Mobility and Social Change: Understanding the European Neolithic Period after the Archaeogenetic Revolution

Journal of Archaeological Research https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-020-09153-x Mobility and Social Change: Understanding the European Neolithic Period after the Archaeogenetic Revolution Martin Furholt1 © The Author(s) 2021 Abstract This paper discusses and synthesizes the consequences of the archaeogenetic revolution to our understanding of mobility and social change during the Neolithic period in Europe (6500–2000 BC). In spite of major obstacles to a productive integration of archaeological and anthropological knowledge with ancient DNA data, larger changes in the European gene pool are detected and taken as indications for large-scale migrations during two major periods: the Early Neolithic expansion into Europe (6500–4000 BC) and the third millennium BC “steppe migration.” Rather than massive migration events, I argue that both major genetic turnovers are better understood in terms of small-scale mobility and human movement in systems of population circulation, social fission and fusion of communities, and translocal interaction, which together add up to a large-scale signal. At the same time, I argue that both upticks in mobility are initiated by the two most consequential social transformations that took place in Eurasia, namely the emergence of farming, animal husbandry, and sedentary village life during the Neolithic revolution and the emergence of systems of centralized political organization during the process of urbanization and early state formation in southwest Asia. Keywords Neolithic of Europe · aDNA studies · Mobility and migration · Social organization · Neolithic revolution · Urbanization Introduction In the last few years, technological and methodological advances in molecular biological studies have had a massive impact on our ways of thinking about European prehistory. Ancient DNA studies (aDNA) have produced so many new datasets, simulations, and models that the archaeological community has had * Martin Furholt 1 Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1019, Blindern, 0315 Oslo, Norway 13 Vol.:(0123456789) Journal of Archaeological Research problems keeping up with it. In an influential contribution, Kristiansen (2014) enthusiastically welcomed this development as part of a new swing toward a more scientific, data-focused approach to prehistory. To him, this is part of “a larger shift from postmodernity to a revised modernity” (Kristiansen 2014, p. 23), though conceding that archaeologists still need to develop the proper theoretical tools to deal with these data. Very prominently, the concept of migration, long deemed outdated, has reentered and even started to dominate the discourse around European prehistory. Leaving out the Paleolithic period here (e.g., López et al. 2016), aDNA studies have now pointed toward two main periods of severe changes in the gene pool that are interpreted as the result of significant population movements: the beginning of the Neolithic period, since 6500 BC (Bramanti et al. 2009) and the onset of the European Bronze Age, in the third millennium BC (Allentoft et al. 2015; Haak et al. 2015). However, we are still far away from understanding these newly discovered phenomena of human mobility in terms of prehistoric social change. When it comes to the “third-science revolution” that Kristiansen hails, we are actually much worse off than he acknowledges. Not only have we so far failed to develop a new theoretical basis to integrate the new wealth of aDNA data for the prehistory of humans, we have not even been able to integrate the current state of theoretical awareness into the archaeogenetic discourse (see Furholt 2018b; Hofmann 2015; Ion 2017; Johannsen et al. 2017; Müller 2013; Sørensen 2017; Vander Linden 2016). Instead, long outdated and dismissed concepts were reactivated to create simple, easily accessible models to make sense of the archaeogenetic data. While there are nuances, the main problem with most variants of the archaeogenetic migration narrative (most explicitly in Brandt et al. 2013; Haak et al. 2015; Kristiansen et al. 2017) is that it relies on the flawed and outdated concept that archaeological classification units—usually referred to as “archaeological cultures”—would represent distinct and clearly delineated human groups of common genetic ancestry and social identity. This concept of the archaeological culture sprang out of 19th century romantic nationalism, the belief in culturally and biologically homogeneous territorial groups as the essential form of human organization (Trigger 2006). It was brought into the archaeological discourse in an intellectual climate of nationalist, chauvinist, and racist attitudes with an explicit nationalist and social Darwinist agenda by Kossinna (1910, 1911, 1919) in an attempt to prove Germanic seniority and superiority over neighboring peoples. While there is no doubt about the importance of Kossinna for the development of early prehistoric archaeology in Europe, this should not be mistaken as a sign of scholarly quality. Indeed, his original work clearly demonstrates a striking simplicity of thinking and a sloppy methodology, which he compensates with drastic personal attacks on any critic of his work (e.g., Kossinna 1919). As a result, his concept is inherently flawed. It presupposes a strict congruence between material culture, ethnic identity, and biological descent (or in his words, race); archaeological cultures were defined as representing socially bounded, culturally uniform groups of people who occupied a clearly delineated, continuous territory. They were, literally, seen as the precursors of modern European nation-state peoples, projected into prehistory. 13 Journal of Archaeological Research Kossinna ignored the fact that such a situation of congruency of regional distribution patterns of specific archaeological object types—e.g., pottery, tools, jewelry, house forms, burial rituals—exists virtually nowhere in the European archaeological record. Instead, he worked around this inconvenience by defining archaeological cultures using only one single type of artifact, mostly pottery, after whose specific types many cultures are named (e.g., Linear Pottery culture, Corded Ware culture, Funnel Beaker culture). The step of further investigating whether or not the spatial distribution of specific types of associated stone tools, house forms, or burial rituals would actually match the regions defined via pottery style has, ever since the time of Kossinna, been largely skipped, probably because it almost never worked (e.g., Furholt 2008). These “cultures” were then treated as if they had a common agency, and change happened through contact between them, or their collective migration. Childe adopted this concept and popularized it in a wider international context (1929), dropping the idea of a racial connotation of archaeological cultures in the face of emerging fascism in Europe (1933). Since these early (...truncated)