Prehistoric Europe [antikvár]

Introduction Viewed in the context of the earher history of mankind which has been the subject of Dr Waechter's volume in this series, Man before History, the later prehistory of Europe, covering at most a span of some seven thousand years, may appear to have been a relatively brief interlude between primitive savagery and later civilizations. In fact, it is an interlude which witnesses some of the crucial steps in man's progress towards the control of his environment, from the beginnings of agriculture to the development of metal technology and the origins of urbanization, a process in part stimulated by the presence of more advanced societies to the south and east, and in part determined by the particular conditions and circumstances of prehistoric Europe. For many years, following the work of late 19th-century scholars hke Oscar Montelius, it was conventional to trace innovations in the assemblages of prehistoric cultures in Europe to the influence of the higher civihzations of the Aegean and the Near East, each successive development, economic or technological, being spread progressively into the barbarian northwest, often in diluted form, by a process of cultural diffusion. Reference to such external impulses was not unrelated to the need to establish synchronisms with Greece, Palestine and Egypt as a means of building up a chronological framework for prehistoric Europe itself. Much the same process was adopted for regions further to the Atlantic northwest, where new cultural assemblages in Britain, for instance, were commonly seen as the product of migrations from the European mainland. In the last 20 years, the pendulum of archaeological fashion has swung away from the diffusionist view of prehistory in favor of independent invention or other forms of reciprocal exchange as explanations of culture change, a trend which has been facihtated by the development of radiocarbon dating as a means of estabhshing more reliable chrono-log ies. To admit the principle of cultural diffusion, however, does not demand the denial of independent development. Gordon Childe, perhaps the foremost of 20th-century prehistorians and an exponent of the diffusionist view, believed that "even in prehistoric times barbarian societies behaved in a distinctively European way." Indeed, dynamic societies indigenous to Europe which generate economic or technological innovations are equally Ukely to promote the diffusion of such innovations, whether by opening up routes for traffic in metal ores or by territorial expansion resulting from their newly acquired wealth and power. Throughout prehistory it is evident that certain well-defmed natural routes served as arteries for cultural diffusion across Europe. Of crucial importance throughout was the Danube, known to Greek historians as the river which extended through the heart of Celtic Europe. Its significance in prehistory stemmed not least from the fact that it led to the metal-rich regions ofthe Carpathians and the Erzgebirge, from which other major outlets led to the north European plain, to the North Sea and to Britain. It is often wrongly assumed by insular students that all innovations from the continent must derive by way ofthe narrow Channel crossing, or perhaps from the Rhine, when the Weser and especially the Elbe must have afforded an alternative arc of access from northern and eastern Britain to the workshops of Europe. The Mediterranean, too, exploited by Greek colonists from the late 7th century BC, must have seen traffic to the west from earliest times, whether by the Straits to the Atlantic seaboard, or through the Carcassonne Gap and the Garonne valley. Over such a wide expanse of Europe, our treatment must of necessity be selective and abbreviated, omitting much that is of undisputed importance regionally in favor of those assemblages that relate more directly to the mainstream of European prehistory, that is our theme. The patterns which were established in later prehistoric Europe are not unique to prehistory; they are those that asserted themselves again in early medieval times. As Stuart Piggott has reminded us, the Migration Period was "no more than a return to the conditions of prehistoric Europe which had been forced into temporary immobility by Roman rule. A Europe of permanently settled communities was an achievement of the Middle Ages, and for an historical counterpart to the conditions of prehistory we must look to the period of the Saxon settlements, the raids of the Norsemen . . . and the movements of Goth, Vandal and Burgundián." These movements take us beyond our present brief, and are chronicled in another volume in this series, by Philip Dixon, Barbarian Europe.