ABSTRACT
There the dwellers in the log houses first revealed at Strandegaard came to adopt not only cattle-farming but agriculture, and therewith embarked upon the creation, on the old Ertebolle foundation, of a distinctive Neolithic civilization of their own. Whence skill and seed for husbandry were brought is not yet fully clear. Domestication of animals, spinning from their coats, and pot-decoration with the spun cord seem to form an interdependent complex for which the pottery evidence points to the south-east, and though agriculture is absent from that initial connexion, there were now Danubian peasant settlements in Pomerania and from Poland and Silesia across Central Germany to Hanover and beyond, and contacts here would seem to be far the likeliest explanation. The earliest signs of com in Denmark are two grain-impressions on potsherds, one of emmer wheat from the Solager midden, the other of littlewheat from one at Brabrand in Jutland, and both these varieties were grown by the Danubians: finds of a few stray ‘ shoe-last’ hoes and of possibly related axe-forms point the same way, though the stone-bladed hoe or plough was never adopted in the North, where such evidence as there is suggests an original-
one-piece implement of wood. Just when these particular middens were abandoned we do not know, but such grainimpressions become relatively frequent on pottery typical of the period of the dolmens. Indeed, it has often been believed that agriculture and the dolmen were introduced together, but the apparent absence of little-wheat from the Neolithic West and of all trace of Western colonization in the North, supports the contrary view here taken. In fact, the material culture of the Northern Neolithic, including the pottery which the dolmen finds exemplify, must have been fully formed when the Western navigators first made the Baltic voyage. For that pottery consists simply of the native funnel-breaker already seen developing at Solager and Strandegaard (Fig. 19, 4), to gether with straighter-necked ‘ amphora’ forms with shoulderlugs (cf. Fig. 19, 7) and flasks most normally represented by a type having a narrow neck with a projecting collar-band (PI. VII, 2), implying a native leather-bottle prototype with a nozzle in wood or deer-hom. Fragments of these collared flasks have been found at a dwelling-site at Havnelev in Zealand with just the same Ertebolle-like coarse ware as there was at Strandegaard-indeed, the Ertebolle tradition runs right through the age of the dolmens and passage-graves, and is expressed not only materially but in a well-defined rite of burial in a flat grave, quite independent of megalithic con ventions, and evidently in being before their introduction. The conclusion that the Northern Neolithic became established as an agricultural as well as a pastoral culture soon after 2500 B.C., while dolmen burial was introduced only from about 2300 from the West, will be borne out by what we have now to see of the culture’s extensions to the East and South.
