet (38 meters) in diameterand 26 feet (8 meters) high, surrounded by a bankand rock-cut ditch, enclosed a beautifully con-structed cruciform passage grave with a vaulted roof.Some of the stones used in its construction werehuge, while others were small slabs built up in hori-zontal layers. A massive triangular stone was used toseal the tomb and was kept in a recess when thetomb was open. A small gap left at the top of thedoorway when the slab was in place directed thesun’s light at midwinter sunset down the passageinto the main chamber. The tomb was cleaned out at

a later date, so nothing is known of the burials thatwere originally placed within it.

Gavrinis (Brittany, France) A passage graveerected on what is now the small island of Gavrinisin the Gulf of Morbihan, formerly a promontory. Apassage around 40 feet (12 meters) long led to thechamber; these lay under the eastern part of a hugecairn 200 feet (60 meters) in diameter, revetted withdrystone walling. The tomb was richly decorated,most of the orthostats being carved with curvilineargeometric designs, axes, and crooks.

Los Millares (Almeria, Spain) A cemetery of pas-sage graves stood outside the bastioned site of LosMillares, some with corbelled roofs. These tombsheld collective burials, but the cemetery may havebeen divided socially, those nearest the monumentalwall holding the most important people, accompa-nied by rich grave goods that included ostricheggshells, ivory, callaïs beads, and small copperobjects such as daggers, as well as larger quantities ofmore mundane objects such as flint arrowheads.

GALLERY GRAVES

Gallery graves were tombs in which the passage andchamber were not differentiated. The rectangulargallery might be divided into chambers by cross


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8.6 A gallery grave from Bagneux near Saumurin France (Figuier, Louis. Primitive Man. London:Chatto and Windus, 1876)

slabs. They were widely distributed, from Iberia andSardinia through France and Germany to Sweden.

Allées Couvertes In the later fourth millenniumgallery graves, known locally as allée couverte, beganto be built in Brittany; these consisted of a long rec-tangular chamber of orthostats, uniform in widthand roofed by slabs. These were subsequently builtalso in other parts of France, such as by the Seine-Oise-Marne (SOM) culture in the Paris Basin. Theywere used generally for collective burial until around2200 B.C., except in southern France, where burialscontinued to be made into the early second millen-nium. In some cases the gallery graves may havebeen freestanding, while in other cases they werecovered by a mound. Compared with the offeringsplaced in passage graves, those deposited in gallerygraves seem relatively poor. Tombs closely similar tothose of SOM were also found in parts of Germanyand Sweden.

Sepultures Coudées Also known as angled gallerygraves, these were a type of gallery grave, largelyconfined to Brittany, in which the gallery turned atthe end to form a chamber at right angles to thegallery.

Court Cairns These were built in northern Ire-land and parts of western Britain, probably duringthe third millennium. The gallery of orthostats wasdivided by cross slabs into two or three chambers,containing cremated or unburnt remains or both.The gallery was accessed through an unroofedcourtyard lined with orthostats, set within a rectan-gular or trapezoidal cairn, which also covered thegallery grave.

Wedge Tombs These developed in western Ire-land in the later third millennium and were useduntil 1200 B.C. or later, generally for cremationburials. The tomb was higher and wider at oneend, usually the southwest, and completelyenclosed in a round cairn with a curb of orthostats.There were two variant forms. In one the chamberwas rectangular and built of a double row oforthostats set close together on each side; thechamber was probably completely enclosed by the

cairn. The other form was probably open at thefront, giving access to the gallery, which was rec-tangular with a rounded end. The chamber had asecond, wider setting of orthostats around thefirst, hidden by the cairn.

Stalled Cairns Stalled cairns were common innorthern Scotland, including Orkney; in these thegallery was separated into chambers by cross slabs.The stalled cairn at Isbister in Orkney also had sev-eral small side cells opening off the main gallery.The tomb, which probably served as the repositoryof all the dead from a small community, containedmany bones arranged into groups by type, skulls inone place, long bones in another, or into heaps ofbone from a number of individuals, with a skullplaced on top. The bones of eight sea eagles werealso placed in the tomb.

DOLMENS

Dolmens were characterized by two to four massiveorthostats supporting an enormous capstone. Proba-bly originally enclosed or set within a mound orcairn, many are now freestanding and their contentslong gone. They were constructed particularly innorthern Europe and western Britain, and were oftenearlier than passage graves in the same regions.

Dysser Dolmens, known as dysser in Denmark,were among the forms of megalithic tomb built byTRB in Denmark, Germany, and Sweden fromaround 3700 B.C. They were enclosed within roundor long rectangular mounds and were probably inac-cessible after the mound was constructed, though ithas been suggested that access to the tomb could begained by removing the capstone.

Portal Dolmens Found in Ireland, Wales, andsouthwest England, portal dolmens were oftendefined by a setting or chamber of low orthostats.Two massive portal stones marked the entrance; amassive capstone was poised on these at the front,sloping down to rest at the back on a third orthostator the stones of the chamber. Though many have nosurviving ancient contents, cremations have beenfound in a few.


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MEGALITHIC CISTS

Cist burials under mounds also occurred in a num-ber of areas in the fourth millennium. The GlobularAmphora culture in eastern and central Europereused earlier TRB megalithic tombs or constructedcists with stone and earth mounds over them. InBritain and Brittany cist burials were earlier thansome of the other megalithic tombs.

Rotunda Graves In the Severn-Cotswolds regionof England, round cairns of stone covered a centralcist in which one or several inhumations wereburied. Some were incorporated into the mounds oflater passage graves.

Grands Tumulus During the earlier fourth millen-nium B.C. huge mounds, known as Carnac moundsor grands tumulus, often more than 300 feet (100meters) long and up to 30 feet (10 meters) high,were erected in the Carnac region. These were oftenbuilt over smaller cairns, containing a square stoneburial chamber with a massive capstone in whichone or several people were buried along with a num-ber of special objects, including stone axes andcallaïs beads and pendants.

GIANTS’ GRAVES AND NAVETAS

In parts of the western Mediterranean megalithictombs continued to be built in the second millen-nium and were used for collective burial. In Sardiniathese are known as tombe di giganti (giants’ graves).These were gallery graves built of enormous dressed(cyclopean) slabs with a facade extending into ahorned forecourt. In the center of the facade was alarge slab with paneled decoration forming theentrance to the tomb.

The Balearic tombs known as navetas were alsoa form of gallery grave of cyclopean masonry, buttheir ancestry was probably in the local rock-cuttombs. The navetas often had an antechamberbetween the entrance and the tomb chamber,which had a rounded end and was sometimes ovalrather than rectangular. Some navetas were dividedinto an upper and lower chamber. The namereflects the resemblance of the covering mound toan upturned boat.

Long BarrowsFrom around 4700 B.C. a tradition began in thenorthern parts of Europe of building long funerarymounds of earth and stones. These were rectangularor trapezoidal in shape, recalling Danubian long-houses in plan. Some were revetted with timberposts or drystone walling, and they were oftenflanked by ditches. The tradition may have begun inKujavia in Poland. These long mounds were con-structed by TRB in parts of Jutland and across theNorth European Plain from the Elbe to the Vistulaand by the Neolithic inhabitants of eastern and low-land Britain, as well as in southwest England, wheremegalithic tombs were also built. Like contempo-rary megaliths, these mounds often contained thecollected bones of a number of individuals; inBritain the mound often covered a mortuary housein which the bodies had been exposed for excarna-tion. Not all earthen long barrows contained col-lected bones, however.

TholoiIn third-millennium southern Crete, communalburials were placed in tholos (or beehive) tombs, cir-cular tombs built aboveground with a singleentrance and probably with a vaulted roof, thoughthese are not preserved. Some had attachedantechambers. Tholoi seem to have been a Cretaninvention, perhaps erected as artificial caves. In thesecond millennium rather different tholoi were con-structed by the Mycenaeans, such as the magnifi-cent “Treasury of Atreus” at Mycenae. Theseconsisted of a long stone-lined open passage (dro-mos) leading to a circular corbel-vaulted chamber.The tholoi were dug into the hillside or built on theground and set within a large round mound;mounds might also be built up over tombs cut intothe hillside. Early examples were built of small flatstones, but later dressed stones of increasing sizewere used, and the final examples were constructedof huge blocks. Tholoi were used for the burial ofroyal families and contained few burials except inMessania, where they were family vaults used overmany generations.


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The use of tholoi for burial died out in classicalGreece but continued farther north. In Macedoniathe magnificent tombs at Vergina housed the remainsof the Macedonian royal family; a tomb excavatedhere in the 1970s may be that of Philip II of Mace-don, father of Alexander the Great. The Thraciansalso buried their royalty in tholoi, along with manyornaments, vessels, weapons, and pieces of armormade from gold and silver. One such tomb at Kazan-luk in Bulgaria had a funeral banquet painting on itsceiling, while battle scenes were painted on its dromos.

Rock-Cut TombsRock-cut tombs were constructed in some parts ofEurope, particularly the Mediterranean regions.Some were subterranean and are known as hypogea,while others, including some Etruscan tombs, werecut into hillsides. Rock-cut tombs were excavated inthe fourth millennium in Malta, Sardinia, Sicily,southern regions of France, parts of Iberia, and muchof Italy. Collective burials were placed within them.The tombs generally had an entrance shaft leadinginto an often hemispherical chamber (from whichthe Italian examples take the name tombe a forno,“oven tombs”), and might be elaborated by the addi-tion of a passage, an antechamber, or side chambers.Rock-cut tombs continued in use in the third millen-nium and later, but now they were used for singleburials, often richly furnished with grave goods suchas fine pottery drinking vessels, jewelry, and weaponsof copper or stone. Elite burials in Iron Age Thracewere placed in rock-cut tombs, accompanied by richgrave goods of silver and gold vessels and jewelry.

MALTESE HYPOGEA

The best-known and most elaborate hypogea are inMalta, constructed in the fourth millennium.

Hal Saflieni (Malta) Also known as the Hypogeum,this massive labyrinthine underground rock-cuttomb near the temples of Tarxien resembled theMaltese temples in plan and was divided into a num-ber of chambers with rock-cut pillars, lintels, andbenches, and red-painted walls with spiral patterns.It held the remains of as many as 7,000 people and

probably had a religious as well as a funerary func-tion. It probably went out of use around 2500 B.C.

Brochtorff Circle (Gozo, Malta) In an area of nat-ural caves used for burial, to which rock-cut tombswere added in the late fifth millennium, one exca-vated tomb contained the remains of 65 people,placed in the tomb over a period of time, the bonesfrom earlier burials being pushed out of the way orremoved when each new body was added. Around3000 B.C. the burial site was transformed; a stone cir-cle was built around it, with an entrance flanked bytwo large orthostats facing the nearby Ggantija tem-ple. The caves were extended and the rock quarriedaway to create an underground complex of chambersapproached down a flight of steps at the foot ofwhich was a trilithon. Nearby were a large humanstatue, an area where bodies were displayed, and a pitwhere the bones of earlier burials were placed alongwith a quantity of red ochre. There was also an altarwith a number of stone figurines, including twoseated corpulent women and six schematic peoplewith heads, belts, and tapering tunics.

WITCHES’ HOUSES

In Sardinia rock-cut tombs were known as domus degianas or witches’ houses; the best known is AngheluRuju. These were cut into the hillside and had anantechamber, sometimes imitating a hut, fromwhich one or a number of burial chambers opened.One tomb, at Mandra Antine, had painted walls.Many burials were placed in these tombs over a longperiod and included a range of Neolithic and Beakerpottery among the grave goods. The latter weremostly pots, but there were also stone tools andoccasional copper daggers, axes, or awls.

READING

GeneralCunliffe, ed. 1994, Milisauskas, ed. 2002, Championet al. 1984.


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Funerary PracticesBradley 1998, Mithen 2003: Mesolithic; Whittle1996: Neolithic; Kristiansen 1998, Harding 2000:Bronze Age; Collis 1984a, Lloyd-Morgan 1995, Jope1995, James 1993, Ritchie and Ritchie 1995, Green1992, Cunliffe 1997: Iron Age; Denison 2000c: depo-sition in water; Bailey 2000: Balkans; Cunliffe 2001a:Atlantic; Thrane 1999b, Jensen 1999a, Christensen1999, Bogucki 2001: Scandinavia; Clarke et al. 1985,Darvill 1987, 1996, Burgess 1980, Bradley 1984,Parker Pearson 1993, Pryor 2003, Cunliffe 1995:Britain; Barclay 1998: Scotland; Barker and Ras-mussen 1998, Trump 1980, Peroni 1996: Mediter-ranean; Ecsedy and Kovacs 1996: Tumulus burials;Vandkilde 1999: Leubingen, ⁄Leki Mal⁄e; Srejovic 1969:Lepenski Vir; Venedikov 1976, Renfrew 1980: Varna;Fitzpatrick 2005, Wessex Archaeology 2005: Ames-bury archer; Thrane 1999b: Seddin, Håga, Bredadör;Carr and Knüsel 1997: Iron Age excarnation; Deni-

son 2000c, Taylor 2001: cannibalism; Green 1992,1997: Celtic funerary beliefs.

Monumental TombsMohen 1989, Sherratt 1997, Daniel 1963, Renfrew1981, Kaelas 1994b, Giot 1994, Bradley 1998: mega-liths; Fitton 2002, Taylour 1983, Venedikov 1976,Andronikos 1980: tholoi; O’Kelly 1989: Ireland;Clarke et al. 1985, Darvill 1987, 1996, Burgess 1980:Britain; Barclay 1998, Ashmore 1996: Scotland;Ritchie 1995: Orkney; Tilley 1999, Glob 1974: Scan-dinavia; Bakker 1979, 1992: hunebedden; Guilaine1992, Pericot Garcia 1972, Lanfranchi 1992, Trump1980, 2002, Leighton 1999: Mediterranean; O’Kelly1982, Stout 2002, Scarre 1998: Newgrange; Hedges1984: Isbister; Chapman 1990: Los Millares;Venedikov 1976, Marazov 1998: Thracian tombs;Selkirk, Selkirk, and Selkirk 2004: Brochtorff circle.


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WARFARE

9

The fragmentary evidence can support contra-dictory interpretations of the origins and

development of European warfare. Death by vio-lence can be detected only when it left some markon the skeleton, except in the rare cases of individu-als whose soft tissue is preserved (such as bog bod-ies). Often it is difficult to distinguish whetherinjuries were inflicted before or after death.

Even when the evidence of death by violence isunequivocal, it is often impossible to determinewhether the death was an accident (due to a poorlyaimed hunting weapon, for instance), a homicide, aritual act, a judicial execution, or the result of armedconflict. A collection of skeletons including somewith evidence of violent death may seem likely torepresent a massacre during an armed attack, butcould equally be an accumulation of sacrificial vic-tims, or a community’s dead, some of whom hadsuffered accidental death, laid to rest followingtradition.

This evidence is viewed through the lens of opin-ions on the nature of humanity: Some scholars seepeople as inherently violent, while others believepeople are driven to conflict only by external pres-sures such as starvation. As a result, reconstructionsof Europe’s past range from a Utopian vision inwhich warfare had no place before the time of the“war-mad” Celts to a grim picture of intercommu-nity violence stretching back deep into the Palae-olithic period. The truth probably lies somewherebetween. While many archaeologists argue againstwarfare in the absence of pressure on land orresources, this is not the only potential casus belli, ashistorical and ethnographic studies show; othersinclude xenophobia, competition for women, andgreed. Social tensions or quarrels may escalate intolong-running feuds in the absence of social mecha-nisms to resolve them. Some societies regard war-fare as an extreme sport.

There seems to be general agreement that thereis little sign of conflict in Southeast Europe duringthe Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. In contrast,the incidence of skeletal damage found amongMesolithic burials in northern and western Europesuggests that violence was a regular part of life, par-ticularly in the Later Mesolithic, due perhaps topressure on resources. Among the LBK farmers ofcentral Europe there seem to have been episodes of

extreme violence in which whole communities mayhave been massacred. In Neolithic western Europesome enclosed settlements were apparently attackedand their inhabitants killed, and some collectivetombs included individuals who had suffered violentdeath.

Violence, therefore, was present in the early peri-ods of European prehistory, but it is difficult to char-acterize; sporadic flare-ups generally seem morelikely than the organized and institutionalized vio-lence of warfare. There seem to have been noobjects designed solely for attacking people; domes-tic tools and hunting weapons were used to inflictthe injuries that have been identified. Nor were set-tlements generally defended against human attack,although the ditches, banks, wooden palisades, andstone walls used to demarcate settlements and keepanimals in or out could also offer protection whenviolence erupted.

From the Chalcolithic period onward, however,the evidence suggests conflict was becoming bothexpected and managed. Sites in many parts ofEurope, from the steppe through the southeast intocentral Europe and in the western Mediterranean,now had more businesslike defenses. Objects per-haps specifically designed as weapons, such as bat-tle-axes, were now appearing, and the Beakeremphasis on archery equipment suggests that suit-able tools were also being promoted as weapons.Individuals, particularly males, were regularlyburied with such equipment, showing that being awarrior was now among the social roles marked infunerary ritual.

By the early second millennium warrior statusand weaponry were becoming more apparent, andboth developed rapidly, daggers giving way toswords of increasing efficiency and body armorappearing. Various clues, such as the emphasis onfinely decorated weapons in some burials, depic-tions of warriors on rock art and stelae, and analo-gies with the nature of warfare in MycenaeanGreece, give an impression of societies where war-fare was small-scale but persistent, where champi-ons engaged in single combat and armed bandsraided their neighbors to rustle cattle or women,and where honor depended on bravery in combat.The construction of defended houses and settle-ments, such as nuraghi and hillforts, offered protec-


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tion for people and livestock against such raids. Bythe Late Bronze Age, perhaps as a result of theproblems caused by climatic deterioration, warfarewas becoming increasingly serious, with many well-fortified sites that suffered armed attacks, largenumbers of weapons in circulation, and continuinginnovation in military technology. These trendscontinued throughout the first millennium, and bythe time classical authors were observing the peo-ples of barbarian Europe, warfare was a way of lifefor many men, large armies could be raised, andwarrior bands might travel across Europe or intothe lands beyond. Defended settlements were com-mon, and fortifications were becoming increasinglysophisticated.

WEAPONS ANDARMOR

WeaponsSkeletons of people who died by violence duringthe Mesolithic and Neolithic periods show thateveryday objects were used as weapons: Headswere hit with stone axes and antler picks and bod-ies were pierced by hunting spears and arrows.Maces, known from sometime in the Neolithicperiod, may have been the first purpose-madeweapons or may have served some utilitarian func-tion as well. Daggers were developed as Chalcol-ithic weapons, being elongated into swords duringthe Bronze Age. Weapons, particularly swords andspears, were subject to continuous change andimprovement.

AXES

Holes and dents in some of the skulls found at lateLBK Talheim and Schletz exactly match the bladeshape of the axes and adzes used for woodworkingand other domestic activities, so there is no doubtthat these were employed as offensive weapons. LateNeolithic and Chalcolithic stone battle-axes and ax-

hammers and copper shafthole axes may have beenintended primarily as weapons.

BOW AND ARROWS

The bow, used for hunting from the Late Palae-olithic period, was probably turned on people at anearly date. Mesolithic rock art from the SpanishLevant shows groups of archers firing at oneanother. Many Mesolithic and later skeletons havebeen found with arrowheads or bone points imbed-ded in them, some undoubtedly killed during anarmed attack, like the Neolithic man shot in theback while carrying a child from the Stepletonenclosure (Hambledon, England). Bows and arrowsprobably reached their peak of popularity in theChalcolithic period, when many Beaker men wereburied with archery equipment, including a wrist-guard to protect the wrist from the backlash of thebowstring. By the Middle Bronze Age bows andarrows were less important, but they continued inuse in later times and were mentioned by Caesar.

Across much of Europe yew was the wood mostgenerally used, since it is very hard but elastic. Somearrows were simple shafts with a sharpened woodentip or a stone, bone or metal arrowhead; others werefletched with feathers. One of the Iceman’s arrows wasmade in two pieces, joined with birch tar and thread, afeature shared by a number of other prehistoricarrows; this was probably so that they would break offin the wound, making them harder to withdraw.

The Iceman (Alps, Italy) Among the equipmentthat the Iceman was carrying were an unfinishedyew bow stave, a damaged fur quiver, two arrowswith flint arrowheads and fletching, both broken,12 unfinished arrow shafts, a bowstring, and frag-ments of antler for making arrow points. He had astone arrow in his shoulder, having been shot frombehind. This did not wound him fatally, but mayhave weakened him, combining with the effects ofa recent illness to make him succumb to the ele-ments on the high Alpine track he was followingwhen he died. The most recent analyses suggestthat he may have been fleeing an attack at thetime; he had received a number of cuts, and hisarrows and clothing bore traces of the blood offour other people.

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SLINGS

It is assumed that slings were used throughout pre-history both for hunting and for fighting, though theevidence is slight. The baked clay balls and smallstones that are sometimes found may have been usedas slingshot. Dumps of large numbers of these insome fortified sites support their defensive use, forexample, in the Chalcolithic Portuguese site of Cas-tro de Santiago and by the gateways of a number ofIron Age hillforts. Caesar reported that the Gaulsfired slag as slingshot.

SPEARS

Spears were used from the Palaeolithic period forhunting, both handheld and as projectiles, and alsoserved as weapons in early times, though it was notuntil the Middle Bronze Age when socketed metalspearheads began to be developed that spearsuperseded arrows as the preferred projectile.Their frequency in Bronze and Iron Age burialsshows that they were used by all warriors and par-ticularly by fighters who did not own a sword.Small spears were used as projectiles, and theseand large spears were both used as thrustingweapons; some Iron Age examples were as much as8 feet (2.5 meters) long. The spearhead took manyforms, with straight or serrated edges; some third-century examples became extremely long, resem-bling bayonets.

MACES

Disc-shaped stone objects with a shafthole weremade in the Neolithic period and are generallythought to have been mace heads, used as weapons,although there is no clear evidence of this before theChalcolithic period. Horse-headed scepters, charac-teristic of the Yamnaya culture of the steppe, mayalso have been used as maces.

KNIVES, DAGGERS, AND HALBERDS

Stone knives, potentially vicious weapons, wouldhave inflicted damage mainly on soft tissue, so theevidence of their use is slim. Daggers were amongthe early objects made from copper, and these were

imitated in stone; they were probably for display butmay also have been functional weapons. By the EarlyBronze Age daggers were very widespread and wereamong the grave goods in many elite burials, espe-cially of men, as well as being frequently representedin art. They could have been used only at close quar-ters, and would therefore suggest single combatbetween warriors and surprise assaults by raidersrather than pitched battle. Blades were also mountedat right angles to a wooden staff as halberds in theEarly Bronze Age: they were unreliable weapons asthey tended to shear at the rivets joining blade toshaft.

RAPIERS AND SWORDS

During the second millennium daggers becamelonger, evolving into rapiers; long, slender bladeswith sharp points for thrusting at the opponent.These were difficult to wield efficiently; exampleswhere the rivets between blade and hilt had givenway show the strain imposed when warriorsattacked with a sweeping action. By the later secondmillennium narrow rapiers had developed intowider swords with cutting edges, suitable for deal-ing slashing blows, and Carp’s-Tongue swords (along blade with a long narrow point and slotted hilt)designed both to thrust and to cut. At the same timehilts also evolved, giving a better grip and replacingthe weak riveted join between blade and hilt with aflange extending from the blade to which a hilt ofother materials was fastened. There were also solid-hilted swords; these were often badly balanced andin general show less use-wear than flange-hiltedswords. In the first millennium iron blades gradu-ally replaced those of bronze across Europe. Swordsand before them daggers were confined to the elite.This is shown not only by their presence in richgraves, but also by the valuable materials used todecorate their hilts, including gold, bronze, coral,glass, and enamel. Parade weapons might also havedecoration on their blades. Scabbards were made ofmetal, wood, and leather and were also often richlydecorated. Winged chapes were developed in theIron Age so a swordsman could steady his scabbardwith his foot, allowing him to draw his sword withone hand.


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ArmorProtective equipment is virtually unknown before thethird millennium and was only seriously developed inthe Bronze Age, when weapons became common andconflict more formalized and predictable. Shields andarmor gave good protection in close-range conflictbut were less effective against projectiles. As well aspractical equipment, fine parade armor, often richlydecorated, was made for show.

SHIELDS

The earliest surviving shield comes from a GlobularAmphora tumulus at Langeneichstädt in Germany.Bronze Age shields were generally round, with anotch in one side, perhaps to allow a spear to becouched close to the body. Often they were deco-rated and strengthened with raised rims and bosses.Most surviving examples are of bronze, althoughseveral wooden molds used to make leather shields

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9.1 A selection of Bronze Age swords, including highly decorated solid-hilted thrusting swords typical ofcentral and northern Europe (7–11), flange-hilted cut-and-thrust swords (1–4), and Late Bronze Ageantenna-hilted swords (5, 6) (Lubbock, John. Prehistoric Times. New York: D. Appleton and Company,1890)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

of the same design, two shields of alder wood, andone of leather are known from Ireland. Thoughrarely preserved, wooden or boiled leather shieldswere probably always more numerous than those ofmetal, which were generally far less tough. Identicalshields are depicted in Bronze Age art.

Other designs were developed in the Iron Age.That most favored by the Celts was a flat elongatedoval shield constructed of a single piece of wood orof two wooden panels held together with a centralmetal rib and boss. The latter covered the space leftin the shield for the warrior’s fist holding the hori-zontal metal hand grip and was also useful forpunching an opponent, while the rim of the shieldcould be used to deal him a powerful blow under thechin.

HELMETS

Leather and bronze helmets were developed in theBronze Age, the latter often for ceremonial use. Animpressive pair of Late Bronze Age helmets wererecovered from Viksø in Denmark; they bore longcurved horns and a face made up of eyes, eyebrows,and a curling beak. In the Iron Age stronger helmetswere made of iron. Some were plain domes, whileothers had extra features such as a top button, a neckguard, and cheek pieces. There were also tall hel-mets rising to a spike and helmets with horns orcrests. More elaborate arrangements on the topincluded figures or heads of animals, such as boarsand birds, intended to make the wearer appear largerand more menacing; one third-century helmet fromCiumesti in Romania bore a huge raven with wingsthat flapped as the wearer charged. Helmets used fordisplay, such as those found at Agris and Amfrevillein France, might be covered with gold or bronzeplating, decorated with intricate patterns, andembellished with silver, glass, and coral. Some Celtictribes, however, did not wear helmets but went intobattle bareheaded.

BODY ARMOR

Leather breastplates, body armor, and padded cloth-ing of leather or thick wool may have been worn as aprotection against arrows; a warrior depicted on aChalcolithic stele from Petit-Chasseur in Switzer-

land probably wore such a garment, and Bronze Agefigurines from Sardinia appear to be clad in leathertunics and kilts with small bronze bosses for addedprotection. Iron Age figurines also wear leathercuirasses. Most body armor dates from the Urnfieldperiod or later. Corselets of bronze were often toothin to offer serious protection and were probablyused mainly for show. Around 300 B.C. the Celtsinvented chain mail, a much more effective bodyprotection. This was made of numerous interlocking


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9.2 A shirt of chain mail from a Danish bog. Thisefficient body protection was probably a Celticinvention. (Worsaae, J. J. A. The Industrial Arts ofDenmark. London: Chapman and Hall, 1882)

iron rings, individually forged, so they were expen-sive and time-consuming to make. Mail shirts,therefore, were confined to the elite, who probablyhanded them down to their descendants. The mailshirt might weigh up to 35 pounds (15 kilograms).Leg armor (greaves) of leather, bronze, or ironmight also be worn.

ChariotsLight, extremely maneuverable chariots were devel-oped during the first millennium. Chariot fittings ingraves and wooden parts preserved in lakes allow thedesign of Celtic chariots to be reconstructed. The twowheels were fastened to the axle with linch pins,allowing them to be easily removed for lubrication,repair, or replacement. The chariot pole was attachedto the axle, with a yoke at its front end to fasten acrossthe neck, withers, or back of a pair of ponies. A flatplatform was fastened to the axle; an arrangement ofcotter pins and straps probably provided suspensionso that the platform did not suffer the bumps and joltsof the wheels’ passage over rough terrain. Archedwooden frames filled with wickerwork or leather orother types of side panel were erected on either sideof the platform. The chariot generally held two peo-ple; a charioteer who sat at the front of the platform,holding the reins and flourishing a whip, and a war-rior who sat or stood behind.

FORTIFICATIONS ANDDEFENSES

Although settlements in prehistoric Europe wereoften open, from the Neolithic period onward manywere surrounded by defenses in the form of a ditch,often with a bank, a stone wall, a timber palisade, ora combination of these elements. These protectedthe settlement against wild animals and kept domes-tic animals from straying. Substantial defenses werealso designed to impress, defining the settlement,

making it visible, and emphasizing the power of itsinhabitants. These defenses could also protect thesettlement against intruders and attackers, and thegrowth of intercommunity conflict gave impetus totheir development and elaboration. Many defendedsites were located on high ground or on promonto-ries, but there were also some low-lying settlements,sturdily fortified. Defended sites often served as aplace of refuge for the rural population.

Fortified sites were designed for protectionagainst sudden attacks and many show signs of vio-lent destruction and abandonment. Many hillfortslacked a supply of drinking water or were unfit inother ways to withstand a siege, and siege warfareseems not to have played a part in prehistoric Euro-pean warfare outside the Mediterranean.

Banks and DitchesDitches dug around settlements or houses and banksconstructed of the earth taken from them presenteda barrier that slowed the advance of intruders andput them at a disadvantage, exposing them to mis-siles (arrows, spears, and slingshot) fired by thedefenders from the elevation of the bank. Earthenramparts absorbed the attackers’ missiles withoutsignificant damage and were hard to demolish,though they required constant maintenance tocounteract erosion. Banks and ditches were usedfrom the Neolithic period onward. In the eastditches were often combined with stone ramparts,and ditches were also regularly dug in front of tim-ber palisades in later Europe. A number of Iron Agehillforts were defended by a series of bank-and-ditchcircuits (multivallation). Sites that took advantage ofpromontories surrounded by water or steep cliffswere frequently protected by banks and ditches ontheir landward side.


A few of the causewayed enclosures of Neolithicnorthern and western Europe, with their inter-rupted ditch-and-bank defenses, seem to haveserved as fortified settlements, their banks enhancedby the addition of a stout wooden palisade.

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Crickley Hill (Gloucestershire, England) Thispromontory was completely enclosed by defensesthat began as a ditch, low bank, and fence with threeto five entrances. It was later reconstructed into anenclosure with a massive ditch broken by twoentrances. A palisade surrounded the settlementinside the ditch, with two timber-lined gateways.The settlement was the subject of a massive attackby a party armed with bows and arrows; more than400 arrows were found at the gateways alone. Thesettlement was abandoned thereafter.

LATER EARTHEN RAMPARTS

Dump Rampart The dump rampart lacked anyinternal structure; a defensive line of earth was piledup into a bank and was often topped by a palisade;some examples were built of stones instead of earth.They were particularly effective against arrows,slingshot, and other missiles.

Fécamp Rampart A variation, used in France, inwhich the rampart was combined with a wide flat-bottomed ditch; it may have been devised specifi-cally as a defense against Roman artillery.

Stone FortificationsStone walls around settlements were most commonin the Mediterranean and the Atlantic west, includ-ing the cyclopean defenses of the Mycenaean worldand simpler walls of drystone or roughly shapedstone blocks. Stone was also used to construct defen-sive houses and towers, designed to withstand light-ning raids but not a siege.

STONE RAMPARTS

Carn Brea (Cornwall, England) A Neolithic hill-top enclosure combining a boulder wall and astretch of ditch with natural granite outcrops, pro-tecting a settlement, Carn Brea fell to an attack inwhich hundreds of arrows were fired, includingmore than 800 that landed within the settlement;many of these were calcined, showing that the settle-ment was burned down.

Murus Duplex A form of rampart was describedby Caesar, in which walls of drystone with stone fac-ings were constructed in layers outward, with severalfacings within the wall. This imparted strength tothe wall, making it harder to demolish.

IBERIAN FORTRESSES

The late fourth-millennium fortified settlements ofLos Millares, Vila Nova de São Pedro, Zambujal, andothers in southeast Spain and southern Portugalwere surrounded by massive walls with great bastionsand elaborate gateways. Though these are generally


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9.3 Reconstruction of an attack on the causewayedenclosure of Furfooz in France, the attackersarmed with bows and arrows, the defenders usingstone from the walls as weapons. A British enclo-sure at Carn Brea, similarly incorporating stonewalls in its defenses, fell to a massive assault byarchers. (Figuier, Louis. Primitive Man. London:Chatto and Windus, 1876)

thought to have been designed to impress rather thanas functional defenses, some scholars note theireffectiveness against attack with arrows and point outpossible slits in the walls for returning fire.

DOMESTIC STRONGHOLDS

Tower Houses During the second millennium forti-fied dwellings were constructed in Sardinia (nuraghi),Corsica (torre), and the Balearic Islands (talayots).These had two or three floors reached by stairs andcorridors built inside a double wall of stone andserved as a place of refuge during intercommunityraids. Stone bastions or houses with stone walls wereconstructed around the base of some of these towersfrom the 12th century to accommodate whole com-munities in safety. Towers (morras or motillas) werealso constructed in southeast Spain; these were sur-rounded by several stone walls between which wereareas partitioned for storage or industrial activity.The houses of the community were located outsidethese walls. In the late first millennium tower houses(brochs) were built in Scotland; these had massivedouble walls with a stair between them leading up tostorage cells, and an interior space used for accommo-dation. Stone-walled houses were built around theoutside of some Orcadian examples, housing largercommunities, with a defensive wall surrounding thewhole settlement. There is little evidence from thebrochs of actual attacks, suggesting that the existenceof such strongholds acted as a deterrent.

Stone-Walled Houses and Settlements A num-ber of different forms of stone-walled house wereconstructed in Iron Age Scotland, including wheel-houses and aisled roundhouses, accommodating anextended family. More widespread were farming set-tlements with drystone walls that surrounded orincorporated buildings; these included the Iron Ageforts, rounds, raths, and duns of western Britain andBrittany and the polygonal walled pastoral enclosuresof Chalcolithic southern France.

RampartsTimber palisades and earth and stone ramparts werecombined with banks and ditches from the Neolithic

period onward. During the Iron Age in particular,many varieties of rampart were developed, makinguse in different ways of stone, timber, and soil. Incentral Europe these often took the form of an outerfacing of upright timbers or stone on an earthenbank; soil and stone ramparts reinforced with hori-zontal timbers, very resistant to assault, were moreusual in western Europe. Ramparts using timber inthe construction might have towers but generallycarried the rampart up to the required height. Incontrast, stone walls and dump ramparts could belower and often had timber breastworks and para-pets above.

PALISADES

A simple timber palisade was a widespread form ofdefensive circuit. This was constructed of close-settimber uprights driven into the ground or erectedwithin a foundation trench. Many early hillfortswere defended by a timber palisade as was thefamous Polish settlement of Biskupin. The defensesmight be strengthened by digging a ditch in front ofthe palisade and banking up the soil behind it.

IRON AGE RAMPARTS

Kastenbau Rampart Many timbers were laid criss-cross to create boxes that were filled with soil.

Timber-Laced Ramparts The murus gallicus wasa form of timber-laced rampart described by Caesaras characteristic of Gaul. The front of the rampartwas faced with a skin of stonework through whichprotruded the ends of a series of massive timberbeams. These ran through to the vertical face or asloping ramp of earth at the rampart’s rear and wereinterlaced with other timbers laid at right angles;iron spikes were driven through the intersections.The core of the rampart was filled with stones andearth. The simpler Ehrang rampart was similar butlacked the iron spikes.

Timber-Reinforced Ramparts Timbers ranthrough the core of the Preist-Altkànig rampart join-ing front and rear faces: these had a stone lower por-tion and timber above. Other ramparts had timbersrunning from the front face into the core: the Kelheim

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rampart was faced with vertical posts separating stonepanels, while the Abernethy rampart had a rubble andearth core faced with a drystone wall at front and rear.Ramparts of the latter type built using igneous ormetamorphic stone are known particularly in Scotlandand France, where their destruction by fire caused thestones to fuse, creating “vitrified forts.”

Box Rampart The front and rear walls of the ram-part were formed of timber uprights infilled withwicker work. Between them was a core of earth. TheHod Hill version had a slighter rear revetment, lowerthan the front face and not anchored into the ground.

Other Defenses

CHEVAUX-DE-FRISE

A number of Iron Age sites, particularly in Iberia butalso in parts of Britain, had a chevaux-de-frise, anadditional defense designed to slow the advance ofattackers and prevent the approach of mounted men.This was composed of a large number of sharpstones placed facing outward in offset rows so thatpeople approaching had to weave their way in andout. Similar obstacles in timber may have been morewidespread.

GLACIS

Hillforts built on a slope were sometimes defendedby a glacis, a spread of artificial scree. This made itextremely difficult to walk up the slope to the foot ofthe defenses, and impossible to run or to approachsilently. A glacis could very effectively be laid on abank that ran continuously from the base of theditch to the base of a timber or stone breastwork.

WATER

Some settlements were located to make use of bod-ies of water in their defenses. Iron Age crannogs(artificial islands) were situated in lakes, with accesseither by boat or across a narrow causeway, whichmight include a drawbridge, although their locationwas probably more for prestige than for defense.Other island settlements were more substantially

defended: For example, the Late Bronze Age settle-ment of Wasserburg in southern Germany was sur-rounded by a palisade set on piles. This incorporatedtowers and watergates and was linked to the islandsettlement by bridges.

Promontories jutting out into lakes or sur-rounded on most sides by a river were also chosenfor defense. For example, the Polish town ofBiskupin was built on a promontory, with its land-ward end protected by a swamp. A long, narrowbridge from firm ground skirted the town’s stockade,allowing the inhabitants to overlook, and if neces-sary bombard, those approaching the gate.

Gateways and EntrancesThe entrance to a site was generally the most vul-nerable place in the defensive circuit and other fea-tures of the defenses, such as a glacis, might channelattackers toward it. Entrances were therefore oftenheavily defended, incorporating features such asmassive gates, towers, bastions, guard chambers,entrance passages, and outworks.

GATEWAYS AND ENTRANCEPASSAGES

The gap in a rampart was often lined with timber toform an entrance passage into which a single gate ora pair of gates were set. In some cases the ends of therampart were turned inward, creating a more sub-stantial passage. Many had timber or stone guardchambers immediately behind the gate.

A number of Iron Age Scottish dwellings, includ-ing duns and brochs, were entered via a passage thatran through the thickness of the stone wall. A heavydoor partway down closed the passage, with draw-bars that could be shot behind it. In some cases aguard chamber was let into the thickness of the wallso that attackers who managed to force the doorcould be dealt with before they left the confinementof the passage.

TOWERS AND BASTIONS

Towers might be erected flanking the gateway in apalisade, but they were not common in temperate


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Europe. In some hillforts a bridge was constructedabove the gate, linking the two sides of the rampart,and in others, for example, at Biskupin, a tower waserected over the gateway. These constructionsallowed the defenders to fire or drop missiles onattackers as they attempted to force an entry. Bas-tions projecting from the line of the wall or rampartallowed the defenders to cover the approach to longstretches of the defenses with missile fire. Rareexamples of bastions are known in the Chalcolithicfortified sites of southern Iberia such as Los Mil-lares. They were also present at the Heuneberg inGermany as part of the unusual mud brick wallerected here at the time of Greek trading contact inthe sixth century B.C.

OUTWORKS

Various arrangements might be made to slow theapproach to the gateway and expose the enemy toattack from the ramparts. One simple method was toconstruct a freestanding bank-and-ditch outworkimmediately in front of the entrance, forcing theattackers to pass round it to right or left, exposing

their unprotected flanks. Another employed a bankand ditch extending like a horn from one end of therampart, forming a corridor down which the attack-ers had to pass. More elaborate versions multipliedthese arrangements, leading attackers down a tortu-ous network of passages flanked by earthworks fromwhich the defenders could rain down missiles.

WARRIORS

Although Mesolithic and Neolithic conflict couldresult in extreme violence, it was not until the Chal-colithic period that burial evidence and artistic rep-resentations indicate that men (or at least the elite)were regarding themselves as warriors, equippedwith bows, battle-axes, and daggers. The increasingimportance of warrior status in the second millen-nium was reflected in votive hoards and warriorburials, which frequently included weapons andparade armor. While bows and throwing spears

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9.4 Depictions of Bronze Age warriors in Scandinavian rock art. The pair in the boat (left) wear horned hel-mets, carry round shields, and are perhaps armed with axes, as is the warrior on the right. (Worsaae, J. J. A.The Industrial Arts of Denmark. London: Chapman and Hall, 1882)

enabled people to be killed at a distance, the devel-opment of daggers, halberds, and rapiers impliesfighting at close quarters; it seems likely that thematching of champions and the concept of honor inovercoming an opponent in personal combat,strongly developed in Mycenaean and later Celticsociety, had their beginnings at this time. By around1300 slashing swords were the elite weapon, whileordinary soldiers were equipped with spears. Con-siderable edge damage to swords shows that theywere used in combat, not just for show. While raid-ing and single combat seem likely to have been themain forms of Bronze Age warfare, pitched battlesmay also have occurred. Warfare was a major preoc-cupation during the Iron Age, and this was reflectedin the continued deposition of weapons and paradearmor in graves and votive hoards. By Roman timesthe Celts, Germani, and other European peopleswere engaged in endemic warfare, conducting raidsagainst their neighbors and raising armies thatcrisscrossed Europe. Some warrior bands soughtemployment as mercenaries; in other cases wholecommunities, men, women, and children, wouldmove together, fighting to gain booty or land onwhich they could settle.

Warrior BurialsGrave goods frequently reflect the status and socialpersonae of the deceased. From the Chalcolithicperiod onward, men, and particularly the elite, wereburied with weapons, implying that society viewedthem as warriors. Many male Beaker burials werefurnished with archery equipment. In SoutheastEurope copper daggers accompanied some fourth-millennium male burials and these became morewidespread in the third millennium, while in thenorth they were imitated in flint. Elite burials in theEarly Bronze Age were furnished with rapiers,spears, and wooden or leather shields, while thegraves of less important individuals often containedspears, frequently deposited in pairs. By the 13thcentury elite burials had a sword and bronze bodyarmor. Well-furnished male graves in the Iron Agecontained a range of weapons and armor, with cartsor chariots and horse harness in some.

Warriors in ArtArtistic representations of conflict and warriors areknown from the Mesolithic period onward.

ROCK ART

Rock paintings in the Spanish Levant show warriorsarmed with bows and arrows, sometimes alone butoften lined up as opposing war bands in scenes fullof movement. Some of these date to the Mesolithicperiod, while others, on the evidence of arrow form,may be later. Some warriors are wearing head-dresses, perhaps of feathers, and occasionally bodyornaments, probably also of feathers.

Bronze Age rock engravings from Scandinaviashow (often ithyphallic) men brandishing swordsand axes on long shafts, singly or opposing eachother in pairs, sometimes on the deck of boats. Therock engravings of Val Camonica also feature war-riors brandishing swords and holding up shields.

SCULPTURE, FIGURINES, ANDRELIEFS

Many of the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age statuemenhirs of the Atlantic and Mediterranean regionsrepresent warriors, often wearing a neck ornamentand a belt and perhaps a leather chest protection.Some were equipped with a bow and a dagger, oth-ers with a battle-axe and a dagger or later a sword.Many of the bronze figurines of Late Bronze AgeSardinia depicted warriors, clad in tunics with metalbosses, helmets, greaves, and bossed belts, carryingbows, swords, daggers, and shields.

Funerary slabs in southwest Iberia in the secondmillennium were carved with short swords and axes.By the first millennium they depicted a round shieldwith a notch, a sword and spear, and personal equip-ment such as a mirror; sometimes they also showed astick figure and his chariot or war cart. The warriorstatues erected in Iron Age northern Spain held asmall round shield against their abdomen and a dag-ger in their right hand. These are shown also inGreek-inspired sculptures in eastern Spain, wherethe warrior wears a circular breastplate. An Etruscanfunerary stele from Bologna depicts a fight between amounted Etruscan warrior and a naked Celt armed


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with a short sword and a shield that protects himfrom chin to thigh. In the Hallstatt chief’s burial atHochdorf a bronze couch was decorated with a friezeof warriors fighting in pairs with sword and shield,framed by a wagon at each end. Warriors were alsodepicted on some Iron Age bronze vessels, includingthe Gundestrup cauldron, where a file of foot sol-diers marches, carrying long rectangular shields withmetal bosses, followed by others blowing carnyxes.

Celtic WarriorsClassical authors such as Strabo regarded the Celts aswar-mad, welcoming every opportunity to engage inwarfare. For the elite, armed raids and single combatwere probably major activities in their normal lives,whereas the farmers and other ordinary peoplebecame involved in warfare only when they werethreatened. Individual chiefs and nobles, armed withswords and owning horses and chariots, were sup-ported by parties of followers armed with spears;farmers and other occasional combatants probablymainly fought with bows and arrows and slings.

Feasts, where drunkenness was a normal part ofthe enjoyment, were often the scene of contestsbetween warriors; these were undertaken as a sportbut could nevertheless end in serious injury ordeath. Feasts were also an occasion for an ambitiousand adventurous warrior to recruit a war band ofvolunteers who would go off to seek their fortune.These might join with bands from other tribes toform large forces of confederate warriors such as theGaesatae. Some bands found employment as merce-naries for the Macedonians, Egyptians, Carthagini-ans, Romans, and various Anatolian states; othersgrew rich on the spoils of armed expeditions likethat in 387 B.C. during which Rome was sacked, ahumiliation the Romans never forgot.

Although battles could involve thousands, bar-barian Europeans fought more as individuals thanas cooperating armies. Disciplined Roman troopswere often able to overcome much larger parties ofCelts or Germani, who would throw away tacticaladvantage in pursuit of personal glory. A warriormarked his success by cutting off the heads ofdefeated opponents, tying them to his horse’s neck

or impaling them on his spear, and on his returnhome nailing them up as trophies on his housewalls. Some Celtic warriors such as the Gaesatae,who faced the Romans at Telamon, enhanced theirprestige by fighting naked (a practice that, whileexposing them to greater likelihood of injury, ironi-cally greatly reduced the risk of their woundsbecoming infected).

CHARIOTS

From the fifth century two-wheeled chariots devel-oped as an important arm of Celtic combat, to besuperseded by cavalry by the second century. Onlyin Britain did the chariot remain important, surviv-ing in Ireland into post-Roman times.

The cost of commissioning a chariot and main-taining a chariot team meant that only the eliteowned them. Celtic warrior nobles would begin abattle by driving around hurling spears at theiropponents. Chariot forces were often deployed onthe flanks. After the charge, however, chariot fight-ers would dismount to engage in hand-to-handfighting on foot while the charioteer drew up thechariot on the sidelines, ready to drive his warriorswiftly away from the battlefield. The Celts becameexceptionally skillful in maneuvering their chariotsat speed and could perform feats such as runningalong the chariot pole while the chariot was inmotion. Irish literature asserted that a skilled chario-teer could make the chariot leap ditches and couldstop or change direction suddenly.

IRON AGE HORSEMEN

Horse riding was developed and perfected in thesteppe and from there spread into Europe. However,the difficulty of controlling horses with the harnessavailable (reins and bar bits) made it impractical tofight on horseback until the Late Iron Age, when thefour-pommelled saddle was introduced, probablyfrom the steppe region. The saddle, which had twopommels behind the rider and two in front curvingback over the rider’s thighs, provided a firm seat,allowing the rider to maneuver and use weapons.Germanic warriors, however, were said to find theuse of the saddle shameful, preferring to dependupon their own skill to keep their seat. Elite cavalry

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became widespread in the later first millennium. TheCelts gained a reputation in the classical world asskilled horsemen and mounted warriors, and Gallicand Iberian cavalry were employed as mercenaries bythe Carthaginians. Mounted warriors were generallyheavily armed. In battle, hurling javelins, they wouldattack the infantry with ferocious charges designed tobreak the foot soldiers’ nerve. Some groups foughton horseback, using lances and swords, and art showshorsemen with spears. In general, however, oncefighting began in earnest they would dismount andengage in hand-to-hand fighting on foot.

Female WarriorsThe Greeks had stories of the Amazons, female war-riors of the steppe. A number of steppe burials fromthe fifth century onward were of warrior women,buried with military equipment including arrows,swords, spears, shields, and armor. Celtic womenwere renowned for their courage and ferocity; theydid not usually go into battle, according to classicalsources, but were often stationed on the sidelines,giving vocal encouragement to their own forces andabusing the enemy. At times, however, they weremoved to take part: For example, when the Romangeneral Marius fought the Ambrones, the women,armed with swords and axes, set upon both theirfleeing menfolk and the pursuing Romans. QueenBoudicca of the Iceni was actively involved as one ofthe leaders of the British uprising against theRomans in A.D. 60, and in the same year the Romantroops had been disturbed by being opposed by bel-ligerent women when they attacked the island ofAnglesey, stronghold of the Druids.

CONFLICTS, BATTLES,AND WARS

The victims present the most graphic evidence ofconflict. Many Mesolithic burials, for example, at

Schela Cladovei in Romania, Téviec in France, andVedbaek in Denmark, are of individuals with frac-tured skulls or arrows still imbedded in their skele-tons. Some LBK communities seem to have sufferedwholesale massacres. Skeletons and arrowheads atsome causewayed enclosures in Britain underline theoccurrence of armed attacks in the Neolithic period,at least in the western half of the continent. A smallproportion of individuals in Neolithic and Chalcol-ithic burials and communal tombs in France andIberia exhibited clear evidence of violence, particu-larly blows to the head and arrow wounds, the latterincreasing in frequency after 3500 B.C. Some indi-viduals had healed injuries. A few bones bore marksof knife attacks; these were probably more commonsince knife wounds inflicted on soft tissue could havecaused death without leaving any skeletal trace.

Burials in later times continued to include indi-viduals who had suffered injury or violent death, andoccasionally there are remains that suggest massmurder. Many hillforts or fortified settlements wereabandoned after armed attack. Combat seems tohave become more formalized and fighting a maleactivity; there is less evidence of the wanton killingof women and children. In the Late Iron Age classi-cal sources provide written accounts of battles.

Victims of ViolenceDnepr Rapids (Ukraine) In an Early Mesolithiccemetery at Voloshkii three of the 19 burials were ofindividuals who had died from arrow wounds. Simi-lar evidence comes from two cemeteries at Vasil-yevka, dated around 9000 B.C., where nine out of 70skeletons had projectile injuries and a further twohad suffered heavy blows.

Ofnet (Bavaria, Germany) Two pits (“skull nests”)were discovered here, containing between them thecarefully arranged skulls and jaws of 34 (or 38)Mesolithic individuals, mainly women and children.All four adult men, half the children, and a quarterof the women had suffered blows to the head. Thevictims had all been decapitated, though it was notclear whether they were killed in this way or if theirheads were cut off immediately after death. Mollusk


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shells and perforated deer teeth indicate that mostwere wearing a decorated cap or jewelry. The headsmay not all have been buried at the same time.

Talheim (Neckar valley, Germany) At Talheim alarge pit containing the jumbled remains of at least34 late LBK men, women, and children with multi-ple injuries was found. Most were killed by blows tothe head with a stone ax, and some had been struckso hard that the ax made an ax-shaped hole in theskull. Others had been shot with arrows. Allappeared to have sustained their injuries frombehind, indicating that they were fleeing rather thanfighting. Several were struck repeatedly after theyhad fallen; evidently the aggressors were intent onensuring that their victims were dead. The bodieswere tidied into a pit without any attempt at funer-ary treatment, presumably the disrespectful actionof the victors. Analysis of the victims’ DNA indi-cates that all were related, suggesting the mass mur-der of an entire extended family, ranging fromchildren to one individual over 60; only the infants(if there were any) were spared.

San Juan Ante Portam Latinam (Alava, Spain) Arock shelter was used between 3800 and 2800 B.C. asa communal burial place in which some 300 individ-uals were interred. Among them were nine men witharrows lodged in their skeletons. Most had been shotfrom behind by crouching archers, implying sur-prise attacks rather than combat. The presence of 55arrowheads in the rock shelter suggests that otherindividuals had died from arrows penetrating theirsoft tissue. Some people had suffered injury to theirhead or to forearms raised to protect their head fromblows. The incidents in which the injuries were sus-tained occurred throughout the period in which thetomb was used, but most bodies showed no trace ofviolence.

Wassenaar (Netherlands) A mass grave datedaround 1700 B.C. contained the remains of sevenmen, three women, and two children, perhaps afamily killed in a raid. One young man had a flintarrow lodged between his ribs, three other men hadsuffered blows to the head, and one of the childrenwas buried with his head separated from his body.

The group was carefully arranged in two rows, onefacing east, the other west, with their legs overlap-ping, the men in the center flanked by the women,with the children at the edges.

Velim (Czech Republic) At Velim a series of Mid-dle Bronze Age pits formed interrupted ditches thatcontained the bones of several hundred people,probably the victims of violent death. Some werewhole individuals, others were incomplete skeletons,and some bore cut marks suggesting dismember-ment or even cannibalism. Men, women, and chil-dren were represented. Most appeared to have beentipped in rather than carefully buried, and there waslittle in the way of accompanying material.

Maiden Castle (Dorset, England) This 43-acre(17-hectare) hillfort was defended by three to fourmassive ditches with banks surmounted by a highstone and wooden wall, their layout dictating a tor-tuous and exposed approach to the summit. A groupof 14 graves at the eastern entrance was identified bySir Mortimer Wheeler as a war cemetery for thehillfort’s final defenders during the Roman conquestof Britain. At least one individual here had indeedbeen killed by the Romans, since he had a Romanspearhead in his spine. Others had sustained swordcuts or spear wounds to the head, and four also hadpartially healed injuries. It now appears, however,that the hillfort was largely deserted by the time ofthe Roman conquest. The “war cemetery” formedpart of a much larger cemetery used for more than acentury, in which three-quarters of the burials wereof uninjured individuals. The bodies may have beenbrought here for burial from the surrounding area.

BattlesClassical sources record that the Celts were ferociousand brave but undisciplined fighters. Armies weredrawn up in contingents by tribe, each with its ownbattle standards. In the lead-up to a battle the Celticforces would engage in activities intended to intimi-date their opponents and awaken their own battlefrenzy: flaunting themselves and their military equip-ment, demonstrating their skills in maneuvering

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chariots and managing horses, blowing the raucouswar trumpets (carnyxes), yelling battle cries, shoutingboasts, singing battle songs, and hurling insults.They would often sit watching while their champi-ons engaged in single combat.

After these initial exchanges battle would bejoined. The elite would charge down in chariots or onhorseback, raining javelins upon their enemy. Behindthem came the foot soldiers, also at the charge. Theelite would dismount and join them, and hand-to-hand fighting would begin. The battle lines wouldquickly break up into individual contests. Classicalauthors reported that the Celts were ferocious andutterly fearless fighters in the initial part of the battle,but easily gave up if they did not quickly succeed indisheartening or routing the enemy. Battles betweenCeltic forces seldom lasted more than an hour or two.Individual warriors or groups of fighters might decidethe day was going badly and retreat, particularly whenfaced by classical armies who stood fast and cooper-ated as a single body. The Romans’ weapons were alsosuperior to those of the Celts for formation fighting.The Germani resembled the Celts in their fightingtechniques and approaches to battle.

Telamon (Italy) A force of around 70,000, made upof Gaesatae from beyond the Alps and north ItalianCelts, including 20,000 cavalry (chariots and horse),launched a freebooting expedition into Etruria in225 B.C. Returning north laden with booty, theywere intercepted at Telamon by two Roman armies.The Gaesatae, a close-knit force of young men at thepeak of fighting fitness, chose to fight naked save fortheir gold torcs and other ornaments, displayingtheir magnificent physiques to awe their opponents.The Celts seized control of a hill where they installedtheir booty, drawing up their forces around it facing


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9.5 The trumpet-head of a carnyx (war trumpet)in the form of a boar’s head from Deskford,Banffshire, Scotland, and a reconstruction of thecomplete carnyx, which was made in the mid-first century A.D. (Drawing by Audrey McIntosh,from material in the National Museums of Scot-land, Edinburgh)

the Romans, with their cavalry and chariots on theflanks. At first they were successful, terrifying theRomans with their ferocity, braying trumpets, andsavage war cries, and killing and decapitating one ofthe Roman generals. The Romans, however, hurledflights of javelins, killing many of the Celts, and theircavalry took the hill. The majority of the Celts stoodfirm, and around 40,000 were killed. The Celtic cav-alry fled, but 10,000 Celts were taken prisoner,including one of the kings; another Celtic king com-mitted suicide to avoid capture.

Delphi A large Celtic force invaded Greece in 279B.C., aiming to plunder the famously rich shrine atDelphi. Despite Greek resistance, they reached Del-phi in the middle of winter. Sources are divided onwhether they succeeded in sacking the treasurieshere. An earthquake and thunderbolts shook theCeltic forces during the night and rock slides fol-lowed the next morning, natural disturbances thatapparently unnerved the superstitious Celts. TheGreeks attacked at dawn, surprising the Celtic armywith a combined assault from front and rear, andinflicting heavy casualties, including injuries to theCeltic leader, Brennus. The Celts were seized withpanic and fled, killing their wounded as theyretreated to prevent their capture; in all some 26,000Celts are said to have died.

CELEBRATING VICTORY

Hjortspring (Island of Als, Denmark) The votiveoffering of a boat containing a large collection ofarms around 350 B.C. in a bog at Hjortspring is gen-erally interpreted as a thank-offering, presumablydeposited by the island’s residents after a victoryover armed attackers. The weapons suggest that awar band of around 80 men arrived in four warcanoes; each held a crew of up to 18 oarsmen, with asteersman, a coxswain, and two other senior crewmembers. The military equipment included 10 mailshirts, 11 swords, eight lances, and 11 or 12 narrowshields, presumably the equipment of the leaders,and infantry equipment for about 65 men, eachcomprising a spear, a javelin, and a shield. About halfalso had an additional javelin with a bone or antlerhead. Details of the equipment indicate that the warband may have come from the Hamburg region.

Ribemont-sur-Ancre (France) After a battle inthe third century B.C. between two Celtic armies, oflocal Belgae and Lexovii from Armorica, the victorserected a unique war memorial. Within a largeditched enclosure they built at least six cubic struc-tures from daub and the longbones of around 300people, presumably the losers, mixed with those ofsome horses. Within these structures they placed thecalcined bones of their own dead. Outside the enclo-sure they set up the bodies of many more of thedead, around 140 individuals, having first hacked offtheir heads as trophies. All the bones on the sitewere from men aged between 15 and 40. Broken anddiscarded weapons, such as arrowheads and spear-heads, were also found in considerable numbers, andseem originally to have been displayed on a plat-form. This monument was a place of reverence forseveral centuries, where offerings of weapons andfood were made, and eventually it was replaced by aRomano-Gallic shrine.

Campaigns, Migrations, andWarsAlthough warfare was endemic in Iron Age society,much of it was on the level of raids to acquire booty,cattle, and women, as well as slaves to supply theinsatiable requirements of the Mediterranean world.Successful raids required mobility; chariots, horses,or boats were essential to make the attack swift andunexpected and to evade pursuit. Raiders weretherefore generally a select band of nobles and theirpersonal followers.

Warfare was also for glory and honor. A losingleader often deliberately died in battle or committedsuicide rather than concede defeat. The demonstra-tion of personal prowess was important in battle andoften interfered with the efficient actions of thefighting force as a whole. Successful warriors col-lected the weapons and the severed heads of enemiesas trophies. Later Irish literature suggests that warsended with the defeated community becoming theclient of the victor, giving hostages for their goodfaith.

There were also armed expeditions by war bandsmade up of young men with a taste for adventure,

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which often traveled considerable distances andswelled in size with success. Occasionally, wholecommunities migrated, fighting their way and accu-mulating booty, until they found a place where theychose to settle. A large number of Helvetii, forexample, left Switzerland in 58 B.C. in search of newland in southern France, but were turned back byCaesar, with the loss of 250,000 Helvetic lives. Theprogress of migrating groups was inevitably sloweddown by the baggage train: women, children, house-hold possessions, and booty.

GALATIANS

The huge band of migrating Celts who invadedMacedonia in 279 B.C. quarreled and divided, withone group continuing east to Anatolia, where theytook service as mercenaries. Here they founded asmall state and gained a comfortable living raidingtheir neighbors. Several times defeated and checkedby Anatolian kingdoms, they were finally suppressedby the Romans in 25 B.C.

ROMAN CONQUEST OF GAUL

Southern Gaul, an area long exposed to classicalinfluences, had by 100 B.C. been absorbed by theRomans. In 58 B.C. several local military crises gaveCaesar, the region’s governor, an excuse to keep anarmy in the field, and he set about conquering therest of Gaul, making use of intertribal hostilities togain alliances with some tribes against others. Sometribes quite quickly admitted defeat, allowing Caesarto move on. Others, including the Nervii, the Venetiin Brittany, and the Belgae and Eburones in Bel-gium, put up strong and determined resistance.Caesar mercilessly punished them, massacring thou-sands or cutting off their hands and selling thou-sands of others into slavery. A coalition of tribes, ledby Vercingetorix of the Arverni, rose against Caesarin 53, and, forgetting their internecine feuding inthe face of the common enemy, almost all theremaining Gallic tribes joined them. Initially, theGauls enjoyed some success and their scorched earthpolicy made life extremely difficult for the Romans.After a defeat, however, Vercingetorix made the mis-take of falling back on the oppidum of Alesia. Theexperienced Romans built military camps, ramparts,

towers, pits with stakes, and other traps around theoppidum. A large Gaulish force attempted to relievethe siege but was defeated, and the starving defend-ers were forced to surrender. Resistance ended thefollowing year.

READING

GeneralCarman and Harding 1999, Guilaine and Zammit2005: warfare; Vencl 1999, Whittle 1996: Neolithic;Harding, 2000, Osgood and Monks 2000: BronzeAge; Ritchie and Ritchie 1995, James 1993, Con-nolly 1998: Iron Age.

Weapons and ArmorHarding 1999b, 1999c, Kristiansen 1999: BronzeAge; Rapin 1991: Iron Age; Chapman 1999:weapons; Mithen 1994, Mercer 1999: bows andarrows; Spindler 1995, Renfrew and Bahn 2004: Ice-man; O’Kelly 1989: Ireland; Furger-Gunti 1991:chariots.

Fortifications and DefensesRalston 1995, Cunliffe 1974, Collis 1984a: Iron Agedefenses; Lenerz-de Wilde 1995: Iberia; Ritchie1988: brochs; Mercer 1990, 1999: enclosures; Scarre1988, Kristiansen 1998: Wasserburg; Armit 1997,Morrison 1997: crannogs; Scarre 1998: Biskupin.

WarriorsDolukhanov 1999b: Neolithic warriors; Harding1999c, Jensen 1999b, Kristiansen 1999: Bronze Agewarriors; Parker Pearson 1999, Ehrenberg 1989:female warriors; Anati 1999, Capelle 1999, Scarre1998, Frey 1995: warriors in art.


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Conflicts, Battles, and WarsJochim 2002c, Cunliffe 2001a, Vencl 1999,Dolukhanov 1999b, Whittle 1996, Mithen 2003:Mesolithic; Chapman 1999, Dolukhanov 1999b:Neolithic; Lloyd-Morgan 1995, Frey 1995, Rands-borg 1999, Twist 2001, Rapin 1995: Iron Age; Bahn,

ed. 2001b: Talheim; Parker Pearson 1999, Clason1999: Wassenaar; Gill and Kaner 1996, Sharples1991: Maiden Castle; Polybius 1979: Telamon;Randsborg 1999: Hjortspring; Caesar 1951, Ralston1995: Caesar in Gaul; Furger-Gunti 1991: chariotry;Centre Archaeologie Departemental de Ribemont-sur-Ancre 2005, Bahn 2003: Ribemont.

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LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND THE ARTS

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Few cultures in prehistoric Europe were literate;knowledge of the continent’s languages and liter-

ature, therefore, depend largely on oral traditions andreconstruction on the basis of what was recorded byliterate classical cultures or survived into later times.

Abundant evidence of the visual arts survives fromprehistory, going right back into Palaeolithic times;in contrast, very little can be said about prehistoricEuropean music, dance, or other performing arts.

EUROPEANLANGUAGES

The vast majority of languages spoken in modernEurope belong to the Indo-European language fam-ily. Of those that do not, some are post-Romanarrivals: these include both the languages spoken byrecent immigrants from Asia and elsewhere, and onessuch as Hungarian and Turkic that were brought inearlier by invaders, particularly from the stepperegion. There are also a few languages that probablydescend from those spoken by the original inhabi-tants of Europe: a group of Finno-Ugric (Uralic) lan-guages in the far north, and in the Pyrenean regionBasque, a language isolate. Other languages wererecorded in prehistoric and early historic times. Thekey question in reconstructing the linguistic prehis-tory of Europe is when the Indo-European languageswere introduced, a matter of continuing controversy.Was proto-Indo-European the language of the firstfarming immigrants into Europe, a view espoused byColin Renfrew (1987) but not widely accepted, or wasit brought in later by immigrants from the steppe?The latter is linguistically acceptable but hard todemonstrate archaeologically or explain.

Indo-European Languages

ORIGINS AND SPREAD

Although the original homeland of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is still a subject of debate and con-

troversy, many scholars, on linguistic and archaeo-logical grounds, favor the region between the BlackSea and the Caspian and argue that the languagebegan to spread from this region into other areas inthe fourth to third millennium. By the late first mil-lennium B.C. Indo-European languages were cer-tainly spoken over a vast area from Europe throughAnatolia and Iran into South Asia and in central Asiaas far as Chinese Turkestan.

GREEK

The existence of the Linear B script, used to writean early form of Greek, demonstrates that by 1450B.C. an Indo-European language was being spokenby the Mycenaeans on the southern Greek main-land. Archaeological and linguistic evidence suggestthe arrival of early Greek speakers here late in thethird millennium B.C., though some scholars wouldplace this intrusion earlier or later and others con-sider that it did not occur at all. Mycenaean Greekmay have been related to Indo-European languagesin Anatolia, such as Luwian. Greek in the first mil-lennium was spoken not only in Greece and theGreek islands but also in Cyprus, Asia Minor, andthe Greek colonies, and was spread farther afield bythe conquests of Alexander the Great.

SOUTHEAST EUROPE

The first-millennium inhabitants of the Balkans, theIllyrians, Dacians, Getae, and Thracians, spokeIndo-European languages. Shared names suggestpossible links with some of the language groups inAnatolia. Archaeological evidence may support thearrival of Indo-European speakers in the Balkans inthe later fourth millennium. Modern Albanian isprobably descended from Illyrian; Thracian andDacian (possibly related dialects rather than separatelanguages) died out.

ITALIC

Indo-European languages probably reached Italy viaSoutheast Europe during the second or possiblythird millennium B.C. The best known is Latin,spread by the Roman conquest into many parts ofEurope, where it evolved into the modern Romancelanguages (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese,


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Romanian, and others). In the earlier first millen-nium B.C. Latin was confined to the region of Rome,and other languages were spoken elsewhere: Siculanin Sicily, Umbrian and Oscan in the center andsouthwest, Messapic in the southeast (possiblyrelated to Illyrian), and Picene (East Italic) to itsnorth, all known from inscriptions. Venetic at thehead of the Adriatic may have been related to theItalic languages or have belonged to a separate sub-group of Indo-European.

EASTERN EUROPE

Speakers of Slavic languages occupied the regionbetween the upper Vistula and the Dnepr perhaps asearly as the second millennium B.C. They wererecorded as raiders in Southeast Europe in the firstmillennium A.D., the period when they also spreadinto areas to the north formerly occupied by Balticspeakers. Slavic languages are spoken today overmuch of the Balkans as well as in eastern Europefrom the Czech Republic and Poland to Russia.

Baltic languages were spoken in classical times inan area east of the Baltic Sea and as far south as thenorthern Dnepr basin; much of this area was lateroverrun by Germanic and Slavic speakers, andLithuanian and Latvian are the only modern sur-vivors of the Baltic languages.

GERMANIC

In late prehistory Roman authors noted the pres-ence of Germanic tribes east of the Rhine and westof the Oder, in northern Germany and southernScandinavia. Migrations during the first millenniumA.D. took Germanic speakers, such as the Goths,into much of Europe, though in many areas theywere assimilated and lost their languages. Germaniclanguages are spoken today in Britain, northernEurope, the Low Countries, and Germany.

CELTIC

In the early first millennium B.C., and probably con-siderably earlier, Celtic languages were spoken inthe area from eastern France to Bohemia. Before500 B.C. speakers of Celtiberian (Hispano-Celtic)spread into Iberia, establishing themselves over mostof the country, with the exception of the south and

east. Celtiberian was related to Gaulish, spoken inFrance and adjacent areas to the east, and Lepontic,spoken in the Alpine regions and the far north ofItaly. The eastern area was home to speakers ofanother block of Celtic languages, Eastern Celtic. Atsome time, probably during the first millennium,Celtic languages also spread to Britain, where theydeveloped into the only Celtic languages that havesurvived into the modern world: Welsh, Scots andIrish Gaelic, and Breton, the latter thought todescend from the language of British immigrantsinto Brittany in the fifth century A.D. Celtic migra-tions took members of Gaulish-speaking tribes suchas the Boii, Insubres, and Senones into northernItaly, probably in the sixth century, and other Celticspeakers in the third century B.C. into Anatolia(Galatia), where their language survived into thefifth century A.D.

Inscriptions from the last three centuries B.C.show that the cultural division made by the Romansbetween Celts and Germani did not coincide exactlywith the distribution of speakers of Celtic and Ger-manic languages: though there was broad coinci-dence, there were also overlaps and considerablemixing between these languages at their interface.

PICTISH

Pictish, a language spoken in Scotland in classicaland early historical times, is known from inscrip-tions that provide only a limited vocabulary andtherefore only limited scope for comparing Pictishwith other languages. Although some scholars con-sider it to have been a non-Indo-European lan-guage, the currently favored view is that Pictish wasprobably a form of Celtic.

THE SPREAD OF INDO-EUROPEAN IN EUROPE

When and how the precursors of the Celtic, Ger-manic, Baltic, and Slavic languages spread intonorthern and central Europe is controversial.Attempts to identify their arrival archaeologicallyhave often focused on the third-millennium CordedWare Culture, widely distributed and having someelements strongly reminiscent of steppe culture,though other elements show local antecedents. The

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mechanism by which the Indo-European languagemight have become established here is obscure. Analternative identification with the sixth-millenniumLBK culture, though perhaps archaeologicallyseductive, is linguistically untenable.

Surviving Non-Indo-European Languages

URALIC

The Uralic language family comprises two groups:Samoyedic, spoken by reindeer herders and huntersacross northern Siberia, and Finno-Ugric. The lat-ter has two branches. Ugric is spoken mainly on andeast of the Ob River, but also includes Magyar(Hungarian), introduced to Hungary by settlers inthe ninth century A.D. Finnic, including Finnish,Lapp, and Estonian, is now spoken east of the Balticand west of the Urals. It has been suggested that thespeakers of the early Uralic languages be identifiedwith the Mesolithic inhabitants of the boreal region,who in the fourth millennium made pottery withcomb and pit-marked decoration. Mutual linguisticinfluences show that Proto-Uralic and Proto-Indo-European were spoken by people who occupiedadjacent areas during the third millennium B.C.

BASQUE

Basque is spoken today in a small area of northeastSpain and southwest France, but originally covered amuch wider region, including the area in France andmuch of northern Spain known to the Romans asAquitania. It is not related to any known language.

Dead European Languages

IBERIA

The pre-Celtic languages of Iberia are known froma number of inscriptions. Iberian was spoken alongthe east coast, and inscriptions in Iberian are con-centrated particularly around the Ebro. Tartessianwas the language of the southern quarter of the

peninsula. It is likely that both were more widelyspoken before the arrival of Celtiberian speakers.The indications are that neither language wasrelated to Basque.

ITALY

A large number of mainly short texts survive inEtruscan, spoken in central Italy in the first millen-nium and probably the language of the indigenouspeople of the region from earlier times. TheRomans were familiar with Etruscan, but it died outby the fourth century A.D. The only language thatwas clearly related to Etruscan was Lemnian, thelanguage of a handful of inscriptions from the northAegean island of Lemnos, said by the Greeks to beinhabited by Tyrrhenians, a loose term that includedEtruscans and pirates, both of which descriptionsmay have applied to the inhabitants of Lemnos.Place names suggest the existence of other indige-nous languages, in Sardinia, the western Alps, north-west Italy (Ligurian), and the northeast (Raetic). It islikely that these formed part of a group of non-Indo-European substrate languages stretching across theMediterranean.

GREECE

The Linear B script, used to write an early form ofGreek, was developed from Linear A, the script usedby the Minoans, and studies have demonstrated thatthe sound values assigned to the signs in the twoscripts often coincide. From this it is clear that Lin-ear A rendered an unknown language (Eteo-cretan),which most scholars believe was not a form of Greek.It may have been a Semitic language, though this isnot widely favored, or related to a language spoken inwestern Anatolia, such as the Indo-European lan-guages Lycian and Luwian.

On mainland Greece many names of individu-als, divinities, and places and words for manyplants, animals, objects, and materials used by theMycenaeans were non-Indo-European, demon-strating that other languages were spoken in theregion into the Bronze Age. These may have beenrelated to non-Indo-European Anatolian languagessuch as Hattic, and may also have been spoken inthe Balkans.


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HISTORICAL INTRUDERS

Phoenicians from the Levant who spoke a Semiticlanguage established colonies in the westernMediterranean during the first millennium B.C.

WRITING

The scripts that developed in Mesopotamia(cuneiform) and Egypt (hieroglyphic) during thelate fourth and third millennia made use of logo-graphic and syllabic elements. A number of otherscripts developed from these, including the hiero-glyph-inspired alphabetic script of the Phoenicians:this was ancestral to most scripts used in Europe.

Pre-alphabetic Scripts

CRETAN SCRIPTS

From around the beginning of the second millenniumB.C. the Minoans made use of seals bearing symbolsthat are known as Cretan hieroglyphs. Around 1750B.C. another script, Linear A, also came into use onCrete, used primarily for accounts written on claytablets. Both seem to have been Cretan inventions,inspired by the scripts used in contemporary westernAsia but not directly based on any of them. Bothscripts were syllabic; neither has been deciphered,though comparisons with Linear B have enabled manyof the sounds of the Linear A signs to be determined.

LINEAR B

Developed by the Mycenaeans from Linear A andCretan hieroglyphic, Linear B was a syllabic scriptwith around 90 signs, used to write an early form ofthe Greek language. Most of the documents in Lin-ear B are clay accounting tablets and sealings. Thescript died out around 1100 B.C.

Alphabetic ScriptsThe alphabetic script of the Levant was written fromright to left and had 22 letters representing conso-

nants only, since the Semitic languages use consonan-tal roots, allowing the vowel sounds to be deducedfrom the context. This script was adopted by theGreeks before 800 B.C. and adapted to include vowelsand a few additional consonants. By the sixth centuryGreek was being written from left to right. Greekeventually gave rise to most other European scripts.

IBERO-TARTESSIAN

The Phoenicians introduced writing into Iberia. Bythe seventh century the Tartessians had developed ascript based on that of the Phoenicians, and this waslater adopted by the Iberian speakers of the east.This script had 28 alphabetic letters but alsoemployed some syllabic signs. It was used to writeshort inscriptions such as legends on coins.

ITALIAN SCRIPTS

Around 700 B.C. the Etruscans adopted the Greekalphabet from Greek colonists settled in Italy, mak-ing some modifications, including the addition ofletters to represent f and u. The direction of writingwas from right to left. More than 10,000 Etruscaninscriptions and other texts are known, most of themshort. Although the script can easily be transliter-ated, the language in which it is written is still verypoorly understood.

The speakers of the Messapic language in south-eastern Italy also adopted the Greek alphabet. Otherregional scripts, including Faliscan, Oscan, Umbrian,and Latin, were developed from the Etruscan script.Latin inscriptions are known from the sixth centuryonward, using 21 letters. Later, two more letters notneeded by the Latin language, y and z, were adoptedfrom Greek to write Greek loanwords. The spread ofRoman power in Italy led to the Latin script eventu-ally replacing other Italian scripts.

TRANSALPINE EUROPE

The Celts in north Italy and the Alps adopted theEtruscan script, and it was used here from the sixthcentury until the first, when it was finally supersededby the Latin script. The Greek alphabet, introducedby the Greek colony at Massalia, was used in south-ern France, and was also known in central Europe.Caesar, writing in the first century B.C., noted that


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the Gauls regularly used the Greek alphabet forbusiness and private matters.

The extension of Roman influence and later of theRoman Empire into other parts of Europe spread theLatin script widely. By the mid-first century the Boiiin central Europe were using it on their coins. It wasemployed in Gaul from the same period and a littlelater in Britain to write Celtic inscriptions. Someincluded modifications of the Roman alphabet to ren-der sounds not used in Latin, such as ch as in loch.

The Latin script survived the collapse of theempire to become the basis of western European lit-eracy. The Greek script was used in the longer-last-ing Eastern Roman Empire and was ancestral to thescripts of eastern Europe and Russia.

OGHAM

Ogham, a script inspired by alphabetic writing butderived from the use of tally sticks, evolved inBritain in the early centuries A.D. It was inscribed onstones and probably wooden wands, using the side ofthe object as a center line. The consonantal signsconsisted of one to five lines arranged perpendicularor at an oblique angle to the center line, on one orother or both sides, and one to five short lines ordots placed on the line represented the vowels.

OtherSymbols such as spirals and crosses found on potteryand other objects from the later Neolithic Balkans,including three tablets from the Vinca settlement ofTartaria, are thought by some scholars to represent anearly script. The symbols are likely to have had somesignificance, perhaps indicating ownership, but, likesymbols in many other places and periods, do nothave the features of a fully fledged writing system.

LITERATURE

TextsPre-classical texts from Europe are mainly very shortinscriptions, the majority on stone or metal, includ-

ing epitaphs and legends on coins. The most exten-sive texts are a 200-word Celtiberian inscriptionfrom Botoritta near Saragossa in Spain, probably aland contract, another inscription from this site, andthe five-year calendar from Coligny in France. Findsfrom settlements in central Europe show that Celticpeople also wrote on bone tablets covered with wax,using bone or metal styli, and the use of papyrus inBritish coin molds suggests that papyrus was alsoimported into transalpine Europe as a writingmedium. Around and after the Roman conquest textsalso included dedications on altars and other votiveofferings, and tablets and strips of lead bearingcurses, prayers, and other magico-religious texts.

Oral TraditionsThe oral literature of the post-Roman Celtic, Ger-mani, and Nordic societies have many similar storiesof gods and heroes, suggesting the existence in pre-history of shared traditions. These include commonthemes such as shape-shifting, particularly theassumption by deities and magicians of bird and ani-mal forms; heroic quests; feuds, raids, and armedconflicts between rival warrior bands, champions, orkingdoms; and struggles between mortals and super-natural beings. Nonhuman races, such as dwarfs,fairies, and elves, and monsters that assumed fairanimal or human form, such as the demonic kelpieof Scottish legend, are also common participants inthese myths and legends. Although these traditionsdo not allow detailed reconstructions of Europeanprehistoric oral literature, they give some impres-sion of the tales likely to have been told or sung byprehistoric bards and storytellers.

The vernacular literature of Ireland gives aglimpse of the Celtic world in the early centuriesA.D. Made up of songs, tales, and poems transmittedorally, they were written down by Christian monksfrom the fifth century A.D. onward. Now known asthe Ulster Cycle, they centered on the prose epicTáin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley). Thisrecounts the warrior deeds of the hero Cú Chulainn,fostered at the court of his uncle Conchobar, leg-endary king of Ulster. The Mabinogion, a Welsh col-lection of prose tales, although mainly medieval, alsodraws on earlier Celtic tradition.


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Druidic EducationClassical authors such as Caesar described the roleof Druids in Celtic education in Britain and Gaul.Young noblemen came in large numbers to studywith the Druids, who themselves underwent a 20-year training during which they acquired knowledgeof astronomy and calendrics, natural science, medi-cine, law, tribal history and traditions, philosophy,and literature, as well as religious lore and ritual.Although educated Celts used writing in their every-day life, it was thought improper to commit Druidicknowledge to writing, so all Druidic teaching wasconducted orally. Students were expected to committo memory great quantities of information in theform of poetry. The first-century A.D. author Pom-ponius Mela recorded that the Druids taught insecluded and remote locations, perhaps in responseto Roman persecution; in contrast, Tacitus referredto a Celtic school within the oppidum of Bibracte,which was superseded in 122 B.C. by a Roman schoolin the nearby new town of Autun.

VISUAL ARTS

Prehistoric art was executed in many media. Themagnificent art of the Upper Palaeolithic periodincluded figurines, particularly of women, powerfulcave paintings and rock engravings of bulls, horses,and other animals, and exquisite carvings on bone,ivory, and antler artifacts such as spearthrowers. Laterpaintings are rare. Decorated ceramic, stone, bone,and antler objects, and metalwork comprise most ofthe extant art of prehistoric Europe; few textiles andobjects of leather and wood survive. A considerableproportion of prehistoric European art is abstract,often using geometric patterns. Many designs incor-porate symbols, ranging from abstract elements suchas spirals, through symbols such as circles and wheelsrepresenting the sun disc, to naturalistic elementssuch as ducks and plants. Figurative art is much lesscommon; sometimes the human form is minimallyrepresented by features such as eyes, breasts, and sig-nificant dress and equipment; often there is a concen-tration on the head at the expense of the rest of the

body; and complete figures are rare except in rock artand occasional statues in bronze or stone. The mostcommon medium using the human form is the pot-tery figurine, but here also a few features were oftenrepresented rather than the whole. Animals are com-mon in rock art and occasionally appear as sculpturesand figurines. Unlike the classical world, where pot-tery was often decorated with naturalistic scenes, theceramics of prehistoric Europe rarely had figurativedecoration. One exception, Iron Age vessels fromSopron in Hungary, shows people spinning, weaving,riding, and playing music, but even here the figuresare shown as triangles with limbs, woven into panelsof geometric decoration.

Mesolithic ArtThe early postglacial inhabitants of Europe pro-duced a number of fine carvings, including wooden


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10.1 An intricately carved stone ball from Towie,Aberdeenshire, Scotland, dated around 2500 B.C.These enigmatic objects were confined to northeastmainland Scotland and Orkney. (Drawing byAudrey McIntosh, from material in the NationalMuseums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

elk’s heads from Oleneostrovski Mogilnik, amberfigurines from Scandinavian sites in the north, andfish-faced stone sculptures from Lepenski Vir in thesouth. Rock paintings were executed in easternIberia. Many Mesolithic objects bore geometricdesigns, such as the elaborately decorated antlerfrom Sjöholmen in Sweden, which had two fishwoven into an intricate geometric pattern, and thepaddles from Tybrind Vig in Denmark, on whichfine carved patterns were inlaid with a brown sub-stance. A number of pebbles painted with lines anddots were found at Mas d’Azil in France and othersites in western Europe; these undoubtedly hadsome more than decorative significance, perhapsbeing used in calendrics.

Sculpture and FigurinesSculptures and figurines of stone, bronze, pottery,and occasionally other materials, were made invarious parts of Europe; in the southeast they werecommon in most periods, but in other areas theyappeared only in certain cultures. Sculptures

included the huge obese statues of people (perhapswomen) in ribbed skirts placed in the Maltese tem-ples; the bronze model cult vehicles from BronzeAge transalpine Europe; and Iron Age stone stat-ues such as the male figures erected on the summitof Hallstatt period barrows, the well-equippedwarriors guarding the entrance to settlements inGalicia, and the landscape figures of bulls, boars,and animal heads in western Iberia. Also from IronAge Iberia come a number of limestone sculpturesof men and women with detailed depiction ofclothing and equipment; these show Phoenicianand Greek influences. Naturalistic sculpturesbecame common elsewhere in Celtic Europe inthe last centuries B.C., similarly reflecting classicalinfluences.

POTTERY FIGURINES

Pottery figurines of people and less frequently ani-mals were made in Southeast and eastern Europefrom the Neolithic period onward. Often these wereschematic, having a head, generally with eyes andoften with a nose, and a sticklike body on which afew features were modeled such as jewelry, a phallus,or breasts and a pubic triangle, although many weresexless. Others showed more detail, including limbs,for example, and sometimes lines suggesting cloth-ing. A series of later Bronze Age figurines from theIron Gates region of the Danube took the form of arounded upper body incorporating rudimentaryarms, a neck, and sometimes a head, and a bell-shaped skirt, covered in geometric designs arrangedto give some impression of patterned clothing, jew-elry, hair, and facial features. More naturalistic werethe fine seated figurines of the Hamangia culture offifth millennium Romania, and the Aegean regionalso made more naturalistic figures, including thelovely Cycladic marble sculptures of the EarlyBronze Age. At the other extreme pots with paintedor modeled human features, generally faces, areknown from the Balkans.

SARDINIAN BRONZES

A number of bronze figurines are known from LateBronze Age Sardinia. These mainly depicted well-armed warriors clad in tunics, but also other malefigures and occasionally women. Made by cire perdue


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10.2 A pottery bowl from a Danish megalithictomb. Pottery gave almost infinite scope for varia-tions in design, representing many techniques.(Worsaae, J. J. A. The Industrial Arts of Denmark.London: Chapman and Hall, 1882)

casting, the figures are long and thin but otherwisenaturalistic, with carefully modeled details such asfaces, decoration on clothing, and features ofweapons and equipment.

Reliefs and EngravingsObjects with relief decoration, such as stelae, werecreated in many parts of Europe from the fourthmillennium onward. These included the schistplaques associated with Iberian megaliths, whichbear geometric designs suggesting human features,and Chalcolithic statue menhirs in the Mediter-ranean and Atlantic Europe, which were oftencarved with necklaces, belts, weapons, and humanfaces, schematically representing people. From thesecond millennium funerary stelae were produced inIberia, engraved with weapons, and by the Iron Agealso a shield, jewelry, a mirror, a chariot, and a war-rior shown as a stick figure.

MEGALITHIC ART

Engravings on many megalithic monuments fea-tured geometric motifs such as spirals, concentricarcs and rectangles, zigzags, lozenges, and cupmarks. Carvings on these monuments also includeda small but widespread repertoire of symbols, pri-marily axes and daggers.

SITULA ART

Iron Age beaten bronze buckets (situlae) fromnorthern Italy and the area around the head of theAdriatic provide a rare example of a figurative artstyle. This was strongly influenced by orientalstyles transmitted via the Etruscans. The punchedand incised decoration was arranged in friezes;early examples, from the seventh century, showedgrazing animals; later ones scenes from life such asfighting, sport, processions, sexual activity, andfeasting, as well as mythical beasts. This decora-tion was also applied to other objects such as lids,belt plates, and plaques. A fourth-century scabbardfrom Hallstatt bears a design of two figures hold-ing a wheel; by this time, however, the style was indecline.


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10.3 A gold lunula from Auchentaggart, Scotland,and a detail of its finely incised geometric decora-tion. Such objects are often shown on depictions ofpeople or gods, such as statue menhirs. (Drawing byAudrey McIntosh, from material in the NationalMuseums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

Rock Paintings andEngravingsRock paintings and engravings are a European tra-dition going back into Palaeolithic times. In thepostglacial period the majority of rock art waslocated in Galicia and the Levante region of Spain,Val Camonica and Mount Bego in the Alps, north-ern Scandinavia, particularly the Bohuslän regionof Sweden, and Britain. In addition, rock art is scat-tered across many other regions, including theMediterranean, and Southeast and central Europe.Many of the eastern Spanish rock paintings datefrom the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods; some ofthe Scandinavian engravings belong to laterMesolithic and Neolithic times, but the majorityare from the Bronze Age; engravings in the Alpsrange from Mesolithic to medieval times. The

engraved designs were mainly executed by grindingand pecking.

Much of the rock art of eastern Spain, the Alps,and Scandinavia is figurative. The eastern Spanishpaintings, executed in red, black, and brown, showboth individuals engaging in activities such as col-lecting honey, and large groups fighting, hunting, ordancing.

Symbols such as the sun disc were common inBronze Age art, and animals were frequently shownin all periods. The main themes of Bronze AgeScandinavian rock art were people, especially war-riors, boats, vehicles, weapons, plowing scenes, andtrees. In the same tradition are scenes and motifsengraved on slabs in a few Scandinavian burialmounds. Earlier art in Scandinavia included huntingscenes and perhaps processions and dances.

Many of the Alpine engravings show scenes fromdaily life, such as hunting, plowing, weaving andother domestic chores, houses and settlements, aswell as weapons, vehicles, and many animals. Therewere also many symbols and geometric patterns.Rock art in Galicia, western Ireland, Scotland, andnortheast England, probably dating from the BronzeAge, was mainly abstract, including many enigmaticcup marks, rounded holes pecked into the surface ofrock outcrops and boulders, often surrounded byone or several rings. These were also common inScandinavia. As well as such abstract designs, Gali-cian art included animals, particularly stags, andweapons.

Celtic ArtThe La Tène period saw the flowering of what isknown as Celtic art, expressed in many media andparticularly in metalwork, including vessels such asjugs and cauldrons, jewelry, horse-harness and char-iot fittings, scabbards, and parade armor such as hel-mets and shields. This art had its roots in the skilledcraftsmanship and exuberant decorative techniquesof the Bronze Age and earlier Iron Age, which com-bined geometric and abstract designs with the use ofsymbols such as ducks and the sun disc. In the sixthcentury imported pottery and bronze vessels intro-duced transalpine Europe to the repertoire of Greekand Etruscan decorative motifs, such as lotus flowers


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10.4 A bucket (situla) of beaten sheet bronze, elab-orately decorated with repoussé designs, principallyfeaturing the sun disc and ducks’ heads, typicalLate Bronze Age motifs (Worsaae, J. J. A. TheIndustrial Arts of Denmark. London: Chapman andHall, 1882)

and palmettes and human faces, as well as designs ofsinuously distorted and sometimes imaginary ani-mals derived ultimately from the steppe and theNear East, such as griffins and sphinxes. Celticartists in the fifth and fourth centuries adaptedthese, weaving them into their own traditionaldesigns. Natural elements were fantastically trans-formed, producing grotesque human heads withpopping eyes, animal heads, and elaborate, geomet-

rically arranged floral patterns (Early Style). Thesewere applied to luxury objects such as jewelry, swordscabbards, and metal and ceramic tableware. Metal-work was decorated with inlays of glass and coral.Intricate patterns were laid out precisely using com-passes, and included openwork metal sheets used toembellish objects in other materials, such as thewooden bowl overlaid by openwork gold decorationfrom Schwarzenbach in Germany.

From the late fourth century the designs becamemore curvilinear, with complex interwoven patternsof plant elements such as tendrils and leaves, andbarely recognizable animal elements, particularlyhuman, bird, and animal heads, sometimes leadinginto sinuous bodies (Waldalgesheim Style). Manymotifs were stylized to the point of geometricabstraction. These included fibulae with bows in theform of animals (mask brooches), made in southernGermany and western Austria. In some cases designson pottery were built up of motifs applied from pre-cut stamps.

In the third century curvilinear geometricdesigns were engraved on many iron scabbards, stillusing plant motifs and abstract patterns (SwordStyle). Often these created an asymmetric decorativepanel. Many pieces of jewelry, such as armlets, andbronze vessels were embellished with substantialthree-dimensional elements such as knobs, bosses,and highly stylized and often grotesque heads ofbirds, animals, and humans (Plastic Style).

Insular artistic designs developed in Britain. Mir-rors and other objects were engraved with elaborategeometric compass-drawn designs of swirling curvesand circles filled with cross-hatching (Mirror Style).Later Celts carried both technical expertise anddesign intricacy to even greater heights in the paganand Christian art of the post-Roman period.

PERFORMING ARTS

Very little evidence survives of the music and dancethat were undoubtedly part of life in prehistoricEurope. Rock art depicts people dancing and playinginstruments, and there are a few other representations.


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10.5 A bronze flagon from Basse-Yutz, Lorraine,France, one of a matching pair from a rich late-fifth-century grave. While the form was inspiredby Etruscan examples, the elaborate decoration,including coral and red glass inlay, human heads,and three-dimensional figures (a pack of houndschasing a duck) is purely Celtic. (TopFoto.co.uk ©The British Museum/HIP. Photographer:Unknown)

Some classical sources commented on the practices ofthe Celts and other cultures, and very occasionallyinstruments themselves have been found. Like thebarbarian inhabitants of later Europe, the people ofthe Iron Age and probably earlier were entertainedand educated with songs and tales from their own tra-ditions, performed by bards and storytellers to theaccompaniment of music.

MusicMammoth bones from the Palaeolithic site ofMezin in Russia may have been used as drums, rat-tles, and even perhaps like a xylophone. A numberof Gravettian bird-bone pipes with finger holeswere found in a cave at Isturitz in France and partof an earlier Mousterian object, which might havebeen a pipe in Yugoslavia, made on a bear femur.Bone flutes were also found in the Neolithic settle-ment of Anza in the Balkans. The classical author

Diodorus wrote that the Celts had bards who sangtheir poetry to the accompaniment of instrumentsresembling lyres; some depictions of these areknown, for example, on an Iron Age pot fromSopron in Hungary. One of the marble figurinesfrom the third-millennium Cyclades is also playinga lyre while another plays a pipe.

Lurer and carnyxes are shown in rock art. Thelur, a long curved tube with a disc end, was probablyused in religious ceremonies. Small jingles werehung from the back of the disc and beside themouthpiece, which resembled that of a moderntrombone. Lurer were probably played in pairs,since many have been found in pairs that were tunedtogether. In Ireland smaller horns of bronze seemlikely to have been modeled on those of the aurochs(wild cattle); they were probably not blown but sunginto. The carnyx was the Celtic war trumpet, madeof bronze, wood, or horn, with a long straight tubeand a bell end in the form of an animal’s head, espe-cially that of a wild boar; it made a loud and pene-trating noise.

READING

European LanguagesDalby 1998, Crystal 1987: general; Mallory 1989,Renfrew 1987: Indo-European languages; Mallory1989, Robinson 2002: non-Indo-European lan-guages; Fitton 2002, Chadwick 1987, Gordon 2000:Aegean languages; Lenerz-de Wilde 1995: Iberia;Frey 1995, Barker and Rasmussen 1998, Bonfante1990: Italy; Wells 2002, Cunliffe 2001a, Collis 2003:Celtic languages; Carver 1999, Foster 1996: Pictish.

WritingCoulmas 1996, Robinson 1995, 2002: general;Chadwick 1987, Fitton 2002: Aegean scripts; Healey1990: alphabet; Frey 1995, Barker and Rasmussen1998, Bonfante 1990: Italy; Lenerz-de Wilde 1995:Iberia; Kruta 1991, Piggott 1975: Celtic writing.


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10.6 A snake-headed bronze armlet from CulbinSands, Scotland, dated to the early centuries A.D.The use of animal motifs was typical of Celtic art.(Drawing by Audrey McIntosh, from material inthe National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh)

LiteratureCunliffe 1997, Kruta 2004: texts; James 1993, MacCana 1995, Davies 1995: vernacular literature; Green1997, Piggott 1975: role of Druids in education.

Visual ArtsSandars 1985, Milisauskas, ed. 2002, Cunliffe, ed.1994: general; Mithen 1994, 2003, Bradley 1998:Mesolithic art; Bradley 1997, Harding 2000,Guilaine and Zammit 2005, Anati 1999, Capelle1999, Scarre 1998: rock art; Anati 1965: Val Camon-

ica; Cunliffe 2001a, Shee Twohig 1981: megalithicart; Whittle 1996, Bailey 2000, Perles 2001, Todor-ova 1999, Marthari 1999, Gimbutas 1956, 1991: fig-urines; Lenerz-de Wilde 1995, Jorge 1999b, DeMarinis 1999, Kristiansen 1998: reliefs and stelae;Jacobsthal 1944, Megaw and Megaw 1989, 1995,Filip 1976, James 1993, Wells 2002: Celtic art; Col-lis 1984a: situla art.

Performing ArtsMcIntosh and Scarre 1998, Green 1997, Milisauskased. 2002, Fagan, ed. 2004: music.


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10.7 An elaborately decorated bronze horn found in a bog at Wismar, Mecklenburg (Worsaae, J. J. A. TheIndustrial Arts of Denmark. London: Chapman and Hall, 1882)

SOCIETY AND LIFE

11

SOCIAL ANDPOLITICALORGANIZATION

Various sources are used to gain an idea of socialorganization in prehistoric Europe, including statusdifferentials manifest in burial practices, gravegoods, and other artifacts; the existence of monu-ments whose construction implies the organizationof communal endeavor; trading patterns; and settle-ment size. In most prehistoric European settle-ments, however, there is little evidence of socialdifferentiation being manifest in the size or com-plexity of individual houses. Classical texts and latervernacular literature shed some light on later IronAge society, and modern ethnography also offerssome insights into social organization.

The Evolution of SocialHierarchyThe evidence suggests that earlier Mesolithic com-munities were largely egalitarian, with some divisionof responsibilities and role differences probablybeing made on the basis of age and gender. At Ved-baek, for instance, men were generally buried withstone blades and bone daggers and women withornaments. Other status differentials, however, seemto have been developing within many Late Meso-lithic communities in northern and western Europe.Individual burials in cemeteries were furnished withdiffering quantities of goods such as beads, otherjewelry, figurines, and tools; some individuals hadnone, others many, with some well-endowed burialsbeing those of children, for example at Zvejnieki inLatvia. In many cases, however, the best furnishedgraves were those of young men in their prime (forexample, at Oleneostrovski Mogalnik in Russia),suggesting that physical might conferred status. Inaddition, some individuals seem to have been hon-ored for other reasons. For example, at Oleneostro-vski Mogalnik four individuals were buried in an

upright position, with many grave goods: they mayhave been shamans. Cemeteries with differing prac-tices and the distribution of certain styles of artifactsuggest that these Mesolithic communities were alsodivided into clans.

Europe’s early farmers seem to have been smallegalitarian groups. In the eastern part of the conti-nent cemeteries contained burials with similar gravegoods or ones differentiated by age and gender. Inthe west megalithic tombs reflect a society in whichmembership of the community was emphasized andindividual identity suppressed in death. The erec-tion of monuments such as the megalithic tombsimplies the ability of these communities to bringtogether large work parties, but ethnographic analo-gies suggest that these were assembled by calling in


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11.1 One of the rich graves in the Chalcolithiccemetery at Varna in Bulgaria (Courtesy ofAncient Art & Architecture Collection. ©2004AAAC /TopFoto.co.uk)

help from kin and favors from neighbors on a recip-rocal basis, with a feast rewarding the participantson completion of the construction work.

Widespread changes took place in the fourth andthird millennia, beginning in the southeast. Grow-ing differentials appeared in grave goods, with someindividuals being buried with none while a few had alarge number, often made from imported prestigematerials. In the west communal burial practicesgave way to single graves in which the deceased wasfor the first time treated as an individual. In partsocial inequality may have been related to the grow-ing importance of land differentials, control overbetter land giving some members of the communitymore power or economic prosperity. Competitionamong communities may also have been a catalyst tothe development of social hierarchy, with those lead-ers able to organize the manpower and cooperativeeffort to construct ever more impressive monuments(such as Stonehenge and other henges and stone cir-cles, or the Maltese temples) growing in authorityand enabling their community to outshine theirneighbors. Leaders could also enhance their ownand their community’s prestige by controlling theextraction of minerals or successfully manipulatingtrade to obtain prestige materials such as fine flint,metal, and amber. The accumulation of large herdsof cattle, often by raiding, also increased the statusof leading individuals. Other leaders in this periodmay have been bullies capable of organizing andusing force to coerce other members of society.

By the second millennium it is thought thatranked societies had emerged in many parts ofEurope, reflected particularly in burials but also inthe ostentatious deposition of hoards of valuableobjects. Social hierarchy was not generally markedby differentials in housing; for instance, in the settle-ment of Biskupin, in the early first millennium,there were 120 houses of similar size. The settle-ment, however, had some occupational divisions. Afishermen’s quarter lay near the center of the settle-ment, with fishing gear stored in their outer rooms.

By the mid-first millennium there was also evi-dence of some settlement hierarchy, with the ruralpopulation in hamlets and farmsteads being tribu-tary to and dependent upon hillforts and otherlarger settlements that housed the local leader andhis entourage. Hierarchical societies were found in

many regions of Europe, status differences stillbeing most clearly visible in burials. For instance,Thracian kings were buried in tholoi with sacrificedwives or servants and magnificent gold and silvervessels, jewelry, and armor; the pastoral warriornobility had rock-cut tombs or burials under bar-rows and were accompanied by smaller quantitiesof fine objects; and the common people, who were

S O C I E T Y A N D L I F E

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11.2 Two Danish flint axes of exceptional size andquality, one chipped, the other polished. Fine stoneaxes like these were status symbols in the Neolithicperiod. (Worsaae, J. J. A. The Industrial Arts of Den-mark. London: Chapman and Hall, 1882)

farmers and artisans, were cremated and theirashes buried in flat cemeteries. Although by thisperiod rank was dependent on birth, status withinone’s social station was dependent upon personalachievement.

Celtic Social Organization

CHIEFDOMS

Traditional Celtic and Germanic societies wereruled by chiefs who maintained an entourage ofnobles and other supporters, including artisans andbards, furnishing them with meat and drink andrewarding them for particular services or militaryprowess with gifts such as jewelry, dogs and horses,and booty from raids. Nobles owned horses and afull panoply of weapons, including a sword. Chiefsand war leaders were drawn from their ranks, gain-ing power from the size of the following they wereable to attract and maintain. Their entourage wouldbe drawn from their kin in the first instance but alsoincluded client nobles from other lineages. Thechief’s wealth came from a variety of sources, includ-ing land revenues, livestock, warfare and raiding,trade, and clientage. Spiritual power was wielded bythe religious authorities: in Gaul and Britain theDruids. These were recruited from the nobility andmight also exercise temporal power: For example,Diviciacus, the leader of the Gallic tribe of the Aeduiat the time of Caesar, was a Druid.

Below the nobles in status were the artisans andother specialists, many of whom were part of thechief’s entourage. Farmers, the backbone of society,were answerable either to nobles or directly to theirchief, providing goods and produce in return for pro-tection and patronage. In later Irish society clients ofnobles and chiefs undertook a contract whereby theywere given cattle in return for service in war andpeace and a return on the cattle at a rate that could beas high as one-third of the number in the originalgrant, over a three-year period. A similar systemseems to have operated in pre-Roman times.

People of different ranks each had their “honor-price,” the amount that they were entitled to receivein the event of injury or death at the hands ofanother. This specified their status in many aspects

of life: For example, in the case of litigation an indi-vidual’s honor-price determined the value placedupon his testimony.

Chiefs controlled small tribes or tribal groups.Many of these were united into larger tribes under atribal leader or king, and, in southern Gaul at least,these tribes often became clients of a major tribe; inthe time of Caesar the Sequani and the Aedui heldthis dominant position, competing with each otherto attract the allegiance of lesser tribes, the Sequaniwith German military support, the Aedui backed bythe Romans. Greek descriptions of the society ofthe Galatians, Celtic immigrants into Asia Minor,show that the Galatian state was ruled by a councildrawn from all the smaller chiefdoms within thestate, who met in a grove (Drunemeton) to makedecisions of state.

MAGISTRATES

Early classical writings refer to the chiefs and kingsof a number of tribes, and this form of organizationwas still in place in many areas, including Britain andGermany, in later times. By the first century B.C.,however, some regions adjacent to the Romanprovinces had developed an oligarchic system ofgovernment. Among the Helvetii, magistrates werechosen annually from among the leading noblemen.Orgetorix, the wealthiest of these, attempted in 60B.C. to subvert the system and was accused of con-spiring to become king, a capital offense. The size ofhis personal following, however, some 10,000 peo-ple, enabled him to resist arrest, but he died mysteri-ously soon after. The Aedui elected a magistrate, theVergobret, who for a year held the power of life anddeath within the tribe but operated within certainrestrictions, including a prohibition on leaving thetribal territory during his magistracy. All membersof the magistrate’s family were debarred from thecouncil of nobles who worked with him. An assem-bly of all free tribesmen met on occasion to decidethe most serious issues such as declaring war. InCaesar’s day two individuals rose to prominenceamong the Aedui. Dumnorix, magistrate for the year60 B.C., used his popularity and power to monopo-lize the contract for collecting taxes and river dues,which was annually auctioned, thus gaining controlof enormous funds. His brother Diviciacus led the


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rival faction and gained the upper hand by allyinghimself with the Romans; Dumnorix was eventuallycaptured and executed by the Romans.

CRIME ANDPUNISHMENT

Theft probably occurred only rarely in small com-munities where everyone knew one another. Thedevelopment of oppida in the last centuries B.C.marks a change, the development of communitiesthat were not only large enough to contain peoplewho were unknown to one another but also cos-mopolitan, housing unrelated people from a varietyof different sources. Security now became an issue:numerous keys (something not previously known)were found in the oppidum of Manching, implyingboth wealth and suspicion of the neighbors, a reflec-tion of the change from kin-based social relationshipsto the anonymity and independence of individuals inurban situations.

Traditional societies probably had their share ofother crimes, however, including offenses against thesocial norms such as incest and adultery, infringe-ments of religious strictures, and antisocial behaviorsuch as murder, as well as imagined crimes such aswitchcraft when ill fortune struck individuals or com-munities. The Roman author Strabo noted that obe-sity was punished among the Gauls. Although there islimited information on crime and punishment in pre-historic Europe, the discovery of people who hadbeen killed prompts speculation. For example, thewoman found pinned down in a bog at Juthe Fen inDenmark may have been a criminal who was exe-cuted, a witch placed under restraint after her deathto prevent her harming the community, or one of thenumerous sacrificial victims deposited in bogs. Classi-cal sources state that some at least of the Iron Age sac-rificial victims were condemned criminals who weresaved up, often for years, until required for a sacrifice.

A grave in the Iron Age cemetery of Garton Slackin Yorkshire, England, contained the bodies of ayoung man and a woman around age 30, apparently

executed together, perhaps for adultery. They wereplaced with their arms pinned together by a stake andwere probably buried alive. A fetus was found belowthe woman’s pelvis. Tacitus, however, describing Ger-manic practices, wrote that adulterous women werepunished by having their hair cut, being strippednaked and beaten publicly, but not executed.

THE ORGANIZATIONOF INDUSTRY

In the Mesolithic period and for most of theNeolithic period, artifacts were produced by mem-bers of the community, but specialization began todevelop alongside the growth of status differentialsin the Late Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods andbecame well developed in the later Iron Age, whenmany products became quite standardized. Somecrafts were practiced in the home, with every house-hold probably meeting their own requirements;these included spinning and weaving, making bas-kets and simple pottery, carving wooden tools, knap-ping flints, and working leather, bone, and antler.Some crafts were technologically within the scope ofeveryone but required collective input: buildinghouses, for example.

An interesting insight into the organization ofearly industry comes from the Lengyel settlement ofBrzesc Kujawski in Poland. Here the manufacture ofantler axes was undertaken in a single house andapparently away from prying eyes. Since such axeswere a typical product of the earlier Mesolithicinhabitants of the region and their TRB descen-dants, it has been suggested that this was the house-hold of an “outsider” TRB craftsman.

More elaborate products and ones that requiredparticular skills or equipment were manufactured byspecialists, particularly in later periods: For example,fine wares such as the wheel-turned ceramics of thelater Iron Age were created by master potters.Objects required by the elite were made in the cen-ters where the leaders lived, by artisans who wereprobably part of their entourage. For example,


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craftsmen based in the Bronze Age regional centersof the Carpathian basin, such as Malé Kosihy, carvedthe decorated bone cheekpieces for the horsesowned by the elite; others produced large quantitiesof fine textiles that were probably prestige goods.Another example is the goldsmith who worked forthe Wessex chieftains, whose handiwork has beenidentified in a number of Wessex elite burials. Thelater Iron Age saw the concentration of many craftspecialists in the emerging oppida and towns, wherethey may have produced goods for sale as well as fortheir aristocratic patrons.

Small-scale mining and metal production wasoften undertaken by small groups who saw the workthrough from mining to metal. Early metal miningwas an occasional rather than continuous activity inmany areas. This is shown by the large numbers ofdiscarded hammerstones found at many mines; forexample, at Cwmystwyth in Wales, where the ham-merstones came from around 20 miles (30 kilome-tres away), the numbers show that these werebrought by the miners on each visit and abandonedhere when the mining trip was complete. Many ofthe larger mines and associated centers of produc-tion, however, such as those of the Mitterberg, prob-ably engaged hundreds of people working full-timeon different tasks, such as winning the ore, hauling itto the surface, felling timber and making charcoal,and smelting. Smiths who used the metal to createartifacts probably worked mainly in settlementsfrom which their products were traded, but somewere itinerant workers. Rich burials containing met-alworking tools imply that, in the Early Bronze Ageat least, smiths enjoyed considerable social status,and Irish literature indicates that they still did so inearly historical times.

Stone working similarly could involve a networkof people who quarried the stone or flint; roughedout the tools from the raw material; traded orexchanged the roughouts; and finished the tools.Many flint mining sites were visited periodically,probably seasonally by groups who lived elsewherefor most of the year. Although obtaining the stonemust have been a specialism or seasonal activity ofcertain communities or individuals, the technologyfor shaping and finishing stone tools was probablycommon to most (men), so this industry was notfully specialized. Specialization probably also

increased through time, as communities becamelarger and social organization more complex, thoughthis was no means a linear progression.

GENDER

Gender distinctions are often shown in burial rites,both in the layout of the body in the grave and in thegrave goods placed with the body. For example,women in Lengyel and Tiszapolgár cemeteries wereplaced on their left side and men on their right. Menwere often buried with hunting tools or weapons,such as arrows, daggers, and knives, while jewelrywas often placed with women, though these associa-tions were by no means universal.

The Division of Labor

PROVIDING FOOD

In hunter-gatherer societies some division of labor isusual, with men hunting larger animals, sea fishingand catching sea mammals, and other activities requir-ing strength, prolonged absence from home, or dan-ger, while women, accompanied and assisted bychildren, gather plants, catch small game, collect shell-fish, and obtain other foods within walking distance ofthe settlement. Men also gather these foods, and men,women, and children eat as they gather; women differfrom men in also bringing home gathered food to feedthe rest of the community such as the elderly and dis-abled. The relevant contribution of men and womento the food supply depends to some extent on lati-tude—meat caught by men being a major part of thediet in cold regions, whereas in the Tropics the food-stuffs collected by women provide the bulk of the diet.During the cold periods of the Palaeolithic and in theextreme north, when it was occupied, it is likely thatmen were significant providers, but during warmerepisodes and in the postglacial period Europe’shunter-gatherers are likely to have foraged much oftheir food for themselves, supplemented on a dailybasis by the food obtained by women and less regu-larly by game and fish provided by men. Ethnography


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also suggests that men would butcher the game theycaught but that other food preparation would be theresponsibility of women.

Although there is no way of determining the divi-sion of labor in early European farming communi-ties, ethnographic and historical studies indicate thatmost of the work was done by women, includingsome ground preparation, sowing, hoeing, weeding,and harvesting, with tasks requiring greater strength,such as forest clearance, being the province of men.The introduction of the plow shifted much of theresponsibility for cultivation to men. While womencontinued to be involved with many agriculturalactivities, it is likely that the beginning of plow agri-culture and the use of animal transport and tractionintroduced a division in labor, men working the fieldsand managing draft animals and women tending veg-etable plots and farmyard animals, with the wholefamily playing a part in major tasks such as harvest-ing. Pastoralism, on ethnographic analogy, also gavemen a greater role in food production.

DOMESTIC WORK

Traditionally, work within the home has been theresponsibility of women. This included food prepara-tion, cooking, and cleaning. While mothers probablygenerally kept their babies with them while theyworked, the care of small children probably devolvedmainly on grandmothers and other women no longerable to undertake demanding physical work.

The production of tools and equipment wasshared between men and women. Domestic potterywas generally made by women, and stone tools andweapons and wooden objects probably generally bymen. Women spun thread, wove cloth, and preparedskins. A number of Bronze Age female graves at Sin-gen contained awls used for working leather. Rarerepresentations of people at work in prehistoricEuropean art show women spinning and weaving.The ubiquity of surviving spindle whorls demon-strates how widespread was the practice of spinning,which must have occupied many hours of mostwomen’s time, often performed while doing otherthings such as minding sheep or children.

House construction was a joint activity, menundertaking the heavy work involved in erecting theframework of wood or stone and women performing

many of the other tasks such as cutting straw, mixingand applying daub, and preparing other materials.

The development of metallurgy may have seen ashift in gender relations: men would have obtainedmetal ores and smelted and worked metals, and fromthis developed other more specialized industrialactivities such as the manufacture of jewelry andweapons, the production of glass, and so on.

PowerCeltic women enjoyed greater freedom and powerthan their classical counterparts. The existence of twoBritish Celtic queens who ruled in their own right,Boudicca and Cartimandua, demonstrates that author-ity was not confined to men. Vernacular literatureshows this to have been an established tradition inCeltic society also in later times, at least in Britain.

EVERYDAY LIFE

Family Life

MARRIAGE AND SEXUAL MORES

Most traditional societies have rules or customs thatdetermine the range of acceptable marriage partners.Acceptance of incest is rare, though many societiespermit or encourage marriage between certain moredistant relations such as cousins or uncles and nieces.Most have some pattern of exogamy, taking marriagepartners from neighboring or more distant commu-nities rather than from their own, a survival mecha-nism presumably developed in the remote past.Exogamy became less essential as communities grewin size and the pool of available partners increased.Marriage was generally still within a kin group,which was often also an occupational group. In hier-archical societies groups drew marriage partnersfrom among those of their own rank. Classical litera-ture refers to dynastic marriages within the nobilityof Celtic society, political ties between the leadingmen of Celtic and other tribes being forged and


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cemented by intermarriage. For example, around 60B.C., when the kingdom of Noricum was threatenedby an alliance between the Celtic Boii and its neigh-bors, the Helvetii, the Norican king married his sis-ter to Ariovistus, chief of the Suebi, a powerfulGermanic tribe. Ariovistus was also allied to theSequani, enemies of the Aedui, two leading Gallictribes that were at that time engaged in a powerstruggle; a leading member of the Helvetian nobility,Orgetorix, forged an alliance with the Aedui by mar-rying his daughter to one of their chiefs, Dumnorix.

Marriage patterns may be one way to shed lighton prehistoric kinship organization. The work is stillin its infancy, but DNA studies and other physical orchemical analyses of bones have the potential totrack the movement of individuals from birthplaceor childhood home to later residence or place ofdeath. Stable isotope analysis of bones from theMesolithic cemeteries of Hoëdic and Téviec showsthat women came from areas inland to marry themen of these coastal communities.

Intermarriage may have been one of the mecha-nisms involved in the transition from hunting andgathering to farming, marriage partners beingexchanged, for example, between LBK and Ertebøllecommunities. Often attempts have been made totrace marriage patterns by looking for nonlocal itemsof material culture, such as tools or pieces of jewelry,that might have been brought into the community bya person from another community at the time of theirmarriage. Where these have been identified, the vastmajority are artifacts associated with women, indicat-ing that in general in prehistoric Europe it was girlswho moved into the households of their husbandsrather than men into those of their wives. A numberof Bronze Age women’s burials in northern Europecontained complete sets of ornaments characteristicof other areas, a north German set in a grave on theDanish island of Zealand, for example, and a numberof north German graves with Scandinavian ornamentsets: It is suggested these women were buried in thejewelry that they brought with them when theymoved to their final home as brides.

Vernacular literature refers to three grades of wifein Irish law. According to Caesar, in Gallic law thebride’s family contributed a dowry, which wasmatched by a bride-price from the groom’s family.The combined sum was inherited by one partner on

the death of the other. The Romans were shocked bythe freedom enjoyed by Celtic women, although Cae-sar commented that husbands had the power of life ordeath over both their wives and their children. Classi-cal accounts perhaps misinterpreted Celtic sexualpractices, which, they said, included wives beingshared among the 10 or 12 men of an extended family,and girls inviting intercourse, taking offense if theiroffer was refused. Vernacular literature indicates thatthe rules of society permitted sexual activity outsidemarriage for friendship or profit.

CHILDREN

Irish vernacular literature describes the practice ofsending children to foster parents, preferably of ahigher status to their own parents, from age seven to14 (marriageable age) in the case of girls and 17(military age) in the case of boys. This may also havebeen a Celtic practice since Caesar states that it wasconsidered unacceptable for a boy to approach hisfather in public before he reached military age. Boysdid not become full members of adult society untilthey inherited land; before this they were landlessmembers of the war band.

SLAVERY

The economies of the Mediterranean civilizationscame to depend on slave labor, and barbarianEurope became a valued supplier: It is probable thatslaves were among the commodities sought byGreek traders in the sixth century. How much ear-lier slave trading occurred is unknown, but by thelate centuries B.C. large numbers of individuals werebeing captured in Celtic and Germanic wars andsold to the Greeks and Romans. Within Iron Agebarbarian Europe, however, it seems slaves were ofmuch less importance, though in later Irish societythey had an important economic role.

Entertainment and SportA few musical instruments are known from prehis-toric Europe, undoubtedly only a tiny fraction ofthose once used. Mesolithic and later rock artdepicts individuals and groups of people dancing


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and taking part in processions. These may have beenritual in nature, but such events would also haveadded interest to the lives of their participants.

Communal activities such as house constructionprobably culminated in a feast. Pits full of animalbones in the floor of the wheelhouse at Sollas onNorth Uist (Scotland), for example, are thought to bethe remains of such a feast. Feasting was a majorsource of entertainment, often within the context ofevents such as births, marriages, and deaths, as well asof religious festivals but probably not exclusively so.Certainly by the later Iron Age feasting was a regularand important activity among the elite, and involvedthe consumption of large (and excessive) quantities ofalcohol and food. Elite graves often contained finetableware for serving and consuming meat and alco-hol, both native beer and mead and imported wine.The drunken fights that inevitably followed were alsopart of the entertainment for both the participants andthe appreciative spectators, though they frequentlyresulted in serious injury or even death. Alcohol wasnot necessarily always consumed in excess; it may orig-inally have played an important role in ritual practices.

Board games and games with dice were also invogue by the Iron Age; dice made of bone or antlerand glass gaming pieces have been recovered from anumber of elite burials, for example, at Welwyn Gar-den City in southern England, which contained 24glass gaming pieces and a wooden board. Vernacularsources show that gambling on the outcome of dicegames and other games of chance was rife and thestakes could be extremely high; this was likely also tohave been the case in earlier times.

Most entertainments have left no archaeologicaltrace; these probably included physical contestsbetween young men to demonstrate excellence instrength, stamina, and endurance, and the recital oftales and songs enshrining community history andtribal lore.

Domestic Arrangements

FAMILY ACCOMMODATION

The layout of houses suggests a variety of domesticarrangements and family groupings in different

areas. In Neolithic Southeast Europe the houses,which were built close together in settlements, seemdesigned to accommodate nuclear families: a coupleand their preadult children. Later Neolithic housesin the Balkans often had two rooms and some hadfour. Houses in the Swiss lake villages and in manyother areas also probably accommodated nuclearfamilies.

The LBK first farmers in central Europe lived inlonghouses, often laid out so that each had its ownsurrounding space, often with gardens and outbuild-ings. These longhouses probably accommodatedextended families: a couple, their children, and theirgrandchildren. This arrangement continued inmuch of western, northern, and central Europethroughout prehistory and well into historical times.

In other parts of western Europe different formsof houses were also probably home to extended fam-ilies; these included the large roundhouses of woodor stone in British Iron Age settlements, holding thewhole extended family. Modular units of smallerhouses grouped together, also familiar from BritishBronze and Iron Age settlements, may have housedthe nuclear units of an extended family; similarly, theNeolithic settlement at Skara Brae was made up of aseries of interconnecting rooms, each with a hearthand beds, which probably housed a nuclear family,linked by a passage and grouped together within asingle complex with a turf and stone outer wall.

Domestic animals might be corralled in the openin the areas adjacent to the houses, stalled in sepa-rate byres, or accommodated in the house alongwith the family. Many longhouses of all periodsincluded partitions for animal stalls at one end; sub-stantial Scottish Bronze and Iron Age stone housesmay have accommodated the animals on the groundfloor and people on an upper floor, while in single-story roundhouses the animals were kept in one sec-tion of the interior.

FITTINGS AND FURNITURE

The majority of European houses had a hearthused for cooking, heating in the winter, and light;the household would sit round it together whileeating, working, talking, and entertaining them-selves and visitors. Houses in the Balkans also hadovens for cooking. In some houses a hole in the


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roof above the hearth drew out the smoke from thefire. In thatched houses, however, the smoke gen-erally found its own way out through the materialof the roof; the interior of the house must oftenhave been smoky and dark. Storage was essential inagricultural settlements where the annually har-vested grain and other storable foods such as fruitand pulses had to be kept for use throughout theyear. Hunter-gatherers also stored food such asnuts and fruit. Other produce such as skins andwool also needed to be stored. Pottery jars, stoneor clay storage bins, wooden buckets and barrels,bags, and sacks were used inside the house; central

and western European Neolithic longhouses had aloft for storage. Water was also necessary but wasprobably fetched daily from a nearby river or lakeor drawn from a well and kept in small containers.Many Scottish houses from the Neolithic periodonward had watertight stone tanks, perhaps forstoring fish or fishing bait. External storage facili-ties included pits and small wooden granaries,sheds, and barns.

Some houses had a platform built out from thehouse wall to serve as a bed at night and a place tosit and work during the day. In others such asSlatina in the Neolithic Balkans the beds were con-


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11.3 An illustration of a lake settlement discovered at Meilen on Lake Zurich in 1853–54 and the mater-ial recovered in its investigation by Ferdinand Keller. Waterlogged settlements like these provide some ofthe richest sources of information on daily life in prehistoric Europe. (Courtesy of Ann Ronan PictureLibrary / HIP / TopFoto. ©2004 Ann Ronan Picture Library)

structed of wood. Box beds of stone slabs were builtalong the walls of the rooms at Skara Brae. Minia-ture furniture from some Balkan settlements sug-gests that chairs and tables were used, but logs orboughs of wood were probably more usual seats.According to classical authors the Celts ate sittingon the ground or on wolf or dog skins, with thefood placed on a low table before them. Other fur-niture might include a wooden chest for storingclothing and coverings, and some houses hadshelves; those at Skara Brae in Neolithic Orkneywere built out of stone slabs, forming freestanding“dressers,” while the brochs of Iron Age Scotlandoften had recesses built into the walls to serve ascupboards. More elaborate pieces of furniture haveoccasionally been found, such as the elaboratelydecorated wooden object, possibly a chest of draw-ers, from fourth-century B.C. Cancho Roano inSpain. Some exotic furniture was imported, proba-bly as prestige items, such as the Mycenaean fold-ing wooden stool with an otterskin seat from aDanish tree-trunk coffin at Guldhøj.

Burnt mounds, large heaps of charred stonesoften arranged in a horseshoe shape around a smallwooden or stone tank, may be the remains of BronzeAge and Early Iron Age saunas. The stones wereheated and dropped into the water to raise its tem-perature and produce steam.

DOMESTIC ACTIVITIES

The house was the scene of much domestic activity.In addition to food preparation, the women wouldhave spent much of their time cleaning and treatingskins, spinning and weaving wool or linen thread,and sewing clothing. An upright loom was a fixturein many European houses, generally set near thedoor to take advantage of daylight. There weremany other tasks that were constantly being per-formed, such as mending broken tools, making fish-ing nets, or shaping pottery. It is unlikely thatanyone sat idle: there were always tasks to engagethe hands, though the brain might be focused onconversation or storytelling.

Many activities took place outside the house;these included tasks that produced a lot of debrissuch as flint knapping and whittling wood and mightalso have included tasks that involved bad-smelling

or otherwise offensive materials, such as tanningleather. For example, at the Mesolithic site ofVaenget Nord in Denmark bone tools were madeand repaired inside the hut, while cooking, stoneworking, and hide scraping and preparation tookplace in the area around the hut.

PERSONALAPPEARANCE

Since the dawn of consciousness people have beenusing their appearance to make statements aboutthemselves, giving information about their cul-tural, ethnic, political, and religious affiliations,their occupation, and their status, the latter both interms of age, marital state, and gender, and interms of social hierarchy. Identity can be shown byvarying aspects of clothing, personal ornaments,and hairstyles, and by altering the body, all meansthat were employed in prehistoric Europe.


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11.4 A large fibula, richly decorated and highlyvalued, that had broken across the bow connectingthe two plates. This was mended by casting-on:The break was coated in wax, the whole fibulaencased in clay, and the wax melted out, forminga mold into which metal was poured. The result isa little rough but serviceable; it may have been adomestic job or the work of an itinerant metal-smith. (Lubbock, John. Prehistoric Times. NewYork: D. Appleton and Company, 1890)

BodiesThe Scythians and other steppe peoples decoratedtheir bodies with tattoos. Several of the frozen bod-ies recovered from the steppe mounds at Pazyrykbore elaborate designs, including animals, and thesteppe dwellers on the European margins weresimilarly elaborately tattooed; the practice is men-tioned by Herodotus. Faint blue patterns on partsof the Iceman’s body, including his spine, ankles,right knee, and left calf, indicate that he had beentattooed. His skin was punctured with a very sharpinstrument and a paste, probably made from char-coal mixed with water, was rubbed in. Though thismay have been decorative, it was more probablyintended as a medical treatment for joint pain.

Classical authors stated that the Britons paintedtheir bodies, particularly before fighting naked.Although the term used for this paint is usually trans-lated as woad, studies of the blue designs on the bodyof the bog man from Lindow Moss show that theywere executed with a mineral pigment, includingcopper and iron, and the Latin term has been reex-amined: it now seems it may refer to this pigment.

HairOccasionally the hair of prehistoric individuals hassurvived, including that of several bog women.This shows that European hairstyles could be elab-orate. Women generally had long hair, but this wasoften braided, pinned into a bun or twisted up ontothe head. Long hair was also often caught up into ahairnet or tight-fitting cap. Men also wore theirhair long, often under a cap, and the Celts oftenbraided their hair to keep it out of the way. Somebog men and women had elaborate arrangementsconstructed from several braids, interwoven orknotted. Classical sources reported that the Gaulsused a limewash on their hair, making it stiff andspiky. The Celtic elite favored long mustaches, andfacial hair was kept neat using razors, which areknown from the Middle Bronze Age onward.Combs, used by the Mesolithic period, were madeof antler, bone, horn, wood, or metal, and mighthave both coarse and fine teeth, the latter forremoving nits.

ClothingBone needles for sewing garments were used from theGravettian period around 25,000 years ago. Clothingwas stitched from leather or cloth made from variousfibers, including flax, wool, grass, and hemp, andleather might also be laced together with sinews.There were also untailored draped garments fastenedwith belts, brooches, and pins. Cloth was generallywoven, but plaiting, felting, netting, twining, andother techniques were also used. Few actual garmentshave been found; most come from the bog bodies andtree-trunk coffins of the north and the lake villages ofthe Alpine regions. The Iceman has provided anexceptionally full picture of one individual’s clothing.Evidence also comes from representations of peoplein various media and from the arrangement of orna-ments used to fasten or decorate clothing.

MATERIALS

The cloth from which garments were made might becolored. A range of natural shades were available;linen naturally had a golden color that could bebleached in sunlight to cream; the natural colors ofwool were a spectrum from white and fawn to darkbrown and black. Wool could be dyed as could someplant fibers, but linen did not take dyes easily. The col-ors produced by dyeing with plant, animal, and min-eral pigments included greens, blues, reds, browns,and yellows. The pintaderas (pottery stamps) commonin Southeast European Neolithic sites may have beenused to stamp colored designs onto cloth, and stamp-decorated cloth is known from the Swiss lake village ofLedro. Leather was also dyed, sometimes in patterns,and designs could be embossed on it.

Patterns could be woven into cloth; some wovendesigns depended on the use of different-coloredthreads, such as the checked designs (resemblingmodern tartans) apparently favored by the Celts;others used a single color, but varied the arrange-ment of the threads, producing twills and other tex-tured cloth. In a few cases the warp and weft were ofdifferent fibers, usually wool and linen. Woven clothcould also include borders and panels of contrastingweave, and fringes and tassels were added to some.

Cloth and clothing was also embroidered withthread (including silk in a few instances) or deco-rated with sewn-on beads and other small elements


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such as tiny shells. Quantities of tiny beads on theheads and bodies of Palaeolithic people buried atArene Candide in Italy and Sungir in Russia showthe shape of headgear and clothing to which theywere sewn as decoration.

GARMENTS

An extraordinary garment was recovered from agirl’s log coffin at Egtved in Bronze Age Denmark. Itconsisted of a woven waistband, from which hungdown a series of threads twisted together in fours toform heavy cords. These were fastened together atthe bottom by a twined cord, beneath which theloop ends of the cords protruded decoratively. Thissee-through garment, which was quite short, offeredneither warmth nor decency, and its significance isunknown. It was wrapped twice around the girl’swaist, presumably to make it as warm as was possiblein the circumstances.

In general, women wore long skirts and blouses,fastened with brooches, ties, or fibulae. Somewomen wore a jacket. A belt might hold the skirt inplace. Women’s clothes from the Scandinavian logcoffins were often worn with a bronze disc at thewaist. Shawls and cloaks might be worn over the top.Men also wore cloaks or capes; the Iceman had anouter cape of grass and beneath it a short-sleeveddeerskin coat. In the Late Iron Age the Celts pro-duced waterproof hooded capes of coarse wool, thesagum and the byrrus.

The main male garments were tunics, kilts, andshirts, often belted at the waist. The Iceman had aleather pouch attached to his belt, probably a commonaccouterment. The Celts, and probably earlier inhabi-tants of transalpine Europe, also wore trousers (bracae).The Iceman wore fur leggings, perhaps the precursorof these trousers. The Gundestrup cauldron depicts afile of warriors with long-sleeved shirts and tightknee-length trousers. Occasionally, undergarmentshave also been found: the Iceman wore a loin cloth asdid some men from the log coffins. A gold penissheath was among the objects worn by a man in one ofthe rich Chalcolithic graves at Varna in Bulgaria; thismay have been a luxury translation of a garment moreusually made in leather. It had small holes at the widerend, probably to enable it to be attached to clothing.

Caps and hoods of various materials, includingplaited or twined fibers, fur, and leather, and even

leather lined with fur, were frequently worn; the Ice-man had a cap with a chin strap of fur. Shoes werealso common, some with a leather sole and a clothupper, others made entirely of leather. Often theywere made of a single piece of leather drawn uparound the foot and laced or fastened by a strap rightaround the foot, passing under the instep, thoughsome were shaped and stitched. The Iceman andsome of the Scandinavian bodies had their shoesstuffed with grass, an excellent insulator, to cushiontheir feet and keep them warm.

Ornaments

DECORATED HEADGEAR

The Mesolithic Ofnet skulls wore caps decoratedwith shells and perforated deer teeth. A Bronze Agewoman buried at Grundfeld in Germany had a banddecorated with rings around her head and a bandjoining it over the top of her head, decorated withbeads. Bronze Age pottery figurines from the Car-pathian basin are shown with an ornament hangingdown their back, fastened to a plait, and similar orna-ments were found in hoards. These consisted of acentral metal plaque in a geometric shape from whichdangled chains and metal rings or other shapes. Laterhead ornaments included gold tress rings.

Earrings of bronze and gold were popular insome periods. Among the fine jewelry in Beaker andlater graves were gold earrings in the form of tinybaskets or boats.

NECK AND CHEST ORNAMENTS

The Iron Age elite wore torcs around their necks;the finest were of gold, but there were also examplesin bronze. Massive collars of beaten gold (gorgets)were also worn in Ireland. In the Bronze Age divinestatues and elite individuals wore collars; theseincluded the gargantillas of Iberia and the magnifi-cent gold lunulae of Ireland, decorated with finedesigns, as well as a unique “cape” (pectoral) ofbeaten gold found at Mold in Wales, dating to theearly second millennium, and elaborately decoratedwith embossed geometric designs. Necklaces andpendants were more widely distributed and com-mon. These included collars made of rows of beads


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11.5 The woolen garments worn by a woman found in a Danish Bronze Age tree-trunk coffin at BorumEshøj, including a hairnet (top left), a woven and stitched jacket, and a long woven skirt with a tasselled gir-dle. Buried with her were a pottery vessel, several ornaments including a decorated disc apparently worn at thewaist, a dagger, and a decorated horn comb (left, second from top). She was buried wrapped in a deerskin cloak(not illustrated). (Worsaae, J. J. A. The Industrial Arts of Denmark. London: Chapman and Hall, 1882)

joined by spacer beads, made of amber, jet, andother prized materials.

PINS AND BROOCHES

Clothing was fastened or decorated with a variety ofbrooches and pins, often with decorated heads. Partic-ularly distinctive are the fibulae (safety-pin brooches),which were invented in north Italy or the eastern Alpsin the 15th century B.C. These offered three areas fordecorative elaboration—the bow, the spring, and thecatchplate—all of which were exuberantly explored inIron Age Europe. The spring could be a simple doubleturn in the center of the pin, but was developed insome instances into a large series of coils protrudingon either side of the essential spring. The catchplate,at its simplest a piece of metal curved over to hold thepoint of the pin, was in many cases elongated andformed into a variety of elaborate shapes. The bow,forming the curve from spring to catchplate, was oftenembellished with luxury materials such as glass orgemstone, or had a bronze figure molded onto it.

OTHER ORNAMENTS

Finger rings, bracelets, leg ornaments, and ankletswere known in many prehistoric European societies,made from shell, stone, metal, or glass. Shale, jet,and related materials were popular for bracelets.Some Iron Age bronze arm rings were massive, with


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11.6 Two fibulae, one ofbronze from a Bronze Agetree-trunk coffin, the otherof iron from Lake Neuchâ-tel (Worsaae, J. J. A. TheIndustrial Arts of Denmark.London: Chapman andHall, 1882; Figuier, Louis.Primitive Man. London:Chatto and Windus, 1876)

11.7 Two finely decorated bracelets from a Bronze Age Swiss lake village. Personal ornaments were wornby men and women from the Palaeolithic period onward. (Lubbock, John. Prehistoric Times. New York: D.Appleton and Company, 1890)

grotesque plastic decoration. In the Bronze Age andearly Iron Age many ornaments incorporated a“spectacle” design, in which a bronze wire wastightly coiled into a pair of spirals.

BEADS

Many ornaments, such as necklaces and bracelets,were made of beads. Some were perforated naturalobjects, such as small shells, fish vertebrae, or ani-mal teeth; others were made from decorativestones, amber, jet, bone, antler, shell, metal, glass,or other attractive materials. Beads were also sewnas decoration onto clothing, bags, and other objects.

Toilet EquipmentVarious implements were used from early times toimprove personal appearance, including combs.

Bronze tweezers, nail parers, and razors were in reg-ular use from the second millennium. Mirrors ofpolished metal became popular accessories in theIron Age; these were placed in women’s graves butwere perhaps also used by men if the objects shownamong warrior equipment on Iberian grave slabshave been correctly identified.

FOOD

Food and CookingThe diet of Mesolithic and later hunter-gatherergroups was probably quite varied but was influencedby location: coastal communities ate a high propor-tion of marine foods, particularly in the north,


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11.8 A selection of personal equipment from Danish sites: a horn comb from the tree-trunk coffin at Treen-hoj, a bronze razor decorated with a ship, and a pair of tweezers (Lubbock, John. Prehistoric Times. NewYork: D. Appleton and Company, 1890; Worsaae, J. J. A. The Industrial Arts of Denmark. London: Chapmanand Hall, 1882)

whereas farther south plant foods and meat were alsosignificant; on inland sites meat was the principalfood, but in riverine locations such as Lepenski Virfish predominated. Apart from the far north wheresuitable plants were restricted in their availability,plant foods were important in the Mesolithic diet.

In contrast, grain was the staple of purely agricul-tural communities, supplemented by pulses, somevegetables and fruits, milk, cheese, and meat. Manyfarming communities, however, also made some useof wild foods, particularly coastal and lake or river-side communities that caught fish. Calculations ofmeat consumption at a number of sites show thatmeat often contributed significantly to the diet,although such figures are at best a very roughapproximation. Some groups such as the TRBinhabitants of Bronocice consumed as much or moremeat than the modern people of some Europeancountries. Meat could be eaten fresh or preserved,for instance, as hams or sausages. Meat fat, particu-larly pork lard, was an important dietary element, aswas oil from plant seeds; these were also used inmedicines and for lighting.

GRAIN

Grain was cooked with liquid as the basis for gruelor soup or made into bread (this was one of the lastfoods eaten by the Iceman). North Italian BronzeAge sites suggest it was also made into gnocchi(boiled balls made from flour paste). Flour for breadcould also be made of pulses, acorns, and nuts. Smallloaves made of unleavened wheat flour was found inthe Neolithic settlement of Twann in Switzerland,and this site also yielded evidence of porridge. Ovalor rectangular saddle querns and rubbers of hardstone were used to grind grain for most of prehistoryin Europe. By the fourth century B.C. rotary quernswere in use; these had a fixed lower millstone onwhich an upper stone was rotated. A central hole inthe upper stone was used as a funnel down which thegrain was slowly poured as the grinding took place,and a section cut out of the lower stone acted as aspout through which the flour came out. A small slotin the upper stone held a handle for turning it.

MILK PRODUCTS

Perhaps from the Early Neolithic period and cer-tainly by the mid-fourth millennium milk from cat-

tle, sheep, and goats was being consumed, particu-larly in transalpine Europe. Most humans cannotdigest lactose, present in raw milk, after they ceaseto produce the enzyme lactase in early childhood.Lactose tolerance is an adaptation that has devel-oped in cattle-keeping populations around theworld; many Europeans, central Asians, and SouthAsians have this adaptation, as do the pastoral peo-ples of Africa, while most other groups, such as theChinese, most Africans, and others, including manyin the Mediterranean, do not, and experience severediscomfort if they consume raw milk. It is notknown how early this adaptation took place inEurope; even in the Iron Age milk was probablymainly made into cheese.

When milk is processed by heating or fermenta-tion to make yogurt, butter, and cheese, the lactoseis broken down, avoiding the problem. Vessels forcollecting and processing milk, known by the fourthmillennium, included pottery strainers, ceramic andwooden bowls, wooden whisks, pottery churns, andhollowed log churns. Cheese-making equipmentincluded baskets and Apennine milk-boiling vesselsthat had a perforated lid sitting on a ledge partwaydown the vessel.

COOKING

Most food was either roasted directly over the fireon sticks or metal spits or cooked with water in ves-sels. These included pottery cooking pots placeddirectly on the hearth, supported by stones, andmetal cauldrons suspended over the fire. Food couldalso be cooked in stone tanks or skins filled with liq-uid into which heated stones were dropped to bringthe liquid to the boil and maintain it at a simmer.


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11.9 A saddle quern used for grinding grain, adaily task (Figuier, Louis. Primitive Man. London:Chatto and Windus, 1876)

The Roman writer Poseidonius, describing southernGaul in the early first century B.C., referred to mealsof bread and large amounts of meat, cooked by boil-ing, roasting, or charcoal grilling, and fish bakedwith cumin, salt, and vinegar.

DrinkThe main drink consumed by everyone in prehistorywas water, drawn from wells, rivers, lakes, or ponds.The earliest well known in Europe, dated to 5089B.C., was found in the LBK settlement of Erkelenz-Kückhoven. Wooden buckets for drawing waterhave been found in a number of sites. Farming com-munities, and especially those specializing in animalhusbandry, may have drunk milk and the relatedsubstances, buttermilk and thin yogurt.

The techniques used to produce alcohol may havebeen introduced from the Near East, where wine andbeer were being brewed by the early third millen-nium. In temperate Europe the techniques wereapplied to produce alcohol (mead) from honey. This,however, was not easily obtained or abundant, somead must have been a prestigious commodity. It isknown from residues in vessels that mead was beingdrunk in temperate Europe by the third millennium.Wine drinking in Greece and probably Iberia beganaround the same time. The handled cups and jugsthat appeared in Southeast Europe and farther northfrom the fourth millennium were probably for con-suming alcohol. Drinking vessels, including Globu-lar Amphora and Corded Ware beakers, becamemore widespread in the later fourth millennium andreached western Europe with the appearance of theBeaker complex. Lime, heather, and plantain honeywere used in the mead drunk from a beaker at Ash-grove Farm, Scotland; this was flavored with mead-owsweet. Mead found in birch-bark pots in theBronze Age log coffin at Egtved in Denmark wasbrewed from wheat and honey flavored with cranber-ries, other fruit, and leaves. Mead residues were alsofound in the massive bronze cauldron in the sixth-century chieftain’s grave at Hochdorf.

Beer, which could be brewed from barley, wheat,oats, or millet, was probably produced from emmerwheat by the Beaker period, if not earlier, and beerbecame common from Urnfield times with the intro-

duction of two-row barley. The Roman authorPoseidonius describes a beer known as corma, brewedfrom wheat, which he said was the drink of the com-mon people, sometimes mixed with honey.

Drinks made with drugs may also have been con-sumed: A residue of black henbane in a GroovedWare vessel from Balfarg in Chalcolithic Scotlandmay have been the remains of a hallucinogenic drink.Opium was used in temperate Europe by LBK times,perhaps infused in a drink. Other narcotics includedbirch bark, which was chewed like gum. Cannabis wasused in the steppe region by the third millennium andprobably in other parts of Europe; it was burned andits smoke inhaled, although it may also have beeneaten. Small braziers or lamps (“altars”) from thefifth-millennium Balkans may perhaps have beenused for heating poppy heads or cannabis. Probablebraziers have also been found in other parts of Europesuch as Neolithic Brittany.

By the second millennium wine was widely madeand drunk in the Mediterranean and was introducedinto barbarian Europe by the sixth century. The eliterapidly developed a taste for wine, which they drankneat, to the disgust of classical writers (who wateredtheir wine), becoming roaring and violently drunk.The Celts also drank beer, described by Dionysius ofHalicarnassus as “a foul-smelling liquor made frombarley rotted in water” (Roman Antiquities XIII, 10,quoted in Sherratt 1997: 394).

FeastingThe Celts’ love of feasting was described by classicalauthors. Meat was roasted on spits or stewed in largecauldrons suspended on chains from a tripod or theroof beams. Fleshhooks were used by feasters to fishout tasty morsels to eat. Residues in cauldrons foundin the Iron Age British hillfort of Danebury showthey were used for stewing pork. Wealthy later IronAge graves often contained a pair of firedogs, verti-cal iron stands decorated with an animal head ateach end, which were used to support spits for roast-ing large joints of meat. The choicest joint of meat,known as the champion’s portion, was presented bylater Irish chiefs to warriors who had showed partic-ular prowess, and it is likely that a similar practiceexisted in the Iron Age.


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Serving FoodAt all periods it is likely that food was eaten frombowls or dishes of wood, though they have survivedonly in rare waterlogged sites such as Iron Age Glas-tonbury. Pottery vessels might also have been used.Wooden and pottery bowls were also used for drink-ing in the earlier Neolithic, but later a range of dif-ferent drinking vessels began to appear, includingbeakers. Animal horns were made into drinking ves-sels; a set of such drinking horns, decorated withgold and bronze bands, was found in the sixth-cen-tury chieftain’s grave at Hochdorf in Germany.Metal vessels were made for the elite in Bronze AgeEurope from copper or gold; these often had han-dles. During the Iron Age Mediterranean fine table-ware, including bronze flagons and fine potterydrinking cups, was imported by European chieftainsfor serving wine.

HEALTH ANDMEDICINE

Examination of skeletons from prehistoric Europehas furnished some insights into health, injuries,treatment, and life expectancy, while occasionalcompletely preserved bodies have provided moredetailed evidence, including conditions that affectedonly soft tissue.

Health and DietThe mixed and varied diet enjoyed by manyMesolithic groups promoted their health. In con-trast, there is evidence of some malnutrition in agri-cultural communities; LBK children, for example,suffered from scurvy (vitamin-C deficiency), and bythe Bronze Age scurvy was more prevalent. Rickets,a condition caused by vitamin-D deficiency, wasalso common. Markings on bones known as Harrislines, which indicate periods of malnutrition, arefrequently seen: For example, they were present on

the bones of the Iron Age girl sacrificed at Windeby.Hunter-gatherers who depended to a significantextent on fish, such as Iron Gates communities andthe inhabitants of Vedbaek in Denmark, often suf-fered from fish tapeworms and other intestinalparasites ingested with the fish; these caused mal-nutrition and unpleasant symptoms such as bloat-ing and diarrhea. Material recovered from the gutsof bog bodies and the Iceman and from othersources show that prehistoric communities oftensuffered debilitating infestations of parasites suchas intestinal worms, some of which caused damageto the kidneys or lungs. Skeletons in LBK andlater cemeteries, including Bronze Age ones inSpain, Italy, Moravia, and Germany, show thatmany children suffered from Cribra orbitalia, ananemic condition that produces spongy boneabove the eye sockets. Various explanations for thisinclude malnutrition, malaria, or infestation withintestinal parasites due to eating untreated beefand dairy products or living in close proximity todomestic animals.

Dental caries, a condition linked to the consump-tion of foods rich in carbohydrates, was associatedwith a diet in which plant foods predominated; itwas rare in Mesolithic Scandinavia but more com-mon in southerly latitudes, in areas such as Brittany,Portugal, and Italy. Mediterranean communities,which had a significant plant component in theirdiet, suffered severe caries. Farmers experiencedmany problems with their teeth, their grain-baseddiet encouraging dental caries, while the minutepieces of grit that resulted from the grinding of thegrain caused the teeth to become worn and chipped.Abscesses and tooth loss are also known. Tooth wearwas also common among hunter-gatherers; thisresulted not only from erosion by grit or bone mixedin with food but also from the use of the teeth astools, for instance for softening hides by chewingthem. Women suffered more from tooth problemsthan men, probably due to calcium deficiency whenbearing and nursing children.

Hygiene was an important factor in health.Sedentary settlements where food waste, dung, andfeces accumulated promoted diseases among farm-ing and settled hunter-gatherer communities, whichwere avoided by mobile hunter-gatherers and pas-toralists.


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Ill HealthEvidence of a number of diseases and medical condi-tions have been found; these included malaria, spinabifida, osteomyelitis, kidney stones, polio, eye prob-lems, ear infections, arthritis, rheumatism, slippeddiscs, various skeletal deformities, and tumors. TheIceman, who was probably around 45 years old whenhe died, was beginning to suffer from arthritis.Injuries were also common, some from falls or acci-dents, others deliberately inflicted in domestic dis-putes or armed combat. Death from infected woundswas probably as common as death from injuries them-selves. Many individuals were permanently crippledby badly healed injuries. People buried in the laterNeolithic cemetery of Tizsapolgár-Basatanya hadsustained injuries to their heads and spines, and suf-fered from paralyzed limbs, deformed skulls, braintumors, osteoporosis, rheumatism, arthritis, andother conditions. The “Amesbury Archer,” the manrecently discovered in a rich burial near Stonehenge,was age 35 to 45 when he died. He had a permanentlimp from a serious knee injury that discharged con-tinuously and also suffered from an abscess, both ofwhich caused him constant pain.

Medical TreatmentIllness and injury were treated with herbal remediesand magical practices. A Bronze Age man atHvidegård in Denmark wore a leather purse con-taining various objects that were probably charms,perhaps intended magically to ensure health: driedroots and bark, a squirrel’s jaw, a grass snake’s tail,and a falcon’s claw. The Iceman carried two pieces ofbirch fungus on a thong; this may have been a pro-phylactic charm against disease or a portable supplyof a material thought to be medicinal. Alcohol andnarcotics were presumably used as anesthetics andmedical drugs.

Cures might also be sought by appealing to thegods. The shrine of the goddess Sequana at Sources-de-la-Seine (Fontes Sequanae) in France receivedmany votive offerings in the form not only of smallfigurines of patients but also models of various partsof the body, deposited either in supplication for a cureor in thanks for having obtained one. Eye problemsand chest diseases were the most common afflictions.

Medical instruments have been found in a num-ber of Iron Age graves; these included saws, rasps,and spatulas. That of the “warrior-surgeon” atMünchen-Obermenzing in Germany, dating fromthe third or second century B.C., included a trepan-ning saw and medical probes, while the first-centuryA.D. collection from Stanway in England comprisedneedles, hooks, a saw, forceps, and scalpels. The skillof prehistoric surgeons is clear from the evidence oftrepanning, which goes back to the seventh millen-nium B.C. This operation, in which a disc of bonewas removed from the skull, was potentially fatalsince it required working with sharp instrumentsnear the brain. Many of those who underwent thisoperation did indeed die, but as many as two-thirdssurvived, and in some cases were successfullytrepanned several times. The operation may havebeen performed to relieve pressure from skullinjuries or brain tumors or to treat mental disorders,or may have had some magical function. The circleof bone could be removed by cutting around it witha special saw, drilling out a circle with a hollowcylindrical drill (trepan) or with a more advanceddrill with a central anchoring pin to prevent the drillslipping (trephine), or by scraping the bone away.

Life ExpectancyThe limited evidence available on the age structureand mortality pattern of ancient European commu-nities shows that infant mortality was high, perhapsas high as one in two; many children died in child-hood or adolescence and many more people inyoung adulthood. Mesolithic life expectancy wasaround 30 to 34 years. Burials at the NeolithicGreek settlement of Nea Nikomedeia includedmany infants and children, while the adults aver-aged around 30 years old when they died. Examina-tion of seven women showed that they had borne anaverage of five children each. In the Corded Warecemetery of Zerniki Górne, the average age of theadult males was 43 and women 36, and many indi-viduals had died in childhood. People buried in theLate Tripolye cemetery of Vikhvatinski had hadaround a one-in-six chance of reaching the age of50; this compares favorably with an earlier cemeterywhere people only had a one-in-eight chance ofreaching this age, and with Bronze Age Britain


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where the chance was less than one in twenty. Fewindividuals survived beyond 35 in the Bronze Ageand very few beyond 45. By the Iron Age lifeexpectancy had risen a little; a high proportion ofthe population still died in infancy, childhood, oryoung adulthood, but those who survived the haz-ards of these years might live to 60, 70 or evenmore. Women were more at risk than men of dyingyoung, due to the dangers of childbearing.

PopulationThere has been a general trend toward populationincrease throughout prehistory and history. Inmobile communities where infants had to be carriedduring the frequent changes of location, birthstended to be spaced at intervals of three or fouryears. In sedentary communities, however, therewere no such constraints, so young women mightbear a child every year.

The population of Europe around 5000 B.C. hasbeen estimated at between 2 and 5 million; this iscomparable with the population of some moderncities. Settlements were generally small, many occu-pied by a single family, numbering perhaps 20 peo-ple, while larger settlements probably had no morethan 200 inhabitants. By the Late Iron Age Europe’spopulation had risen to between 15 and 30 million,with Italy and Greece being the most densely settledregions. The majority of settlements in the rest ofEurope still housed fewer than 50 people. EarlierIron Age hillforts and other more substantial settle-ments may have had populations, in some cases, of asmany as 1,000 people, and some of the oppida thatemerged in the last centuries B.C. may have accom-modated as many as 10,000 people, though otherswere smaller.

READING

GeneralMilisauskas, ed. 2002, Cunliffe, ed. 1994, Championet al. 1984, Cunliffe 2001a: general; Whittle 1996:

Neolithic; Harding 2000: Bronze Age; Cunliffe1997, James 1993, Collis 1994a: Iron Age.

Social and PoliticalOrganizationMithen 2003, Bradley 1998, Jochim 2002c: Meso-lithic; Renfrew 1973, Scarre 1998, Bradley 1998:the social context of monument construction; Bai-ley 2000, Sherratt 1997: Neolithic; Audouze andBüchsenschütz 1992: Bronze Age; Moosleitner1991, Maier 1991a, Motykova et al. 1991, Cham-pion, T. 1995: Iron Age; Caesar 1951: Celtic politi-cal history; Frey 1995: magistrates; Taylor 1994,Venedikov 1976, Marazov 1998: Thracians; ParkerPearson 1999, Carman and Harding, eds. 1999: sta-tus in burials.

Crime and PunishmentMaier 1991b: keys; Brothwell 1986: bog bodies;Green 1992: Garton Slack; Lloyd-Morgan 1995:Iron Age.

The Organization ofIndustryJope 1995, Wells 1995a: Iron Age industry; Midge-ley 1992: Brzesc Kujawski.

GenderEhrenburg 1989, Lloyd-Morgan 1995, Finlayson1998: women’s roles.

Personal AppearanceSchumacher-Matthaus 1999, Glob 1974: BronzeAge; Barber 1991: Egtved skirt; Lloyd-Morgan1995, Hingley 1998, Pyatt et al. 1995: body paint-ing; Spindler 1995: Iceman; Kruta 2004: Celts;


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Lloyd-Morgan 1995, Hingley 1998, Bahn, ed. 2003:hair; Bahn, ed. 2003, Spindler 1995: tattoos; Hing-ley 1998: clothing; Champion, S. 1995: jewelry.

Everyday LifeScarre 1998: Skara Brae; Lloyd-Morgan 1995,Champion, T. 1995, Ritchie 1988, Hingley 1998:Iron Age; Champion, T. 1995, Ehrenburg 1989:women.

FoodBarker 1985, Garrison 1997: types of food; Cunliffe1995, Coles 1973, 1987, Barker 1985: cooking

equipment; Bökönyi 1991, Sherratt 1997: milkproducts; Barclay 1998, Sherratt 1997: henbanedrink; Sherratt 1997, Bogucki 2001: alcohol.

Health and MedicineFitzpatrick 2005, Wessex Archaeology 2005:Amesbury archer; Green 1992: Fontes Sequanae;Kunzl 1991, Fagan 2004: surgical equipment;Trump 1980, Kunzl 1991, Guilaine and Zammit2005, Schultz 1999, Walker 1998: trepannng;Mithen 2003: parasites; Bahn, ed. 2001b, 2003,Parker Pearson 1999, Hingley 1998, Mithen 2003,Schultz 1999: illness; Bahn, ed. 2003, Hingley1998, Lloyd-Morgan 1995, Ashmore 1996: lifeexpectancy.


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C H R O N O L O G I C A L C H A R T

351

7 million years ago

Divergence of hominid and chimpanzee lineages

2.5 million years ago

Emergence of first members of genus Homoand first stone tools

1.9 million years ago

Emergence of Homo ergaster in Africa andrapid spread of Homo across Asia

800,000 years ago

First secure evidence of humans (H. antecessor)in Europe

500,000–300/250,000 years ago

H. heidelbergensis present in Europe. Earliestknown European camp sites and wooden tools.

300,000/250,000–45/40,000 years ago

Neanderthals in Europe, possible develop-ment of burial and simple artEvolution in Africa culminating in emergenceand spread of H. sapiens

45/40,000–28,000 years ago

Neanderthals and H. sapiens both occupyingEurope

Probable emergence of spoken language;beginning of many cultural and aestheticadvances

26,000–12,700 B.C. (28,000–14,650 yearsago)

Neanderthals extinctUpper Palaeolithic cultures flourishing in IceAge environmentGlacial maximum c. 18,000–16,000 B.C.(20,000–18,000 years ago)

12,700–9600

Global warming to 10,800; dramatic return ofglacial conditions

9600–7000

Beginning of HoloceneMesolithic cultures adapting to new opportu-nities offered by postglacial environmentYoldia Sea 8300–7800

7000–5500

Britain separated from the continent and Dog-gerland drowned by c. 6000Ancylus lake 7800–5500Spread of farming

CHRONOLOGICAL CHART

Greece—Pre/Proto-Sesklo, Early Elateia,PPN Argissa to 6000; Sesklo from 6000Balkans—Karanovo I and II, Starcevo, Crisfrom c. 6500/6000Hungary—Körös from c. 6500/6000Ukraine and Moldavia—Bug-Dnestr from c.6200/6000South and Central Italy—Impressed and Red-Painted Ware cultures from 6800/6000Po plain—Castelnovian (Padan variety)Rest of Mediterranean—Impressed Ware cul-tures from 6500/6000 including Danilo-Smilcic in the eastern AdriaticSouthern France—Castelnovian, Sauveterrian,Cardial Impressed WareTemperate Europe—Mesolithic culturesScandinavia—KongemoseWestern Europe (Belgium, N. France)—Lim-burgian, TardenoisianNorthwest Switzerland—Birsmattian

5500–5000

Black Sea coasts flooded c. 5500Further spread of farming and infillingFirst cold-hammered copper artifactsLitorina sea by 5500Greece—SeskloBalkans—Karanovo III, Vadastra, Early Vinca(Vinca-Tordos), DudestiUkraine and Moldavia—Bug-Dnestr, EasternLBKEastern Slovakia—c. 5300–5000 BükkMediterranean—continuing spread ofImpressed Ware culturesSouth and central Italy—Impressed and Red-Painted Ware culturesPo plain—CastelnovianS. France—Epicardial

Iberia—Late CardialCentral Europe—LBKRhine-Neckar valley—La HoguetteTemperate Europe and Atlantic—MesolithicDenmark—Ertebølle from 5400

5000–4000

Beginning of metallurgy in Balkans and laterin IberiaFarming adopted in most of EuropeMegalithic tombs began to be constructedGreece—Late Neolithic: Tsangli to 4500 thenDiminiBalkans—Karanovo IV–VI, Vinca (Vinca-Tor-dos then Vinca-Plocnik), Boian to c. 4700 thenGumelnitsa, Hamangia to c. 4500 then VarnaUkraine and Moldavia—Cucuteni-Tripolye,Dnepr-Donets including Mariupol complex;LBK NotenkopfHungary—Tisza to c. 4600; TiszapolgárSouthern Italy—Trichrome to 4500, Serrad’AltoNorthern Italy—Impressed Ware, BoccaQuadrata; Fiorano, Vhò (both acculturatedMesolithic); CastelnovianFrance—Chasseen from 4500Iberia—Almerían, AlentejanEastern Switzerland—Egolzwil then Cortail-lod, Pfyn from 4500Atlantic facade—Mesolithic, early Megalith-building culturesBritain—Mesolithic and Early NeolithicNorthwest France—Cardial Atlantique5000–4500; Castellic-Chambon-Sardun4500–4000Paris Basin—Mesolithic; LBK 5000–4500;Cerny 4500–4000, Rössen 4200–4000North France/Rhine—Limburg


352

Central and eastern Europe—Danubian II:Bischeim, Hinkelstein/Grossgartach, Rössen,Stichbandkeramik (SBK), Lengyel; AichbühlLow Countries and North European Plain—Mesolithic including Swifterbant, Ellerbek,WistkaScandinavia—ErtebølleNortheast Europe—Narva, Neman, CombedWareNorthern Poland and Neman Basin—Comband Pit wares from 4800

4000–3500

Farming becoming main way of lifeGrowing focus on burials and monumentsMetallurgy becoming more widespreadGreece—SitagroiBalkans—Karanovo VI, Bodrogkeresztúr, Cer-navoda, Salcutsa, Bubanj HumUkraine and Moldavia—Cucuteni-Tripolye,Sredny StogSteppe—Lower Mikhailovka-Kemi Oba cul-tureSwitzerland—north: Michelsberg; east: Pfyn,CortaillodSouthern and central Italy—DianaNorthern Italy—Bocca Quadrata, LagozzaIberia—Almerian, Alentejan, Sepulcros deFosaNorthwest France—Carn-Cous-BougonFrance—ChasseenCentral Europe—TRBLow Countries / Rhine—Michelsberg,Swifterbant/Hazendonk 4000–3800; TRBfrom 3800Poland—Sarnowo and Comb and PittedWares 4200–3700; from 3700 TRBDenmark—Ertebølle to 3900; TRB

Northern Europe (North European Plain,Polish uplands, German uplands, southernSweden)—TRBNortheast Europe—Comb and Pit Wares,Neman, Pit-comb WareAtlantic—Developed Megalith-building cul-turesBritain—Grimston-Lyles Hill

3500–3200

Farming almost universalSpread of innovations (“secondary productsrevolution”)Metallurgy spreadingIncreasing trade especially in flint and stoneGreece—Final Neolithic, Rakhmani, SitagroiBalkans—Ezero, Cotofeni, Pit-grave, BubanjHum, CernavodaUkraine and Moldavia—Tripolye, Usatovo(hybrid culture), YamnayaSouthern Central Europe—BadenEastern Switzerland—HorgenSouthern and central Italy—DianaNorthern Italy—LagozzaFrance—ChasseenIberia—Almerian, Alentejan, Sepulcros deFosaNorthern Central Europe—GlobularAmphoraScandinavia—TRBNortheast Europe—Pit-comb WareBritain—Windmill Hill, Lyles Hill

3200–2200

Animal husbandry becoming increasinglyimportantEmerging social hierarchy in some areasSingle burial replacing communal rites


353

Copper and gold metallurgy in most regionsGreece—EBA prepalatial period 3200–1950:Early Minoan 1, Early Cycladic 1, Early Hel-ladic 1; from c. 2800 Early Minoan 2, EarlyCycladic 2, Early Helladic 2Balkans—Final Ezero, Cotofeni, Glina, Sch-neckenberg, Karanovo VIIHungary—VucedolUkraine, southern Russia—Pit-GravesItaly—Gaudo, Rinaldone, and Remedellofrom c. 3100; BeakersNorthern France—SOM then BeakerBelgium—SOM, Wartburg-Stein-VlaardingenLow Countries—Wartburg-Stein-Vlaardin-gen, Corded Ware (PFB); Bell Beaker from2500Northern Europe—Corded Ware, PittedWarePoland—Globular Amphora then CordedWareNortheast Europe—Boat Axe culture, Pit-comb Ware culture, Corded Ware from c. 2700Scandinavia—TRB to 2800 then Single GraveCulture = Corded WareCentral Europe including eastern Switzer-land—Corded Ware to c. 2600; Bell BeakerNorthwest France—Kerogou 3200, Conguel2800Western Europe—Beakers from 2800Southern France—Ferrières and FontbouisseIberia—Millaran, VNSP to c. 2700; BellBeaker, ChalcolithicBritain—Peterborough Ware, Grooved Ware,Bell Beaker

2200–1800

Bronze metallurgyDeveloping international trade

Increasing social hierarchyGreece—EBA protopalaces from c. 2300 EarlyMinoan 3, Early Cycladic 3, Early Helladic 3;from c. 2000 Middle Minoan (early palaces),Middle Cycladic, Middle HelladicUkraine, South Russia—Pit-Graves to c. 2000,Catacomb GravesSoutheast Europe—A1 Final Glina, Nagyrév;then Hatvan, MonteoruCentral Europe—Bronze A1 2200–1800/1950Singen, Nitra, ÚneticeScandinavia—Late Neolithic / Dagger periodIberia—Later Beakers, Palmela complex,Ciempozuelas; EBA (Bronce Antiguo), ArgaricBronze Age, motillasBritain—Late Beaker; Food Vessel; Wessex I2000–1700; MigdaleAtlantic and Western Europe—later BeakerSouthern France—Fontbouisse, Bell BeakerFrance—Late Beaker; EBAItaly—Laterzo, Rinaldone, Proto-Apennine(center and south), Polada (north)

1800–1500

Burial under tumuli adopted in many regionsBronze metallurgy becoming widespreadGreece—Middle Minoan, Middle Cycladic,Middle Helladic to c. 1600; Late Minoan(Late Palaces), Shaft Graves Late HelladicSoutheast Europe—A1 Kisapostag, Hatvan,Monteoru, Otomani; A2 TumulusUkraine—Middle Dnepr, Catacomb GravesCentral Europe—Bronze A2—Únetice andrelated cultures; Bronze B TumulusScandinavia—Bronze Age 1 TumulusFrance—EBA (Bronze ancien) to c. 1700,MBA (Bronze moyen—Tréboul); Bretontumuli


354

Italy—Polada then Fiavé (north), Proto-Apen-nine EBAMediterranean islands—Nuraghic (Sardinia),Castelluccio (Sicily), Capo Graziano (AeolianIslands)Britain—Collared Urns, Food Vessels, LateBeakers; Wessex I to 1700; Wessex II c.1700–1400; Acton ParkIberia—Bronce Medio, Argaric Bronze Age

1500–1200

Growing evidence of conflictInternational trade flourishingGreece—Late Minoan, Late Helladic Myce-naeanUkraine—Timber grave cultureSoutheast Europe—A2 TumulusCentral and Western Europe—Bronze B-CTumulus culture to 1300; Lausitz; Bronze DUrnfields from c. 1400Scandinavia—Bronze Age 2 Tumulus, tree-trunk coffinsBritain—Deverel-Rimbury, Acton Park thenTaunton Ornament HorizonFrance—MBA (Bronze moyen—Tréboul);Breton tumuliIberia—Cogotasl, Bronce Medio to c. 1350;Bronce Tardio, CogotasItaly—Terramare (north), Apennine Bronze AgeMediterranean islands—Nuraghic (Sardinia),Thapsos (Sicily), Milazzese (Aeolian Islands)

1300/1200–1000

Agricultural intensificationCremation and urn burial widely practicedFortified settlements widespreadBronze in common useGreece—Late Helladic IIIC, Dark Age destruc-tions, SubMycenaean then ProtoGeometric

Steppe—Timber grave culture

Southeast Europe—EBA including Urnfields

Central Europe—Urnfields—Hallstatt A(1250–1050), Hallstatt B1 (1100–1000); Lausitz(southern Poland and eastern Germany)

Scandinavia—Bronze Age 3

Italy—Peschiera (north), Sub-Apennine; Proto-golasecca (north), Protovillanovan

Mediterranean islands—Nuraghic (Sardinia),Pantalica (Sicily), Ausonian (Aeolian Islands)

Britain—Deverel-Rimbury, Penard, Wilburton

France—EBA (Rosnoen), Urnfields

Iberia—Bronce Final, Urnfields

1000–800

Environmental deterioration

Iron gradually coming into use

Urnfields widespread

Phoenicians active in central and westernMediterranean

Greece—Early Geometric

Steppe—Timber Grave culture, Cimmerians

Southeast Europe—EBA including Urnfields

Central Europe—Hallstatt B2/3 (1050–800/750)—Urnfields

Scandinavia—Bronze Age 4–5

Britain—Ewart park, Dowris to c. 750

France—Bronze final IIIa, St-Brieuc-des-Iffsto c. 850; IIIb Carp’s Tongue

Iberia—Bronce Final, Urnfields; Phoenicians(coast)

Mediterranean islands—Nuraghic (Sardinia),Pantalica (Sicily), Ausonian (Aeolian Islands)

Italy—Este, Bologna, Golasecca (north),Terni, Villanovan (center and south)


355

800–700

Greek colonies established in the central andwestern MediterraneanElite wagon burialsGreece—Middle Geometric, Late GeometricSteppe—CimmeriansSoutheast Europe—Early Iron AgeCentral and Western Europe—Hallstatt CItaly—Este, Bologna, Golasecca (north); Vil-lanovan, GreeksIberia—Hierro (Iron Age), Castros (north-west), Tartessians (southwest), Phoenicians(coast)Britain—Llyn Fawr to 750Scandinavia—Bronze Age 5

700–600

Salt mining at its peakIronworking widespreadGreece—Orientalizing, ArchaicSteppe—ScythiansSoutheast Europe—Early Iron AgeCentral and Western Europe—Hallstatt CItaly—Este, Bologna, Golasecca (north), Etr-uscans, GreeksIberia—Iberians, Castros, Celtiberians, Tartes-sians; Phoenicians (coast)Scandinavia—Bronze Age 6Britain—Early Iron AgeAtlantic—Atlantic Iron Age

600–500

Greek traders penetrating central Europe viathe RhôneChieftains’ burials with Mediterranean luxuriesGreece—ArchaicSteppe—Scythians

Southeast Europe—ThraciansCentral and western Europe—Hallstatt DItaly—Este, Bologna, Golasecca, Celts(north); Etruscans, Latins, GreeksIberia—Iberians, Castros, Celtiberians, Tartes-sians; Carthaginians, Greeks (coast),Scandinavia—Early Iron AgeAtlantic—Atlantic Iron Age

500–400

Celts and Etruscans trading across the AlpsIron used across EuropeGreece—Classical from 480Steppe—ScythiansSoutheast Europe—ThraciansCentral and western Europe—Hallstatt D to450; La Tène A 500–400, CeltsItaly—Celts (north), Etruscans, Latins, GreeksIberia—Iberians, Castros, Celtiberians;Carthaginians, Greeks (coast)Atlantic—Atlantic Iron Age

400–300

Celtic migrationsGreece—Classical; Macedonian from 338Steppe—ScythiansSoutheast Europe—ThraciansIberia—Castros, Celtiberians, Iberians;Carthaginians (coast)Central and western Europe—La Tène BItaly—Gauls (north), Etruscans, Rome, Sam-nites, GreeksCarpathian basin—GalatiansAtlantic—Atlantic Iron Age

300–200

Celtic culture widespreadGreece—Hellenistic


356

Steppe—SarmatiansSoutheast Europe—ThraciansFrance to Balkans —La Tène B to 275; LaTène CEastern Europe—GermaniEastern Alps—NoricumIberia—Castros, Celtiberians, Iberians;Carthaginians (south)Italy—Gauls (north), Etruscans, Romans (cen-ter), Greeks; Romans from 218Atlantic—Atlantic Iron Age

200–100

Oppida emerging in western and centralEuropeProgressive Roman expansion in Mediter-raneanGreece—Hellenistic; Romans from 146Steppe—SarmatiansSoutheast Europe—ThraciansFrance to Balkans—La Tène C to 150; LaTène DEastern Europe and Scandinavia—Germani

Italy—RomansIberia—Castros, Lusitanians, Celtiberians;Romans (south and east)France—Romans from 120 (south), GaulsAtlantic—Atlantic Iron Age

100–0

Oppida widespreadRoman conquest of western EuropeSteppe—SarmatiansSoutheast Europe—Thracians, DaciansCentral and western Europe—La Tène DEastern Alps—NoricumEurope east of the Rhine and Scandinavia—GermaniMediterranean, western Balkans—RomansFrance—Gauls; Romans from 51Atlantic—Atlantic Iron Age

Sources: Whittle 1996, Milisauskas, ed. 2002,Cunliffe, ed. 1994, Cunliffe 2001a, Harris, ed.1996, Champion et al. 1984, Harding 1994,Bailey 2000, Scarre 1988, Twist 2001.


357

LIST OF MUSEUMS WITH IMPORTANTEUROPEAN MATERIAL ANDOPEN-AIR MUSEUMS


358

ALBANIA

Tirana: Archaeological museum

AUSTRIA

Vienna: Naturhistorisches MuseumGraz: Steiermarkisches Landesmuseum

JohanneumHallein: KeltenmuseumSalzburg: Museum Carolino AugusteumHallstatt: Hallstatt MuseumAsparn an der Zaya: Museum für

Urgeschichte

BOSNIA

Sarajevo: National Museum of Bosnia andHerzegovina

BULGARIA

Sofia: National History Museum; Archaeolog-ical Institute and Museum

Varna: Archaeological MuseumPlovdiv: Archaeological MuseumLovech: Museum of History

CROATIA

Zagreb: Archaeological Museum

CZECH REPUBLIC

Prague: Národní Muzeum

Brno: Moravské Zemské MuzeumRoztoky: Stredoceské Muzeum

DENMARK

Copenhagen: NationalmuseetLejre: Lejre Experimental CentreMoesgaard: Forhistorisk MuseumSilkeborg: Silkeborg Museum

ESTONIA

Viljandi: Museum of Viljandi

FINLAND

Helsinki: National MuseumTurku: Aboa VetusEspoo: Glims Farmstead Museum

FRANCE

Saint-Germain-en-Laye: Musée des Antiqui-tés Nationales

Aix-en-Provence: Musée GranetLyon: Musée de la Civilisation Gallo-RomaineDijon: Musée ArchéologiqueMarseilles: Musée d’Archéologie Méditer-

ranéeneChâtillon-sur-Seine: Musée ArchéologiqueVannes: Musée de PrehistoireRennes: Musée de BretagneChâlons-en-Champagne: Musée Municipal

GERMANY

Berlin: Staatliche Museen; Museum für Vor-und Frühgeschichte; Antikenmuseum

Bonn: Rheinisches LandesmuseumStuttgart: Württembergisches LandesmuseumSchleswig: Schleswig-Holsteinische Landes-

museumEberdingen-Hochdorf: Keltenmuseum

HochdorfMunich: Prahistorische StaatssammlungNuremberg: Germanisches NationalmuseumSaarbrücken: Landesmuseum

GREECE

Athens: National Archaeological MuseumThessaloniki: Archaeological Museum

HUNGARY

Budapest: Magyar Nemzeti MúzeumSopron: Soproni MúzeumDebreccen: Déri Múzeum

IRELAND

Dublin: National Museum of IrelandBoyne Valley: Brú na Bóinne Visitor Centre

ITALY

Bolzano: South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology(including the Iceman)

Brescia: Museo CivicoCapodiponte: Parco Nazionale delle incisioni

rupestriBologna: Museo CivicoRome: National Museum of Prehistory and

Ethnography; Antiquarium CommunaleMilan: Archaeological MuseumVerona: Natural History MuseumEste: Museo Nazionale AtestinoAncona: Museo Archeologico Nazionale delle

Marche

LATVIA

Riga: History Museum of Latvia

LITHUANIA

Vilnius: National Museum of Lithuania

LOW COUNTRIES

Liège: Museum of Prehistoric ArchaeologyLeiden: Rijksmuseum van OudhedenBrussels: Musées Royaux d’Art et d’HistoireLuxembourg: Musée National d’Histoire et

d’ArtLibramont: Musée des Celtes

MALTA

Valletta: National Museum of Archaeology

MACEDONIA

Skopje: Archaeological Museum

NORWAY

Trondheim: VitenskapsmuseetOslo: University Museum of National Antiq-

uitiesBergen: Museum of HistoryStavanger: Arkeologisk Museum

POLAND

Warsaw: Panstwowe Muzeum ArcheologiczneBiskupin: Biskupin MuseumPoznan: Muzeum Archeologiczne

PORTUGAL

Lisbon: Museu Nacional de Arqueologia

ROMANIA

Bucharest: Muzeul National de Istorie aRomaniei

Cluj-Napoca: History Museum of Transylva-nia

Iassy: Moldova National Museum

RUSSIA

St. Petersburg: State Hermitage Museum

L I S T O F M U S E U M S

359

SERBIA

Belgrade: National Museum

SLOVAKIA

Bratislava: Slovenské národné múzeumNitra: Archeologicky ústav SAV

SLOVENIA

Ljubljana: Narodni Muzej Slovenije

SPAIN

Madrid: Museo Arqueológico NacionalCordoba: Archaeological MuseumPalma de Mallorca: Museu de MallorcaBarcelona: Museo Arqueológico

SWEDEN

Stockholm: Statens Historiska MuseetTanum: Hällristningsmuseet

SWITZERLAND

Bern: Bernisches Historisches MuseumGeneva: Musée d’Art et d’HistoireZürich: Schweizerisches LandesmuseumBiel: Musée SchwabNeuchâtel: Musée Cantonale d’Archéologie

UNITED KINGDOM

London: British Museum; Museum of LondonEdinburgh: Museum of ScotlandOxford: Ashmolean MuseumCambridge: Museum of Archaeology and

EthnographyCardiff: National Museum of WalesSalisbury: Salisbury MuseumLerwick: Shetland MuseumAndover: Museum of the Iron AgeDorchester: Dorset County MuseumDevizes: Devizes MuseumChalton: Butser Ancient FarmPeterborough: Flag Fen Visitor CentreKirkwall: Tankerness House MuseumSt. Fagans: Museum of Welsh LifeBelfast: Ulster Museum

UKRAINE

Kiev: Ukraine National Historic MuseumOdessa: State Archaeological MuseumPereiaslav-Khmel’nyts’kyi: State Historical

Archaeological Preserve


360

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

361

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E L E C T R O N I C R E S O U R C E S

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Bronze Age 67, 72–74, 107geography of 4–5glass 173mud/clay building materials

128roof timbers 129–130Tsangli 40

Aegean Sea 179Aeolian Islands 144, 355cAfrica, humans in 19, 351cAfrican materials (as commodity)

173agricultural tools 119–120agriculture and farming 102–112,

355c. See also cropsafter harvest techniques

121–122animal husbandry 122–123the Atlantic region 8, 52, 76the Balkans 32, 33beginnings of 29–32Britain 44Bronze Age 66, 76, 77

Chalcolithic period 56mclimate/flora/fauna 8crops 102–107Danubian II 44domestic animals 107–112early 160–161Eastern Europe 41environmental change 12Etruscans 84Europe, development of 16food and cooking 345further spread of, to 3500 B.C.

47mGreece 32, 33history of xiIron Age 81m, 84, 103labor, division of 335Later Sesklo-Vadastra-Vinca-

Karanovo III-Dudesti 37LBK culture 34–37Mediterranean 4, 33, 34, 42,

49mixed 117–123Neolithic consolidation 39, 41,

42, 44Neolithic period 29, 29–32,

31, 32–34, 46, 48, 49, 52northern Europe 8, 10plow 120in postglacial Europe 30mRoman Empire 98settlement 77, 141, 142–145spread of 30m, 351c–353c

steppe region/culture 48swidden 118temperate Europe 8unequal trade transactions 166as way of life 353c

Aibunar 216Aichbühl 353caisled roundhouses 139Albania 358alcohol 111, 346Alderley Edge copper mine 213Alentejan 352c, 353cAlexander the Great 83, 91, 169,

293, 316allées couvertes 291Almerían 352c, 353calphabetic writing 83Alpine region 134–135, 146, 163Alps Mountains 5, 71, 356c, 357caltar 261Amazons 308amber 8, 71, 73, 75, 76, 234, 235,

235Amesbury Archer 269, 283, 348amphorae 87, 89, 140, 175, 285anaktora 139Anatolia 4, 29, 199Ancylus Lake 38, 351cAnemospila 67Anglesey 257animal horns 347animal husbandry 55, 122–123,

353c

I n d e x

375

Index

Page numbers in boldface indicate major treatment of the subject. Page numbers in italic refer to illustrations. Page numbers with the suffix m refer to maps. Page numbers with the suffix c refer to the chronology.

animalsand aesthetic/symbolic

behavior 22in agriculture 124–125burials 274Celtic art 325, 326as commodity 174–175Corded Ware culture 59as cult objects/symbols 248–

249environmental change 12Holocene 26Late Glacial Period 23–24Mesolithic art 322Palaeolithic period 22sheep 32, 34, 48, 55, 58, 59,

110, 345travel by 181visual arts 321as wild resources 114–116

animals, domestic 107–112. See also cattle; horses

the Balkans 32Britain 44cats 112dogs 23, 27, 38, 112, 112, 249,

274Eastern Europe 33, 41environmental change 12family accommodation 337Greece 32hunter-gathers/farmers 43Late Glacial Period 23Later Eneolithic 49LBK culture 35, 37Mediterranean 34, 42Neolithic consolidation 41–44Neolithic period 29, 32–34pigs 29, 32, 34, 55, 59, 108,

119anthropomorphic carvings and

stones 54, 266–267antlers 18, 43, 204–205A1 Final Glina 354cA1 Kisapostag 354cApennine Bronze Age 106, 355cappearance, personal 339–344appliqué (on ceramics) 229aquatic resources 116–117arboriculture 106archaeology xi–xii, 16, 240–241,

296, 317–318archery 296, 297. See also arrows;

bowsarchitecture. See also houses

circular houses 137–138ephemeral housing 132–133housing construction 128

longhouses 44–45, 109, 136–137, 146, 337, 338

mansions 139–140Mesolithic houses 133–134monumental 16, 353coppida 94, 95square and rectangular houses

134–136storage facilities 140strongholds 138, 139

Arctic Circle 10ard 46, 49, 52, 119–120, 161Arevaci 156Argaric Bronze Age 124, 354c, 355cArgaric culture 106, 124Ariovistus (chief of the Suebi) 95, 336armlet 326armor 77, 299–301arrows 23, 27, 38, 43, 116, 297, 309.

See also bowsart. See also Celtic art; rock art; specific

headings, e.g.: sculptureaesthetic/symbolic behavior

22–23Bronze Age 73Greece 83Iberia 87Iron Age 83, 87Late Glacial Period 23megalithic 250, 323Mesolithic period 29Minoan Crete 73Neanderthals 19Palaeolithic period 22–23performing 325–326Roman Empire 98settlement/movement/society

29visual 316, 321, 321–325warriors in 306–307

artifactsthe Balkans 32coal/shale 233–234Danubian II 44Greece 32marriage and sexual mores 336religious 240–241visual arts 321wood 192–193

Asia 20astronomy 269–270Athens, Greece 83Atlantic Ocean 2, 8, 9Atlantic region (zone) 352c–354c,

356c, 357cBronze Age 63, 69–71, 75–76,

80domestic architecture 132

Early Postglacial Europe 37–39

fortifications 149geography of 8–9Holocene 24Iron Age 87–88megaliths/funerary monuments

45Mesolithic society 42–43Neolithic consolidation 42–45Neolithic period 46, 52–54roundhouses 144settlement 141stone fortifications 302trade routes 178Urnfield burial 284

Atrebates people 96Aurignacian periods 20aurochs 248Ausonian 355cAustria 175, 216–217, 358Avaricum 157Avebury 264Avenue (Stonehenge) 263Avernus, Lake 253axes 297

the Atlantic region 43, 54ax-hammer, stone 210the Balkans 32battle-axes 59, 60, 62, 67, 210Britain 55bronze 215Bronze Age 68domestic wood equipment 194Greece 32humans, early 18industry, organization of 333LBK culture 35Mediterranean 49, 50Neolithic consolidation 39Neolithic period 32, 49–52,

54, 55northern Europe 43as offerings 258Southern Central Europe 52stone 36, 170, 210, 247TRB culture 50, 51wood felling/preparation 192

azurite 213

BBaden culture 52, 109, 134, 353cBalbridie, Scotland 54, 137Balearic Islands 150, 303Balfarg 277the Balkans 352c–354c, 357c

callaïs 235Chalcolithic period 58–59

H a n d b o o k t o L I f e I n P r e H I s t o r I c e u r o P e

376

copper 171, 215, 216, 218domestic architecture 132Early Postglacial Europe 37eastern Europe 94farming communities 160, 161gold 171Indo-European languages 316Iron Age 80Mediterranean 179metal 171metallurgy 213metal mining 213mountains 5mud/clay building materials

128Neolithic consolidation 40–41Neolithic period 32, 33, 37population shifts 163pottery kilns 228square houses 134tells 152

Ballachulish Moss 251Baltic languages 317Baltic Sea 7, 10, 24, 179, 234bank barrows. See barrows, bankbanks (earthen) 67, 77, 88, 301Barbarians 95, 96–97Barca 153, 153bards 241Bargeroosterveld 193, 261bark 113bark boats 185–186bark containers 202barley 34, 103Barnack 283barrows, bank 262–263barrows, funerary 274–276

the Atlantic region 69, 75the Balkans 59Bronze Age 66, 74, 79, 276Bush Barrow 276Carpathians 59Corded Ware culture 59, 275exposure 277Håga 276Hallstatt D 89inhumation burials/cemeteries

281Iron Age 85, 86long 268, 274, 277, 287, 292monumental tombs 286, 292Nordic zone 79North Mains 275passage graves 287round 274–275Seddin 276Southeast Europe 85

stelae/anthropomorphic stones 266

steppe region/culture 74, 86, 275

Tumulus culture 75, 276Únetice 69Wessex 268, 269, 275

basalt 171, 211basins 5basketry 195, 197, 201Basque language 318bastions 60, 80, 304, 305Battersea shield 257battle-axes 59, 60, 62, 67, 210battles 309–311Bavaria 157–158, 215beads 73, 75, 76, 78, 341, 344Beaker burials 61, 269, 273, 283Beaker culture and pottery 176,

354c, 355camber 235bows and arrows 297Bronze Age 71callaïs 235Chalcolithic period 55, 58, 60,

61, 61Corded Ware culture 59French river trade routes 178Mediterranean 71metallurgy 213temporary settlement 141–142warfare 296

beds 338–339beehive tombs. See tholoibeer 346beeswax 112Belgae 169Belgium 207–209, 354cbeliefs 241, 272Bell Beaker 354cbelt ring, shale 233Beorgs of Uyea 210–211berries 106, 113–114Bibracte 158, 321biers 88Bigbury Bay 188birds 248Birsmattian 352cBischeim 353cBiskupin 91, 135, 136, 153–154Björke 185Black Patch 144, 145Black Sea

environmental change 10–11flooding 352cGreece 84Holocene 24Iron Age 80

Later Sesklo-Vadastra-Vinca-Karanovo III-Dudesti 37

Mediterranean 4temperate Europe 7

blockhouses 151bluestones 263board games 337boars 249, 252Boat Axe culture 354cboat burials 79boats 28–29, 183–187, 248, 257. See

also dugout canoesBocca 352cBocca Quadrata 353cBodrogkeresztúr 353cbody armor 300body decoration 72, 340body parts 285bog bodies 259–260, 260, 333, 340,

347bog offerings 50–51, 92Bohemia 140, 157, 215, 216, 232,

234Bohemian Ore Mountains 172–173,

216, 223, 231Boian 352cBoii 91, 157Bologna 355c, 356cbone 18, 109, 131, 204–205, 285,

287, 320bonfires (in pottery firing) 227booty (from war/raids) 91, 311, 312Borremose 259Bosnia 358Bos primigenius. See AurochsBoudicca (queen of the Celts) 158,

308, 335bows 23, 27, 42, 116, 297box rampart 74, 304Boyne Valley 289, 290boys 336bracelets 71, 343, 344The Breiddin 154Brennus 242Breton 355cBrigg 185, 187briquetage 212Britain 352c–356c. See also England;

specific headings, e.g.: Wessexamber 234, 235antler tools 205the Atlantic region 8, 75, 80,

87, 178barbarians 97barrows, long 292Beorgs of Uyea tool working

site 210–211Bronze Age 77

I n d e x

377

Britain (continued)causewayed enclosures 143Chalcolithic period 62coinage 169copper 215Cornwall mine 217–218crannogs 148cremation 284domestic architecture 132Druidic education 321environmental change 10faience 230family accommodation 337halls 137hide boats 185Holocene 24late Mesolithic settlements

in 44La Tène culture 91, 92, 95Meare glass bead workshop

232megalithic developments 62menhirs/alignments 265Neolithic consolidation 44Neolithic period 54–55northern European trade routes

179Ogham script 320passage graves 287pits 140plank-built boats 186polished stone tools 209population expansion 161rock paintings and engravings

324roundhouses 137–138, 144separated from continent 351csettlement/economy/society 77square houses 134stone circles 264temperate Europe 7territorial markers 159territorial oppida 158textiles 176Wessex barrow burials 222wine 175

Brittanyallées couvertes 291the Atlantic region 52, 54, 70,

88, 178callaïs 235Celtic languages 317Chalcolithic period 63French river trade routes 179gold 171graphite 234markers 267megalithic 63, 286, 287

menhirs/alignments 265–266pottery 175, 176Sélèdin quarry 210souterrains 140territorial markers 159tombs 286, 287

brochs 138, 138, 139, 150–151brochtorff circle 293Broighter 185–186, 257Bronce Final 355cBronce Medio 355cBronce Tardio 355cbronze 354c, 355c

the Atlantic region 76, 80axes 215bits for horses 111Bronze Age 63, 66, 71, 77, 79Celtic 226, 244, 325and copper 171–172, 215, 219,

220Europe, development of 16figurines (religious) 252fishhooks 117founder’s workshop 219Hallstatt C 88helmets 300Iron Age 81metallurgy 77, 78Nordic zone 79palstave mold/ax 220rapiers and swords 298sculpture 322settlement/economy/society 77shields 299tin 216unequal trade transactions 167Únetice 69votive deposits 256

Bronze Age 63–80, 354c–356c. See also Early Bronze Age; Late Bronze Age

Aegean art 107amber 235Amesbury Archer 283animals for transport 181ard use 120armor 299Balfarg 278barrows, funerary 274–275boats 183body armor 300bracelets 343burials 273, 274buried/hidden offerings 258Camp Durand 154caves as housing 133Celtic art 324chestnut cultivation in 106

coffin, tree-trunk 279cult objects 245decorated headgear 341domestic animals 122–123Europe, development of 16exposure 277fibulae 343field systems 119flax preparation 196Galicia mine 217garments 341gold working 221grain 345and grain harvesting 120Grand Pressigny flint mine

207graphite 234and Greek herb use 107helmets 300industrial settlements 145industry, organization of 334iron working 224jet artifacts 233lake villages 146, 147leather objects 203, 204life expectancy 348–349and livestock as wealth 123longhouses 143looms 199lunulae 245megalithic sites 65mmetal mining 213Middle Bronze Age 71–74, 72,

297, 298, 309Mitterberg chalcopyrite ore

mine 216model chariot with sun disc

244neck and chest ornaments 341and pastoralism 125plank-built boats 186population shifts 163postglacial climate/vegetation

11pottery figurines 322razors 188rock art 109, 181, 187, 245,

249, 324roundhouses 137–138,

144–145sculpture 322serving food 347sheep 109shrines 261spearheads/palstave 172stone circles 264stone-lined graves/cists 278swords 299


378

tells 152temporary settlement 142textile fiber 196textiles/domestic equipment

198torc 222, 245–246trade/industry in 64mtravel by foot 181vegetable cultivation in 105vehicle transport 181and votive deposits in watery

locations 257and war deities 245warriors 305, 306and waterbird art 248water travel 188Wessex 269wood construction 193wooden bowl 195wool 110woolen garments 342

Bronze A1 culture 354cbronze figurines 252Bronze Medio 355cbronzes 248brooches 343brushwood 129, 130Bu 138Bubanj Hum 353cBug-Dnestr 352cbuilding materials 128–131Bükk 352cBulgaria 133, 152, 170, 216, 221–

222, 230, 358. See also Thrace and Thracians

Burebista (king of Dacia) 94Burgundy, France 158burial(s) 273–274, 353c, 354c, 356c.

See also barrows, funerary; death (rites/practices); grave goods; graves; specific headings, e.g.: monumental tombs

aesthetic/symbolic behavior 23the Atlantic region 39, 43, 54,

69–71, 75the Balkans 59Beaker burials 61, 269, 273, 283Britain 54Bronze Age 66, 67, 69–71, 75,

78, 79Carpathians 59cemeteries 281–282Cernavoda 282Chalcolithic period 55, 59cist 69, 71, 273, 278, 292communal 273, 288, 292, 353cconflicts/battles/wars 308Corded Ware culture 59

cremation 273, 279, 284Europe, development of 16funerary practices 273garments 341gender distinctions 334glacial Europe 21Globular Amphora culture 51Gumelnitsa-Karanovo V/Vi-

Vinca-Varna 41Hallstatt culture 88, 89industry, organization of 334inhumation 37, 75, 79, 273,

275, 281–283, 284Iron Age 82, 86, 88, 283Later Eneolithic 49LBK culture 37marriage and sexual mores 336Mediterranean 50, 71megalithic 45, 46, 62, 286–

287, 292Mesolithic period 39, 281–282Mycenaean Greece 73Neanderthals 19Neolithic consolidation 43,

45, 46Neolithic period 48, 50, 51,

54, 69northern Europe 39Placidhol II 275rites 274Scandinavia 69, 75sculpture 306–307settlement 281single 273, 283, 353cSkateholm 282social hierarchy 330–332Southeast Europe 67, 282–283spears 298steppe region/culture 48, 67, 86Tiszapolgár 41TRB culture 51Tumulus culture 74–75Únetice 69urn 79, 284, 355cvictims of violence 308–309victory celebrations 311warfare 296warrior 305, 306

buried and hidden offerings 258Bush Barrow 205, 276buttons, shale 233Byci Skála 255byres 109Byzantium 97

CCabeco de Mina 266Cádiz, Gulf of 178

Caesar, Juliusand Aedui tribe alliance 241the barbarians 96Bibracte 158campaigns/migrations/wars 312cliff castles 151dugout canoes 184Gaul 95leather objects 204oppida 157social complexity 162

cairns 275, 278, 280, 289, 291calendar, Coligny 269–270callaïs 174, 235–236Callander, Scotland 137Callanish 266Camelina 105Camp Durand 154campsites 19Camulodunon 95, 96, 158Camulos 242cannabis. See hempcannibalism 19, 285canoes. See dugout canoesCantabrian Mountains 5Capo Graziano 355ccaprines. See sheepcarburization 224Cardial Atlantique 352cCardial Impressed Ware 352cCarnac 63, 265, 265–267, 267, 268,

292Carn Brea 302Carn-Cous-Bougon 353ccarnyx 245, 310, 310, 326Carpathian basin 356c

barrows, funerary 275Bronze Age 74gold 171Mediterranean 5Neolithic consolidation 41Neolithic period 48–49population shifts 163Southeast Europe 74temperate Europe 7Tumulus culture 75

Carpathian Mountains 5, 7Carpathians 58–59Carp’s Tongue 355cCarthage and Carthaginians 167,

356c, 357cGreece 84Iberia 87, 92Iron Age 83, 83–85, 87ivory 173La Tène culture 92Phoenicians 83Rome 85

I n d e x

379

Cartimandua (queen of the Celts) 335

carved-stone ball 321carvings 73, 321–323cassiterite 213Castellic-Chambon-Sardun 352cCastelluccio 355cCastelnovian 352ccasting 67, 69, 74, 78, 80, 322–323castles, cliff. See cliff castlescastros 87–88, 154, 356c, 357cCatacomb Grave culture 67, 354cCatalonia 175, 211cats 112cattle 108–109, 248

the Balkans 32campaigns/migrations/wars

311Chalcolithic period 55Corded Ware culture 59Eastern Europe 41Globular Amphora culture 51Greece 32LBK culture 35milk products 345Neolithic consolidation 41Neolithic period 29, 32, 48, 50rustling 123sacrificial use of 109, 248social hierarchy 331Tisza 41TRB culture 50

Catuvellauni tribe 96, 158cauldrons 223–224, 242, 244, 245,

247causewayed enclosures 143–144,

301–302, 302Britain 54as cattle corrals 109Hambledon main enclosure

277Neolithic period 51, 54as religious monuments 262TRB culture 51

cavalry 307–308, 311caves 60, 133, 255, 280, 293Ceide, Ireland 118–119celt (winged) 68Celtiberians 87, 92, 356c, 357cCeltic art 324, 325, 325, 326

boars in 249, 252Iron Age 81–82, 87plant motifs in 249Roman Empire 97severed heads in 250

Celtic chiefdoms 332Celtic deities 242–245, 244Celtic horses 111

Celtic languages 317Celtic magistrates 332–333Celts 356c

alphabetic scripts 319animals 174, 175asymmetric trade 168the barbarians 96, 97battles 309–311bronze coin 226campaigns/migrations/wars

312children 336coinage 168–169and domestic fowl 111Druidic education 321dugout canoes 184feasting 346field systems 123funerary practices 272furniture and fittings 339furs 202gold 171graphite 234hair 340Iron Age 82, 83, 85, 86La Tène culture 89–92literature 320marriage and sexual mores 336music 326oppida 95oral traditions 320population shifts 163power 335rafts 184religion 240, 241Rome 85settlements 108shields 300slaves 174social organization 332–333Southeast Europe 85temperate Europe 86warriors 307–308wine 175wooden wheels 195

cemeteries. See also burial(s)the Atlantic region 38, 43,

69, 70barrows, funerary 275Bronze Age 67, 69–71, 79Eastern Europe 41Etruscans 84funerary practices 272grave 330Gumelnitsa-Karanovo V/Vi-

Vinca-Varna 41Hoëdic/Téviec 278Iron Age 84

Los Millares 290Mediterranean 71Neolithic consolidation 40,

41, 43Neolithic period 46Southeast Europe 67Tiszapolgár 41Tumulus culture 75, 276urnfields 79

Central Europe 352c–357cBronze Age 69, 74–77Chalcolithic period 59–60Early Postglacial Europe

34–37Globular Amphora culture 51Iron Age 88, 89Neolithic consolidation 44–46Neolithic period 50–52rock paintings and engravings

324trade routes 179

ceramics 226–230, 333cereals 4, 34, 48, 58, 102–104, 103Cernavoda 282, 353cCernunnos 242, 248, 249Cerny 352cCevennes Mountains 5chain mail 300, 300, 301Chalcolithic period 55–63, 354c

axes 297bows and arrows 297drug use 107farming 56mgraves 330Iberia 149–150industry, organization of 333jet artifacts 233lignite beads 233metallurgy 57mpostglacial climate/vegetation

11reliefs and engravings 323southeastern Europe 58–59stone as tool material 211temperate Europe 59–60towers/bastions 305warfare 296warriors 305

chalcopyrite 213chalk 236chambers, funerary. See containers

and chambers, funerarychamfrien 91Charavines-les-Baigneurs 131, 147charcoal production 124chariots 301

battles 310Bronze Age 72, 74, 77


380

Celtic 307Iron Age 82La Tène culture 89in rock art 248steppe region/culture 74war 111

charms 348Chasseen 353cChâtelperronian 20chenopodium 105chest ornaments 341, 343chevaux-de-frise 304chickens 111chickpeas 104chiefdoms (Celtic) 332chiefs 89, 98, 346, 356cchildren

domestic work 335everyday life of 336health and diet 347life expectancy 348, 349Sculptor’s Cave 280settlement burials 281victims of violence 308, 309

China 7, 17, 197Chrickley Hill 302Christianity 98churches 98Ciempozuelas 354cCimbri 94Cimmerians 85, 86, 355c, 356ccinerary urn 284circles 245, 264circular houses 137–138Cissbury 207cist burial 69, 71, 273, 278, 292Citania de Sanfins 154city-states 82–84Claudius (emperor of Rome) 96Clava Cairns 289clay 128, 134, 140, 247clay pottery 226–229Cleaven Dyke 262–263Clickhimin, Ireland 151cliff castles 88, 151, 255–256climate 4, 7–8, 10–12, 23–26clinker-built boats 187cloth 40, 201clothing

chamfrien/pony-cap 91domestic activities 339glacial Europe 21materials for 340–341Neolithic period 52Palaeolithic period 18pins and brooches 343western Europe 52

cloth-making techniques 199–201

Cnip 139coal and shale 173, 232, 232–234coastlines 8, 9, 24, 25mcoffins 75, 273, 276, 278–279, 279,

355cCogotas 355cCogotsal 355ccoinage (coins) 168–169

alphabetic scripts 319, 320the barbarians 97bronze Celtic 226Iberia 92literature 320oppida 95production 225, 226Southeast Europe 85southern France 92

Coligny calendar 269–270collared flask 228Collared Urns 355ccollars 71, 341, 343colonization 17–18, 34, 83–84,

85–86, 89Combed Ware culture 353ccombs 43, 344commodities 169–176. See also

specific commoditiesdecorative materials as 173–

174manufactured goods as 175–

176metals as 171–173oxen as 109perishable goods as 174–175stone 169–171

communal burials 273, 288, 292, 353c

communication 19cones (as cult objects) 247Conguel 354cConstance, Lake 131construction 128–132, 171, 193–

194, 211containers and chambers, funerary

274, 278–280, 286, 291continental shelf 10, 11, 26cooking food 17–18, 22, 33, 337,

338, 345–346copper 213, 354c

asymmetric trade 167the Atlantic region 69, 70ax 68Bronze Age 69, 70, 75, 78Chalcolithic period 60, 62cold-hammered 352cas commodity 171–172and copper alloys 215–220Eneolithic period 40, 49

Europe, development of 16Gumelnitsa-Karanovo V/Vi-

Vinca-Varna 40, 41Iberia 60Later Sesklo-Vadastra-Vinca-

Karanovo III-Dudesti 37Mediterranean 42, 50metallurgy 62, 78, 213metal mining 213Mycenaean Greece 73Neolithic consolidation 40, 42Neolithic period 50, 51Scandinavia 75southern France 60TRB culture 51Únetice 69

copper ore 215–218coral 174, 234Corded Ware culture 354c

Beaker vessels 60and cannabis use 107Chalcolithic period 55, 59–60drink 346funerary barrows 275life expectancy 348and spread of Indo-European

languages 317temporary settlement 141–142

corduroy road 182Corlea 1 182–183Cornwall

the Atlantic region 87, 178clay for pottery 226courtyard houses 139Iron Age 87mine 217–218northern Europe 179souterrains 140tin 172, 217–218trade routes 178, 179

Corsica 34, 150, 278, 303Cortaillod 352c, 353cCotofeni 353c, 354ccoulter 118, 120courtyard houses 139Coventina 242crafts. See industry and craftscrannogs 129, 148–149, 149, 304cremation 284–285, 355c

absent rites 285the Atlantic region 43, 75, 80barrows, funerary 275, 276Bronze Age 75, 78–80burials 273, 279Iron Age 85LBK culture 37Neolithic consolidation 43Nordic zone 79

I n d e x

381

cremation (continued)northern Europe 43Scandinavia 75Southeast Europe 85urnfields 79

Cretan scripts 319Crete 29, 67, 72–73, 230, 292. See

also Minoan culturecrime and punishment 333Croatia 75, 358crops 102–107

Bronze Age 73cereals 4, 34, 48, 58, 102–104,

103fibers 107fodder 123fruits 28, 32, 37, 105–107grain 35, 36, 43, 102, 120, 122,

345, 345, 347LBK culture 35–37Mediterranean 4Minoan Crete 73Neolithic period 29, 32pulses 34, 58, 104, 109vegetables 104–105wheat 102–103

crows 248Cucuteni-Tripolye 352c, 353cCueva de los Murciélagos 107, 197,

201, 280cultivation 119, 120, 121cult objects and symbols 245–250,

246, 247cultural transformation 19–20cuneiform 319cups 69, 70cursus 54, 262, 268Cwmystwyth 145, 217Cyclades 58, 354cCzech Republic 358

DDacia 94, 357cdagger(s) 298

the Atlantic region 70Bronze Age 66, 70–72Chalcolithic period 62flint 70Mediterranean 71metallurgy 62Mycenaean Greece 73warrior burials 306weapons 297

Dagger period 69Dalmatia 106Dampierre-sur-le-Doubs 142dance 325, 336–337Danebury 155

Danube region 5, 79, 170, 284Danube River 7, 9, 67, 94, 179Danubian II 44–45, 136, 143, 353cDark Ages 355cDartmoor 76dating (methods) 16–17, 252, 255,

257daub 128, 134dead European languages 318–319death (rites/practices) 272–293. See

also barrows, funerary; burial(s); cremation; funerary practices; grave goods; graves; passage graves

absent rites 285aesthetic/symbolic behavior 23architecture, megalithic 286body parts 285Bronze Age 78–79cannibalism 285cists 292containers and chambers 274,

278–280, 286, 291exposure 276–278funeral procession 272funerary beliefs 272funerary monuments 43, 45,

46, 54, 262, 306–307gallery graves 62, 63, 286, 290,

290–291, 292giants’ graves/navetas 76, 292inhumation and cemeteries

281–283long barrows 268, 274, 277,

287, 292megalithic 286, 292monumental tombs 53,

286–293Neolithic period 48Palaeolithic period 23rock-cut tombs 62, 73, 85, 261,

286, 293steppe region/culture 48tholoi 73, 85, 275, 282, 292–

293, 331warfare 296

Decebalus (king of Dacia) 94decorated headgear 341decoration

bodies 340Bronze Age 74incised 74La Tène culture 89, 90megalithic tombs 288pottery 229situlae art 323Southeast Europe 74visual arts 321

decorative materials 173–174deer 27, 28deities 348. See also Celtic deitiesDelphi 311dendrochronology 131, 255, 257Denmark 352c, 353c

the Atlantic region 42, 43Gundestrup cauldron 223–224Hjortspring boat 187longhouses 143looms 199museums in 358Neolithic consolidation 42, 43northern Europe 42, 43northern European trade routes

179Thisted flint mine 209Tybrind Vig canoes 185weaving 200weaving equipment 200

dental caries 347Deverel-Rimbury 355cDiana 353cdice 337diet 38, 347Dimini 40, 152–153, 352cDiodorus Siculus 218diseases 348distance slab (Roman) 96ditches

the Atlantic region 88Avebury 264barrows, funerary 274Britain 54Bronze Age 67, 77Crickley Hill 302as defenses 301Eastern Europe 41Gumelnitsa-Karanovo V/Vi-

Vinca-Varna 40henges 263holes and structures 131Iron Age 88Mediterranean 33, 42Neolithic consolidation 41, 42Neolithic period 33, 52, 54outworks 305settlement/economy/society 77Southeast Europe 67Southern Central Europe 52

Diviciacus (leader of Aedui tribe) 332–333

Divostin IA 133Divostin Ib 137Dmanisi 18DNA studies 20, 98, 309, 336Dnepr-Donets 352cDnepr Rapids 308


382

Dobrovody settlement 49Doggerland 24, 25m, 38, 351cdogs 23, 27, 38, 112, 112, 249, 274dolmens 291domestic activities 339domestic animals. See animals,

domesticdomestic arrangements 337–339,

338domestic work 335domus de gianas. See witches’ housesdonkeys 111, 112, 175, 181Dorset, England 143–144, 262Dover, Straits of 9, 179Dover boat 186Dowris 355cDressel amphorae 175drink 82, 273, 346drugs 107, 241, 346Druids 241–242

Anglesey 257Britain 96Celtic social organization 332Coligny calendar 269–270education of 241, 321and human sacrifice 259and importance of trees 249Iron Age 82Mona 253–254Roman Empire 98

drums 236, 326Drunemeton 249, 253drying, in crop processing 122D-shaped fortifications 151Duchcov 257ducks 111, 248dugout canoes 29, 42, 124, 184,

184–185Dumnorix 332dump rampart 302Dun Aonghasa 151dun enclosures 151duns (roundhouses) 139Dürrnberg bei Hallein 145–146,

212dwarfs 320dye (plant) 107, 340dyeing (textiles) 201dynastic marriage 335–336dysser 291

Eeagles 248Early Bronze Age 63, 66–71

appliqué 229cereal crops in 104cremation 284culture 354c, 355c

daggers 298flint dagger 70hide boats 185human figures 252jewelry materials 173ornaments 205pottery figurines 322territorial markers 159tools 68warrior burials 306wooden burial chambers 279

Early Eneolithic period 40–41Early Geometric 355cEarly Holocene period 24–26, 351cEarly Iron Age 81m, 199, 202, 212,

231, 349, 356cEarly Mesolithic period 26–29Early Neolithic period 29–39, 352c

beginnings of agriculture in 29–32, 30m, 31

cereal crops in 104high-gluten wheat 103Karanovo 152looms 199mats/matting 201–202and permanently cultivated

fields 118pottery making 227shells as ornaments 236weaving 200wheat 102

Early Postglacial Europe 24–39beginnings of agriculture in

29–32changing coastlines in 25mEarly Holocene 24–26expansion/development in

34–39farming 30mhunter-gatherers 30mhunting equipment 27Mesolithic period 26–29Neolithic period 29–39stone axes from 36

earrings 62, 341earthquakes 12, 72Eastern Europe 33, 41, 51, 93–94,

179, 317, 353c, 357cEBA culture. See Early Bronze Age

culture economic divisions 66economic strategies (in agriculture)

117–125economy 102–125

archeological information on xii

Bronze Age 77crops 102–107

domestic animals 107–112Early Mesolithic 26–28intensification/specialization

124–125mixed farming 118–123Neolithic period 46Palaeolithic period 22Roman Empire 97strategies for 117–125wild resources 112–117woodland management

123–124education (Druidic) 241, 321Egolzwil 352cEgtved 279Egypt 319Eilean an Tighe 227–228electrum 223elites 356c

the Atlantic region 70barrows, funerary 274Bronze Age 66, 70Celtic warriors 307Chalcolithic period 62and history xiindustry, organization of

333–334Iron Age 85La Tène culture 90rapiers and swords 298rock-cut tombs 293Roman Empire 97Southeast Europe 85Urnfield burial 284warrior burials 306

Ellerbek 353cElp 143elves 320enameling glass 232enclosures 254

causewayed 51, 54, 109, 143–144, 262, 277, 301–302, 302

Danubian II 45monuments 262mortuary 59, 277–278Neolithic period 45, 46, 52Southern Central Europe 52

enemies, heads of 273Eneolithic period 40–41, 48–49England 48

amber 235Bigbury Bay shipwreck 188Brigg logboat 185Brigg “raft” 187Britain 96Camulodunon 158Cissbury flint mine 207

I n d e x

383

England (continued)coal and shale sources 232Danebury 155domestic wood equipment 194Dover Boat 186Ferriby boat 186–187flax preparation 196Great Langdale quarry 210Grimes Graves flint mine 207Hasholme logboat 185Hengistbury Head shale

production 233–234Langdon Bay shipwreck 188metal mining 213Moor Sands shipwreck 187–

188Neolithic period 48northern European trade routes

179oppida 95pottery 175roads 182rounds 151Seahenge 264Somerset Levels 183Star Carr 182trackways 182trade patterns 166water travel 188Wessex barrow burial area 222

English Channel 9, 10, 24engravings 323, 323, 324entertainment 336–337entrance graves 289entrance passages 304, 305Entremont 92, 156, 261, 267environment xii, 10–12, 26environmental change 10–12, 16,

23, 39, 82, 351c, 355cephemeral housing 132–133Epicardial 352cepitaphs 320Epona 242–243equipment, domestic 194, 195, 198Ertebølle 352c, 353c

the Atlantic region 42, 43Bronze Age 66domestic wood equipment 194furs 202Neolithic consolidation 42, 43Neolithic period 51Northern Europe 42, 43trade patterns 166TRB culture 51

Erzgebirge. See Bohemian Ore Mountains

esparto grass (in textiles) 197, 201Este 355c, 356c

Estonia 358Esus 243Etruscan language 318, 319Etruscans 84, 84, 85, 89, 356c, 357cEtton, England 262Euboea 84Europe

development of 16–98far Northern 9–10grain crops 116political map of 3mtemperate 5–8topography of 6m

European language 316–319Europeans 18everyday life 18, 75, 324, 335–339,

338Ewart park 355cexcarnation 285, 287exogamy 335exposure (as funerary practice) 273,

276–278, 285Eyni, Estonia 134Ezero 353c, 354cEzinge 148

Ffahlerz 213faience beads 173, 230–231fairies 320family accommodation 337family life 335–336farmers 40, 44, 86, 97, 330, 332, 347farming. See agriculture and farmingfarms 144, 145, 150–152fastenings (wood) 193fauna

environmental change 12Far North 10Holocene 26humans, early 18Late Glacial Period 23Mediterranean 4Mesolithic period 26–27Palaeolithic period 17temperate Europe 7–8

feasting 82, 262, 307, 337, 346Fécamp rampart 302Feddersen Wierde 148Fellbach Schmiden 255Ferriby, North 186–187Ferrières 354cFiavé 355cfiber crops 107fibers (textiles) 196–198. See also

specific headings, e.g.: silkfibulae 84, 284, 339, 341, 343, 343fields 66, 77, 118–119, 123

fights 337figs 105–106figurative art 321, 324figurines 250–252, 251, 260, 306–

307, 322–323Bronze Age 80god of thunder 244Later Sesklo-Vadastra-Vinca-

Karanovo III-Dudesti 37Mediterranean 80pottery 250–251, 321, 322religious 250–252, 251,

306–307Sardianian bronzes 322–323visual arts 321

Finland 7, 9, 10, 181, 197, 358Finnish language 318Fiorano 352cfire 17–18, 21, 22, 28firing (clay pottery) 227–228First Palace period 67fish 7, 9, 26, 28, 33, 37fishing 116, 117

the Atlantic region 38, 42–43economy 26, 28fishhooks, bronze 117Mediterranean 42Mesolithic period 26, 28, 38Neolithic consolidation 42–43Neolithic period 46, 50northern Europe 38, 42–43sea trade routes 177temperate Europe 7TRB culture 50

fish traps 116–117fish weirs 116–117Flag Fen 255flagons 89flagstone 130flask, collared 228flax 105, 107, 196flint 353c

axes 331blades 41climate/flora/fauna 8as commodity 169–170Mediterranean 42, 49microliths 114Neolithic consolidation 42Neolithic period 49–51sickle 121temperate Europe 8tool making 206, 209TRB culture 50, 51wood felling/preparation 192

flint mining 48, 51, 206–209, 208, 334

Flood stories 26


384

flooring 129, 130flora 7–8flutes (bone) 326fogous (chambers) 88Folkton drums 236Fontbouisse 354cfood 344–347

burials 273cooking 345–346drink 346economy 22, 27, 28feasting 346grain 345hunter-gathers/farmers 43Late Glacial Period 23Mesolithic period 27, 28milk products 345Neolithic consolidation 43Neolithic period 52Palaeolithic period 22providing 334–335serving 347western Europe 52

Food Vessels 355cfoot travel 180–181forest groves 249, 253forests 7–8, 10–12, 26, 38, 39, 114fortifications and defenses 301–305

the Balkans 59Bronze Age 67, 72, 74, 77Carpathians 59causewayed enclosures 302Chalcolithic period 59, 60Europe, development of 16farms 150–152gateways/entrances 304, 305Hallstatt D 89Iberia 60Iron Age 85La Tène culture 91Mycenaean Greece 73Neolithic period 32, 52oppida 94settlement/economy/society 77Southeast Europe 67, 74, 85Southern Central Europe 52southern France 60stone 302, 303Tumulus culture 75villages 153–154, 252

forts 149, 151, 155. See also hillfortsforum (Roman) 97foster parents 336founder’s workshop 219fowl, domestic 111France 353c–355c, 357c

allées couvertes 291alphabetic scripts 319

asymmetric trade 167the Atlantic region 75Basque language 318Beaker vessels 61Bibracte 158Bronze Age 75, 79callaïs 235–236Camp Durand 154causewayed enclosures 143caves for burial 280Celtic languages 317Chalcolithic period 60, 62classically influenced towns 156coinage 169conflicts/battles/wars 308cord 201cremation 284dugout canoes 184dyeing 201earthen ramparts 302Entremont 156glacial Europe 21Grand Pressigny flint mine

207and grape/olive cultivation 106hemp fiber 197Iberia 60, 92lake villages 146literature 320mansions 139Mediterranean 42, 49, 50, 180megalithic developments 62museums in 358Neolithic consolidation 42Neolithic period 49, 50northern European trade routes

179pastoral enclosures 152population expansion 161river trade routes in 178–179Sélèdin quarry 210southern France 60, 92stone-lined graves/cists 278Terra Amata 133towns 155urnfields 79victory celebrations 311wine 175

Franchthi cave 32, 170, 236Frattesina 232frescoes 73fruits 28, 32, 37, 105–107fruit trees 106funerary monuments 43, 45, 46, 54,

262, 306–307funerary practices 272–285

the Atlantic region 53–54and barrows 274–276

and beliefs 272Bronze Age 66, 78burials 273–274containers/chambers 278–280cremation 284–285death/religion 78exposure 276–278inhumation burials/cemeteries

281–283Iron Age 82megalithic tombs 286–287Neolithic period 53–54offerings 256procession 272settlement burials 281

funerary stelae 267, 323fur 18, 27, 38, 174, 202, 204furniture and fittings 194, 337–339,

339

GGadir 83, 87, 167Galatians 86, 91, 92, 249, 253, 312,

332, 356cgalena 213Galicia 154, 159, 172, 178, 216,

217, 324Galician saunas 262gallery graves 62, 63, 286, 290,

290–291, 292Gallia Transalpina 92gambling 337gaming counters, glass 231garments 20, 55, 341, 342, 342Garton Slack 333gateway 75, 304, 305gathering plants 114Gaudo 354cGaul(s) 356c, 357c

alphabetic scripts 320the barbarians 97campaigns/migrations/wars

312Celtic social organization 332cliff castles 151cooking food 346Druidic education 321eastern Europe 94hair 340Iron Age 86La Tène culture 95oppida 94pottery 176ramparts 303Roman conquest of 312temperate Europe 86wine 175

Gavrinis 265, 290

I n d e x

385

geese 111gender distinctions 120, 334–335geography 2–12

Atlantic facade 8–9climate/vegetation 4and environmental change

10–12Mediterranean 2–5mountains 5northern Europe 9–10North Sea 9political map of Europe 3mtemperate Europe 5–8topography 6m

geometric designs 322, 325Germanic languages 317Germanic tribes 97, 174Germani people 86, 96, 307, 310,

357cGermany 353c, 355c

asymmetric trade 167Feddersen Wierde 148The Heuneberg 154–155leather objects 203museums in 359Nebra Sky-Disc 269salt 175silk fiber 197stone as tool material 211trackways 182wierden 148wine 175Wittemoor Trackway XLII 182Wittnauer Horn 153woodworking 193

Ggantija 261–262giants’ graves 292Giant’s House. See GgantijaGibraltar, Strait of 2, 5, 9, 180gift-giving 166, 167–168glacial Europe 10, 17, 20–22, 351cglaciers 10, 11, 24, 351cglacis 304glass 78, 173, 231, 231–232Glastonbury 114, 149glaze (pottery) 229Glina 354cglobal warming 351cGlobular Amphora culture 51, 173,

207, 292, 299, 346, 353c, 354cgnocchi 345goats 32, 34, 48, 55, 59, 110, 345goddess 243, 251gods 320. See also deitiesGolasecca 355c, 356cgold 213, 221–223

the Atlantic region 69the barbarians 97

barrows, funerary 276Bronze Age 69, 75as commodity 171Early Eneolithic period 40eastern Europe 94Europe, development of 16Gumelnitsa-Karanovo V/Vi-

Vinca-Varna 40, 41in metallurgy 221–223Neolithic consolidation 40Scandinavia 75sources 221torc 222

gold work 221–223, 354cBronze Age 78Ireland 222Iron Age 86metallurgy 78steppe region/culture 86Thrace 222Torcs 222–223Varna 221–222Wessex 222

goods, manufactured 175–176Gournay-sur-Aronde 248, 254grafting 106grain

as food 345free-threshing of 102harvesting of 120health and diet 347hunter-gathers/farmers 43LBK culture 35, 36Neolithic consolidation 43Neolithic threshing floor 122saddle quern for grinding 345

Grand Menhir Brisé 171, 265, 266, 268

Gran Dolina, Atapuerca 18Grand Pressigny 170, 207grands tumulus 292grapes 105–106grapevines 58graphite 234Grauballe 260grave goods

aesthetic/symbolic behavior 23the Atlantic region 38, 43, 70Bronze Age 66, 70, 71, 78, 79burials 273–274death/religion 78Egtved 279Eneolithic period 40, 49gender distinctions 334Hallstatt C 88Hallstatt D 89inhumation burials/cemeteries

281

Iron Age 86LBK culture 37Mediterranean 71megalithic tombs 287Mesolithic period 29, 38,

281–283metallurgy 78Neolithic consolidation 43northern Europe 38, 43Palaeolithic period 23rock-cut tombs 293settlement burials 281settlement/movement/society

29social hierarchy 330, 331steppe region/culture 86Tiszapolgár 41Únetice 69Urnfield burial 284urnfields 79warrior burials 306wooden burial chambers 280

graves 278. See also passage gravesthe Atlantic region 39, 43barrows, funerary 275Beaker wares from 61Bronze Age 71, 74, 75, 79burials 273furnishings 273–274gallery graves 62, 63, 286, 290,

290–291, 292giants’ graves/navetas 76, 292Globular Amphora culture 51markers 273Mediterranean 71and megalithic tombs 287–291Mesolithic period 39Neolithic consolidation 43Neolithic period 48Nordic zone 79northern Europe 39, 43rich 330rotunda 292Scandinavia 75Southeast Europe 282stelae/anthropomorphic stones

266steppe region/culture 48, 74stone-lined 278Tiszapolgár 41

Gravettian period 20, 21Great Langdale 210Great Orme’s Head 217Greece and Greeks 352c–357c. See

also Mycenaean Greeceasymmetric trade 167, 168battles 311Bronze Age 63, 107


386

ceramics 226cereal crops in 104Chalcolithic period 58coinage 168crops 106dead European languages

318–319Dimini 152–153and domestic fowl 111Early Postglacial Europe 37Entremont 156Etruscans 84Europe, development of 16farming communities 160French river trade routes

178–179Hallstatt D 89Hellenistic 356c, 357cand herb use 107The Heuneberg 155Holocene 24and human figurines 251Iberia 87, 92Iron Age 80, 83–84, 84–87La Tène culture 92looms 199mansions 139mats/matting 201–202Mediterranean 179museums in 359Nea Nikomedeia 152Neolithic consolidation 40Neolithic period 29, 32–33,

37, 106ostrich eggshells 236and oxen use 109pottery 176, 227Rome 85sea trade routes 177Sesklo culture 352cshells as ornaments 236slaves 174Southeast Europe 85southern France 92square houses 134steppe region/culture 85–86tells 152timber 174vegetable cultivation in 105wine 175

Greek language 73, 316, 319Greek script 319, 320Grimes Graves 207, 208, 258Grimston-Lyles Hill 353cgrindstones 28, 211, 345Grooved Ware pottery 63, 107,

263, 354cGrossgartach 353c

ground preparation (farming) 119–120

Gulf Stream 9Gumelnitsa culture 104, 352cGumelnitsa-Karanovo V/Vi-Vinca-

Varna 40–41Gundestrup cauldron 223–224

as buried/hidden offering 258cattle on 248cult scenes on 245deities on 242, 244dolphin on 249La Tène culture 92Raevemose 259Teutates 244

Gurness 150Gussage All Saints 220

HHaddenham 277haematite 213Håga 276hair 340Hajdúsámson 258halberds 298halls 137Hallstatt culture 355c, 356c

amber 235barrows, funerary 275Bronze Age 78bronzes 248cemeteries 283Hallstatt C 88, 88Hallstatt D 89, 173Hauterive-Champréveyres 147human sacrifice 255ivory 173metallurgy 78salt mining 212sculpture 307, 322situlae art 323social complexity 162

hallucinogenic substances 241Hal Saflieni 50, 293Hamangia 352cHambledon 54, 277hamlets, roundhouse 144, 145Hammer God 243hammerstones 28, 334hand tools 119Hasholme 185Hatvan 354cHauterive-Champréveyres 131,

146–147, 231hay drying 122headgear, decorated 341heads, severed 250, 285health and medicine 347–349

hearths 17, 21, 337, 338Heelstone 263Helladic cultures 354c, 355chelmets 300Helots 83Helvetii people 94, 312hemp 59, 107, 196–197, 346henges 263–264. See also

StonehengeHengistbury Head 233, 234herbal remedies 348herbs 107H. ergaster/H. erectus 17–18, 351cheroes 320Heuneberg 89, 154–155H. heidelbergensis 18, 351chide boats 185–186hides 18, 27, 131, 133, 174hierarchy, social 330–332hieroglyphics 319Hierro 356chill figures (religious) 252hillforts 154–155, 155, 304

banks and ditches 301Bronze Age 77fortifications and defenses 301glacis 304Hallstatt D 89La Tène culture 91oppida 94population 349ramparts 303settlement/economy/society 77towers/bastions 305warfare 296Závist 261

hilts 298Hinkelstein 353cHjortspring 92, 257, 311H. neanderthalensis. See Neanderthalshoards. See also votive deposits and

offeringsthe Atlantic region 80Bronze Age 66, 74, 75, 78, 80death/religion 78of gold lunulae 258Iron Age 85metallurgy 78Scandinavia 75Southeast Europe 74, 85stelae/anthropomorphic stones

266Tumulus culture 75Únetice 69votive 66, 74, 266

Hodde 143Hoëdic 278hoes 82, 120

I n d e x

387

Hoguette, La 352cHohmichele barrow 193, 197, 200holes (and structures) 131Holland 141Holocene period 17, 24–26, 102,

116, 351cHolzhausen 255Homo genus 17, 351choney 112“honor-price” 332Hoogkarspel 109horns 204–205, 327horsemen 85, 86, 88, 307–308horses 111–112

animals 175animals for transport 181Bronze Age 74, 77burials 274Chalcolithic period 58climate/flora/fauna 8Corded Ware culture 59as cult objects/symbols 248–

249Eastern Europe 41economy 22, 27Hallstatt C 88industry, organization of 334Kurgans 280Late Glacial Period 23Later Eneolithic 49Mesolithic period 27Neolithic consolidation 41Neolithic period 48Palaeolithic period 22settlement/economy/society 77Southeast Europe 74steppe region/culture 48, 74temperate Europe 8vehicle transport 181

houses 132–140circular 137–138courtyard 139domestic strongholds 138,

139, 303ephemeral 132–133furniture and fittings 339Gumelnitsa-Karanovo V/Vi-

Vinca-Varna 40La Tène culture 92life expectancy of 131–132longhouses 44–45, 109, 136–

137, 146, 337, 338mansions 139–140Mesolithic 133–134Neolithic period 52, 130oppida 94–95pit 137pit houses 131, 133, 137

rectangular 134–136roundhouses 130, 131, 137–

139, 144, 145, 145, 148, 149, 337

shrines 260–261Southern Central Europe 52square 134–136storage facilities 140wells 140, 255

housingthe Atlantic region 76the Balkans 32Bronze Age 73, 76Chalcolithic period 60Corded Ware culture 59domestic work 335economy 26entertainment and sport 337Europe, development of 16family accommodation 337glacial Europe 20, 21Greece 32humans, early 18Iberia 60LBK culture 35Mediterranean 76Mesolithic period 26, 29Minoan Crete 73Neanderthals 19Neolithic period 32Palaeolithic period 18–19Roman Empire 97settlement/movement/society

29social hierarchy 331southern France 60Tsangli 40Tumulus culture 75

Howick 137H. sapiens 19, 351cHuelva 187, 223, 257Hueneberg 128human figures (religious) 252humans

aesthetic/symbolic behavior of 22–23

early 16, 17–19, 351cmodern 16, 19–23, 21

human sacrifice 67, 82, 92, 258–260, 264

Hungary 152, 153, 199, 229, 352c, 354c, 359

Hunnebedden 289Huns 97hunter-gatherers

and aquatic resources 116–117the Atlantic region 37–38and dogs 112

and domestic animals 108Eastern Europe 33, 41environmental change 12ephemeral housing 132Ertebølle 113history of xilabor, division of 334–335LBK culture 37Mediterranean 42Mesolithic period 37–38Neolithic consolidation 39–42Neolithic period 29, 32, 33, 46northern Europe 37–38postglacial 30mtemperate Europe 43and wild resources 37, 118

Hunter God 243hunting 115, 116

aesthetic/symbolic behavior 22–23

economy 22, 26–27equipment 27humans, early 18Iron Age 115Late Glacial Period 23Mesolithic period 26–27Neanderthals 19Neolithic period 50Palaeolithic period 22–23TRB culture 50

hurdles 194huts 133hygiene 347hypogea. See rock-cut tombs

(hypogea)

IIberia 255, 352c–357c

asymmetric trade 167Atlantic region 52Atlantic seaboard trade routes

178Beaker vessels 61callaïs 235castros 154caves for burial 280Celtic languages 317Chalcolithic period 60,

149–150chevaux-de-frise 304Citania de Sanfins 154classically influenced towns

156conflicts/battles/wars 308copper 171dead European languages 318fortifications 149fortresses in 302, 303


388

gold 171and grape/olive cultivation 106Holocene 26hunter-gathers/farmers 43Iberia 60, 92inhumation burials/cemeteries

281Iron Age 83, 86–87ivory 173, 206La Tène culture 92mansions 139Mediterranean 2megalithic tombs 286, 287megaliths/funerary monuments

45Neolithic consolidation 43, 45Neolithic period 52Phoenicians 83population expansion 161reliefs and engravings 323schist 234sculpture 306, 322silver 172–173southern France 60, 92stone-lined graves/cists 278territorial markers 159towns 155

Ibero-Tartessian script 319Ice Ages 16, 17, 351cIceland 9, 177–178Iceman 203

arrows 113bark 202body decoration 340bone tools 205bows and arrows 297clothing 204, 340clothing of 107cords and netting 201garments 341health and diet 347ill health 348importance of xiileather objects 204medical treatment 348Mediterranean 50Neolithic period 50travel by foot 180–181twining 202weapons on 297

ice sheets (cap) 10, 11, 23, 24, 27. See also glaciers

iconography (religious) 245–250megalithic art 250Nebra Sky-Disc 245–246rock art 250

igneous rock 170ill health 348

Impressed Ware culture 33–34, 102, 104, 113, 131, 133, 352c

incest 335Inchtuthil 277incised decoration 74Indo-European languages 316–318Indonesia 17industrial production 335industrial settlements 145–146industry and crafts 192–236. See also

specific headings, e.g.: textilesamber 234, 235the Atlantic region 70baskets, mats, nets and cords

201–202bone, horn antler 204–205Britain 95Bronze Age 64m, 70callaïs 235–236ceramics 226–230chalk 236coal and shale 232–234coin production 225–226copper and copper alloys

215–220coral 234decorative minerals 236Etruscans 84gold 221–223graphite 234Greece 83industry, organization of 333iron 224–225Iron Age 83, 84ivory 206La Tène culture 90leather and furs 202–204metallurgy 212–226mining and prospecting

213–215Neolithic consolidation 40oppida 95ostrich eggshell 236Roman Empire 97salt 211–212schist 234shells 236silver and lead 223–224stone 206–211textiles 195–201vitreous materials 230–232wood 193–195

industry organization 333–334ingots 221inhumation burials 37, 75, 79, 273,

275, 281–283, 284injuries 19, 348inscriptions 320

Insubres 91intensification (agricultural) 124–

125intermarriage 336intestinal parasites 347Ionia 168Ipfweger Moor 255Ireland 222

the Atlantic region 87, 88Britain 55Broighter boat 185–186campaigns/migrations/wars

311Chalcolithic period 62, 63Corlea 1 182–183crannogs 148domestic wood equipment 194Dun Aonghasa 151environmental change 10forts and blockhouses 151gallery graves 291gold 171Holocene 24Iron Age 87, 88La Tène culture 92leather objects 204megalithic developments 62,

63Mount Gabriel mine 217museums in 359music 326Neolithic period 55oral traditions 320passage graves 287, 289portal dolmens 291Ross Island copper ore mine

216stone forts 151twining 202Wicklow Mountains gold mine

221Irish Sea 178iron 355c, 356c

agricultural tools 120Bronze Age 78climate/flora/fauna 8as commodity 173Etruscans 84Europe, development of 16Iron Age 82, 84La Tène culture 89metallurgy 78, 224–225pincers/shears 224plowshare/coulter 118, 120rapiers and swords 298scythe 109, 120sources/extraction 224temperate Europe 8

I n d e x

389

Iron Age 80–96, 356c, 357cabsent rites 285agriculture 103agriculture and farming 81m,

84, 103amber 235animals for transport 181appliqué 229art 249art and religious artifacts 240banks and ditches 301boats 183body armor 300body parts and burial 285bog bodies 259bog bodies and crops 102bonfire pottery firing 227brushwood 129burials/cemeteries 283buried/hidden offerings 258campaigns/migrations/wars

311cannibalism 285Celtic art 324chamfrien/pony-cap from 91chevaux-de-frise 304clay receptacles 140copper working 219coral 234corn dryers 122Cornwall mine 218crannogs 148cremation in 284, 285crime and punishment 333Cwmystwyth mine 217dogs in 112domestic wood equipment

194–195Early Iron Age 81m, 199, 202,

212, 231, 349, 356centertainment and sport 337exposure 277family accommodation 337farmstead 220feasting 346field systems 119figurines 251, 252furs 202gateway/entrances 304glass 231Glastonbury 149gold working 221graphite 234Gundestrup cauldron 223Hallstatt D, 600–450 B.C. 89health and diet 347helmets 300hillforts 153, 155

holes and structures 131horn drinking vessels 205horsemen 307–308and horses 111, 248–249human sacrifice 255, 256hunting 115inhumation burials/cemeteries

281iron scythe 109ivory 206Late Iron Age 93m, 120, 141,

173–176, 220, 232, 233, 252, 349

La Tène culture 89–96, 90mleather objects 204life expectancy 349markers 267market economies 168Meare glass bead workshop

232Mediterranean 83–85metallurgy 213mortuary enclosures/structures

277neck and chest ornaments 341oppida 94–95ornaments 205performing arts 326pillars 267pins and brooches 343plank-built boats 186population 163, 349postglacial climate/vegetation

11post-Roman conquest 96–98priests 241ramparts 303–304rapiers and swords 298reliefs and engravings 323ritual landscapes 267roads 182Roman conquest 92–96, 96Rome 83, 84–85roundhouses 137, 138, 144,

145sacred enclosures 254salt 175, 212sculpture 306, 322scythes 120and seasonally flooded land/

marshes 124serving food 347settlement burials 281shields 300shrines 252, 261situlae art 323slavery 336southeastern Europe 85–86

spears 298square houses 134stone as tool material 211stone-walled houses 303temperate Europe 86–96terpen 148textile spinning 199torc 222, 245–246trade 118travel by foot 181Urnfield burial 284, 285visual arts 321vitreous materials 230walnut cultivation in 106warriors 306water defenses 304weaving equipment 199–200wood construction 194wooden granaries 122woodworking 193wool fiber 197

Iron Gates Gorge 133–134, 142, 179, 281

iron smelting and working 80, 81, 92, 224–225, 356c

irrigation (agriculture) 124, 162Italian languages 316–318Italian scripts 319Italy 352c–357c

amber 235asymmetric trade 167Bronze Age 76, 77, 79, 80Chalcolithic period 62copper 171Etruscans 84farming communities 160Frattesina glass industry 232glass 173, 231and grape/olive cultivation 106Greece 84holes and structures 131Holocene 24Indo-European languages

316–317inhumation burials/cemeteries

281Iron Age 84lake villages 146La Tène culture 91looms 199Mediterranean 33, 34, 42, 49,

50, 76, 77, 80, 180metallurgy/elites/trade 62museums in 359Neolithic consolidation 42Neolithic period 33, 34, 49, 50obsidian 170Roman Empire 97


390

roundhouses 144stelae/anthropomorphic stones

266, 267urnfields 79

ivory 73, 173, 206

Jjadeite 174Jarlshof 150–151Jaszdozsa-Kapolnahalom 153javelins 310, 311jet 173, 232jewelry 62, 67, 71, 75, 79, 173, 325,

343, 344joints (wood) 193Jupiter (Roman god) 243, 244Jutland 173, 234, 235

KKaranovo 40, 128, 152, 352c–354cKastenbau rampart 303Kerlescan 266Kernonen 278Kerogou 354ckeys 333kilns 227–228King Björn’s Mound 276King’s Grave 276Knap of Howar 135knives 298Knossos 72Körös 352ckrater, Vix 168Krzemionki Opatowskie 145, 207,

209kumiss (alcoholic drink) 111kurgans 279–280

Llabor, division of 334–335, 336lactose intolerance 345Lagozza 353clakes 11, 39lake villages 106, 107, 146–147,

147, 338land 2–4, 24, 76, 77, 177landscapes 158–163. See also ritual

landscapeslandscape statues 252land transport 180–183Langdon Bay 188languages 19, 20, 86, 98, 316–319Lascaux cave 201Late Bronze Age 77–80

buried/hidden offerings 258coffins 279copper 172, 215, 220Dampierre-sur-le-Doubs 142

domestic wood equipment 194felting 200fortified village 153and funerary barrows 276glass 173, 231helmets 300hemp fiber 197inhumation burials/cemeteries

281lead 173Río Tinto metal mine 215salt 175, 212Sardianian bronzes 322–323sculpture 306situlae art 324stone forts 151Trundholm sun cart 247warfare 297weaving 200well/shafts as focus of worship

254–255Wittnauer Horn 153

Late Eneolithic period 48–49Late Glacial Period 11, 23–24, 146Late Iron Age 93m

animals 174–175ards 120coal and shale 233copper working 220enamel 232population 349pottery 176settlement 141shrine 252silver 173textiles 176

La Tène culture 356c, 357cbronze coin 226Celtic art 324gold working 221Iron Age 86La Tène A, 500–400 b.c.

89–91, 90mLa Tène B, 400–275 b.c.

91–92La Tène C-D, 275 b.c. to

Roman conquest 92–96leather objects 204mansions 140temperate Europe 86votive deposit, Switzerland

257weaving equipment 200

Late Neolithic period 46–55, 352c, 354c

arboriculture in 106farming 47mfiber crops 107

flint dagger 70flint sickle 121herb use in 107industry, organization of 333lake villages and fruit trees

106Mediterranean 49–50northern Europe 50–52settlement 141southeastern Europe 48–49spread of farming in 47mtemperate Europe 50–55territorial markers 159unequal trade transactions

166Later Beakers 354cLater Sesklo-Vadastra-Vinca-

Karanovo III-Dudesti 37Laterzo 354cLatin 316–317, 319, 320Latvia 234, 359Lausitz 355cLBK culture. See

Linearbandkerammik (LBK) culture

lead 172, 173, 213, 223–224leaders 331, 332. See also chiefsleather 122, 202–204, 300, 340Le Baratin 133legends 320legumes. See pulses (legumes)leisters (fish spears) 116L⁄ eki Mal⁄e 280Lemnos 318Lengyel settlement 333, 353cLepenski Vir 132, 134, 142, 281Leubingen 280the Levant 319Libenice 254life expectancy 348–349lignite 173, 233Limburg 352cLindow Moss 249, 259, 260Linear A script 73, 318, 319Linearbandkerammik (LBK) culture

34–37, 352caxes 297bark 202bell-shaped pits 117and cattle 108–109conflicts/battles/wars 308cremation 284Danubian II 44, 45domestic architecture 132drink 346and drug use 107Eastern Europe 41family accommodation 337

I n d e x

391

Linearbandkerammik (LBK) culture (continued)

farmers and grain harvesting 120

field systems in 118–119furs 202and hand tools in cultivation

119health and diet 347inhumation burials/cemeteries

281and legume crops 104log cabins 136longhouses 122, 136, 142–143megaliths/funerary monuments

45, 46Neolithic consolidation 41,

44–46Neolithic period 32shells as ornaments 236and spread of Indo-European

languages 318victims of violence 309warfare 296wells 140

Linear B script 73, 316, 318, 319linen 196linseed 105Linum usitatissimum 196literature 82–83, 320–321, 330. See

also poetryLithuania 234, 359Litorina sea 352clivestock 123Llyn Cerrig Bach 257Llyn Fawr 356clog boats. See dugout canoeslog cabins 76, 135–136Loire (island) 254Loire River 7, 9, 178, 179longhouses 44–45, 109, 136–137,

146, 337, 338longhouse settlements 142–143looms (weaving) 55, 134, 199Los Millares 150, 290lost-wax casting 220Lowbury 254Low Countries 353c, 354c, 359Lower Mikhailovka-Kemi Oba

culture 353clowlands (European) 5–7, 76Lucan (Roman author) 243, 244Lug 243, 248lunulae 71, 245, 258, 266, 323lurer 78, 79, 245, 246, 326Lusitanians 357cLyles Hill 353clynchets 119

MMabinogion 320Macedonia 40, 83, 293, 312, 356c,

359maces 297, 298Machrie Moor 264Maes Howe 290Magalenian. See Late Glacial Periodmagistrates (Celtic) 332–333magnetite 213Maiden Castle 309malachite 213, 216, 217malnutrition 347Malta 293, 359Maltese hypogea 293mammals 28, 38, 42, 114–115, 117mammoth 26Manannan Mac Lir 257Manching 157–158mansions 139–140Manteis 241manufactured goods 41, 175–176manure 118Margaux 280marine mammals 28, 38, 42, 117Maritime Bell Beaker 60, 61markers 267market economies 168–169marriage and sexual mores 38, 43,

335–336Mars (Roman god) 244marshlands 26masks 29, 73, 247masonry 130Massalia 84, 89, 156, 178–179Massif Central 6Matrona (goddess) 253mats and matting 196, 197, 201–

202MBA (Bronze moyen–Tréboul

culture) 354c, 355cmead 346Meare 232meat 18, 27, 48, 345, 346medicine 347–349Mediterranean 2, 183, 185, 352c,

355c–357cthe Atlantic facade/North

Sea 9boats 183Bronze Age 71, 76–77, 80cereal crops 116climate/flora/fauna 7coral 234dead European languages 318domestic architecture 132drink 346environmental change 10–12

Europe, development of 16fortifications 149fruits 105–106geography of 2–5Holocene 24, 26inhumation burials/cemeteries

281Iron Age 82, 83–85La Tène culture 89, 91megalithic tombs 286Neolithic consolidation 42Neolithic period 33–34,

49–50oats 103–104polyculture 124rafts 183rock-cut tombs 293rock paintings and engravings

324roundhouses 144stone fortifications 302temperate Europe 7trade routes 179–180tuna harvesting 116

megalithic art 250, 323megalithic burials 62, 286–287, 292megalithic monuments and sites 49,

50, 52, 53, 53m, 54, 62–63, 65m, 353c

megalithic tombs xi, 46, 286–292, 352c. See also monumental tombs; rock-cut tombs (hypogea); wedge tombs

architecture in 286the Atlantic region 54Beaker vessels 61burials 273, 286–287Carnac 268Chalcolithic period 62–63and cists 292developments in 62–63dolmens 291early 45, 45, 46, 287gallery graves 290–291giants’ graves/navetas 76, 292Mediterranean 50Neolithic consolidation 40Neolithic period 45, 45, 46,

50, 51, 54passage graves 287–290, 288ritual landscapes 267social hierarchy 330, 331TRB culture 51

Melos 29, 170men 334, 340, 341menhirs and alignments 63, 264–

266, 265, 268, 306, 323mercenaries 89, 181, 307


392

Mesolithic period (communities) 352c, 353c

adaptation of 351cantler tools 205art 321–322the Atlantic region 37–39the Balkans 32barrows, funerary 274body parts and burial 285bow and arrow hunting in 116Britain 44brushwood 129burials 273buried/hidden offerings 258cannibalism 285cemeteries 281–282circular houses 137conflicts/battles/wars 308cremation 284cult objects 245decorated headgear 341decorative minerals 236domestic architecture 132Early 26–29Eastern Europe 41Europe, development of 16exposure 276–277flint mining 206food and cooking 344, 345funerary practices 272furs 202Greece 32and hazelnut use 113hide boats 185houses 133–134Howick circular house 137hunter-gatherers 43, 160jewelry materials 173LBK culture 37leather objects 203life expectancy 348lignite beads 233and marine mammal use 117Mediterranean 34, 42monumental tombs 286Neolithic consolidation 39,

41–44Neolithic period 32, 34, 46northern Europe 37–39obsidian 170ornaments 205pit houses 137and plant use 113postglacial climate/vegetation

11and ritual masks 247rock art 250, 324settlement burials 281

and shellfish use 117shells as ornaments 236small mammals/wildfowl as

food source 115social hierarchy 330society 42–43spread of farming 47mStaosnaig 133stone as tool material 211stone figures 252Stonehenge 263textiles 196trade patterns 166travel by foot 181Uralic language 318villages 142votive offerings 256warfare 296water transport 183wickerwork 202woodland management

123–124woodworking 193

Mesopotamia 111, 319Messapic language 319metal 69, 167, 171–173, 334. See

also specific headings, e.g.: bronzemetallurgy 212–226, 352c–354c. See

also specific headings, e.g.: ironthe Atlantic region 76, 80Bronze Age 66, 67, 74, 76,

77–78, 80Chalcolithic period 55, 57m,

58, 61–62coin production 225–226copper/copper alloys 215–220domestic work 335gold 221–223Greece 58Gumelnitsa-Karanovo V/Vi-

Vinca-Varna 40history of xiiron 224–225Later Eneolithic 49Mediterranean 50mining/prospecting 213–215Neolithic consolidation 40Neolithic period 48, 50settlement/economy/society 77silver/lead 223–224Southeast Europe 67, 74spread of 57mÚnetice 69

metal ore 5, 8, 41, 63, 73, 87metalworking

the Atlantic region 76the Balkans 58Bronze Age 67, 73–76, 78

burials 274Carpathians 58Celtic art 325Chalcolithic period 58and charcoal production 124Europe, development of 16Iberia 86, 87Iron Age 86, 87metallurgy 78Minoan Crete 73Mycenaean Greece 73Neolithic period 48Roman Empire 97Scandinavia 75Southeast Europe 74steppe region/culture 67Tumulus culture 75

metamorphic rock 170Michelsberg culture 109, 353cmiddens. See shell middensMiddle Bronze Age 71–74, 72, 297,

298, 309Middle Dnepr 354cMiddle Neolithic period 102Middle Palaeolithic Europe 18–19Middle Pleistocene 17Migdale 354cmigrations 311, 312, 356cMilazzese 355cmilk products 58, 345Millaran culture 60, 62, 106, 124,

288, 354cmillet 104Milton Loch 148, 149mineral resources 4, 5, 9, 84, 87minerals (decorative) 236Minerva (Roman god) 244mines 76, 88mining 356c

antler tools 205Bronze Age 78flint 48, 51, 206–209, 208, 334industry, organization of 334metal 214–215metallurgy 78population shifts 163salt 162, 211–212trade patterns 166

Minoan culture 72–73, 109, 354c, 355c

mirrors 325, 344mistletoe 249Mitterberg 216–217Modlesovice, Bohemia 221Moldavia 352c, 353cmolds (for metal) 74, 78Molino Casarotto 132, 133Mona 253–254

I n d e x

393

monsters 249Monteoru 354cmonumental architecture 16, 353cmonumental tombs 53, 286–293monuments 262–269

causewayed enclosures 51, 54, 109, 143–144, 262, 277, 301–302, 302

Chalcolithic period 62–63circles 245, 264cursus 54, 262, 268excavation of xifunerary 43, 45, 46, 54, 262,

306–307henges 263–264megalithic 49, 50, 52–54, 53m,

62–63, 65m, 353cmenhirs/alignments 264–266monumental tombs 53,

286–293ritual landscapes 267, 267–269social/political organization 330stelae/anthropomorphic stones

266–267Moor Sands 187, 188Moravian Heights Mountains 5morras 150mortuary enclosures and structures

59, 277–278Mother Goddess 243mothers 335motillas 150mounds

the Atlantic region 54bank barrows 262–263barrows, funerary 274, 292Beaker burials 283Bronze Age 71, 75, 79burials 273Chalcolithic period 63cists 292Corded Ware culture 59funerary monuments 45, 46L⁄ eki Mal⁄e 280Leubingen 280megalithic 45, 45, 46, 63, 286,

287, 292Neolithic consolidation 45,

45, 46Neolithic period 48, 52, 54Nordic zone 79passage graves 290Scandinavia 75Southern Central Europe 52steppe region/culture 48tombs 286, 287

mountains 2, 3, 5, 7, 10Mount Gabriel 217

Mount Olympus 253Mousa 138, 138, 139mud 128mud brick 128, 134Muntanya de Sal salt dome 211Murus Duplex 302museums 358–360music 19, 325, 326musical instruments 245, 246, 326,

336Mycenaean Greece 355c

asymmetric trade 167Bronze Age 72, 73–74, 76, 80coffins 279dead European languages 318and grape/olive cultivation 106Linear B script 316, 319mansions 139Mediterranean 76, 80, 180ostrich eggshells 236palace economy 110tholoi 292warfare 296

Mycenaean Shaft Graves 235Mynydd Prescelly 210myths 98, 320

NNagyrév 354cNantosuelta 243, 248Narbo 92narcotics 107Narva 353cNative Americans 114natural resources 8, 26navetas 76, 292Neanderthals 18–19, 19, 20, 351cNea Nikomedeia 135, 152, 260Nebra Sky-Disc 245, 246, 269necklaces 344neck ornaments 341, 343needles 20, 21Nehalennia 243Neman 353cnemeton 254Neolithic consolidation 39–46

cannibalism 285hard stone 170Mediterranean 42megaliths/funerary monuments

45, 45, 46Southeast Europe 40–41temperate Europe 42–46

Neolithic period (communities) 352c–354c. See also Early Neolithic period; Late Neolithic period

absent rites 285antler tools 205

ard use 120axes 170, 247, 297, 331banks and ditches 301barrows, funerary 274barrows, long 292burials 273buried/hidden offerings 258callaïs 235causewayed enclosures 301chalk 236crannogs 148decorative minerals 236ephemeral housing 132Europe, development of 16exposure 277family accommodation 337furniture and fittings 338Great Langdale quarry 210Hauterive-Champréveyres

146–147hemp fiber 197hide treatment 203house 130housing life expectancy 131ivory 206jewelry materials 173leather objects 204life expectancy 348looms 199maces 298Middle Neolithic period 102and milk products 108monumental tombs 286monuments 262mortuary enclosures 277pit houses 137postglacial climate/vegetation

11rock paintings and engravings

324Scandinavian Late Neolithic

period 69settlement burials 281shells as ornaments 236sickles 120spread of farming 47mstelae/anthropomorphic stones

267stone fortifications 302stone working 210tell settlements 125textile fiber 196threshing floor 122Twann village 146use of limpets as bait 116vegetable cultivation in 105votive offerings 256warfare 296


394

wattle 129Wessex 268wood construction 193wooden burial chambers 279wood felling/preparation 192

Nerthus 243Nervii 176Netherlands 61, 75, 143, 148, 284nets 22, 26, 38, 116, 196, 201Neuchâtel, Lake 343New Euxine Lake 25, 25mNewgrange 269, 289, 290Niederwil 146Nitra 354cnobles 332nomadism 49, 85, 141–142non-Indo-European languages 318Norcium 157Nordic zone 79–80Noreia 157Noricum 92, 94, 357cnorthern Europe 353c, 354c

Bronze Age 69, 79–80Chalcolithic period 59–60Early Postglacial Europe

37–39geography of 9–10Late Glacial Period 23–24La Tène culture 92Mesolithic society in 42–43Neolithic consolidation 42–45Neolithic period 37–39,

50–52trade routes 179warfare 296

North European Plain 6–8, 10, 43, 162, 353c

North Ferriby 186–187North Mains 275North Sea

the Atlantic facade/North Sea 9

the Atlantic region 38environmental change 10geography of 9Holocene 24Mesolithic period 38northern Europe 38northern European trade routes

179terpen 136, 148

Norway 9, 10, 359Numantia 92, 156numen 242, 243, 244nuraghi 150, 296, 303Nuraghic culture 355cnuts 28, 32, 37, 106–107

Ooats 103, 104Obourg 207obsidian

the Balkans 32, 33Chalcolithic period 58as commodity 170Greece 32, 33, 58Mediterranean 2, 4, 42, 49Mesolithic period 29Neolithic consolidation 42Neolithic period 32, 33, 49settlement/movement/society

29as tool 209

ochre (red/yellow) 48, 49, 272, 278, 282, 293

Octavian (Augustus) 95Oder River 179Odysai, Thrace 85offerings 247, 254–255, 258. See also

votive deposits and offeringsOfnet 308–309Ogham script 320ogival blades 66oigs 12Oleneostrovski Mogilnik 29, 281–

282, 330olives 4, 58, 62, 73, 105–106Olympic games 83opium 36, 346oppida 94–95, 97, 156–157, 162,

333, 357coptical simulated luminescence

dating (OSL) 252oral traditions 98, 320–321Ore Mountains. See Bohemian Ore

MountainsOrgetorix 332Orkney

brochs 150Chalcolithic period 63gallery graves 291Gurness 150hide treatment 203housing construction 128Knap of Howar 134leather objects 203, 204megalithic developments 63passage graves 287, 289souterrains 140Stenness 269stone 130, 211

ornaments 341–344, 342, 343amber 235the Atlantic region 70beads 344Bronze Age 70–72, 78

as cult objects 246–247decorated headgear 341glacial Europe 21Gumelnitsa-Karanovo V/Vi-

Vinca-Varna 41metallurgy 78neck/chest 341, 343pins/brooches 343

orthostats 265, 291ösenringe 69OSL (optical simulated luminescence

dating) 252ostrich eggshells 173, 236Otomani 354cÖtzi. See IcemanOuateis 241outworks 305Ovcharovo 230, 261oxen 46, 48, 50, 108–109, 181

PPadnal 142painting 20, 72–73, 229, 340. See

also rock artpaintings 22, 122, 321, 322, 324palace economy 110palaces xi, 67, 72, 73, 80, 354cPalaeolithic Europe 16–24

amber 234ceramics 226commodities 169cord 201dating 16–17Early Postglacial Europe

26–29flint 169, 206glacial Europe 20–22Grand Pressigny flint mine

207Hauterive-Champréveyres 146hide treatment 203humans, early 17–19humans, modern 19–23iron working 224ivory 206labor, division of 334Late Glacial Period 23–24leather objects 203Middle Palaeolithic period

18–19reciprocal trade patterns 166roofing material 131spears 298Upper Palaeolithic period 20,

21, 22woven baskets 196

palisades 40, 42, 45, 52, 302, 303Palmela complex 354c

I n d e x

395

palstave 68, 172, 220panicum. See MilletPantalica 355cpapyrus 320parching 121–122Paris basin 352cpassage graves 272, 287–290, 288

astronomy 269the Atlantic region 54Chalcolithic period 60, 63decoration 250Iberia 60Mediterranean 50megalithic 45, 63, 286menhirs/alignments 265Neolithic consolidation 45Neolithic period 50, 51, 54Newgrange, Ireland 289southern France 60Stenness 269tombs 286TRB culture 51

passes (mountain) 5Passo di Corvo 144pastoral enclosures 152pastoralism 125

the Balkans 59Bronze Age 66Carpathians 59Chalcolithic period 55, 59Corded Ware culture 59ephemeral housing 132Iron Age 85labor, division of 335Mediterranean 50Neolithic period 46, 50Southeast Europe 85temperate Europe 7temporary settlement 141–142

pastoral transhumance 52peat 131pemmican 114Penard 355cpeople 161–163

and early farming 160–161and emerging social complexity

161–162Mesolithic lifestyle of 160pottery figurines 322rock paintings and engravings

324and settlement patterns

161–163performing arts 325–326perishable goods 174–175Persian Empire 83personal appearance 339–344Peschiera 355c

“Pete Marsh” (bog body) 260Peterborough Ware culture 354cPFB culture. See Corded Ware

culturePfyn culture 52, 352c, 353cPhilip II (king of Macedon) 169, 293Phoenicians 355c, 356c

asymetric trade 167Bronze Age 80dead European languages 319Galicia mine 217grape/olive cultivation 106Iberia 87Ibero-Tartessian script 319Iron Age 83, 87ivory 173, 206Mediterranean 80ostrich eggshells 236silver trade 223

Pictish languages 317PIE language. See Proto-Indo-

European (PIE) languagepigs 29, 32, 34, 55, 59, 108, 119pincers, iron 224pins (as ornaments) 71, 284, 343pisé 128, 134Pit-comb Ware 353c, 354cPit Grave culture 279–280, 353c,

354cpit houses 131, 133, 137pits 122, 140, 279–280pittars, stone 267Pitted Ware culture 173, 353c, 354cplaiting (cloth-making technique)

200–201plank-built boats 186–187plank-built houses 76planks (as building material) 129plants 28, 41, 105, 113–114, 347plateaus 5Platia Magoula Zarkou 261Pleiades 245Pleistocene period 17Pliny 120, 249plow 119–120

ard 46, 49, 52, 119–120, 161and division of labor 120, 335early farming 161Iron Age 82Neolithic period 46

poetry 188, 321, 326points, “leaf” 21Polada 354c, 355cPoland 353c–355c

amber 234, 235Biskupin 153–154flint tools 209industrial settlements 145

Krzemionki Opatowskie flint mine 207

longhouses 136museums in 359obsidian 170

political map of Europe 3mpolitical organization. See social and

political organizationpolyculture, Mediterranean 124pony-cap 91Po plain 161, 352cpoppy 107population 349

the barbarians 97Chalcolithic period 55demographics 162–163expansion 161glacial Europe 21, 22Greece 84humans, early 17Iron Age 82, 84La Tène culture 91Neolithic consolidation 40Neolithic period 32, 46

portal dolmens 291Portugal 34, 38, 43, 150, 154, 187,

359postholes 129post-Roman conquest 96–98potlarch 66potter’s wheel 227pottery

the Atlantic region 52Baden 109the Balkans 32, 33Beaker 176bowl 322Britain 44Bronze Age 76ceramics 226Chalcolithic period 55, 63clay 226–229collared flask 228as commodity 175–176cooking food 345Corded Ware culture 59Danubian II 44domestic work 335Etruscans 84figurines 250–251, 321, 322,

322for food/liquid storage 122funerary 279furniture and fittings 338Globular Amphora culture 51Greece 32, 33Grooved Ware 107Hallstatt D 89


396

henges 263Iberia 87Iron Age 84, 87Later Eneolithic 49LBK culture 35Mediterranean 34, 42, 76megalithic developments 63Mycenaean Greece 73–74Neolithic consolidation 42, 44Neolithic period 32–34, 46,

50–52oppida 95production 226–228production of 226–228sculpture 322TRB culture 50, 51vessels 37, 50, 75, 228–229,

279, 324, 347wine 175

pottery stamps 340power 66, 335prestige goods 48, 55, 69, 70, 72,

75, 80priestesses 241priests 241–242procurement, direct 166prospecting (for metal) 213–214Proto-Apennine 354c, 355cProto-golasecca 355cProto-Indo-European (PIE)

language 316Protovillanovan 355cProtruding Foot Beaker (PFB)

culture. See Corded Ware culturepulses (legumes) 34, 58, 104, 109Punic Wars 83, 92punishment. See crime and

punishmentPyrenees Mountains 5, 6pyrite 213Pytheas 9, 178

QQuadrata 352cquarrying stone 209–210quenching, of steel 225querns 114, 211. See also grindstones

Rrabbits 115radiocarbon dating 16–17rafts 183, 184raids 74, 77, 82, 91, 311rainfall 4, 7–9, 11, 12, 26, 38, 77Rakhmani 353cramparts 75, 94, 301, 302–304, 305rapiers 298Rappendam 260

raths 151ravens 248razors 188reaves 119reciprocity, trade 166rectangular houses 134–136Red Castle (Scotland) 140Red-Painted culture 352creindeer 23, 24, 26–28reliefs 306, 307, 323religion 240–270. See also specific

deitiesand astronomy 269–270and beliefs 241Bronze Age 66, 78–79and Celtic deities 242–245and cult objects/iconography

245–250death/religion 79and figurines/statues 250–252and human sacrifice 258–260Iron Age 82, 85and monuments 262–269and priests 241–242reconstructing 240–241Roman Empire 98and sacred places 253–256and shrines 260–262Southeast Europe 85and votive deposits 256–258

religious artifacts 240–241religious authorities 241religious monuments. See menhirs

and alignmentsreligious wooden figures 251, 251,

252Remedello 354cRhine 187, 352c, 353c, 357cRhine River 7, 9, 97Rhône River 7, 9, 178–180, 356cRhône valley 5Ribemont-sur-Ancre 311rickets 347Ridgeway 182riding horses 111Rinaldone 354crings 69Río Tinto 214–215, 223ritual landscapes 63, 70, 262, 267–

269, 268mritual masks 247ritual vehicles 247, 247, 248, 249rivers 4–5, 7, 9, 42, 178–179, 253roads 181rock art 187, 250, 306

boats/chariots in 248bows and arrows 297

Bronze Age 66, 75, 79, 109, 181, 305

death/religion 79looms 199paintings and engravings 22,

122, 321, 322, 324Scandinavia 75visual arts 321wagon 181warfare 296

rock-cut tombs (hypogea) 62, 73, 85, 261, 286, 293

Romance languages 316–317Roman conquest 92–96, 357c

battles 310, 311Britain 95, 96distance slab from 96Entremont 156female warriors 308Gaul 95of Gaul 312Iberia 92Iron Age 86La Tène culture 92, 94literature 320Numantia 156oppida 94, 157population shifts 163southern France 92temperate Europe 86towns 156victims of violence 309warriors 306

Roman Empire 97–98alphabetic scripts 320animals 174–175animals for transport 181the barbarians 97Britain 96furs and hides 174Italian scripts 319mansions 139pottery 175, 176rafts 184Río Tinto metal mine 214slaves 174textiles 176and votive deposits in watery

locations 257water travel 188wine 175

Romania 359Roman script 269Rome and Romans 356c, 357c

and the barbarians 96–97and Celtic deities 242Celtic languages 317Celtic warriors 307

I n d e x

397

Rome and Romans (continued)cultivation of nuts 106and domestic fowl 111and the Druids 240, 242Etruscans 84Germanic languages 317Greece 84Iron Age 83, 84–85La Tène culture 91Noreia 157Phoenicians 83and tree grafting 106and vegetable cultivation 105wheat 103

roofing materials 129, 130–131roof timbers 129–130rope 201Roquepertuse 254Rosnoen 355cRössen 352c, 353cRoss Island 216roundhouse 130, 131, 137–139,

144, 145, 145, 148, 149, 337rounds 151roundwood 129royal family 67, 73Rudna Glava 216Runnymede 123Russia 354c, 359rye 104

SSaami people 272Sabrina (goddess) 253sacred enclosures 254sacred places 253–256sacred symbols 245–250sacrifice

animal 261of cattle 109, 248by Druids 241of horses 248human 67, 82, 92, 255, 258–

260, 264saddles 111, 307, 345St-Brieuc-des-Iffs 355cSt-Martin-de-Corléans 266–267Saint-Michel-du-Touch, France 144Salcutsa 353csalt 211–212, 356c

Bronze Age 78as commodity 175Dürrnberg bei Hallein

settlement 145–146Hallstatt C 88Iron Age 82Late Neolithic period 48metallurgy 78

mining 162, 211–212production 212

Samnites 356cSan Juan Ante Portan Latinam 309Sardinia 34, 76, 80, 150, 278, 303,

306, 355cSardinian bronzes 322–323Sarmatians 357cSarnowo 353csaunas 262, 339Sauveterrian 352cSauvii 92SBK (Stichbankeramik) 353cScandinavia 353c–357c

boats 183Bronze Age 75, 78, 79burial in Urnfield period 284coffins 278, 279copper 171, 172death/religion 79domestic architecture 132environmental change 10Iron Age 80La Tène culture 92longhouses 136Mesolithic art 322metal 171metallurgy 78Nordic zone 79northern European trade routes


324sea trade routes 177temperate Europe 7textile fiber 196warriors in art 306

Scandinavian Late Neolithic period 69

schist 174, 234, 323Schneckenberg 354cScotland

the Atlantic region 88bark 202Beaker burials 283bone tools 205Britain 96brochs 138, 150Callanish 266Chalcolithic period 107Cnip wheelhouse 139coal and shale 233crannogs 148D-shaped fortifications 151dugout canoes 184duns 139, 151Eilean an Tighe potter’s

workshop 228

gallery graves 291gateway/entrances 304halls 137hemp fiber 197hide boats 185Iron Age 88Milton Loch 148–149Pictish language 317Roman Empire 98roundhouses 137–138shells as ornaments 236souterrains 140Staosnaig 133stone circles 264stone-lined graves/cists 278textile fiber 196tower houses 303turf and peat 131vitrified forts 155wheelhouse 139woodworking 193

scriptsalphabetic 319–320pre-alphabetic 319

Sculptor’s Cave 280sculpture 29, 88, 306–307, 321,

322–323. See also figurinesscurvy 347scythe 109, 120Scythians 86, 340, 356cseafaring 2, 5, 8, 9, 34, 58, 76Seahenge 249, 264sea levels 10, 24Sea Peoples 73, 74seas 2, 24, 177–180, 183, 185seawater 212Seddin 79, 276Seine River 7, 9Sélèdin 210semibrochs. See D-shaped

fortificationsSepulcros de Fosa culture 211, 353csepultures coudées 291Sequana 243, 253Serbia 133, 216, 360Serra d’Alto 352cSesklo culture 37, 352csettlement(s) 128–163, 140–158

the Atlantic region 9, 38, 42, 87–88

the Balkans 32Britain 54–55Bronze Age 66–68, 72, 74,

76, 77cemeteries 281Chalcolithic period 58, 60construction 128–132Corded Ware culture 59


398

Crickley Hill 302Danubian II 44–45domestic architecture 132–140environmental change 12Europe, development of 16family accommodation 337fortifications and defenses 301forts, towers and farms 149–

152Greece 32, 58Gumelnitsa-Karanovo V/Vi-

Vinca-Varna 40–41hillforts and fortified villages

153–155Iberia 60, 92industrial 145–146Iron Age 87–88landscapes 158–163La Tène culture 91, 92Later Eneolithic 49Later Sesklo-Vadastra-Vinca-

Karanovo III-Dudesti 37LBK culture 35Mediterranean 5, 42, 49, 76Mesolithic period 28–29, 142,

281Neolithic consolidation 39, 41,

42, 44–45Neolithic period 32, 46, 48,

49, 51, 52, 54–55northern Europe 38, 42North Sea 9other defenses 304small farming 142–145social hierarchy 331Southeast Europe 67, 68, 74southern France 60, 92steppe region/culture 48and stone-walled houses 303tells 152–153temporary 141–142Tisza 41Tiszapolgár 41towns 155–158TRB culture 51Tsangli 40Tumulus culture 75villages 142warfare 296–297western Europe 52wetland 146–149

settlement burials 281sewing 20, 339, 340Shaft Graves Late Helladic 354cshafts 254–255shale 232–234, 233shaman 43shape-shifting 320

shears 224sheep 32, 34, 48, 55, 58, 59, 110,

345sheet bronze 220shellfish 23, 26, 28, 117shell middens 28, 38, 133, 133, 281shells 174, 236Shetland

Atlantic seaboard trade routes 178

Beorgs of Uyea tool working site 210–211

forts and blockhouses 151Jarlshof 150–151sea trade routes 177souterrains 140stone 210, 211wheelhouse 139

shields 77, 299, 299–300shipwrecks 73–74, 78, 80, 187–

188shoes 341shrines 33, 98, 260–262, 267Sicily 4, 24, 62, 80, 84, 139, 167,

317, 355csickles 120Silbury Hill 263silk 176, 197silver 96, 97, 172, 173, 213,

223–224Singen 354csingle burial 273, 283, 353cSingle Grave culture 354cSitagroi 353csitulae 90, 323, 324Skara Brae 130, 205Skateholm 282skis 181skulls 250Skye 151Sky God 243, 247Slatina 135slavery and slaves 86, 96, 174, 311,

336slave trade 168, 174, 175Slavic languages 317slings 298slip (pottery) 229Slovakia 154, 352c, 360Slovenia 231, 360smelting 40, 218snakes 249snares 27Snettisham 223, 258social and political organization 21,

22, 97, 98, 330–333social complexity 161–162social divisions 66

social hierarchy 330–332, 353c, 354c. See also status differentials

society and life 330–347Bronze Age 77crime and punishment 333everyday life 335–339food 344–347gender distinctions 334–335health and medicine 347–349industry organization 333–334Mesolithic period 28–29,

42–43personal appearance 339–344social/political organization 21,

22, 97, 98, 330–333soil xi–xii, 8, 10–12Solutrean period 21SOM culture 354cSomerset Levels 124, 183, 192, 194,

197, 255Somme-Bionne 283songs 326souls, transmigration of 272Sources-de-la-Seine 252, 253souterrains 88, 140Southeast Europe 355c–357c

barrows, funerary 275Bronze Age 67–68, 74Chalcolithic period 58–59clay receptacles 140domestic architecture 132early houses in 134–135family accommodation 337and inhumation burials

282–283Iron Age 85–86languages in 316Middle Bronze Age 74Neolithic consolidation 40–41Neolithic period 48–49rock paintings and engravings

324square houses 134trade routes 179–180warfare 296warrior burials 306

southern France 60, 92, 352c, 354cspades 82Spain

amber 234–235asymetric trade 167Basque language 318Bronze Age 71, 106burials 273, 279callaïs 235Chalcolithic period 62chestnut cultivation 106esparto grass fiber 197

I n d e x

399

Spain (continued)Galicia mine 217glacial Europe 21Greece 84Iberian fortresses 302, 303Iron Age 84ivory 206literature 320Los Millares 150managed oak woodlands in

124–125Mediterranean 42, 49, 50, 71,

180metal 171metallurgy 62, 213motilla 150museums in 360Neolithic consolidation 42Neolithic period 49, 50Numantia 156ornaments 205ostrich eggshells 236passage graves 288Río Tinto metal mine 214–


324sculpture 306silver 223stone-lined graves/cists 278tower houses 303twining 201warriors in art 306

Sparta 83spearheads 172spears 18, 297, 298, 306specialization 66, 124–125spelt 102spices 107Spiennes 208spindle whorls 55, 335spinning 199spirits 272, 285Spissky Stvrtok 153, 154spoked wheel 245sport 337, 337sprang (cloth-making technique)

201square houses 134–136squirrels 115Sredny Stog 353cS-symbol 247stags 249standing stones 264, 266, 267Stanton Drew 266Staosnaig 133Star Carr 129, 132–133, 182statues 252

status differentials. See also social hierarchy

Bronze Age 67, 71Chalcolithic period 55Corded Ware culture 59Gumelnitsa-Karanovo V/Vi-

Vinca-Varna 40Hallstatt C 88industry, organization of 333Later Eneolithic 49Mediterranean 71social hierarchy 330, 331Southeast Europe 67warriors 305

status symbols 72, 331steel 81, 225“Steerswoman.” See Nehalenniastelae 88, 266–267, 273, 288Stenness 268Stepleton 143–144steppe region and culture 353c,

355c–357cthe Balkans 59Bronze Age 67, 74Carpathians 59Chalcolithic period 59and funerary barrows 275Holocene 26Iron Age 85–86Neolithic period 48temperate Europe 7

Stichbankeramik (SBK) 353cstirrups 111stockades 77, 91stockbreeding 48stone 206–211, 353c

agricultural tools 120the Atlantic region 76, 88Britain 55Bronze Age 76as building material 130chevaux-de-frise 304as commodity 169–171Europe, development of 16family accommodation 337housing construction 128Iron Age 88knives/daggers 298Mediterranean 5, 42, 49Neolithic consolidation 42Neolithic period 48–51, 55pillars 267sculpure 322in tool making 193, 206–211tools 16–18, 20, 28, 32, 120,

193, 206, 209, 210, 334TRB culture 50, 51

stone alignments 264–266, 265

stone axes 36, 170, 210, 247stone circles xi, 63, 264, 265stone figures 252stone fortifications 302, 303stone forts 151Stonehenge 263, 269

Amesbury Archer 283art engravings on 247astronomy 269the Atlantic region 70Bronze Age 70building stone 171Chalcolithic period 63megalithic developments 63menhirs/alignments 265Mesolithic period 29, 249, 263Mynydd Prescelly quarry 210ritual landscapes 267settlement/movement/society

29social hierarchy 331Wessex 268, 269wooden circles 264Woodhenge 264

stone-lined graves 278stone roundhouses 137–138stones, anthropomorphic 266–267stone vessels 122stone-walled houses 303stone walls 76stoneworking 334storage 22, 122, 338storage facilities 140Strabo 108, 174–175, 184, 262, 333Strait of Gibraltar. See Gibraltar,

Strait ofstraw 103Street House Farm 277Strettweg cart 247, 249strongholds 138, 139structures, timber 140Sub-Apennine 355cSucellus 244Sulis 244Sun 247, 269Sun God 244surgery 348swan 248swastika 244, 247Sweden 7, 10, 133, 185, 205, 287,

353c, 360Sweet Track 124, 255, 256Swifterbant 353cSwifterbant/Hazendonk 353cSwitzerland 352c–354c

domestic wood equipment 194Hauterive-Champréveyres

146–147


400

lake villages 105, 122museums in 360Neolithic period 52Niederwil 146population shifts 162settlement 141Thayngen Weier 146weaving 200western Europe 52

swords 298the Atlantic region 80Bronze Age 72, 74, 77, 78,

80, 299metallurgy 78settlement/economy/society 77Southeast Europe 74warriors 306weapons 297

symbols 72, 245, 320, 324

TTable des Marchand, La 265, 266, 268Tacitus (Roman writer) 259Tagus region 71Tagus River 178talayot 76, 150, 303Talheim 309tally sticks 320Taranis 244Tarasque of Noves 249Tardenoisian 352cTartessians 84, 87, 319, 356cTartessos 87Tarzien 261tattoos 340Taunton Ornament Horizon 355cTavoliere region, Italy 134, 144, 160technology xiteeth 347Telamon 310, 311tells 125, 128, 152–153, 159temperate Europe 352c

Chalcolithic period 59–60drink 346geography of 5–8Iron Age 82, 86–96Mesolithic period 352cNeolithic consolidation 39,

42–46Neolithic period 50–55

temperature 9, 11, 12, 17, 18, 21, 23tempering, of steel 225temples 97, 98tents 133Terni 355cterpen 136, 148Terra Amata 133terramare 147–148, 355c

territory, marking 158–159tertres tumulaires 287Tethys Sea 2, 3Teutates 244, 259Téviec 278textiles 195–202

baskets/mats/nets/cords 201–202

Bronze Age 198Chalcolithic period 55cloth 199–201as commodity 176dyeing 201fibers/materials in 196–198and spinning 199Tsangli 40and weaving 199–200

texts (pre-classical) 320Thames 257Thapsos 355cthatch 130–131Thayngen Weier 146Thebes 83Thera 3–4, 12, 72thermoluminescence 17Thessaly, Greece 40, 152–153, 161Thisted 209tholoi 73, 85, 275, 282, 292–293,

331Thom, Alexander 269Thrace and Thracians 40, 85, 94,

155, 222, 293, 316, 356c, 357cthread (weaving) 199timber

the Atlantic region 76Bronze Age 76as commodity 174the Far North 10ramparts 303roofing 129–130roundhouses 137, 138square houses 134structures 140

Timber grave culture 74, 280, 355ctimber-laced ramparts 303timber-reinforced ramparts 303–

304Timmeras 133tin 216

the Atlantic region 87Bronze Age 63as commodity 172copper 171, 172, 215, 220Cornwall mine 217–218Galicia mine 217Iron Age 87unequal trade transactions 167Únetice 69

Tisza 41, 352cTiszapolgár 41, 352cTiszapolgár-Basatanya 282toilet equipment 344, 344Tollund 260Tollund Man 260Tolosa 92tombs. See also megalithic tombs

Atlantic region 53Britain 54Bronze Age 76–77Etruscans 84gallery graves 290–291Iron Age 84, 86Mediterranean 76–77monumental 53, 286–293Neolithic period 53, 54passage graves 287rock-cut 62, 73, 85, 261, 286,

293steppe region/culture 86wedge 291

tool making 193, 206–211tools 119–120

aesthetic/symbolic behavior 23

agricultural 42, 82the Balkans 32Britain 55Bronze Age 68domestic activities 339economy 28flake 18, 20flint 18, 51, 209Greece 32for harvesting plants 114humans, early 17, 18humans, modern 20industry, organization of 334Iron Age 82iron working 224LBK culture 35Mediterranean 42Mesolithic period 28Neolithic consolidation 42Neolithic period 32, 51, 55Palaeolithic period 16, 18, 23for shaping wood 193stone 16–18, 20, 28, 32, 120,

193, 206, 209, 210, 334TRB culture 51wood 18

topography 2, 5, 6mtorcs 89, 222, 222–223, 258, 280torre 76, 150, 303tower houses 76, 80, 303towers 88, 150–151, 304, 305towns 97, 155–158

I n d e x

401

trackways 77, 123, 182–183, 194, 255

trade 166–180, 353c, 356camber 235Atlantic region 38, 42, 75–76, 80the Balkans 33the barbarians 96Britain 95Bronze Age 64m, 66, 67,

72–76, 78, 80Chalcolithic period 58, 60, 62changing patterns of 166–169and commodities 169–176Eastern Europe 33, 94Etruscans 84glacial Europe 22Greece 33, 58, 83, 84Hallstatt D 89The Heuneberg 154–155Iberia 60, 87, 92international 354c, 355cIron Age 82–84, 86, 87and land transport 180–183La Tène culture 89, 91LBK culture 35Mediterranean 49–50, 76, 80Mesolithic period 38metallurgy 62, 78Middle Bronze Age 72Minoan Crete 73mountains 5Mycenaean Greece 73Neolithic consolidation 42Neolithic period 33, 49–51Noreia 157northern Europe 38, 42ostrich eggshells 236population shifts 163routes 176–180Southeast Europe 67, 74southern France 60, 92temperate Europe 86TRB culture 51and water transport 183–189

trade patterns 166–169trade routes 177–180trading networks 167

Atlantic region 87Bronze Age 63, 68, 75Gaul 95Greece 84Iberia 87Iron Age 82, 84, 87Scandinavia 75Southeast Europe 68

transactions, unequal 166–167transalpine Europe 7, 82, 319–320,

324, 345

transportBronze Age rock art 181land 180–183water 183–189

Transylvania 173, 216Transylvanian Mountains 5, 74traps 27, 116–117TRB culture. See

Trichterrandbecherkultur–Funnel- Necked Beaker (TRB) culture

“Treasury of Atreus” (Mycenae) 292trees 113

agriculture 124–125in Celtic religion 249, 253climate/flora/fauna 7, 8coppicing 124Holocene 26Mediterranean 4pollarding 124temperate Europe 7, 8

tree-trunk coffin 279trepanning 348Trichrome 352cTrichterrandbecherkultur–Funnel-

Necked Beaker (TRB) culture 50–51, 353c, 354c

amber 173barrows, long 292and berry use 114and cattle 248collared flask 228dysser 291flint tools 209food and cooking 345Hunebedden 289industrial settlements 145Krzemionki Opatowskie flint

mine 207megalithic cists 292Neolithic period 52passage graves 287pottery 109, 229roads 182vehicle transport 181votive offerings 256western Europe 52

Trinovantes 158Tripolye culture 251trophies 250Trundholm sun cart 244, 247–248Trundle hillfort 155Tsangli 40, 352ctumuli 71, 75, 82, 278, 354c, 355cTumulus culture 74, 74–75, 276,

278, 354c, 355ctuna 116tundra 5, 10, 12, 26, 39tunics 341

turf 131Twann 146twill 200twining 201–202Tybrind Vig 124, 185

UUffington white horse (statue)

252Ukraine 352c–355c, 360Ulster Cycle 320Únetice 69, 219, 231, 354cUnited Kingdom 360Upper Palaeolithic period 20, 21,

22, 250, 321, 351cUpper Pleistocene 17Uralic language 316, 318Ural Mountains 6urbanization 168Urnfields period 79, 80, 122, 245,

284, 300, 355curns 78, 84, 284, 284, 355c

VVal Comonica 306valleys 5variscite. See callaïsVarna 221–222, 282, 352cVates 241Vedbaek 282vegetables 104–105vegetation

climate/flora/fauna 7as cult objects/symbol 249environmental change 11, 12the Far North 10Holocene 26Mediterranean 4of mountains 5postglacial 11temperate Europe 7

vehicles 181, 182, 247, 248Velim 309Veneti 95, 186, 204Venus figurines 20, 22Vercingetorix of the Arverni 95,

312Verulamium 97vessels

Beaker 60, 61bronze 325pottery 37, 50, 75, 228–229,

279, 324, 347stone 122

Vesuvius 4, 12Vhò 352cvictory celebrations 311viereckschanzen. See sacred enclosures


402

villages 144, 146–147, 153–154, 252

Villanovan culture 84, 279, 355c, 356c

Vinca 352cvines 4, 62violence 38, 43, 44, 296, 297, 308,

308–309Vistula River 179visual arts 316, 321, 321–325vitreous materials 230–232Vix 168, 175, 223, 280Vlasac 142, 282VNSP culture 354cvolcanoes 3–4, 12votive deposits and offerings 256,

256–258the Atlantic region 71Bronze Age 66, 71, 74, 78–79death/religion 78–79Iron Age 82La Tène culture 92ritual landscapes 267Southeast Europe 74stelae/anthropomorphic stones

266Vucedol 354c

Wwagons 74, 88, 356cWales

The Breiddin 154coal and shale 233Cwmystwyth mine 217Great Orme’s Head mine 217industrial settlements 145Mynydd Prescelly quarry

210passage graves 287plank-built boats 186portal dolmens 291raths 151Roman Empire 97

Wallachian plain 7warfare 296–312, 355c

Bronze Age 66, 77campaigns/migrations/wars

311–312Celtic warriors 307–308conflicts/battles/wars 308–312fortifications/defenses 301–

305Greece 83Iron Age 82, 83Mycenaean Greece 73settlement/economy/society 77warriors 305–308weapons/armor 297–301

War God 245warriors 305–308

battles 310Bronze Age 67, 77, 80campaigns/migrations/wars

311Celtic 307–308female 308garments 341Iron Age 82, 85, 86La Tène culture 91Mediterranean 80Mycenaean Greece 73Roman Empire 98Sardianian bronzes 322sculpture 306–307settlement/economy/society 77Southeast Europe 85steppe region/culture 85, 86temperate Europe 86

Wartburg-Stein-Vlaardingen 354cwar trumpet 310Wassenaaar 309Wasserburg 304water (as a defense) 304water (as votive depository) 256–

257water, drinking 346water transport 183–189wattle (as building material) 129,

130, 133Wayland’s Smithy 289wealth 66, 332weapons 297–298, 299

the Atlantic region 76Bronze Age 66, 67, 72, 75–78Celtic warriors 307death/religion 78Hallstatt D 89Iron Age 82metallurgy 78Neanderthals 19Scandinavia 75settlement/economy/society 77Tumulus culture 75victory celebrations 311warfare 296warriors 305–306wood 195

weaving 199–200, 335, 339, 340wedge tombs 291weirs, fish 116–117wells 140, 255Welwyn Garden City 285Wessex 222, 268, 275, 355c

amber 235the Atlantic region 69–71barrows, funerary 275

Bronze Age 69–71faience 231monuments 263ritual landscapes 267Upton Lovell burial 235

western Europe 352c, 354c–357cBronze Age 69–71, 75–77Chalcolithic period 60–63inhumation burials/cemeteries

281Iron Age 89Neolithic period 52warfare 296

West Kennet Avenue 264West Voe 133wetland 124, 134, 146–149wheat 102–103wheel(s) 46, 49, 74, 195, 245Wheeler, Sir Mortimer 309wheelhouses 139wheel of the sun 242, 243wickerwork 202Wicklow Mountains 221Wierden 148Wilburton 355cwild foods 345wildfowl 115wild resources 37, 112–117Wilsford shaft 255, 269wind 9, 10Windmill Hill 262, 353cwine 73, 96, 97, 175, 346winged chapes 298winter 7, 8–9Wistka 353cwitchcraft 333witches’ houses 293Wittemoor Trackway XLII 182Wittnauer Horn 153woad 107women

Bronze Age 71, 72campaigns/migrations/wars

311crime and punishment 333domestic activities/work 335,

339garments 341hair 340labor, division of 334, 335life expectancy 348, 349power 335sculpture 322victims of violence 308, 309warriors 308

wood 192–195Bronze Age 195as building material 129

I n d e x

403

wood (continued)domestic architecture 132harvesting and use of 123–124Mesolithic Stonehenge 263shields 299–300

wooden figures (religious) 251, 252wooden granaries 122wooden mortuary chambers 279–280Woodhenge 264

woodland management 55, 123–124woodlands 44. See also forestswoodworking 192–195wool 58, 196, 197, 200wounds 19, 348writing 16, 82–83, 319–320wrought iron 225

Y

yew 297Yoldia Sea 351c

ZZambujal 62, 150Závist 157, 261zinc 220


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handbook to life in prehistoric europe

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