Linear Pottery Culture: The First Farmers of Central Europe

The Linear Pottery culture, known by the German abbreviation LBK (Linearbandkeramik), was the first farming culture of central Europe. Emerging in western Hungary around 5500 BC, its farmers spread across the fertile loess soils from Ukraine to the Paris Basin in only a few centuries, living in villages of timber longhouses. Around 5000-4900 BC the culture ended in a period of crisis marked by violence, giving way to regional successors.

Name and discovery

The culture is named after its pottery: round-bottomed bowls and flasks decorated with incised lines arranged in bands, spirals and meanders. The term Bandkeramik (“band pottery”) was introduced by the German scholar Friedrich Klopfleisch in the 1880s, and the culture has been studied ever since across Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, Austria and France.

Landmark excavations include Bylany in Bohemia, dug by Bohumil Soudský from 1953, and the Aldenhovener Platte near Aachen in western Germany, where a team including Jens Lüning excavated whole LBK villages ahead of open-cast lignite mining from the 1960s to the 1980s. These projects revealed how settlements developed over generations.

Origins and expansion

The LBK developed from the earlier farming communities of the Starčevo-Körös tradition in the Carpathian Basin. The earliest phase, sometimes called the “oldest LBK”, appeared around 5500 BC in Transdanubia (western Hungary) and nearby regions.

From there it spread with remarkable speed. Within about 300 to 500 years LBK farmers had settled a vast area: east into Poland, Ukraine and Moldova, and west along the Danube and Rhine to the Netherlands, Belgium and the Paris Basin. This expansion was a key stage in the spread of farming into Europe.

LBK settlers strongly favoured loess, a fine, wind-blown soil that is fertile and easy to work, and usually built their villages near streams. Ancient DNA shows that they were mainly descendants of Neolithic farmers with Anatolian ancestry, with only a small contribution from local hunter-gatherers.

Longhouses and villages

The LBK is famous for its longhouses. These were timber buildings, commonly 20 to 30 metres long and around 6 to 7 metres wide, with some exceeding 40 metres. Inside, three rows of posts supported a pitched roof, and the walls were made of posts with wattle and daub.

Clay for the walls was dug from pits along the sides of the houses, which were then filled with rubbish, providing archaeologists with much of their evidence. Houses were usually aligned in the same direction, often north-west to south-east, and were probably home to extended families.

Villages typically consisted of a few houses at any one time, though some places had dozens over their lifetime. Houses seem to have lasted a generation or so before being replaced nearby, creating complex settlement plans.

Some LBK villages had timber-lined wells. Tree-ring dating has shown that wells at Kückhoven, Eythra and Altscherbitz in Germany were built around 5200-5050 BC, making them among the oldest dated timber constructions in the world.

Farming and society

LBK farmers grew einkorn and emmer wheat, peas, lentils and flax, and in the west also opium poppy. Cattle were the most important livestock, alongside sheep, goats and pigs. Hunting played only a small part in the diet.

Their typical stone tool was the polished “shoe-last adze”, used for woodworking and felling trees. Fine stone for these tools, such as amphibolite, was traded over long distances, as was Spondylus shell from the Aegean or Adriatic.

Pottery was made by hand without a wheel. Fine wares carried the incised band decoration that gives the culture its name, and over time regional styles developed, such as the “music-note” (Notenkopf) style, in which the incised lines are punctuated by small round impressions resembling written notes. Archaeologists use these changing styles to date settlements and trace contacts between regions.

The dead were usually buried in cemeteries, lying on their side in a crouched position. Studies of strontium isotopes in skeletons, published in 2012, found that men buried with adzes tended to have grown up locally, while women more often came from outside. This suggests that women usually moved to their husbands’ communities, a pattern called patrilocality.

Crisis and end

Around 5000-4900 BC the LBK world went through a severe crisis. At Talheim in south-western Germany, 34 men, women and children were killed and buried together in a pit around 5000 BC. At Schletz-Asparn in Austria, the remains of dozens of people were found in an enclosure ditch, and at Schöneck-Kilianstädten in Germany a mass grave of 26 people, published in 2015, showed many with deliberately broken shin bones.

At Herxheim in the Palatinate, the remains of more than 500 people were deposited in ditches around 5000 BC, many of them carefully broken up. Some researchers argue that this reflects cannibalism, while others see it as an unusual funerary or ritual practice.

The causes of the crisis are debated. Possible factors include population growth, competition for land, climate fluctuations and social tensions. After about 4900 BC the LBK was replaced by regional successor cultures, such as the Stroked Pottery culture, the Rössen culture and the Lengyel culture, some of which built the first circular enclosures, including the Goseck Circle.

Legacy

The LBK left a lasting imprint on the landscape of central Europe. Its farmers began the clearance of the great lowland forests, and many of the loess areas they chose remained prime farmland for the next seven thousand years. Modern rescue archaeology, especially in the lignite fields of the Rhineland and along new motorways and railways, has uncovered thousands of LBK houses, making it one of the best-documented prehistoric cultures in the world.

The genetic legacy is also significant. The ancestry carried by LBK farmers forms a major component of the ancestry of present-day central Europeans, combined with that of earlier hunter-gatherers and of later migrants from the steppe in the Bronze Age.

The longhouse tradition itself survived the end of the LBK. Successor cultures built trapezoidal longhouses, and long timber buildings remained characteristic of much of Neolithic Europe for centuries.

Myths and facts

Myth: LBK farmers practised slash-and-burn agriculture and moved on when the soil was exhausted. Fact: This was a popular theory in the mid-twentieth century. Studies of weed seeds found with charred crops now suggest that LBK fields were permanent, intensively worked plots, manured and weeded, and that villages were occupied for centuries.

Myth: The LBK was a peaceful society of egalitarian farmers. Fact: While most LBK communities show little sign of strong hierarchy, the mass graves at Talheim, Schletz-Asparn and Schöneck-Kilianstädten show that lethal violence between groups did occur, especially towards the end of the culture.

Timeline

• c. 5500 BC: Earliest LBK appears in Transdanubia, western Hungary.
• c. 5300 BC: LBK farmers reach the Rhine valley.
• c. 5200-5050 BC: Timber-lined wells built at Eythra, Altscherbitz and Kückhoven.
• c. 5100 BC: LBK settlements in the Paris Basin.
• c. 5000 BC: Massacre at Talheim; mass deposits at Herxheim.
• c. 4900 BC: LBK gives way to successor cultures in most of central Europe.
• 1953: Excavations begin at Bylany in Bohemia.

Why it matters

The Linear Pottery culture brought farming to the heart of Europe and created the first permanent villages across a huge area. Its longhouses, fields and cattle laid the foundations of central European rural life, while the violence at its end shows the strains that early farming societies could face.