The intention of this work is to show that European expansion not only transformed the historical trajectory of non-European societies but also reconstituted the historical accounts of these societies before European intervention. It asserts that anthropology must pay more attention to history.

Europe and the People without History

The Bronze Age of Eurasia (around 3000-1000 BC) was a period of major cultural changes. However, there is debate about whether these changes resulted from the circulation of ideas or from human migrations, potentially also facilitating the spread of languages and certain phenotypic traits. We investigated this by using new, improved methods to sequence low-coverage genomes from 101 ancient humans from across Eurasia. We show that the Bronze Age was a highly dynamic period involving large-scale population migrations and replacements, responsible for shaping major parts of present-day demographic structure in both Europe and Asia. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesized spread of Indo-European languages during the Early Bronze Age. We also demonstrate that light skin pigmentation in Europeans was already present at high frequency in the Bronze Age, but not lactose tolerance, indicating a more recent onset of positive selection on lactose tolerance than previously thought.

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Population genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia

List of illustrations Preface 1. The relevance of archaeological history 2. Classical archaeology and antiquarianism 3. The beginnings of scientific archaeology 4. The imperial synthesis 5. Culture-historical archaeology 6. Soviet archaeology 7. Functionalism in Western archaeology 8. Neo-evolutionism and the New Archaeology 9. The explanation of diversity 10. Archaeology and its social context Bibliographical essay References Index.

A History of Archaeological Thought

Languages, like genes, provide vital clues about human history1,2. The origin of the Indo-European language family is “the most intensively studied, yet still most recalcitrant, problem of historical linguistics”3. Numerous genetic studies of Indo-European origins have also produced inconclusive results4,5,6. Here we analyse linguistic data using computational methods derived from evolutionary biology. We test two theories of Indo-European origin: the ‘Kurgan expansion’ and the ‘Anatolian farming’ hypotheses. The Kurgan theory centres on possible archaeological evidence for an expansion into Europe and the Near East by Kurgan horsemen beginning in the sixth millennium BP7,8. In contrast, the Anatolian theory claims that Indo-European languages expanded with the spread of agriculture from Anatolia around 8,000–9,500 years bp9. In striking agreement with the Anatolian hypothesis, our analysis of a matrix of 87 languages with 2,449 lexical items produced an estimated age range for the initial Indo-European divergence of between 7,800 and 9,800 years bp. These results were robust to changes in coding procedures, calibration points, rooting of the trees and priors in the bayesian analysis.

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Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin

The Great Hungarian Plain was a crossroads of cultural transformations that have shaped European prehistory. Here we analyse a 5,000-year transect of human genomes, sampled from petrous bones giving consistently excellent endogenous DNA yields, from 13 Hungarian Neolithic, Copper, Bronze and Iron Age burials including two to high (~22 × ) and seven to ~1 × coverage, to investigate the impact of these on Europe’s genetic landscape. These data suggest genomic shifts with the advent of the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages, with interleaved periods of genome stability. The earliest Neolithic context genome shows a European hunter-gatherer genetic signature and a restricted ancestral population size, suggesting direct contact between cultures after the arrival of the first farmers into Europe. The latest, Iron Age, sample reveals an eastern genomic influence concordant with introduced Steppe burial rites. We observe transition towards lighter pigmentation and surprisingly, no Neolithic presence of lactase persistence.

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Genome flux and stasis in a five millennium transect of European prehistory

This paper considers the range of evidence for the secondary uses and products of animals: traction, transport, wool and milk. It suggests that early farming populations used livestock mainly for meat, and that other applications were explored as agriculturalists adapted to new conditions, especially in the semi‐arid zone. Innovations in different parts of the Near East were exchanged and disseminated as part of the process leading to urbanisation. Their dispersal affected both the steppe belt, which saw a marked increase in population, and also temperate Europe, where agriculture was revolutionised by more extensive methods of farming and landscape clearance.

The secondary exploitation of animals in the Old World

One of the most crucial but poorly understood phases in the development of the Mediterranean economy is the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. During this period of fundamental social transformation, the command economies of the second millennium gave way to less centralized forms of economic organization which were to characterize a new period of accelerating growth that lasted for the whole of the first millennium BC (Hicks 1969: chs 2-4). The development of early Iron Age trading systems is vital to an understanding of the nature of the Ancient Economy, with its attendant controversies (Finley 1985; Lombard 1971). The new pattern had already begun to take shape in the centuries before 1000 BC, in the processes which underlay the disappearance of the Bronze Age palace centres and the new social forces which were released by their dissolution (Sherratt and Sherratt 1991). Fundamental to this new pattern was the dissociation of trading activity in high value materials from the control of the state. While the Bronze Age coastal cities of Cyprus and the Levant had achieved a considerable degree of commercial autonomy within contemporary political power blocs, the continuing differentiation of commercial and political structures now came to characterize the internal organization of individual states themselves. This had important consequences for the nature of the documentary record, since trading activity was no longer reflected in state records and the literature of the ruling class, so that the economic history of the first millennium has been systematically distorted both by the nature of the evidence and the theories which have grown up to rationalize it (cf. Rowlands 1984). It is here that the evidence of archaeology can offer an important contribution to understanding the processes leading to the civilizations which European scholarship has canonized as 'classical' but which must themselves be situated in a wider matrix of contemporary economic and political activity. The developments which differentiate the first millennium from that which preceded it were social, political and technological; yet these elements must not be seen as coincidental features with separate origins, but rather as complementary aspects of an unfolding pattern with its own internal logic. Before considering the chronological sequence of their appearance, it is worth noting the basic elements of the new pattern. In

The growth of the Mediterranean economy in the early first millennium BC

In Search of the Indo-Europeans; Language, Archaeology and Myth

This paper examines differences in the nature of inter-regional relations in the Neolithic, Bronze Age, and early Iron Ages, in an attempt to define the specific characteristics of Bronze-Age world systems. It distinguishes between the slow spread of innovations and the active intervention of trade networks related to the expansion of urbanism. The former dominate in the Neolithic, and similar phenomena continue to occur in later periods. Following a suggestion by Jane Schneider, a distinction is drawn between a core area of urban consumers, a periphery that is actively altered by its role as a supplier of raw materials to the core, and an outer margin that is indirectly affected through the spread of innovations. For most of prehistory, temperate Europe acted as a margin to a Near Eastern/Mediterranean core-periphery system. The formation of long-distance routes linking northern and southern Europe (successive axial routes along the Danube and Black Sea, and from Italy to Scandinavia) was critica...

What Would a Bronze-Age World System Look Like? Relations Between Temperate Europe and the Mediterranean in Later Prehistory

The purpose of this paper is to review current ideas of agricultural development in the sub-tropical and temperate parts of the western Old World and to suggest that the small scale and restricted extent of early cultivation systems gave them a unique character which has not been generally appreciated. Recent studies of prehistoric settlement in the western Old World have shown the basic role of soil moisture in early cultivation, and the association of such sites with riverine and springside locations. The beginning of such a cropping system marked a significant departure from earlier forms of cereal exploitation in the natural habitat zone, and may have involved a difference in growth cycle from that of the wild forms. The kind of cultivation which can be reconstructed as the earliest stage of agriculture is best described as a form of fixed plot horticulture dependent on ground- and surface-water, which differentiated in succeeding millennia into various forms of dry farming and irrigation agriculture. The former path involved the development of cultivation techniques suitable for interfluvial areas, including plough cultivation and swiddening; while the latter involved increasing degrees of water management to enlarge the area suitable for intensive cultivation. Because the evidence for early cultivation systems is so varied in character and the arguments often speculative, three aspects will be considered separately rather than treated in strict chronological or regional order. After a short discussion of current schemes of agricultural development, the problem is approached first from the settlement evidence, and then from the viewpoint of crop ecology, before discussing the development of methods of water-management. The final section sets these observations in a wider context.

Andrew Sherratt

Papers

The secondary exploitation of animals in the Old World

The growth of the Mediterranean economy in the early first millennium BC

In Search of the Indo-Europeans; Language, Archaeology and Myth

What Would a Bronze-Age World System Look Like? Relations Between Temperate Europe and the Mediterranean in Later Prehistory

Water, soil and seasonality in early cereal cultivation