Europe: A History (17 page)
Today’s prehistorians also place great emphasis on the processes of prehistoric social change. Time was when almost all new cultural phenomena were explained in terms of human migration. The emergence of new burial practices, of new rites, of new artefacts, or of a new language group was automatically linked to the presumed arrival of new peoples. Now, though prehistoric migrations are not discounted, it is well understood that material and cultural changes can be explained in terms of evolution within existing populations. Technological advances, religious conversions, and linguistic evolutions must all be taken into consideration.
European prehistory has to be related to two chronologies of entirely different orders of magnitude. Geological time, which spans the estimated 4,550 million
years since the formation of the earth, is divided into eras, periods, and epochs from the Azoic to the Holocene. Human life, in contrast, is confined to the terminal tip of geological time. Its earliest origins occur in Africa in the middle of the Pliocene. It reaches Europe in the middle of Pleistocene. It does not move into the stage called ‘Civilization’ until after the end of the Quaternary. Europe in its present form is no more than five million years old; and the human presence in Europe has not lasted for more than one million years (see Appendix III, p. 1215).
VENDANGE
H
ISTORICAL
climatology relies on records preserved in books, and on records preserved by nature herself. The former include diaries, travellers’ tales, and weather data kept by estate managers, grain merchants, or wine-growers. The latter involves the study of tree-rings, fossils, sediments, stalactites, and glaciers.
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The precision of Nature’s own records is amazing, even within historical times. The annual deposits of the great Salt Lake in Crimea have been logged to 2294
BC.
Some of the great stalagmites, such as that in the cave of Aven d’Orgnac in the Jura, are over 7,000 years old. Variations in the density of their calcite deposits faithfully reflect historical rainfall patterns.
Phenology is the study of fruit-ripening, and has been widely exploited in relation to the history of wine-harvests. Every year for centuries, many French vineyards issued a public proclamation of the date for commencing the collection of grapes. An early date signified a sunny growing season; a late date signified a cool season. By listing the dates of the
première cuvée
in a particular location, historians can produce complete ‘pheno-logical series’ over very long periods. By collating the phenological series for different locations, they can work out the mean seasonal date for each region. These
courbes de vendanges
or ‘wine-harvest curves’ present precise indications of climatic change.
2
(See Appendix III, p. 1220.)
The movement of glaciers provides another source of information. Glaciers advance in periods of cold, and retreat in periods of relative warmth. What is more, the length of Europe’s alpine glaciers in any particular year can often be established from eyewitness accounts, from old prints, or from official records. Archives such as those of the Chambre des Comptes de Savoie contain inspectors’ reports on glacial advances which destroyed villages or prevented the inhabitants from paying their tithes and taxes. In 1600, for example, a year of disaster at Chamonix, people on both the French and Italian side of Mont Blanc lived in fear for their future. Detailed studies of the
Mer de Glace
, of the
Rhonegletscher
in the Valais, or the
Vernagt
in Tyrol, all of whose termini in the late sixteenth century stood several kilometres below their current position, demonstrate the reality of Europe’s ‘Little Ice Age’. Periods of glacial maxima peaked in 1599–1600, 1640–50, 1680, 1716–20, and 1770. In 1653 local people defiantly placed a statue of St Ignatius at the base of the Aletsch glacier; and the glacier stopped. The contemporary glacial retreat has continued since 1850.
3
Climatic data are most convincing when different sources produce the same results. Wildly fluctuating weather in the 1530s, for example, is confirmed both by tree-rings from Germany, and by the Franco-Swiss vendanges (see Appendix III). The coldest year for Europe’s vineyards occurred in 1816. Collection of the ruined grapes began in eastern France on All Saints Day (1 November). Mary Shelley, vacationing in nearby Switzerland, could not even go out for walks. Instead, she stayed indoors, and invented Frankenstein.
C14
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0,000 years is the length of time within which isotopes of Carbon14 show measurable signs of radioactivity. This means that radiocarbon dating methods can be applied to organic materials from the late palaeolithic to the recent past. 35,000
BC
is approximately the date when the Neanderthals died out and when humans lived at Cromagnon.
The value of C14, whose exploitation gave rise to a Nobel prize for chemistry in 1960, derives from the spontaneous and steady rate of its decay. It is the only one of three carbon isotopes to be radioactive, and it accumulates in all living matter through the action of cosmic rays on the atmosphere. It is present in bones, body tissue, shells, meat, hair, rope, cloth, wood, and many other materials which abound on archaeological sites. It starts to decay as soon as the organism dies, and continues to do so over a half-life of 5,730 years and a mean life of c.8,033 years. A 1 per cent decrease can be measured to c.80 years.
The calibration of results is fraught with variables. But it has been greatly improved in recent years by the discovery of complementary techniques that provide a basis for comparison. Thermoluminescence (TL) and electron spin resonance (ESR), for example, detect minute changes caused by natural radioactivity in the crystal lattice of minerals, and are specially effective in dating ceramics. The examination of carbon isotopes by Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) has extended the chronological range to c.100,000 years, throwing doubt on previous age estimates of the oldest humanoid remains.
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After three decades of development, radiocarbon dating has been used to construct impressive data collections. Archaeologists of the mesolithic, for instance, can consult catalogues which list the dates of finds from all over Europe. A piece of linear beaded pottery from Eitzum in Lower Saxony is dated 6480 ± 210; charcoal from a site at Vlasac in Serbia, 7930 ± 77; a charred pine-branch from Calowanie near Warsaw, 10,030 ± 120.
2
Every new measurement consolidates the overall picture.
The most sensational challenge for C14, however, arose with the dating of the Turin Shroud. Supposedly brought to Europe from the Holy Land in the fourteenth century, the shroud bears the faint impression of a dead man’s face and body, and had been venerated as a relic of the Crucifixion. Tests undertaken in 1988–9 showed that the cloth of the shroud had been manufactured between
AD
1260 and 1390. But they did not explain the dead man’s image.
3
On the scale of geological time, the formation of the European Peninsula must be counted as a recent event. Eighty million years ago most of the land that was destined to constitute Europe lay half-submerged in a scattered archipelago of mid-ocean islands. After that, as the Adantic opened up to its fullest extent, the drifting African plate closed the ocean gap from the south. Five million years ago Africa was still directly joined to Eurasia, with the Alps and the Atlas mountains piled high on either side of the dry Mediterranean trench. But then ‘the natural dam at Gibraltar broke’. ‘A gigantic waterfall of sea-water, one hundred times the size of Victoria Falls’ rushed in, and completed the Peninsula’s familiar outline.
12
Two final afterthoughts less than ten thousand years ago opened up the English Channel and the Danish Sound, thereby creating first the British Isles and then the Baltic Sea.
Over the last million years, the young Peninsula lived through seventeen ice ages. At its greatest extent, the ice sheet reached to a line joining North Devon, Hanover, Cracow, and Kiev. Humanoid visitors made their appearance during the warmer interglacials. The earliest traces of Man in Europe have been found at sites near Vertesszölös in Hungary and at Isernia in Italy, both dated 850–700,000
BC.
At Isernia,
Homo erectus
ate a varied diet from the fauna of a savannah-type countryside. At Terra Amata, on the beach near Nice, a human footprint 400,000 years old was found in hard-baked fireside clay. In 1987 a cache of fossilized human remains was discovered deep in a cave chamber at Atapuerca near Burgos in Spain.
In the course of the ice ages, human evolution progressed though the stages of
homo erectus, homo sapiens
, and
homo sapiens sapiens
(modern humankind). The remains of a transitional creature were found in a quarry in the Neanderthal Valley near Dusseldorf in 1856, thereby provoking the public debate on human origins that has continued ever since,
[MONKEY]
The Neanderthals, with massive bones and short limbs, are thought to have been a specifically European variant adapted to glacial conditions. They used flint tools, understood the secret of fire, buried their dead, and cared for the living. Their particular brand of‘Mousterian’ stone technology was named after a site in Dordogne. They hunted in organized collectives, as shown by the sites at La Cotte de St Brelade on the island of Jersey, or more recently at Zwoleń in Poland, which was used over many millennia for the entrapment of stampeding horses and mammoths. They passed away some 40–35,000 years ago, during the last interglacial. Recent finds at St Césaire have suggested that they survived for a time alongside new immigrants who were arriving from Africa and the Middle East.
13
The newcomers were slight in build, but much more dexterous, possessing finger-bones only half as thick as those of their predecessors. As shown by remains from Sungir in northern Russia, they could thread very fine bone needles and could sew clothes. They are widely known as ‘cavemen’, but caves were only one of their habitats. They roamed the plains, hunting bison and mammoth and gathering wild plants. At Mezirich in Ukraine, one ice-age encampment has survived intact. Its spacious huts were built from hundreds of mammoth bones covered with hides,
[GAT-HUNTER]
The end of the last ice age was preceded by the daddy of all volcanic explosions. The pressure of the African plate had opened a fault-line running along the bed of the Mediterranean; and it created a string of volcanoes, which still exist. Some 36,000 years ago the largest of these volcanoes blew its cone, leaving a trail of volcanic ash that reached to the Volga. At Pozzuoli, near Naples, it left a
caldera
or crater ring some seven miles wide. It was the forerunner of all the great eruptions of historic times—at Thera in 1628
BC
(see pp. 93–4), at Vesuvius in
AD
79
[PANTA]
,
at Etna in 1669. It is a sobering reminder that mankind has always been skating on the fragile crust of its geological heritage.
By convention, the human sector of European prehistory is usually related to the ‘Three-Age System’ of Stone, Bronze, and Iron. The system was first set out in 1836 by a Danish antiquary, Christian Thomsen; and it provides a framework of time based on the changing implements of primitive man. Hence, the palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) refers to the vast period before the end of the ice ages when Man worked with chipped stone tools. The mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) refers to the much more recent period following the last of the ice, c.8000–3000
BC.
The two millennia which preceded the Christian or Common Era, which forms our own, arbitrary scheme of chronology
[ANNO DOMINI]
,
were taken up successively by the neolithic (New Stone Age), the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. Each of these technological ‘Ages’ can be subdivided into early, middle, and late phases. It is essential to remember, however, that the Three-Age System is
not
based on any absolute scale of time. At any given moment, one place might have lingered in the neolithic whilst others had reached the Iron Age. In any given region, there could be peoples living at different stages of development, or using different forms of technology simultaneously.
The Old Stone Age reached back for a million years. It overlapped with the penultimate era of quaternary geological time, the Pleistocene, and with the last great glaciations—known respectively as Mindel, Riss, and Wiirm. Apart from Neanderthal and Le Moustier, invaluable finds have been made at Cromagnon (1868), Grimaldi (1874), Combe-Capelle (1909), Chancelade (1888), and at all points between Abbeville and Ojców, each associated with particular humanoid types, periods, or cultures. At Aurignac, Solutré, and Abri La Madeleine, sculptures of the human form first appeared in the shape of figurines such as the ‘Venus of Willendorf’ or the ‘Venus of Laussel’. With the Magdalenian period, at the end of the palaeolithic age when bone tools were in fashion, under the shadow of the last ice cap, the high point of cave art was reached. Magnificent
subterranean galleries have survived at Altamira in Spain (1879) and at Lascaux in Dordogne (1940), leading some commentators to talk of a ‘Franco-Cantabrian School’. In a cave near Mentón on the Riviera, a hoard of
Cassis rufa
shells from the Indian Ocean was found. The shells were thought to possess life-giving powers, and their presence would seem to conñrm both a sophisticated religious system and a far-flung trading network.
14
[LAUSSEL]
GAT-HUNTER
T
HE
origins of organized political communities, or ‘states’, have rarely been sought before the neolithic period. Some theorists, including Marxists, have looked to the tribes and tribal chiefdoms of the Bronze and Iron Ages. Others have looked to the neolithic revolution in agriculture and to the associated growth of fixed settlement. According to V. Gordon Childe, for instance, the preconditions for a state organized on residence, not kinship, required territorial authority, surplus capital, symbolic monuments, long-distance trade, labour specialization, stratified society, scientific knowledge, and the art of writing. Such preconditions were first met in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and in Europe, in the city-states of ancient Greece (see Chapter II).
Analysis of the complex society of hunter-gatherers, however, projects the topic much further back in time. Hunter-gatherers or gatherer-hunters, it seems, were not saved by the advent of agriculture from the immemorial threat of extinction. On the contrary, they enjoyed many millennia of ‘unending leisure and affluence’. They were not unfamiliar with agriculture when it arose, but rejected it, except as a marginal or supplementary activity.
What is more, in the later stages of prehistory they developed social structures which permitted differentiated specialization. In addition to the far-roaming hunter-warriors and the home-based gatherers, some groups could specialize in the new labour-intensive processes of fishing, seafood collection, harvesting wild grass and nuts, or bird-trapping. Others were free to specialize as organizers or as negotiators in the formation of federations and regional alliances. In other words, the hunter-gatherer bands possessed an embryonic representative and political class. The historical problem can be addressed by analogy with the native peoples of North America, Australia, or New Guinea.
The big question about the hunter-gatherers, therefore, does not seem to be ‘How did they progress towards the higher level of an agricultural and politicised society?’ but ‘What persuaded them to abandon the secure, well-provided and psychologically liberating advantages of their primordial lifestyle?’.
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