As the incipient era of cultivation and animal domestication passed onward into the era of the primary village-farming community, the first basic change in human economy was fully achieved. In southwestern Asia, this seems to have taken place about nine thousand years ago. I am going to restrict my description to this earliest Near Eastern case—I do not know enough about the later comparable experiments in the Far East and in the New World. Let us first, once again, think of the contrast between food-collecting and food-producing as ways of life.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FOOD-COLLECTORS AND FOOD-PRODUCERS

Childe used the word “revolution” because of the radical change that took place in the habits and customs of man. Food-collectors—that is, hunters, fishers, berry- and nut-gatherers—had to live in small groups or bands, for they had to be ready to move wherever their food supply moved. Not many people can be fed in this way in one area, and small children and old folks are a burden. There is not enough food to store, and it is not the kind that can be stored for long. Do you see how this all fits into a picture? Small groups of people living now in this cave, now in that—or out in the open—as they moved after the animals they hunted; no permanent villages, a few half-buried huts at best; no breakable utensils; no pottery; no signs of anything for clothing beyond the tools that were probably used to dress the skins of animals; no time to think of much of anything but food and protection and disposal of the dead when death did come: an existence which takes nature as it finds it, which does little or nothing to modify nature—all in all, a savage’s existence, and a very tough one. A man who spends his whole life following animals just to kill them to eat, or moving from one berry patch to another, is really living just like an animal himself.

THE FOOD-PRODUCING ECONOMY

Against this picture let me try to draw another—that of man’s life after food-production had begun. His meat was stored “on the hoof,” his grain in silos or great pottery jars. He lived in a house: it was worth his while to build one, because he couldn’t move far from his fields and flocks. In his neighborhood enough food could be grown and enough animals bred so that many people were kept busy. They all lived close to their flocks and fields, in a village. The village was already of a fair size, and it was growing, too. Everybody had more to eat; they were presumably all stronger, and there were more children. Children and old men could shepherd the animals by day or help with the lighter work in the fields. After the crops had been harvested the younger men might go hunting and some of them would fish, but the food they brought in was only an addition to the food in the village; the villagers wouldn’t starve, even if the hunters and fishermen came home empty-handed.

There was more time to do different things, too. They began to modify nature. They made pottery out of raw clay, and textiles out of hair or fiber. People who became good at pottery-making traded their pots for food and spent all of their time on pottery alone. Other people were learning to weave cloth or to make new tools. There were already people in the village who were becoming full-time craftsmen.

Other things were changing, too. The villagers must have had to agree on new rules for living together. The head man of the village had problems different from those of the chief of the small food-collectors’ band. If somebody’s flock of sheep spoiled a wheat field, the owner wanted payment for the grain he lost. The chief of the hunters was never bothered with such questions. Even the gods had changed. The spirits and the magic that had been used by hunters weren’t of any use to the villagers. They needed gods who would watch over the fields and the flocks, and they eventually began to erect buildings where their gods might dwell, and where the men who knew most about the gods might live.

WAS FOOD-PRODUCTION A “REVOLUTION”?

If you can see the difference between these two pictures—between life in the food-collecting stage and life after food-production had begun—you’ll see why Professor Childe speaks of a revolution. By revolution, he doesn’t mean that it happened over night or that it happened only once. We don’t know exactly how long it took. Some people think that all these changes may have occurred in less than 500 years, but I doubt that. The incipient era was probably an affair of some duration. Once the level of the village-farming community had been established, however, things did begin to move very fast. By six thousand years ago, the descendants of the first villagers had developed irrigation and plow agriculture in the relatively rainless Mesopotamian alluvium and were living in towns with temples. Relative to the half million years of food-gathering which lay behind, this had been achieved with truly revolutionary suddenness.

GAPS IN OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE NEAR EAST

If you’ll look again at the chart (p. 111) you’ll see that I have very few sites and assemblages to name in the incipient era of cultivation and domestication, and not many in the earlier part of the primary village-farming level either. Thanks in no small part to the intelligent co-operation given foreign excavators by the Iraq Directorate General of Antiquities, our understanding of the sequence in Iraq is growing more complete. I shall use Iraq as my main yard-stick here. But I am far from being able to show you a series of Sears Roebuck catalogues, even century by century, for any part of the nuclear area. There is still a great deal of earth to move, and a great mass of material to recover and interpret before we even begin to understand “how” and “why.”

Perhaps here, because this kind of archeology is really my specialty, you’ll excuse it if I become personal for a moment. I very much look forward to having further part in closing some of the gaps in knowledge of the Near East. This is not, as I’ve told you, the spectacular range of Near Eastern archeology. There are no royal tombs, no gold, no great buildings or sculpture, no writing, in fact nothing to excite the normal museum at all. Nevertheless it is a range which, idea-wise, gives the archeologist tremendous satisfaction. The country of the hilly flanks is an exciting combination of green grasslands and mountainous ridges. The Kurds, who inhabit the part of the area in which I’ve worked most recently, are an extremely interesting and hospitable people. Archeologists don’t become rich, but I’ll forego the Cadillac for any bright spring morning in the Kurdish hills, on a good site with a happy crew of workmen and an interested and efficient staff. It is probably impossible to convey the full feeling which life on such a dig holds—halcyon days for the body and acute pleasurable stimulation for the mind. Old things coming newly out of the good dirt, and the pieces of the human puzzle fitting into place! I think I am an honest man; I cannot tell you that I am sorry the job is not yet finished and that there are still gaps in this part of the Near Eastern archeological sequence.

EARLIEST SITES OF THE VILLAGE FARMERS

So far, the Karim Shahir type of assemblage, which we looked at in the last chapter, is the earliest material available in what I take to be the nuclear area. We do not believe that Karim Shahir was a village site proper: it looks more like the traces of a temporary encampment. Two caves, called Belt and Hotu, which are outside the nuclear area and down on the foreshore of the Caspian Sea, have been excavated by Professor Coon. These probably belong in the later extension of the terminal era of food-gathering; in their upper layers are traits like the use of pottery borrowed from the more developed era of the same time in the nuclear area. The same general explanation doubtless holds true for certain materials in Egypt, along the upper Nile and in the Kharga oasis: these materials, called Sebilian III, the Khartoum “neolithic,” and the Khargan microlithic, are from surface sites, not from caves. The chart (p. 111) shows where I would place these materials in era and time.

Both M’lefaat and Dr. Solecki’s Zawi Chemi Shanidar site appear to have been slightly more “settled in” than was Karim Shahir itself. But I do not think they belong to the era of farming-villages proper. The first site of this era, in the hills of Iraqi Kurdistan, is Jarmo, on which we have spent three seasons of work. Following Jarmo comes a variety of sites and assemblages which lie along the hilly flanks of the crescent and just below it. I am going to describe and illustrate some of these for you.

Since not very much archeological excavation has yet been done on sites of this range of time, I shall have to mention the names of certain single sites which now alone stand for an assemblage. This does not mean that I think the individual sites I mention were unique. In the times when their various cultures flourished, there must have been many little villages which shared the same general assemblage. We are only now beginning to locate them again. Thus, if I speak of Jarmo, or Jericho, or Sialk as single examples of their particular kinds of assemblages, I don’t mean that they were unique at all. I think I could take you to the sites of at least three more Jarmos, within twenty miles of the original one. They are there, but they simply haven’t yet been excavated. In 1956, a Danish expedition discovered material of Jarmo type at Shimshara, only two dozen miles northeast of Jarmo, and below an assemblage of Hassunan type (which I shall describe presently).

THE GAP BETWEEN KARIM SHAHIR AND JARMO

As we see the matter now, there is probably still a gap in the available archeological record between the Karim Shahir-M’lefaat-Zawi Chemi group (of the incipient era) and that of Jarmo (of the village-farming era). Although some items of the Jarmo type materials do reflect the beginnings of traditions set in the Karim Shahir group (see p. 120), there is not a clear continuity. Moreover—to the degree that we may trust a few radiocarbon dates—there would appear to be around two thousand years of difference in time. The single available Zawi Chemi “date” is 8900 ± 300 B.C.; the most reasonable group of “dates” from Jarmo average to about 6750 ± 200 B.C. I am uncertain about this two thousand years—I do not think it can have been so long.

This suggests that we still have much work to do in Iraq. You can imagine how earnestly we await the return of political stability in the Republic of Iraq.

JARMO, IN THE KURDISH HILLS, IRAQ

The site of Jarmo has a depth of deposit of about twenty-seven feet, and approximately a dozen layers of architectural renovation and change. Nevertheless it is a “one period” site: its assemblage remains essentially the same throughout, although one or two new items are added in later levels. It covers about four acres of the top of a bluff, below which runs a small stream. Jarmo lies in the hill country east of the modern oil town of Kirkuk. The Iraq Directorate General of Antiquities suggested that we look at it in 1948, and we have had three seasons of digging on it since.

The people of Jarmo grew the barley plant and two different kinds of wheat. They made flint sickles with which to reap their grain, mortars or querns on which to crack it, ovens in which it might be parched, and stone bowls out of which they might eat their porridge. We are sure that they had the domesticated goat, but Professor Reed (the staff zoologist) is not convinced that the bones of the other potentially domesticable animals of Jarmo—sheep, cattle, pig, horse, dog—show sure signs of domestication. We had first thought that all of these animals were domesticated ones, but Reed feels he must find out much more before he can be sure. As well as their grain and the meat from their animals, the people of Jarmo consumed great quantities of land snails. Botanically, the Jarmo wheat stands about half way between fully bred wheat and the wild forms.

ARCHITECTURE: HALL-MARK OF THE VILLAGE

The sure sign of the village proper is in its traces of architectural permanence. The houses of Jarmo were only the size of a small cottage by our standards, but each was provided with several rectangular rooms. The walls of the houses were made of puddled mud, often set on crude foundations of stone. (The puddled mud wall, which the Arabs call touf, is built by laying a three to six inch course of soft mud, letting this sun-dry for a day or two, then adding the next course, etc.) The village probably looked much like the simple Kurdish farming village of today, with its mud-walled houses and low mud-on-brush roofs. I doubt that the Jarmo village had more than twenty houses at any one moment of its existence. Today, an average of about seven people live in a comparable Kurdish house; probably the population of Jarmo was about 150 people.

It is interesting that portable pottery does not appear until the last third of the life of the Jarmo village. Throughout the duration of the village, however, its people had experimented with the plastic qualities of clay. They modeled little figurines of animals and of human beings in clay; one type of human figurine they favored was that of a markedly pregnant woman, probably the expression of some sort of fertility spirit. They provided their house floors with baked-in-place depressions, either as basins or hearths, and later with domed ovens of clay. As we’ve noted, the houses themselves were of clay or mud; one could almost say they were built up like a house-sized pot. Then, finally, the idea of making portable pottery itself appeared, although I very much doubt that the people of the Jarmo village discovered the art.

On the other hand, the old tradition of making flint blades and microlithic tools was still very strong at Jarmo. The sickle-blade was made in quantities, but so also were many of the much older tool types. Strangely enough, it is within this age-old category of chipped stone tools that we see one of the clearest pointers to a newer age. Many of the Jarmo chipped stone tools—microliths—were made of obsidian, a black volcanic natural glass. The obsidian beds nearest to Jarmo are over three hundred miles to the north. Already a bulk carrying trade had been established—the forerunner of commerce—and the routes were set by which, in later times, the metal trade was to move.

There are now twelve radioactive carbon “dates” from Jarmo. The most reasonable cluster of determinations averages to about 6750 ± 200 B.C., although there is a completely unreasonable range of “dates” running from 3250 to 9250 B.C.! If I am right in what I take to be “reasonable,” the first flush of the food-producing revolution had been achieved almost nine thousand years ago.

HASSUNA, IN UPPER MESOPOTAMIAN IRAQ

We are not sure just how soon after Jarmo the next assemblage of Iraqi material is to be placed. I do not think the time was long, and there are a few hints that detailed habits in the making of pottery and ground stone tools were actually continued from Jarmo times into the time of the next full assemblage. This is called after a site named Hassuna, a few miles to the south and west of modern Mosul. We also have Hassunan type materials from several other sites in the same general region. It is probably too soon to make generalizations about it, but the Hassunan sites seem to cluster at slightly lower elevations than those we have been talking about so far.

The catalogue of the Hassuna assemblage is of course more full and elaborate than that of Jarmo. The Iraqi government’s archeologists who dug Hassuna itself, exposed evidence of increasing architectural know-how. The walls of houses were still formed of puddled mud; sun-dried bricks appear only in later periods. There were now several different ways of making and decorating pottery vessels. One style of pottery painting, called the Samarran style, is an extremely handsome one and must have required a great deal of concentration and excellence of draftsmanship. On the other hand, the old habits for the preparation of good chipped stone tools—still apparent at Jarmo—seem to have largely disappeared by Hassunan times. The flint work of the Hassunan catalogue is, by and large, a wretched affair. We might guess that the kinaesthetic concentration of the Hassuna craftsmen now went into other categories; that is, they suddenly discovered they might have more fun working with the newer materials. It’s a shame, for example, that none of their weaving is preserved for us.

The two available radiocarbon determinations from Hassunan contexts stand at about 5100 and 5600 B.C. ± 250 years.

OTHER EARLY VILLAGE SITES IN THE NUCLEAR AREA

I’ll now name and very briefly describe a few of the other early village assemblages either in or adjacent to the hilly flanks of the crescent. Unfortunately, we do not have radioactive carbon dates for many of these materials. We may guess that some particular assemblage, roughly comparable to that of Hassuna, for example, must reflect a culture which lived at just about the same time as that of Hassuna. We do this guessing on the basis of the general similarity and degree of complexity of the Sears Roebuck catalogues of the particular assemblage and that of Hassuna. We suppose that for sites near at hand and of a comparable cultural level, as indicated by their generally similar assemblages, the dating must be about the same. We may also know that in a general stratigraphic sense, the sites in question may both appear at the bottom of the ascending village sequence in their respective areas. Without a number of consistent radioactive carbon dates, we cannot be precise about priorities.

The ancient mound at Jericho, in the Dead Sea valley in Palestine, yields some very interesting material. Its catalogue somewhat resembles that of Jarmo, especially in the sense that there is a fair depth of deposit without portable pottery vessels. On the other hand, the architecture of Jericho is surprisingly complex, with traces of massive stone fortification walls and the general use of formed sun-dried mud brick. Jericho lies in a somewhat strange and tropically lush ecological niche, some seven hundred feet below sea level; it is geographically within the hilly-flanks zone but environmentally not part of it.

Several radiocarbon “dates” for Jericho fall within the range of those I find reasonable for Jarmo, and their internal statistical consistency is far better than that for the Jarmo determinations. It is not yet clear exactly what this means.

The mound at Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) contains a remarkably fine sequence, which perhaps does not have the gap we noted in Iraqi-Kurdistan between the Karim Shahir group and Jarmo. While I am not sure that the Jericho sequence will prove valid for those parts of Palestine outside the special Dead Sea environmental niche, the sequence does appear to proceed from the local variety of Natufian into that of a very well settled community. So far, we have little direct evidence for the food-production basis upon which the Jericho people subsisted.

There is an early village assemblage with strong characteristics of its own in the land bordering the northeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea, where Syria and the Cilician province of Turkey join. This early Syro-Cilician assemblage must represent a general cultural pattern which was at least in part contemporary with that of the Hassuna assemblage. These materials from the bases of the mounds at Mersin, and from Judaidah in the Amouq plain, as well as from a few other sites, represent the remains of true villages. The walls of their houses were built of puddled mud, but some of the house foundations were of stone. Several different kinds of pottery were made by the people of these villages. None of it resembles the pottery from Hassuna or from the upper levels of Jarmo or Jericho. The Syro-Cilician people had not lost their touch at working flint. An important southern variation of the Syro-Cilician assemblage has been cleared recently at Byblos, a port town famous in later Phoenician times. There are three radiocarbon determinations which suggest that the time range for these developments was in the sixth or early fifth millennium B.C.

It would be fascinating to search for traces of even earlier village-farming communities and for the remains of the incipient cultivation era, in the Syro-Cilician region.

THE IRANIAN PLATEAU AND THE NILE VALLEY

The map on page 125 shows some sites which lie either outside or in an extension of the hilly-flanks zone proper. From the base of the great mound at Sialk on the Iranian plateau came an assemblage of early village material, generally similar, in the kinds of things it contained, to the catalogues of Hassuna and Judaidah. The details of how things were made are different; the Sialk assemblage represents still another cultural pattern. I suspect it appeared a bit later in time than did that of Hassuna. There is an important new item in the Sialk catalogue. The Sialk people made small drills or pins of hammered copper. Thus the metallurgist’s specialized craft had made its appearance.

There is at least one very early Iranian site on the inward slopes of the hilly-flanks zone. It is the earlier of two mounds at a place called Bakun, in southwestern Iran; the results of the excavations there are not yet published and we only know of its coarse and primitive pottery. I only mention Bakun because it helps us to plot the extent of the hilly-flanks zone villages on the map.

The Nile Valley lies beyond the peculiar environmental zone of the hilly flanks of the crescent, and it is probable that the earliest village-farming communities in Egypt were established by a few people who wandered into the Nile delta area from the nuclear area. The assemblage which is most closely comparable to the catalogue of Hassuna or Judaidah, for example, is that from little settlements along the shore of the Fayum lake. The Fayum materials come mainly from grain bins or silos. Another site, Merimde, in the western part of the Nile delta, shows the remains of a true village, but it may be slightly later than the settlement of the Fayum. There are radioactive carbon “dates” for the Fayum materials at about 4275 B.C. ± 320 years, which is almost fifteen hundred years later than the determinations suggested for the Hassunan or Syro-Cilician assemblages. I suspect that this is a somewhat over-extended indication of the time it took for the generalized cultural pattern of village-farming community life to spread from the nuclear area down into Egypt, but as yet we have no way of testing these matters.

In this same vein, we have two radioactive carbon dates for an assemblage from sites near Khartoum in the Sudan, best represented by the mound called Shaheinab. The Shaheinab catalogue roughly corresponds to that of the Fayum; the distance between the two places, as the Nile flows, is roughly 1,500 miles. Thus it took almost a thousand years for the new way of life to be carried as far south into Africa as Khartoum; the two Shaheinab “dates” average about 3300 B.C. ± 400 years.

If the movement was up the Nile (southward), as these dates suggest, then I suspect that the earliest available village material of middle Egypt, the so-called Tasian, is also later than that of the Fayum. The Tasian materials come from a few graves near a village called Deir Tasa, and I have an uncomfortable feeling that the Tasian “assemblage” may be mainly an artificial selection of poor examples of objects which belong in the following range of time.

SPREAD IN TIME AND SPACE

There are now two things we can do; in fact, we have already begun to do them. We can watch the spread of the new way of life upward through time in the nuclear area. We can also see how the new way of life spread outward in space from the nuclear area, as time went on. There is good archeological evidence that both these processes took place. For the hill country of northeastern Iraq, in the nuclear area, we have already noticed how the succession (still with gaps) from Karim Shahir, through M’lefaat and Jarmo, to Hassuna can be charted (see chart, p. 111). In the next chapter, we shall continue this charting and description of what happened in Iraq upward through time. We also watched traces of the new way of life move through space up the Nile into Africa, to reach Khartoum in the Sudan some thirty-five hundred years later than we had seen it at Jarmo or Jericho. We caught glimpses of it in the Fayum and perhaps at Tasa along the way.

For the remainder of this chapter, I shall try to suggest briefly for you the directions taken by the spread of the new way of life from the nuclear area in the Near East. First, let me make clear again that I do not believe that the village-farming community way of life was invented only once and in the Near East. It seems to me that the evidence is very clear that a separate experiment arose in the New World. For China, the question of independence or borrowing—in the appearance of the village-farming community there—is still an open one. In the last chapter, we noted the probability of an independent nuclear area in southeastern Asia. Professor Carl Sauer strongly champions the great importance of this area as the original center of agricultural pursuits, as a kind of “cradle” of all incipient eras of the Old World at least. While there is certainly not the slightest archeological evidence to allow us to go that far, we may easily expect that an early southeast Asian development would have been felt in China. However, the appearance of the village-farming community in the northwest of India, at least, seems to have depended on the earlier development in the Near East. It is also probable that ideas of the new way of life moved well beyond Khartoum in Africa.

THE SPREAD OF THE VILLAGE-FARMING COMMUNITY WAY OF LIFE INTO EUROPE

How about Europe? I won’t give you many details. You can easily imagine that the late prehistoric prelude to European history is a complicated affair. We all know very well how complicated an area Europe is now, with its welter of different languages and cultures. Remember, however, that a great deal of archeology has been done on the late prehistory of Europe, and very little on that of further Asia and Africa. If we knew as much about these areas as we do of Europe, I expect we’d find them just as complicated.

This much is clear for Europe, as far as the spread of the village-community way of life is concerned. The general idea and much of the know-how and the basic tools of food-production moved from the Near East to Europe. So did the plants and animals which had been domesticated; they were not naturally at home in Europe, as they were in western Asia. I do not, of course, mean that there were traveling salesmen who carried these ideas and things to Europe with a commercial gleam in their eyes. The process took time, and the ideas and things must have been passed on from one group of people to the next. There was also some actual movement of peoples, but we don’t know the size of the groups that moved.

The story of the “colonization” of Europe by the first farmers is thus one of (1) the movement from the eastern Mediterranean lands of some people who were farmers; (2) the spread of ideas and things beyond the Near East itself and beyond the paths along which the “colonists” moved; and (3) the adaptations of the ideas and things by the indigenous “Forest folk”, about whose “receptiveness” Professor Mathiassen speaks (p. 97). It is important to note that the resulting cultures in the new European environment were European, not Near Eastern. The late Professor Childe remarked that “the peoples of the West were not slavish imitators; they adapted the gifts from the East ... into a new and organic whole capable of developing on its own original lines.”

THE WAYS TO EUROPE

Suppose we want to follow the traces of those earliest village-farmers who did travel from western Asia into Europe. Let us start from Syro-Cilicia, that part of the hilly-flanks zone proper which lies in the very northeastern corner of the Mediterranean. Three ways would be open to us (of course we could not be worried about permission from the Soviet authorities!). We would go north, or north and slightly east, across Anatolian Turkey, and skirt along either shore of the Black Sea or even to the east of the Caucasus Mountains along the Caspian Sea, to reach the plains of Ukrainian Russia. From here, we could march across eastern Europe to the Baltic and Scandinavia, or even hook back southwestward to Atlantic Europe.

Our second way from Syro-Cilicia would also lie over Anatolia, to the northwest, where we would have to swim or raft ourselves over the Dardanelles or the Bosphorus to the European shore. Then we would bear left toward Greece, but some of us might turn right again in Macedonia, going up the valley of the Vardar River to its divide and on down the valley of the Morava beyond, to reach the Danube near Belgrade in Jugoslavia. Here we would turn left, following the great river valley of the Danube up into central Europe. We would have a number of tributary valleys to explore, or we could cross the divide and go down the valley of the Rhine to the North Sea.

Our third way from Syro-Cilicia would be by sea. We would coast along southern Anatolia and visit Cyprus, Crete, and the Aegean islands on our way to Greece, where, in the north, we might meet some of those who had taken the second route. From Greece, we would sail on to Italy and the western isles, to reach southern France and the coasts of Spain. Eventually a few of us would sail up the Atlantic coast of Europe, to reach western Britain and even Ireland.

Of course none of us could ever take these journeys as the first farmers took them, since the whole course of each journey must have lasted many lifetimes. The date given to the assemblage called Windmill Hill, the earliest known trace of village-farming communities in England, is about 2500 B.C. I would expect about 5500 B.C. to be a safe date to give for the well-developed early village communities of Syro-Cilicia. We suspect that the spread throughout Europe did not proceed at an even rate. Professor Piggott writes that “at a date probably about 2600 B.C., simple agricultural communities were being established in Spain and southern France, and from the latter region a spread northwards can be traced ... from points on the French seaboard of the [English] Channel ... there were emigrations of a certain number of these tribes by boat, across to the chalk lands of Wessex and Sussex [in England], probably not more than three or four generations later than the formation of the south French colonies.”

New radiocarbon determinations are becoming available all the time—already several suggest that the food-producing way of life had reached the lower Rhine and Holland by 4000 B.C. But not all prehistorians accept these “dates,” so I do not show them on my map (p. 139).

THE EARLIEST FARMERS OF ENGLAND

To describe the later prehistory of all Europe for you would take another book and a much larger one than this is. Therefore, I have decided to give you only a few impressions of the later prehistory of Britain. Of course the British Isles lie at the other end of Europe from our base-line in western Asia. Also, they received influences along at least two of the three ways in which the new way of life moved into Europe. We will look at more of their late prehistory in a following chapter: here, I shall speak only of the first farmers.

The assemblage called Windmill Hill, which appears in the south of England, exhibits three different kinds of structures, evidence of grain-growing and of stock-breeding, and some distinctive types of pottery and stone implements. The most remarkable type of structure is the earthwork enclosures which seem to have served as seasonal cattle corrals. These enclosures were roughly circular, reached over a thousand feet in diameter, and sometimes included two or three concentric sets of banks and ditches. Traces of oblong timber houses have been found, but not within the enclosures. The second type of structure is mine-shafts, dug down into the chalk beds where good flint for the making of axes or hoes could be found. The third type of structure is long simple mounds or “unchambered barrows,” in one end of which burials were made. It has been commonly believed that the Windmill Hill assemblage belonged entirely to the cultural tradition which moved up through France to the Channel. Professor Piggott is now convinced, however, that important elements of Windmill Hill stem from northern Germany and Denmark—products of the first way into Europe from the east.

The archeological traces of a second early culture are to be found in the west of England, western and northern Scotland, and most of Ireland. The bearers of this culture had come up the Atlantic coast by sea from southern France and Spain. The evidence they have left us consists mainly of tombs and the contents of tombs, with only very rare settlement sites. The tombs were of some size and received the bodies of many people. The tombs themselves were built of stone, heaped over with earth; the stones enclosed a passage to a central chamber (“passage graves”), or to a simple long gallery, along the sides of which the bodies were laid (“gallery graves”). The general type of construction is called “megalithic” (= great stone), and the whole earth-mounded structure is often called a barrow. Since many have proper chambers, in one sense or another, we used the term “unchambered barrow” above to distinguish those of the Windmill Hill type from these megalithic structures. There is some evidence for sacrifice, libations, and ceremonial fires, and it is clear that some form of community ritual was focused on the megalithic tombs.

The cultures of the people who produced the Windmill Hill assemblage and of those who made the megalithic tombs flourished, at least in part, at the same time. Although the distributions of the two different types of archeological traces are in quite different parts of the country, there is Windmill Hill pottery in some of the megalithic tombs. But the tombs also contain pottery which seems to have arrived with the tomb builders themselves.

The third early British group of antiquities of this general time (following 2500 B.C.) comes from sites in southern and eastern England. It is not so certain that the people who made this assemblage, called Peterborough, were actually farmers. While they may on occasion have practiced a simple agriculture, many items of their assemblage link them closely with that of the “Forest folk” of earlier times in England and in the Baltic countries. Their pottery is decorated with impressions of cords and is quite different from that of Windmill Hill and the megalithic builders. In addition, the distribution of their finds extends into eastern Britain, where the other cultures have left no trace. The Peterborough people had villages with semi-subterranean huts, and the bones of oxen, pigs, and sheep have been found in a few of these. On the whole, however, hunting and fishing seem to have been their vital occupations. They also established trade routes especially to acquire the raw material for stone axes.

A probably slightly later culture, whose traces are best known from Skara Brae on Orkney, also had its roots in those cultures of the Baltic area which fused out of the meeting of the “Forest folk” and the peoples who took the eastern way into Europe. Skara Brae is very well preserved, having been built of thin stone slabs about which dune-sand drifted after the village died. The individual houses, the bedsteads, the shelves, the chests for clothes and oddments—all built of thin stone-slabs—may still be seen in place. But the Skara Brae people lived entirely by sheep- and cattle-breeding, and by catching shellfish. Neither grain nor the instruments of agriculture appeared at Skara Brae.

THE EUROPEAN ACHIEVEMENT

The above is only a very brief description of what went on in Britain with the arrival of the first farmers. There are many interesting details which I have omitted in order to shorten the story.

I believe some of the difficulty we have in understanding the establishment of the first farming communities in Europe is with the word “colonization.” We have a natural tendency to think of “colonization” as it has happened within the last few centuries. In the case of the colonization of the Americas, for example, the colonists came relatively quickly, and in increasingly vast numbers. They had vastly superior technical, political, and war-making skills, compared with those of the Indians. There was not much mixing with the Indians. The case in Europe five or six thousand years ago must have been very different. I wonder if it is even proper to call people “colonists” who move some miles to a new region, settle down and farm it for some years, then move on again, generation after generation? The ideas and the things which these new people carried were only potentially superior. The ideas and things and the people had to prove themselves in their adaptation to each new environment. Once this was done another link to the chain would be added, and then the forest-dwellers and other indigenous folk of Europe along the way might accept the new ideas and things. It is quite reasonable to expect that there must have been much mixture of the migrants and the indigenes along the way; the Peterborough and Skara Brae assemblages we mentioned above would seem to be clear traces of such fused cultures. Sometimes, especially if the migrants were moving by boat, long distances may have been covered in a short time. Remember, however, we seem to have about three thousand years between the early Syro-Cilician villages and Windmill Hill.

Let me repeat Professor Childe again. “The peoples of the West were not slavish imitators: they adapted the gifts from the East ... into a new and organic whole capable of developing on its own original lines.” Childe is of course completely conscious of the fact that his “peoples of the West” were in part the descendants of migrants who came originally from the “East,” bringing their “gifts” with them. This was the late prehistoric achievement of Europe—to take new ideas and things and some migrant peoples and, by mixing them with the old in its own environments, to forge a new and unique series of cultures.

What we know of the ways of men suggests to us that when the details of the later prehistory of further Asia and Africa are learned, their stories will be just as exciting.