Worldviews
So there were all those communities, some living closely together in groupings of houses, and others still tightly connected even though they were more dispersed across their landscapes; population increased in many areas, and great communal acts of construction were undertaken; and people worked in gardens with their crops and moved around their local and wider taskscapes with their animals.
How did these people see the world, and what were their values?Archaeologists have often struggled to come up with satisfactory answers to these questions. This has been partly because of a perception that dimensions of past lives like worldview must be less accessible than, say, the workings of the agricultural economy; partly due to a preference for characterizations based on aspects of social differentiation such as rank and status; and partly because of the obviously great diversity of the evidence, which perversely often results in monolithic explanations. To try to get round some of these difficulties, I want here to risk some generalizations.
One way to start could be to compare hunter-gatherers and farmers. The social anthropologist Alan Barnard has sketched a series of differences, in which hunter-gatherers value immediate consumption, sharing, followership, and deference to the will of the community; they classify everyone as kin, think of the land as sacrosanct and primordial, regard people as free individuals, and equate natural equality with social harmony, with strong sanctions against anti-social behaviour; farmers, by contrast, value accumulation, saving for oneself and dependants, leadership, high status, and initiative; they divide up society by means of kinship and groupings such as tribes, regard land as sovereign and associated with alienable wealth or political authority, see people as sacrosanct, and esteem inequality, equating it with the ability to accumulate, achieve, and compete.[1301] There is much to debate here, not least the immediate dangers from the scale of generalization.
Not all hunter-gatherers are the same, and early farmers were no less diverse; in both cases it is important to keep open, as already seen in this chapter, the possibility of differences, contrasts, and tensions within any one situation; and the timescales over which such transformations are effected can be very long indeed.[1302] One of the attractions of his scheme, however, is the claim that elements of the hunter-gatherer mode of thought, as he calls it, can perfectly well be maintained even when the technology of subsistence has altered - as in the southern African context which Barnard has studied, where people turned to small-scale cultivation and stock-keeping.A further useful way to think about the worldview of early farmers is through their sense of time. For the purposes of this discussion, Neolithic temporality can be seen as mutually constituted by futures, presents, and pasts. Clearances, gardens, herds, and flocks can all be seen as obvious investment in the future; possession of land and place were also part of the agricultural ideology of continuity. The Alpine foreland example in particular has shown how permanence and impermanence of residence and place may be relative, but in this case possession and use of the land normally endured. In other cases, strikingly with the tells of southeastern Europe, the future was written generation by generation in the maintenance of pre-eminent places. The future need not be seen as confined to the technology of agricultural life. Material culture, too, served as a forward-looking projection of identities; not just in dramatic instances like the winning of jadeitite from high Alpine locations or copper from underground seams, but also in the making and firing of mundane pots, materiality was partly about what was to come.
Life also goes forward in the rolling present, and Neolithic existence was rich in connections and performances, routine and episodic. Mostly it would seem that people lived well together, day to day, and year to year, and the important new evidence for interpersonal and intergroup violence[1303] in fact serves to underline that general claim.
There is no indication yet that episodes of violence, for example in the late LBK, were concentrated in boundary situations, so rather we could think of an endemic level of competition and a periodic tendency for normal dispute-solving mechanisms to break down. Networks of connection and alliance must normally have maintained peaceful relations. An ethic of co-operation and perhaps sharing must have enabled the maintenance of large aggregations of settlement which lack signs of differentiated houses or spaces within them. Beautiful things were acquired but often given away; desirable animals were sacrificed for feasts, in which a single large beast could have fed hundreds of people.[1304]Tracking the past was also characteristic of early farmers in Europe. Demonstration of the fact of past possession served as legitimation in the present, and for the future. This took different forms. Tells in southeastern Europe have nicely been dubbed ‘ancestral timemarks',90 though that still leaves us puzzling over how to characterize contemporary flat settlements. Houses themselves could be seen as a vehicle of descent, the idea of ‘house societies', first formulated by Claude Levi-Strauss, being increasingly borrowed by Neolithic specialists.[1305] If that is too abstract or too loose a fit with the anthropological model, then the concrete example of LBK long- houses illustrates the blending of past and present; as older buildings decayed, after whatever span of use, they normally seem to have been left alone to decay while successors were created around them. Grave by grave and in accumulating clusters or rows, cemeteries beside settlements inscribed the past into the ground. Over wide swathes of western Europe, from Scandinavia to the central and western Mediterranean, people created complex visions (and perhaps cults) of the past through burial monuments; some of their architectural features may have memorialized the deep past, for example in the mimicking of earlier longhouses in the form of barrows and cairns, though the dead accumulated in such constructions normally belong to the immediate past.
Remembered forebears were perhaps later transformed into remote ancestors.What happened in Neolithic histories
Control of future, present, and past, no less than of agricultural production itself, could have enabled difference to emerge. Some households within communities, and some communities compared to others, could have had access to better land and resources and could have produced more. Unreciprocated gifts and generosity could have created unbalanced social relations. Some people could have been more charismatic, more able to command the respect necessary to mobilize labour for communal enterprises, and more skilled at patching up disputes as well as more adept at provoking them in the first place. A recent near-global survey has charted some of the many ways in which, over the long term, social inequality could be created, though it has also rightly stressed the inbuilt resistance to the emergence of difference.[1306] The account, however, largely left out Europe. That is a pity, as both the timescales and character of social change in prehistoric Europe seem different to many other situations. The adoption of agriculture had many consequences in Europe, some of which this chapter has attempted to sketch. Differences among people and their communities were one of these, but no single, linear trajectory of increasing social inequality can easily be tracked. In my view, the range of values held in common by Neolithic people in Europe provided checks and balances against tendencies in the direction of competition, acquisitiveness, and inequality. It seems no accident, for example, that the displays of what we would call wealth in the Varna cemetery took place in the mid fifth millennium cal bce, shortly before the old order of the tell system began to unravel,[1307] and I have hinted at other cycles of increasing tension and dissolution.[1308]
Clear, directional change has often been a major expectation of Neolithic history; the longer things went on, the more society was seen to become more hierarchical: stepping towards the modern.
In this view, the third millennium is a particularly important hinge. Someone on the move across Europe even as late as around 2800 cal bce, however, would have seen, in my view, a complicated mixture of changes, continuities, and the old ambiguities. Take the great settlements at the heart of Orkney,[1309] or the early constructions at Stonehenge,[1310] or corded ware burial grounds in central Europe,[1311] or the end of the Baden culture cemetery at Budakalasz near the Danube in northern Hungary,[1312] or the continuing settlements of the Alpine foreland.[1313] If these involved, in part, dominant individuals or pre-eminent lineages, these were not new phenomena, and the evident collectivities and communalities would also have been familiar to previous generations. More complex, detailed, precise, and regionalized narratives are now required.