Transcription
[Music] Around 7,000 years ago, a remarkable influential society flourished in the heart of Neolithic Europe. Archaeologists call it the linear pottery culture after their distinctive ceramics, and they were pioneers of agriculture and village life. But their most awe-inspiring innovation was the colossal timber long houses they built. The biggest of them were the largest structures humanity had ever erected.
Founding villages in fertile river valleys from the Carpathians to the Paris basin and the riverista, these people's long houses were much more than just shelters. They were the foundation of the whole society. These long houses could be 50 m or 160 ft long, housing entire extended families, their livestock, and stores of grain under a single massive roof. Precisely built using enormous structural timbers and walls of split logs and wattle and daub, these structures demonstrated advanced carpentry and engineering skills. It's especially surprising because their ancestors from Southeast Europe and their ancestors in Anatolia did not build enormous long houses in small farmsteads. Their homes were usually more modest structures, often in densely packed settlements.
So, what motivated the linear pottery culture to suddenly start building such grand structures? What do these long houses reveal about the people who lived in them and how they organized their daily lives and their societies? And what happened to long houses when this society declined and collapsed in violence? This is the story of the largest structures the world had ever seen, the amazing long houses of Neolithic Europe.
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Anatolian farmers crossed the Aegean to establish the first Neolithic settlements in Europe after about 7,000 BC. These successful societies kept growing and founding new settlements until their descendants left the Aegean region in two main directions. One route expanding across the Mediterranean coasts, the other expanding through the Balkans, following the river valleys and into the Carpathian basin. This furthest extent of what we call the Starčevo culture remained the northern frontier of Neolithic Europe for maybe four or 500 years.
The farmers of the Neolithic Balkans lived in broadly the same way as their forebears on either side of the Aegean, farming the same range of crops their ancestors had all the way back to Anatolia. They also tended to live in tell settlements where they built their houses over the ruins of ones they'd pulled down. And along with the accumulation of the general refuse of life, their settlements slowly rose into monumental hills over generations. What likely stopped further expansion beyond the Carpathian frontier was that it was a different environment to the north: colder, wetter, less annual sunlight, and so on.
But then from around 5,500 BC, from a small area of the Starčevo culture, a new kind of culture developed in what's modern western Hungary today. These people developed new ways of life and new farming methods, perhaps developing strains of barley and other crops that were adapted to northern environmental conditions while dropping other crop types like chickpea from their repertoire entirely. And they developed new long houses and settlement types. They also developed new decorated pottery types. The pottery that gives this culture its modern name, the linear pottery culture, commonly known as the LBK after their German name Linearbandkeramik.
Soon after 5,500 BC, they suddenly expanded first from Transdanubia to Slovakia, Austria, Moravia, Bohemia, and central and eastern Germany within just 100 years or so. And then around 5,300 BC, a second wave of expansion reached the Paris basin and adjacent areas of France as far west as Normandy. And in the east reached as far as modern Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania. Finally, around 5,000 BC, this culture came to an end in an explosion of violence, evidence of which is seen in various massacre sites like the famous Talheim death pit. But clearly, the way they did things, their technologies, their social organization, their beliefs, and everything about how they lived worked very well indeed for about 500 years.
No one knows how and why all these social innovations developed here in Transdanubia in about 5,500 BC. But one idea supported by new ancient DNA evidence is that it was stimulated by mixing with the local hunter-gatherer population. When the Neolithic farmers spread through the Balkans, Europe was already inhabited by European hunter-gatherers, a population sometimes called WHG for Western Hunter-Gatherer, by geneticists. The ecological zones the farmers were interested in were not those especially exploited by the hunter-gatherers. So, there wasn't necessarily much competition for resources or direct contact everywhere. It's thought that small groups of hunter-gatherers lived parallel lives in the same regions as the colonizing farmers spread out. Nevertheless, there were interactions and many admixture events. We see partial WHG ancestry in LBK people from some of the earliest LBK settlements. These early LBK people averaged 11% WHG ancestry, but could be as high as 35 or even 50%, meaning in that case that person had one farmer parent and one hunter-gatherer parent. And limited WHG admixture continued to occur with LBK groups over the centuries, apparently from both men and women joining these farming societies. And this 2024 DNA study suggests this admixture with local hunter-gatherers could have played a key part in the formation of the LBK culture, or at least was one way they differentiated themselves from their ancestral societies.
The extent of the hunter-gatherer influence on this new society is hard to say, but we do know this new way of life was different from what came before, and it was also enormously successful. Like all Neolithic cultures though, their way of life enabled far greater population sizes than hunter-gatherer societies could maintain, and the WHG genetic component typically remained correspondingly small, averaging about 5%. The LBK birth rate was high, and settlements were quickly outgrown, and the next generation moved on to colonize new virgin lands in succession, driving these two waves of expansions across Europe. New family groups set out to establish new settlements, bringing their domesticated plants and animals with them, while also hunting wild animals and gathering wild resources. Interestingly, early LBK people favored cattle and did more hunting. While later on, before their decline and collapse around 5,000 BC, they tended to favor pigs and hunted less. Their cattle not only provided meat and hides, but manuring their fields helped these settlements thrive for generations. And they milked their cows, too. I really love that they used these ceramic sieves to separate curds from whey for cheese making. Europeans have been enjoying dairy products for at least 7 and a half thousand years.
[Music] Settlements varied in size. The largest could have 40 to 50 long houses and perhaps 3 to 400 people. Others though might have just one large long house with two or three smaller ones nearby. The long houses had a fairly consistent width of between 5 1/2 to 7 m, which is 18 to 23 ft. The lengths though could vary considerably. They ranged from between just 10 m or 32 ft to an enormous and rare 50 m or 160 ft. I think just 5% or so were this big. Probably the houses in the range between 15 to 30 m or 50 to 100 ft long were the most common.
We're all quite familiar today with the idea of these kinds of buildings. We might think of Viking long houses, the Germanic mead hall of the early medieval era. And we're used to the idea of large domestic buildings where we live permanently with our family, surrounded by plots for growing crops and areas beyond for grazing our animals. It's so familiar you might assume it's how people always lived. But 7 and a half thousand years ago, these buildings and the farmstead or village way of life were an astounding innovation. And their houses were the largest buildings in the world. They were monumental structures that formed the physical and conceptual heart of the community. They were foundational to the society. And again, that might seem obvious, but in fact, houses need not be so central to successful Neolithic societies. Plenty of others before and after lived in smaller, more temporary structures, like in late Neolithic Ireland, or focused more on the collective settlement as a whole, becoming a unifying monument at tell sites. The LBK might be named after its pottery, but they'd be better defined by their buildings.
These long houses tended to be oriented in the same way, generally northwest to southeast, with the doorways tending to be on the southeast end, although some might have had a door on the long side. They often had ditches dug along the outside walls, presumably for drainage or collecting water shedding off the roof, and might have been dug originally to provide clay for the wattle and daub walls. Most sites appear in the archaeological record as post holes along with ditches and pits, but very few original house floors survive. It might be the ancient floors have been plowed away by later farming, or the original house floors might have been suspended on piles above the ground surface.
Some of the LBK long houses were not rectangular, but were more trapezoidal, narrowing at the northern end, but they tended to have the same kind of modular structure and similar kinds of internal organization. The huge posts forming the frame of the building supported the roof and also formed internal divisions. The large houses were separated into up to three sections: the southern front part, the central part, and the northern part at the rear. Archaeologists have reconstructed how they were used largely by the different finds associated with each part, seeing sections for living and sleeping, working and food storage, and others for stabling animals. Some houses likely had a raised second floor for sleeping or food storage.
Finds suggest working areas where the men produced and maintained their stone tools and where the women made pottery and did the grinding of grain to make flour. We know they had sex-differentiated economic roles because of their sex-differentiated burials. Men were often buried with their tools like polished stone axes that they used for woodworking, clearing land and building long houses, and for killing their enemies. And women were buried with pottery and grinding stones, as well as personal ornaments like shell beads and pendants. From testing human remains for chemical signatures that show where they grew up, researchers have demonstrated that men, at least men of high status, tended to stay in the regions they were born in all their lives, being buried where they grew up, while women were more mobile, moving to new areas during their lives. This suggests patrilocal organization and female exogamy, where men inherit the lands of their forefathers and marry women from other areas.
Each long house was apparently a self-contained social and economic unit. This was where an extended family lived, worked, and stored their food and perhaps stabled their animals. But not all houses in one community were the same. There was inequality within settlements. For example, a study on LBK settlements in a valley in northwest France found the largest houses focused on growing grain and herding cattle and sheep, while the smallest houses focused on hunting boar and deer and making hides. And the middle-sized houses did a bit of both. This suggests a hierarchy of lineages or groups within these societies, with the wealthiest controlling access to grain plots and grazing land. No doubt they exchanged their produce in a mutually beneficial way, but it's hard to imagine the smaller houses as anything but subservient to the larger ones.
These massive structures not only served to store wealth, whether in grain or animals or people, but the houses were monumental declarations of power, too. And it's possible their size, housing many men, and the limited entrances also served as a deterrent to potential tribal violence. Some believe the large size of the houses developed from a kind of competition between rival groups, each trying to outdo the other until some reached these enormous sizes. There was also a hierarchy between sites, with some large ones maybe forming an ancestral power base with many smaller settlements in its orbit.
Houses seem to have stood for a generation or so, maybe 30 years at most, before being abandoned and new houses being built nearby. Some people think the long houses were abandoned when the head of the household died. The ruins of the former houses might stand unused, or at least the area where they had once stood was left alone, as if respecting its memory and that of the people who had lived there. Later LBK groups increasingly began building large ditched enclosures. Some see these as defensive in nature. Others see them as ritual meeting centers or at least demonstrating a new kind of concentrated social structure.
But the massive success of the LBK could not last. Sometime after 5,100 BC, there may have been a slight climatic downturn. The soils might have been exhausted by over-farming, and the population density might have reached a critical mass, leading to intensifying competition for remaining resources. There is evidence for disruption in long-range networks, population decline, and a terrible crisis. Clustered around 5,000 BC, there is evidence for widespread large-scale massacres. There was always intergroup violence in LBK society, likely blood feuds and raiding for cattle and to abduct women, that kind of thing. But now whole settlements, even many settlements in a single event, seem to have been massacred. People being shot by arrows and clubbed on the head with axes and adzes, and the bodies being dumped into ditches or pits. Some of these massacre sites have a distinct lack of women and girls, suggesting they were carried off by the victors.
Eventually, the cycle of violence came to an end along with the LBK culture. After 5,000 BC, new societies emerged in various regions across what had been the LBK territory, distinct from the LBK, but carrying various elements of their ancestral society forward into the future. Some societies kept building long houses, but they were no longer constrained by the rules governing the sizes, shapes, and organization of the LBK ones. The most notable society for me is the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture that emerged in the east after 5,000 BC. They eventually built the largest settlements that the world had ever seen, made up of thousands of long houses and tens of thousands of people.
And notably, in some places like Northern Europe, there was a genetic and cultural resurgence of the local hunter-gatherers. For centuries during the LBK era, some hunter-gatherer groups had quietly thrived in coastal regions and wetlands beyond the reach of the LBK. And now they would emerge and assert their influence, even dominance over the battered survivors. In some places, completely replacing the LBK male lineages with their own. But that's a story for another time. Please subscribe now if you're interested in hearing it. Thank you very much indeed to my patrons and channel members for supporting my work. If you like what I do here, please join us using the links below.
Now, please watch this video on the spectacular megalithic monuments of Neolithic Ireland and the mysterious people who built them, who unlike the LBK, lived in very ephemeral circular structures. Thank you for watching.
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