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#0273
272
Crosstown traffic: contemplating mobility, interaction and migration among foragers and early farmers
of ‘Neolithic’ and all hunting activities as related to
‘Mesolithic’ identities.
This model will need refining once more detailed
studies are available for other LBK areas, and espe-
cially once chronological resolution in particular of
post-neolithisation hunter-gatherer sites, within and
beyond the LBK territory, is improved. But sharpening
our theoretical models for interaction is undoubtedly
also one of the biggest research challenges for the
coming years. This in turn will require much more
detailed knowledge of the historically situated ways in
which hunter-gatherers inhabited and moved through
landscapes, not only along the putative frontier itself,
but also across and behind it on either side. This di-
versity is explored in the sections that follow.
Migration and mobility in the
Mesolithic Low Countries
Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in northwestern Europe
are still generally portrayed as ‘whole-time food see-
kers’, dependent on what the environment had to
offer, and therefore organised in small and mobile
groups (Zvelebil/Moore 2006). Holocene sea-level
rise would have caused the loss of previously inha-
bitable land, followed by an increase of regionally
variable population densities, increased sedentism
due to a growing dependency on stable marine resour-
ces, territoriality and social complexity (Waddington
2007). Together, these factors are believed to have
paved the path for the adoption of farming outside
the LBK zone (but see Amkreutz 2013 for a far more
nuanced model). One can, however, question whether
this simplified one-directional cause-and-effect scena-
rio fits the complexities of hunter-gatherer lifeways
and their connection to the land. And as argued in
the preceding section, one can question whether early
farming communities were as sedentary and stuck to
cultivated resources as many tend to believe.
Subsistence and wandering foragers?
Food is as critical to foragers as it is to early farmers -
in fact to any living organism - and the main challenge
was probably how to balance certainty and uncertainty
in its supply. This will have been strongly related to the
degree to which seasonal and annual availability was
predictable (dependent on longer-term fluctuations),
a factor foragers, as well as early farmers, had to deal
with. In order to cope with uncertainty regarding food
acquisition, foragers had to collect information about
the distribution and presence of animal and plant
resources. Clearly, animals are variably distributed
in a landscape, having variable degrees of mobility
and group behaviour. But also plants are variably
distributed and occur in variable density, depending
on a range of factors related to, for instance, climate
conditions and the influence of animals, as well as hu-
mans. It is the symbiotic relationships between these
‘agents’ which will have characterised the qualitative
and quantitative structure of the environment, and
mobility is one strategy to monitor the situation which
does not come as a given state of being.
As prehistoric foragers are generally portrayed
to have had little influence on the environment, and
as having been dependent on it, they are believed to
have been living in more uncertainty than farming
communities. This appears questionable, however,
from several perspectives. There is ample ethnographic
as well as increasing archaeological evidence for the
manipulation of the environment by foragers through
deliberate firing of vegetation zones.4 It is a form of
environmental management in which the manipula-
tion of vegetation serves the purpose of managing
animal and plant communities, and requires intensive
cooperation between group members (Bliege Bird
et al. 2016). Clearing land through burning is advan-
tageous for the regenerative capacity of the environ-
ment, thus increasing predictability and decreasing
uncertainty for its users. However, were access rights
equally distributed, in other words, was there a degree
of ‘ownership’? And what would happen if incom-
ing groups would want to use such land, for instance
to settle and grow crops? After all, the burning of
vegetation is also advantageous to improve soil fertil-
ity. Interactive attitudes may have been variable, and
strongly dependent on how much room is given by
resident groups to incoming groups to ‘do their stuff.
Crop cultivation attracts game, and could therefore
also form a basis for social integration of farmers in a
forager-dominant landscape, or vice versa, integration
of foragers in a farmer-dominant landscape.
The scale at which such practices occur - and
might have occurred - is quite variable, however,
ranging from small localised patches to vast areas.
Simmons (1996) argues for an anthropogenic drive in
the creation of moorland landscapes in England and
Wales. However, evidence from Mesolithic northwest-
ern Europe suggests that such ‘fire ecology’ was mainly
of a local nature, and too short-term to support struc-
tural (i. e. measurable) changes in the vegetation on a
4 See e.g. Mellars 1976; Simmons 1996; Bos/Janssen 1996;
Dark 1998; Bos/Urz 2003; Bird et al. 2016; Sevink et al. 2018.
Crosstown traffic: contemplating mobility, interaction and migration among foragers and early farmers
of ‘Neolithic’ and all hunting activities as related to
‘Mesolithic’ identities.
This model will need refining once more detailed
studies are available for other LBK areas, and espe-
cially once chronological resolution in particular of
post-neolithisation hunter-gatherer sites, within and
beyond the LBK territory, is improved. But sharpening
our theoretical models for interaction is undoubtedly
also one of the biggest research challenges for the
coming years. This in turn will require much more
detailed knowledge of the historically situated ways in
which hunter-gatherers inhabited and moved through
landscapes, not only along the putative frontier itself,
but also across and behind it on either side. This di-
versity is explored in the sections that follow.
Migration and mobility in the
Mesolithic Low Countries
Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in northwestern Europe
are still generally portrayed as ‘whole-time food see-
kers’, dependent on what the environment had to
offer, and therefore organised in small and mobile
groups (Zvelebil/Moore 2006). Holocene sea-level
rise would have caused the loss of previously inha-
bitable land, followed by an increase of regionally
variable population densities, increased sedentism
due to a growing dependency on stable marine resour-
ces, territoriality and social complexity (Waddington
2007). Together, these factors are believed to have
paved the path for the adoption of farming outside
the LBK zone (but see Amkreutz 2013 for a far more
nuanced model). One can, however, question whether
this simplified one-directional cause-and-effect scena-
rio fits the complexities of hunter-gatherer lifeways
and their connection to the land. And as argued in
the preceding section, one can question whether early
farming communities were as sedentary and stuck to
cultivated resources as many tend to believe.
Subsistence and wandering foragers?
Food is as critical to foragers as it is to early farmers -
in fact to any living organism - and the main challenge
was probably how to balance certainty and uncertainty
in its supply. This will have been strongly related to the
degree to which seasonal and annual availability was
predictable (dependent on longer-term fluctuations),
a factor foragers, as well as early farmers, had to deal
with. In order to cope with uncertainty regarding food
acquisition, foragers had to collect information about
the distribution and presence of animal and plant
resources. Clearly, animals are variably distributed
in a landscape, having variable degrees of mobility
and group behaviour. But also plants are variably
distributed and occur in variable density, depending
on a range of factors related to, for instance, climate
conditions and the influence of animals, as well as hu-
mans. It is the symbiotic relationships between these
‘agents’ which will have characterised the qualitative
and quantitative structure of the environment, and
mobility is one strategy to monitor the situation which
does not come as a given state of being.
As prehistoric foragers are generally portrayed
to have had little influence on the environment, and
as having been dependent on it, they are believed to
have been living in more uncertainty than farming
communities. This appears questionable, however,
from several perspectives. There is ample ethnographic
as well as increasing archaeological evidence for the
manipulation of the environment by foragers through
deliberate firing of vegetation zones.4 It is a form of
environmental management in which the manipula-
tion of vegetation serves the purpose of managing
animal and plant communities, and requires intensive
cooperation between group members (Bliege Bird
et al. 2016). Clearing land through burning is advan-
tageous for the regenerative capacity of the environ-
ment, thus increasing predictability and decreasing
uncertainty for its users. However, were access rights
equally distributed, in other words, was there a degree
of ‘ownership’? And what would happen if incom-
ing groups would want to use such land, for instance
to settle and grow crops? After all, the burning of
vegetation is also advantageous to improve soil fertil-
ity. Interactive attitudes may have been variable, and
strongly dependent on how much room is given by
resident groups to incoming groups to ‘do their stuff.
Crop cultivation attracts game, and could therefore
also form a basis for social integration of farmers in a
forager-dominant landscape, or vice versa, integration
of foragers in a farmer-dominant landscape.
The scale at which such practices occur - and
might have occurred - is quite variable, however,
ranging from small localised patches to vast areas.
Simmons (1996) argues for an anthropogenic drive in
the creation of moorland landscapes in England and
Wales. However, evidence from Mesolithic northwest-
ern Europe suggests that such ‘fire ecology’ was mainly
of a local nature, and too short-term to support struc-
tural (i. e. measurable) changes in the vegetation on a
4 See e.g. Mellars 1976; Simmons 1996; Bos/Janssen 1996;
Dark 1998; Bos/Urz 2003; Bird et al. 2016; Sevink et al. 2018.