DOI Kapitel:
Grenzgänger, traders and the last hunter-gatherers of the North European Plain
DOI Kapitel:Hofmann, Daniela; Peeters, Hans; Meyer, Ann-Katrin: Crosstown traffic: contemplating mobility, interaction and migration among foragers and early farmers
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.66745#0272
Daniela Hofmann, Hans Peeters and Ann-Katrin Meyer
271
Fig. 7 Distribution of La Hoguette sherds around houses in Bruchenbriicken (after Maletschek 2010, 91 fig. 11).
have termed ‘Mesolithic’, and which have now been
increasingly documented in LBK society - most no-
tably considerable mobility at various social scales
and a tendency to economic diversification - must be
understood as related to the internal dynamics of these
early farming societies in the course of expansion and
consolidation. In many of these central and eastern
areas, it would have been possible for hunter-gatherers
to survive alongside the LBK, and the evidence is
slowly being collected. However, interaction appears
to have been reduced and was perhaps dominated
mainly by suspicion. There may also have been more
potential for conflict once LBK farmers increasingly
used non-loess areas for their own needs, although
this requires more concerted comparisons especially
of Late Mesolithic exploitation patterns. Evidence
from the LBK is also not unanimous here, with ec-
onomic diversity apparently decreasing at Paris Basin
sites over time (Gomart et al. 2015, 241), while the
Herxheim isotopes (Turck 2019) indicate sustained
use of uplands in the locally latest LBK phase. Still, if
the later Neolithic resurgence of hunter-gatherer genes
really is mainly fuelled by new population movements
from western Europe (see Beau et al. 2017; Lipson
et al. 2017), then the local central European hunter-
gatherers were perhaps ultimately squeezed out.
The evidence from artefacts nuances this story.
Persistent traditions in stone tool production and es-
pecially pottery manufacture indicate that there was
coexistence, but that it varied chronologically. In the
initial and rather more conservative expansion phases
of the Earliest LBK, difference in pottery styles may
have been actively suppressed to stress group cohe-
sion (see also Sommer 2001), so that any makers of
non-LBK pottery east of the Rhine soon gave up their
own traditions if they settled on LBK sites. Later on,
when LBK pottery was increasingly used to signal a
variety of identities from personal to household and
regional, there was social room for non-LBK pottery to
persist, and for some limited fusion phenomena. The
production sequences of Mesolithic-style arrowheads
may have been less affected by these trends and are
variable from the start. It is difficult to see how either
of these patterns could have emerged without any
direct contact between LBK and forager communities,
even if this did not result in large-scale interbreeding.
In sum, the trajectories of hunter-farmer interac-
tion in the LBK differed over time and regionally, as
is to be expected in a situation in which very unlike,
but dynamically evolving societies come into con-
tact. Especially in central and eastern areas there is
relatively little evidence for sustained acculturation
from either side; instead, parallel societies and mutual
circumspection may have been the order of the day in
a context in which demographically dominant LBK
communities tolerated little deviation in their own
settlements. Further west, changing LBK dynamics
perhaps allowed the persistence of forager ways of
doing things, albeit within an economic framework
dominated by farming. This similarly did not proceed
on an even footing, but makes it more difficult (and
indeed perhaps inappropriate) to draw up mutually
exclusive and binary categories of identity, which
would for example see all ceramics as emblematic
271
Fig. 7 Distribution of La Hoguette sherds around houses in Bruchenbriicken (after Maletschek 2010, 91 fig. 11).
have termed ‘Mesolithic’, and which have now been
increasingly documented in LBK society - most no-
tably considerable mobility at various social scales
and a tendency to economic diversification - must be
understood as related to the internal dynamics of these
early farming societies in the course of expansion and
consolidation. In many of these central and eastern
areas, it would have been possible for hunter-gatherers
to survive alongside the LBK, and the evidence is
slowly being collected. However, interaction appears
to have been reduced and was perhaps dominated
mainly by suspicion. There may also have been more
potential for conflict once LBK farmers increasingly
used non-loess areas for their own needs, although
this requires more concerted comparisons especially
of Late Mesolithic exploitation patterns. Evidence
from the LBK is also not unanimous here, with ec-
onomic diversity apparently decreasing at Paris Basin
sites over time (Gomart et al. 2015, 241), while the
Herxheim isotopes (Turck 2019) indicate sustained
use of uplands in the locally latest LBK phase. Still, if
the later Neolithic resurgence of hunter-gatherer genes
really is mainly fuelled by new population movements
from western Europe (see Beau et al. 2017; Lipson
et al. 2017), then the local central European hunter-
gatherers were perhaps ultimately squeezed out.
The evidence from artefacts nuances this story.
Persistent traditions in stone tool production and es-
pecially pottery manufacture indicate that there was
coexistence, but that it varied chronologically. In the
initial and rather more conservative expansion phases
of the Earliest LBK, difference in pottery styles may
have been actively suppressed to stress group cohe-
sion (see also Sommer 2001), so that any makers of
non-LBK pottery east of the Rhine soon gave up their
own traditions if they settled on LBK sites. Later on,
when LBK pottery was increasingly used to signal a
variety of identities from personal to household and
regional, there was social room for non-LBK pottery to
persist, and for some limited fusion phenomena. The
production sequences of Mesolithic-style arrowheads
may have been less affected by these trends and are
variable from the start. It is difficult to see how either
of these patterns could have emerged without any
direct contact between LBK and forager communities,
even if this did not result in large-scale interbreeding.
In sum, the trajectories of hunter-farmer interac-
tion in the LBK differed over time and regionally, as
is to be expected in a situation in which very unlike,
but dynamically evolving societies come into con-
tact. Especially in central and eastern areas there is
relatively little evidence for sustained acculturation
from either side; instead, parallel societies and mutual
circumspection may have been the order of the day in
a context in which demographically dominant LBK
communities tolerated little deviation in their own
settlements. Further west, changing LBK dynamics
perhaps allowed the persistence of forager ways of
doing things, albeit within an economic framework
dominated by farming. This similarly did not proceed
on an even footing, but makes it more difficult (and
indeed perhaps inappropriate) to draw up mutually
exclusive and binary categories of identity, which
would for example see all ceramics as emblematic