ABSTRACT
The nomads of the steppes whom we identified in the last chapter can hardly have been the ancestors of the peasants who created the earliest civilization in the Danube valley. The peasant cultures begin west of the region previously surveyed on the well watered and fertile loess plains lying between the steppes bordering the Black Sea and the great forests of Central Russia and Volhynia. In the Ukraine, Eastern Galicia and Roumania the loess is to-day overlaid by a more recent deposit, equally fertile, known as the black-earth. Such a region is eminently suitable for early agricultural settlers and the oldest traces of post-glacial habitation are due to such people ; for the “epipalæolithic” microliths are met only on the borders of the fertile tract. The peasants of the black-earth belt painted their pottery as did the earliest inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Elam, and Turkestan. This trait has inspired some orientalists with the hope of connecting the first Ukrainian peasants with the ancient food producing peoples of the Western Asia. However the known facts must be stated before that hypothesis can be judged. The first painted pottery is commonest and most richly developed in a small enclave of the black-earth belt just west of the Carpathian range on the upper course of the Alt in Transylvania (Map I). Here the patient excavations of Dr. Ferencz Laszlo at Erösd have revealed a very high civilization which we have already met as an intruder in Thessaly. A brief description of his results forms the best introduction to the whole question of the painted pottery.
