The New Stone Age in Northern Europe Part 7

The result of this exchange of products and ideas will be more apparent during the next period. Trade-routes and lines of communication will then become far more clear and fixed. But it is important to notice that these routes are already opening in all directions, perhaps more numerous because still experimental, tentative, and somewhat vague. The routes of transportation during prehistoric times, as usually in pioneer periods, were mainly along river valleys. Where basins almost or quite touch one another centres of contact and distribution naturally arise.

Hence the prosperity of the Department of Saone-et-Loire, in France. A study of any good relief-map of Europe will show the chief routes of trade almost at a glance. The great east-and-west artery is the valley of the Danube, with its tributaries extending far northward, almost touching the headwaters of rivers flowing into the North Sea or Baltic.

The westernmost north-and-south route is by sea along the Atlantic coast from Spain to England or Denmark. A second was formed by the Rhone and Rhine, eastward and parallel to the French highlands extending from the Mediterranean to Belgium, broken by the pa.s.s of Belfort. A third ran up the valley of the Elbe and down the Moldau to the Danube. This was the most important route in Europe, especially for amber. A fourth, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, followed the Vistula and the Dniester. From ancient times the Black Sea and its tributaries have been the great route of communication between the aegean and southern Russia as well as parts of the Balkan Peninsula. During the greater part of the Neolithic period it was probably only a sluggish and irregular current of trade which trickled along most of these routes, put it was the beginning and promise of larger and better things, and must not be despised or neglected.

In any study of the industries of this period the manufacture of pottery is of the greatest interest and most fundamental importance. Pottery is to the archaeologist what characteristic fossils are to the paleontologist. It is almost indestructible. In its texture, form, and ornament it affords wide scope for individual or tribal skill and invention, and yet over wide areas the general type shows a remarkable unity and persistency. A single sherd may often tell a long and reliable story. The pottery of the Mediterranean basin and of many oriental localities is a fairly sure guide to the age of a long-buried settlement and to the relations of its people with other, often distant regions.

The chronology and much of the history of Egypt, Troy, and Crete, and many ancient settlements of Greece and Italy, are based largely on the study of their pottery. It is far more expressive and informing than the average stone or bone implement.

The time is not yet ripe, however, for such deductions from the study of the pottery of northern and middle Europe. A good foundation has been laid, much material gathered which is being built up into a firm system.

But in this pioneer work many rash generalizations have been based upon a foundation of facts drawn from a very narrow area, often incompletely understood. Here we must proceed cautiously and can give only a very brief and inadequate outline sketch of the most important results in which we may have a fair degree of confidence and which are needed in our further study.

Pottery appears first in the transition epoch from Paleolithic to Neolithic, at Campigny and in the kitchen-middens. Long before this time there must have been containers for fluids. A concavity in the rock may have been the first reservoir and a mussel-sh.e.l.l the first drinking-cup.

Wherever gourds occurred they were doubtless hollowed out and made most convenient jars and dishes. Vessels of bark and wood probably came into use early in the north. Skins of animals tightly sewn with sinew and with well-greased seams formed excellent bottles, still used in the Orient. Where the art of plaiting twigs, splints, or reeds into mats and baskets had been discovered, it was not a long step to coat the inside with clay and dry or finally burn it before the fire. The potter's wheel did not come into use until the Bronze period. Pottery had been used in the Orient long before this time. It is found well made and beautifully decorated in the oldest strata at Susa. The art may have been introduced from Asia or lost during the long migration and then reacquired. Here we are still in the dark.

[Ill.u.s.tration: POTTERY FROM NEOLITHIC GRAVES]

The pottery of northern Europe can be distributed into a few groups or general types, every one of which is wide-spread and fairly distinct, though mixture or combination of types is not uncommon, especially along the boundaries of distribution where two types meet. There is much difference of opinion and discussion concerning details, but general agreement as to fundamentals and essentials.[117]

Intermediate or "hybrid" forms also occur. The cla.s.sification is hardly natural and is responsible for much confusion and dispute. It can have only temporary and provisional value. These three groups are:

1. Banded pottery, _Ceramique rubanee_, _Bandkeramik_.

2. Corded pottery, _Ceramique cordee_, _Schnurkeramik_.

3. Calyciform pottery, _Vases caliciforms_, _Zonenbecher._

They differ mostly in ornamentation, but often also as distinctly in form.

1. _Banded pottery_ occurs all over Europe except northeast of the Oder, perhaps also in Great Britain. Its shape is usually that of a spheroidal gourd with the upper fourth removed; and its system of ornament may have been derived from the system of cords by which the jar was once suspended. Sometimes we find a low neck, rim, or collar around the large mouth. The ornament in what seems to be its most primitive form consists of lines marked in the clay, arranged parallel to one another in bands covering most of the body of the jar. These bands, either broad or narrow, run in a zigzag or saw-tooth pattern horizontally around the base. By doubling each saw-tooth we get a diamond-shaped area. Even this simple ornament admits of a large variety of patterns. But the bands may be curved instead of angular, forming scrolls, meanders, or spirals.

Logically, these should represent the latest development of the type.

But the spiral may yet prove to be actually older than the angle. The bands may be raised and projecting (Bosnia) or be merely painted on a flat, sometimes burnished, surface. The incised lines may be plain or filled with a white material (encrusted). The briefest consideration shows that we have here a very generalized type or group of types which made its first appearance in Europe on the lower Danube and then underwent development by simplification or sometimes, perhaps, by increased complexity, as it radiated from this centre, becoming more and more modified as it went westward or northward.

The banded pottery of southwest Germany and the Rhine region is found in dwellings as well as graves, usually accompanied by the mattock or the deer-horn pick, but lance-heads fail. The rectangular houses belonged to people of a settled and quite advanced agriculture. We find cellars, and barns or granaries. The dwellings are single or in groups, sometimes, as at Grosgartach, forming quite a village or town. They are situated by preference on the loess terraces of the streams and rivers, near enough to the water for boat communication. The pottery varies in fineness and beauty according to the size of the dwelling and therefore the wealth of its owner. Social differences, rank, and fashion are appearing in truly modern form.

2. _Corded Pottery._ The most characteristic and, perhaps, culminating form is the Amphora or flasklike vase with wide neck, which starts abruptly from a globose portion with flat base. Its prototype may have been the leathern flask or bottle. Here the ornament consists of parallel lines arranged in a band or in bands around the neck, but often extending somewhat on to the upper surface of the bulb. The lines look as if made by winding a cord around the neck while the clay was still soft; hence the name of the group. It seems to have been originally a purely northern product, which toward the close of the Neolithic period was carried southward by a distinct movement of population. It is found almost entirely in graves, often accompanied by calyciform cups. Schliz says that it is never found in remains of dwellings. The household pottery was apparently crude and coa.r.s.e, with no distinctive type of ornament. The carriers of the culture were apparently herdsmen rather than tillers of the soil, and always more or less hunters. Their finest implements were their weapons.

3. _Calyciform Pottery, Zonen-or Glocken-becher_, has been by some united with Corded Pottery. It has the shape of a goblet or inverted bell with flaring rim and flat base.

[Ill.u.s.tration: POTTERY

_A._ Banded pottery.

_B._ 1. Origin of banded ornament from cords suspending a more or less hemispherical vessel derived from the hollow gourd.

2. Corded ornament derived from suspension of flask (Amphora).

_C._ Cups and Kugelamph.o.r.e (globular flask) from Groszgartach.]

The ornament is in circular zones separated by bands of well-polished surface covering the whole outside. It is found in Asia Minor, Egypt, Italy, and in western Europe along the whole zone of megalithic monuments, whence it spread northward and eastward into middle Europe.

The incrusted pottery characterized by incised lines filled with a white material may have had a distinct origin and development, though its technique has often been borrowed and applied to other types. The pottery of the oldest lake-dwellers is crude, coa.r.s.e, with little or no ornament. Hence it is difficult to connect it with any other type.

Form and shape of pottery are often quite or very persistent. We cannot understand why the base of so many jars was left rounded, or in some old lake-dwellings pointed, when it might easily have been flattened, apparently to good advantage. But even the form, and still more the ornament, changes according to time, place, and fashion; hence these are very useful in tracing periods and cultures and their relations. Where different types meet there is usually more or less change or modification, often difficult to interpret. Our knowledge of European pottery is still small and unsatisfactory, but it has already been of much use in tracing migrations of culture and relations between provinces often widely separated.

CHAPTER VIII

NEOLITHIC CHRONOLOGY

"We must imagine Europe in upper Paleolithic times again as a terminal region, a great peninsula toward which the human emigrants from the east and from the south came to mingle and to superpose their cultures. These races took the grand migration routes which had been followed by other waves of animal life before them; they were pressed upon from behind by the increasing populations from the east; they were attracted to western Europe as a fresh and wonderful game country, where food in the forests, in the meadows, and in the streams abounded in unparalleled profusion.... Between the retreating Alpine and Scandinavian glaciers Europe was freely open toward the eastern plains of the Danube, extending to central and southern Asia; on the north, however, along the Baltic, the climate was still too inclement for a wave of human migration, and there is no trace of man along these northern sh.o.r.es until the close of the Upper Paleolithic, nor of any residence of man in the Scandinavian peninsula until the great wave of Neolithic migration established itself in that region."[118]

We must now attempt to determine the succession of these great changes in the climate and face of Europe, and then see if we can fix any dates for some of the changes and for the introduction of new cultures.

In the oscillations of the ice-front marking the final retreat of the Alpine glaciers there were three epochs of advance. Two of these, the Buhl and Gschnitz advances, with the interval of retreat between them, were occupied by the Magdalenian or last epoch of Upper Paleolithic time. The third advance, the Daun Epoch, or perhaps the latter part of the Gschnitz and the first part of the Daun, is represented by the Azilian-Tardenoisian Epoch, a period of transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic time. These changes have been clearly traced by Osborn.[119]

We are most closely concerned with the changes which took place around the Baltic in Denmark and Scandinavia during this post-glacial retreat of the ice. Here also we find the same disappearance of the tundra and "barren-ground" fauna already noticed in France, and the appearance of a park-flora of forests interspersed with open glades or meadows. But we need not be surprised if we find that the retreat of the great Baltic or Scandinavian ice-sheet does not keep step exactly with that of the Alpine.[120]

1. The last ice-sheet had covered most of Scandinavia except the western half of Denmark and, perhaps, the most southern portion of Sweden. But a broad ma.s.s of ice covered most of Schleswig, at least the eastern half of Holstein, and a fairly wide zone of land south of and more or less parallel to the south sh.o.r.e of the Baltic. To the eastward and northward a great sea extended to the Arctic Ocean. This earliest stage marked the farthest advance of the ice just before the final retreat.

2. Slowly and gradually the ice retreated until finally it occupied only the mountains of the backbone of Scandinavia. The region of the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Bothnia, a large part of Sweden and a good portion of Finland were covered by a great sheet of water, the Yoldia Sea, connected by a broad sound at the present Skager Rack with the North Sea and Atlantic, and still opening widely into the Arctic Ocean northeastward. The submerged regions had been greatly depressed, especially in the north. The clays deposited along the sh.o.r.es of the sea are now raised often to a height of one hundred metres above tide-level. But to the southward the depression was only slightly marked.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SUCCESSIVE STAGES AND FORMS OF BALTIC SEA

1. Culmination of last advance of ice.

2. Yoldia Sea during retreat of ice.

3. Yoldia Sea at greatest size.

4. Scandinavia during Ancylus Epoch.

(The white represents the ice; dark gray represents the land; light gray the Baltic Sea.)]

It is important to our later study to notice that these clays, which are thick and fine-grained, are composed of thin layers of alternating dark material deposited in fall or winter, and lighter, more sandy, brought down by the spring freshets. The temperature of the sea could hardly have been much above freezing-point, as is shown by the presence of arctic forms of mollusks, like _Yoldia arctica_ and _Astarte borealis_.

The land-plants of this epoch, the so-called Dryas flora, are dwarf cold tundra forms, now occurring in Spitzbergen, Lapland, and Arctic Russia and Siberia. But certain plants, especially in Sweden, lead us to infer that while the winters were long and severe, the short summers were warm or even hot. This does not surprise us in northern tundra regions.

Reindeer still lived in the region. This Yoldia Epoch is our second great post-glacial stage. Man had apparently not yet reached Denmark, though some reindeer hunters probably roamed over Germany.

3. Toward the end of the Yoldia Epoch the land rose in southwest Sweden, connecting this country with Denmark and cutting the connection of the remains of the Yoldia Sea with the North Sea. A similar emergence in Finland completed the change of this sea into a great landlocked body of water called the Ancylus Lake, from the most common and characteristic mollusk, _Ancylus fluviatilis_. The glaciers had shrunken to a narrow band covering the mountains between Norway and Sweden. The climate, while moderating, was still cold. The Arctic flora retreated northward and was followed in Denmark by woods and even forests of willows, aspens, and poplars, entering from the south and southeast.

These were followed by pines, especially in the dryer districts, later by alders, coming from the east across Finland, according to Hoops.[121]

The Ancylus Epoch forms our third stage. The settlement at Maglemose probably took place toward its close.

4. The elevation and emergence of land so characteristic of the Ancylus Epoch was followed by a depression of this region, especially in its southern portions. That part of the Ancylus Lake corresponding to the Baltic regained broader and deeper connections with the North Sea than it has at present. Hence the waters of the Baltic contained a larger percentage of salt than now. The marine life, _Littorina littorea_, _Tapes_, and others, testifies to a rise in temperature since the Ancylus Epoch. Oaks had already begun to crowd out the pines, and will be followed after a time by the beeches loving a soil rich in humus, rather than the sandy barrens occupied by the pines. A similar evidence is furnished by other plants, some of which reached a higher lat.i.tude than now. The summer temperature was perhaps 2-1/2 Cent. higher than at present, an "optimum temperature" for the plant life of this region.

This improvement of climate is most marked in northeastern Europe and seems far less noticeable even in Germany. Our fourth stage is marked by a greatly improved climate and the spread of the sh.e.l.l-heaps.

5. A fifth stage ushers in the full Neolithic period. Between the Littorina stage and the genuine Neolithic culture of lake-dwellings and megaliths there is a considerable gap in our knowledge, a period during which agriculture and domestic animals were brought in and utensils and pottery and general conditions were greatly improved.

We may now venture to attempt to gain an absolute chronology of more or less definite dates for the appearance of the cultures which we have noticed. We must clearly recognize that our best results can be only tentative and provisional. A careful study and comparison of the pottery of northern Europe will some day furnish data for a reliable system.

For the sake of convenience we will begin by attempting to set a date for the close, rather than the beginning, of the whole Neolithic period.

We have seen that this was brought about by the introduction of the metal bronze. Copper had come into use somewhat or considerably earlier, but it seems hardly worth while to consider it as characterizing a distinct period. It is rather the last phase of the Stone Age, when wider communications and trade were making the transition to the use of metals like bronze and iron.