Linear Pottery

[Goswin_van_Eyck]

The linear pottery culture or Linearband Keramik
Kultur envelops from 5400 to 4600BC a vast area
extending from Central Europe(East Hungary, eastern
parts of Rumania and Moldavia) upwards to the North
European Plain(Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, Bavaria,
Thuringen, Hessen, Elzass, the Low Countries and the
Parisian Basin),following the rivers of the Upper
Danube, the Rhine, the Elbe and Neckar and avoiding
mesolithic communities by their preference of
forrestal regions, colonizing well-watered and fertile
soils(loess) along valleys, plaines and plateaus on
the edge of rivers.

They built scattered homesteads,small villages and
hamlets according a pattern of regional clustering,
probably based on non-hierarchic, close-kin-groups,
failing to the urge and demands of competition, but
marked by wide-distance relationships punctuating
affinity and solidarity.

Their houses were rectangular post-framed, single
level longhouses(average lenght= 25m), though attics
would have been present to store goods as rows of
posts suggest a storeyed structure.The interior was
transversally divided in a center piece for domestical
activities, the southeast end for storage and the
northwestern part for dayliving and sleeping-place.
The buildings were put parallel to each other and
agglomerated, though dipersed single-habitats are also
known to exist.
Ditches around the buidings were used to get rid of
debris and organic wastes.
A village could obtain 8 to 12 buildings, including a
kind of meeting-house or shrine, and each village was
about 3-4km away from the nearest.every village
counted to 20 families maximum which resulted in an
average population of 50 to 100 individuals and a
demographic density rate of 17 individuals per square
kilometres.
No trace of social hierarchy may be read of the
outlook of the buildings, no distinctives at all.


The linear pottery culture or Linearband Keramik
Kultur envelops from 5400 to 4600BC a vast area
extending from Central Europe(East Hungary, eastern
parts of Rumania and Moldavia) upwards to the North
European Plain(Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, Bavaria,
Thuringen, Hessen, Elzass, the Low Countries and the
Parisian Basin),following the rivers of the Upper
Danube, the Rhine, the Elbe and Neckar and avoiding
mesolithic communities by their preference of
forrestal regions, colonizing well-watered and fertile
soils(loess) along valleys, plaines and plateaus on
the edge of rivers.

They built scattered homesteads,small villages and
hamlets according a pattern of regional clustering,
probably based on non-hierarchic, close-kin-groups,
failing to the urge and demands of competition, but
marked by wide-distance relationships punctuating
affinity and solidarity.



Arable ground within the environs of the village mounted up to 10 or
20ha, the villages itselves taking only 2ha.Fields for cereal
cultivation and herding their cattle were won due to their system of
forest fallowing; once the soils were exhausted, the village was
deplaced and new territories cleared for housing and agriculture,
afterwards, within a generation's time, the old country was revisited
and the former village reconstructed.

The lithic remains of this culture lack the axe, while there have been
found made of deer bones and used as paring-chisel.
Most are laboured from amphibolits of sandstone, quartz and volcanic
material, but in silex short, regular-shaped blades are known as well
many gimlets, scrapers and other tools.

The ceramics underwent two essential phases; the oldest depict simple
lines as ornamental finishing of the vessels, this type expands no
further westward than the Rhine, the more recent stage with filled-up
strokes advances upon the whole of West Europe.
Originally, the Dabubians were inspired to natural forms, especially
the gourd-shape with apparently no necessity felt to give it a neck,
if occasionally slightly indicated.
The aperture was large, handles omitted and covered with nipple-like
knots.
Large vessels were undecorated, not though the globular vases and
bowls had incised strokes which went curved, meandering, straight, in
spirals or run in horse shoe designs; so-called "music notes" of
grossly dots would have marked the alongated model of some vessels.
In the recent phase, the shapes and models are not yield to important
innovations, except that the neck nearly closes and the elaboration
and varieties in pottery excel the previous period by miles.
The basic colour of the walls is black with a lustrely red; the
incised lines however attain a white-coloured filling, the strokes
themselves are coverd under points.









The sepulchres are within the proximity of the village.The tombs are
individual, the body resting in a flexed position and put in a ditch,
then covered with ochre and with a girdle of gratuities, consisting of
tools, spondyles(the main exchange objects of the Danubians/LPC),
potteries and whet-stones.

In contrast to the Balkan-East-Mediterrenean neolithic communities, no
female figurines and symbolic stamps show up; today their credited as
a distinct autonomous and original neolithic culture of Westeuropean
extraction, i.e. local mesolithics outgrow the secondary-neolithic
stage and accomplish themselves independantly as spearhead of new
socio-cultural and subsistence ideas and proceedings.