Hi everybody, welcome to Office
Hours with the Brofessor, the show that’s Proudly Irrelevant! Today we’re going
to start a new series, which given my rate of putting out videos will probably
be the focus of the next several eternities. Originally I had planned to remake
my Evenki video, but unfortunately I don’t have my notes on that language here
in Warsaw. Instead, we’re going to take a look at late European prehistory,
covering the period between eight thousand and one thousand years ago. This is
a time that I like to call: the Age of Barbarians!
Earlier this month I visited the
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern region of Germany, and was very privileged to explore
the Tollensetal Battlefield, where a bunch of bronze-age badass bros got
together 3300 years ago and fought to the death in an all-out boss-championship
battle royale. What they were fighting over we may never know, other than that some
of them felt like crossing a bridge, while others strenuously objected to their
doing so:
The candid dialogue that followed is still observable today in the form of disarticulated bones and weapons dredged up from the river, and the several surviving tombs dotting the landscape. Archaeologists think that at least three thousand men took part in the battle, a huge number by prehistoric standards.
3300 years later, here I am crossing a much nicer
modern bridge in the same area without so much as a peep from the guys
weed-whacking nearby. Casually doing what thousands of prehistoric badasses fought
and died to do:
And here I am laying down in some poor schlub’s final
resting place. To this day there are several stone tomb chambers in the woods
nearby. It’s very possible that the original inhabitant of this tomb died in
the battle here, and was honored with a relatively fancy tomb for his mighty
deeds.
The legacy of Late Prehistory is woven
intimately into the landscapes, languages, and folklores of Europe to this day.
From Shetland to Malta, from the Urals to Portugal, the silent specters of
distant days have always haunted the European consciousness. Since the
Neolithic, Europeans have gazed with wonder upon the burial mounds and standing
stones of other years, and farmers have turned up with their plows the weapons
and bones of mighty heroes fallen and forgotten, left long behind by the
rolling tide of ages. For the last eight thousand years, Europeans have inhabited
a landscape filled with subtle reminders of mysterious and long-gone peoples utterly
alien to themselves.
So this is a video series covering a
period of about 7000 years, from 6000 years before the Christian Era to 1000
years into it. Given that Christianity is irrelevant for most of this series, I
will attempt to follow the “years ago” format in my dating, as opposed to the “(Before
the) Christian Era” dating commonly used when discussing written history.
As I say, this series is going to
focus on the cultures of the European Neolithic through Iron Age. I’m calling
this period “The Age of Barbarians”, in keeping with my convention of using
pop-culture nomenclature to talk about real prehistory. I’ve previously used
the word “cavemen” to talk about Paleolithic populations, because cavemen are
awesome and framing the discussion in those terms makes it a lot more fun.
Likewise, I’ll use the term “barbarians” to refer to Europeans of Late
Prehistory. As with “cavemen”, I am stripping the word of any negative
connotation whatsoever—while the term in popular parlance connotes
unsophistication and brutishness, I use “barbarian” as a complimentary term of
endearment and admiration. For the purpose of this series, let’s have the word
“barbarian” connote resiliency, heroic deeds, and a rich, orally transmitted
intellectual and folkloric tradition. We’ll have it denote “small-scale food
producers of Late European Prehistory”.
You’ll also hear me refer to
Europeans of this time as “Those Dudes”, something I’ve done mentally for years
now, in acknowledgement of the fact that we really don’t know what they called
themselves or what languages they spoke, which were diverse in spite of many shared
cultural elements.
The Neolithic through the Iron Age is of course a very
long time, and although the peoples inhabiting Europe at this time formed many
distinct populations in terms of culture, language, and genetics, I cannot help
but be struck by the level of cultural continuity that existed throughout the
period.
The
setting sunlight glows soft as you sling your plow over your shoulders, leading
the cows back to their enclosure. Mist gathers along the distant trees, and an
evening chill is in the air. Returning home for the day, you pass the barrow,
ringed by mossy standing stones, that lifts its green head a short distance
from your village.
What mighty king rests
beneath this monument, or what primordial magic is sealed within, has been long
lost to the ages. Your people may tell stories about an ancient battle fought
here, its heroes sleeping with their treasures in the narrow halls of death--or
it may be that some sorcerer, fairy or troll raised his dwelling here from the
living earth. Whatever the case, it is clear to your people that the fertile lands
you call home have been inhabited for a long, long time, whether by spirits or
men. Tales of the ancients live on among your people in your oral history, for
writing is an art yet unknown.
Returning
to the village, you cross the protective ditch and palisade to a ring of dwellings.
Depending on the era, you
may live with your extended family in one of Europe’s longest-enduring cultural
institutions: the communal longhouse, which remained a fixture of life from the
earliest Neolithic through to the Medieval period, and is the architectural
ancestor of the mythical Heorot and Valhalla.
HEOROT,
MARK 1, 7000 YEARS AGO
HEOROT,
MARK V, 1500 YEARS AGO
Shout
out to Burden of Ymir, Ontario’s most criminally underexposed one-man viking
metal band.
A typical village
contains two to five longhouses or six to ten single-family huts. Entering the village
you hear the otherworldly whistle of a flute, let’s imagine it’s being played
by a guy hopping around on one foot who looks exactly like Ian Anderson:
After dropping your grain
off at the miller, you walk into your family home, and the aroma of cooking
meat fills your nostrils. You help yourself to a ceramic beaker of barley beer,
or perhaps a horn of mead, and join your friends and family around the fire.
They, like you, are dressed in pants, shirts, and cloaks of leather or rough-spun
wool. Above you, suspended on a string from the rafter, hangs a thunderstone,
or an ancient stone axe-head turned up by your plow in the fields—these are
occasionally found by your people, and are thought to have been cast down by
the thunder god in his rages. To hang it up in your home is a protection from lightning,
fire, and the mischief of the elves. Some believe that it was in fact the work
of the elves, while others see them as the ancient weapons of mortal warriors.
The
scene that I have just described is a mundane one, depicting typical people
living typical lives; but it is remarkable in that it could just as easily
describe life in the sixth millennium before Christ as in the first millennium
after. Consider also the pictures provided, which could reasonably depict life
at any point over a period of thousands of years. Certainly, the details change
over this period, most notably in the introduction of metal tools, the religion
practiced by the people, and the languages spoken. But if we consider these elements
to be window dressing to the basic surroundings, cycles, and institutions of daily
life, it is truly astonishing how little things change over a 6000+ year
period. From the sixth millennium BC, from Poland to Britain, you’re basically
living in a Jethro Tull song. Check over the same region in the first
millennium after Christ, and you’re still living in a Jethro Tull song:
SITTING
ON A PARK BENCH….
No, no! Not “Aqualung”
Tull, you understand, but “Songs from the Wood” Tull:
That’s
better.
And I’m not just making
this series for an excuse to plug his new album, although that certainly helps.
Suppose we took a guy
from the Central European Linear Pottery Culture of 7000 years ago, and a
Scottish Pict of fifteen hundred years ago, and had them trade places like Dan
Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy:
Each of them would
experience pretty severe culture shock and have to learn languages completely
unrelated to their own. The presence or absence of technology like the wheel,
the sail, and domesticated horses would be a pretty big deal too. The Linear
Pottery guy would have to get used to a hierarchical pantheon of Indo-European
gods and goddesses, while the Pict would have to get used to a much more
diffuse, animistic, and shamanistic religious tradition. However, each would
find a comfortable familiarity in a surprising number of institutions that have
remained more or less unchanged from one to the other. The communal hall or longhouse,
the burial mounds and megaliths, the small-scale farming and herding economy,
and the endemic tribal warfare including headhunting practices are all elements
held in common. Certain beliefs may have even crossed that gulf of time,
including but not limited to a parallel world of elves and fairies, a
psychedelic drug cult, and a belief that swamps and islands as the meeting
points of land and water constituted special places where the natural and
supernatural met. Once each of our time travelers has settled in, learned the
language, and decapitated a few rival tribesmen, I think they would be
pleasantly surprised by how at home they felt:
Given
the legacy of late prehistory, which hangs heavy on the European consciousness,
I don’t think it is any surprise that High Fantasy is a primarily a genre of
Western literature. For thousands of years, Europe effectively was a
fantasy world, complete with elves, trolls, and wizards in pointy hats (!) that
were very real to its inhabitants, though your mileage may vary today. In the
same way that fantasy worlds will go millennia without advancing past the Middle
Ages, Europeans spent thousands of years headhunting and raising monoliths in
what must have seemed like a static or at least highly cyclical universe. To be
sure there were differences between groups in culture, worldview, and language,
but even this must have highlighted the mystery of the past and reminded
Europeans that they, too, would someday be known only by their silent monuments.
Living
in a landscape of monuments raised by unknown hands, and walking on a ground
that occasionally turns up mysterious axe-heads leads the imagination to run
wild, especially when one meditates on the understanding, however nebulous,
that these people were not your own. It is thus entirely unsurprising that
Europeans would imagine a past age of magic and heroism, especially given the
absence of written records. As some of my viewers know I am a massive Lord
of the Rings fan, and it is easy to imagine how Tolkien could look at the
weapons and monuments of prehistoric Britain and allow his imagination to
conjure up kingdoms, heroes, and races now lost to time—just as Europeans have
done since those very days. In a sense, Middle-Earth was a real chapter in the
story of Europe. Reading his work, especially the chapter about the
Barrow-Downs, really ignited my interest in this area of prehistory.
In the age of modern
archaeology, anthropology, linguistics and folkloristics, we are gaining a
greater understanding of that long-lost world, and its secrets are becoming
known to us once more.
Along
with Lord of the Rings, a slightly guiltier pleasure of mine is Conan the
Barbarian; I believe Howard would be thrilled to hear that the world of his
imagination was indeed not that far off from reality. Conan would have felt
right at home in most of the real-world Hyborian Age! This is a time when
tribes and kingdoms rise and fall, a time of bloody battles and wise wizards, and
a time when nubile priestesses seek out hunky partners for their fertility
rituals. Right up Conan’s alley.
Our
next video will talk about the conditions and players in the Europe of 8000
years ago, and the generations of struggle between the hunters and farmers, the
shamans and the priests--the last of the cavemen and the first of the
barbarians! Or, if you like, the “Caveman to Barbarian Pipeline”!
