The Pioneers & Frontiersmen of Prehistoric Europe

2012-03-07T00:05:00+01:00

The Pioneers & Frontiersmen of Prehistoric Europe

By Andrew Hamilton

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

Avebury Henge, Wiltshire, southwest England

When reading accounts of European prehistory I am often struck by a sense of familiarity—time and again glimmers of the white conquest of North America are awakened.

Continental Europe ^[2] occupies roughly 3.86 million square miles (10 million square kilometers)—roughly the size of the United States. The retreat of the glaciers after the last Ice Age (10,000 BC) caused the seas to rise as old coastlines flooded permanently for miles inland, former tundra retreated northward, and Europe became covered with trees.

From c. 10,000 BC to 5000 BC, northern Europe was dominated by Mesolithic (post-Ice Age, pre-agricultural) hunter-gatherers (foragers). The Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) fell between the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) and the Neolithic (New Stone Age).

By 5500-5000 BC, the earliest Neolithic farmers were expanding through central Europe. It seems likely that these “pioneers” and “frontiersmen” (for such they must essentially have been) displayed character traits and lifestyles similar in many ways to the pioneers and frontiersmen of early North America.

These first farmers cannot automatically be equated with Indo-European invaders, however.

Curiously, prehistorians typically omit any mention of the Indo-European framework from their publications. In reading standard academic accounts it is difficult to understand how the Indo-European narrative ^[3] fits into European prehistory chronologically, racially, demographically, or linguistically.

For example, according to Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia, Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was still a unified language around 3000 BC, but by 2000 BC Greek, Hittite, and Sanskrit had each become distinct. (Reconstructed PIE shows that its speakers were agriculturalists—i.e., not hunter-gatherers.)

The problem with such a “recent” dating for PIE is that by 3000 BC Neolithic farmers had been expanding across Europe for at least two to three thousand years, if not more. According to historical demographer Colin McEvedy, quoted below, 3000 BC actually marks the completion of the colonization of Europe by agriculturalists—the very time when PIE speakers were presumably still united in or near their ancestral homeland on the steppes north of the Black Sea.

“Frontier” characteristics of the Early Neolithic in Europe include a probable contest for dominance between indigenous hunter-gatherers and incoming farmers, grievously lop-sided population densities, deforestation, agricultural expansion, and profound cultural transformation accompanying the transition from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural lifestyle.

The Neolithic Frontier

Around 5000 BC, Germany and the Low Countries were colonized by Early Neolithic farmers belonging to the Linear Pottery Culture ^[4] (abbr. LBK, Linearbandkeramik)—the first farmers to colonize central and northwestern Europe.

^[5]

The early Neolithic in Europe. Colors indicate time scales for the spread of farming. "Earliest LBK" (Linear pottery culture) and "Later LBK/AVK" (LBK/Alföld linear pottery culture) represent the first farmers in central Europe.

LBK culture may have been spread by pioneers immigrating along rivers, practicing slash-and-burn agriculture. Their lifestyle was characterized by farming, herding, polished stone axes, timber longhouses, and pottery. The lands into which they moved are believed to have been uninhabited or too sparsely populated by hunter-gatherers to hinder the newcomers’ long-term progress.

As with their adventurous prehistoric and ancient seafaring counterparts, or North American successors, the arrival of settlers (or traders) was likely heralded by initial penetration into a trackless wilderness of river valleys, plains, mountains, and deep forests by dauntless men in quest of adventure and the unknown: explorers, hunters, trappers (is it likely they did not trap?), and scouts interacting with native forager bands and tribes as guests, unofficial diplomats, traders, and foes, sometimes killing and being killed.

After colonizing an area, a new farming population was sedentary up to the capacity of the land, and then the excess population moved to less inhabited areas.

The newcomers not only cultivated grain and kept livestock, but like their American successors supplemented their diet by hunting and fishing for waterfowl, fish, turtles, small mammals, deer, and other wild resources, as revealed in archaeological excavations of refuse pits.

As might be expected, Mesolithic hunter-gatherer sites lacked the large, deep pits from which clay was extracted by settlers for construction and other purposes. Instead, there were small pits, postholes, and scattered, low-density distributions of refuse containing numerous shards of broken pottery, unlike the dense, concentrated Neolithic-style rubbish deposits. Gradually, the Mesolithic way of life became marginalized and disappeared.

In northeastern Belgium, fortified frontier villages marked early Neolithic culture. Individual LBK villages were united together against the foragers beyond. Archaeological remains show that one such Neolithic village was fortified after having first been burnt.

Settlers evidently received a hostile reception from the indigenous, low-density Mesolithic hunter-gatherer populations on the frontier.

In War Before Civilization ^[6] (1996), American archaeologist Lawrence Keeley notes that prehistorians tend to assume that all foreign goods found at archaeological sites are present because of trade.

When exotic goods are found at a site, they are almost invariably interpreted as being evidence of prehistoric exchange. That such items might be the spoils of war seldom occurs to prehistorians, who immediately proceed to plot “trade routes” and try to reconstruct the mechanisms of exchange. . . . [A]rchaeologists should at least consider the possibility that they represent plunder. (p. 126)

The author acknowledges the problem of proof: “Given the aversion of modern archaeology to the idea of migration and colonization (let alone conquest), the problem of documenting such processes in prehistory is difficult.” This is because defeat or forced migration is typically manifested in the archaeological record only by the peaceful existence of winners on territory formerly occupied by the losers.

Keeley cites the example of the defeat of the Celtic Boii in Bohemia by the Germanic Marcomanni, recorded by Roman historians: “Archaeologically, this [known] event is evidenced only by the expansion of Germanic settlements and cemeteries into regions previously inhabited by Celts” (p. 111). In the absence of Roman written records, this conquest would have remained archaeologically “invisible.”

Deforestation

Mixed and broadleaf forests once dominated all of central Europe, including the British Isles and part of the Russian plains. But, as with the frontier US, they were felled to create plots to grow produce, obtain material for the construction of homes and other structures, and for use as heat and fuel. Only a small portion of this area still has forest cover.

Michael Williams, an English geographer, has outlined the process of deforestation in Neolithic Europe. (“Dark Ages and Dark Areas: Global Deforestation in the Deep Past,” ^[7] Journal of Historical Geography, 26 [2000]: 28–46)

The older paradigm, he says, viewed indigenous hunter-gatherer Mesolithic cultures from c. 8000–5000 BC “as the primitive fagend of the Palaeolithic.” The Mesolithic populations were engulfed by successive waves of Neolithic proto-agriculturalists sweeping across central Europe from the Near East in a great colonizing wave. The Neolithic colonizers were “primitive” farmers practicing slash-and-burn methods.

In line with this view, Williams quotes English archaeologist Grahame Clark’s assertion in Prehistoric Europe (1952) that the earliest farmers did not initiate

systematic, permanent clearance and the formation of settled fields. Their approach was tentative and their agriculture extensive. Patches of forest would have been cleared, sown, cropped, and after a season or two allowed to revert to the wild, while the farmers took in a new tract.

But Williams, relying upon more recent research, maintains that the truth “is much more complex, and has profound implications for our understanding of forest clearing.” Large sections of forest were cleared with flint and stone axes, demonstrated by modern experiments to have been capable of felling trees. Burning and animal grazing thinned and ultimately eliminated additional woodland.

Neolithic settlement and agriculture were also more stable and permanent than previously thought:

The significance of the timbered long houses found throughout Europe has been ignored yet archaeological excavations during the 1970s showed that some had been occupied for many hundreds of years which makes the universal slash-and-burn hypothesis unlikely. . . . Trees were chopped down by flint and polished stone axes and the flood plains were used for intensive garden cultivation and meadows. Neolithic settlements would have been entirely recognizable to the modern European farming eye.

Williams cites a simulation (model) from Gregg, Foragers and Farmers: Population Interaction and Agricultural Expansion in Prehistoric Europe (1988), conjecturing the type of farming and nutritional strategies necessary to maintain a hypothetical six-household, 30-person village in central Europe. It would have required a little over 6 km² of woodland to survive—”a staggering 20 hectares [49.4 acres] per person.”

Continuity or Replacement?

The ancestry of contemporary white Europeans is debated by geneticists, archaeologists, and anthropologists. A crucial question is the extent to which Europeans are descended from the first European farmers in the Neolithic Age 7500 years ago, or from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers who were present in Europe since 40,000 years ago. In other words, were the early farmers newcomers from afar, or descendants of indigenous hunter-gatherers who transitioned to farming?

Intuitively, it would seem that the demographically vibrant newcomers must have had significantly higher fertility rates than Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, and therefore contributed more to the modern European gene pool than forager populations.

To provide a rough indication of relative Mesolithic (hunter-gatherer) and Neolithic (early farmer) population densities, I quote Colin McEvedy’s and Richard Jones’s historical estimates for Europe as a whole:

The first Europeans, the hunters of the Old Stone Age, never amounted to more than 100,000 at the best of times; at the worst—specifically during the cold phases of the last Ice Age—there were considerably fewer than that. The ending of the Ice Age offered the chance of escape from this depressing pattern: during the better weather of the following mesolithic period (10th–8th millennia BC) numbers rose past the previous best, finally inching up to the quarter million mark [250,000 people]. Then came the great leap forward, the neolithic revolution of the 5th milliennium. This carried the total over [one] million. It also created the first important distinction between styles of settlement, for, whereas the food-gatherers of the Old Stone Age had rarely achieved densities as high as 0.1 km², the New Stone Age food-producers ordinarily lived at densities of 1 per km². By the time these agriculturalists had completed their colonization of southern and western Europe—say by 3000 BC—the continent’s population was more than 2 million. (Atlas of World Population History, Penguin, 1978, p. 19)

Archaeological Cultures

By Andrew HAMILTON

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

In the attempt to understand who we are and where we came from, history takes us only so far. Once the written record thins and ends—not far back in time, evolutionarily speaking—we are left primarily with archaeological evidence and inferences from linguistics.

Prehistory is a world of few facts and much guesswork. In the early historical period, when archaeological evidence and spotty written records at least complement one another, existing knowledge is extended. But when the historical record ends completely and archaeologists take over, the situation becomes much more opaque.

The unit of prehistorical analysis is the “culture,” characterized by a defined range of material artifacts. Cultures may be named after particularly rich geographical sites, after unique artifacts, or after regions in which sites of a certain type frequently occur. For each culture a geographical distribution can be mapped and radiocarbon dating pinpoint an estimated date and duration. A series of prehistorical maps can be drawn showing sequences of cultures analogous to sequences of peoples and states on historical maps.

Therefore, cultures should be visualized both “horizontally” and “vertically.” The horizontal dimension is a culture’s geographic distribution, the vertical its development, persistence, and disappearance across time, as well as the sequential succession of different cultures.

Thus, cultural change in prehistoric Europe can be envisioned as a shifting mosaic of different cultures (white ethnic groups or “populations”) moving across the continental landscape in both time and space.

Kossinna’s Law

The term “culture” entered archaeology through 19th century German ethnography, where the Kultur of tribal groups and rural peasants was distinguished from the Zivilisation of urbanized peoples. Kultur was used by German ethnologists to designate the distinctive ways of life of a particular people or Volk.

The idea of archaeological cultures became central to the discipline in the 20th century thanks to the work of Gustaf Kossinna (1858–1931) of the University of Berlin, the most famous archaeologist in the German-speaking world of his day (he was also a linguist).

Kossinna perceived the archaeological record as a mosaic of clearly defined cultures (Kultur-Gruppen or culture groups) that were strongly associated with race. He was particularly interested in reconstructing the movements of direct prehistoric ancestors of Germans, Slavs, Celts and other Indo-European ethnic groups in order to trace the Aryan race to its homeland or Urheimat.

Kossinna developed the theory that regionally delimited ethnic groups can be defined by the material cultures identified by archaeologists. A unified set of archaeological artifacts, a culture, was the sign of a unified ethnicity: “Sharply defined archaeological cultural areas correspond unquestionably with the areas of particular people or tribes.”

This statement is known as “Kossinna’s law.” The only objection to it is the imputation of an invariable identity between archaeological cultures and ethnic or racial groups (populations). The science is more complicated than that.

Kossinna’s law applies best to Neolithic and subsequent eras. The advent of agriculture was accompanied by a population explosion—the Neolithic Demographic Transition. By contrast, in the earliest human era, the Paleolithic, distinct cultural groups and differences are less readily discernible in the archaeological record.

Kossinna’s ideas have made him anathema to guardians of the racial Zeitgeist. Symptomatic of the dumbing down of academia, he is invariably depicted as a proto-Nazi.

Unfortunately, Kossinna’s “academic racism” is warm tap water compared to the poisonous brew of any of the hundreds of professors of Jewish Studies, Holocaust Studies, “Whiteness Studies,” Asian Studies, African Studies, Native American Studies, and Latino Studies active in universities today. Kossinna and other white academics routinely vilified as “racists” are sorry contenders for the mantle. For real hate you must examine today’s academy.

The Linear Pottery Culture

Kossinna’s concept of archaeological culture was introduced into the English-speaking academy by Australian-born, English-descended Stalinist archaeologist V. Gordon Childe, who stated in The Danube in Prehistory (1929):

We find certain types of remains—pots, implements, ornaments, burial rites, house forms—constantly recurring together. Such a complex of regularly associated traits we shall term a “cultural group” or just a “culture.” We assume that such a complex is the material expression of what today would be called a people.

Noted for synthesizing archaeological data from a variety of sources, Childe was the first academic to construct a prehistory of the entire European continent (The Dawn of European Civilization, 1925). He also wrote The Aryans: A Study of Indo-European Origins (1926), a cause for discomfort among the politically correct today.

Examples of very early Neolithic cultures in Europe include the Starčevo-Kőrös-Criş culture ^[3] (Serbia-Hungary-Romania) and the Karnavo culture of Bulgaria.

The first agrarian society in central and eastern Europe was the Linear Pottery culture (Linearbandkeramik, LBK), formerly known as the Danubian culture after V. Gordon Childe’s book. Starting around 5500 BC from the middle Danube (Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary) it expanded northward along the Rhine and the other rivers going north through the German and Polish plains toward the North Sea.

According to McEvedy’s hypothesis in 1967,

Given that the Danubians were a genuine people and remained so until provincial differences began to appear among them a millennium after they had expanded across central Europe, it is difficult to avoid the view that their movement created an Indo-European heartland which must be postulated for roughly this time and place on purely linguistic grounds. Therefore the Danubian culture represents the arrival and establishment of the Indo-Europeans in Central Europe. (Colin McEvedy ^[5], The Penguin Atlas of Ancient History, 9)

Limitations of the Culture Concept

By definition, a prehistory in racial and ethnic terms remains hypothetical. Despite its popularity as a means of organizing the archaeological record, a simple correlation between peoples and distinctive archaeological cultures is not always warranted.

Nevertheless, as Colin McEvedy observed 45 years ago, “We are not so helpless in this matter as the puritans pretend.” And Indo-Europeanist archaeologist J. P. Mallory adds, “While one may deny the necessity of assuming an invariable one-to-one correlation between an archaeological [culture] and a linguistic entity, it is equally perverse to assume that there can be no correlation between the two.” (In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth, 1989, 164. Emphasis added.)

It will likely soon be possible to make well-founded inferences about the genotypes of ancient populations from DNA analyses of human remains. To a limited extent this is already occurring.

It is perfectly acceptable to make reasonable predictions and assumptions about white prehistory based upon archaeological, linguistic, anthropological, and genetic evidence. Archaeologists and prehistorians formulate analogous hypotheses and assumptions about scores of matters all the time.

What is not acceptable is to deny prehistoric evidence due to racist-ideological dogmas motivated by the determination that whites must and will be denied a sense of collective identity.

People so motivated are keenly aware that the development of identity among whites akin to that enjoyed by Jews and non-whites could derail the genocidal policies upon which contemporary politics and the culture war are predicated.

Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/07/archaeological-cultures/

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