School of Engineering and Applied Science
March 25, 1997
The spread of farming across Europe between 8,000 and 5,000 years ago was the result of two processs: the migration and dispersal of farmers and the adoption of crops and livestock by indigenous foragers. In some regions, one of these processes clearly predominated, while in others is it not clear which one played the major role. This paper will discuss the geography of agricultural dispersals in Europe and identify some signature characteristics which can be used to differentiate the above two processes, based on recent research in several parts of Europe.
This paper will examine the question of the Neolithic diaspora in Europe, with special reference to central Europe. I have chosen to use the term "diaspora" deliberately, for I am persuaded that the dispersal of people, and not simply of cultivated plants and domesticated animals, was a key element in the rapid establishment of farming communities throughout Europe. Even when indigenous foragers chose to adopt agriculture, the appearance of farming communities in adjacent regions was often the conduit which brought them the founder crops and animals that eventually transformed their economy.
The presence of domesticated wheat, barley, sheep, and goat unequivocally provides the vector for the Neolithic diaspora in Europe. Since these species exist in their wild form only in the Near East, their dispersal was clearly from the southeastern corner of Europe to the northwest and to the west. Domestic livestock, of course, can move on their own, and the role of feral animals in expanding the range of domesticated species in Europe cannot be overlooked (Bogucki 1995). On the other hand, domestic plants require human agency to be carried across the landscape, so the presence of wheat and barley by about 3500 BC in the British Isles was the result of many human interactions over the 3500 kilometers between the Levant and the English Channel.
In contrast to these views are the positions taken by what Ammerman (1989) has called the "indigenists". For example, Dennell (1992: 91) maintains that "early farming in Europe always occured in areas where there were already hunter-forager communities. These cannot be regarded as irrelevant to the pattern of agricultural expansion." Although I disagree with the inclusion of the word "always", it is true that foragers were indeed widely dispersed throughout pre-agricultural Europe. But it does not follow that the development of agricultural communities was always an in situ process. Alasdair Whittle has recently disputed the notion that colonization was a major factor in agricultural dispersal in Europe (Whittle 1996). He prefers instead to see the introduction of food production as an in situ development resulting from its adoption by indigenous peoples virtually everywhere in Europe.
With regard to the colonization vs. indigenous development question, it is helpful to consider the criteria laid down by Irving Rouse in 1958 when evaluating whether population movement is a better explanation for change in the archaeological record than in situ development:
Let us examine these criteria, which still seem valid 40 years after Rouse first articulated them, with regard to the first farmers in north-central Europe, an area which reaches from the middle Danube valley where Hungary, Austria, and Slovakia come together, north to the lower Vistula and Oder rivers, and west to the Paris Basin, an area of approximately 750,000 km2. The period between 5500 and 5000 B.C. saw the establishment of farming-based communities throughout this area in several phases.
Rouse's criteria support the case that the establishment of early farming communities in this area was the result of colonization rather than a local development:
The central European evidence, then, conforms to Rouse's criteria for demonstrating population movement: the earliest agricultural communities are intrusive, have a clear source outside the region, appear across central Europe in a very short span of time, and took advantage of favorable conditions for migration. The clincher, however, lies in its conformity with Sanger's additional qualifier. All cultural subsystems technology, subsistence, settlement, mortuary practice are involved.
In a comparison of the Pleistocene colonizations of the Americas and Australia, Beaton (1991) discussed the notion of what he refers to as "megapatches" and their implications for the study of colonization and migration. By using the term "megapatch", Beaton means that colonists may not have a sufficiently fine-grained view of the variability contained by virgin territory and see it at a very coarse level of resolution. As a result, a characteristic of a colonizing population might be that it will very clearly demonstrate a preference for gross habitat types, and within these gross habitat types they might locate their settlements in very similar places. Only over time would the colonizers distribute their sites in a variety of habitats as the resolution at which they perceive their environment becomes finer and finer.
I believe that this discussion has relevance for understanding the spread of early farming in Europe. A signature of colonization, it could be argued, would be the focus on one gross habitat type to the virtual exclusion of all others, no matter how similarly attractive or productive the others might eventually prove to be. Within that gross habitat type, moreover, the location of settlements in a specific landscape zone to the exclusion of others would also be a signature characteristic of a colonizing population.
By contrast, a settlement pattern which exhibits the use of many different types of gross habitat types and where settlements are located in many different parts of the landscape would be more characteristic of a continuation of an existing pattern of foraging settlement, even if there were slight changes in the settlement pattern. The exploitation of many different habitats would suggest a fine-grained familiarity with the environment that might be expected of an indigenous population rather than the coarse-grained perception of a colonizing population.
In central Europe, the concentration by early farmers on a limited number of gross habitat types is obvious. In the upland loess basins, early farmers chose to settle almost exclusively along the valleys of the smaller tributaries of the major river systems, which would have been a the most fertile and moist habitats in the loess belt. These also would have been the areas of natural breaks in the vegetation, what Verboom (1977) has called "zones of weakness" in the primeval forest. Many other areas which separate the loess basins, where early agriculture certainly could have been practiced, were simply ignored by the early farmers and were not colonized until later in the Neolithic.
When the early central European farmers entered lowlands of the North European Plain, there was a similar concentration on gross habitat types. The lowland analogs of the upland loess basins in northern Poland are patches of ground moraine which are engraved with sub-glacial meltwater valleys. The earliest farming settlement in northern Poland occurs almost exclusively along these so-called tunnel valleys, These zones would also have been the natural breaks in the forested lowland environment, since they would have been part of the hydrological network during the moist Atlantic period. Intervening areas, despite their suitability for agriculture, are not occupied until later in the Neolithic.
This concentration by the early farmers on a limited number of habitats contrasts markedly with the pattern observed in other parts of northwestern Europe. In the Rhine-Meuse delta, for example, early farming sites are known from a variety of habitats and come in varying sizes and functions (Louwe Kooijmans 1993). Such variety appears to reflect a much finer-grained knowledge of the environment than the concentration on a very specific habitat type in the loess zone and in northern Poland. Similarly in Ireland the early farmers used the landscape very widely (Green and Zvelebil 1993), which appears to reflect the residual knowledge of the terrain from indigenous foraging peoples.
The other dimension of the colonizing logic of the earliest farmers of central Europe which deserves attention lies in their conservative and strikingly remarkably standardized technology. If there had been a mass conversion to agriculture of indigenous foragers over the 750,000 square kilometers of central Europe, then one would expect almost immediately to see considerable variation in house forms, pottery, and other aspects of culture. Instead, the initial pattern is strikingly homogeneous. Houses and pottery from Slovakia look like those from the Paris basin. The expected regional variation does not set in until several centuries later, when local populations develop distinct material identities.
In particular, the use of a standardized, modular form of construction the longhouse of the early farmers is consistent with a colonizing population using proven technology to facilitate its expansion. These longhouses, up to 45 meters in length, were the largest buildings in the world at this time. They were multipurpose structures, providing shelter for humans and livestock as well as storage and working space. Despite some regional variation in construction details, the dimensions and general organization of the longhouses is remarkably similar throughout central Europe.
The suggestion is offered here that it might be possible to look for similar signatures of colonization in other parts of Neolithic Europe. In particular, the plains of Thessaly studied by van Andel and Runnels (1995) also seem to be good candidates for the colonization argument. Here, too, there is an overwhelming preference for a specific, but rare, habitat floodplains and backswamp levees and populations which can be traced back to their Anatolian origins who settled in areas where antecedent forager populations were slight. On the other hand, if early agricultural settlements are found in many different types of habitats, as they appear to be in Ireland, then the colonization hypothesis would appear to lose force in favor of the indigenous-adoption position.
A more realistic picture of the Neolithic diaspora in Europe is to consider it to have been a mixture of various waves, currents, and eddies of people, animals, and plants. In some areas, an influx of migrating farmers swept with it any sparse local foraging populations as it deposited its own agricultural communities. Elsewhere, early farming communities appeared as isolated pioneer outposts in a multicultural landscape of foragers and farmers. Finally, in many regions the indigenous foragers eventually found it advantageous to incorporate domestic plants and animals into their diet and in the process became farmers themselves.
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