VIRVELINĖS KERAMIKOS KULTŪRA LIETUVOJE 2800–2400 cal BC

Abstract

SUMMARY CORDED WARE CULTURE IN LITHUANIA IN 2800–2400 CAL BC INTRODUCTION This book focuses on the Corded Ware culture (hereinafter referred to as CWC), its technological and typological characteristics, function, and chronology based on the research of ceramics. Corded Ware (hereinafter referred to as CW) was studied in most of the Lithuanian museums as well as in the largest archaeological storage facilities in Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. Substantial data were obtained from the excavations of the CWC sites conducted under my supervision from 2013 through 2017. During these excavations, short-term settlements were investigated and stratified archaeological layers were precisely dated through AMS Radiocarbon dating. As a consequence the collected ceramic assemblages within this study and their associated stratigraphy have become the cornerstone for the reconstruction of the pottery sequence in Lithuania. The research and the publishing of the book were funded by the Research Council of Lithuania (LIP-011/2016). THE CONCEPTION OF THE CWC BEFORE THE GENETIC DISCOVERIES IN 2015 The CWC characterised communities that used to bury their dead in a crouched position, produced beakers decorated with cord impressions and incisions, short-wave moulded pots, and amphorae, used boat-shaped axes, and frequently placed weapons and ceramics into graves. This set of features has been identified in the areas from the Volga River to France and from Southern Finland to the Carpathians for the period between 2900/2800- 2400/2200 cal BC. For a number of years, the main question about the CWC has been and remains to be: how did the cultural homogeneity emerge in such a large area? The two most extreme theses are the mass migration of people or the internalevolution of the society engaged in intensive interregional contact, while a number of interjacent hypotheses have also been put forth. The term CWC was first used by German scholars in the late 19th century (Gotze 1891). Soon afterwards, it was applied to the origins of Germans and other Indo-European nations, such as the Indo-Germans, while the CWC was believed to have originated in Northern Germany and Scandinavia (Kossinna 1902; 1926/1927). In contrast, another theory was proposed almost simultaneously in Germany and England, which associated the origins of the Indo-Europeans with the eastern European steppes instead of Northern Europe (Wahle 1924; Childe 1926). Childe believed that the present distribution of Indo-Europeans must have been caused by massive migration of people at some time during prehistory, and among the known prehistorical cultures, it was the CWC that best corresponded to the scenario. Wahle and Childe’s ideas received support and had followers in different countries (e.g., Glob 1945; Sulimirski 1956), with Marija Gimbutas being the most well known. She developed the so-called ‘Kurgan hypothesis’ (Gimbutas 1956; 1979), which combined all the archaeological cultures of the Pontic-Caspian steppe into one whole, i.e. ‘the Kurgan culture’. Gimbutas hypothesised that between 3500-2200 cal BC the steppe nomads migrated into Central Europe in waves and en masse, destroying or transforming the local cultures. Warlike and mobile nomads of the steppes brought their language, religion, and social structure to the new lands. Due to their mass migration to Central Europe, the Indo-European Globular Amphora culture (hereinafter referred to as GAC) and CWC formed between the Carpathians and the Baltic Sea. Following Gimbutas, Anthony (1986) analysed in detail the natural, economic, and social preconditions necessary for the steppe nomads in order to migrate. Up until the collapse of the Soviet Union, a cultural-historical approach was predominant in the archaeology of the countries of the Soviet bloc, and archaeological cultures were identified with peoples, tribes, languages, or language groups. The CWC was most frequently seen as a culture of migrating Indo-Europeans (e.g., Lietuvių etnogenezė 1987; Эпоха... 1987; Buchvaldek 1966; 1986; Machnik 1966). The origins of the CWC and the Indo-Europeans were most often looked for in the European steppes, the Yamnaya or the Catacomb cultures (Артеменко 1967; Брюсов, Зимина 1966), or between the Dnieper and the Vistula Rivers (Крайнов 1972). In the free post-war Europe, however, a different approach prevailed to the effect that mass migration did not play a significant role in the prehistory of Europe, and the substantial changes in the material culture and social structure in the 3rd millennium cal BC had resulted from peaceful internal development instead (Malmer 1962; Champion et al. 1984; Shenan 1986; Damm 1991). As the topics of ethnicity and migration patterns were strongly related to political ideology during the First and Second World Wars, they were subsequently mostly avoided in scholarly discussion. The CWC was thought not to mean one tradition, one ideology, one people, one language, or one culture, but a collective of multiple peoples and traditions. Certain common cultural elements in a vast European area in the 3rd millennium cal BC had not developed due to mass migration, but rather due to supra-regional networks (Lang 1998; Furholt 2014; Beckerman 2015). In the CWC area, it was not the similarities in the burial rites and the material culture, but the differences that were emphasised and considered to be more important. The research on the CWC had reached somewhat of an impasse. Based on the same archaeological material, archaeologists managed to draw completely different conclusions. There were no systematic methods, rules, or a general consensus on how to recognise migration patterns through archaeological materials. Few attempts have been made to bridge the gap between historical migrations and the signs of migration in archaeological materials (e.g., Anthony 1990; Burmeister 2000; Klejn 1999). It is most likely that, excluding the advances in genetics, the view of the formation and development of the CWC would have continued to fluctuate back and forth depending on a preconceptions and subjectivity on the development of culture rather than on the archaeological material itself. THE CWC RESEARCH IN LITHUANIA The first conception of the CWC in Lithuanian archaeology did not emerge from the studies of the said culture in Lithuania because they simply did not exist. The initial studies were based on published works of foreign scholars. Puzinas wrote that most scholars tended to assign the CWC to Indo-Europeans and then trace its origins to the Eurasian steppes (Puzinas 1983). The academic supervisor of Puzinas’ studies in Heidelberg University between 1930 through 1934 was Professor Wahle, who traced Indo-Germans to the Eastern European steppes (1924). As stated in the book Features of Lithuanian Archaeology (Kulikauskas et al. 1961), the CWC was brought about by new tribes that subsisted on primitive agriculture and raising livestock. It was then noticed that the CWC settlements further away from the sea did not have a marked archaeological layer and were found not only close to other bodies of water, like the Subneolithic sites, but were also much more widely distributed across the landscape. Rimantienė began systemic excavations of the CWC sites in the 1960s. She wrote (1984) that the CWC had been brought by newcomers from the southwest during the Late Neolithic, yet she emphasised that they were scarce in this initial stage. Despite that, the CWC Indo-Europeanised the local non-Indo-Eeuropean Narva and Nemunas cultures (Rimantienė 1996, 318). Rimantienė started using the name of the Pamariai/Bay Coast/Rzucewo culture (hereinafter referred to as RC) not only in reference to the coastland sites, but also to the mainland ones with cord-impressions decorated ceramics (1984). The ceramics presently called the post-Corded Ware (hereinafter referred to as PCW) and dating back to the late Neolithic or the early Bronze Age (hereinafter referred to as EBA) was also assigned to the CWC. Rimantienė considered the CWC communities to have been animal breeders and farmers (1984). Pupils of Rimantienė, Butrimas and Girininkas, however, held different views on this issue. Butrimas wrote that the CWC people came from the south, and “…substantially changed the entire cultural-ethnic development of the region, and had a decisive influence on the future of the people of the eastern Baltic coast” (Butrimas, Kazakevičius 1985). Girininkas also agreed that the CWC people were newcomers to Lithuania, however, according to him, “the Cord Ware people, having got to an alien natural landscape and environment, simply could not change the economic development of the local people… they had to adapt to the local population and to simply dissolve amongst the locals” (1994). He hypothesised that the Narva culture people were northern Indo-Europeans, and the CWC people, southern ones, and traced Balts (i.e. Lithuanians and Latvians) to the former. The CWC people were thought to have been tradespeople operating between the Subneolithic hunters-gatherers and the Neolithic farmers living further south (Girininkas 2009). By quantifying the CWC potsherds and vessels in the entire East Baltic region, Girininkas tried to prove that the CWC immigrants had been scarce, and therefore had not been able to change either the established economy or the ethnic composition (2002). Brazaitis was the first scholar to state that the origin of the RC was completely unrelated to the CWC (2005). According to him, the RC emerged at the same time as the GAC, and the cord ornament appeared specifically in those cultures and later spread to other ones, including the CWC (Brazaitis 2005, 226). GENETICISTS ON THE ORIGIN OF THE CWC PEOPLE The CWC research community was shaken by two seminal genetics papers clearly indicating that the CWC originated in the Eastern European steppes, the Yamnaya culture (Allentoft et al. 2015; Haak et al. 2015). In the 3rd millen

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