Linear Pottery

The Linear Pottery culture, or Linearband Keramik Kultur, spans the period from 5400 to 4600BC, extending from Central Europe (East Hungary, eastern parts of Rumania and Moldavia) upwards into the North European Plain (Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, Bavaria, Thuringen, Hessen, Elzass, the Low Countries and the Parisian Basin), migrating along the tributaries of the Upper Danube, the Rhine, the Elbe and Neckar and avoiding mesolithic communities by their preference of forrestal regions, colonizing well-watered and loess zones along valleys, plaines and plateaus on the edge of rivers.

They built scattered homesteads,small villages and hamlets according a pattern of regional clustering, probably based on non-hierarchic, close-kin-groups, failing to the urge and demands of competition, but marked by wide-distance relationships punctuating affinity and solidarity.

Their houses were rectangular post-framed, single level longhouses (average lenght= 25m), though attics would have been present to store goods as rows of posts suggest a storeyed structure.The interior was transversally divided in a center piece for domestical activities, the southeast end for storage and the northwestern part for dayliving and sleeping-place.The buildings were put parallel to each other and agglomerated, though dipersed single-habitats are also known to exist. Ditches around the buidings were used to get rid of debris and organic wastes. A village could obtain 8 to 12 buildings, including a kind of meeting-house or shrine, and each village was about 3-4km away from the nearest.every village counted to 20 families maximum which resulted in an average population of 50 to 100 individuals and a demographic density rate of 17 individuals per square kilometres. No trace of social hierarchy may be read of the outlook of the buildings, no distinctives at all.

Arable ground within the environs of the village mounted up to 10 or 20ha, the villages itselves taking only 2ha.Fields for cereal cultivation and herding their cattle were won due to their system of forest fallowing; once the soils were exhausted, the village was deplaced and new territories cleared for housing and agriculture, afterwards, within a generation's time, the old country was revisited and the former village reconstructed.

The lithic remains of this culture lack the axe, while there have been found made of deer bones and used as paring-chisel. Most are laboured from amphibolits of sandstone, quartz and volcanic material, but in silex short, regular-shaped blades are known as well many gimlets, scrapers and other tools.

The ceramics underwent two essential phases; the oldest depict simple lines as ornamental finishing of the vessels, this type expands no further westward than the Rhine, the more recent stage with filled-up strokes advances upon the whole of West Europe.Originally, the Dabubians took their inspiration from natural shapes, especially the gourd-shape with apparently no necessity felt to give it a neck. The aperture was large, handles omitted and covered with nipple-like knots.Large vessels were undecorated, not though the globular vases and bowls had incised strokes which went curved, meandering, straight, spirals or run in horse shoe-like designs; so-called "music notes" or gross dots marked the alongated model of some vessels. In the recent phase, the shapes and models are not yield to important innovations, except that the neck nearly closes and the elaboration and varieties in pottery excel the previous period by miles. The basic colour of the walls is black with a lustrely red; the incised lines however attain a white-coloured filling, the strokes themselves are coverd under points.

The sepulchres are within the proximity of the village.The tombs contain one individual each; the body resting in a flexed position and put in a ditch, then covered with ochre and with a girdle of gratuities, consisting of tools, spondyles (the main exchange objects of the Danubians/LPC), potteries and whet-stones.

Unlike the Balkan-East-Mediterrenean neolithic communities, no female figurines and symbolic stamps show up; it is assumed that the LPC bearers were a distinct autonomous and original neolithic culture of Westeuropean extraction, rooted in local mesolithics outgrowing the secondary-neolithic stage and lifted to act as a kind of spearhead advancing new socio-cultural ideas and subsistence strategies.