I wonder what life was like in Neolithic Europe when it was still mostly wilderness. People began practicing agriculture, and they became more sedentary, but this must have been difficult. They grew wheat, rye, barley, peas, flax, and poppy seeds. These crops had to be defended from wild boar, deer, bear, crows, and other seed-eating birds. Livestock had to be protected from wolves and bears. Moreover, village outcasts likely rummaged through the crops as well. Perhaps the biggest threat to not only their food supply, but their lives, came from nomadic tribes traveling on horseback from distant lands. These strangers pillaged, raped, and robbed. Motivations varied but clearly some tribes participated in these heinous acts from a sense of joyous cruelty. As a defensive adaptation, some sedentary people built their villages on stilts or piles over marshes or lakes. They surrounded these villages with walls of upright logs, and they used canoes to access the village from land. Gates could keep the villages relatively safe from invading barbarians traveling on horses. They weren’t impregnable, but invaders would need to build a fleet of canoes and also find a way to breech the walls.
In Europe archaeologists often find the remains of houses built over lakes that people lived in thousands of years ago.
Location of some lakes in Europe where the remains of villages built on stilts have been found. The Jura region of Switzerland has the most sites, but this defensive adaptation was used all over Europe. Map from the below referenced study.
Artist’s representation of a Neolithic lake village. During winter when the lake froze they could just walk over the ice. Nomadic raiders may have roamed less during brutal European winters.
Lake villages must have been neat places to live with a beautiful view of the lake. Hearths kept the insides of homes warm. Archaeologists have found collapsed walls where tools were hung. Houses had trap doors where people crapped, pissed, and dumped their garbage. The waste likely attracted fish and turtles–an easily accessed form of protein. If crops failed or were destroyed, the lakes offered these 2 sources of protein as well as ducks and geese and edible aquatic plants. Archaeologists sift through the organic matter from these former sites and find remains of some of the wild plants they ate. Crabapple and hazelnut are the most common items found, but lake dwellers also ate strawberries, black berries, raspberries, elderberries, beechnuts, acorns, common reed seeds (Phragamites), spinach relatives, turnip, garlic mustard, pine nuts, and blackthorn (a relative similar to sour plums).
The oldest known site of a lake village (also known as pile dwellings) is in Albania, and it dates to 7900 years ago. The practice spread across Europe, and sites of former lake villages are found in Germany, France, and Austria. The Jura region in Switzerland has the most sites–more than 50. The practice spread all the way to Great Britain where they are known as crannaries. People ceased building lake villages in Europe about 2000 years ago, and these structures rotted and collapsed into the lake for archaeologists to find thousands of years after they were abandoned.
Reference:
Colledge, S.; and J. Conolly
“Wild Plant Use in European Neolithic Subsistence Economics: A formal assessment of Preservation Bias and the Implication for Understanding Changes in Plant Distribution”
Quaternary Science Review 101 October 2014
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