Making a living

Around7000 cal bce there were hunter-gatherers everywhere across Europe; by soon after 4000 cal bce, very few of these remained, principally in the eastern Baltic and points north.

That Neolithic communities subsisted largely on cereals and animal pro­ducts is not therefore in doubt. Even though perhaps a specialized figure, accustomed to high altitude, the Iceman from the southern Alps in the later fourth millennium cal bce had eaten cereals as part of his last meal or meals.^[1289] This broad result is shown over and over again from excavations right across Europe, though there were phases now and then when wild resources were still important. The pattern is not unvarying. For example, crop variety seems to have declined as cultivation spread to the west, with fewer cereal species and fewer associated legumes,^[1290] and sheep were replaced by cattle as the key animal, not only in central Europe, but also in the Carpathian basin.^[1291] The challenge now is to understand the balance of resources, and the organization, scale, and goals of production, and to examine critically how and whether things changed markedly or significantly through time; the conventional expectation is of linear intensification, but I believe that more subtle developments were a key ingredient of Neolithic histories.

The model of intensive, prolonged cultivation in fixed, relatively small gardens, rather than in extensive fields or in shifting plots managed by slash- and-burn techniques, is persuasive and seems demonstrable whenever the appropriate recovery techniques provide the weed assemblages which decide the issue.^[1292] We have already seen probable variety in the situation at LBK Vaihingen, and it can be inferred that gardens were maintained in the Alpine foreland while particular settlements came and went; nonetheless there is also evidence for cycles of woodland use in parts of the Alpine foreland, so we perhaps have to be cautious in applying the same fixed-plot model everywhere, at all times.^[1293] Larger and more extensive systems of stone walls of the earlier fourth millennium cal bce, sharing a common axis across the landscape, have been found preserved beneath blanket peat in Co.

Getting at scale is even harder with herds and flocks. One obvious model is again of household-based ownership and management - perhaps linked closely to gardens, not least for manuring - early on of flocks of sheep and later of herds of cattle. Isotopic studies are beginning to reveal something of the detail of animal movement, at differing distances from settlements, for example in southwest Germany in the LBK.^[1295] There would be advantages in household co-operation to maintain larger herds and to spread risks, but evidence already reviewed suggests plenty of difference among the residues associated with individual structures, so that it is unwise to envisage the community operating as a single, unified whole. Other studies suggest further ways of breaking down the generalized picture. Body-part represen­tation and bone treatment suggest in both central Poland in the LBK and southern England in the earlier fourth millennium cal bce that sheep may have been used for more routine consumption, while cattle may have been reserved for feasting.^[1296] While the balance between cereals and animal pro­ducts is extremely difficult to establish, we may envisage a mainly ‘domestic mode of production', as Marshall Sahlins called it,^[1297] and allow for variation among both households and communities.

I believe therefore that we should be suspicious of claims for simple trends towards intensification and increased scale over time. One version of this, the so-called ‘secondary products revolution', has been widely cited, and still attracts many adherents. According to this, milk, wool, traction in the form of wheeled vehicles and ploughs, and alcohol and other drugs came into Europe from the fourth millennium as a set of secondary innovations from the Near East and the eastern Mediterranean.^[1299] Now, it is clear that these can be assigned to various dates. Milk came in earlier, as we have seen, and wool probably later; the jury is out on the chronology of ploughs and the exploitation of animal traction, though wheeled vehicles do seem genuinely to appear in both the Carpathian basin and the Alpine foreland in the fourth millennium;^[1300] even then, we have to specify what effect small carts could have had on production. My own view therefore is that agricultural produc­tion remained largely household-based. Beyond the needs of survival, which were on the whole successfully met, the goals of production were to meet the social obligations of household and community. In any situation, there were likely to be differences and variations, as more and more studies are showing, a possibility not confined to later situations. It is very hard to link the scale or control of production to, say, the possession of particular valu­ables or the ability to mobilize labour for communal efforts of monument construction, in specific instances, though this is not implausible; correlations between the possession of stone adzes and local isotopic signatures in the LBK should be borne in mind. But it seems unlikely that particular house­holds, lineages, communities, or other social groupings were in the end able to so control the means of production that ownership of land or surplus became held by a minority in society as a whole.