Introduction: Europe after the Ice

By ten thousand years ago, the ice sheets of northern Europe had retreated to the highlands of Scandinavia and Scotland. Deglaciated areas and former periglacial zones were colonised by shrubs, then forests, and inhabited by foragers harvesting the resources of woodlands, rivers, lakes and seas. After several millennia, this world of hunters and fishers was disrupted by new ways of life based on domesticated plants and animals. Economic and ideological transformations that accompanied the transition to agriculture produced agrarian communities that formed the foundation for later prehistoric society.

This essay reviews the period between c. 9000 and 3000 bce in Europe north of the Alps, encompassing two major periods of European prehistory, the Mesolithic and the Neolithic. Chronologically, it begins at the start of the Holocene during the 9th millennium bce and continues until the beginning of the 3rd millennium bce. Geographically, it includes the riverine uplands of northern central Europe, the North European Plain, the Baltic and North Sea basins, the Atlantic facade of France and the British Isles, and the Sub-Arctic regions of northern Scandinavia and Russia.

Mesolithic foragers of northern Europe left one of the richest archaeological records of hunter-gatherer societies in the world. Wood, bone and antler artifacts are preserved in bogs and in coastal waters alongside stone tools and crude pottery, while cemeteries yield information about social practices. The Neolithic transition to agriculture in northern Europe saw the appearance not only of crops and livestock but also of new forms of domestic life and ideological expression. In some areas, early farmers left abundant traces of settlement with houses, rubbish-filled pits and cemeteries, but elsewhere habitation sites are scarce while mortuary architecture dominates the landscape.

Introduction

Agriculture came to north-central Europe somewhat over 7000 years ago. In the last century of archaeological research, we have been able to establish the archaeological record of these communities in some detail and have adequate, but not perfect, control over their chronology. The “how” and “why” of the establishment of these agricultural communities have been much more elusive. Since 1980, concerted research in many different parts of north-central Europe has been focused on the earliest farming communities (Bogucki and Grygiel 1993). The first goal of this chapter will be to review the current status of this research and establish a baseline for knowledge as the new millennium begins.

A central issue, as it is in all the chapters in this volume, is whether agricultural communities in north-central Europe spread through colonization by populations which had originated elsewhere or through the adoption of Neolithic economy and technology by indigenous foraging peoples. For reasons which will be explained more fully below, the current evidence strongly favors colonization as the mechanism of agricultural dispersal in this region. The second goal of this chapter will be to argue this point against competing hypotheses.

The final goal of this chapter is much more ambitious. Explanations for the dispersal of the first farming communities in north-central Europe, and especially for its rapidity, have all been unsatisfactory and often not supportable with empirical evidence. An attempt will be made here to introduce a framework for considering this dispersal as a member of a category of phenomena called “complex adaptive systems” which exhibit a number of common properties (Waldrop 1992).