The European Neolithic was a period of enormous cultural, social and economic change affecting subsistence strategies, settlement patterns, technology and population size, as well as ideologies and world views.
By its closing stages around 2500 bce, established lifeways in central and western Europe had been permanently transformed from being based on mobile or semi-mobile hunter-fisher-gatherer groups to settled communities relying on mixed farming economies and extensive trade and exchange networks.
The extent and significance of violence within and between communities during this period has been a subject of ongoing debate since the nineteenth century, with prevailing opinions fluctuating over time as to the frequency and importance of such hostilities in relation to other societal changes occurring across this transition. The idea of relative peace and social/economic stability as synonymous with the Neolithic has seen significant revision in the last few decades, including suggestions that violent conflict between groups and individuals might have been a result, by-product or at times even a catalyst for some of the changes and developments observed. In this respect shifting views on the Neolithic can be seen as a microcosm of wider debates regarding the nature and significance of violence as a phenomenon of importance to human societal development in general. The key questions addressed in this chapter focus on changes in general patterns of violence with the onset of the Neolithic, as well as on regional and diachronic variation through the period. Underpinning our approach is a reliance on the evidence of skeletal trauma. While objects interpreted as weapons and structures identified as defences are certainly important lines of evidence, both are fraught with problems in that neither can indicate how much actual violence took place during a given period. In this regard human skeletons offer the only direct and unequivocal evidence for violent acts while also constituting a form of remainsMARTIN J. SMITH, RICKJ. SCHÜTTING, LINDA FIBIGBR
that is consistent between human societies and so is directly comparable.
While there is a certain consistency in the kinds of trauma observed among Neolithic burial assemblages, this can be attributed to a degree of shared material culture (e.g. the lack of metal weapons) and social organisation throughout the period. However, we are by no means seeing a completely homogeneous pattern. The manifestations of violence observed throughout the study region and period suggest considerable variation in the contexts and potential roles of conflict. In many respects it may be the case that violent interactions in the Neolithic differed little from those that took place in preceding periods. At the same time, aspects of an increasing scale of conflict - involving larger numbers of participants, with apparently greater levels of organisation than previously seen - imply that something new had indeed happened to facilitate social strategies manifesting hostility in ways that some modern observers would characterise as warfare rather than simply homicide. This chapter also explores possible causative factors of such a far-reaching development.
While the skeletal record for the Neolithic has yielded unambiguous evidence for large-scale violent events for some time (for example, evidence from the Early Neolithic mass grave at Talheim was first published in 1984), this evidence initially had relatively little impact on views of Neolithic society, which tended to emphasise the new productive economy, new material culture, trade and exchange, ideology, ritual and ceremony. More recently, there has been a shift from the idea of peaceful farming societies to a more complex picture involving intra- and inter-group conflicts, with the latter sometimes resulting in mass-fatality events like those seen at Talheim, Asparn-Schletz, SchoneckKilianstädten, Wiederstedt, Halberstadt and Eulau.1 At Talheim, thirtyeight men, women and children appear to have been killed in a single event and buried hastily in a mass grave, while Halberstadt appears to show execution-style killings of adolescent and adult males. While there has now been a shift towards general acceptance that the Neolithic was not always peaceful, there remains considerable debate over the prevalence and scale of conflict, its causes and its wider implications. Recent publications have highlighted instances of extreme lethal violence carried out against men, women and children,[135] [136] making the period seem
Settled Lives, Unsettled Times: Neolithic Violence in Europe increasingly bellicose. But of course, while one can find physical evidence for violence, one cannot point to concrete evidence for peace.
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