EAA 2023: Abstract

After 5400 BC the expansion of Linear Pottery culture (LBK) disseminated the sedentary way of life rapidly across fertile lowlands of Central Europe. However, most of the upland regions were omitted by the early colonisation being settled much later if ever. In our paper, we will follow the neolithization process in South Bohemia (Czech Republic) which constituted a relatively isolated and spatially limited enclave within the LBK milieu. Our multidisciplinary project, therefore, examined potential differences and adaptations in subsistence and settlement strategies employed by local farmers. According to radiocarbon chronology, the region was settled by farming communities about 100 years later than all surrounding areas and even after that, hunter-gatherers still thrived around local lakes. Substantial evidence for contacts is missing in the archaeological record, but they must have been inevitable considering the spatial proximity of sites inhabited by these two groups. Yet at agrarian settlements, inhabitants followed the conservative LBK repertoire of material culture. Substantial alternations were revealed by archaeobotanical analysis for the spectrum of cultivated crops. It is interpreted as an effort to accommodate farming practices for less favourable environmental conditions of South Bohemia. Despite attempts for adaptation, a steep decrease in occupation density is recorded after 5000 BC suggesting a collapse after which the occupation was not restored to a similar extent for 2000 years. The case of South Bohemia illustrates how unstraightforward the process of neolithization could have been when a biased research focus on fertile lowlands with an abundant archaeological record is abandoned.

Linear Pottery culture, periphery, hunter-gatherers, neolithization, Central Europe

Oral presentation

  Abstract (PDF)

Václav Vondrovský³

Michaela Ptáková⁴
Petr Šída²
Jindřich Prach¹
Martin Pták⁴
Jiří Bumerl⁴
Petr Pokorný¹