Added December 5, 2002. Updated May 4, 2003, 22:27 hours.
(The Comparative Archaeology WEB, Copyright
© 2002 - May 4, 2003. All rights reserved)
This page will be updated occasionally
to add and revise information.
The
International Symposium:
Comparative Archeology and
Paleoclimatology: Sociocultural Responses to a
Changing World
Organized by
Dr. Maximilian O. Baldia, Ph.D., Research Associate
Institute for the Study of Earth and Man, Southern
Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA,
Editor, The
Comparative Archaeology WEB,
Director/Principal Investigator, Czech-American Research
Program
Dr. Timothy K. Perttula, Director/Principal Investigator
Archeological & Environmental Consultants, LLC.,
Austin, TX, USA
Douglas S. Frink, MA, Director/Principal
Investigator
Archaeology Consulting Team, Essex Junction, VT, USA
Presented at the
Fifth
World Archaeological Congress
Under the theme:
Past Human Environments in Modern Contexts[1]
Convened by Maximilian O. Baldia, Timothy K. Perttula, and Douglas S. Frink.
The Catholic
University of America
Washington
D.C., USA
Saturday, June
21st through Thursday, June 26th, 2003
WAC 5 is held in partnership with the Anthropology Department of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and in collaboration with the Getty Conservation Institute.
(The Comparative Archaeology WEB, Copyright © 2001 - May 4, 2003. All rights reserved)
SESSION ABSTRACT
Archaeological excavations throughout the world and at all time periods show surprising but strong correlations between climatic oscillations and the character of social and cultural responses by different human populations. They confirm humanity’s battle with (and impact on) the environment. In some cases, adjustments are a principal cause for social and technological innovations. Innovations include plant and animal domestication, as well as the punctuated spread and adoption of agriculture, the first use of wheeled vehicles, the construction of large earthen and stone monuments, and perhaps the advent of metallurgy. In other cases, an outright collapse of cultural systems is indicated. Signs of collapse traced to climatic oscillations include religious and social upheavals, warfare, genocide, site abandonment, and population migration. This session aims to examine the range of sociocultural responses to climatic stress and specific climate forcing variables that may account for the observed climate record. Tree-ring data, lake level and glacial fluctuations, ice core data, pollen analysis, physical anthropology research, and other pertinent data will be used for high quality reconstructions of climatic and human history in different parts of the New and Old World. This history will be used in conjunction with changes in settlement and procurement strategies, human physical and dietary changes, technological innovations, as well as stylistic and symbolic convergence, to measure sociocultural responses to and impact on climate change, reflected in archaeological data from nomadic hunter-gatherers, proto-horticulturalists, sedentary agriculturists, to early urbanized societies.
PUBLICATION
Although the WAC intends to publish the papers though
Archaeopress, we will also look for a publishing house. Note that such a publisher
may have additional requirements.
ABSTRACTS
Transforming Linear Limits into Dynamic
Solutions: Changes in
Environmental Constraints and Cultural Adaptations.
Douglas Frink
Director/Principal Investigator
Archaeology Consulting Team, Inc.
Essex Junction, VT 05452
USA
Abstract
Since the late 14th century scholars
have attempted to understand cultural patterns in terms of their environmental
context. The linearity of many of
these studies were in part the result of a search for an environmental causal
relationship that proscribed cultures, and were all to often used to legitimize
racial and cultural biases.
Subsequent studies argued that the complexity of cultures could not be
reduced to categorical results determined by the environment. More recently, the complexity of the
environment has been taken into account, rendering impossible any linearity
between the two. Both cultures and environments are complex and dynamic systems
whose organization can be understood through an analysis of their constituent
components, and the internal relationships between the constituent
components. As separate systems,
one cannot be viewed as the cause or result of the other. However, cultural change and
environmental change can be viewed as interrelated systems each influencing the
other. The environment places constraints
on a cultures strategies and their potential success. A culture's strategy may include modification of various
components, and thus the relationships among all the components, of the
environment. This paper will serve
as an introduction to the following papers looking at various aspects of these
interactive dynamic systems, and how they are being employed in current
archaeological studies.
From Hunter-Gatherer to
Livestock-Keeper: Economic Change in Northeastern and Southwestern Africa.
Ralf
Vogelsang
Universität
zu Köln
Forschungsstelle
Afrika
Jennerstr.
8
50823 Köln
Abstract
This paper focuses on the process of
economic change during the middle and late Holocene in Northeastern and
Southwestern Africa. Both areas show roughly similar economic sequences with a
transition from foraging to pastoralism. However, differences in the transition
process can be observed. In the Sudanese Saharan region of Northeastern Africa
there was a complete change of economic system. By contrast, in Southwestern
Africa, only some elements of the pastoral lifestyle seem to have been adopted.
The background of these different developments is discussed on the basis of two
case studies, situated in areas with different physical conditions. The first
is the Wadi Howar region of the Eastern Sahara/Sudan, an ecologically favorable
area in a key geographical position, but subject to dramatic climatic changes
over the last 10.000 years. The second is in the Kaokoland in North-western
Namibia which has had a more stable climate. The analysis of the archaeological
data indicates that the differences in the economic transition process observed
in each area can only partly be explained by the different intensity of
climatic and environmental change. According to studies in the Wadi Howar
region, the transition from foraging to cattle pastoralism seems to have been
less stimulated by climatic change than by other factors such as social and
demographic conditions. An important factor may have been the key geographical
position of the Wadi Howar, which encouraged contacts with groups with
different subsistence patterns and social structures. On the other hand, a
second - later - change in this region is marked by an increase in economic diversification
that seems to be mainly a reaction to the growing aridity. In the Kaokoland in
Northwestern Namibia the situation is quite different. The slower and selective
adoption of a new economic system in this region can perhaps be partly
explained by the more static conditions in Southwestern Africa. In this area,
there was no stimulus from far-reaching climatic and environmental change and
no intense regional and inter-regional contact with groups with different
subsistence patterns and social structures. New ideas seem to have needed more
time to be accepted fully.
Early Prehistoric Migration as
Sociocultural Response to a Changing World.
Olena V. Smyntyna, Head
Department of Archaeology and Ethnology
of Ukraine
Mechnikov National University
Odessa I.I.
Ukraine
Abstract
From the very beginning of the
systematic studies of early prehistoric cultures there was no doubt that Late
Palaeolithic and Mesolithic groups changed their territory in time and space.
In most cases these regular movements are explained by the necessity for a
secure food base. Contemporary archaeology, facing the new millennium, now
should try to reconsider this oversimplified interpretation, taking into
account renewed theoretical and empirical data. Putting in operation of living
space exploitation concept with its emphasis on territorial (dwelling-living
floor-settlement-foraging territory-living space), temporal
(daily-seasonal-year-round-life-long-generational) and most probably purposeful
hierarchy of human activities opens wide opportunities for new migration theory
delineation. Points of primary importance need to be clarified are: migrations
scaling in accordance with temporal, territorial and purposeful frameworks of migrant's
living space exploitation structure;
migrations cause revision in consideration of economic as well as social
and ritual activity of early prehistoric communities; the migration destination
point and rout definition, taking into account not only food and raw material
procurement, but also ethnic traditions, marriage and kinship systems, specific
features of ritual activity, world outlook, religious beliefs etc.
Dangerous Regions: A Source of Cascading
Cultural Changes.
Joel Gunn
New South Associates, Inc.
Mebane, North Carolina
USA
Mailing Address
2712 Butler Road
Chapel Hill NC 27516
USA
Abstract
In 1961, Glenn T. Trewartha published
The Earth's Problem Climates. In
this book he examined important regional climates around the world. Although the book still serves as a
source of initial assessments of regional climates, greater access to
information on global-to-regional climate relationships and more detailed
cultural chronologies allows for much for detailed understanding of local
climate changes and the effects they have and will have on human
populations. Two examples are
provided, one from the Maya lowlands of the Yucatan Peninsula and the other
from the Coastal Plain of North and South Carolina. The Bermuda-Azores subtropical high serves as the key link
between global and local climates as the global energy balance changes. The analyses appear to show that although
never the sole cause of cultural changes, climate is often the proximate
cause. Some regions are more
potently linked to global climate than others. They appear to be locales where changes in global
temperatures precipitate shifts across critical cultural thresholds such as
from urban-to-town life in the Maya lowlands and horticultural-to-gatherer life
in the Carolinas Coastal Plain. Shifts across these critical subsistence level
boundaries appears in many instances to lead to cascading cultural changes as
populations and ideas are flushed out of more sensitive regions into
surrounding less sensitive regions.
Population Movements and the
Archaeological Record.
Dean R. Snow, Chair
Department of Anthropology
The Pennsylvania State University
409 Carpenter Building
University Park, PA 16802
Tel.:
814-865-2509
Fax:
814-863-1474
Abstract
Environmental change prompts
population expansions and contractions over time and space at scales that are
archaeologically detectable. Migration continues to be difficult to define and
apply in archaeological interpretation because the term covers several often
smaller scale processes that together drive large-scale demographic change.
Cases from North American archaeology are used to show how archaeology can
solve large-scale demographic problems using modern dating techniques and
geographic information systems. The cases show that large-scale processes
involve many small scale migrations. Cases from both northeastern and
southwestern North America demonstrate the timing of migration episodes with
climatic shifts. They also illustrate the common emergence of matrilineal
social organizations amongst migrating communities of horticulturalists. The
cases thus illustrate some basic processes that typically characterize the
adaptive radiation of horticultural societies responding to long-term environmental
changes.
The Poverty of the Settlement Abandonment
Concept in Archaeology: Ancestral
Pueblo Landscape Use in the American Southwest.
Michael Adler
Anthropology Department
Southern Methodist University
Dallas, Texas
USA
Abstract
This presentation highlights the major
changes in human land use, resource availability, and effects of human
settlement in the northern part of the American Southwest after about the 12th
century AD. The late pre-Contact
period (AD 1150-1450) occupation of the northern Southwest by ancestral Pueblo
peoples was typified by a few major trends in settlement strategy, including
the aggregation of most puebloan peoples into large village settlements and
settlement relocation to regions with lower variability in precipitation
regimes. These alterations in
local and regional settlement strategies resulted in fewer, larger village
settlements distributed across what is now the Southwestern United States. The resulting archaeological landscape
appears to be one in which large areas are abandoned in favor of fewer, densely
occupied localities. Ancestral
Pueblo land use, however, is best understood as locally intensive and
regionally extensive. The
"buffer zones" between settlements were underutilized for residential
use relative to the village localities, but archaeological evidence indicates
continued use of the interstitial areas for hunting and foraging activities. Along the same lines, earlier village
settlements were often reused as farmsteads and other short-term activities.
Given the increasingly patchy use of landscapes by village-dwelling ancestral
Pueblo peoples, we need scale-sensitive paleoenvironmental reconstructions with
respect to local and regional patterns of precipitation, soil erosion,
aggradation, and resource availability.
Anthropogenic changes to the environment may have to be modeled differently
for those areas nearer to settlements compared to those areas outside of major
settlement localities.
It got cold and they died? Climate and the End
of Norse Greenland.
Thomas H. McGovern
Northern Science & Education
Center
Anthropology Dept
Hunter College CUNY
695 Park Ave
New York, NY 10021
Abstract
The extinction of the Norse colony of
West Greenland in the late Middle Ages has long been considered a classic
example of climatic impact on human societies. A small community that had been
the westernmost out post of medieval Christendom for nearly 500 years collapsed
and became extinct during the early phases of the "little ice age" ca
AD 1350-1450, and generations of researchers have used this correlation as a
deterministic explanation for the mysterious end of the Norse presence in the
Western Hemisphere. New high-resolution proxy climate data, paleoenvironmental
evidence from Greenland and fresh archaeological evidence from Greenland and
the wider North Atlantic now allow a fuller and more sophisticated look at the
end of Norse Greenland. While climate impact must have played a major role,
broader economic and political factors were also important in creating fatal
vulnerabilities in Greenlandic society. It did get cold and they did die, but the
linkages between climate change and historical event are heavily mediate by
human perception, politics, and worldview.
Sprucing Up the House: An Interdisciplinary
Investigation of an 18th Century Communal House in Northern Labrador.
Susan A. Kaplan,1 Jim
Woollett, Rosanne DíArrigo, Brendan Buckley, Allison Bain, and Cynthia Zutter
1. Director of Peary-Macmillan Arctic
Museum & Arctic Studies Center
Sociology & Anthropology Dept.
Bowdoin College
211A Hubbard Hall
9300 College Station
Brunswick, ME 04011-8493
USA
207 725
3289
Abstract
Uivak was one of three significant
18th century whaling communities in Okak, Labrador, Canada. A communal house at the site has been
dated to the very end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century through
analysis of dendrochronological samples and a diverse array of artifacts.
Analyses of faunal, dendrochronological, entomological, and botanical remains
recovered from the communal house and its associated midden are providing
insights into ways in which Labrador Inuit relied on terrestrial and marine
mammals, as well as on trees and a variety of plants. These studies, combined with paleoenvironmental ice core and
sea ice studies, are revealing how
18th century Inuit adapted to climate change and European contact, while
profoundly altering the landscapes on which they made their homes.
Late Holocene Climatic Change and
Human Responses at Southern Patagonia: A Geoarchaeological view.
Cristian
M. Favier Dubois
CONICET/Departamento
de Arqueología
Universidad
Nacional del Centro
Olavarría,
Prov. de Buenos Aires. Argentina
Abstract
Geoarchaeological research conducted
in five localities in Southern Patagonia and Northern Tierra del Fuego
(Argentina) identified archaeological material within a mollisol formed from
late Holocene aeolian and colluvial deposits. The mollisol's chronology and
development are due to increased humidity (ca. 1000 YBP) following an episode
of severe drought during the Medieval Warm Period, Corroborating data is
supplied from dendroclimatic and pollen studies. The distribution of artifacts
shows a low frequency in the upper part of the pedologic profile. In spite of
representing a stable surface for several centuries, it was not heavilly
utilized by people. This would suggest a greater human presence in these places
at some time prior to the mollisol's development, during arid conditions at a
regional scale. It is speculated that changes occurring immediately prior to
severe drought as evidenced by dendroclimatic studies, would have affected
resource distribution and/or concentration, producing variations in human
groups' mobility and permanence. These hydrological changes help explain the
pattern found at sites in Lago Argentino by Borrero and Franco (1999), who
propose an abandonment of the sector (already of marginal use), or a drastic
change in circulation and settlement strategies probably linked to water
availability. We also consider the changes generated in the formation processes
of the archaeological record with the mollisol's emergence. The cultural
evidence following the pedologic development is not easily visible, having a
low resolution due to being superimposed on previous archeological deposits.
Differences in earlier formation processes may conditioned the visibility and
preservation of assemblages due to the pedologic development, thereby favoring
some signs and occulting others. This study provides an example of the useful
and necessary interaction between different perspectives in archaeological
studies.
Keywords: Geoarchaeology, Southern
Patagonia, late Holocene soil, Medieval Warm Period, site formation processes.
Redefining the Shashe-Limpopo
Landscape: An Archaeological Perspective.
Munyaradzi Manyanga
University of Botswana, Archaeology
Unit
Botswana
Abstract
The paper looks at archaeological
research and attempts at past environmental reconstruction in Zimbabwe's
southern Lowveld. The research area, which is geographically referred to as the
Shashe-Limpopo Valley, incorporates southern Africa's first known state system,
Mapungubwe, which developed between the 11th and the 12th Century AD. A wide range of sites has been noted in
the region, with important sites predating and post dating the achievements at
Mapungubwe. A Number of the sites also show close affinities with those that
have been recorded on the South African and Botswana side of the Valley. This
suggests that a related and an interacting community once occupied both sides
of the Shashe-Limpopo Rivers. Viewed against a background of recent droughts,
floods and survival strategies that currently look beyond Zimbabwe's political
boundaries, the Shashe-Limpopo valley is thus viewed as a treacherous landscape
that has not been preferred by human populations since prehistoric times. The
general perception of the valley has been that it is hot, dry and therefore not
conducive to human habitation. Contrary to the general belief research has
confirmed that the valley has always been abuzz with human activity. While the
valley was at times affected by unfavorable environmental condition, it
continued to attract human settlement beginning with the hunter-gatherers (30
000 years ago) to the current inhabitants of the area. A look at the ecological
conditions as well as how the present inhabitants of the area are surviving
today has in many ways offered an alternative explanation on how the
prehistoric communities could have interacted with this fragile landscape. This
emanates form observations made on the landscape and the human response to such
recent events as flooding associated with cyclone Eline and droughts, of which
the later has become perennial in the region. The cumulative data confirms
earlier suggestions that the Shashe-Limpopo valley offers alternatives to this
otherwise hash environment. The Mateke Hills area seem to benefit from the
circumscribed environmental conditions while areas closer to the river valleys
seem to have benefited from the flooding opportunities. This seem to be
confirmed by the archaeological record in the form of sites which have a strong
orientation towards the rivers over looking the flood plains. This brings a
strong possibility of flood plain agriculture, a practice commonly used by
local communities in the area today.
Marshland of Cities: Deltaic Landscapes
and the Evolution of Early Mesopotamian Civilization.
Jennifer
R. Pournelle
Office:
Mesopotamian Alluvium Project
3881 AP&M, UCSD
(619) 822-1540 (MAP lab, UCSD)
Departmental Address:
UCSD Dept. of Anthropology
9500
Gilman Drive, MC0532
La Jolla,
CA 92093-0532
Tel.: (858) 534-4145
Fax: (858) 5946
Abstract
During the 1950s, the Iraqi government
contracted for a series of engineering studies aimed at harnessing the water
and power of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It intended to implement ambitious
schemes, first proposed by Sir William Wilcox in 1908, to systematically drain
marshes, lower the saline water table, rationalize irrigation systems, and
thereby reclaim "waste" land for high-profit agricultural production.
Wilcox's ambitious proposal reflected 19th century European beliefs that
marshes are inherently diseased, sodden wastelands, and that the appropriate
effort of good government was to eliminate and bring them under cultivation.
Final realization of these proposals in the 1990's has resulted in the
elimination of some 20,000 square miles of wetlands in southeastern Iraq. The
ideas that underpinned this hydrologic engineering were also imbedded in 20th
century archaeological research paradigms. These viewed the birth of Mesopotamian
civilization as inherently tied to sufficient drying of primordial lands to
allow irrigated plow agriculture. Using declassified satellite photography to
integrate geomorphologic, paleoclimatic, and excavation evidence within a
comprehensive examination of the Tigris-Euphrates delta, I cast serious doubt
on the landscape characterization underlying this model. The mid 5th-mid 3rd
millennium BCE lower alluvium was not a uniform, arid plain transited by
unitary rivers. It consisted in large part of vast wetlands that, rather than
inhibiting social complexity, promoted settlement nucleation, facilitated
transportation, financed accumulation, and buffered climatic and political
extremes.
Climatic Change and 3rd Millennium BCE
Collapse: A View from the Mesopotamian Delta.
Jennifer
R. Pournelle
Office:
Mesopotamian Alluvium Project
3881 AP&M, UCSD
(619) 822-1540 (MAP lab, UCSD)
Departmental Address:
UCSD Dept. of Anthropology
9500
Gilman Drive, MC0532
La Jolla,
CA 92093-0532
Tel.: (858) 534-4145
Fax: (858) 5946
Abstract
Cultural-ecological investigations of
early Mesopotamian urbanity continue to focus on the role and mechanisms of
agropastoral production in an arid environmental context, and especially on
ovicaprid husbandry and barley-wheat farming. Therefore, against the (seen from
the long view) normative state of peer polity emulation/contestation among
independent city-states in the southern Mesopotamian delta, considerable
attention has been paid to the "collapse" of a short-lived regional
polity that during the mid-3rd millennium BCE claimed for itself far-reaching,
imperial, territorial prerogatives from its (as yet unlocated) capitol in the
northern Mesopotamian alluvium. This disaster-focused approach privileges
territorial empire as a normative political organization, presumes the
political viability of Akkad absent regional climate change, ignores the
cultural ecology of contemporaneous urban growth in southern Mesopotamian
city-states, and fails to address urban resilience elsewhere in the face of
unstable climatic regimes broadly correlated with the "collapse"
period. New data derived from declassified satellite imagery suggests that,
viewed from the Mesopotamian urban heartland, climatic change favored the
expansion of political institutions adept at marshalling wetlands resources and
opportunities.
Nomadic Agriculturalists in Wetland Mediterranean
Archaeology: Papa Uvas (Aljaraque, Huelva, Spain) in its Context.
Agustín Mª
Lucena Martín
Área de
Prehistoria
Facultad
de Filosofía y Letras
Plaza del
Cardenal Salazar, nº 3
C.P.
14003, Córdoba.
Spain
Tel.:
0034-957-218299.
Fax: 0034-957-218379
Abstract
Papa Uvas (Aljaraque, Huelva,) possesses
a chronology that dates approximately from 3500-2500 B.C., and it has a
cultural sequence that starts from the Late Neolithic to the Middle Copper Age.
All of the documented structures in more than 200 practiced trenches are
structures which were excavated by way of ditches or pits, and so, the site is
inserted in a much more amplified chrono-cultural panorama, which affects an
enormous number of Neolithic and Copper Age records that extends through
Cyprus, Italy, the Balkans, Portugal and Spain. We can derive from the data
about the succession of multiple processes of sedimentation and from the faunal
and paleo-botanical information that Papa Uvas is a nomadic habitat. This
nomadic habitat, in the middle of changing ecological conditions, would have
been tied to the harvest cycles or to the posterior growing of vegetation and
the natural resources of the environment, and thus it would be inserted into a
wide circuit of settlements.
Distribution Pattern of the
Settlement Sites with Menhirs in SW Atlantic Europe and the Inference of the
Socio-economic Organization of their Builders.
David Calado
Researcher at the IPPAR. Instituto
Português do Património Arquitectónico - The Portuguese Institute for
Architectonic Heritage
State Department for Cultural Affairs
Portugal
davidcalado@hotmail.com, dcalado@ippar.pt
Abstract
An intensive surface survey was undertaken
to identify the sites with standing stones in a 50-km² area near the town of
Lagos, Portugal. Seventeen large
settlements with menhirs were detected during the survey. The settlements with
menhirs appear to be related to an artifact set from the "Early
Neolithic" period. Statistical analysis of lithic and ceramic artifacts
suggested that these settlements date to the period between late 6th and first
half of the 5th millennium BC, corroborating Gomes and Cabrita's earlier
findings. This chronology is
further supported by OSL dates from Menhir n.3 at the Quinta da Queimada site.
The upper half of the thick soil layer overlaying and sealing the implantation
pit of Menhir n. 3, was OSL dated to the transition of the 5th to the 4th
millennium BC (Shfd 2013: 5925± 175 BT), providing a solid date ante quem for
the erection of the standing stone. The erection of the menhir is substantially
older than the OSL date. It is unlikely that the menhir was erected after
middle of the 5th millennium BC, because incised ceramics, typically dating
from the second half of the 5th millennium BC, are absent from the site. The
use of geographical models to understand the dense pattern of spatial
distribution of the settlement sites with standing stones suggest that the
early food producer communities in the area were numerous and completely
sedentary at the transition from the 6th to the 5th millennium BC.
Breaking Unnatural Barriers:
Comparative Archaeology, Climate, and Culture Change in Central and Northern
Europe (6000 - 2000 BC).
Maximilian O. Baldia
Research Associate
Institute for the Study of Earth and
Man
Heroy Science Hall
Southern Methodist University
3225 Daniel Avenue
Dallas, Texas 75275-0274
USA
Mailing Address:
The Comparative Archaeology WEB
3616 Dinsmore Castle Dr.
Columbus, OH 43221-4410
USA
http://www.comp-archaeology.org/
CompArchaeologyWEB@columbus.rr.com
the_comparative_archaeology_web@yahoo.com
the_comparative_archaeology_web@hotmail.com
Abstract
Bridging the unnatural barriers to interdisciplinary research, Comparative Archaeology aims to understand humanity's ability to overcome barriers created by a changing world. Here I analyze socio-cultural responses to climate change on a cross cultural, interregional, and diachronic level. Using archaeological and paleoclimate data, the focus is on Central and Northern Europe from the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition to the Bronze Age. The prevailing paradigm assumes that the spread of Near Eastern domesticates (if not outright human migration) encountered successive barriers in the Carpathian Basin, northern Central Europe, and Scandinavia. However, scrutiny of the data raises questions about the Carpathian Basin barrier and the timing of the Bandkeramik farmers' expansion. The northern Central European barrier is clearly established by the Bandkeramik during relatively calm climate conditions. Although the Bandkeramik ends with deadly warfare during an environmental disturbance, the boundary survives, remaining static for the next half a millennium of a generally optimal climate. Cracks appear in the northern Central European barrier only when climatic oscillations increase. Concurrently, elaborate pottery decorations and substantial longhouses are abandoned. The barrier's final breakup occurs as Nordic Mesolithic foragers and southern Copper Age farmers coalesce into the Funnel Beaker (TRB) interaction sphere to ensure long-term economic security. Simultaneously cattle byres, ploughs, long-barrows, and even stone walled hilltop sites develop. The subsequent lessening of climatic severity falls in line with increased construction of palisaded as well as stone walled "central sites" and long-barrows, the development of megalithic tombs, and the invention of wheeled vehicles. The production and exchange