During the early fifth millennium BC, Linearbandkeramik groups along the Danube in Central Europe constructed hundreds of circular enclosures, or ‘rondels’. These monumental sites signalled major ...social, economic and ideological change among these early farming communities. Their absence north of the Carpathian and Sudeten Mountains has been taken to suggest that this area lay on the periphery of this Early Neolithic world. Here, the authors report on a systematic programme of non-invasive prospection, including aerial photography, in Lower Silesia. The survey has identified eight previously undocumented rondels, significantly extending their distribution. Their detection emphasises the importance of combining prospection methods, and calls for a re-evaluation of core-periphery interpretations of Early Neolithic Central Europe.
The introduction of dairying was a critical step in early agriculture, with milk products being rapidly adopted as a major component of the diets of prehistoric farmers and pottery-using late ...hunter-gatherers. The processing of milk, particularly the production of cheese, would have been a critical development because it not only allowed the preservation of milk products in a non-perishable and transportable form, but also it made milk a more digestible commodity for early prehistoric farmers. The finding of abundant milk residues in pottery vessels from seventh millennium sites from north-western Anatolia provided the earliest evidence of milk processing, although the exact practice could not be explicitly defined. Notably, the discovery of potsherds pierced with small holes appear at early Neolithic sites in temperate Europe in the sixth millennium BC and have been interpreted typologically as 'cheese-strainers', although a direct association with milk processing has not yet been demonstrated. Organic residues preserved in pottery vessels have provided direct evidence for early milk use in the Neolithic period in the Near East and south-eastern Europe, north Africa, Denmark and the British Isles, based on the δ(13)C and Δ(13)C values of the major fatty acids in milk. Here we apply the same approach to investigate the function of sieves/strainer vessels, providing direct chemical evidence for their use in milk processing. The presence of abundant milk fat in these specialized vessels, comparable in form to modern cheese strainers, provides compelling evidence for the vessels having being used to separate fat-rich milk curds from the lactose-containing whey. This new evidence emphasizes the importance of pottery vessels in processing dairy products, particularly in the manufacture of reduced-lactose milk products among lactose-intolerant prehistoric farming communities.
Archaeological investigation of Circum-Alpine lake, or pile, dwellings has afforded unprecedented insight into Neolithic and Bronze Age societies. The discovery in 1989 of a submerged settlement near ...Rome added an early (eighth millennium BP) geographical outlier to this distribution. Two decades of excavation at La Marmotta have identified more than a dozen dwellings and an enormous assemblage of organic remains. Here, the authors present an overview of the textiles, basketry and cordage recovered, and the tools used to manufacture them. The assemblage paints a more complete picture of the technological expertise of Neolithic societies and their ability to exploit and process plant materials to produce a wide range of crafts.
Recent genetic, isotopic and linguistic research has dramatically changed our understanding of how the Corded Ware Culture in Europe was formed. Here the authors explain it in terms of local ...adaptations and interactions between migrant Yamnaya people from the Pontic-Caspian steppe and indigenous North European Neolithic cultures. The original herding economy of the Yamnaya migrants gradually gave way to new practices of crop cultivation, which led to the adoption of new words for those crops. The result of this hybridisation process was the formation of a new material culture, the Corded Ware Culture, and of a new dialect, Proto-Germanic. Despite a degree of hostility between expanding Corded Ware groups and indigenous Neolithic groups, stable isotope data suggest that exogamy provided a mechanism facilitating their integration. This article should be read in conjunction with that by Heyd (2017, in this issue).
Westward Ho Rowley-Conwy, Peter
Current anthropology,
10/2011, Volume:
52, Issue:
S4
Journal Article, Conference Proceeding
Peer reviewed
Recent work on the four major areas of the spread of agriculture in Neolithic western Europe has revealed that they are both chronologically and economically much more abrupt than has hitherto been ...envisaged. Most claims of a little agriculture in Late Mesolithic communities are shown to be incorrect. In most places, full sedentary agriculture was introduced very rapidly at the start of the Neolithic. “Transitional” economies are virtually absent. Consequently, the long-term processes of internal development from forager to farmer, so often discussed in Mesolithic-Neolithic Europe, are increasingly hard to sustain. The spread of agriculture by immigration is thus an increasingly viable explanation. The crucial role of boats for transport and of dairying for the survival of new farming settlements are both highlighted. Farming migrations were punctuated and sporadic, not a single wave of advance. Consequently, there was much genetic mixing as farming spread, so that agricultural immigrants into any region carried a majority of native European Mesolithic genes, not Near Eastern ones.
The study of language origin and divergence is important for understanding the history of human populations and their cultures. The Sino-Tibetan language family is the second largest in the world ...after Indo-European, and there is a long-running debate about its phylogeny and the time depth of its original divergence
. Here we perform a Bayesian phylogenetic analysis to examine two competing hypotheses of the origin of the Sino-Tibetan language family: the 'northern-origin hypothesis' and the 'southwestern-origin hypothesis'. The northern-origin hypothesis states that the initial expansion of Sino-Tibetan languages occurred approximately 4,000-6,000 years before present (BP; taken as AD 1950) in the Yellow River basin of northern China
, and that this expansion is associated with the development of the Yangshao and/or Majiayao Neolithic cultures. The southwestern-origin hypothesis states that an early expansion of Sino-Tibetan languages occurred before 9,000 years BP from a region in southwest Sichuan province in China
or in northeast India
, where a high diversity of Tibeto-Burman languages exists today. Consistent with the northern-origin hypothesis, our Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of 109 languages with 949 lexical root-meanings produced an estimated time depth for the divergence of Sino-Tibetan languages of approximately 4,200-7,800 years BP, with an average value of approximately 5,900 years BP. In addition, the phylogeny supported a dichotomy between Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages. Our results are compatible with the archaeological records, and with the farming and language dispersal hypothesis
of agricultural expansion in China. Our findings provide a linguistic foothold for further interdisciplinary studies of prehistoric human activity in East Asia.
In the course of last decades Neolithic research has taken a new pace in Turkey, while projects in the western and the central parts of the of the country have been working mainly on the later stages ...of the Neolithic era, those in south-eastern Turkey had their focus on the incipient stages of neolithization. Work in the south-eastern parts, highlighted by the results attained at Göbeklitepe has been carrying out large scale excavations at several Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites, most of them having their earliest layers by the very beginning of PPNA, evidence of antecedent stages being highly debatable. Recent recoveries have been greatly elaborating our understanding on the entire span of Neolithic way of living, also displaying the differences among distinct core areas of neolithization. However, more significant is the outcome of new research taking place in the Upper Euphrates-Upper Tigris basins of south-eastern Anatolia, revealing ground breaking results so different from our conventional perceptions that redefining what is implied by the term Neolithic is now stands as an absolute necessity; inevitably some more time is necessary for the newly emerging picture on Neolithic process to sink in. However, some of the recent findings being unexpectedly different is apt to lead to speculative misconceptions, particularly when coupled with deeply rooted biases of research history. In this respect, the paper will present a conspectus on the progressive stages of Neolithic research in Anatolia, touching upon some biases in retrospect. Accordingly, the paper neither intends to cover an exclusive narrative of research history nor to bring the highlights of present research; it is targeted to surface the modalities that patterned past research so as a provide a subtle bases to future prospects.
La recherche sur le Néolithique a pris un nouveau rythme en Turquie. Alors que les projets dans les parties occidentales et centrales du pays portaient principalement sur les étapes ultérieures de l’ère néolithique, ceux du sud-est de la Turquie se concentraient sur les étapes naissantes de la néolithisation. Les travaux menés dans le sud-est, mis en évidence par les résultats obtenus à Göbeklitepe, ont consisté en des fouilles à grande échelle sur plusieurs sites du Néolithique précéramique. La plupart d’entre eux ayant leurs couches les plus anciennes au tout début du Néolithique précéramique, les preuves des étapes antérieures sont très discutables. Les récentes découvertes ont permis d’approfondir notre compréhension de l’ensemble du mode de vie néolithique et de mettre en évidence les différences entre les différentes zones centrales de néolithisation. Cependant, les résultats des nouvelles recherches menées dans les bassins du Haut-Euphrate et du Haut-Tigre, au sud-est de l’Anatolie, sont encore plus significatifs. Ils révèlent des résultats si différents et si exceptionnels par rapport à nos perceptions conventionnelles qu’une redéfinition de ce qu’implique le terme « Néolithique » apparaît désormais comme une nécessité absolue. La nouvelle image qui se dessine est tellement incompatible avec les vues habituelles sur le processus néolithique qu’il faut encore un peu de temps pour qu’elle s’impose. Cependant, elle est également ouverte aux idées fausses et spéculatives, en particulier lorsqu’elle est associée à des préjugés profondément ancrés dans l’histoire de la recherche. À cet égard, l’article présentera un aperçu des étapes progressives de la recherche sur le Néolithique en Anatolie, en abordant rétrospectivement certains préjugés. En conséquence, l’article n’a pas l’intention de couvrir un récit exclusif de l’histoire de la recherche ni de mettre en évidence les points forts de la recherche actuelle ; il est donc prévu de fournir une base subtile pour les perspectives futures en faisant apparaître les modalités qui ont modelé la recherche passée.
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