The New Stone Age in Northern Europe

Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 41649-h.htm or 41649-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/41649/pg41649-images.html) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41649/41649-h.zip)

Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See http://archive.org/details/newstoneageinnor00tyleuoft

[Illustration: RECONSTRUCTED LAKE-DWELLINGS]

THE NEW STONE AGE IN NORTHERN EUROPE

by

JOHN M. TYLER

Professor Emeritus of Biology, Amherst College

New York Charles Scribner's Sons 1922

Copyright, 1921, by Charles Scribner's Sons

Printed in the United States of America

Published March, 1921

TO

JOSEPH DÉCHELETTE

PATRIOT AND ARCHÆOLOGIST

KILLED IN BATTLE AT VINGRÉ (AISNE) OCTOBER 3, 1914

PREFACE

The dawn of history came late in Northern Europe and the morning was stormy. We see the Roman Empire struggling in vain to hold back successive swarms of barbarians, pouring from a dim, misty, mysterious northland. Centuries of destruction and confusion follow; then gradually states and institutions emerge, and finally our own civilization, which, though still crude and semibarbarous, has its glories as well as its obvious defects.

The growth, development, and training of these remarkable destroyers and rebuilders was slowly going on through the ages of prehistoric time. Most of the germs, and many of the determinants, of our modern institutions and civilization can be recognized in the habits, customs, and life of the Neolithic period. Hence the importance of its study to the historian and sociologist. It has left us an abundance of records, if we can decipher and interpret them. It opens with savages living on shell-heaps along the Baltic. Later we find the stone monuments of the dead rising in France, England, Scandinavia, and parts of Germany. They begin as small rude shelters and end as temples, like that at Stonehenge. People were thinking and cooperating, and there must have been no mean social organization.

We find agriculture highly developed in the valleys of the Danube and its tributaries. We see villages erected on piles along the shores of the Swiss lakes--probably a later development. We find implements, pottery, and bones of animals; charred grains of wheat and barley and loaves of bread; cloth and ornaments--almost a complete inventory of the food and furnishings of the people of this period. We should call them highly civilized, had they been able to write their own history. What was their past and whence had they come?

Implements and pottery tell us of exchange of patterns and ideas, or may suggest migrations of peoples, and finally map out long trade-routes. Some day the study of the pottery will give us a definite chronology, but not yet.

We can reconstruct, to some extent, these phases of prehistoric life. Our greatest difficulties begin when we attempt to combine these separate parts in one pattern or picture, to trace their chronological succession or the extent of their overlappings and their mutual influence and relations in custom and thought. Here, we admit, our knowledge is still very vague and inadequate. Twenty years ago the problem seemed insoluble; perhaps it still remains so. But during that time explorations, investigations, and study have given us many most important facts and suggestions. Some inferences we can accept with a fair degree of confidence, others have varying degrees of probability, sometimes we can only guess. But guesses do no harm, if acknowledged and recognized as such.