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 21st, 2024, when I started this script. I’m recording this almost
six months later, on February 14th. That shows you the pace of
things around here. But I thought, here it is. Friday, February 14th.
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 14th, 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
