Current Anthropology February 1987 [antikvár]

Current Anthropology, Volume Number i, February 1987 1987 by The Wennei-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, all rights reserved 00ii-3204/87/a80i-000i$2.i5The Establishment of Agrarian Communities on the North European Plain^by Peter BoguckiThe introduction of food production to the North European Plain was a complicated process. A crucial distinction must be drawn between the exogenous agrarian communities which penetrated the lowland zone and the indigenous foraging communities which ultimately adopted elements of the agrarian economy. This paper discusses the nature of these two populations and proposes some models for their interaction which ultimately led to the integration of domestic plants and animals into the indigenous sub-sistence-settlement system. The consequences of this process for the new agrarian communities are also discussed.peter bogucki Is Director of Studies of Forbes College, one of five residential colleges at Princeton University (Princeton, N.J. 08544, U.S.A.). His undergraduate degree is from the University of Pennsylvania (1974) and his Ph.D. from Harvard (rpSi). His archaeological fieldwork has been primarily in Poland on early Neolithic sites. He is the author of "Early Farmers of the North European Plain" (with Ryszard Grygiel) (Scientific American 248(4]: 104-12); Early Neolithic Subsistence and Settlement in the Pohsh Lowlands (British Archaeological Reports Intemational Series 150); and Forest Farmers and Stockheideis: Eaily Agriculture and Its Consequences in Central Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press). The present paper was submitted in final form 25 vi 86.I. Bemard Wailes, Ryszard Grygiel, David Anthony, and L. P. Louwe Kooijmans made very helpful comments on a draft of this article or provided important information. Responsibility for interpretations and leaps of faith rests with the author.The process of the introduction of food production to temperate Europe was not uniform, for the earliest farming communities settled in a variety of ecological zones. A distinction can be made between the agricultural settlement by the Linear Pottery culture and its congeners of the loess belt in the central European uplands and the introduction of agriculture in adjacent areas such as the Alpine Foreland and the North European Plain (fig. i). In the loess belt, the establishment of agrarian communities appears to have been the result of colonization by populations almost wholly dependent on cultigens and domestic livestock alien to temperate Europe (Tring-ham 1968, Hamond 1981). Although indigenous foraging populations were present in the loess belt (e.g., Geupel 1980), it seems that they were quickly absorbed by this colonization or relegated to nonarable areas (which may have been more favorable for foraging anyway). On the North European Plain, however, there were substantial populations of indigenous foragers, and the introduction of food production in many areas is clearly not a result of direct colonization by agrarian communities from the south.Archaeologists have recently begun to reconsider the process of the introduction of food production to the North European Plain. Since the end result was the establishment of agrarian communities where there previously had been foragers, the understanding had been that domesticated plants and animals were somehow acquired from food-producing peoples in the loess belt. The integration of these into the foraging economy was viewed as the normal result of the inherent superiority of reliance on domesticated plants and animals as opposed to wild foodstuffs. Anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer populations in the last 25 years have indicated that this view of the relative merits of foraging and food production is naive and often misleading. The adoption of food production by hunter-gatherers is usually not automatic, and there needs to be some sort of incentive to make such a radical change in subsistence organization. The extraordinary natural productivity of the climax forests which covered the North European Plain during the early Holocene has been noted by Clarke (1976), and in such a habitat there would appear to have been little motivation for adopting alien cultigens and domestic livestock. Moreover, Zvelebil and Rowley-Conwy (1984) have noted that the maritime adaptations of the Baltic coastal area were a viable alternative to food production. The disincentives to adopting food production on the North European Plain suggest that its acceptance by the indigenous foragers of this area was the result of factors beyond simple "acculturation."The consequences of the introduction of food production to the North European Plain also deserve examination. The long-term result of the establishment of agrarian communities in this area was not the development of the same sort of nucleated settlements that characterized the initial occupation of the loess belt by food-producing populations. Instead, most initial indigenous food-producing communities of the North European