The Rise & Fall of Europe's First Longhouse Builders - European Prehistory

before I start the video so quickly thank the great courses plus for supporting my channel the great courses plus is an on-demand video service with lectures and courses from world leading universities and scientific institutions they've got over 11,000 video lectures on all sorts of topics art science literature and of course history and archaeology I just finished understanding Imperial China dynasty's life and culture by Professor Andrew Wilson you wouldn't catch me taking that civil service entrance exam bloody hell you can watch all of these for free simply click on the link in the description or visit the great courses plus comm forward slash Stefan to start your free trial hey everyone how's it going at various points in human history even up until today if you watch Grand Designs like I do people have lived in long houses timber long houses like this Chinook n' plank house behind me here at catholic bottle washington which i have made a video on it's one of the first videos i made on this channel so if you're gonna go watch it go easy on me I was trying my best over in Europe I think it's fair to say they're most commonly associated with the Vikings but way before the Vikings way before the Danes realized how easy it was to rob English monasteries timber long houses had spread across the whole of Central Europe from Normandy in the West to Ukraine in the East I think I was pointing in the wrong directions there nevermind this society is called the lbk or the linear band kamek by archeologists and they expanded across the continent extremely quickly and then declined in really dramatic bloody fashion so today I'm gonna take a look at the archaeology and see if we can kind of understand the causes behind the rise and fall of Europe's first longhouse culture [Music] okay so let's quickly talk about who and what the lbk culture was for those who might not know neolithic farming groups arrived in europe around 7000 BCE from Anatolia and had slowly been making their way north through the Balkans reaching what is now hungry by around 6000 BCE here the neolithic seems to have paused for about four to five hundred years archaeologists aren't sure exactly why but it was probably because these Neolithic farming groups had to adapt to a new environment not only did crops potentially have to adjust to a different climate and different daylight hours the further north these farming groups traveled but perhaps culturally things needed to change to the culture of tell building villages that served farmers so well in Anatolia the Aegean and the Balkans was maybe not as well suited to the flatter heavily forested environment of Central Europe at that time around 5,600 to 5,500 BCE the lbk culture seems to have arisen in what is now Hungary Austria northern Serbia the the general Carpathian region perhaps more specifically around Lake Balaton where it evolved out of the Neolithic starch evoke culture which spanned the Balkans at szent-gyorgyi volgy pitcher Dom forgive me Hungary a starch of our village was replaced by an lbk culture site around 5500 BCE whatever the reason for this delay the farming groups in this region had finally hit upon a winning lifestyle they focused much more on a select few crops particularly EMA and einkorn wheat and instead of focusing on sheep and goats cattle and pig domestication becomes much more common named after the incised lines that adorn their pottery the lbk is probably more readily recognized by their distinctive long houses the typical early lbk longhouse was commonly orientated north to south consisted of three rows of posts dividing the kernel-space and was surrounded by pets which archaeologists believe served two purposes it provided a source of mud for wattle and daub walls before probably then being a convenient place to throw all your rubbish although there are small variations in design these houses are remarkably uniform across Central Europe from its origins around 5500 BCE in just 200 years the lbk had spread as far west as the Rhine and had reached northern Poland 300 years after that it had reached Normandy in the West and almost the Black Sea in the East by five thousand one hundred BCE it is estimated that there were 15,000 lb K households across Central Europe and a population as high as maybe 100,000 people huge difference compared to the preceding Mesolithic [Music] all right there you go that lbk was central Europe's first farming culture so how did they spread from the Carpathians to Ukraine and Normandy in just a few centuries well if there's one thing we can say for sure it wasn't because local hunter-gatherers adopted farming we can tell from the genetics of people buried in lbk cemeteries that this spread was purely demographic lbk groups were the descendants of the Anatolian farmers that had crossed into Europe 1,500 years ago with just some minor exceptions just a little bit of sex with the preceding Mesolithic people it was suggested that one reason for the rapid spread of lbk sites was the use of slash-and-burn agriculture the land that these farmers would work would gradually become less and less fertile and these communities would move on to clear another piece of forest we do have a little bit of evidence for large-scale forest clearing at a few lbk sites but it is far from overwhelming the lbk farmers were extremely extremely picky when it came to which land they occupied their houses appear exclusively along rivers and even then they're clearly selecting very fertile spots spots that really appeal to them experiments have shown that to feed a community of 20 people for a year would have required around 10 hectares of land which sounds like a lot but that's only 3% of the land within a kilometer radius of the settlement so the land that they chose could have supported quite a large community finally river banks particularly the choicest juiciest spots great at maintaining consistent crop yields for long periods of time consequently falling crop yields were not likely to be a major concern for them and unlikely to be the reason for their expansion well is there another possible reason then what if they moved on to escape the tyrannical clutches of their older brother now I know what you're thinking you're thinking how can we possibly tell that in the archaeological record well let me make the case for you it is possible that lbk communities were patrilocal this means that the men often stayed in one location inheriting the family farm whilst women move around as they married by studying the relationship of strontium isotopes not bones and teeth archaeologists can tell if we have died in the same region that we spent our childhood in a 2012 study of over 300 early lbk graves shows a marked difference between men and women women were much much more likely to have moved than men where and even within men there was also a difference between men buried with adzes and those without men buried with adzes were less likely to have moved than men who were buried without them this is interpreted by the authors of their study as evidence of patra locality maybe this adds is some symbol of a higher status and they had access to the better soils and so had less reason to move a possible social difference between newcomers and founding families can also be observed in the layout and structure of some lbk villages at Curie lay shout dad sorry France in northern France the lbk village is made up of two types of houses large houses that have great evidence for stock keeping cereal grinding and very consistent pottery traditions and small houses which more often hunted and had a wider variety of pottery making techniques the first is interpreted as the houses of long-established farmers with access to the best most fertile lands capable of producing an agricultural surplus the second I interpreted as the houses of newcomers in the process of establishing themselves in the new area with out access to the choicest spots more reliant on hunting things like that finally lbk houses seem to have been short-lived structures lasting just one generation there's also not great evidence for them being / suggesting that abandoned houses lived on in the landscape were they some symbolic link to the ancestors perhaps the act of constructing these houses was an essential feature or ritual of their culture again so how does all this relate to the spread of their culture well let's say hypothetically you're a young LBJ farmer starting out in life you can't stay at home house this last one generation you've got to leave you've got to build your new house do you stay in your village and live with inferior access to the best land that perhaps is being claimed by your older brother or some other high status male or do you move up River knowing full well that there is great land to be had elsewhere confident in the knowledge that if you are the founder of a village you get the best land and your descendants will be of a high status there's much more evidence for this idea than I've presented here of course check out first Farmers of Europe for more I do bloody love that book if our interpretations of the evidence are correct and they may not be of course but if they are there would be a huge pressure for lower status members of lbk society to continually move on obviously such a system can only exist if there is new land to move to what happens when the river banks are full of houses there's no more new land how did the lbk react to such a scenario this brings us neatly to part three the fall of the lbk towards the end of the lbk which is around 5000 BCE to 4800 BCE ish varies depending on region we see a marked change in the archaeological record sites are abandoned the population seems to have crashed long-distance trade has interrupted villages become enclosed probably fortified and evidence of large-scale conflict violence warfare whatever you want to call it appears in the archaeological record the evidence for warfare is particularly interesting because it's really the first time in European history that we see it so abundantly and clearly not only do many lbk villages become fortified but we also find mass graves from massacres three big ones in particular have been discovered so far the talam death pit is probably the most famous so today I'll cover the other two at Cernik Kilian startin a mass grave of at least 26 individuals was discovered dated to sometime between five thousand two hundred and four thousand eight hundred and fifty BCE these people were tossed carelessly into a pre-existing ditch in a village of around eighteen lbk houses there is absolutely no doubt these people were murdered blunt-force trauma to the head seems to have been their method of execution though some may have been shot with arrows as well what is unique about Killian starten compared to other lbk Massacre sites is the evidence for perimortem destruction of the limbs basically their legs were probably broken when they were alive in some circumstances this violence may have taken on a ritual aspect at her time Germany an enclosure has been excavated that contained the remains of a whopping 500 people what is even more astounding is that only half the site has been excavated so perhaps as many as 1,000 people lay buried there even more even more astounding is that it seems that these people were eaten the bodies were definitely skinned and defleshed which isn't evidence in itself of cannibalism because some burial rituals involve defleshing but these bones were deposited alongside animal remains and broken parts and just the general kind of things you would expect to see after a feast or a meal stuff like that suggesting that these people were eaten along with those animals pretty crazy stuff really I mean clear-cut evidence of mass cannibalism does not often appear in the archaeological record it's not often you find a thousand bodies that have been eaten crazy again could this disaster that befell lbk communities be explained by demographic pressures as I said earlier at the start of the lbk when Europe was only sparsely populated by hunter-gatherers these farming groups could just split up at will they always had the ability to move further upriver move away from each other take some tension out of their communities towards the end though as the rivers of Europe become full of villages one group's demographic success couldn't help but affect neighboring groups the fortunes of your family would have been increasingly dependent on working together with your neighbors fortifying your village attacking other villages that may threaten yours lest you become lunch first okay there you have it the rise and fall of Europe's first longhouse culture was perhaps entirely due to demographic pressures demographic forces at the start out of a desire to escape your older brother and get that sweet sweet fertile soil and at the end out of a desire to not become lunch when your neighbors become too powerful obviously our impressions and ideas can change the more we uncover and the more we excavate and certainly many big questions remain one of the biggest is probably if at the end of the lbk the demographic pressure had gotten so extreme that people have resorted to eating each other and violence on a large scale then why did they stick so doggedly to their river side villages why didn't they experiment more with farming inland where did it take so long for farming inland to develop under such circumstances we don't have an answer to that question is something for future archaeology to uncover I suppose skiddley do thanks to my top-tier patreon they're the real skiddly do is the real big skill lead ooze I'm gonna go home now see it

Channel: Stefan Milo

Views: 388,156

Keywords: History, Archaeology, anthropology, stefan milo, ancient history, world history, european prehistory

Id: OF664B27aBo

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 31 2019