Read Online Europe: A History by Norman Davies - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Norman Davies
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mystic to understand … the holistic and mythopoeic thought of Ice Age humanity. The very language we use … speaks of tools, hunters, and men, when every statue and painting we discover cries out that this Ice Age humanity was a culture of art, the love of animals, and women … Gathering is as important as hunting, but only hunting is discussed. Storytelling is discussed, but the storyteller is a hunter rather than an old priestess of the moon. Initiation is imagined, but the initiate is not the young girl in menarche about to wed the moon, but a young man about to become a great hunter. 4
Western civilization, however defined, is generally thought to have its roots in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and in the Classical World. Both those source cultures, whether of Yehovah or of Zeus-Jupiter, were dominated by male Godheads. Yet one should not forget that through eons of earlier time the Godhead was female. One can only presume that humankind, so long as it was a tiny vulnerable species, was more moved by the feminine role of generation and birth than by the male role of killing and death.
All sorts of people have dreamed of a long-lost paradise in the remote past. Romantics, nationalists, and Marxists have all had their idealized Gardens of Eden, their semi-mythical Golden Ages. Now feminists are doing the same. 5 One thing is certain. The Venus of Laussel, and others like her, was no sex object of male gratification. In fact, she was no Venus at all.
The Middle Stone Age or mesolithic represents a transitional era when Man was adapting to rapidly improving climatic conditions. The terminal moraine of the last Finno-Scandinavian ice sheet has been dated to 7300 BC. Technological advance was characterized by the appearance of microliths—very small, pointed or bladed flints. Greatly increased supplies offish and shellfish encouraged settlement along the lakes, rivers, and coasts. Earlier cultures identified in the south, as at Mas d’Azil in the Pyrenees, were complemented by more northerly ones, such as Maglemose in Zealand or Ertebolle in Jutland, where deep-sea fishing emerged. For the first time, the mesolithic stone axe was capable of felling the largest trees.
The New Stone Age, or neolithic, was marked by the transition from food-gathering to food production. The domestication of plants and animals, otherwise known as agriculture, was accompanied by further improvements in stone technology, where grinding, polishing, and boring produced implements of far superior quality. This ‘Neolithic Revolution’ began in the Middle East in the eighth millennium BC, in northern parts of Europe as late as the second. It saw the beginnings of cattle, sheep, and pig-farming; of horse-breeding and of hybridization to produce mules; of systematic cereal production; of ploughing, weaving, pottery, mining. It also saw the principal drive for the comprehensive colonization of the Peninsula, where previously only scattered settlements had existed.
Two main lines of neolithic advance have been identified. One, which is associated with the Linearbandkeramik or ‘linear pottery’, moved rapidly up the Danube Valley into central Europe. In a brief spurt of perhaps 700 years in the fifth millennium, it crossed the 1,500 miles between present-day Romania and the Netherlands. The pioneer settlements clustered round great communal long-houses built from the largest timbers of the newly cleared forest. Problems of agricultural over-exploitation and of manpower shortages led to temporary retreats, followed by the characteristic reoccupation of abandoned sites. A second line of advance, associated with the spread of a ‘stamped-pottery’ culture, moved westwards round the Mediterranean shore. In the fourth millennium there were further extensions of agricultural settlement into the Peninsula’s western and northern extremities—into Iberia, France, and Switzerland, the British Isles, Scandinavia, and eastern parts of the Great
Western civilization, however defined, is generally thought to have its roots in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and in the Classical World. Both those source cultures, whether of Yehovah or of Zeus-Jupiter, were dominated by male Godheads. Yet one should not forget that through eons of earlier time the Godhead was female. One can only presume that humankind, so long as it was a tiny vulnerable species, was more moved by the feminine role of generation and birth than by the male role of killing and death.
All sorts of people have dreamed of a long-lost paradise in the remote past. Romantics, nationalists, and Marxists have all had their idealized Gardens of Eden, their semi-mythical Golden Ages. Now feminists are doing the same. 5 One thing is certain. The Venus of Laussel, and others like her, was no sex object of male gratification. In fact, she was no Venus at all.
The Middle Stone Age or mesolithic represents a transitional era when Man was adapting to rapidly improving climatic conditions. The terminal moraine of the last Finno-Scandinavian ice sheet has been dated to 7300 BC. Technological advance was characterized by the appearance of microliths—very small, pointed or bladed flints. Greatly increased supplies offish and shellfish encouraged settlement along the lakes, rivers, and coasts. Earlier cultures identified in the south, as at Mas d’Azil in the Pyrenees, were complemented by more northerly ones, such as Maglemose in Zealand or Ertebolle in Jutland, where deep-sea fishing emerged. For the first time, the mesolithic stone axe was capable of felling the largest trees.
The New Stone Age, or neolithic, was marked by the transition from food-gathering to food production. The domestication of plants and animals, otherwise known as agriculture, was accompanied by further improvements in stone technology, where grinding, polishing, and boring produced implements of far superior quality. This ‘Neolithic Revolution’ began in the Middle East in the eighth millennium BC, in northern parts of Europe as late as the second. It saw the beginnings of cattle, sheep, and pig-farming; of horse-breeding and of hybridization to produce mules; of systematic cereal production; of ploughing, weaving, pottery, mining. It also saw the principal drive for the comprehensive colonization of the Peninsula, where previously only scattered settlements had existed.
Two main lines of neolithic advance have been identified. One, which is associated with the Linearbandkeramik or ‘linear pottery’, moved rapidly up the Danube Valley into central Europe. In a brief spurt of perhaps 700 years in the fifth millennium, it crossed the 1,500 miles between present-day Romania and the Netherlands. The pioneer settlements clustered round great communal long-houses built from the largest timbers of the newly cleared forest. Problems of agricultural over-exploitation and of manpower shortages led to temporary retreats, followed by the characteristic reoccupation of abandoned sites. A second line of advance, associated with the spread of a ‘stamped-pottery’ culture, moved westwards round the Mediterranean shore. In the fourth millennium there were further extensions of agricultural settlement into the Peninsula’s western and northern extremities—into Iberia, France, and Switzerland, the British Isles, Scandinavia, and eastern parts of the Great
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