Ornaments reveal resistance of North European cultures to the spread of farming

Abstract

The transition to farming is the process by which human groups switched from hunting and gathering wild resources to food production. Understanding how and to what extent the spreading of farming communities from the Near East had an impact on indigenous foraging populations in Europe has been the subject of lively debates for decades. Ethnographic and archaeological studies have shown that population replacement and admixture, trade, and long distance diffusion of cultural traits lead to detectable changes in symbolic codes expressed by associations of ornaments on the human body. Here we use personal ornaments to document changes in cultural geography during the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition. We submitted a binary matrix of 224 bead-types found at 212 European Mesolithic and 222 Early Neolithic stratigraphic units to a series of spatial and multivariate analyses. Our results reveal consistent diachronic and geographical trends in the use of personal ornaments during the Neolithisation. Adoption of novel bead-types combined with selective appropriation of old attires by incoming farmers is identified in Southern and Central Europe while cultural resistance leading to the nearly exclusive persistence of indigenous personal ornaments characterizes Northern Europe. We argue that this pattern reflects two distinct cultural trajectories with different potential for gene flow.

Fig 1. Principal Coordinates Analysis (A) and Neighbor-Joining Tree (B) of the 48 archaeological cultures using the Dice similarity index for binary data (D_i).

Both analyses show differentiation of the bead-type associations among the Mesolithic and Early Neolithic archaeological cultures. Archaeological cultures are color-coded according to the chronological period and European region they belong to. Numbering of archaeological cultures is detailed in Text A in S1 Text.

Fig 2. Neighbor-Net tree of the 48 Mesolithic and Early Neolithic cultures (Text A in S1 Text), using the D_i.

Reticulations represent evidence of borrowing or exchange and are visible within and among each archaeological culture. Archaeological cultures are color-coded according to the chronological period and European region they belong to.

Fig 3. Spline interpolation of the first axis of the Principal Coordinates Analysis.

Geographic structure differentiation between Mesolithic and Early Neolithic indicates reshaping of the bead-type diversity in Europe during the transition to farming. Maps were made by S.R. by using ArcGIS 9.3.1 software.

Fig 4. Cartography of the Early Neolithic bead-type configuration.

A) Large-scale diffusion of exclusively Neolithic ornament types; B) Diversification of Early Neolithic ornament types; C) Persistence of Mesolithic bead-types in the Neolithic; D) Emergences of new bead types at regional scale. Dotted black lines indicate the major shifts in bead-type associations in South East Europe. Dotted orange ellipses show the two areas where numerous new bead-types were adopted during the end of the Early Neolithic. Color shaded areas indicate the geographic distribution of the MEN (pink), DEN (green) and BEN (blue) archaeological cultures considered in the analysis. Maps were made by S.R. by using ArcGIS 9.3.1 software. Some bead types were redrawn from [–67].