European Archaeology As Anthropology Essays In Memory Of Bernard Wailes Pam J Crabtree Editor European Archaeology As Anthropology Essays In Memory Of Bernard Wailes Pam J Crabtree Editor European Archaeology As Anthropology Essays In Memory Of Bernard Wailes Pam J Crabtree Editor

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5. European Archaeology
as
Anthropology
Essays in Memory of Bernard Wailes

6. This page intentionally left blank

7. European Archaeology
as
Anthropology
Essays in Memory of Bernard Wailes
edited by
Pam J. Crabtree and Peter Bogucki
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
Philadelphia

8. Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress.
LCCN 2016049885
ISBN 13: 978-1-934536-89-6
ISBN 10: 1-934536-89-X
© 2017 by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
Philadelphia, PA
All rights reserved. Published 2017
Distributed for the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

9. Contents
Figures vii
Tables ix
Contributors xi
Introduction
Remembering Bernard Wailes: European Archaeology
in North America
Pam J. Crabtree and Peter Bogucki 1
1 “Disruptive Technologies” and the Transition to Agriculture in
Scandinavia and the British Isles
Peter Bogucki 9
2 Archaeology and Language: Why Archaeologists Care about the
Indo-European Problem
David W. Anthony 39
3 Materiality of Performance and Diversity of Practice: Comparing
Bronze Age Pits in Southern Bavaria
Peter S. Wells 71
4 Archaeological Manifestations of Religious Belief in Southern
Iberia from the Neolithic to the Iron Age
Antonio Gilman 95
5 Dún Ailinne: Then and Now
Susan A. Johnston 107
6 Ghosts of Chiefdoms Past: Kings, Complexity, and Resistance at
the Edge of European History
Elizabeth Ragan 137

10. vi Contents
7 Socioeconomic Change in Early Medieval Ireland: Agricultural
Innovation, Population Growth, and Human Health
Rachel E. Scott 161
8 Ceremonial Complexity: The Roles of Religious Settlements in
Medieval Ireland
John Soderberg 195
9 New Archaeology from Old Coins: Antioch Re-examined
Alan M. Stahl 227
10 State Formation in Anglo-Saxon England
Pam J. Crabtree 247
Conclusion
European Archaeology in North America
Peter Bogucki and Pam J. Crabtree 263

11. Figures
1.1 Northwest Europe showing dates of earliest farming in
years BCE, as well as areas of the Villeneuve-St. Germain
and Brześć Kujawski Groups discussed in text 12
2.1 Geographic distribution of the major Indo-European lang-
uage branches at about 400 BCE 46
2.2 Central and Eastern Europe ca. 3000–2500 BCE showing
the early Yamnaya culture area 56
3.1 Map showing locations of the sites of Hascherkeller and
Kelheim-Mitterfeld in Lower Bavaria, Germany 77
3.2 Ceramic vessel from Pit V at Hascherkeller 78
3.3 Parts of dog mandible from Pit V at Hascherkeller 79
3.4 Complete cup and sherds of four of the other five cups
represented in Pit B at Kelheim 80
3.5 Daub surface showing complete cup in situ in Pit B at
Kelheim 80
3.6 Light gray cup from Pit D at Kelheim 81
3.7 Selection of ceramic handles from Pit D at Kelheim 81
3.8 Sherds from Pit D at Kelheim with pattern of carefully
incised vertical lines 84
5.1 Aerial views of Dún Ailinne 108
5.2 Map showing the four largest royal sites 109
5.3 Plans of the four main Iron Age phases at Dún Ailinne 112
5.4 Reconstructions of the Rose and Mauve phase palisades
as viewing platforms 114
5.5 The suggested Rose phase structure 116
5.6 Cross sections of the bank and ditch at four locations 119
6.1 Map of Scotland 140
6.2 Dunadd 145

12. viii Figures
6.3 Stone with carved footprint, ogham inscription, and
Pictish Class 1-style boar, Dunadd 145
6.4 Drawing of carved footprint, ogham inscription, and
Pictish Class 1-style boar, Dunadd 146
6.5 Kildalton Cross, later 8th century CE 148
6.6 Hilton of Cadboll Class II stone, ca. 800 CE 149
6.7 Inauguration of King Alexander III at Scone, 1249 CE 151
7.1 Location map of the early medieval cemeteries 166
8.1 Irish sites mentioned in the text 196
8.2a Carns fragment count (NISP) for cattle, sheep/goat, and
pigs 209
8.2b Carns minimum number of individuals (MNI) for cattle,
sheep/goat, and pigs 209
8.3 Cattle premolar wear data 211
8.4 Inishcealtra NISP and MNI values for cattle, sheep/goat,
and pigs 215
9.1 The Green Carpet Mosaic in situ 231
9.2 Antioch coin finds, 1932–39 233
9.3 Antioch coin finds from sector 17-O 235
9.4 Distribution of Seleucid coins, 300–223 BCE 236
9.5 Distribution of municipal coins, 99–23 BCE 238
9.6 Distribution of Julio-Claudian coins, 30 BCE–69 CE 239
9.7 Distribution of Constantinian coins, 310–336 CE 240
9.8 Distribution of early Byzantine coins, 491–522 CE 242
9.9 Distribution of middle Byzantine coins, 970–1030 CE 243
9.10 Distribution of Crusader period coins, 1101–1120 CE 244
10.1 Reconstruction of a sunken-featured building at the West
Stow County Park 251
10.2 Mound 1 Sutton Hoo as it appears today 252
10.3 Harvesting taro at a reconstructed wet-land taro field in
the Iao Valley, West Maui 255
10.4 Remains of dry-land field systems in Kaupo, East Maui 255
10.5 Pi‘ilanihale Heiau in East Maui 256

13. Tables
5.1 Time taken to move earth using a variety of implements 120
5.2 Time range estimates for digging the Dún Ailinne ditch 121
5.3 The estimated total number of posts required for each
phase 122
5.4 Depth range of recorded postholes 124
5.5 Estimated time to fell a tree using stone and metal
implements 125
5.6 Calculated rates for obtaining the trees for the three
timber structures 126
5.7 Number of hours required to raise the posts in each phase 127
5.8 Overall time estimate for each construction phase 128
7.1 Early medieval skeletal samples 167
7.2 Prevalence of enamel hypoplasia in skeletal samples
from early medieval Ireland 171
7.3 Prevalence of cribra orbitalia in skeletal samples from
early medieval ireland 172
7.4 Comparison of stress indicators over time 177
7.5 Comparison of stress indicators for coastal vs. inland sites 178
7.6 Comparison of stress indicators according to land use
capability 181
7.7 Comparison of stress indicators according to average
ringfort density 182
8.1a Fragment Count for All Identified Species (NISP) 219
8.1b Minimum Number of Individuals (MNI) for Cattle,
Sheep/Goat, and Pigs 219
8.2 Wear stage data for third mandibular molars from the
Church features 220

14. This page intentionally left blank

15. Contributors
David W. Anthony received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania under
the advisorship of Bernard Wailes, whose generosity as a mentor and host of
gatherings was legendary. A professor at Hartwick College, Anthony has written
or edited three books, including The Horse, The Wheel, and Language: How Bronze
Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (2007), which won
the best-scientific-book prize from the Society for American Archaeology in
2010. With collaborator/spouse Dorcas Brown, he studies language and material
culture, innovations in transportation (horse domestication, wheels, chariots), and
the evolution of pastoralism in the Eurasian steppes.
Peter Bogucki began studying European prehistory at the University of
Pennsylvania, inspired by Bernard Wailes, and completed his Ph.D. at Harvard
University. He was called to Princeton University to be the Director of Studies of
Forbes College and then became Dean for Undergraduate Affairs of the School
of Engineering and Applied Science, while continuing an active scholarly practice
in the study of early European farming societies with excavations in Poland. He
is the author of Forest Farmers and Stockherders (Cambridge 1988), The Origins of
Human Society (Blackwell 1999), and The Barbarians (Reaktion Books 2017), and
co-editor (with Pam Crabtree) of Ancient Europe: An Encyclopedia of the Barbarian
World (Scribner’s 2004).
Pam J. Crabtree is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University.
She received her B.A. from Barnard College (1972) and her M.A. (1975) and Ph.D.
(1982) from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include later
prehistoric and early medieval European archaeology, zooarchaeology, and Near
Eastern archaeology. She is the author of Middle Saxon Animal Husbandry in East
Anglia (2012) and the co-author (with Bradley Adams) of Comparative Osteology:
A Laboratory and Field Manual of Common North American Animals (2011). She took
part in the Dún Ailinne excavations in 1972 and in the subsequent magnetometer

16. xii Contributors
and topographic survey at the site (2006–08), and she served as co-director of the
2016 program of excavation at Dún Ailinne.
Antonio Gilman (A.B. [Harvard 1965], M.A. [Cantab. 1971], Ph.D. [Harvard
1975]) is an emeritus Professor of Anthropology at California State University-
Northridge. He studies the prehistoric political economy of the Iberian Peninsula.
In 1968 he excavated at Dún Ailinne under the direction of Bernard Wailes.
Susan A. Johnston is an archaeologist currently teaching in the Anthropology
Department at George Washington University. She received her Ph.D. from the
University of Pennsylvania and Bernard Wailes was her advisor. Her current
research focus is the Iron Age in Ireland, in particular how ritual is used in the
creation and maintenance of social power. Along with Bernard Wailes, she
published the final report of the excavations at Dún Ailinne, Co. Kildare, Ireland,
in 2007, and since then has been carrying out further research at that site.
Elizabeth Ragan is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Anthropology
program at Salisbury University in Maryland. She holds a PhD in Anthropology
from the University of Pennsylvania, earned under the supervision of Bernard
Wailes; and a MPhil in Celtic Archaeology from the University of Glasgow.
Her research has focused on the role played by maritime trade in developing
sociopolitical complexity, both in early medieval Scotland and the early colonial
Chesapeake.
Rachel E. Scott is a bioarchaeologist with a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the
University of Pennsylvania, a Higher Diploma in Celtic Archaeology from
the University College Dublin, Ireland, and a B.A. in Anthropology from the
University of Chicago. Her research interests include human osteology and
paleopathology, European archaeology, and anthropological and archaeological
theory. More specifically, her work addresses the interrelation of biology and
culture in the creation of human lives, focusing on the case study of early and late
medieval Ireland. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of
Anthropology at DePaul University.
John Soderberg is an Assistant Professor at Denison University and a Visiting
Scholar at Ohio State University. His research interests include the archaeology of
religion and zooarchaeology. He is author of a forthcoming article in the Journal
of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, titled “Anthropological Civitas and the
Possibility of Monastic Towns in Early Medieval Ireland,” and an annual review of
medieval archaeology for The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern
Europe. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at the
University of Minnesota and an M.A. in Irish Studies from Boston College.

17. Contributors xiii
Alan M. Stahl received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1977, with
Bernard Wailes as the archaeology advisor for his interdisciplinary degree in
Medieval Studies. From 1980 to 2000, he was Curator of Medieval Coinage at the
American Numismatic Society, and since 2004 has been Curator of Numismatics at
Princeton University, where he teaches in the departments of Art and Archaeology,
Classics, and History. Among his publications are: The Merovingian Coinage of the
Region of Metz (1982) and Zecca: The Mint of Venice in the Middle Ages (2001).
Peter S. Wells was educated at Harvard University (B.A. 1970, Ph.D. 1976). His
special research interests are in later European prehistory and in the ways that
people use material culture to communicate and to create meaning. He is a
professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota.
Among his publications are The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered Peoples Shaped
Roman Europe (Princeton University Press, 1999) and How Ancient Europeans
Saw the World: Vision, Patterns, and the Shaping of the Mind in Prehistoric Times
(Princeton University Press, 2012).

18. This page intentionally left blank

19. Remembering Bernard Wailes: European
Archaeology in North America
pam j. crabtree and peter bogucki
INTRODUCTION
Bernard Wailes (1934–2012) was a unique figure in American archaeology
for over four decades. He was a British archaeologist who received all
his academic training (B.A. 1957, M.A. 1961, and Ph.D. 1964) at Cambridge
University, where he was a student of Grahame Clark, Raleigh Radford, and
Nora Chadwick. His Ph.D. thesis was a study of E-Ware, a form of early me-
dieval, wheel-turned pottery that is found on sites in western Britain, Scot-
land, and Ireland (Wailes 1963). Although his Ph.D. was never published, it
has stimulated important recent work on E-Ware (Campbell 2007).
Bernard joined the Anthropology Department of the University of
Pennsylvania (Penn) in 1961 and spent his entire career there, retiring in
1999. In addition to his teaching and administrative duties in the Anthro-
pology Department, he also served as Graduate Chair of the Departments
of Classical Archaeology, Ancient History, and Art and Archaeology of the
Mediterranean World. In the course of his career at Penn, Bernard served as
a mentor and advisor for many undergraduate and graduate students, both
inside and outside the Anthropology Department.
Much of Bernard’s research focused on the archaeological study of the
Irish royal sites. Ninth-century historical sources describe the sites of Dún
Ailinne, Emain Macha, Rathcrogan, and Tara in Ireland as “royal sites”
(Grabowski 1990; Johnston 2006, and this volume), but archaeology paints a

20. 2 Pam J. Crabtree and Peter Bogucki
very different picture of these sites than that based on the limited documen-
tary information. After a short period of excavation at Emain Macha (also
known as Navan Fort), Bernard began a long-term program of excavation
at Dún Ailinne in 1968. The eight seasons of research at Dún Ailinne served
as an important training ground for both American and Irish archaeology
students. Three of the contributors to this volume took part in the original
Dún Ailinne excavations, and a fourth was co-author of the final site report
volume (Johnston and Wailes 2007). In addition, Bernard’s excavations pro-
vided the most detailed archaeological data to date on the structure of these
royal sites (Wailes 1990; Johnston and Wailes 2007).
Although he made important contributions to the archaeology of Iron
Age and Medieval Ireland, perhaps his greatest contribution was as a teacher
and mentor (Crabtree 2014). Bernard taught a wide range of courses during
his nearly 40 years at Penn. He was one of the very few scholars to teach a
course titled Medieval Archaeology in an Anthropology program in North
America. In 1973, his course helped one of us (P.J.C.) develop a life-long
interest in early Anglo-Saxon settlement and subsistence.
Bernard’s signature course was called the Prehistoric Background to
Western Civilization (Penn’s Anthropology 532). The course was a com-
prehensive introduction to later European prehistory from the beginnings
of the transition to farming in Greece through the end of the Iron Age.
The course was a powerful corrective to the text-based courses in West-
ern Civilization that are taught at many North American colleges and uni-
versities. These courses begin in the Ancient Near East and Egypt, follow
with Greece and Rome, briefly touch the European Middle Ages, and
then spend the rest of the semester on the modern world from the Italian
Renaissance to the present. These courses rarely mention that when the
Romans conquered Gaul in the first century BCE, they encountered tech-
nologically sophisticated people who had been practicing farming for over
4000 years. These “barbarians” gave the Romans a run for their money, ul-
timately ending the Roman advance into north central Europe at the battle
of Teutoburg Forest (Wells 2003). The careers of the of the editors of this
volume were profoundly influenced by Bernard’s Prehistoric Background
to Western Civilization, and we appropriated the title for a course that we
co-taught at Princeton University in the late 1980s.
Bernard was interested in the big-picture questions in archaeology and
anthropology, but was never a slave to theoretical fashion. He began teach-

21. Remembering Bernard Wailes 3
ing at Penn just as the processual movement was beginning (Binford 1962;
Binford and Binford 1968). While anthropologists like Julian Steward (1955
[1973]:16) saw V. Gordon Childe’s work as “the heritage of nineteenth-cen-
tury unilinear evolution,” Bernard recognized the value of Childe’s interest
in the Agricultural Revolution and the Urban Revolution, issues that remain
important to anthropological archaeologists in the 21st century. The final
edition of Childe’s Dawn of European Civilization (1957) was on the reading
list for Anthropology 532 in 1972, and Bernard edited a volume on craft spe-
cialization and social evolution in honor of the centenary of Childe’s birth
(Wailes, 1996; see also Soderberg, this volume).
THE CONTENTS OF THIS VOLUME
Nearly all the chapters in this volume were presented as papers at the
78th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology that was held
in Honolulu, Hawai‘i in April, 2013. The session was titled “Remembering
Bernard Wailes: The Importance of European Later Prehistoric and Medi-
eval Archaeology for American Anthropological Archaeology.” Most of the
participants were students of Bernard Wailes; the rest were scholars whose
research was directly influenced by Bernard’s guidance. Fittingly, half the
chapters in this volume discuss European prehistory, while the others deal
with historic and medieval Europe and the Mediterranean.
Peter Bogucki’s chapter addresses questions of how and why successful
forager communities in southern Scandinavia and the British Isles adopted
farming technologies in the early 4th millennium BCE. While much of the
processual archaeological research in the 1960s and 1970s focused on the
beginnings of plant and animal domestication, especially in the Near East
and Mesoamerica, the spread of agricultural technologies is an equally im-
portant question. Bogucki argues that dairying may have been a disruptive
technology that led to the adoption of farming by successful foraging popu-
lations in Northwest Europe.
David W. Anthony’s chapter tackles the often contentious questions of
Indo-European origins, migration, and the relationship between archaeol-
ogy and language. While migration was de-emphasized as an important
explanation for cultural changes during the processual era, there is no ques-
tion that migration played an important role in European archaeology. New
methods, including ancient DNA (aDNA) studies and strontium isotope

22. 4 Pam J. Crabtree and Peter Bogucki
analyses, can allow us to identify movements of people more directly. An-
thony brings together biological studies, archaeological data, and historical
linguistics to suggest that the archaeologically-known Corded Ware Cul-
ture was associated with the spread of pastoral Indo-European speaking
peoples into central Europe. This is a model that Bernard favored based
on the widespread distribution of the Corded Ware Culture, and he would
have been delighted to see that new data, including aDNA, provide addi-
tional support for this model.
Peter S. Wells’s chapter focuses on the analyses of three Bronze Age
pits from southern Germany. In the past, pits were often dismissed as
simply trash pits. However, Wells’s careful analysis of the contents, stratig-
raphy, and sequence of deposition for three Early Bronze Age pits reveals
important information about Bronze Age ritual performance and practice.
The work represents a continuation of Wailes’s interest in such topics at
Dún Ailinne.
Antonio Gilman takes up the theme of prehistoric ideology from an
Iberian perspective. He argues that the lack of evidence for overt ritual prac-
tices in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age is evidence for social solidarity
among kin, without the need for a ruling class to validate itself through
ideological displays. This is in contrast to the subsequent societies in which
control of labor and land provided opportunities for an emergent elite to
accumulate wealth and affirm their privilege through ritual displays.
Susan A. Johnston also builds on Bernard’s work in her study of Dún
Ailinne then and now. Johnston was the co-author of the final comprehen-
sive site report on Dún Ailinne (Johnston and Wailes 2007), and she subse-
quently led a new research program that carried out magnetometer survey
and targeted topographic studies at the site (Johnston et al. 2009; Johnston
et al. 2014). In her chapter, Johnston builds on previous work, using the data
from the Dún Ailinne excavations and subsequent surveys to estimate the
amounts of labor that would have been necessary to construct the bank and
ditch and the timber structures at Dún Ailinne. As Johnston shows, these
data have important implications for our understanding of both social orga-
nization and ritual practice in late Iron Age Ireland.
For many years, Bernard Wailes co-taught a course on the archaeology
of complex societies with the late Prof. Robert Sharer. The course traced
social, political, and economic changes in both the Eastern and Western
Hemispheres from the beginnings of farming through the development of

23. Remembering Bernard Wailes 5
complex, urban societies. Bernard shared Childe’s interest in social evolution,
but he argued that many of the processual models for urban origins and state
formation were over-generalized and lacking in archaeological and histori-
cal specificity. In particular, he thought that many of the North American
models relied too heavily on data from the Near East and Latin America and
that the rich archaeological data from later prehistoric and medieval Europe
could make an important contribution to broader questions of social and po-
litical evolution. In her chapter on socio-political complexity and ethnogen-
esis in Scotland, Elizabeth Ragan revisits the concept of a chiefdom, which
has too often been seen as a transitory stage on the road to state formation.
Chapters seven and eight focus on early medieval Ireland, an area of
research that was of particular interest to Bernard, who always encouraged
his students to make use of a range of different archaeological methods
and techniques to address questions of social-political evolution. Rachel E.
Scott uses data from human skeletal biology to examine the relationship
between agricultural innovations, population growth, and human health in
early medieval Ireland. Although popular historians often view early medi-
eval (5th–12th century CE) Ireland as the land of saints and scholars, recent
archaeological research has shown that this was a period of agricultural
innovation, including the addition of new crops and the appearance of wa-
termills and the heavy plow. Scott’s data reveal that despite the agricultural
innovations of Ireland’s “golden age,” early medieval Irish populations suf-
fered from both infectious diseases and nutritional deficiencies. These data
have important implications for our understanding of the relationship be-
tween agricultural intensification and human health.
John Soderberg’s chapter in this volume builds on Bernard Wailes’s
(1995) argument that medieval Irish society should be seen as heterarchical
rather than strictly hierarchical. Bernard used Irish historical sources to sug-
gest that early medieval Ireland included multiple competing hierarchies—
clerics, farmers, and men of art such as metalworkers and poets. Soderberg
draws on data from zooarchaeology to examine the roles that monasteries
played in medieval life. In the process, he problematizes the sharp distinc-
tions that have often been drawn between secular and religious sites.
Chapter nine is by Alan M. Stahl, who was a Ph.D. student in Penn’s
History Department and worked closely with Bernard throughout his
graduate school career. As Stahl notes in his chapter, he was encouraged
by Bernard to study numismatics, a challenging field that sits in the border

24. 6 Pam J. Crabtree and Peter Bogucki
between archaeology and history. Stahl’s contribution to this volume shows
how detailed numismatic studies can shed new light on the excavations car-
ried out by Princeton University over 80 years ago at the late antique city of
Antioch-on-the-Orontes.
In the final chapter, Pam J. Crabtree explores some similarities and differ-
ences between the early phases of state formation in pre-contact Hawai‘i and
Anglo-Saxon England, two cases that are rarely considered in the compara-
tive study of state formation. Similar to Ragan’s chapter, this work builds on
Bernard’s interest in the formation of complex societies and highlights the
importance of an anthropological approach to European prehistory.
A FINAL NOTE
We hope that this volume reflects the admiration and respect that we all
had for Bernard Wailes. Both of us met Bernard before we were old enough
to drink and worked closely with him for about 40 years. Long after our
student days were over, Bernard was always willing to look over (and exten-
sively edit) manuscripts, to write letters of recommendation and support,
and to provide us with a drink, a meal, or a place to sleep. We would not be
who and where we are today if it were not for Bernard Wailes. Thank you,
Bernard. Rest in eternal peace.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors would like to express their gratitude to Jim Mathieu and
Page Selinsky of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology
and Anthropology. Jim, who had participated in the Honolulu symposium
that yielded the papers in this book, invited us to submit a proposal for
consideration by the Museum’s Editorial Board. Page expertly steered it
through every stage of production with superb attention to detail and an
elegant sense of design. We are also grateful to two anonymous reviewers
who helped the authors sharpen their anthropological arguments.
REFERENCES
Binford, L.R. 1962. Archaeology as Anthropology. American Antiquity 28:217–25.
Binford, S.R., and L.R. Binford, eds. 1968. NewPerspectivesinArcheology. Chicago: Aldine.

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Campbell, E. 2007. Continental and Mediterranean Imports to Atlantic Britain and Ireland,
AD 400–800. CBA Research Report 157. London: Council for British Archaeology.
Childe, V.G. 1957. The Dawn of European Civilization, 6th edition. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
Crabtree, P.J. 2014. Remembering Bernard Wailes: Archaeological Approaches to
Late Iron Age and Early Medieval Ireland [2013 Farrell Lecture]. Eolas 7:92–102.
Grabowski, K. 1990. The Historical Overview of Dún Ailinne. Emania 7:32–36.
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27. 1
“Disruptive Technologies” and the Transition
to Agriculture in Scandinavia and the
British Isles
peter bogucki
INTRODUCTION
The delay of nearly a millennium between the establishment of farming
communities in interior central Europe during the second half of the
sixth millennium BCE and the transition to agriculture in Scandinavia and
the British Isles at the beginning of the fourth millennium BCE has never
been fully explained. What led successful foraging peoples—aware (if only
from a distance) of farming practices and life—to decline to enroll in the
Neolithic project for a thousand years, only to embrace it suddenly within
a matter of decades or at most a century or two? A search for factors that
pushed Late Mesolithic societies into the embrace of agriculture, whether
they liked it or not, has not produced satisfactory results. Agricultural colo-
nization on the model of central Europe seems unlikely on a scale that
would have produced a simultaneous and widespread transformation. The
goal of this essay is to investigate this question and identify internal fac-
tors that might have persuaded foragers of the value and wisdom of aban-
doning their economy and ethos to adopt “Neolithic things and practices”
(Whittle et al. 2011:1).
Early European farming was of great interest to Bernard Wailes. His
students count Grahame Clark (1907–1995), under whom Bernard studied
at Cambridge, as one of their academic grandparents. Clark’s 1952 book,

28. 10 Peter Bogucki
Prehistoric Europe: the Economic Basis, was a staple on Bernard’s reading lists,
and from it I first learned of the great Neolithic settlement at Brześć Ku-
jawski in Poland. Although Bernard was less interested in the transition to
agriculture and more about its subsequent intensification with innovations
such as the plough (Wailes 1970, 1972), he clearly saw (and taught us) the
big picture across the millennia. One of his early Ph.D. students was K.-
Peter Lade (1943–2001), whose dissertation was on the fifth-millennium
BCE Rössen culture in Germany (Lade 1973). Bernard’s encouragement, as
I pursued my interest in early farmers in central Europe, motivated me to
get involved with research at Brześć Kujawski and to persevere.
LAST FORAGERS/EARLY FARMERS
The transition from hunting and gathering to farming during the late
fifth millennium to early fourth millennium BCE in northwestern Europe
is a topic of lively debate. Complex, often contradictory, evidence frustrates
archaeologists who seek broad patterns that yield uniform explanations. In-
stead, regional archaeological records reflect considerable incoherence as
local foragers redefined their economies, settlement patterns, social struc-
tures, and ideologies to accommodate Neolithic opportunities. Straits and
seas as boulevards of regional interaction permitted ideas and technology
to spread widely but haphazardly. Commitments to new economic, social,
and ideological values occurred at the level of the community or the house-
hold. Gabriel Cooney’s characterization “local worlds linked by exotic ele-
ments” (2000:232) is apt.
These inhabitants of local worlds had their roots in Mesolithic societ-
ies that inhabited the coastlines and wetlands of northern Europe after the
onset of temperate climatic conditions about 10,000 years ago. Although
late Mesolithic life was far from idyllic due to interpersonal violence, occa-
sional dietary stress, and other mortality factors, most groups did not have
to fear mass starvation. Rising sea levels eventually gave more people ocean-
front views, particularly with the inundation of the southern North Sea by
the early sixth millennium BCE. Marine resources were of crucial impor-
tance (Schulting 2011), but so were freshwater fish, waterfowl, plant foods,
wild pigs, deer, and aurochs. The warmth of the Holocene Thermal Maxi-
mum (ca. 7000–4000 BCE) meant that species like pond tortoise (Emys or-
bicularis) were abundant as far as 59°N in southern Sweden (Sommer et al.

29. “Disruptive Technologies” and the Transition to Agriculture 11
2007). “Persistent places” (Thomas 2008) in the landscape for living, burial,
hunting, fishing, obtaining raw materials, and interacting with the spiritual
world created a complex practical and symbolic geography. By Stone Age
standards, life in northwestern Europe during the sixth and fifth millennia
BCE was pretty good.
THE DANUBIAN WORLD
Farming arrived on the doorstep of northern and western Europe
during the second half of the sixth millennium BCE (Fig. 1.1). In the major
watersheds of central Europe—the Danube, the Elbe, the Oder, the Rhine,
the Vistula, and the Meuse—communities making distinctive incised vessels
of the Linear Pottery Culture (Linearbandkeramik, LBK) are found on loess
and other fertile soils. These were the first “Danubians” characterized by V.
Gordon Childe (1958:106) as “perhaps the most classically neolithic in the
ancient world.” Although Linear Pottery ceramics and houses appear to
be similar across Europe from Ukraine to France, giving an impression of
homogeneity, regional and local heterogeneity gives rise to Modderman’s
(1988) celebrated characterization of “diversity in uniformity.”
The place of the Linear Pottery communities in the prehistory of north-
central Europe has been discussed extensively elsewhere (for summaries see
Bogucki [2014] and Whittle and Bickle [2013]). These fully agricultural pop-
ulations used crops and livestock that originated from domestication events
in the Near East and lived in sedentary settlements with structures that
were the largest free-standing buildings in the world at the time. There is no
mistaking them for direct elaborations upon precursor foraging societies,
regardless of whether or not indigenous hunter-gatherers were absorbed
into the Linear Pottery communities.
The Linear Pottery diaspora that started in Transdanubia around 5600
BCE reached northern Poland and eastern France within a matter of centu-
ries. It was probably a combination of long-distance colonization events and
short-distance advances of the agricultural frontier, facilitated by a highly
effective agropastoral economy and the warmth of the Holocene Ther-
mal Maximum that permitted Near Eastern domesticates to find congenial
conditions in central European latitudes. Cattle were the mainstay of the
animal economy, used both for meat and for dairy production (Bogucki
1989; Salque et al. 2013).

30. 12 Peter Bogucki
Yet, this Danubian diaspora was arrested around 5000 BCE along the
southern margin of the North European Plain and at the edge of the Breton
Massif. It is difficult to know exactly why, but it is true that the edge of the
region settled by the Linear Pottery culture and its Danubian successors
corresponds roughly to the limits of the fertile riverine habitats they found
so congenial in central Europe. It has also been suggested that their advance
was resisted by populations of Mesolithic foragers, denser than those they
encountered in central Europe, who were not so amenable to assimilation
(Isern and Fort 2012). Over the next several centuries, modest advances
(along with some retreats) of farming occurred along the Danubian fron-
tier, but for the most part, the spread of the use of domestic plants and
animals halted until the final centuries of the fifth millennium BCE.
THE DANUBIAN BORDERLANDS
The foraging societies of the fifth millennium BCE of the Baltic and
North Sea basins and the Atlantic Façade were separated from Danubian set-
1.1. Northwest Europe showing dates of earliest farming in years BCE, as well as
areas of the Villeneuve-St. Germain and Brześć Kujawski Groups discussed in text.

31. “Disruptive Technologies” and the Transition to Agriculture 13
tlement in interior central Europe by borderlands of varying width. On the
lowlands of the North European Plain, about 200 kilometers separated for-
agers from farmers. Between the Dutch-Belgian loess and the coastal lagoons
and creeks of the Rhine-Meuse delta, lies a belt of sandy soils about 150 ki-
lometers wide. These borderlands were permeable, as indicated by finds of
Danubian artifacts, especially stone axes (Fischer 1982), in forager contexts.
During the fifth millennium BCE, the southern margins of the border-
lands were inhabited by Neolithic societies descended from pioneer Linear
Pottery farmers several centuries earlier. Two of these Danubian societies
are especially important. In the east, the settlements of the Brześć Kujawski
Group are found along the lower Vistula in the Polish region of Kuyavia,
while in the west, settlements of the Villeneuve-St.-Germain Group (VSG)
are widespread in the Paris Basin, Normandy, and Brittany. Both represent
local developments in the Danubian tradition of longhouse architecture,
contracted burials, and subsistence economies based on a mix of cereals and
livestock, including cattle, caprines, and pigs.
It appears that foragers on the Baltic coast of Poland at Dąbki were in
contact with farmers from the south who left their ceramic calling cards
(Czekaj-Zastawny et al. 2013). At the same time, an argument can be made
that the Ertebølle hunter-gatherers interacted with farming communities of
the Brześć Kujawski Group in the late fifth millennium BCE in the Kuyavia
region of Poland (Bogucki 2008). These contacts are reflected by antler
T-axes, design motifs, and bone tool types at sites like Osłonki and Brześć
Kujawski. Kuyavia was separated from the Baltic coast by just over 200 ki-
lometers, across which flow low-energy streams, easily navigated by boat
upstream and downstream.
The Danubian borderland in northwestern France wraps around the
western end of the area settled by Danubian farmers at the very end of
the sixth millennium BCE. Normandy saw expansion of agricultural settle-
ment during the first centuries of the fifth millennium BCE as indicated
by Villeneuve-Saint-Germain settlements like Poses (Bostyn and Beurion
2003). Within several centuries, farming communities were established in
Brittany and the Loire valley, with reasonably well-marked Villeneuve-Saint-
Germain connections. A less distinct role was played by the makers of im-
pressed pottery connected with Mediterranean traditions presumed to have
reached across southern France to the Atlantic coast (Marchand and Manen
2006). Throughout the fifth millennium, mature farming economies devel-

32. 14 Peter Bogucki
oped along the English Channel and the Atlantic coast of France. Toward
the end of the fifth millennium BCE, the Cerny Group in northern France,
the Michelsberg culture in Belgium and the Netherlands, and the makers of
Castellic pottery in Brittany provide the most likely precursors for the intro-
duction of agriculture to the British Isles (Whittle et al. 2011).
Rowley-Conwy (2014) provides an illuminating critique of how we have
envisioned the interaction between foragers and farmers across northern
Europe. Influenced too heavily by ethnographic and ethnohistoric accounts
between technologically complex farmers and technologically simple for-
agers, many archaeologists have envisioned the foragers as becoming “pe-
ripheral clients” of the farmers of the Danubian core area, resisting but
eventually grudgingly adopting the superior Neolithic things and practices.
This traditional view is probably flawed. In northern Europe, however, the
Neolithic societies of the Danubian core area and the foragers of the Baltic
and North Sea basins were relatively similar in their technological founda-
tions. Interaction between foragers and farmers was probably a two-way
street. The appearance of farming on the southern edge of the North Euro-
pean Plain and in northern France did not trigger a widespread conversion
of foragers to the agricultural way of life.
Based on the current state of research, there does not appear to have
been a long period of mixed or alternating foraging and farming in late
Mesolithic northern and western Europe during the sixth and fifth millen-
nia BCE. Few credible claims exist for the uptake of domestic plants and
animals prior to 4000 BCE in southern Scandinavia and the British Isles.
The pace and timing of agricultural uptake after 4000 BCE is still debated,
but the transition to farming in northern and western Europe is generally
abrupt, even if some foraging continued to be practiced during the fourth
millennium BCE. This long delay, followed by a sudden uptake of agricul-
ture, sets the transformation of foragers into farmers in northern and west-
ern Europe apart from most modern examples of foraging-farming transi-
tions that have been studied ethnographically.
FARMING FRONTIERS IN NORTHERN AND
WESTERN EUROPE
At the end of the fifth and beginning of the fourth millennium BCE,
“farming frontiers” emerged in the Baltic Basin and the British Isles, as well

33. “Disruptive Technologies” and the Transition to Agriculture 15
as other parts of Europe (Bogucki 2014:1845–52). These frontiers are not
sharp boundaries nor are they borderlands. Instead, they are wide units of
space and time, often lasting over 500 years and covering more than 105
square kilometers, in which indigenous foraging groups converted to agri-
cultural techniques and values at different paces. Within these areas, many
events and processes took place, including mini-diasporas of farmers and
patchwork patterns of uptake of domesticated plants and animals by for-
aging groups. Such farming frontiers are notable for their disharmonious
archaeological records during the periods in question, which frustrate ar-
chaeologists looking for uniformity in the transition to agriculture.
Collard et al. (2010) define four possibilities for the manner and speed in
which agriculture was introduced to Britain, which can be adapted for this
essay and generalized to southern Scandinavia as well:
1. Diaspora by farmers from continental Europe ca. 4000 BCE, either
through
a. A single migration event, or
b. Multiple local, largely independent, incursions
2. Conversion of indigenous foragers starting around 4000 BCE, either
a. Gradually, over about a millennium, or
b. Rapidly, within decades or centuries.
Within the farming frontier concept, identifying one such process and
tempo does not rule out the other three occurring either sequentially or
concurrently. In neither the Baltic Basin nor the British Isles does there
appear to have been massive population replacement of hunters by farm-
ers, so the likelihood of 1a being the dominant factor can be minimized.
Instead, we can focus attention on 1b, 2a, and 2b as the primary modes of
the transition to agriculture in the farming frontiers of northern and north-
western Europe.
Although there is no compelling evidence for a single mass diaspora of
Danubian farmers from interior central Europe into southern Scandinavia
or the British Isles, the possibility of multiple local, small, independent in-
cursions over the borderland and across the straits and seas cannot be ruled
out. Multiple small-scale incursions from mainland Europe to the British
Isles have been proposed by Alison Sheridan (2010), widely separated in

34. 16 Peter Bogucki
time and space. Radiocarbon evidence (Collard et al. 2010) and interpreta-
tions of the archaeozoological record (Serjeantson 2014) support a case for
Neolithic diasporas from the Continent to the British Isles and sharp discon-
tinuities between Mesolithic and Neolithic. Clearly, the domesticated plants
and animals from the Danubian world reached Britain and Ireland in quan-
tity, and it is likely that these often came with actual farmers attached. There
was almost certainly considerable intercourse between the British Isles and
the Continent through the fifth millennium BCE. At the same time, how-
ever, it is very hard to identify clear continental precursors for the pottery
and material culture of the British Neolithic more broadly.
For several decades, there has been considerable enthusiasm for a
gradual transition to farming in the British Isles by indigenous foragers
(see Thomas [2013] for an extensive discussion). Although it takes different
guises, the general form of the gradual model argues for non-sedentary
Neolithic peoples, essentially pursuing a mobile foraging way of life with
occasional returns to marked places in the landscape, largely to carry out
ritual practices. Cereals and livestock, once rare on sites from the early
fourth millennium BCE in Britain, were not used daily but were consumed
on special occasions. Not until much later did fully sedentary Neolithic
communities emerge in Britain and Ireland, under this model.
After reaching its zenith in the 1990s, the model of a gradual transi-
tion to agriculture by non-sedentary Neolithic communities in the British
Isles has been undercut by the emergence of copious amounts of archaeo-
zoological and archaeobotanical data, a profusion of Neolithic houses (es-
pecially in Ireland), and many high-precision radiocarbon dates. Rowley-
Conwy (2011) has presented a solid case for an abrupt change—and this
theme seems to be ascendant—whether it was due to the adoption of live-
stock and crops by indigenous people or by migration from the Continent.
Bayesian analysis of the growing corpus of radiocarbon dates (Whittle et
al. 2011; Wysocki et al. 2013) suggests that the “first Neolithic things and
practices” appeared in the area of the Thames Estuary just before 4000 BCE
due to small-scale movement from the Continent before spreading to the
north and west through subsequent movement and by acculturation of the
indigenous population.
Data from Ireland illustrates the complexity of the problem and the
need for a large number of dates on short-lived materials to character-
ize the transition to farming (Cooney et al. 2011; McClatchie et al. 2014;

35. “Disruptive Technologies” and the Transition to Agriculture 17
Whitehouse et al. 2014). The cattle bones from Ferriter’s Cove dated 4450–
4270 BCE stand in isolation several centuries before any further evidence
for Neolithic activity can be dated. It is not until ca. 4000 BCE that spe-
cific evidence for Neolithic activity appears in Ireland, although for the
first 250 years of the fourth millennium BCE the record is equivocal, with
uncertain datings, often on long-lived materials. Around 3750 BCE, how-
ever, there was an explosion of Neolithic settlement and mortuary activity,
including a period of intensive house construction (Smyth 2014) and the
construction of the earliest Irish megalithic monuments, the court tombs
(Schulting et al. 2012). After a few centuries of intensive activity, the Neo-
lithic record grows dimmer during the second half of the fourth millen-
nium. Nonetheless, the Irish evidence is also “consistent with a rapid and
abrupt transition to agriculture” (Whitehouse et al. 2014:201) during the
38th century BCE.
In southern Scandinavia, however, the high archaeological visibility of
Mesolithic populations as well as continuities in material culture from Me-
solithic to Neolithic assemblages means that there is relatively little support
for migration from the Danubian world as the primary cause of the spread
of agriculture. Although the possibility has been raised of mini-diasporas of
pioneer farmers from interior Europe as reflected by sharp discontinuities
in faunal samples (Sørenson and Karg 2012), the more widely held view is
that the transition to agriculture in Scandinavia was an “inside job” in which
the last hunters became the first farmers just after 4000 BCE. In terms of
archaeological cultures, the Ertebølle foragers became the farmers of the
Funnel Beaker culture in northern Germany, Denmark, and southern
Sweden (Larsson 2013).
In much of southern Scandinavia and the British Isles, current evi-
dence suggests that the fundamental changeover from foraging to farm-
ing happened fairly quickly, between ca. 4000 and 3700 BCE. A rapid tran-
sition does not necessarily mean population change or replacement but,
rather, could reflect very fast internal processes within the frontier zone.
It is indeed possible, even likely, that the transition to agriculture in both
these areas occurred at different paces in different places. Richard Bradley
(2007) has suggested that the uptake of domestic animals and plants in
southern Britain took longer than it did in northern Britain and Ireland,
for example, and such geographical variation may also have occurred in
the Baltic zone as well.

36. 18 Peter Bogucki
We are almost certainly dealing with a mosaic of decisions in space
and time about adoption and commitment to agriculture that took place
at the community and household level. What I believe we see in much of
the British Isles and southern Scandinavia are: (1) anomalous early hints of
domestic plants and animals with precarious dating during the late fifth mil-
lennium BCE; (2) a period with firmer traces of agriculture, especially the
presence of domestic cattle, starting around 4000 BCE with occasional mor-
tuary and domestic structures; and finally, shortly thereafter, (3) an intense
burst of Neolithic activity as many households adopt the use of domestic
plants and animals and the construction of mortuary monuments becomes
widespread. The overall impression is of a very rapid uptake of domestic
plants and animals, after many centuries of awareness of their existence and
a short period of tentative early adoption, often involving cattle.
WHY IT’S HARD FOR HUNTERS TO BECOME FARMERS
The availability of domestic animals and plants over several centuries
before their eventual uptake in the British Isles and southern Scandinavia
reminds us of how difficult it is for hunter-gatherers to become farmers. Al-
though it is not necessary to invoke massive external forces such as climate
change, sea level rise, or population pressure to compel hunter-gatherers
to change their ways, nonetheless, there are fundamental societal values
common among foragers that prevent an easy transition to agriculture.
Key among these are an egalitarian ethos that opposes property and hoard-
ing along with the fluid and open composition of hunter-gatherer groups.
Foraging societies may consist of many unrelated individuals who are not
bound solely by family ties. The points made below only touch upon a much
larger and wide-ranging anthropological discussion, which is explored in
much greater depth in recent publications (e.g., Kelly 2013; Howell 2011;
Dallos 2011).
In most hunter-gatherer societies, the economy is embedded within a
social and cosmic order that emphasizes interconnectedness and interper-
sonal egalitarianism while resisting the pursuit of acquisition. For exam-
ple, Howell (2011:96) described the overriding concern of the Chewong in
Malaysia as being with “the long-term reproduction of social and cosmic
order rather than with short-term individual maximization of advan-
tages.” Foraging societies are generally ideologically constrained from

37. “Disruptive Technologies” and the Transition to Agriculture 19
simply adopting “Neolithic things and practices” without some dramatic
reduction in their concern for perpetuating the egalitarian social order.
Simply being aware of agriculture does not lead foragers to enlist in it
in the absence of some arrangement that undermines this characteristic
social order.
Examples of modern hunter-gatherer societies that are said to be in the
process of adopting agriculture generally turn out to be complicated upon
closer examination. Many have alternated between foraging and farming
for decades, even centuries, or acquired domesticated plants through ex-
change (see table 1 in Greaves and Kramer 2014). For example, the Agta in
the Philippines have long lived next to non-Agta farmers and have developed
a symbiotic relationship in bartering forest products for cultivated resources
(Headland 1987; Headland and Reid 1989), while the Pumé of Venezuela
cultivate a small amount of manioc as a fallback resource that does not sup-
plant their traditional reliance on wild foods (Greaves and Kramer 2014).
It is much harder than once thought to find modern examples of pristine
transitions from foraging to farming.
Freeman (2012) proposes that there are two general patterns that can
be observed cross-culturally in the uptake of agriculture by foragers. The
first is what he calls ancillary cultivation, the casual use of domesticated
resources as a complement to foraging, while the second is termed surplus
cultivation, in which increasing time is devoted to farming that eventually
supplants the use of wild resources. The former groups live at relatively
low population densities, while the latter have larger populations and are
less mobile. Ancillary cultivators persist in their foraging lifestyles, like the
Pumé, while surplus cultivators cross the threshold to agricultural commit-
ment and intensification. Ancillary cultivation systems, however, require
the presence nearby of surplus cultivators, from whom farming products
can be obtained in the event of crop loss.
The Mesolithic societies of northern Europe during the sixth and fifth
millennia BCE do not conform to either of these patterns. With very few
(and often problematic) exceptions, there is no evidence for the use of do-
mestic plants and animals before 4000 BCE in southern Scandinavia and
the British Isles, even on an ancillary basis. No gradual admixture of ag-
riculture into the foraging economy appears to have taken place. Interac-
tion with farmers in interior central Europe does not seem to have had
the symbiotic character as seen with the Agta. For over a millennium, the

38. 20 Peter Bogucki
Mesolithic foragers of northern Europe simply declined to adopt Neolithic
things and practices.
In most respects, the Mesolithic societies of northern Europe were mari-
time and riverine foragers under conditions of resource hyperabundance
and logistical mobility. Such conditions may act in the long term to under-
mine the foraging egalitarian ethos, as they seem to have done for the sed-
entary hunter-gatherers of the Pacific Northwest who developed complex
patterns of acquisition and leadership. Farming, however, does not appear to
have held an immediate attraction for Mesolithic societies, either as an ancil-
lary resource or as a means to generate surpluses for exchange and security,
despite the presence of sedentary agricultural societies not far away.
By the fifth millennium BCE, the foraging economies of northern and
western Europe had developed a highly successful and resilient way of life.
Key to it, was a suite of high-productivity wild resources, including wild
pigs, hazelnuts, and both marine and freshwater fish and shellfish. We see
increasing evidence for watercraft in the form of dugout and sewn canoes.
The mobility provided by watercraft had the paradoxical effect of promot-
ing sedentism, for residential mobility was no longer required to exploit re-
sources a distance away that could be reached by water. Bands could, thus,
stay longer in residential bases, while task groups could range outward for
dozens of kilometers along coastlines, across bays, and up slow-flowing
rivers of northern Europe and return with canoes full of fish and game.
On land, Mesolithic foragers also maximized the resources they could
extract from their rich environment. Pre-agricultural manipulation of
plant communities is well known from around the world, and consider-
able evidence exists for this practice across northern Europe during the
Mesolithic (Mellars 1976; Innes et al. 2013; Bishop et al. 2015 among many).
Deliberate burning appears to have been the most common activity and,
based on ethnographic analogies, its primary purposes would have been to
establish and maintain artificial glades for attracting game and the propa-
gation of useful plant resources such as hazel and berries. Such activity
did not cause the uptake of agriculture by hunter-gatherers, although it is
compelling evidence that hunter-gatherers are acutely aware of plant suc-
cession and animal behavior. The creation and maintenance of artificial
glades also could have provided attractive locations for feral cattle escaped
from Neolithic communities in interior central Europe to collect and mul-
tiply (Bogucki 1995).

39. “Disruptive Technologies” and the Transition to Agriculture 21
Increased sedentism by Mesolithic bands along the estuaries and around
the lakes of northern Europe had several key effects. The first is that people
living near each other were increasingly likely to be related genetically to
each other. In forager bands, this is often not the case. Cross-cultural stud-
ies of 32 modern-day hunter-gatherer bands indicate that most individuals
in the residential groups studied were either genetically unrelated or at best
were distant relatives, with fewer than 10% of residential groups being com-
posed of primary kin (Hill et al. 2011). As Mesolithic bands became increas-
ingly sedentary, however, we might expect the number of co-residential pri-
mary kin to increase, with the result that it now became more obvious who
is a relative and who is not. This growing sense of being related would have
had an impact on the fluid networks of sharing relationships that character-
ize hunter-gatherer bands. What had previously been a system of “share
with whomever is in the camp” could shift to keeping more fish and game
for primary kin.
The second effect of this increased attachment to persistent residen-
tial bases was the development of fixed facilities for catching fish on an
almost industrial scale using traps and weirs. Elaborate fixed installations
for catching fish have been found from the Baltic to the Atlantic. Several
are known from the Liffey estuary in Ireland, and they are ubiquitous at the
submerged Ertebølle sites of the southwestern Baltic. These fixed instal-
lations permitted the maintenance of populous communities on bays and
estuaries, especially when large fish catches could be preserved, through
smoking and drying.
Such a dramatic increase in the potential for harvesting a resource,
combined with increasing sedentism, can also undermine the egalitarian,
sharing ethos of a foraging society. Osaki (1990) reports on the effect of
the adoption of equestrian hunting on newly-sedentary San communi-
ties in Botswana. In the traditional bow-hunting system, since every man
could hunt, the sharing of meat was reciprocal, going through an elabo-
rate pattern of distribution of different body parts. Hunting from horses
using spears greatly increased the number of animals that a hunter lucky
enough to have a horse could kill. Meat was still shared, but the flow of
sharing became one-directional, from the hunters to the recipients, and it
was unequal. The horse owners received about half of the first distribution,
some of which would be sold, while the other half was distributed among
the others in the band, with each recipient getting relatively little. Thus, the

40. 22 Peter Bogucki
increase in hunting effectiveness made possible by using horses undermined
the egalitarianism and sharing ethos of San society.
We can imagine the effect of massive fish catching using traps and weirs
on Mesolithic societies in a similar light, undermining the egalitarian shar-
ing ethos of the foraging bands. Although these may have been collective
activities, at some point there would be a sense of inequality between the
individuals who built, maintained, and emptied the traps and weirs and
those who did not. While this may have subverted the egalitarian ethos and
disrupted the social and cosmological order of hunter-gatherers, it may also
have created conditions for the adoption of Neolithic values of acquisition
and ownership. In other words, by the end of the late fifth millennium BCE,
the Mesolithic societies of northern Europe, particularly those along coasts
and estuaries, were open to a change for which they had not been ready a
millennium earlier.
We can, thus, infer that, despite their relative technological parity, a
deep ideological and cosmological gulf probably existed between the farm-
ers of interior central Europe and the indigenous foragers of the northern
and western frontiers, for the distinction between Mesolithic and Neolithic
goes far beyond the economic realm. What could have undermined the for-
ager ideology of non-acquisition and egalitarianism? Some of the Neolithic
groups known to the northern foragers, like the Brześć Kujawski Group,
were particularly acquisitive, while others, simply by cultivating crops and
keeping livestock, had values incompatible with the hunter-gatherer egali-
tarian ethos. Instead, there must have been some internal factors within the
Mesolithic societies of northern Europe that led them to be open to shifting
from prioritizing the long-term preservation of an egalitarian cosmic and
social order to short-term cycles of acquisition and ownership that charac-
terize sedentary food producers.
DISRUPTIVE AND SUSTAINING INNOVATIONS
Let us consider the possibility that Danubian domestic plants and ani-
mals alone did not offer anything attractive to the successful foragers of
northern and western Europe, since they declined to embrace them for
most of the fifth millennium BCE. Then suddenly, at the beginning of the
fourth millennium BCE, they were adopted enthusiastically, with all this
entails in terms of overturning their values of non-acquisition and egali-

41. “Disruptive Technologies” and the Transition to Agriculture 23
tarianism. Within a few centuries, farming hamlets could be found as far
north as the Dala valley in central Sweden. What might have caused this
sudden transformation?
One way of looking at the problem comes from the concept of disrup-
tive and sustaining innovations introduced by Clayton Christensen (1997)
of the Harvard Business School (although much more clearly stated in
Christensen and Raynor [2003]). His ideas have been widely discussed in
popular literature but are often misunderstood. A sustaining innovation
is one in which existing technology is steadily improved for greater value
and effectiveness. Christensen cites the computer hard disk as an example.
From its earliest forms in the 1950s to the present, the hard disk has become
smaller and tremendously increased in capacity, but the basic idea and its ap-
plications are largely the same. While its market expands and develops, new
users do not suddenly embrace it. The eventual replacement of hard drives
in some applications by solid-state memory (e.g., memory sticks) is not a
disruption since it does not involve new populations of users or hitherto
unimagined applications.
A disruptive technology, on the other hand, is not simply something
that permits an existing system to be improved. Instead, it exploits a novel
niche, often very small or narrow, that then expands dramatically. An exam-
ple would be Alexander Graham Bell’s electric speech machine, now known
as the telephone, which did not merely improve upon telegraphy but rather
penetrated a new niche and attracted users other than telegraphers. It is not
simply the innovation itself but rather the creation of a new market for it or
the opening of a niche that has not hitherto been exploited. A disruptive in-
novation does not have to be a technological breakthrough but rather might
be an off-the-shelf component of an existing technology that suddenly finds
a novel application and willing customers. Often, it may be less effective
than the technological system it disrupts. A disruptive innovation does not
replace sustaining innovations. Rather, it is an alternative that initially com-
petes and eventually succeeds.
Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovations has been subject to criti-
cism and does not apply uniformly across technological systems. Since the
word “disruption” sounds “edgy” and gives the user a fashionable tone, it
is used very loosely and inappropriately by people who have not taken the
time to understand the core concepts. Lepore (2014) asserts that the con-
cept of disruption is based on shaky, often anecdotal, evidence and has no

42. 24 Peter Bogucki
predictive value. In particular, she objects to its application in arenas out-
side of business, including presumably its use in this essay. Such criticism
provides a useful caution against the uncritical use of the word “disrupt”
and requires one to think carefully about deploying “the rhetoric of disrup-
tion,” as Lepore calls it. At the same time, however, the Christensen theory
provides a way to frame a discussion of the impact of novel technologies
on the Mesolithic world in the hindsight of six thousand years, and in this
spirit it is being applied here.
It is important to stress that “disruptive” does not mean “unwelcome”
and should not be viewed in a negative light. Indeed, a necessary criterion
for an innovation to be disruptive is its enthusiastic uptake by users who
may suddenly have appreciated what it can do for them or discover that they
need something that they had not known they needed before. At the turn
of the 20th century, the Sony Walkman®
represented what seemed at the
time to be the last word in portable music. No one knew that they would
subsequently want an iPod®
, only shortly thereafter to have that innovation
itself be disrupted by smart phones that play music. A few early adopters
can become evangelists for the new technology, and word spreads quickly.
DISRUPTING THE FORAGING ECONOMY
To persuade the happy foragers of northwestern Europe to overturn
their highly successful way of life and embrace the demands and rewards
of farming would have required something like a disruptive innovation to
take hold among a small subset of them and make them so much more suc-
cessful that their fellow hunter-gatherers noticed. The replacement of wild
pigs, deer, and fish with cattle, sheep and goats, and domestic pigs as meat
sources or the replacement of hazelnuts with cereals would not have been
a compelling value proposition in itself. Yet there must have been some
element of the Danubian economy certain foragers seized upon that sud-
denly made it an attractive proposition. Was there a disruptive innovation
in play here?
Several elements in the Danubian economy of interior central Europe
were alien to the foraging economy of northwestern Europe. One was the
use of milk from domestic cattle to make dairy products such as cheese,
while another, also involving cattle, was their use for traction in ploughing
and hauling. You would not use deer or aurochs for these purposes. An-

43. “Disruptive Technologies” and the Transition to Agriculture 25
other candidate for a disruptive technology would have been the fermenta-
tion of grain into beer. While fermented beverages could have been made
by foragers from honey and wild plants, the transformation of grain into
liquid bread would have been something very novel indeed. These inno-
vations also could have meshed well with industrial-scale forager practices
such as fish-trapping and food preservation.
When it comes to the earliest domestic animals across northern and
western Europe just before or just after 4000 BCE, domestic cattle are
almost always the first species present (Serjeantson 2014). Something about
cattle must have appealed to foragers, but why bother raising them just for
meat when you have all those deer and wild pigs? Domestic cattle would
have been attractive as docile smaller versions of the fierce aurochs, but if
all it involved was killing them for meat, then they may not have provided
such a compelling value proposition to the foragers compared with deer
and wild pigs. Sheep and goats were certainly exotic, but if they were only
being used for meat, the motivation to herd them instead of hunting deer
and wild pig would be minimal.
Dairy production, however, presented a novel biotechnology to forag-
ers. It would not simply represent an improved method of hunting and
gathering, as foragers might have viewed cultivated plants and livestock,
but rather may have been taken up by some early adopters who seized on
its potential. It is unclear what products were made from milk. We can be
relatively certain that the Linear Pottery farmers of central Europe pro-
duced some form of cheese through the separation of curds from whey in
cow milk (Salque et al. 2013). This technology would be a prime candidate
for the sort of disruptive penetration of a new bioprocess into the hunter-
gatherer economy. Another dairy product could have been a fermented bev-
erage like kefir (Patrick McGovern, pers. comm.).
Another candidate for a disruptive technology among the Mesolithic
foragers is the production of beer by fermenting grain. Surprisingly, Neo-
lithic beer production in Europe prior to the third millennium BCE has
rarely been a subject of discussion in light of the attention it has received in
other parts of the Old World. The first attention was focused on the issue
by Sol Katz and Mary Voigt (1987) nearly 30 years ago, when they suggested
that the primary motivation for the domestication of grain might have been
beer production, reviving a suggestion that had been circulating in archaeo-
logical thought for some time (Braidwood et al. 1953). Since then, the case

44. 26 Peter Bogucki
for Neolithic, even Epipaleolithic/Mesolithic, brewing has been made for
the Near East (Dietrich et al. 2012; Hayden et al. 2013) and China (McGov-
ern 2009), but it is rarely taken up in Europe with reference to the first
farming communities during the seventh and sixth millennia BCE. Thus,
residues from pottery at Can Sadurní in Spain dated to the late fifth millen-
nium BCE are cited as the earliest evidence for European beer (Blasco et al.
2008). It seems quite reasonable, however, to believe that beer-making was
known to the first Linear Pottery farmers of central Europe, despite the
current lack of hard evidence for it.
Prehistoric beer is frequently discussed for its intoxicating effects and its
possible role in rituals (e.g., Guerra-Doce 2015). Despite the resonance be-
tween such prehistoric use and the proclivities of modern archaeologists, it
is entirely possible that the fermenting of grain was done for a more prosaic
effect, namely the conversion of their cultivated crops into a concentrated
source of nutrition, “liquid bread.” A more appropriate analogue might be
the “porridge-beer” food system of Nubian agropastoralists from the fifth
millennium BCE onward (Haaland 2012), in which beer is consumed for its
contributions both to nutrition and to sociability.
An important aspect of the above candidates for disruptive innovations
in the late forager economy is that they are processes, not domesticates
themselves or artifact types like axes or pottery. This is key for understand-
ing their disruptive character, for they were largely novel and did not sustain
earlier technologies based in categories of plants, animals, and tools. As I
have suggested earlier, the actual plants, animals, and artifacts that signified
Neolithic life were probably known to foragers long before they were taken
up in northern and western Europe. Processes like dairying and brewing,
however, are unlikely to have been passed along without personal contact,
probably often repeated, and thus people needed to cross the borderland
from the farming world to the foragers or vice-versa.
This makes the Brześć Kujawski Group in Poland, the Rössen and Mi-
chelsberg communities of Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and the
Villeneuve-St.-Germain, Cerny, and Castellic Groups in France some of the
key players in the transmission of technological processes that disrupted
the comfortable economy of the foragers. These mature mixed-farming
economies of the fifth millennium BCE, demonstrated a relatively secure
agricultural life that permitted long-distance contacts. From them would
have emanated the feral, rustled, and exchanged cattle that could be found

45. “Disruptive Technologies” and the Transition to Agriculture 27
in the glades and marshes of the borderlands and beyond. They also would
have been the source of seed grain that found its way into the hands of the
foragers. Finally, they would have been the origins of Neolithic individuals
and groups who may have been evangelists for the new disruptive technolo-
gies as they found their way among the foragers.
EVIDENCE FOR DAIRYING IN EARLY NEOLITHIC
SCANDINAVIA AND BRITAIN
Lest the reader assume that this discussion is purely speculative, the evi-
dence for an early and rapid uptake of dairying in Scandinavia and Britain
early in the fourth millennium BCE is very real. Much of this research has
been published since 2010 and more appears every year as the techniques
for extracting and analyzing lipid residues in Neolithic pottery pioneered in
the Evershed laboratory at the University of Bristol become more widely
applied (Copley et al. 2005; Evershed et al. 2008).
Evidence for early dairying has been emerging across southern Scan-
dinavia and the British Isles, in many cases datable very close to the initial
appearance of domestic cattle in these areas. In Denmark and northern
Germany, a recent study showed that “more than half of the Neolithic ves-
sels yielding detectable lipid residues met the established criteria for rumi-
nant dairy products” (Craig et al. 2011:17912). Despite the fact that this
residue analysis indicated that there was not a sharp cessation in the use of
marine resources as indicated by earlier stable isotope studies (e.g., Tauber
1981), and thus a continuation of many Mesolithic dietary practices into the
Neolithic, the researchers observed that “remarkably, it seems that dairy-
ing was practiced at coastal and inland sites as soon as domestic animals
appeared in the sequence” (Craig et al. 2011:17912). It is clear that dairying
can be incorporated into a hunting-fishing economy without intermediate
transitional steps.
An early Funnel Beaker (TRB) farmstead and ritual fen was excavated
at Skogsmossen in central Sweden (Hallgren 2008). Although today the site
is nearly 100 kilometers inland due to isostatic rebound of the land surface,
during the fourth millennium BCE, it was within a kilometer of the Baltic
coast. Analysis of several samples of pottery from the offering fen show
milk lipid biomarkers (Isaksson and Hallgren 2012). Reacting to the popular
idea of a gradual transition to agriculture and a “symbolic Neolithic,” Isaks-

46. 28 Peter Bogucki
son and Hallgren (2012:3607) note that “this observation fits badly with
the idea of displaying material attributes of TRB while keeping a hunter-
gatherer lifestyle as it is evidence for an animal husbandry including at least
some dairying.”
In contrast with the southwest Baltic area, where residues suggest a
persistence of a marine component in the diet alongside a rapid uptake of
dairying, in the British Isles, there is widespread evidence for a very sharp
decline in marine foods concurrent with the appearance of dairying at the
beginning of the fourth millennium BCE. Biomarkers “confirm rejection
of marine resources by early farmers coinciding with the adoption of inten-
sive dairy farming” (Cramp et al. 2014:1). This pattern was spread through-
out the British Isles, including Ireland. Among the Early Neolithic pottery
samples, dairy fats made up 80% of the lipid residues, which is regarded as
“strong evidence [that] now associates the introduction of the earliest pot-
tery with the exploitation of secondary (liquid) animal products” (Cramp
et al. 2014:4). Thus, it seems clear that the biomarkers for dairy production
appear immediately and abruptly at the transition from foraging to farming
in the British Isles.
Compelling evidence for an early uptake of dairying in Ireland has been
presented by Smyth and Evershed (2015). Carinated Bowl pottery from the
first centuries of the fourth millennium BCE yielded significant concentra-
tions of lipid residues consistent with milk fats. Although the introduction
of farming and dairying to Ireland may have been driven more by coloni-
zation across the Irish Sea from Britain than by indigenous adoption, the
evidence from lipid residues nonetheless underscores the central role of
dairying in the earliest development of agriculture in Ireland just after the
start of the fourth millennium BCE.
The question of the earliest pottery in both these regions is intriguing.
In the southwestern Baltic, it now appears that the Ertebølle pottery of the
fifth millennium BCE is the westernmost extent of a “hyperborean stream”
of pointed-based pottery innovation that originated in east Asia many mil-
lennia earlier and is associated with the cooking of aquatic foods (Craig et
al. 2013; Gibbs and Jordan 2013). This might explain the continuity in the
use of Funnel Beaker pots for preparing marine foods after the appearance
of domestic plants and animals at Funnel Beaker sites. Dairying may have
been another purpose found for ceramic containers, which shifted from
having pointed bases for use in hearths to bottoms that permitted the ves-

47. “Disruptive Technologies” and the Transition to Agriculture 29
sels to stand on their own. In Britain, on the other hand, the earliest pottery
seems to have a continental derivation, from cattle-using farming Neolithic
societies, in which case it may have been purposively adopted to facilitate
the simultaneous uptake of dairying.
A PREFERENCE CASCADE
Our attention then is drawn to the tipping point, at the end of the fifth
millennium BCE in northern Germany and the beginning of the fourth
millennium BCE in southern Scandinavia and the British Isles, when farm-
ing abruptly replaced foraging in many localities. It was probably preceded
by several centuries of quiet—and archaeologically invisible—experimenta-
tion with these processes and their early adoption by certain households.
The archaeological visibility of the uptake of domestic animals and plants
in northern Europe reflects the time when Neolithic practices and things
were employed by enough households for a fraction of them to survive to
be discovered six millennia later.
A way of thinking about the abrupt transition to agriculture in southern
Scandinavia and the British Isles is as a manifestation of a “preference cas-
cade.” This term, popularized by Glenn Reynolds (2002), is the flip side of
“preference falsification,” a concept developed by Timur Kuran (1995) to de-
scribe when dissenters from the status quo suppress their personal views and
aspirations in the face of what they believe to be majority opinion or under
authoritarian control. In the original conception of the preference cascade,
as an explanation for the sudden collapse of totalitarian regimes, dissenters
suddenly realize that they are not alone and that there are others with simi-
lar views. They mutually discover that more people than they thought do
not support the status quo, and this knowledge then expands dramatically as
others, who themselves are making a similar realization, connect with the
dissenters. The result is a cascade of transformation that overturns the old
order as individuals prefer a new set of values and practices.
In many respects, the ideological and cosmological values of foraging so-
cieties that act to maintain an egalitarian social order might be seen as analo-
gous to a totalitarian regime. This comparison will no doubt horrify those
who study hunter-gatherer societies, yet the focus that one sees in so many
such societies on suppressing individual acquisition and initiative through an
all-encompassing order that sees everyone as socially and ideologically inter-

48. 30 Peter Bogucki
twined seems to fit. The decision to adopt Neolithic “things and practices”
could not have been made by whole communities collectively but rather
required individuals or families to defect from the established order.
Yet some individuals who became interested in Neolithic “things and
practices” realized they were not alone. Once they discovered that other
individuals and families had similar interests and motivations and preferred
them to the older way, the hunter-gatherer social order began to fall apart
from the bottom up. Since the Mesolithic economy would have been em-
bedded in this all-encompassing social order, initial deviations such as large-
scale fish trapping and eventually disruptive innovations such as dairying
and brewing can be seen as having triggered such a cascade of defections
from the hunter-gatherer social order. The role of watercraft, enabling in-
formation to be exchanged between groups based many kilometers apart,
was probably crucial. A new social consensus in the Mesolithic world of
northern Europe, one that allowed for “Neolithic things and practices,”
quickly emerged in the first half of the fourth millennium BCE.
CONCLUSION
The spread of agriculture in temperate Europe did not halt for a millen-
nium simply because expanding farmers ran into thickly-settled Mesolithic
foragers. It stopped because the Danubian economy did not initially have
much to offer the foragers that would convince them to change from their
highly-successful and resilient economy based on high-productivity wild
resources. Mesolithic people had high-productivity, storable resources in
abundance, and for the millennium following the appearance of agriculture
in riverine interior central Europe, they would have had no motivation to
disavow the egalitarian, non-acquisitive ethos that was incompatible with
the adoption of domestic plants and animals. On their developmental tra-
jectory during the fifth millennium BCE, the foraging societies of northern
and western Europe may well have been on the way to being early analogs
of more recent complex foragers such as the inhabitants of the cedar long-
houses of the Northwest Coast. Yet they changed course abruptly around
4000 BCE and joined the Neolithic project without being overrun by demo-
graphically-expanding farmers.
The question is what finally tipped the scales in favor of an uptake of
farming across northern Europe around 4000 BCE. Widespread changes in

49. “Disruptive Technologies” and the Transition to Agriculture 31
the late fifth millennium BCE, including sedentism promoted by watercraft
and industrial-scale fish trapping, may have begun to undermine the tradi-
tional forager values. Increasing contacts across the borderlands and straits
between the Danubian world and the foraging world brought “Neolithic
things and practices” to the attention of foragers. By the final centuries of
the fifth millennium BCE, the traditional values that had sustained the suc-
cessful Mesolithic economy had been weakened, but not yet abandoned.
My suggestion is that mundane elements of the Danubian economy,
such as dairy production and possibly beer-making, functioned as disruptive
innovations that penetrated the forager economy, bringing with them the
motivation to keep cattle and grow grain. Adoption of these innovations by
a critical mass of foraging households and communities triggered a cascade
of agricultural uptake throughout northwestern Europe. At the same time,
tensions in the Mesolithic world between tradition and innovation resulted
in regional heterogeneity in the pace of the transition to food production,
thus, leaving an archaeological record that frustrates archaeologists looking
for clear and unambiguous patterns.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Bernard Wailes stimulated the author’s earliest interest in prehistoric
European farmers over 40 years ago. Ed Zschau and the focus on entrepre-
neurship that he fostered at Princeton University provided the impetus to
link the concept of disruptive innovations with past advances in technology.
Patrick McGovern made very helpful comments on a draft of this paper
that led to several clarifications.
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56. At length the words were all spoken, and for a long space there was
silence, while the truth, bitter and burning as vitriol, ate into the
poor lad's brain. Then said Harry, his face still buried:
"As God sees you, Dr. Armytage, this is true?"
"It is true, Harry," said he.
"Geoffrey?" asked the same hard cold voice.
"God help you, yes!"
"And Jim?"
"Yes, my lord, as far as this night's work goes."
Harry got up from his chair, quietly and steadily. He advanced to the
groom and grasped both his hands in his. Still, without a word, he
turned to the doctor with the same action. Then, still steadily, he
walked across the hearth rug to Geoffrey, and the doctor moved
from where he stood, touched Jim on the shoulder, and withdrew
with him. Not till then did Harry speak, but now his mouth quivered,
and the tension grew to snapping point.
"Geoff, Geoff!" he said, and the blessed relief of tears came to him.

57. EPILOGUE
Evie was sitting in one of the low window seats in the hall at Vail,
regarding with all the gravity due to the subject her two months' old
baby, that soft little atom round which revolved the world and the
stars and all space. Her discoveries about it were in number like the
sands of the sea, but far more remarkable. This afternoon they had
been, and still continued to be, epoch-making.
"His nose," she said, after a long pause, to Lady Oxted, who was
sitting by the fire, "is at present like mine—that is to say, it is no
particular nose, but it will certainly be like Harry's, which is
perpendicular. That's a joke, dear aunt, the sort of thing which
people who write society stories think clever. It isn't, really."
Lady Oxted sighed.
"And his brains exactly resemble both yours and Harry's, dear," she
said—"that is to say, they are no particular brains."
Evie took no notice whatever of this vitriolic comment.
"And its eyes are certainly Harry's eyes," she went on. "Oh, I went
to see Jim's wife to-day, you know the dairymaid whom Harry was
supposed—— Well, I went to see her. Jim was there too. I love Jim.
You know the resemblance to Harry is simply ridiculous. I was in
continual fear lest I should forget it was Jim and say, 'Come, darling,
it's time to go.' And then Harry might have behaved as I once did.
Oh, here's nurse.—What a bore you are, nurse, O my own angelic!"
Evie gave up a kiss-smothered baby, and went across to where Lady
Oxted was sitting.
"And Mrs. Jim's baby, I must allow, has its points," she continued.
"That's why I'm sure that Geoff's eyes are like Harry's, because

58. Geoff's eyes are exactly like Jim's baby's eyes, and Jim is Harry. By
the way, where is the spurious Geoff,—the old one, I mean?"
"The old one went out within five minutes of his arrival here," said
Lady Oxted. "I tried to make myself agreeable to him, but
apparently I failed, for he simply yawned in my face, and said,
'Where's Harry?'"
"Yes, Aunt Violet," said Evie, "you and I sha'n't get a look in while
those men are here, and we had better resign ourselves to it, and
take two nice little back seats. In fact, I felt a little neglected this
morning. Harry woke with a great stretch and said, 'By gad, it's
Tuesday!—Geoff and the beloved doctor come to-day,' and he never
even said good-morning to the wife of his bosom."
"He's tiring of you," remarked Lady Oxted.
"I know; isn't it sad, and we have been married less than a year? As
I was saying, he got up at once, instead of going to sleep again, and
I heard him singing in his bath. Oh, I just love that husband of
mine," she said.
"So you have told me before," said Lady Oxted acidly.
"What a prickly aunt!" said Evie. "Dear Aunt Violet, if Geoffrey and
the beloved physician and Jim weren't such darlings, all of them, I
should be jealous of them—I should indeed."
"What a lot of darlings you have, Evie!" said the other.
"I know I have. I wish there were twice as many. For the whole
point of the world is the darlings. A person with no darlings is dead
—dead and buried. And the more darlings you have, by so much the
more is the world alive. Isn't it so? I have lots—oh, and the world is
good! All those I have, and you, and Harry even, and I might include
my own Geoff. Also Uncle Bob, especially when he is rude to you."
The prickly aunt was tender enough, and Evie knew it.
"Oh, my dear!" she said. "It makes my old blood skip and sing to see
you so happy. And Harry—my goodness, what a happy person Harry

59. is!"
"I trust and believe he is," Evie said, "and my hope and exceeding
reward are that he may always be. But to-day—to-day——" she said.
Lady Oxted was silent.
"Just think," said Evie, "what was happening a year ago. At this hour
a year ago Harry was here with the doctor and his uncle and his
uncle's servant. And then evening fell, as it is falling now. Later
came Geoffrey and Jim. Oh, I can't yet bear to think of it!"
"I think if I were Harry I should be rather fond of those three," said
Lady Oxted. "Being a woman, I am in love with them all, like you."
"Of course you are," said Evie. "Oh, yes, Jim was just going out
when I was with his wife, to meet the others."
"To meet them?" asked Lady Oxted.
"Yes; Harry said it was a secret, but it's such a dear one I must tell
you. They were going together—it was Harry's idea—to the church.
The two graves, his uncle's and that other man's, are side by side. I
asked if I might come too, but he said certainly not; I was not in
that piece!"
"And then?"
Evie got up.
"I think they were just going to say their prayers there," she said.
"Oh, I love those men. They don't talk and talk, but just go and do
simple little things like that."
"And the women sit at home and do the talking," said Lady Oxted.
"Yes, you and me, that is. Oh, I daresay we are more subtle and
complicated—and who knows or cares what else?—but we are not
quite so simple. One must weigh the one with the other. And who
cares which is the best? To each is a part given."
"You had a big part given you, Evie," said the other.

60. "I know I had, and feebly was it performed. Ah, that morning! Just
one word from Dr. Armytage, 'Come!'"
Evie returned to the fire again and sat down.
"If Geoffrey had not been here the night before," she said, "the
night when it took place, I don't know what would have happened to
Harry. There would have been a raving lunatic, I think. As it was, he
just howled and wept, so he told me, and Geoff sat by him and said:
'Cheer up, old chap!' and 'Damn it all, Harry!—yes, I don't care,' and
gave him a whisky and soda, and slapped him on the back, and did
all the things that men do. They didn't kiss each other and scream,
and say that nobody loved them, as we should have done. And as
like as not they played a game of billiards afterward, and felt
immensely better. I suppose David and Jonathan were like that. Oh,
I want Harry always to have a lot of men friends," she cried. "How I
should hate it if he only went dangling along after his wife! But he
loves me best of all. So don't deny it."
"Oh, I don't anticipate his eloping with the doctor," said Lady Oxted.
Outside the evening was fast falling. It was now a little after sunset,
and, as a year ago, a young moon, silver and slim, was climbing the
sky, where still lingered the reflected fire from the west in ribbons
and feathers of rosy cloud. But to-night no mist, low hanging and
opaque, fit cover for crouching danger, hung over lake and lawn; the
air was crisp with autumnal frost, the hoarse tumult from the sluice
subdued and low after a long St. Martin's summer. The four men—
Jim, servantlike and respectful, little distance from the rest—had left
the churchyard and strolled slowly in the direction of the stable and
the house. Opposite the stable gate Jim would have turned in, but
Harry detained him.
"No, Jim," he said, "come with us a little farther," and like man and
man, not master and groom, he put his arm through that of the
other. Then, by an instinctive movement, the doctor and Geoffrey
closed up also, and thus linked they walked by the edge of the lake,
and paused together at the sluice.

61. "And it was here," said Harry, "that one day the sluice broke, and
down I went. Eh, a bad half hour!"
"Yes, my lord," sad Jim, grown suddenly bold, "and here it was that
Mr. Geoffrey jumped in of a black night after a black villain."
"And somewhere here it is," said Geoffrey, "that the Luck lies. How
low the lake is! I have never seen it so low."
They had approached to the very margin of the water, where little
ripples, children of the breeze at sunset, broke and laughed on the
steep sides of ooze discovered by the drought. Their sharp edges
were caught by the fires overhead, and turned to scrolls of liquid
flame.
"And that was the end of the Luck," said the doctor.
"The Luck!" cried Harry. "It was the curse that drove us all mad. I
would sooner keep a cobra in the house than that thing. Madness
and crime and death were its gifts. Ah, if I had guessed—if I had
only guessed!"
Even as he spoke, his eye caught a steadfast gleam that shone from
the edge of the sunken water. For a moment he thought that it was
but one of the runes of flame that played over the reflecting surface
of the lake, but this was steady, not suddenly kindled and consumed.
Then in a flash the truth of the matter was his: the leather case had
rotted and fallen away in the water. Here, within a foot of the edge
of the lake, lay his Luck.
He disjoined himself from the others, took one step forward and
bent down. With a reluctant cluck the mud gave up the jewel, and
he held it high, growing each moment more resplendent as the ooze
dripped sullenly from it. The great diamonds awoke, they winked
and blazed, sunset and moon and evening star were reflected there,
and who knows what authentic fires of hell? There was a glow of
sapphire, a glimmer of pearl, a gleam of gold. But two steps more
took Harry on to the stone slab that covered the sluice, and there on
the scene of one of its crimes he laid the priceless thing. Then, as a
man with his heel crushes the life out of some poisonous creeping

62. horror, he stamped and stamped on it, and stamped yet again. This
way and that flew the jewels; diamond and sapphire were dust; the
pearls, unbroken, leaped like flicked peas, some into the lake, others
into the outflowing thunder of the sluice. Then, taking the crumbled
and shapeless remnant, he flung it far into mid water.
"And the curse is gone from the house!" he cried.
THE END

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