The first farmers of Central Europe - diversity in LBK lifeways

The Linearbandkeramik culture, often abbreviated LBK, is the first Neolithic culture in many parts of central Europe. Dating to roughly 5600-4900 cal BC, it stretches from Hungary to the Paris Basin and from southern Germany into the northern Polish and German plains and Holland. Apart from introducing a farming way of life, the LBK is most notable for the construction of monumental wooden houses, which form the first permanent villages in the area.

For a long time, researchers have treated the LBK as a very uniform culture which spread very quickly from the east by migration and simply displaced the indigenous hunting and gathering population. However, there is now increasing evidence that the situation may have been much more complex, with a mixture of immigration, selective adoption of elements of the farming way of life by indigenous peoples, and fusion between populations. In addition, it seems that Neolithic people may have remained a lot more mobile than previously thought, for example moving with their herds to seasonal or annual rhythms or at significant stages of the lifecourse.

In short, the LBK is much more varied than was once believed, and economic strategies, mobility and nutrition, alongside material culture items such as pottery, house designs and ways of burial, differ both through time and across space. At any one point in time, there may have been considerable economic and ethnic diversity within what were once thought to be homogenous communities.
Our study takes this further by combining interpretations of material culture and conventional palaeoeconomic data with new scientific techniques. Isotopes in human and animal teeth and bone, for example, can show whether people and their herds moved between areas with different geologies or water sources (strontium or oxygen isotopes) and what kind of plant food and proteins they consumed (nitrogen, carbon and calcium isotopes; C14 dates to assess importance of fish). We will also carry out osteological investigations on human skeletons to discover more about activity and nutrition.

Some studies have already been undertaken in this field, but they have been applied to only very few sites in quite small areas (mostly southwest Germany). This means that their results may not necessarily be true for other regions within the extensive LBK distribution. It has often not been possible to sample many skeletons, and generally only one or two of the techniques have been employed, giving a partial view. As a result, conclusions so far have remained strictly limited.

This project, involving experts from Cardiff, Durham and Oxford Universities, is the first to look at this very detailed level at a much wider area, from the lower Rhine and Alsace, through southern Germany and Austria and into Slovakia and western Hungary. In this way, we will seek to establish regional difference in lifeways within the LBK. We will also sample more skeletons in order better to compare differences in diet and mobility between men and women and between younger and older members of the community. We will investigate whether people who were buried in different locations, such as in cemeteries or in pits in settlements, show differences in nutrition or in the kind of work they did. This can then be combined with a study of material culture patterns, on which there is a rich literature. By using many techniques and approaches in combination, we can achieve a better picture of past life and reconstruct it in much more detail.

In this sense, the project is also a case study in the investigation of diversity within the global Neolithic phenomenon as a whole, where the recognition of difference and local responses to new lifeways is becoming increasingly important.