The Age of Barbarians, Episode 4: Ongka’s Big Eurotrip

What’s up every single one of you, this is Office Hours with the Brofessor: The Show that’s Proudly Irrelevant! This is The Age of Barbarians, Episode 4: Ongka’s Big Eurotrip.  Today we’re going to talk about the Linear Band Ceramic Culture of Central Europe, dated to about 7,000 years ago. These workers of stone and wood spread their culture up the river valleys of Europe, flourished, and collapsed dramatically* over the course of one thousand years. This was a time of thick primeval forests, longhouses, small-scale agriculture, first cultural contacts, endemic tribal warfare, Big Men, and the elephant in the room that is ritual cannibalism. But I’m not talking about New Guinea, I’m talking about Europe.

*…in an orgy of cannibalistic destruction

              This episode has two dedications: first my homie Parlik, latest subscriber as of August 21^st, 2024, when I started this script. I’m recording this almost six months later, on February 14^th. That shows you the pace of things around here. But I thought, here it is. Friday, February 14^th. I can think of nothing better to do on this fine evening to put on a tie, sit in my apartment, and record a video for Parlik and all the bros on Youtube. Yes sir, tonight, Friday, February 14^th, is just as good a night as any. To do that.

Anyway, Parlik, welcome aboard the cool guys’ train. We’re on a trip through late prehistoric Europe inspired by the likes of Middle-Earth, Conan the Barbarian, and Jethro Tull. But the real hero of this episode is, of course, Ongka, the Papuan Big Man who pig-distributed his way into all of our hearts in the delightful documentary “Ongka’s Big Moka”. I hope he would be happy to have a little tribute from a fan, even though I’m sure he’d prefer I just sent him some pigs and an extra wife.

              Also, I’ll give a shoutout to the inimitable Stefan Milo, who put out an excellent video on this very topic several years ago. Check it out.

              A final bit of housekeeping. Today I am going to attempt the experiment of giving all years in BC (Before the Christian era) rather than KYA (thousand years ago). We’re breaking things down by the century rather than the millennium, so this may be easier. Let’s see how it feels.

              So as we discussed in our last episode, the first farmers in central Europe were the descendants of settlers from Anatolia, were prevented for several centuries from expanding north of the Danube. These people needed to adapt to a different climate and environment, and develop a very different mode of life from their Mediterranean forebears. Between 8000 and 6000 BC, these people had migrated, generation over generation. They came from the warmer, mediterranean climate of Anatolia, into the comparatively frigid steppes and forests of Hungary and Romania.

For the next five centuries the population absorbed the ecology. A new mode of living developed, adapting to European seasons, geography, and demography. They acclimated and, in a sense, indigenized themselves and their way of life. They adapted the Mediterranean innovation of farming to the seasons and soil of interior Europe. Starting around 5500, they exploded their way up the river valleys of Europe, absorbing hunter-gatherer populations and populating Central Europe with a patchwork of related tribes. After they ran out of river valleys, population got high, and resources got low, and the culture collapsed*. This was the Linear Band Ceramic Culture.

*in an orgy of cannibalistic destruction.

              Also known as LBK, since ceramic starts with a K in German, or the Linear Pottery Culture, these guys developed a way of life that was structured around an extended family living in a single longhouse, clan villages of several longhouses, and what was likely a patriarchal lineage structure. These villages dotted the riversides of central Europe, at first in the low-lying river valleys, for example of the Danube or Vistula, but gradually working their way upstream and along tributaries. They lived by small-scale slash-and-burn farming, cutting out swathes in the dense forests, and expanding up the river when things got too crowded.

              Let’s check these guys out:

              Looking at these pictures I have to remind myself that this is a European culture. I’m struck at least superficially by the clothing, the digging sticks, the ornamentation on people and houses, that puts me more in the mind of New Guinea, or say, the Woodlands Indian cultures of Eastern North America. Indeed, the Linear Pottery Culture in many ways resembles small-scale tribal agricultural societies around the world in our time. I’m very intrigued when I think of Europe populated by the same sort of slash-and-burn, Big-Man, longhouse culture that existed in New Guinea, the Pacific Northwest, or parts of the Amazon. These guys would be right at home in Ongka’s Big Moka, which I must say is a brilliant and hilarious film. If you’ve never seen it, let me explain.

              Ongka is a Big Man, or a de-facto leader in a tribal society in which power and influence are gained through gift-giving. He lives in a village in Papua New Guinea with his wives, children, and most importantly pigs:

Ongka on pigs.

Ongka is a powerful man within his society. As a Big Man, Ongka must give a moka, or ritual gift distribution, in order to keep his power and influence. The more lavish the moka, the more influence he gains through the implied obligations of giver and recipient, guest and host. Ongka’s goal is to amass enough pigs to give away that all the rival Big Men will be put to shame at his big rager, I mean moka. Sounds pretty dry, but Ongka wears a hilarious t-shirt and the narrator busts out a few asides and dubs that made me and my roommate laugh so hard beer came out our noses.

              Well anyway, this is what I see LBK Europe being like, and I imagine similar scenarios happening in that culture. Jockeying with your third cousins for power, arable land, and cattle would have happened, ritualized perhaps in gift-giving, endemic warfare, and the exchange of marriage partners. De-facto leaders would have had influence over several clans, exercised by calling in favors and gift-debts. As fields became less fertile, you slashed-and-burned your way to a new field. When your field was no longer productive, you abandoned your longhouse. These ruins of longhouses, reduced to grassy mounds, may later have played a role in the construction, many centuries later, of long burial mounds for the dead.

              As the LBK culture expanded, they would have encountered local hunter-gatherer groups, who belonged to the WHG (“Western Hunter-Gatherer”) genetic clade. Gradually through trading, fighting and intermarriage, the LBK replaced the hunter-gatherers, who nevertheless made a genetic contribution to the LBK makeup. Hunter-gatherers not assimilating into LBK would have been gradually restricted to mountain refugia and deep forests. As hunter-gatherers married into LBK families, people would have grown up hearing stories handed down both from their farming ancestors in the Balkans and Anatolia, and their mesolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors in Europe. It may be through this influence that the “Swamper” cultural package of mystic land-water boundaries and a strong fascination with astronomy entered the agriculturalists’ consciousness and worldview. Lore brought up in previous centuries from the Middle East blended with that of Europe’s deep, perhaps paleolithic, antiquity. It may be that some of their stories and frameworks of worldview survive to this day. Who knows. This dynamic is also mirrored in places like New Guinea and parts of Africa, where hunter-gatherers and farmers or herdsmen coexist, the more populous food producers often edging out the hunter-gatherers. At times, hunter-gatherers may find ways to exist for a time within niches unexploited by food producers. There is evidence that hunter-gatherers may have had a high social status in Early Neolithic Europe.

              In a relatively short time—a couple of centuries—the LBK had spread across the Central European Plain, from the Dniester all the way to modern France:

              Let’s jump in Bill and Ted’s time-traveling phonebooth and go back to this time. The year is 5200 BC, and we are visiting our LBK friends at their village on the banks of the Vistula river, maybe located where modern Warsaw stands today. Forests of birch and maple cover the landscape between the rivers, along which are cut rough patches in the forest for wheat and barley. In the center of the fields stands a cluster of thatched, wattle-and-daub longhouses. The same building materials would continue to be used throughout European prehistory, and one might be forgiven for seeing, at first glance, a village of Iron Age Europe.

              We meet our friend at the field where he and his sons tend their cattle. Let’s give him a name: Ongka, after the great (or rather, Big) Man himself. It’s a warm August day, so the guys are naked except for some cool ochre body paint, which works as a sunscreen and performs some of the same social functions that clothing does to us. The patterns of their body paint are the same as those on their pottery, some of which survives to this day:

For these guys, cattle are everything. Ongka’s late father’s mourning period is over, and to celebrate the occasion he hopes to perform such a lavish ceremony of gift-giving that his enemies should be disgraced utterly, and he should become for the foreseeable future the preeminent Big Man of the district. The Biggest Man, if you will. He recently acquired more cattle in exchange for one of his daughters in marriage. One of the cows was pregnant, and did not miscarry. His oldest son, having established his own farmstead on an upriver tributary, promised to send all of his mature cattle calved two years previously. Ongka thinks his son is being stingy, and though he loves his son, he feels a touch of resentment at having raised him, acquired a wife for him, and supported him in his move upriver, only for the young man to send him such a small number of cattle. Doesn’t his son realize the importance of this event? Since lunchtime, Ongka has been racking his brain over how to get a few more cattle by the time he distributes them.

              Ongka, his sons, and their dogs drive the cattle home. I try to help by waving my arms and mooing, but a cow headbutts me and I almost get trampled*. Ongka pulls me out of danger and shakes his head in secondhand embarrassment. A real man should know how to drive cattle, he says as we walk along. Even his son-in-law agrees, who joined his household from the men of the coast.

*True story.

Ongka is proud of his son-in-law. Men of the coast are good hunters and fighters, and have magical powers. It’s good to have one in the family, not least because their presence mitigates the effects of curses. They’re swarthy, thin men who do not know bread and live on fish and berries. Imagine such a life. It’s much better to raise cattle. The son-in-law, walking beside us, smiles and rolls his eyes.  

We arrive at the longhouse where Ongka lives with his wives and children. As we approach the house, his fourth wife takes charge of the cattle and sons. She joined his household last year. He admits that she is not very attractive, but he married her anyway because she knows a lot about raising cattle.

              Ongka invites us into the longhouse. It is divided into a space for animals in the back, and a living area in the front. This technology developed as a response to the colder climate of central Europe, where it makes sense in winter to share warmth as much as possible. Ongka entertains us with some venison his son-in-law had killed—cattle are too valuable to slaughter outside of special occasions—and we pass around a ceramic pot of porridge-like beer, flavored with raspberries. Maybe someone lights up a joint.

As the beer jug passes around, Ongka opens up a bit about why he’s so anxious. The upcoming gift distribution is critically important for him because, as he explains, Ongka will be moving his household to another field in two years. However, a rival is eyeing the same land, known as good grazing ground.

Every twenty years or so, households move to another location, where the fallow fields have regained their fertility. The same areas have been in families for generations. When Ongka was a young man, his father moved their household to where he lives now—and he will soon move to the field where his father spent his boyhood. The ruins of his father’s boyhood longhouse still stand. His grandfather is buried there.

How will Ongka face his father and grandfather in the afterlife if he loses their land, where their houses stood? By distributing cattle to his allies, he hopes to enlist their help against the encroachment; by distributing cattle to his enemies, Ongka hopes to humiliate them so thoroughly that they would never again dare so audacious a challenge. We quote a Big Man of our time, the original Ongka, to our friend: “Now that I have given you all these things, I have won. I have knocked you down by giving you so much.” Our friend laughs and claps his hands. This is exactly what he hopes to do at the distribution of his cattle.

Ongka has been careful, however, not to invite the curses of witches, whose help his enemy has certainly enlisted. Ongka’s father always told him that a witch killed his brother. His father had to hunt down the witch, an old man, and kill and eat him before anyone else was put in danger. Ongka feels fairly confident that his son-in-law from the coast ((Snoop) Doggerland!) will help ward off evil, but he can’t be too careful, and he is assiduous in applying the most auspicious symbols and patterns in his body paint. Sometimes, unusual visitors can be manifestations of witches, but Ongka assures us that he knows we are no such thing. We wish him a good evening and return to our own time.

              Our friend’s society would last, as we have observed it, for another century before the underlying problems began to really put a strain on things. This was the first time Europe had been widely settled by agriculturalists in such high populations, and their way of life was simply unsustainable. Our buddy’s son moved to a tributary and set up a farmstead, while his father’s old field was being eyed with envy. Eventually, the population would just get too big, and they would run out of rivers. People couldn’t just move upstream anymore, there was already someone there. Land was probably decreasing in fertility over many generations of use. Something had to give, and over perhaps a century we see the collapse of the Linear Pottery culture into a nightmarish apocalypse. It is from this period that we find three of the most disturbing and click-baity sites of Neolithic Europe: the Tahlheim Death Pit, Schöneck-Kilianstädten, and Herxheim in modern Germany.

Somehow, I keep running into archaeological sites with really metal names. “Tahlheim Death Pit” is almost as good of a band name as the “Pit of Bones” over in Spain. Anyway, whatever happened here, it wasn’t good. Tahlheim looks like the site of a village massacred, disturbingly, for its women. We know this because young women are underrepresented among the victims. This was during the LBK decline, so around 5000 BC. People are getting crowded, they’ve run out of rivers to move up, and young men are competing violently for resources and, yes, women.

Schöneck-Kilianstädten is another site where some bad stuff went down. It looks like a village of people was not only massacred, but also tortured by having their legs broken before death. Once again, young women are underrepresented among the victims.

Herxheim is even more ghastly. Hundreds if not over a thousand people were ritually dismembered and cannibalized here. We don’t know for sure if it was human sacrifice or simply a funerary practice, but it looks pretty bad, and it probably was. Interestingly this is the only site I know of, even though the Linear Pottery Culture was widespread through Central Europe. Was this a particularly psychopathic local institution? Or was it a ritual center for a pan-European blood cult, to which communities sent victims as a mark of cultural cohesion? What would be the benefit of doing so? Or, more charitably, was this where people sent their dead, or went to die? Some of the victims seemed to have come from some distance away. So, in fairness and justice to the Temple-of-Doom Cannibal Blood Priests, it is not impossible that they only chopped up, feasted upon, and piled in heaps the bones of already dead people. Maybe nobody got hurt, like in 90s cartoons, and Herxheim merely quacks like a duck. Or Aztec blood priest. Again in fairness, Herxheim may have been in use over some generations around the turn of the fifth millennium. So maybe they got a couple poor bastards a year, and over a couple hundred years that added up.

So all of this terrible stuff is happening around 5000 BC, after the Linear Pottery Culture has expanded and flourished across Central Europe. They have assimilated the region’s mesolithic hunter-gatherers, moved up the river valleys, and reached unsustainable populations. That demographic zit popped in a torrent of blood (sorry), and the smaller, readjusted population limped on for several more centuries in a kind of late-Linear-Pottery Culture until about 4500 BC. This was Europe’s first Dark Age, a time when civilization, or the closest thing to it, collapsed, leaving people with stories of the splendors of the past, and the rotting skeletons of their ancestors’ longhouses, now nothing more than grassy mounds, under which could have lain the bones of the dead. These houses of the ancestors could be the conceptual forerunners of the first burial mounds in Europe, which would come to be a hallmark of the late-prehistoric European cultural package. For the first half of the fifth millennium BC, the once-unified Linear Pottery Culture split up into smaller, more isolated tribal cultures, settling into a cultural and linguistic equilibrium of related yet distinct peoples and languages.

Speaking of language, that’s the last thing I’d like to touch on today. What was the Linear Pottery Culture’s language like? Whatever language they spoke, it was probably a later form of the speech brought into the Balkans by their Anatolian ancestors. It probably had borrowing and substrate from whatever was spoken by the mesolithic hunter-gatherers they assimilated. Linear Pottery language(s) were related to what was then spoken in the Balkans, and had been spoken three thousand years previously in Anatolia.

There was plausibly a distant relationship with the language then spoken in Italy and the Iberian Peninsula, since as one Anatolian farmer group had moved into the Balkans, another migrated across the Mediterranean. Let’s call this the “Anatolian Farmer Language Family”. Proto-Anatolian-Farmer would have been spoken in Western Anatolia around 8000 BC. We know that by 3000 BC, the language families of that region were Hurro-Urartian, Afro-Asiatic, Sumerian, and the ancestral language families of the Caucasus. But that’s not until five thousand years after the first farmers arrived in Europe. A lot can change in that time.

 At time depths like this, and with a paucity of hard data, it’s better to think typologically than genealogically. Their language may have had some features undocumented in the language families of Western Eurasia, but I doubt the typology was radically different. A rich tonal system is historically undocumented in Western Eurasia. Even if the Linear Pottery language had such a feature, it probably had many more in common with documented languages of the region, for instance agglutination or verbal inflection. I highly doubt they had click consonants. Very broad statements like this are about all we can put together when we go this far back into prehistory—but it’s not nothing.

Next time we’ll be learning about the cultures arising from the Linear Pottery Collapse—this first European Dark Age—as well as what was happening in other areas of the continent at this time. We’ll look at the beginning of the British Neolithic, and the megalithic culture gradually creeping up the Atlantic Coast from Iberia, which would ultimately lead to the iconic barrows and standing stones that are still with us today.

I say “next time”, but I’m probably going to leave the barbarians series here for now. I’ve actually got some good Dene-Yeniseian stuff here in the pipelines. For now I will say that I have something pretty big in the works related to Ket. So please look forward to that. All right, thanks a lot for watching, give me a like and subscribe. Let’s see if I can hit 1000 subscribers, although I worry if I could handle such dizzying heights of fame gracefully. Anyway, you guys have a good weekend, I’m probably gonna study Ket and read. Take it easy.

Dedicated to the real-life Ongka of Papua New Guinea’s Kawelka people, whose documentary inspired my interest in anthropology (and pigs). Fans can read about the end of his life here:

https://www.pngattitude.com/2016/10/how-to-die-with-dignity-peace-learning-from-the-people.html

 

Ket Morphosyntactic Hierarchy

My big presentation at the Tenkaichi Budokai that is the 4th Annual CU 2025 Linguistics Department grad student conference.

I talk really fast in this, probably because I was doing the Futurama thing where Fry drinks 100 coffees. It's the tail ail end of an all nighter. At 18:19 I say "disjunct boundary" but it sounds like "jeshabobry".

I wanted to put out something within a year of the last video, which was published on 5/3/24. ~50% through the editing process for Age of Barbarians, Part 4: Ongka's Big Eurotrip, which was written in fall and recorded on Valentine's day. Corrected Ket text from beginning incoming.

Sorry it's quiet. I don't have a special microphone and can't be assed to go out, buy one, and learn how to use it. If you guys really think it would improve the videos, I'll think about it.

The Age of Barbarians, Episode 3: The Caveman-to-Barbarian Pipeline

            Hello friends, welcome to Office Hours with the Brofessor: The Show that’s Proudly Irrelevant! Today is the third episode of my series on THE AGE OF BARBARIANS, or late European prehistory. We’ll look at the very first tentative steps into Europe by Anatolian farmers, first into the Balkans and then across the Mediterranean into Iberia.

Before we start, some stupid annoying Youtube stuff. I see a lot of other Youtubers doing this, so I thought I’d try it too. Here goes: when people like my videos and subscribe to my channel, it makes me happy, and inspires me to put out more than two videos a year. Also, I’m getting close to 1000 subscribers—quadruple digits!—which would be an amazing goal to reach. More likes, comments, and subscribers will also help me reach more people with these interesting stories. So, if you like my video, “like” it. If you want to see more of my mediocre content about interesting topics, subscribe! Also, I have a Facebook page! Join it! Link in description! I’ve just posted my first discussion topic, let’s talk about it!

In Youtube-related news that is neither stupid nor annoying, this video is dedicated to my bro Vizzini, whose comment “I love you Brofessor!” has kicked my butt into getting this video out. Interestingly, despite being named after the Sicilian kidnapper from the Princess Bride, his avatar is a picture of Steve Buscemi. Thanks Vizzini, your level of support is truly “inconceivable”! Maybe you can get Inigo and Fezzik into my stuff too. Ok, I’m done. No more Princess Bride references now, I mean it. Anybody want a peanut?

Today we are going back between ten and eight thousand years ago, to the very beginnings of Neolithic Europe, to look at the first steps of Europeans from the hunter-gatherer life into the settled agricultural life that characterized the Neolithic. This process ultimately spread irresistibly throughout the continent, leading to my characterization of the phenomenon as the “Caveman-to-Barbarian Pipeline”. Remember, by “Caveman” I mean “hunter-gatherer” and by “Barbarian” I mean “small-scale food producer”. By “Pipeline”, I mean that once the process began around 9000 years ago, Europe was placed on an inevitable trajectory into the settled agricultural way of life, and ultimately the rise of large-scale civilization. 9000 years ago, Europe’s first farmers entered a continent populated entirely by small-scale hunter-gatherers. They spread steadily and irrepressibly through the continent, and by 4000 years ago, all Europeans were food producers. The only possible exception here may be a few remnant hunting tribes remaining in the forests between Finland and the Urals, but even these would soon adopt small-scale farming or reindeer herding.

Let’s start by looking at a few easily confused words, all containing the word “lithic”, or “stone” in Greek.

Mesolithic—the middle stone age, which lasted from the recession of the glaciers to the adoption of agriculture.

Neolithic—the new stone age, which lasted from the adoption of agriculture to the first use of metal.

Megalithic—not a period of time, but an adjective used to describe monumental architecture using large stones, popular between the neolithic and iron age.

You may roll your eyes and think this is unnecessary to go over, but not everyone knows these words. Namely my parents, who constitute roughly half my viewership.

As for the very first farmers in Europe, they originated in Anatolia and moved across the continent in two waves—one overland through the Balkans into Central Europe, and another by sea across the Mediterranean. In this video as in the entire series, I’ll probably be spending more time on the northern group, rather than the Mediterranean, since I’m more attracted to the environmental and cultural aesthetic of Northern rather than Southern Europe. Basically, I like trees and snow more than sun and sand—apologies to my Mediterranean friends. However, we can’t ignore the Mediterranean completely, since the whole Neolithic package came from there, as would megalith-building in later years. With that said, let’s begin.

We pick up the story 11,000 years ago, with the Mesolithic in full swing—for more on that, see Episode 2 of this series! But our story begins not in Europe itself, but in what is now Southwest Turkey, close to the border with Syria. And as soon as I say that, I’ll bet that lots of you already know what I’m going to talk about—the spectacular site of Gobekli Tepe! At this location, right at the transitional moment between the hunter-gatherer and agricultural modes of life, people came together to build an amazing monument. It was a stone temple complex that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for settled agriculturalists with big populations, but it boggles the mind when you consider that it was made by little bands of hunter-gatherers just starting to flirt with sedentary life. Here are some highlights from the site—and remember, this stuff goes back ten or eleven thousand years:

 

There’s nothing like it at this time depth that’s been found anywhere else in the world. It’s a very mysterious site, too. Goodness knows why it was built or what kind of rituals were performed there, but I think I read somewhere there’s evidence for food storage, which became ritualistic and managed by the priests. I like to imagine it as a center for religious feasting and partying. This is right at the time beer would have been invented, after all. It’s also interesting because it suggests the very early emergence of an elite priest class able to mobilize a lot of people for a whole lot of hard work on something not immediately relevant to survival, albeit in the case of food storage tangential to it.

On a fairly badass note, I’ll add that these guys had a skull cult that involved grooving, carving and plastering facial features onto the skulls of apparently important people (1). Cool. Compare with a similar plastered-skull cult that continued into the Neolithic Levant.

The reason I begin our story at Gobekli Tepe is because this is the first stirring of what would become the megalithic tradition of late-prehistoric Europe. As I mentioned, the builders of Gobekli Tepe were still hunter-gatherers, but they were gathering wild grains and likely standing right at the threshold of agricultural village life. Some two millennia later, the Gobekli people’s descendants would be more settled into sedentary agriculture and would have domesticated the sheep and goat. Likely pressured by the resultant boom in population, they crossed the Aegean into Europe. Nine thousand years ago, Europe’s very first farmers arrived in what is now Greece from Anatolia:

As you can see, agriculturalists entered Europe following two routes of migration: one through the Balkans into Central Europe, and another across the Mediterranean, eventually reaching the Iberian peninsula and then turning northward along the Atlantic coast. Let’s talk about the Balkans first.

As far as we can tell, the dawn of the Neolithic in Europe occurred just over nine thousand years ago, about one thousand years after Gobekli Tepe was abandoned. The oldest known agriculturalists in Europe are called the Sesklo culture—pardon as always my mispronunciation—named for the type site on the coast of Thessaly. These farmers of wheat and barley and herders of sheep and goats—no cattle for another millennium—expanded into the region historically known as Macedonia, inching closer the Danube in what is now Serbia:

As the Anatolian newcomers interacted and mixed with the indigenous nomadic hunter-gatherers, certain sites show a gradual sedentarization of the mesolithic Balkans, namely at the 9000-year-old Lepenski Vir site in modern Serbia. While the Lepenski Vir people remained hunter-gatherer-fishers for the next thousand years, they settled into at least semi-permanent population centers, influenced by the newcomers to the south.

The Lepenski Vir site is interesting because it shows a characteristically European culture adopting certain elements of the Anatolian agricultural lifestyle and cultural package. Remember what I said in my last video about Mesolithic Europe being divided into two groups: “Painters” in the western Mediterranean, and “Swampers” in the interior of Europe. Well, these guys were definitely Swampers. They were apparently interested in the idea of the meeting of land and water, and probably drew some sort of comparison between the material-spirit and land-water dichotomies. How do we know this? Because they made sculptures of fish people, probably representing either river spirits, or Spongebob background characters:

            According to Wikipedia, these fish-person sculptures were made from stones found on the riverbank, and kept in the shrine areas of houses, which sounds like textbook Swamper behavior to me. Another classic aspect of the Swamper cultural package is a fascination with astronomy. Across the Danube from Lepenski Vir there’s a cliff that briefly blocks the sun in the morning of the summer solstice, producing a “double sunrise” effect (2):

The Lepenski Vir people might have deliberately located their village at the spot where this phenomenon occurred, and indeed may have been so fascinated that they designed their houses, which have an unusual trapezoid shape, to look like the rock outcropping (3):

 

It may have also made sense to shape their houses like hills, since these guys were just transitioning out of living in caves. In fact, and this is really cool, they had their main fireplaces at the entrances of their houses, just like you do when living in a cave! They weren’t dumb, they could have built smokeholes in their roofs, but it looks like they just preferred a cave-like design to their houses. It seems that cavemandom was still alive in the memory of these people (4).

Since the Lepenski Vir village developed just under nine thousand years ago, right after the arrival of Anatolian farmers in Europe, it makes sense that the new arrivals gave them the idea to sedentarize. We know they interacted in some way with the coast-dwelling agriculturalists, since they traded with them for seashells. Interestingly, however, there was no genetic admixture from the newcomers until almost a thousand years later, about 8200 years ago. As the paper I reference puts it, “mating was not part of regular interactions between Iron Gates [i.e. Lepenski Vir] and Aegean populations before the advent of agriculture in the Central Balkans, ~ 6200 BC” (5). Why did it take so long for the populations to begin mixing, despite the trade and cultural exchange?

Let’s head back to Greece to look for the answer. The Sesklo culture continued to flourish through the seventh millennium BCE, but again did not penetrate as far north as Lepenski Vir territory. While the groups traded and possibly fought, the populations themselves did not mix until almost eight thousand years ago. Reasons for this could have been cultural, medical, and geographical.

Considering culture, we’re looking at two very different groups of people. The Sesklo people came from a tradition of settled agriculture that was already over a thousand years old. The Lepenski Vir people were hunter-gatherers still experiencing cave nostalgia. They also would have spoken completely unrelated languages. The difference between their lifestyles would have also led to mutually baffling values, behavior, and religion. They may have looked down on each other. Consider how in the historical record, agriculturalists have always seen non-agros as uncivilized, and non-agros have seen agriculturalists as unfree. People at this time thought and behaved the same as we do today, so there’s no reason we can’t apply the historical record to reconstruct how they may have perceived one another.

As for medical reasons, the populations may have gotten each other sick through the exchange of diseases. The Sesklo people had domesticated livestock, so they could have been intermediaries for germs between animals and non-immune hunter-gatherers, as infamously happened to New World populations during the Age of Discovery. People could have gotten sick if they spent too much time around each other.

Finally, in terms of geography, the Sesklo Culture was geographically used to a hot, dry Mediterranean climate. This doesn’t really change between Anatolia and peninsular Greece. When you get up over the Macedonian mountains, which themselves constitute no small obstacle, and into the Danube watershed, you find yourself in a cooler, wetter, woodland climate that’s very different from the Mediterranean coast. The Sesklo people would have had to develop an entirely different cultural toolkit to thrive there, and that takes time. Finally, the Sesklo people probably continued to have strong cultural, linguistic, and maybe even familial links across the Aegean with their cousins remaining in Anatolia. The culture would have faced east to Anatolia, rather than North to the Balkans. Consider how the US has always been European-facing culturally, rather than Indigenous American-facing. We took our cues from Western Europe, rather than from Native Americans, and have developed as essentially a branch of Western civilization.

Which, if I may tangentialize for a moment, is a real shame. I would love to see a US that kept Christianity and Western technology but assimilated into Native American culture. I’ve always said that we should abolish the states, restructure along traditional territories of Native nations, and make Native languages official while keeping English as a lingua franca.

            Moving on from my weird fantasies, I think at least a few of the above reasons may explain why the Sesklo people took so long to penetrate north. When they finally did, they had already been in Europe for almost a thousand years, and moved into the Lepenski Vir area around 8200 years ago. What pressured them to finally move northward into the Danube watershed, I’m not sure. As before, the easiest explanation would be that agriculture and livestock domestication led to ever-higher populations back in Anatolia, which led to more people crossing the Aegean, which led to people getting population-pressured up into the unfamiliar but less densely populated environments of the Balkans. While there was some cultural exchange during this time—for example, the newcomers seem to have become more reliant on fishing—they retained a certain separation from the indigenous hunter-gatherers, as evidenced by separate burial practices, food sources, and maybe even restrictive marriage practices leading to inbreeding.

It’s possible the first wave of immigrants came as “marriage partners, slaves or war captives”, but we also know that there were equal numbers of men and women among the immigrants, male hunter-gatherers typically didn’t marry female farmers, and the immigrants might have brought children with them (5). This suggests agriculturalist families, rather than individuals, coming over as pioneers and living as agriculturalists among the hunter-gatherers. Within 300 years—by 7900 years ago—Anatolian farmer DNA had become predominant over indigenous hunter-gatherer DNA at the Lepenski Vir site. The newcomers had colonized the Danube and were poised to expand into Central Europe. The mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Lepenski Vir had either assimilated or been pushed out of their homelands, into the northern forests and eastern steppes.

            As Anatolian farmer populations in the Balkans grew, these people adapted to the colder, wetter environment of the European interior, and within several centuries would expand across Central Europe. This would come to be known as the Linear Band Ceramic Culture—Europe’s first truly native food-producing culture. And boy, are these guys fascinating. We’ll pick up their story in our next video, but just as a teaser, this was a culture natively European not only in its soil, but in its spirit. While agriculturalists, these people adopted aspects of the Mesolithic Swamper cultural worldview, just as the newcomers at Lepenski Vir remained agriculturalists, but raised their children in the local fishing tradition. The Linear Band Ceramic Culture is one of my favorites, though as Youtuber Stefan Milo pointed out, I’d be careful about going there. I call this the “New Guinea” period of European prehistory. Endemic warfare and cannibal feasts of course, but also longhouses and big-man cultures.

            But I must restrain myself, lest I get ahead of the story, and so for now we’ll leave the Balkans settled with early farmers, poised to enter Central Europe, right around eight thousand years ago. Over the last several centuries, while the Sesklo people gradually farmed their way into the Balkans, another wave of Anatolian migration has spread westward across the Mediterranean. From the Aegean, these pioneers would hop between islands and peninsulas, across the Adriatic to the Italian peninsula, and from Sardinia to the Iberian Peninsula. These people are known today as the Cardium Pottery culture, named for the heart-shaped shell impressions with which they decorated their ceramics. Between 8500 and 7000 years ago they introduced agriculture across Mediterranean Europe, and likely the north coast of Africa too. In the Western Mediterranean they would have encountered the local mesolithic hunter-gatherers who belonged to the “Painter” cultural continuum that I discussed in Episode 2. I can’t find as much information about the Cardium Pottery people’s way of life, or their interactions with indigenous populations, as I have with Lepenski Vir. However, we may think of them as being the first to follow the template that would later be practiced by the Phoenicians and Greeks, working their way along the islands and coasts of the Mediterranean and setting up colonies, probably having a common language, religion and way of life.

            The Cardium Pottery people reached the Iberian Peninsula between eight and 7.5 thousand years ago. Around the same time, we start finding pottery colored with red ochre, suggesting a different cultural tradition around the same time—possibly imported from North Africa. This ochre pottery tradition is differentiated from the Cardium Pottery Culture as the La Almagra Culture:

Map from Sjur Papasian: aratta.wordpress.com.

Cardium Pottery

La Almagra Pottery

This is a big mystery right now, since we know so little compared to what was going on in the Balkans. Was the La Almagra tradition simply a new development of the Cardium Pottery Culture? It could have simply been a new ceramic technique that became fashionable in that geographical area. Nothing unusual about that. Still, it differs from the rest of the Mediterranean enough for us to think that there was something different going on here. Remember that the indigenous hunter-gatherers of Iberia would have belonged to the “Painter” group from my last video—it’s natural that once these guys got a hold of pottery, they’d start adding ochre to color it! La Almagra pottery could simply be the result of local hunter-gatherers and Cardium Pottery people mixing and integrating. It could also be related to the fact that in Iberia there was more of a focus on animal herding than elsewhere (6), which would have presumably been more appealing to the nomadic hunter-gatherers of the area. But again, we can’t rule out influence from North Africa, since there’s a Mesolithic precedent for it—see the rock art I showed you last time—and we don’t know much about North Africa at this time. We’re just not sure.

            It’s a shame too that we’re not so sure about what was happening in Iberia, because it’s out of this culture that we see the start of something that would come to dominate later European prehistory—megalithic monuments. In the first half of the sixth millennium before Christ, in Southern Portugal, there was raised a circle of standing stones, the very earliest one we know about in Europe. Known as the Almendres Cromlech, this is the first rumbling of a tradition that would explode across Europe over the coming millennia, dotting the landscape with stone circles, standing stones, and burial mounds, a tradition indeed that would last into historical times among the Celtic and Germanic peoples. The building tradition echoed in the standing stones of Ossian and the barrow of Beowulf can be traced over six thousand years before their time to southern Iberia. And here it is:

Photo by Miguel Costa

(7)

            In its earliest form it wasn’t that huge—just thirty or forty feet in diameter, and in subsequent millennia a larger circle was added to it, as were carvings onto the surface of the stones. The original circle, which is our concern for now, can be dated to between 7500 and 8000 years ago right about the time the Cardium Pottery people brought agriculture and animal husbandry to Iberia. Their interactions with the locals, and perhaps other migrants from North Africa, gave rise to the culture that would raise this distant ancestor to Stonehenge. Like later stone circles, the Almendres Cromlech likely served religious or ritualistic purposes related to astronomy; marks on the stones may represent equinoxes, and the stones are aligned to the sun and moon on those days (8). Remember also, the Swampers really liked astronomy, so Swamper influence from the north might have influenced the building of the Almendres Cromlech.

You might have noticed, however, the conspicuous lack of megalithic constructions between the stones of Almendres and my earlier discussion of Gobekli Tepe. Europe’s first farmers came from Anatolia. They might have been descendants of Gobekli Tepe’s builders. Why are there none of these constructions elsewhere in the early Cardium Pottery Culture, or among their cousins in the Balkans? With just over two thousand years (and miles) between the sites, seems like there was a break in continuity between the megaliths of Gobekli Tepe and those of Almendres. We do know that Gobekli Tepe was abandoned around 10 thousand years ago, one thousand years before the Sesklo culture emerged in Greece and two thousand years before the Cardium Pottery Culture expanded across the Mediterranean. The Gobekli Tepe culture collapsed, and people weren’t into the megalith thing anymore. Maybe it had to do with the depredations of a powerful and oppressive priest class, which annoyed people enough that subsequent cultures left the whole system behind after their overthrow. By the time Anatolian farmers entered Europe, all that was left was the distant memory of somebody, long ago, building great monuments. I imagine something like our story of the Tower of Babel.

It’s important to note that Gobekli Tepe was probably built at the instigation, coerced or otherwise, of an emergent priest class. I imagine something similar happening at Almendres. Let’s take the Wu-Tang elevator back 8000 years and meet the men raising this monument:

Image source unknown.

Talking to them—in goodness knows what language—we’d probably hear a lot of stories and songs. My favorite expert on the topic of late European prehistory is Dr. Ronald Hutton at the University of Hull. One of my favorite observations of his is that while the builders of Stonehenge in England probably couldn’t explain why they were toiling away, such a question wouldn’t make sense to them. Rather, we should instead ask them to sing us a song about it, which they would be happy to do.

I imagine the Almendres builders would be semi-settled farmers working on the monument in the off-season. They were the descendants of long-ago seafarers who lived on the coast and gradually worked their way inland. Maybe they still tell stories about nautical migration, and they would likely have had connections cultural, familial and linguistic to the islands and peninsulas of the Mediterranean. Generations passed, they became more settled into the agricultural cycle, and more comfortable in permanent villages. Soon they felt the need to make their mark on the landscape in some permanent fashion, reflecting the mindset of settled villagers rather than as nomadic wanderers. Closely in tune with the seasons, and probably having culturally significant rituals around solstices and equinoxes, it makes sense that whatever they build was in some way tied thereto.

We learn that the raising of the circle was spurred on by the priests. While a shamanistic element still exists in their religion, their priest class has been ensconced in a position of authority since they settled down as agriculturalists. The priests, holders of esoteric and ancient knowledge, may tell stories of ancient men or spirits, known to their ancestors in a distant land, who built monumental structures of stone with some spiritual significance. Remembering these stories, they urge their people to a megalithic project of their own, this time a stone circle aligned to the sun and moon on the year’s most ritually important days. The circle is to be raised at the top of a hill, thereby placed closer to the heavens themselves.

Observing the builders at their work, we hear a lot of songs. First of all, they serve a practical purpose when coordinating effort to move heavy stones, but they also refer to the spirits and stories inspiring them. Likely sharing the cyclic view of time and space held by many small-scale and Indigenous cultures, their work is a ritual whereby they become the ancient builders of half-remembered yore, or the spirits setting the heavens and seasons in their places. The clothing of the workers is crude, mostly skins and furs which may have been cast off in the hot Portuguese sun. The priests directing their work may have worn primitive textiles as a marker of their higher status. Maybe one priest, having painted himself or donned a mask, shamanistically channels one of the spirits as he manages the work crew, giving their work a directly divine approval. At the beginning and end of each work day, the builders enter and exit a special ritual state, perhaps by eating a special food or ritual washing. Probably not by taking psychoactives, as I would imagine moving around heavy stones, while stoned, might be dangerous. Once completed, the circle would function as a ritual center for the community over many generations, and as a locus of power for the priest class. Word of this special place spread far and wide over the region, igniting a spark in related peoples’ imagination that, in coming millennia, would fan into flame across Europe in a series of monuments still standing to this day.

Conclusion

            We’ve covered a lot of ground today. First we looked at the Anatolian origins of Neolithic European farmers, with special attention drawn to the megalithic complex of Gobekli Tepe, which may have been a distant ancestor to later European constructions. We then spent some time discussing the very first European farmers who crossed into the Balkans from Anatolia and had the first interactions with local hunter-gatherers. They split into two waves of migration, one which worked its way up the Balkans into Central Europe, and another maritime group which worked its way across the Mediterranean to the Iberian peninsula. The third part of our video focused on the latter group, who raised the first known Neolithic European Cromlech, or stone circle, at Almendres in Portugal. As this first chapter of Neolithic European history closes, we leave these two groups—one at the Danube, another at the Atlantic—eight thousand years ago, as they gradually adapt to the land and climate of Europe. Our next video will discuss the spread of the first fully European Neolithic Culture, known to us as the Linear Band Ceramic Culture, which rose, flourished, and came crashing down over the course of the sixth millennium BC. I’ll see you then!

Sources:

1.     Gresky et al. “Modified human crania from Göbekli Tepe provide evidence for a new form of Neolithic skull cult”. Science Advances: DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1700564, 28 June 2017, Sci. Adv. 3, e1700564 (2017)

2.     wikipedia.org/en/Lepenski_Vir. Photo by Vanilitsa.

3.     Jubinka Babović: Sanctuaries of Lepenski Vir: Location, position and function. Archaeological monographs 17, National museum, Belgrade, 2006. Images by Philip Wiegell, Dusan Pavlic, and Unknown.

4.     Hristivoje Pavlović (28 August 2017), "Tajne Lepenskog Vira IX - Vatra kao zaštita i čarobna svetiljka", Politika (in Serbian)

5.     Brami, Maxime (11 October 2022). "Was the Fishing Village of Lepenski Vir Built by Europe's First Farmers?". Journal of World Prehistory. Springer Science+Business Media. 35 (2): 109–133. doi:10.1007/s10963-022-09169-9.

6.     https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opar-2020-0196/html?lang=en

7.     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almendres_Cromlech. Images by Dicklyon and Fulviusbsas.

8.     Calado, M. (2012). All quiet on the Western Front? In Statues-Menhirs et Pierres Levées du Néolithique a Aujourd’hui. Actes du 3 colloque international sur la statuaire mégalithique, Saint-Pons-de-Thomières, pp. 243–253.