Cultural Origins

  The map above depicts the spread of Neolithic culture from the fertile crescent into Europe. There were two migration paths. One around the Mediterranean coast into Southern Europe, and another through Anotolia into Northern Europe. I am interested in the Northern migration wave, and in particular the Linear Pottery Culture (LBK), not so much for their pottery, as because these were the people, three of whose settlements were massacred in Germany and Austria around c.5000 BC. A question which has not been conclusively answered is who carried out the attacks? Were they fellow members of the LBK migrant community, or locals? My first instinct was to blame the locals (European Mesolithic or Western hunter gatherers (WHGs)). If the farmers had been warlike and frequently attacking each other, there would surely be at least some evidence of open battles in the record. If the villagers frequently visited other villages to slaughter the residents while they slept,...

  NSM Rally (image from Southern Poverty Law Centre ) From what I have read so far there is not much evidence of violence among the early neolithic communities of Anatolia and the fertile crescent. There is circumstancial evidence that the priests were up so something strange at Cayonu Tepesi and the copper mace head found at Can Hasan implies that violence was not unheard of in these communities. But there seem to have been plenty of neolithic settlements like Çatalhöyük, where the evidence suggests that people lived peacefully and buried their dead intact. So when, where, why and how did warfare become the norm? Edward (Ned) Pegler’s blog Armchair Prehistory poses a similar question: “What was happening in Neolithic and Chalcolithic Europe and the Near East between 5500BC and 3500BC to make it an apparently much more violent place?” He goes on to ask “What evidence can be used to indicate violence?” I’ll list the four bullet points he suggests, because his ...