CHAPTER XIV
THE GROWTH OF CIVILIZATION: OLD WORLD PREHISTORY AND ARCHÆOLOGY
211. Sources of knowledge.—212. Chronology of the grand divisions of culture history.—213. The Lower and Upper Palæolithic.—214. Race influence and regional differentiation in the Lower Palæolithic.—215. Upper Palæolithic culture growths and races.—216. The Palæolithic aftermath: Azilian.—217. The Neolithic: its early phase.—218. Pottery and the bow.—219. Bone tools.—220. The dog.—221. The hewn ax.—222. The Full Neolithic.—223. Origin of domesticated animals and plants.—224. Other traits of the Full Neolithic.—225. The Bronze Age: Copper and Bronze phases.—226. Traits associated with bronze.—227. Iron.—228. First use and spread of iron.—229. The Hallstadt and La Tène Periods.—230. Summary of development: Regional differentiation.—231. The Scandinavian area as an example.—232. The late Palæolithic Ancylus or Maglemose Period.—233. The Early Neolithic Litorina or Kitchenmidden Period.—234. The Full Neolithic and its subdivisions in Scandinavia.—235. The Bronze Age and its periods in Scandinavia.—236. Problems of chronology.—237. Principles of the prehistoric spread of culture.
211. SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE
The story of the growth and development of culture in the Western Hemisphere which has been sketched in reconstruction in the last chapter is built up from the incomplete information of excavations and the indirect evidence of culture trait distributions and analyses. Earlier than about ten thousand years ago, this hemisphere has no known human history. In the Old World, conditions are doubly different. There is a long primeval record, stretching perhaps a hundred thousand years beyond 8000 B.C., documented much like the subsequent culture history of America, but with a wealth of geological, faunal, and skeletal data to compensate for the loss of ancient cultural evidences in the lapse of time. Secondly, for the last ten thousand years, there is a fuller record than for America. This greater fullness is partly due to the earlier start toward its higher forms which civilization took in the Eastern Hemisphere. And this relatively early advancement brought it about that by 3000 B.C. adequate systems of writing had been achieved in Africa and Asia, so that contemporary inscriptions have been preserved to throw direct light on the thoughts and institutions of the people of that day, and to date the centuries of their rulers for us. These last five thousand years thus belong to history, rather than to prehistory, in some parts of the hemisphere; and they allow many a close inference as to what happened in the previous five thousand years when writing was as yet unknown or its first systems were being evolved.
These ten thousand years since the close of the Old Stone Age, half of them studied by the methods of anthropology, half also by those of history, and the whole forming the richest field in human culture history, are the subjects of the present chapter and the next.
First, however, it is necessary to refer back to the earliest known development of civilization in the Old Stone Age (Chapter VI), whose close is our present starting point.
212. CHRONOLOGY OF THE GRAND DIVISIONS OF CULTURE HISTORY
The period of human existence since the first tool was made is generally divided into four grand divisions (§ 66, 67): the Palæolithic or Old Stone Age; the Neolithic or New Stone Age; the Bronze Age; and the Iron Age. The duration of these four ages is diverse and notably diminishing from earliest to latest. The last three are comprised within the past ten thousand years: 8000 B.C. may be looked upon as a reasonably accurate date for the commencement of the Neolithic. For western Europe, at least, the probable error of this date is not over one or at most two thousand years. Back of this approximately fixed point stretches the immeasurably longer Palæolithic, for the determination of whose duration there is available not even any semi-historical evidence, and which can only be estimated in terms of geological alterations, continental glaciations, and faunal and floral changes—all unsatisfactory means for arriving at an absolute chronology expressible in years.
To a vague 100,000 B.C. as the tentative figure for the beginning of the Palæolithic, and an approximate 8000 B.C. for the commencement of the Neolithic, there can be added 3000 B.C. for the onset of the Bronze and 1000 B.C. of the Iron Age. The last two dates are averages only. The Greek islands, for instance, received bronze about this period, the Orient had it earlier, western Europe not until about 2500 B.C., northern Europe still later. In the same way, iron is well attested for western Asia in the thirteenth century before Christ, for Central Europe and France about 900 B.C., in Scandinavia some centuries later, in fact becoming abundant only shortly before the Roman period.
In the wide sense, the outstanding generalizations derivable from these figures are twofold. As regards the later periods, those of metal and probably the Neolithic, the west lagged behind the east, the north behind the south; Asia preceded and invented, Europe followed and imitated. As regards the entire duration, a tremendous disproportion is observable. The vast bulk of the total time of culture is covered by the Palæolithic: the three following Ages are all squeezed into a tenth of the whole. Within this fraction again the Neolithic takes up half, leaving the two metal Ages to divide the other half between them. There is a clear tendency toward acceleration of development.
213. THE LOWER AND UPPER PALÆOLITHIC
Within the Old Stone Age, a primary division is to be made between the Lower and Upper Palæolithic. The Lower Palæolithic comprises the Chellean, Acheulean, and Mousterian periods, when Europe was inhabited by Neandertal man, who was distinct from the modern human species, and possibly by a pre-Neandertal race not yet discovered. The Upper Palæolithic, or Reindeer Age, consists of the Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian, with the Azilian as epilogue. Through these Upper Palæolithic periods long-headed branches of _Homo sapiens_—ourselves—existed: the Cro-Magnon, Grimaldi, and Brünn types, some of them foreshadowing the existing Caucasian and Negroid races (§ 14, 16-18). The longest step forward in the development of European Palæolithic civilization comes in the passage from its Lower to its Upper phase. Before this transition, new achievements were rare and their total small. The use of fire, of flint cores and flakes, of fracturing and retouching, possibly the use of wooden handles, a minimal employment of bone, and a definite disposal of the dead, about sum up known human attainments to the end of the Lower Palæolithic (§ 81).
Compared with this stock of culture, that of the Upper Palæolithic is elaborate. Bone awls and weapon points; shell necklaces and armlets; clothing; painting of the dead; sculpture and engraving—a greater number of elements than the Lower Palæolithic had been able to accumulate in perhaps 75,000 years—appear in the Aurignacian. The foundations of the whole of the Upper Palæolithic civilization were laid in this period. That the Solutrean added needles and surface retouching of flint, the Magdalenian a more vigorous development of pictorial line and use of colors, lamps, harpoons, and spear throwers, represented in the main only an enriching of the general Upper Palæolithic culture, whose essentials were determined at the outset.[32]
214. RACE INFLUENCE AND REGIONAL DIFFERENTIATION IN THE LOWER PALÆOLITHIC
This profound change raises a natural conjecture. The Lower Palæolithic culture, at least in its latest form, was carried by Neandertal man; Upper Palæolithic culture is in great part associated with Cro-Magnon man, whose anatomy was nearer our own. Did not this relatively modern structure involve also a relatively modern set of mental faculties, and these in turn, by their own sheer worth, produce the richer culture? The supposition is plausible enough, and has been made. But it is sounder procedure to withhold commitment of opinion. The inference involves the assumption that approach to our own bodily type is accompanied by higher native intelligence; and the further assumption that higher intelligence will automatically produce advance in civilization. Probable as both these assumptions may seem, they are still undemonstrated, in general and in particular. The application of the assumptions to the facts therefore gives an apparent explanation in terms of an ultimate but really unknown causality. By accepting this hypothetical causality, it turns attention away from the question of its validity. But the validity of the causal relation between the body and intelligence, and between intelligence and culture, is precisely a point that needs elucidation. It needs elucidation as much as does the change of civilization that occurred in Europe about 25,000 years ago; and is a much broader problem—indeed, part of the most fundamental problem that anthropology still faces as unsolved. Instead of a snapping interpretation of a dubious point in human history in terms of a couple of still more dubious principles, it will be wiser to lay these principles aside, for a time at least, and to reconsider more intensively the facts bearing on the particular point at issue.
There are two obvious lines of evidence that may help to throw light on the change from the Lower to the Upper Palæolithic, and in fact aid understanding of the whole Palæolithic. The first comprises the relations between western Europe and other areas during that period; the second, regional differences within Europe. In the previous chapter on the Palæolithic, such considerations have been disregarded in favor of a schematic presentation of what seemed the salient facts in a field made sufficiently difficult by the antiquity and incompleteness of data. The best of these data, and those which arrange themselves most systematically, are those from Europe, which have therefore been presented as if they constituted a self-sufficient unit. But it is unlikely that the culture should have developed in Europe in complete detachment for a hundred thousand years or that it should have remained identical over the whole of that continent. It is necessary, in short, to revise the simple outline of Chapter VI by giving heed to geographical and other disturbing considerations.
First of all, it is well to realize that what has heretofore been called the first tool, the Chellean pick or coup-de-poing, was not so much the only tool of its period as the most characteristic one. It seems to have been accompanied at all times and everywhere by smaller, less regularly made implements, some of which were even worked out of flakes instead of cores and subjected to crude blow-retouching. Further, these medium-sized pieces were probably “invented” before the coup-de-poing; which is after all what might be expected, the coup-de-poing being a comparatively effective, regularly shaped, symmetrical implement involving both an ideal of form and a tolerable, rough skill to produce. Several Pre-Chellean stations, containing such smaller implements but no coups-de-poing, are now recognized by many specialists in prehistory. The most notable are those of St. Acheul and Abbeville, in northern France; the remainder are in the same part of that country, in Belgium, or in southern England, which at that time formed part of the continent. The fauna of some of these sites is an early one and has been attributed to the second interglacial era (§ 69) as compared with the third interglacial in which the Chellean and Acheulean fall.
When the Chellean proper, with its typical, well-developed picks, is examined, it becomes clear that the distribution of this distinctive form is limited to a narrow strip of westernmost Europe from Belgium to Spain. The picks recur in north and east Africa and the districts of Asia bordering on the Mediterranean. They may not be of exactly the same age in these regions as in westerly Europe, but they are of the same type, and in view of the continuity of their distribution must be historically connected. In fact, the coup-de-poing Chellean might well be described as essentially an African (or Africo-Asian) development which underwent an extension across what was then the land-bridge of Gibraltar up the Atlantic face of Europe (Fig. 37).
The remainder of Europe was evidently also inhabited in this era; but by people of a variant culture. From Germany eastward into Russia, possibly Siberia, implements were worked which in part suggest the Pre-Chellean ones of northern France, in part developments of such Pre-Chellean pieces, and in part forms approaching Mousterian types. They do not include Chellean picks. The name Pre-Mousterian has been proposed for this central and east European culture. This name is appropriate, provided it is remembered that Pre-Mousterian denotes not a phase intermediate between the Acheulean and Mousterian of western Europe, but a culture developed, like the Chellean, yet more or less independently, out of the Pre-Chellean, and approximately coeval with the pure Chellean of western Europe and its Acheulean continuation. In other words, two culture-areas, an African-west-European and an east European, begin to be discernible from an extremely early time in the Lower Palæolithic (Fig. 37).
During the Acheulean, the western culture spread somewhat: into southern England, southeastern France, Italy, and began to overlap with the eastern culture along the Rhine. In the Mousterian, an assimilation seems to have taken place: culture, or at least flint industry, became more uniform over the whole of Europe, and in a measure the near parts of Asia and Africa also. This general Mousterian culture, with its small implements and emphasis on retouching, seems more likely to have evolved out of the pickless eastern Pre-Mousterian than out of the western Chellean-Acheulean with its large hewn coups-de-poing.
This would suggest an eastern origin for Mousterian man—the Neandertal race. But it is well not to proceed beyond some slight probability on this point because it is by no means certain that culture traveled only as races traveled. In their simple way, culture contacts without migrations may have been substantially as effective in shaping or altering civilization fifty thousand years ago as to-day. For all that can be demonstrated at present, the Mousterian Neandertal men of western Europe may have been the blood descendants of the undiscovered Chellean-Acheulean inhabitants of western Europe who had learned more effective retouching and smaller tools from the east Europeans.
215. UPPER PALÆOLITHIC CULTURE GROWTHS AND RACES
With the advent of the Upper Palæolithic, possibly some 25,000 years ago, the divergent culture-areas of the early Lower Palæolithic which had become largely effaced during the Mousterian, emerge again; but with shifted boundaries. The line of demarcation now is no longer formed by the Rhine and the Alps, but by the Pyrenees. Throughout the Upper Palæolithic, most of Spain formed an annex to the North African province, whose culture has been named the Capsian after the type station of Gafsa in Algiers. The Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian as they have been previously described (§ 72-81) ran their course in a middle European belt stretching from France to Poland (Figs. 38, 39). Northern Spain, southern England, at times Italy and southern Russia, were more or less in this mid-European province. The Balkans remain insufficiently explored; all northernmost Europe was still uninhabited. In general, it may be said that the mid-European Upper Palæolithic culture is characterized by the associated traits of work in bone and art; the contemporary Spanish-African Capsian by specialization along the line of increasingly smaller and finer flint implements, culminating in neat microliths measurable only in fractions of inches.
The southern equivalent of the mid-European Aurignacian was the Lower Capsian, of at least equal territorial extent even in its narrowest form (Fig. 38). The industry of Syria at this period was allied to the Capsian of Africa and may be regarded as related to it. The rather scant remains of the age in Italy are perhaps also to be allied with the Capsian culture rather than with the true Aurignacian. This makes it look as if at this time a great Lower Capsian culture-area embraced nearly all the shores of the Mediterranean. As against this, the mid-European true Aurignacian, so far as now known, covered only a narrow region.
During the Solutrean and Magdalenian, Africa and Spain were in the Upper Capsian. Evidence from the eastern Mediterranean begins to fail. Italy is wholly without discovered remains. There are indications (§ 240) that at least by the beginning of the Magdalenian in Europe, the favored land of Egypt had already entered into the Neolithic. If this is so, westernmost Asia, Greece, and even Italy may have begun to be affected by this higher phase of culture, and the paucity or absence of their late Palæolithic remains would be accounted for. This view seems reasonable, but is unproved.
The Solutrean seems to have been a brief period in western Europe, and its extent appears limited also (Fig. 39). It reveals two principal areas: one north of the Danube, the other in southern France. The former may have been the earlier, from which the culture, or certain phases of it, such as the art of even surface retouch on leaf-shaped blades, were carried westward into France. In this connection two facts may be significant.
First is the circumstance that the north Danubian Solutrean area possessed an art, apparently largely of Solutrean age, which is quite different from the Upper Palæolithic art of the west. Naturalism was scarcely attempted, figures were highly conventional, the style was one of concentric curves or stippling or hatching.
The second consideration is the Brünn race. This type, which as yet is known only from a few examples (§ 17), is generally considered Neandertaloid, but also shows leanings toward the Cro-Magnon race as well as differences from it. The less dubious Brünn remains, those from Brünn, Brüx, and perhaps Predmost, are all from Czecho-Slovakia, that is, the north Danubian region; and they seem to be of Solutrean age. These facts render it likely that there existed a connection between the east Solutrean culture, the geometric art, and the Brünn race, and they indicate at least some probability of the spread of Solutrean culture from eastern to western Europe. Brünn man may have been a modified Neandertal man who persisted in the east after Cro-Magnon man had become established in the west during the Aurignacian. Or he may have been a local eastern variant of a generic type whose better known western form we call Cro-Magnon man.
As to Grimaldi man, his Negroid affiliations also seem less startling once it is clear that the Aurignacian civilization was a mid-European phenomenon, and that contemporary Spain and probably Italy formed part of the essentially African development of the Lower Capsian. With southern Europe a cultural annex of north Africa at this period, the presence there of a Negroid type is reasonable enough. Further, both the strait of Gibraltar and that between Tunis and Sicily were land bridges during part of the Pleistocene; Gibraltar, for instance, probably during the Lower Capsian and, again, after a subsidence, in the Upper Capsian. The Mediterranean, in other words, must be conceived not as a great barring sea, but as a land-locked lake or pair of lakes, so that Europe and Africa were joined geographically as well as racially and culturally.
As to the Cro-Magnon race, its association with the Aurignacian-Magdalenian culture of mid-European type is clear enough, but its origin remains problematical. One naturally looks eastward: to the north lay ice, to the west the Atlantic, to the south a different even though related culture. But nothing is really known; no ancestral Asiatic form, no closely cognate later race, no eastern culture out of which the Aurignacian might have sprung nor to which it might have been specifically related. All or some of these may have existed, but in the absence of discovery, speculation is of little profit. There is the further difficulty about a theory that brings Cro-Magnon man out of the east into the west of Europe, that a little later, in the Solutrean, central Europe, through which he presumably passed, seems to have been in possession of the Brünn race. True, this might have been a later wave out of the east; but to derive both races out of Asia, and perhaps the preceding Neandertal type also, is a bit monotonous as a hypothesis, besides being one of those assumptions that seem to answer problems without really helping their understanding.
Much the same may be said as to the fate of Neandertal man—whether he was exterminated by the Cro-Magnons, or absorbed, or was driven away, or died out. A single discovery on this point will be worth more than the most elaborate conjecture.
Two points seem clear, whatever may have been the diffusions of race and culture at the time that the Lower Palæolithic was being replaced by the Upper. On the side of flint industry, there was no break: the Aurignacian is the continuation of the Mousterian. The experts occasionally have difficulty in agreeing whether a station or level is to be assigned to the late Mousterian or early Aurignacian. Whatever, therefore, was imported in the Upper Palæolithic was joined to something that remained over and continued in middle Europe from the Lower Palæolithic. Secondly, the center of known naturalistic art development was the west, southern France especially; perceptibly in the Aurignacian, notably in the Magdalenian. Yet this tract is peripheral to the Aurignacian-Magdalenian culture as a whole. It would thus be a forced explanation to look upon this art as the outright result of a diffusion or migration: the supposed recipients of the accomplishment would be carrying it farther than its originators. In other words, Upper Palæolithic art was in the main a growth on the soil of western Europe, so far as present evidence indicates. These findings diminish the probability of any large scale importation of Upper Palæolithic culture ready made as a by-product of the irruption of a new race. The change from Lower to Upper Palæolithic was indeed profoundly significant. But much of it may have been consummated by a gradual evolution within western and central Europe.
It is worth observing that the Lower Palæolithic of Europe with all its fundamental unity of culture stretched through different climates. The Chellean was at least in part sub-tropical, the Acheulean a time of cooling steppe climate, the Mousterian the period of maximum glaciation. The Upper Palæolithic again has its transition from the close of the Würm glaciation to the present temperature of Europe broken by three temporary advances of the ice, known as they occurred in the Alps as the Bühl, Gschnitz, and Daun phases. The following correlation of climatic and cultural periods has been suggested: Aurignacian, close of the last glacial and beginning of the post-glacial; Solutrean, first maximum of ice recession (_Achenschwankung_); Magdalenian, Bühl advance, second recession, and Gschnitz advance, corresponding respectively to the early, middle, and late stages of the period. To these might be added that the Azilian came at about the third recession and brief final Daun advance; the Neolithic, with the final recession of ice and appearance of modern conditions. It is clear that climatic circumstances were not the chief determining factor in the cultural development of early Europe. Had they been such, the Chellean would have differed culturally more from the Mousterian than this from the Aurignacian.
Southern Europe and North Africa were not glaciated in the Pleistocene. Heavier rainfall, perhaps accompanied by forestation, are likely to have taken the place of the ice, whereas a change from forest to steppe, or steppe to desert, corresponded to the recession of the ice in Alpine and northern Europe. For more distant regions, such as India and south Africa, the climatic correlations with Europe become dubious; which is one of the reasons why as yet no sure linking in time can be effected between their Palæolithic culture and that of Europe.
216. THE PALÆOLITHIC AFTERMATH: AZILIAN
After the Magdalenian, there follows in western Europe the Azilian, or Azylian, named after Mas d’Azil in the French Pyrenees. It has also been called Tourassian. This was the period in which the reindeer died out, being replaced by the deer. Harpoons were accordingly made of deer horn instead of reindeer antler, the spongier texture of the interior of the material necessitating a coarser and broader form. Perforations to hold the harpoon line now began to be regularly provided. Bone implements were fewer, chiefly awls or simple dart heads. Stone implements became less important. The best made flint forms were minute points or blades of geometric form, often trapezoidal. These are the microliths, obviously intended, in the main, for insertion in wood, sometimes perhaps in sawlike rows. The great naturalistic Magdalenian art was dead in the Azilian. Its place was taken by simple conventional designs painted on pebbles, sometimes curiously suggestive of alphabetic symbols, although it is unthinkable that they could at this early time, and among so backward a people as these deer hunters, have served any purpose of writing. The puzzling designs are more likely to have been used in magic or religion.
The period of the Azilian was perhaps 10,000-8000 B.C. The climate was approaching that of to-day, though still cooler. The area of the Azilian proper was limited to the Pyrenean environs of southern France and northern Spain. Related and contemporary cultures can however be traced much farther; and the name Azilian in a larger sense may justifiably be applied to these also. The greater part of Spain and Portugal and north Africa were at this time in the Terminal Capsian. This was a local phase lacking the deer horn harpoons and painted pebbles of the Pyrenees, but with the microlithic flint industry especially conspicuous. In fact it is in Africa that the development of the extreme microlithic forms out of their antecedents, the reduced implements of the Upper Capsian, has been most clearly traced. In Europe the Azilian forms do not connect nearly so closely with the preceding Magdalenian. It looks therefore as if the culture of western Europe in this period were based to a considerable extent on traits evolved in Africa, to which various additions were made locally, like the pebble-painting in the Pyrenean area. This preponderance of African influences is corroborated by the occurrence in Syria and southern Italy of small flints allied to the Terminal Capsian ones. The same may be said of a culture phase of northern France, the Tardenoisian, which extended also to Belgium and England—which latter seems not to have become finally separated from the continent until about this era. The Tardenoisian is specifically characterized by microliths almost indistinguishable from the north African ones, but lacks the other traits of the south French Azilian. It may also have persisted longer, into the period which in the south was already early Neolithic. Approximately contemporary and related is also the south German culture represented at Ofnet, famous for its nests of skulls from decapitated bodies; and that in southern Scandinavia called Maglemose (§ 233). In Scotland and northern England, on the other hand, the harpoon head is once more to the fore, perhaps because here as in the Pyrenean area forested mountains and the sea were in juxtaposition and deer and salmon could both be taken abundantly. The food habits of sub-arid and arid north Africa must have been quite different; in fact it is evident that snails were seasonally consumed here in large quantities.
All these local phases interrelate and may be grouped together as Azilian as designative of the period and generic culture. The map (Fig. 40) shows the extent to which the manifestations of this culture stage have been traced. They may prove to extend farther.
Spain, at the close of the Palæolithic, possessed art of three types. In the north, Magdalenian realism flourished as vigorously as in neighboring southern France. The paintings of the cave of Altamira, for instance, are no less numerous and superb than those of Font-de-Gaume. Second, in the south, there prevailed a conventional style. Men and animals are still recognizable, but schematically drawn, and among them are pictographic symbols. Third, in eastern Spain, a cliff art was realistic in purpose, but crude in execution. One can see without difficulty what the figures are doing, but the proportions are distorted, and the fresh, vivid, sure spirit of Magdalenian painting is wholly lacking. The figures represent people more often than animals: gatherings, dances, long-gowned women, men with bows. This is the earliest direct or indirect record of the bow and arrow. It dates from the final phase of the Palæolithic, and the weapon may not have become employed throughout Europe until the Neolithic was definitely under way.
It is well to remember in this connection that no specific type of culture, no matter how old, is likely ever to have existed without variation over a whole hemisphere or continent. The later any type is, the greater is the probability that it has had sufficient time for specific characterization to enable it to be distinguished readily from the contemporary cultures of other areas. The local provinces or culture-areas of the Palæolithic foreshadow the deeper regional differentiations of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages.
There is some variation of usage as to whether the Azilian is assignable to the Palæolithic or Neolithic. Some include it with the earliest Neolithic phases to constitute a Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age. The era has also been designated Epi-Palæolithic and Proto-Neolithic. The concept of a separate Mesolithic period becomes important in the degree that the original definition of the Neolithic as limited to the age of polished stone remains rigorously adhered to. With the Neolithic conceived more broadly, as discussed in the following section, a separate Mesolithic becomes unnecessary, and the Azilian takes its place as a final Palæolithic episode of mixed African and local developments after the passing of the characteristic European Upper Palæolithic.
217. THE NEOLITHIC: ITS EARLY PHASE
The Neolithic is by original definition the age of polished stone as opposed to the fracturing of stone in the Palæolithic. In a sense, this definition is a true one, at any rate for Europe and the Near East. There is no stone grinding in the Palæolithic and there is in the Neolithic. But since the two stone ages were first discriminated fifty or more years ago, a vast body of knowledge has accumulated about them, with the result that the original criterion has become only an approximate one. The definition of the Neolithic as the age of ground stone is at the present time so over-elementary as to have become inaccurate. A long initial phase of this age did not yet grind stone, but continued to use tools made by the Palæolithic process of chipping. It was not until the latter part of the New Stone Age was reached, what we may call the Full Neolithic, that the grinding and polishing of stone were attempted.
What, then, it is natural to ask, makes the Early Neolithic Age really Neolithic—what in fact separates it from the Palæolithic? It is a cluster of traits; a cluster that grew as the Neolithic progressed; but every one of whose constituents was lacking from the Old Stone Age.
218. POTTERY AND THE BOW
Outstanding in this cluster of cultural traits that mark the Neolithic is pottery. Wherever, in Europe and the Near East at least, there is universal agreement that a stage of development was Neolithic, pottery is present. And conversely, wherever pottery occurs, no one has yet doubted that a true Neolithic stage existed. The earliest potteryless phases, such as that of Maglemose, which have sometimes been designated as Proto-Neolithic, sometimes as Mesolithic, can advantageously be considered terminal Palæolithic.
Second in importance is the bow, which in general appeared contemporaneously with pottery. The evidence for its existence is sometimes less clear. Pottery is imperishable and unmistakable. The bow and arrow, on the other hand, are made of materials that decay in a few years, under ordinary conditions. Only the stone or bone point preserves, and this cannot always be distinguished with positiveness from the head of a light spear or even from a small knife blade. There was a time, for instance, when the smaller flint blades of the Solutrean were often regarded as arrow points, whereas now the tendency, based on more intensive comparisons, is to deny the bow and arrow to the Magdalenian as well as the Solutrean. Certainly the harpoon and its thrower are so numerous and indubitable in the Magdalenian that there would be reason to expect an important weapon like the bow to have left at least some sure traces: a definitive type of recognizable arrow head would have been worked out. But such is not the case.
These two culture elements, pottery and the bow, signalized an enormous advance over the past. Both required definite technical skill to manufacture. And both were of the greatest service. Whole lines of foods could now be utilized that had formerly been passed by: soups, stews, porridges. Plants whose seeds or parts before were inedible, or almost so, were added to the diet as soon as they could be boiled. The bow made possible long range fighting, the free pursuit of large game, and the capture of many small mammals and birds which previously it must have been difficult to take. The harpoon was developed chiefly for fishing. It would be of little help in killing birds, rabbits, and the like, or large and dangerous animals like wild cattle.
219. BONE TOOLS
Hand in hand with the invention or rather introduction of the bow and pottery—it seems doubtful whether they were devised in Europe—went an increased employment of bone and horn tools at the expense of stone. This drift had already begun in the Upper Palæolithic; in fact, is one of the signs that mark it off from the Lower Palæolithic. It became accentuated as the Upper Palæolithic wore on, still more prominent in its closing Azilian phase[33]—hence the increasing minuteness of flint blades—and continued into the early Neolithic. A good working chisel, wedge, awl, or needle, for instance, must be smooth. This finish is difficult in chipped stone, but easily attained in bone or horn by rubbing. It was not therefore until stone grinding came into use in the later Neolithic, that bone and horn began to fall in significance as materials. But they had performed their service. It is unlikely that stone polishing would have been attempted but for the experience and long habits of the polishing process as acquired in dealing with the softer materials.
220. THE DOG
The first animal was also domesticated about the beginning of the Neolithic. Dog remains have been found in two very late post-Magdalenian Palæolithic sites, one in Scotland, the other in Denmark, both apparently Azilian in age. Then, the Danish kitchenmiddens, which began in the first stage of the Early Neolithic, contain innumerable bones that have been gnawed by dogs. The animals may still have been half wild at this period, since their own skeletons are rare in the middens. Evidently the species was not yet firmly attached to man; its members went off to die in solitude. This is what has generally been predicated on hypothetical grounds of the history of dog and man. Contrary to most domesticated animals, the dog is thought not to have been captured and tamed outright, but to have attached himself to human beings as a parasitic hanger-on, a shy, tolerated, uncared-for scavenger, living in a stage of symbiotic relationship with our ancestors before his real domestication. This view the prehistoric evidence seems to confirm.
221. THE HEWN AX
One more trait signalizes the Early Neolithic: the hewn stone ax. This was a chipped implement, straight or slightly convex along the cutting edge, tapering from that to the butt, about twice as long as broad, rather thick, unperforated and ungrooved; in fact perhaps often unhandled and driven by blows upon the butt: a sharp stone wedge as much as an ax, in short. The whole Palæolithic shows no such implement: even the Azilian has only bone or horn “axes.”
It is hardly necessary to repeat for the Neolithic what has already been said of the Palæolithic periods: the older types, such as chipped flint tools, continued very generally to be made. Such persistence is natural: a survival of a low type among higher ones does not mean much. It is the appearance of new and superior inventions that counts.
The Early Neolithic can be summed up, then, in these five traits: pottery; the bow and arrow; abundant use of bone and horn; the dog; and the hewn ax.
222. THE FULL NEOLITHIC
It is the later or Full Neolithic, beginning probably between 6000 and 5000 B.C. in western Europe, that is marked by the grinding or polishing of stone. Even this criterion is less deep-going than might be thought from all the references that prehistorians have made to it, since the new process was put to limited service. Practically the only stone implements that were ground into shape in Europe were of the ax class: the ax head itself, the celt or chisel, hammer stones, and clubheads. The mill is the principal artifact that can be added to the list. The ax long remained what we to-day should scarcely dignify with the name of ax head: an unpierced, ungrooved blade. It is only toward the end of the Neolithic in Europe, after metal was already in use in the Orient and Mediterranean countries, that perforated and well ground stone axes appear; many of these make the impression of being stone imitations, among a remote, backward people, of forms cast in bronze by the richer and more advanced nations of the South and East.
Much more important than the ground stone ax in its influence on life was the commencement, during the Neolithic, of two of the great fundamentals of our own modern civilization: agriculture and domestic animals. These freed men from the buffetings of nature; made possible permanent habitation, the accumulation of food and wealth, and a heavier growth of population. Also, agriculture and animal breeding were evidently introduced only after numbers had reached a certain density. A sparse population, being able to subsist on wild products, tends to remain content with them. A fertile area with mild winters may support as high as one soul per square mile without improvement of the natural resources; in large forests, steppes, cold climates, and arid tracts, the territory needed for the subsistence of each head becomes larger in a hunting stage of existence.
The cultivated food plants of the European Neolithic were barley, wheat, and millet, pease, lentils, and somewhat later, beans and apples. All of these seem to derive from Mediterranean or west Asiatic sources. Of non-edible plants there was flax, which served textile purposes and involved loom weaving.
The species of domesticated animals numbered four, besides the dog: cattle, swine, sheep, and goats. The horse,[34] cat, hen, duck, came into Europe during the metal ages, in part during the historic period.
223. ORIGIN OF DOMESTICATED ANIMALS AND PLANTS
The place of first domestication of the four oldest species is not known surely. Most of them had wild representatives in Europe long before and after the domesticated forms appear, but the same was true in western Asia and Egypt, and the general priority of these tracts in metal working and other cultural achievements makes it likely that their inhabitants were also the first to tame the animals in question. The subject is as intricate as it is interesting, because of difficulty which biologists experience in tracing the modified tame forms back to the wild species with certainty. The mere fact of continued domestication, even without conscious selection in breeding, often alters a species more from what may have been its old wild form than this differs from another wild species.
It is however clear from the unusually abundant and well preserved Lake-dwelling remains of Switzerland that the earliest known domestic animals of this region were considerably different from the nearest native species. The wild bull or urus of Europe, _Bos primigenius_, was large and long-horned. His bones in the oldest lake dwellings seem to come from wild individuals that had been hunted. Alongside are the remains of the domesticated _Bos brachyceros_, a short-horned form, small and delicately built. Later, though still in the Neolithic, long-horned tame cattle appear in the lake dwellings. Apparently the short-horns had first been imported from the south; then the native urus was tamed; finally, the two strains were crossed. These strains are thought to survive in our modern cattle, those of eastern and central Europe being prevailingly of the _primigenius_, of western Europe of the _brachyceros_ type.
A similar story applies to the pig. The first domesticated swine of Switzerland were small, long-legged, and easily distinguishable from the wild boar of the region. It thus is likely that they were imported domesticated. In the Bronze Age, pigs grew larger, due perhaps to crossing with the wild species. Sheep were certainly brought into Europe, as there is no corresponding wild form; the goats, too, have their nearest relatives in Asia. They were perhaps tamed before sheep. At any rate, goats prevailed in the earlier lake dwellings, whereas later, sheep outnumbered them.
Similar arguments apply to the origin of the cultivated plants in Europe. For some of these, such as wheat, wild relatives—possible ancestors—are known from Asia, but not from Europe. Also there has been such a drift of later cultivated plants—legumes, greens, and fruits—from Asia and the Mediterranean into Europe during the Bronze and Iron Ages, as to render it probable that the earliest flow was in the same direction. The instances of diffusion from north to south are few: oats, rye, and hemp are perhaps the principal. These plants, however, were carried southward slowly and accepted reluctantly, whereas the northerners were in general avid of any southern or Oriental form which would bear their climate, as the progressive spread and increased use of new forms shows. Furthermore, even oats, rye, and hemp appear to be Asiatic in origin, and thus to have entered Europe merely from the east, instead of southeast.
224. OTHER TRAITS OF THE FULL NEOLITHIC
The earliest animals were kept for their flesh and hides. Two or three thousand years passed before cattle were used before the plow or to draw wagons. Both the plow and the wheel were unknown in Europe until well in the Bronze Age, after they had been established for some time in Asia. Still later was the use of milk. Here again Asia and Egypt have precedence.
Many other elements of culture appear in the Full Neolithic. Houses were dug into the ground and roofed over with timbers and earth. The dead were buried in enduring chambers of stone: “dolmens,” often put together out of enormous slabs; or excavations in soft bed rock. Upright pillars of undressed stone were erected—either singly as “menhirs” or in “alignments”—in connection with religious or funerary worship. Pottery was ornamented in a variety of geometric decorative styles, usually incised rather than painted; their sequences and contemporary distributions in several areas are gradually being determined.
225. THE BRONZE AGE: COPPER AND BRONZE PHASES
There is no abrupt break between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. Metal was at first too rare, too difficult to mine and smelt and work, to be used extensively. It served for special weapons, tools, and ornaments of the wealthy. The life of the mass of the population went on in much the old channels for generations or centuries after the new material had become known. This was true especially of peoples in oreless regions, or too backward to have learned the art of metal working. To such nations, the first bronze came as an imported rarity, to be guarded as a treasure or heirloom.
Of even less immediate effect than the discovery of bronze, was that of the first metals known, copper and gold. The latter is of course too scarce and too soft to serve for anything but ornaments; and pure copper also, even when hardened by hammering, is of little use for many mechanical purposes. It makes a fairly efficient dagger, a rather mediocre ax, and a poor knife. The result was that a recognizable period of copper preceded the true Bronze Age, yet that it was essentially a last phase of the New Stone Age, with the metal creeping in as something subsidiary. In Italy and Spain it has therefore become customary among archæologists to speak of an “Eneolithic” period as a transition stage in which some copper, and occasionally bronze of low tin content, occur. In central and northern Europe, the equivalent stage falls somewhat later and is sometimes called the Stone-Bronze period.
Bronze is an alloy of tin with copper, harder than the latter, easier to melt, and casting better. In many properties it resembles brass, by which term it is referred to in the English Bible; but must not be confounded with it. Brass is an alloy of zinc with copper, of much later discovery, apparently in Asia, and until recent centuries little used in Europe. As regards bronze, even a two per cent addition of tin to copper results in a perceptible hardening; and five to ten per cent produce a greatly superior tool metal.
The origin of bronze is a problem of some difficulty, because the earliest known users of bronze, the peoples of the Near East, possessed little or no tin. There are said to have been tin supplies in the Khorasan district of Persia, which might have been drawn upon by the pre-Babylonians and thence carried to Egypt. The chief source of the tin of later antiquity was Spain and England. But at the outset of the Bronze Age, the Orientals did not even know of the existence of these countries, while their natives, still ignorant of copper, could not have mined tin for the purpose of hardening that basic metal.
Just how, then, bronze was discovered, is still unknown; but it must have been in Western Asia not later than the fourth millenium B.C. Before 3000 B.C., in the period of the first dynasties ruling over united Egypt, the art had been established in that country, since bronzes low in percentage of tin have been discovered from that era. While ancient Egypt mined its own copper in the adjacent Sinai peninsula, it is barren of tin resources, so that the latter metal must have been imported. Within a few centuries, bronze began to be used in Crete and Troy, and by 2500 B.C. in Italy and Spain, whereas it did not penetrate central and northern Europe until about 1900 B.C., according to the usual estimates. That the use of bronze over these widespread areas is a connected phenomenon, a case of single origin and diffusion, is clear from the manner in which the art spread from its center of invention like a wave which arrived later the farther it had to travel. The spread is confirmed by the fact that certain implement forms such as early triangular daggers and later swords traveled with the material. Had the western natives discovered bronze for themselves, they would have cast it into shapes peculiar to themselves, instead of adopting those long established among the Orientals.
226. TRAITS ASSOCIATED WITH BRONZE
About coincident with bronze there developed in Egypt and Babylonia a flood of new arts and inventions: writing; sunburned brick; stone masonry; sculpture and architecture; the arch; the plow and later the chariot; the potter’s wheel, which turns clay vessels with mechanical roundness; astronomical records and accurate calendars; an enhanced cult of the dead and greater monuments for them. Many of these elements were carried into westernmost Asia and the Ægean Islands; not so many to Italy; fewer still to Spain and France; and a minimum to central and northern Europe. But it would be an error to infer from the continued backwardness of the northern peoples that they were wholly passive and recipient. In their simpler, more barbaric way, they remodeled much of what they had carried to them, altered the form, decorated it in their own style, made much of some item which filled but an insignificant place in the more complex civilization of the southeast. The fibula or safety-pin, for instance, was seized upon with avidity by the central and north European nations, made ornate and tremendously enlarged, until it sometimes measured half a foot in length and more than half a pound in weight with spiral whorls, bosses, pin clasps, or attached rings as big as a palm. The Baltic nations, the farthest reached by this diffusion, in particular threw themselves into the development of the fibula with zest, success, and a large measure of decorative taste.
Even longer is the history of the sword. This has two lines of historic development. The one-edged sword or saber tends to curvature and is essentially a hewing weapon, not intended for thrusting, or only secondarily so adapted. This form is first known in western Asia, is apparently of Asiatic origin, and is the direct ancestor of the Saracen and Indian scimitar, the Malayan kris and barong, the Japanese samurai’s sword. The two-edged sword with point has at all times—until after the introduction of firearms—been the prevailing form in Europe. Its ancestor is the Egyptian bronze dagger, which in turn is probably derived from a copper and ultimately a flint blade of dagger length. The Egyptian dagger never grew to more than half-sword length, but the type was early carried to Crete and Italy and Spain. By 2500-2000 B.C. the latter countries were using triangular wide-bladed daggers of copper and bronze, with a basal breadth not much less than the length. The handle was a separate piece, riveted on. Gradually the length grew greater, the breadth less, the edges more nearly parallel, the point sharper; the half-sword and then the sword evolved out of the dagger. The handle, or its spike, came to be cast with the blade. These drawn-out forms traveling to central and northern Europe, were made there of greater and greater length, especially after iron was known. For three thousand years, and from the southern Mediterranean in its progress to the North Sea, the sword grew longer and longer, but always by gradual modification: the whole series of forms shows a transition in both time and geography. The Greek and Roman sword remained of thigh length, and was used mainly for thrusting; the Keltic and Germanic weapon was for hewing and almost unwieldy; blades so big as to require two-handed swinging finally came to be employed—a barbaric, ineffective exaggeration to which the long-cultured Mediterraneans never descended.
227. IRON
Iron was worked by man about two thousand years later than bronze. It is a far more abundant metal than copper, and though it melts at a higher temperature, is not naturally harder to extract from some of its ores. The reason for its lateness of use is not wholly explained. It is likely that the first use of metals was of those, like gold and copper, that are found in the pure metallic state and, being rather soft, could be treated by hammering without heat—by processes more or less familiar to stone age culture. It is known that fair amounts of copper were worked in this way by many tribes of North American Indians, who got their supplies from the Lake Superior deposits and the Copper River placers in Alaska. If the same thing happened in the most progressive parts of the Eastern Hemisphere some 6,000 years ago, acquaintance with the metal may before long have been succeeded by the invention of the arts of casting and extracting it from its ores. When, not many centuries later, the hardening powers of an admixture of tin were discovered and bronze with its far greater serviceability for tools became known, a powerful impetus was surely given to the new metallurgy, which was restricted only by the limitations of the supply of metal, especially tin. Progress went on in the direction first taken; the alloy became better balanced, molds and casting processes superior, the forms attempted more adventurous or efficient. For many centuries iron ores were disregarded; the bronze habit intensified. Finally, accident may have brought the discovery of iron; or shortage of bronze led to experimenting with other ores; and a new age dawned.
Whatever the forces at work, the actual events were clearly those outlined. And it is interesting that the New World furnishes an exact parallel with its three areas and stages of native copper, smelted copper and gold, and bronze (§ 108, 196), and with only the final period of iron unattained at the time of discovery.
228. FIRST USE AND SPREAD OF IRON
Some of the earliest known cases of the use of iron were decorative: for jewelry, or as inlay upon bronze. Finds of this sort have been made in Switzerland, Germany, Greece, and the Caucasus. Once however the extraction of the new material had become known, its abundance was so great as to further its employment, which grew fairly rapidly, though held back by several factors. One of these retarding causes was the prevalence of the casting process, which had become definitely established for bronze and was carried on with great skill, whereas iron lends itself to ready casting only in a foundry and for objects of larger size than were in customary use among the ancients. They forged their iron, and this new art had to be gradually learned. At its best, it could not produce some of the finer results of casting; in ornaments and statuettes, for instance.
Wrought iron is comparatively soft. A bronze knife will cut or shave better than a forged iron one. It was not until it was discovered that the iron from certain ores could be converted into steel by tempering—plunging the heated implement into water—that the new metal became a tool material superior to bronze. The invention of tempering seems to have followed fairly soon after the discovery of iron. But some centuries elapsed before this art became at all general.
Finally, conservative fashion operated to delay the undisputed supremacy of iron. Bronze has an attractive goldenish color; it oxidizes slowly and superficially; it was anchored in ritual; and it tended to remain associated with state and splendor, with wealth and nobility, whereas iron crept into commonplace and humble usages. Nearly four centuries after iron became known in the Greek world, the Iliad mentions it but twenty-three times, bronze two hundred and seventy times. In the Odyssey, a more bourgeois epic, and a little later in authorship, the proportion of references to iron is higher: twenty-nine to eighty. The first four books of the Old Testament, the composition of whose older parts is usually placed synchronous with that of the Iliad—about 850 B.C.—but whose outlook is the conservative one of religion, mention iron still more rarely: four times as against eighty-three references to bronze—“brass” the Authorized Version calls it.
Which nation first made iron available to the world has not yet been ascertained. It was almost certainly some people in western Asia. The Hittites of Asia Minor, the Chalybes of Armenia, are prominent contenders for the honor. It could scarcely have been the most civilized people of the region, the Babylonians, because their alluvial country contains neither ore nor stone. The time was probably subsequent to 1500 B.C., but not long after. By the time of Rameses the Great, in the thirteenth century, the metal was known and somewhat used in Egypt, being imported from the Hittites. Contemporaneously, the early Greek invaders who overthrew the Ægean culture of Crete and Mycenæ and Troy were in the beginnings of the Iron Age. Italy learned the new material from the Etruscans about 1100 B.C. Babylonian and Assyrian records seem to refer to it some few centuries earlier. The Jews in the time of Saul, 1000 B.C., are said by the Bible to have had little iron and no steel, a fact that made possible their oppression by the Philistines of the coast. This people, apparently descendants of the Minoan Cretans, have recently been alleged as the discoverers of the art of steel making; though whether with reason, remains to be proved. In central Europe iron became fairly abundant about 900 B.C., and was soon mined and smelted locally. In northern Europe its first sporadic appearance is soon after, but its general prevalence, justifying the use of the term Iron Age, not anterior to 500 B.C.
In the Far East, the history of iron is little known. In India, where it is likely to have been derived from western Asia or Persia, its first mention is at the end of the Vedic period, whose close is variously estimated at 1400 B.C. and 1000 B.C. The metal must have been new then: it was called “dark blue bronze.” The Hindus later carried knowledge of iron and steel-working to the Malaysian East Indies.
When China got its first iron is not known, though it appears to have been comparatively late. By the early part of the seventh century before Christ, iron had become common enough to be taxed. But it was used for hoes, plowshares, hatchets, needles, and domestic purposes only. Not until the fifth century B.C. did steel-making become introduced into China, and bronze begin to be superseded for weapons. Even in the first century after Christ the natives of southernmost China were fighting with bronze weapons in their struggle against amalgamation with the empire. At any rate, the Chou dynasty, the period of the production of the literary classics, from the eleventh to the third century B.C., was still prevailingly a time of bronze, as attested both by native historical records and the evidences of archæology. This lateness of iron in the Far East raises a strong probability that the Chinese did not enter the iron stage through their own discovery but were led into it by the example of Mongol or Turkish peoples of north central Asia, who in turn leaned upon the western Asiatics.
Japan has a definite Iron Age, well known through excavations. It is thought to have begun about the fourth century B.C. This approximate contemporaneity with China, whereas in nearly all the remainder of its culture Japan borrowed from China and followed long behind it in time, suggests that the Japanese or neighboring Koreans may have learned of iron directly from the north Asiatic teachers of the Chinese.
229. THE HALLSTADT AND LATÈNE PERIODS
North of the Mediterranean lands, the prehistoric Iron Age of Europe is divided into two periods: that of Hallstadt, named after a site in Austria, and lasting from about 900 to 500 B.C.; and that of LaTène, designated from a famous discovery in Switzerland, which stretched from 500 B.C. until almost the birth of Christ. The Hallstadt period is better developed in middle than in western Europe: it was influenced from Greece, the Balkans, and Italy. It prevailed along the Adriatic and Danube as far as Bosnia and Hungary; over all but northern Germany; in Switzerland; and in eastern France. Its flow was northwestward. The LaTène culture was carried primarily by Kelts, falls into the period of their greatest extension and prosperity, and centers in France. Here it seems to have developed under the stimulus of Greek colonization at Marseilles, to have spread northward to the British Isles, and eastward into central Europe. Its general flow was northeastward.
Considerable iron and bronze work of some technical fineness was made during the Hallstadt and LaTène periods. Fibulas, jewelry, weapons, and cult apparatus were often elaborate. But the quality of the cultures remained homespun, backward, and barbaric as compared with the plasticity and polish which contemporary Greek civilization had attained.
The Hallstadt culture, for instance, was wholly without cities, stone architecture or bridges, paved roads, coins, writing of any sort, the potter’s wheel, or rotary millstone; nor was metal used for agricultural implements. It was a time of villages, small towns, and scattered homes; of sacred groves instead of temples; of boggy roads, of ox-carts and solid wooden wheels; of a heavy, barbaric, warlike population, half like European peasants, half like pioneers; self-content, yet always dimly conscious that in the southern distance there lay lands of wealth, refinement, and achievement.
The LaTène time showed many advances; but, relatively to the civilizations of Greece and Rome—it was the period of Phidias and Plato, of Archimedes and Cicero—the northern culture was as many milestones of progress behind as during the Hallstadt era. The coins in use were Greek, or local imitations of Greek money, their figures and legends often corrupted to complete meaninglessness. Writing was still absent. Some attempts at script began to be made toward the close of LaTène, but they resulted in nothing more than the awkward Ogham and Runic systems. Until perhaps a century or two before Cæsar, there were no cities or fortified towns in Gaul. When they arose, it was on heights, behind walls of mixed logs, earth, and stone, as against the masonry circumvallations which the Ægean peoples were erecting more than a thousand years before. Even these poor towns were built only by Kelts; the Germanic tribes remained shy of them for centuries longer. Society was still essentially proto-feudal and rustic. But there had filtered in from the Mediterranean, and were being wrought locally, holed axes, iron wagon wheels, the potter’s wheel and potter’s oven, rotary mills, dice, tongs, scissors, saws, and scythes—all new to these northern lands, and curiously modern in their fundamental types as compared with the essentially half-primitive, half-barbarian suggestion that Hallstadt manufactures carry.
230. SUMMARY OF DEVELOPMENT: REGIONAL DIFFERENTIATION
Two conclusions emerge from the facts reviewed in this chapter and serve to prevent an over-simple and schematic conception of the growth of prehistoric civilization. The first is that successive phases of culture, even in the earliest times, cannot be identified, much less really understood, by reference to any single criterion such as this or that technique of working stone or the knowledge of this or that metal. In every case the culture is complex and characterized by a variety of traits whose combination produces its distinctive cast. The more important of these culture traits, with particular reference to Europe, may be summarized thus:
_Period_ _Culture Elements Appearing_
Iron Iron, steel; in the Orient, alphabet Bronze Metals, alloying, megaliths; in the Orient, masonry, writing Full Neolithic Domesticated animals and plants, stone polishing Early Neolithic Pottery, bow Upper Palæolithic Bone work, harpoon, art Lower Palæolithic Fire, flint work
The second conclusion is that differentiation of culture according to region is too great to be lightly brushed aside. Even for the Palæolithic, which is so imperfectly known outside of Europe, and whose content is so simple, it is clear that the developmental sequences in Europe cannot be correctly interpreted without reference to provincial growths and their affiliations in other continents (§ 214-216). In the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages, regional diversity increases. Egypt and China, India and France, present deeply differentiated pictures in 3000 B.C., and again in 1000. Their cultures have throughout a separate aspect. And yet innumerable connections link them. The very bronze and iron that name the later ages, the grains and animals that are the basis of their economic life, were intercontinentally disseminated, and represent in most of the lands that came to possess them an import from an alien focus of growth. And currents usually run both ways. China received metals, wheat, cattle and horses, cotton, architecture, religion, possibly the suggestion of script, from the west; but she gave to it silk and porcelain, gunpowder and paper. Also there are inertias and absences to be reckoned with. The Near East probably gave to Europe most of the elements of civilization which the latter possessed during the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron periods; but much which the Near East had, it failed to transmit. Writing flowed into Europe a full two thousand years after bronze, with which it was coeval in origin. Coinage is far later in the Orient than masonry, but outstripped it and became earlier established in western Europe.
The result is a great tangled web, whose structure is only gradually being revealed by painstaking comparison and intensive study. Often the most convincing evidence as to the composition and direction of the culture currents is provided by highly specialized matters: styles of pottery decoration, shapes of ax heads, forms of ornamental safety-pins. It is not because these minutiæ are so fascinating in themselves that archæologists are endlessly and often tediously concerned with them. It is because these data offer the longest clues through the labyrinth, because on their sure sequences can be strung hundreds of otherwise non-significant or detached facts. But the results are as yet incomplete; they are and promise to remain forever complex; and their systematic presentation in coherent narrative awaits a larger and future treatment. It will be wisest, in a work of the present compass, to outline the whole development of a single area, to serve as a type sample.
231. THE SCANDINAVIAN AREA AS AN EXAMPLE
The most satisfactory region for such a purpose is Scandinavia—the peninsula, Denmark, and the Baltic coasts, including much of northeast Germany. This was a glacier-covered area in the Mousterian, and either obliterated or uninhabited in the Upper Palæolithic. It has therefore no Old Stone Age history. During the Magdalenian, the glaciers had shrunk to cover only most of the Scandinavian peninsula and Finland. Denmark was ice-free. But what is now the Baltic stretched as an open sound from the North Sea across southern Finland and northwestern Russia to the Arctic Ocean. From this ocean as well as the remaining glaciers emanated a low temperature, in which there throve arctic forms of life, especially the small shell _Yoldia arctica_, which flourishes only where the sea bottom temperature ranges between 1° plus and 2° minus Centigrade. This great, chilly sound of some sixteen to ten thousand years ago is known as the Yoldia Sea. Denmark and the German coast must still have been cold, as the remains of the sub-arctic flora show, and were without human inhabitants.
232. THE LATE PALÆOLITHIC ANCYLUS OR MAGLEMOSE PERIOD
Around 10,000 B.C., as western Europe was entering upon the Azilian aftermath of the Palæolithic, the land at both ends of the Yoldia Sea was elevated sufficiently to cut this off from the open ocean. The Baltic was thus closed at both ends, instead of neither, as before, or one only, as now. The rivers continued to flow into it; it became brackish and almost fresh, and the fauna changed. The distinctive fossil shell became _Ancylus fluviatilis_, from which the great lake is known as the Ancylus Lake. The Scandinavian flora once more included real trees, chiefly pines and birches.
Man occupied south Sweden and Denmark in the Ancylus period. At Maglemose have been found his remains during this Scandinavian equivalent of the Azilian. Here he appears to have lived on rafts floating on a lake, which subsequently filled with peat. Whatever fell overboard, became embedded in the growing peat and was preserved. The inhabitants cut their raft logs and firewood with axes of bone and elk horn, some of them perforated for handles. They had bone fish-hooks, harpoons with single and double rows of barbs, and still others with slits for the insertion of minute flint blades, much like saw teeth. Some of the microlithic points have also been found. All of the stone was chipped; there is no trace of polishing other than of bone and antler. They engraved, sometimes in a deteriorated style of Magdalenian naturalism, sometimes with simple geometric ornaments. The dog accompanied these people, perhaps was already half tame. Remains similar to those of Maglemose have been found in several of the Baltic lands.
233. THE EARLY NEOLITHIC LITORINA OR KITCHENMIDDEN PERIOD
Within perhaps two thousand years, the Baltic opened again as at present, grew saltier, and took on much its present conditions, except for being somewhat larger. The water warmed, and _Litorina litorea_ and the oyster became the characteristic molluscs. The climate was milder than before, and the forests changed from birches and pines to oaks.
The men of this period lived largely on oysters and scallops, whose shells piled up about their habitations by millions, forming ridge-like mounds sometimes hundreds of yards long. These are the Kjökkenmöddings, or Kitchenmiddens, refuse heaps or shell heaps. Among the shells are ashes, bones of the land animals and birds that were hunted, and lost or broken utensils. Some of the Maglemose implements continued to be used, such as bone awls, chisels, and fish-hooks. Others were no longer made: harpoons, the minute flint blades, and engraved objects. But new forms had come in: above all, pottery and the stone ax—evidences that this was an early period of the Neolithic, even though polished stone was still lacking. The ax or “splitter” was chipped—hewn is really a more fitting term—oval or trapezoidal in outline, the cutting edge convex or straight. It seems to have been lashed to an elbow handle: there was no groove or perforation. The pottery was coarse, dark, and undecorated except sometimes for rows of crude dot impressions along the edge. Another new implement was a handled bone comb with four or five teeth. It appears to have been employed for carding rather than hair-dressing. The bow was in use: arrowheads bore a cutting edge in front. The dog was the only domestic or semi-domesticated animal; probably a Spitz-like breed, perhaps of jackal origin. He managed to gnaw most of the bones that have been preserved in the shell layers.
Approximately contemporary with the Danish kitchenmiddens, and similar to them in their cultural repertoire, are a Spanish phase known as Asturian and the Campignian of northern France. The Asturian remains are also shell deposits. Their lower levels contain bones of cattle that had perhaps been domesticated; middle strata add the sheep; and in the uppermost, pottery appears. The northern ax is replaced by a handheld pick. The Campignian possessed hewn axes or splitters similar to the Danish ones; pottery; domesticated cattle; and seems to have made a beginning of agriculture with barley. It would thus seem that pottery and the hewn ax were the characteristic general criteria of this Early Neolithic stage, with domesticated animals and agriculture coming in earlier in southern and middle Europe, whereas the northerners continued to depend longer on shellfish and game.
234. THE FULL NEOLITHIC AND ITS SUBDIVISIONS IN SCANDINAVIA
Two or three thousand years passed, and by about 5500 B.C. the Scandinavian climate had become slightly cooler once more, the oaks gave way to birches and pines, the Baltic lost some of its salt content, and the oyster grew scarcer. The Kitchenmidden or Litorina period of the Early Neolithic was over; the Full Neolithic had arrived. Axes were polished, cattle kept, grain grown. Four Stages of development are discernible.
5500-3500 B.C. Burials in soil. Sharp-butted axes.
3500-2500 B.C. Burials in dolmens, chambers of three to five flat upright stones, roofed with one slab. Narrow-butted axes.
2500-2100 B.C. Burials in _Allées couvertes_ or _Ganggraeber_, chambers of dolmen type but larger and with a roofed corridor approach. Thick-butted axes. Some copper. Beautifully neat and even chipping of flint daggers, lance heads, arrowpoints, some suggesting by their forms that they may be flint imitations of bronzes already in use on the Mediterranean. The same is true of perforated stone axes, ground into ornamental curves, such as are natural in cast metal.
2100-1900 B.C. Burials in stone cysts, progressively decreasing in size. Thick-butted axes. Chipped daggers and curving axes reminiscent of bronze forms continue. The first bronze appears, its percentage of tin still low.
235. THE BRONZE AGE AND ITS PERIODS IN SCANDINAVIA
Bronze reached the Scandinavian region late, as a well developed art, and its working soon showed a high degree of technical and æsthetic excellence. But arts that in the Orient had appeared almost simultaneously with bronze—writing, masonry, wheel turning of pottery—did not reach Scandinavia until after bronze had been superseded by iron there. The consequence was that the Northern culture remained on the whole thoroughly barbarous. And yet, perhaps on account of this very backwardness, an aloofness resulted which drove the Scandinavian bronze-workers to follow their own tastes and develop their own forms and styles, often with taste as exquisite as simple. In other words, a local culture grew, much like the analogous local cultures in America which have been traced in previous chapters. Yet the basis of this Northern bronze culture was southern and Oriental invention; and the south and east continued to influence Scandinavia. The northern safety-pin, for instance, underwent the same stages as the southern one: backs that were first straight and narrow, then sheetlike, then bowed, with the ends enlarging to great buckles or disks. But the southern fibula, whatever its type or period, was one-piece and elastic, the northern at all times made of two separate parts, and without real spring.
Connection with other countries is evident from the Northern bronze itself, at least the tin of which, if not the alloy, was imported. Yet the finds of the Scandinavian Bronze Age, numerous as they are, do not contain a single specimen that can be traced to Egypt or to Greece. Even pieces made in middle Europe are rare. And molds, ladles, unfinished castings, prove that the North cast its own bronze on the spot. First knowledge of the art had evidently seeped in from the region of Switzerland, Austria, and Hungary, which in turn derived it from the Italian and Balkan peninsulas, which at a still earlier time had learned it from Egypt or Asia.
It appears, then, that it would be equally erroneous to regard the Scandinavian Bronze Age as an independent development or to regard it as a mere copy or importation from the Orient. It was neither; or, in a sense, it was both. Its origin lies in the great early focal point of civilization in the Near East; its specific form, the qualities which it took on, are its own. The disseminated ingredient, the basis due to diffusion, must be admitted as fully as the elements of local development which mark off a distinct Northern culture-area, or sub-focus of cultural energy.
This interplay of forces is typical also of the Iron and New Stone Ages, and it is the number of local centers of culture growth, their increasingly rapid flourishing as time went on, and the multiplication of connections between countries, that render the prehistory of Eur-Asiatic civilization so difficult. If enough were known of the life of the Palæolithic, it is probable that a similar though less intricate tangle of developments might be evident for that period also.
The resemblance to the interrelations of areas within America is manifest. The Southwest stands to southern Mexico as Scandinavia does to the Orient: suffused by it, stimulated by it, created by it, almost; yet at all times with a provincial cast of its own. The Southwestern specialist can trace a continuous evolution on the spot which tempts him to forget the obvious and indisputable Mexican origins. The Mexicanist, on the other hand, impressed by the practical identity of fundamentals and close resemblance in many details, is likely to see Southwestern culture only as a mutilated copy of the higher civilization to the south. Correct understanding requires the balancing of both views.
Close equivalents of the culture-areas of American ethnologists are in fact recognized by European archæologists. Thus, Déchelette distinguishes seven “geographical provinces” in the Bronze Age of Europe, as follows: 1, _Ægean_ (Greece, islands, coast of Asia Minor); 2, _Italian_ (with Sicily and Sardinia); 3, _Iberian_ (Spain, Portugal, Balearics); 4, _Western_ (France, Great Britain, Ireland, Belgium, southern Germany, Switzerland, Bohemia); 5, _Danubian_ (Hungary, Moravia, the Balkan countries); 6, _Scandinavian_ (including northern Germany and the Baltic coast); 7, _Uralic_ (Russia and western Siberia).
The fourteen hundred years generally allowed the Scandinavian Bronze Age are divisible into five or six periods,[35] which become progressively shorter.
2500-2100, Neolithic, with copper, and 2100-1900, with occasional bronze, have already been mentioned.
1900-1600 B.C. Burial in stone cysts. Little decoration of bronze, and that only in straight lines. Flat ax heads or celts. Triangular daggers. Daggers mounted on staves like ax heads.
1600-1400 B.C. Occasional cremation of corpses, the ashes put into very small cysts. Decoration of bronze in engraved spirals. Flanged and stop-ridged axes. Swords. Straight fibulas.
1400-1050 B.C. Cremation general. Axes of socketed type. Bowed fibulas. Bronze vessels with lids.
1050-850 B.C. Spiral ornament decaying. Fibulas with two large bosses. Ship-shaped razors.
850-650 B.C. Ornamentation plastic, rather than engraved, often produced in the casting. Rows of concentric circles and other patterns replace spirals. Fibulas with two large disks. Knives with voluted antennæ-like handles. Sporadic occurrence of iron.
650-500 B.C. Iron increasing in use; decorative bronze deteriorating.
236. PROBLEMS OF CHRONOLOGY
The dating of events in the Neolithic and Metal Ages is of much more importance than in the Palæolithic. Whether an invention was made in Babylonia in 5000 or in 3000 B.C. means the difference between its occurring in the hazy past of a formative culture or in a well advanced and directly documented phase of that culture. If the dolmens and other megalithic monuments of northern Europe were erected about 3000 B.C., they are older than the pyramids of Egypt and contemporaneous with the first slight unfoldings of civilization in Crete and Troy. But if their date is 1000 B.C., they were set up when pure alphabetic writing and iron and horses were in use in western Asia, when Egypt was already senile, and the Cretan and Trojan cultures half forgotten. In the one case, the megaliths represent a local achievement, perhaps independent of the stone architecture of Egypt; in the other event, they are likely to be a belated and crudely barbarian imitation of this architecture.
But in the Palæolithic, year dates scarcely matter. Whether the Mousterian phase culminated 25,000 or 75,000 years ago is irrelevant: it was far before the beginning of historic time in either case. If one sets the earlier date, the Chellean and Magdalenian are also stretched farther off; if the later, it is because one shrinks his estimate of the whole Palæolithic, the sequence of whose periods remains fixed. It is really only the relative chronology that counts within the Old Stone Age. The durations are so great, and so wholly prehistoric, that the only value of figures is the vividness of their concrete impression on the mind, and the emphasis that they place on the length of human antiquity as compared with the brevity of recorded history. Palæolithic datings might almost be said to be useful in proportion as they are not taken seriously.
At the same time, the chronology of the Palæolithic is aided by several lines of geological evidence that are practically absent for the Neolithic and Bronze Ages: thickness of strata, height of river deposits and moraines, depth of erosion, species of wild animals. The Neolithic is too brief to show notable traces of geological processes. Its age must therefore be determined by subtler means: slight changes in temperature and precipitation; the thickness of refuse deposits; and above all, the linking of its latter phases to the earliest datable events in documentary or inscriptional history. By these aids, comparison has gradually built up a chronology which is accepted as approximate by most authorities. This chronology puts the beginning of bronze in the Baltic region at about 1900 B.C., in Spain at 2500, the first Swiss lake-dwellings at 4000, the domestication of cattle and grain in middle Europe around 5500, the first pottery-bearing shellmounds about 8000 B.C. Of course, these figures must not be taken as accurate. Estimates vary somewhat. Yet the dates cited probably represent the opinion of the majority of specialists without serious deviation: except on one point, and that an important one.
This point is the hinge from the end of prehistory to the beginning of history: the date of the first dynasties of Egypt and Babylonian Sumer. On this matter, there was for many years a wide discrepancy among Orientalists. The present tendency is to set 3400 or 3315 B.C., with an error of not over a century, as the time when upper and lower Egypt began to be ruled by a single king, Mena, the founder of the “first dynasty”; 2750 as the date of Sargon of Akkad, the first consolidator and empire-builder in the Babylonian region; and about 3100 as the period of the earliest discovered datable remains from the Sumerian city states.
The longer reckoning puts the Egyptian first dynasty back to about 4000; according to some, even earlier; and Sargon to 3750. This last date rests on the discovery by Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, successor of Nebuchadnezzar in the sixth century B.C., of a deeply buried inscription in a foundation wall erected by Naram-sin, son of Sargon. Nabonidus had antiquarian tastes, and set his archæologists and historians to compute how long before him Naram-sin had lived. Their answer was 3,200 years—the thirty-eighth century B.C., we should say; and this figure Nabonidus had put into an inscription which has come down to us. All this looks direct and sure enough. But did the king’s scholars really know when they told him that just 3,200 years had elapsed since his predecessor’s reign, or were they guessing? The number is a round one: eighty forties of years, such as the Old Testament is fond of reckoning with. The trend of modern opinion, based on a variety of considerations, is that the Babylonian historians were deceiving either the king or themselves.
The bearing of the discrepancy is this. The scholars who are in more or less agreement that bronze reached Mediterranean Europe about 2500 and Northern Europe about 1900, were generally building on the longer chronology of the Near East. They were putting Mena around 4000 and Sargon in 3750. This allowed an interval of over a thousand years in which bronze working could have been carried to Spain, and two thousand to Denmark. With the shorter chronology for Egypt and Babylonia, the time available for the transmission has to be cut down by a thousand years. Should the European dates, therefore, be made correspondingly more recent? Or is the diminished interval still sufficient—that is, might a few centuries have sufficed to carry the bronze arts from the Orient to Sicily and Spain, and a thousand years to bear them to Scandinavia? The interval seems reasonable, and is accordingly the one here accepted. But it is possible that if the shorter chronology becomes proved beyond contradiction for Egypt and Babylonia, the dates for the Neolithic and Bronze Ages of Europe may also have to be abbreviated somewhat.
One famous time-reckoning has in fact been made by the Dane Sophus Müller, who, without basing very much on any Oriental chronology, shortens all the prehistoric periods of Europe. His scheme of approximate dating is reproduced, with some simplifications, in Figure 42. It will be seen that he sets the second or dolmen period of the Full Neolithic in Scandinavia from about 1800 to 1400 B.C., whereas the more usual reckoning puts it at 3500 to 2500; his earliest Kitchenmidden date is 4000, as against 8000.
237. PRINCIPLES OF THE PREHISTORIC SPREAD OF CULTURE
This chronology has much to commend it besides its almost daring conservatism; especially the clarity of its consistent recognition of certain cultural processes. Five principles and three extensions are set up by Müller:
1. The south [of Europe, with the Near East] was the vanguard and dispensing source of culture; the peripheral regions, especially in the north [of Europe] followed and received.
2. The elements of southern culture were transmitted to the north only in reduction and extract.
3. They were also subject to modifications.
4. These elements of southern culture sometimes appeared in the remoter areas with great vigor and new qualities of their own.
5. But such remote appearances are later in time than the occurrence of the same elements in the south.
6. Forms of artifacts or ornaments may survive for a long time with but little modification, especially if transmitted to new territory.
7. Separate elements characteristic of successive periods in a culture center may occur contemporaneously in the marginal areas, their diffusion having occurred at different rates of speed.
8. Marginal cultures thus present a curious mixture of traits whose original age is great and of others that are much newer; the latter, in fact, occasionally reach the peripheries earlier than old traits.
The basic idea of these formulations is that of the gradual radiation of culture from creative focal centers to backward marginal areas, without the original dependence of the peripheries wholly precluding their subsequent independent development. It is obvious that this point of view is substantially identical with that which has been held to in the presentation of native American culture in the preceding chapter.
It is only fair to say that a number of eminent archæologists combat the prevalent opinion that the sources of European Neolithic and Bronze Age civilization are to be derived almost wholly from the Orient. They speak of this view as an “Oriental mirage.” They see more specific differences than identities between the several local cultures of the two regions, and tend to explain the similarities as due to independent invention.
Since knowledge of ancient cultures is necessarily never complete, there is a wide range of facts to which either explanation is, theoretically, applicable. But the focal-marginal diffusion interpretation has the following considerations in its favor.
Within the fully historic period, there have been numerous undoubted diffusions, of which the alphabet, the week, and the true arch may be taken as illustrations. At least in the earlier portion of the historic period, the flow of such diffusions was regularly out of the Orient; which raises a considerable presumption that the flow was in the same direction as early as the Neolithic. On the other hand, indubitably independent parallelisms are very difficult to establish within historic areas and periods, and therefore likely to have been equally rare during prehistory.
Then, too, the diffusion interpretation explains a large part of civilization to a certain degree in terms of a large, consistent scheme. To the contrary, the parallelistic opinion leaves the facts both unexplained and unrelated. If the Etruscans devised the true arch and liver divination independently of the Babylonians, there are two sets of phenomena awaiting interpretation instead of one. To say that they are both “natural” events is equivalent to calling them accidental, that is, unexplainable. To fall back on instinctive impulses of the human mind will not do, else all or most nations should have made these inventions.
Of course it is important to remember that no sane interpretation of culture explains everything. We do not know what caused the true arch to be invented in Babylonia, hieroglyphic writing in Egypt, the alphabet in Phœnicia, at a certain time rather than at another or rather than in another place. The diffusion point of view simply accepts certain intensive focal developments of culture as empirically given by the facts, and then relates as many other facts as possible to these. Every clear-minded historian, anthropologist, and sociologist admits that we are still in ignorance on the problems of what caused the great bursts of higher organization and original productiveness of early Egypt and Sumer, of Crete, of ancient North China, of the Mayas, of Periclean Athens. We know many of the events of civilization, know them in their place and order. We can infer from these something of the processes of imitation, conservatism, rationalization that have shaped them. We know as yet as good as nothing of the first or productive causes of civilization.
It is extremely important that this limitation of our understanding be frankly realized. It is only awareness of darkness that brings seeking for light. Scientific problems must be felt before they can be grappled. But within the bounds of our actual knowledge, the principle of culture derivation and transmission seems to integrate, and thus in a measure to explain, a far greater body of facts than any other principle—provided it is not stretched into an instrument of magic and forced to explain everything.