Prehistoric Men

by Robert J. Braidwood

THE SPREAD OF THE VILLAGE-FARMING COMMUNITY WAY OF LIFE INTO EUROPE

How about Europe? I won’t give you many details. You can easily imagine that the late prehistoric prelude to European history is a complicated affair. We all know very well how complicated an area Europe is now, with its welter of different languages and cultures. Remember, however, that a great deal of archeology has been done on the late prehistory of Europe, and very little on that of further Asia and Africa. If we knew as much about these areas as we do of Europe, I expect we’d find them just as complicated.

This much is clear for Europe, as far as the spread of the village-community way of life is concerned. The general idea and much of the know-how and the basic tools of food-production moved from the Near East to Europe. So did the plants and animals which had been domesticated; they were not naturally at home in Europe, as they were in western Asia. I do not, of course, mean that there were traveling salesmen who carried these ideas and things to Europe with a commercial gleam in their eyes. The process took time, and the ideas and things must have been passed on from one group of people to the next. There was also some actual movement of peoples, but we don’t know the size of the groups that moved.

The story of the “colonization” of Europe by the first farmers is thus one of (1) the movement from the eastern Mediterranean lands of some people who were farmers; (2) the spread of ideas and things beyond the Near East itself and beyond the paths along which the “colonists” moved; and (3) the adaptations of the ideas and things by the indigenous “Forest folk”, about whose “receptiveness” Professor Mathiassen speaks ([p. 97]). It is important to note that the resulting cultures in the new European environment were European, not Near Eastern. The late Professor Childe remarked that “the peoples of the West were not slavish imitators; they adapted the gifts from the East ... into a new and organic whole capable of developing on its own original lines.”