LINEAR POTTERY CULTURE

The Linear Pottery culture or (German) Linearbandkeramik (abbr. LBK), Bandkeramik, Linear Band Pottery culture, Linear (Band) Ware culture, Linear Ceramics culture, Danubian I culture of V. Gordon Childe, Early Danubian culture or Incised Ware Group is a major archaeological horizon of the European Neolithic (stone age), flourishing ca. 5500—4500 BC. The heaviest concentrations are on the middle Danube, the upper and middle Elbe, and the upper and middle Rhine. The LBK represents the advent of agriculture into this part of the world. The LBK at maximum extent ranged from about the line of the Seine—Oise (Paris Basin) eastward to the line of the Vistula and upper Dniester, and southward to the line of the upper Danube down to the big bend. An extension ran through the Western Bug river valley, leaped to the valley of the Dniester, and swerved southward from the middle Dniester to the lower Danube in eastern Romania, east of the Carpathians. Danube lands near Vienna, by Johann Christian Brand, ca. 1760The LBK did not begin with this range and only reached it toward the end of its time. It began in regions of densest occupation on the middle Danube (Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary) and spread over about 1500 km along the rivers in 360 years. The rate of expansion was therefore about 4 km per year, which can hardly be called an invasion or a wave and does not offer much support to theories of population replacement. A model of gradual colonization is perhaps most apt.

The LBK was concentrated somewhat inland from the coastal areas; i.e., it is not evidenced in Denmark or the northern coastal strips of Germany and Poland, or the coast of the Black Sea in Romania. The northern coastal regions remained occupied by Mesolithic cultures exploiting the then fabulously rich Atlantic salmon runs. There are lighter concentrations of LBK in the low countries, such as at Elsloo, and at the mouths of the Oder and Vistula. Evidently, the Neolithics and Mesolithics were not excluding each other; in fact, some use the concepts of "permeable border" or "mosaic" to describe the northern interface between the two. The term, Linear Band Ware, is a mnemonic of the pottery's decorative technique.

The "Band Ware" or Bandkeramik part of it began as an innovation of the German archaeologist, Friedrich Klopfleisch (1831-1898), in his work, published in 1882. Depending of the area, the major stone material is the tabular (platy) chert or flint. In comparision with the Nordic cultures around the baltic sea, the recources are poor,
the classical inventary consists of small and very small tools.

This small flake sickle is made of Platy chert ( tabular chert, "crusted hornstone") Material (geologic): Upper Jurassic (Tithonian/Malm ?) chert.

The occurrence of the material under discussion here is limited to one of the Upper Jurassic basins in the southern Franconian Alb The most important type of chert is without a doubt the tabular to platy chert of the Baiersdorf-type. This material occurs in tablets with a thickness of up to a few centimetres, but most typically the plates used in prehistory are about 1 cm thick. The colour varies between light gray, gray, olive gray, brown to reddish brown, but brownish gray to grayish brown hues are most typical.

Partly covered with a thicker and smoother chalky cortex.

Knapping notes: The material knaps very nicely. The thicker tablets are a bit coarser, giving quite straight fractures without pronounced bulbs of percussion. Preparation is hardly necessary as the edges with cortex always give good ridges for blades and elongated flakes to follow. The thinner tablets are a lot finer and are easily worked too, but I find them too thin to used them as cores. They are ideal for making bifaces and can be retouched very nicely by pressure flaking, and that is why the material was very popular during the Late Neolithic.

The use of the typical tabular chert starts in the Middle Paleolithic, as a few specimens in the nearby Sesselfelsgrotte show. In the Upper Paleolithic it becomes a very popular material, with for example the whole Gravettian in the Sesselfelsgrotte being characterized by the working of tabular Jurassic chert (Weißmuller 1995b). With the beginning of the Neolithic, the material becomes more and more popular in the region, like in one of the few excavated settlements in the region, Hienheim. On this well-published site, 10 to 20 % of the raw material in the Linear Pottery Culture could be identified as tabular chert from the Paintener Wanne.

In the Middle Neolithic the share of this type of silex in the lithic industry rises to over 50% (de Grooth 1994). Its highest popularity and Widest distribution is nevertheless reached in the Late Neolithic, as the manufacture of bifacial tools becomes more widespread. Around the middle of the 4th millennium cal. BC the typical knives and sickles made from thin plates can be found in the area sketched above. Most material is found in association with the Michelsberg and Altheim Cultures, with the specimens from the east coming from TRB (Funnel Beaker) context as long distance imports. The distribution in later periods is somewhat unclear, and seems a lot more restricted, but locally the material will probably have been used well into the Bronze Age.

Blade sickle or insets are the first type of sickles from the Neolithic.