Ornaments Reveal Resistance of North European Cultures to the Spread of Farming

Abstract

The transition to farming is the process by which human groups switched from hunting and gathering wild resources to food production. Understanding how and to what extent the spreading of farming communities from the Near East had an impact on indigenous foraging populations in Europe has been the subject of lively debates for decades. Ethnographic and archaeological studies have shown that population replacement and admixture, trade, and long distance diffusion of cultural traits lead to detectable changes in symbolic codes expressed by associations of ornaments on the human body. Here we use personal ornaments to document changes in cultural geography during the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition. We submitted a binary matrix of 224 bead-types found at 212 European Mesolithic and 222 Early Neolithic stratigraphic units to a series of spatial and multivariate analyses. Our results reveal consistent diachronic and geographical trends in the use of personal ornaments during the Neolithisation. Adoption of novel bead-types combined with selective appropriation of old attires by incoming farmers is identified in Southern and Central Europe while cultural resistance leading to the nearly exclusive persistence of indigenous personal ornaments characterizes Northern Europe. We argue that this pattern reflects two distinct cultural trajectories with different potential for gene flow.

Demic and cultural diffusion in prehistoric Europe in the age of ancient genomes

“…This is consistent with the idea that cultural diffusion may have been the dominant process of neolithization in that region. This idea is supported by a recent study of body ornaments at the time of the Neolithic transition of Europe, which showed continuity of Mesolithic body ornaments across the Neolithic transition in northern Europe, but not in southern and central Europe …”

Time Order and ‘Speaking Out’: Traditional Farming and Beliefs in Europe and Indonesia and Sky Symmetry Considerations

“…And indeed there is evidence that the peoples who around 5000 BC in Europe started with farming practices used ornaments that are different from ornaments used by those in the same region and time who remained hunter-gatherers (Solange, d'Errico & Vanhaeren, 2015). The latter people's ornaments consisted mainly of necklaces with animal teeth and punctured shells.…”

Miocene shells in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age burials in Poland

“…In the area of present-day Poland ornaments made of fossil shells were found at archaeological sites, specifically in burials, related to Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age societies such as the Lublin-Volhynia, Złota, Mierzanowice and Strzyżów (Figure 1 and Table 1) -Yosef Mayer, Bonsall, & Choyke, 2017;Bonnardin, 2009;Rigaud et al, 2015). As was previously noted, there are discernable regional patterns in the use of particular types of ornaments for body adornment, some of which persisted for several millennia (Rigaud et al, 2015;Vanhaeren & d'Errico, 2006). This can already be observed in the Palaeolithic period, for example, within Magdalenian entities in the Paris Basin (Peschaux et al, 2017).…”

“…The discussed types of shells, all characteristic for the European Neolithic (Bonnardin, 2009;Rigaud et al, 2015), were brought to the area of present-day Poland, and, at the same time, locally available raw materials were used to produce ornaments modelled on the imported items.…”