"Kossinna's Smile" (Heyd, 2017)

Today I'll focus on a paper by Volker Heyd entitled "Kossinna's Smile".  This paper and this other paper, are meant to be read together.

Because this subject is just too dense to work left to right, I'll offer a condensed version.

"Pots are people you idiots!" -Kossinna

1.  Pots or people?  Kossinna had the ridged view that archaeological culture = ethnicity.  Then a younger generation of archaeologists lurched to the opposite extreme, discounting the validity of the ethnic question, but even the conceptual basis of a unifying 'culture' or its components, such as language.   (More on Kossinna -Roberts, VanderLinden, page 51)

Every generation is rewarded with teenagers.  At some point there is an acknowledgement that the older generation 'may have got a few things right'.  Now that ancient DNA is demonstrating clear genetic boundaries and migratory change, "culture-history and ethnic interpretations are back on the dinner table" as Heyd states.

2.  While Heyd acknowledges the genetic turnovers, he is also much more cautious than the authors of "Re-theorising mobility and the formation of culture and language among the Corded Ware Culture in Europe". 

He points to a number of archaeological discrepancies and logical errors that the Nature crowd seem to be making.  I've combined several things here to save space and time.  Here's a few examples, parentheses are mine:

• No where is the Globular Amphora Culture considered in any genetic study.  Yet, GAC has more direct contact and overlap with Yamnaya and influences from the North Black Sea are more direct.  Heyd gives the example of the Mikhaylovka Culture of the Dneiper (also mentioned is the Maikop by Mallory and Adams.  Also, see Woidich on GAC contact with the Northern Funnel-beaker Culture as one explanation for the formation of the Northern Single Grave Culture.  Woidich, 2014) 
• Other evidence of earlier intrusion - Baalberge round pit barrows 
• Seemingly domestic horses are earlier than expected, Salzmünde Group, Central Europe.
• Suggests the possibility that Salzmünde-Eperstedt may have already been steppified, long before the CWC and BBC.

He also makes these arguments:

• There is still very limited sampling of vast regions.  Not ready for simple conclusions.
• CWC is not descended from Yamnaya, not directly and not partly.  The Kristensen authors (2017) admit they are using Yamnaya as a proxy, even though their own arrow maps (Nature) make this association quite clear.  There are similarities between the two, but the two cultures are nearly contemporary which is problematic. 
• Yamnaya expanded into familiar steppe ecozones.  CWC expanded into familiar temperate forest ecozones.  The two never overlap.
• The burials are more different than similar.  And conversely, more similar burials from other cultures offer more convincing fits.

Fig 4 (steppe sandals in pre-Beaker Iberia)

3. The emergence of the Corded Ware Culture and the Bell Beaker Culture at roughly the same time is not coincidental.  He seems to suggest the steppe component had already spread all over Europe as an incubating Neolithic elite (my interpretation) and then both cultures are born on a Neolithic substrate (again, my interpretation), one in Iberia and the other in Northern Europe.


Finally, it's important to emphasis the point Heyd reiterates.  On the facts, there is no doubt.  Eastern European Steppe influences clobbered Europe, all of it.  The Corded Ware and Beaker Cultures were born of this upheaval.  After all, that is the point of calling the paper "Kossinna's Smile". 

The real question is the specifics of social change, which will continue to come into focus with a "new archaeology", as he calls it.

Siret's Smile? Part 1 (Jean Guilaine, 2018)

Surprises in the tea leaves?  Sounds like new data ahead...maybe... "Siret's Smile" is discussed at Bernard's Blog.

And a little disclosure.  I've read the four sentences in the abstract and the references.  Hopefully a nice person will send me a copy of the paper!

The best I understand is that Gustav Kossinna and Louis Siret represent different flavors of a diffusionist archaeological interpretation.  From this viewpoint, innovation occurs rarely in humanity and when it does, like the invention of the airplane or the use of metals, it originates from an epi-center, a homeland, and by some process spreads to other places, sometimes dragging an entire cultural package with it.

Diffusion is demonstrably more often the lazy act of borrowing, but it can also be a full-blown, heads-spinning-off-shoulders population replacement in the other extreme.  Major disruptions in the archaeological record, according to the diffusionist perspective, are not evidence of a kind of localized punctuated equilibrium, they are instead actual disruptions from an external source.

Kossinna viewed culture as necessarily rooted in ethnicity and equated changes in material culture with changes in ethnicity, whereas Siret viewed religion and technology as the glue that bound most cultures together, however routinely stimulated from the outside.  "Kossinna's Smile" was published as a prelude to, and with foreknowledge of, The Bell Beaker Phenomenon and the Genomic Transformation of Northwestern Europe.  From that study we learned that the heads-spinning-off-the-shoulders variety was the primary instigator for material change in the Island of Britain.

Importantly, Volker Heyd sees the original, external stimulation of proto-Beaker Culture in Iberia as potentially having subtle steppic tendencies.  That's probably a minority view, but he gives examples of this in his paper.  In other words, I doubt he would he would accept that the northern and southern Beaker domains had totally discrete origins that were simultaneously and coincidentally expanding on each other and somehow melded into pan-Beaker through acculturation.

"Siret's Smile" by Guilaine is a reply to Heyd's "Kossinna's Smile" which may be nothing more than an argument for what embodies the Beaker Culture center of gravity.  This question is dealt with by David Reich in the video presentation linked by Bernard, and Reich clearly sees religion as the glue of Beaker material culture in opposition to the ethnically monolithic Corded Ware.

Guilaine appears to be of an opinion similar to Oliver Lermercier, Convertini, Besse & co. in the idea of a Greek Implantation Model of the Beakerization of SW Europe.  It's a diffusionist view also, which emphasizes the evangelization of local people by elites.  It may be entirely valid for this region.  But I doubt he's arguing acculturation, and looking at the abstract, it seems that Guilaine's argument and style (Siret's Smile) is hinting (or taunting) at even newer evidence not disclosed, maybe genetic.

Although Siret's chronology for Southern Iberia is technically outdated, in broad terms he saw the beginning of the Metal Age in Southern Iberia as being stimulated from the Eastern Mediterranean, which he called "Phoenician".  These were colonies of skilled men devoted to mining and trade with high status who upgraded the local culture.  Then in the regular Bronze Age, Iberia went through the process of "Celticization", as he called it. (Aranda Jimenez, 2015, pg8) Which brings us to the tea leaves...

At 1:53 in the video Bernard linked, David Reich specifically says that there was almost "no shared ancestry between the Spanish practitioners of this culture..and the Central European ones...".  But let's look at that statement closely.  According to Siret's view (Guilaine), that's kind of irrelevant since most Spanish practitioners of this culture are native Spanish who have become indoctrinated in a new religion.  And Guilaine, at least from the snippets I viewed, emphasizes the role of the Eastern Mediterranean elites (Siret) in remaking early Metal Age Spain.

Of course, during the Bronze Age Spain is increasingly Steppified (Celtified), and later, actually Celtified.

So of course Guilaine presents new archaeological data in this paper to counter Heyd.  I haven't seen it yet, but when I do, I'll post part 2.  I imagine that it's new data from Valencia de Conception which will be rather conclusive, like isotopes or updated radiocarbon dates.  I may be reading too much into this, but I imagine ancient DNA (not disclosed in this paper) maybe be lurking around the corner to offer a new twist to the narrative.  Maybe not.

Abstract:

Recent palaeogenomic data have expanded the debate concerning the direction of cultural transmission during the European Chalcolithic by suggesting the western movement of people from the Eurasian Steppe. Heyd (2017) considers a simultaneous spread of material culture as supportive of these model. The author addresses Heyd’s suggestions in the light of new archaeological data from the southern Iberian Peninsula. These data strongly suggest both Eastern Mediterranean and endogenous influences and innovation in the spread of culture across Europe during the third millennium BC.

Siret's Smile? Part 2 (Jean Guilaine, 2018)

Here's part 2 on Siret's Smile published in Antiquity.

Guilaine's counter-arguments to Kossinna's Smile are condensed here with a few notes.  Some concepts like 'diffusion' mentioned in part 1 need a little context when considering similarities and differences between Kossinna and Siret.  Here, diffusionism includes migration or outside stimulation and is opposed to acculturation or internal innovation.  Usage varies historically.

By invoking Siret, Guilaine is not arguing for an internally native Iberian origin of Beaker as opposed to steppic ones.  He sees different sources of the Iberian stimulation that were most important to the birth of proto-Beaker which is widely believed to have expanded from Iberia.  Whether or not this involves a genetic component would be irrelevant in this argument, and the cultural and genetic identity of Continental Beakers is probably irrelevant to this discussion as well.

Stele from Lacunae, Tarn, France (snip Fig 1)

Guillaine counters Heyd on three points and they really center around the origin of the Beaker phenomenon from exterior day 1, especially in Iberia:

"In the present paper, partly as a response to that published by Heyd, I wish to comment on three issues among the many raised therein: [1] the anthropomorphic stelae, [2] the Chalcolithic funerary rituals and grave goods of southern Iberia, and [3] the origins of the ‘Maritime’ Bell Beaker tradition."

1.  Guilaine doesn't see anthropomorphic stelae in Western Europe as evidence of steppe influence from the East.  He thinks the various groups of stelae are too diverse to represent a single source borrowing and that they more represent themes and objects of local Neolithic cultures.  Guilaine views some of the groups, such as the Amorican group, as being too old (3500-3000) to be linked with Yamnaya specifically or any known Eastern influx.  He also sees the Western European stelae as a continuous development from the early Neolithic and following a pattern of increasing detail comparable to a similarly-phased evolution in the Pontic Steppe.


2.  Grave rituals and grave goods.  Guilaine doesn't see any special relationship between Pontic and Iberian sandals.  He makes reference to similar foot fetish in Southern Egypt and goes on to point to other exotic objects in Iberian tombs with North African or Eastern roots, rather than Pontic roots.

Sandal comparison by V. Heyd, "Kossinna's Smile"

3.  Guilaine believes the Maritime expression of the Bell Beaker is unrelated to events in Northern or Eastern Europe.  Like many others, he sees a uniquely southern expression in the Maritime beaker decoration that has no precedent in the Continent but does have antecedents in the decoration of pottery from certain Moroccan sites through which Southern Iberians traded heavily.  He also mentions the early dates.


It's important to consider that these archaeologists would probably agree on many points.  They probably agree on the importance of Iberia in spreading the early manifestations of Beaker Culture.  Kossinna's Smile took issue with holy archaeology denying what should have been obvious from the skeletal remains, but it also skewered the overly simplistic approach of ancient DNA.  Siret's Smile takes issue with the relationship between culture and ethnicity by disagreeing on what got the ball rolling in the first place.

Of course Beakerblog has opinions on a lot of this, but this post is already too long!  More stuff ahead.

A Prince and His Twenty Wives (Garcia Sanjuan et al, 2018)

Try and wrap your mind around the size of the gigantic Copper Age site, Valencia de Concepcion.  If even a tenth of it was utilized at a time, that sector would still shadow most any contemporary site in Europe.  One of these sectors contains some very rich and interesting graves.  This large paper by Garcia Sanjuan et al is Open-Access, linked below.   

Crystal & Ivory from Valencina de la Concepción, S.W. Spain Garcia SanJuan et al
(foto: Miguel Ángel Blanco de la Rubia)

The grave above and beyond any other belonged to a man possessing this crystal dagger.  BTW, Be on the lookout for DNA that will follow these radiocarbon dates.  There is a related paper in the same journal by Antonio Blanco-Gonzales concerning demographic 'dynamics' in this region in the Copper and Bronze Age, so you know it's coming.  It'll be surprising if there are no surprises.  I'll start psyching myself out now.

The prince buried with the crystal dagger is identified in PP4-Montelirio Structure 10.049.  See also [link]   He is absolutely, positively the richest, big-man burial in all of Europe at this time with competition only from Goldfinger in Varna.

This Copper Age prince was buried in a vault at the end of a very long, stone-vaulted corridor (39 meters, or 127 feet).  The entire gamut was painted with priceless cinnabar.  Although the archaeologists shy away from any speculation based on the fragmentary evidence, it does appear that the prince of 10.049 was buried with around two dozen or so twenty-to-thirty-year-old women.

The large chamber also included a steppic-like steale and a number of gold, African ivory, ostrich and other objects.  Volker Heyd describes some of these in "Kossinna's Smile".   Using a large number of new radiocarbon dates from this tomb, a fairly secure date of build and burial puts it around 2850-2750 B.C.

In the discussion part of the paper, there is this comment:

Anecdotally, when excavations of this monument began in 2007, the Spanish media reported extensively on comments (intended just as informal remarks) by one of the team members, who claimed that the individuals buried in the main chamber (mostly women) may have formed part of the ‘grave goods’ of an important individual buried there, in a scenario similar to the tomb of Queen Pu-Abi from the Third Dynasty of Ur, in Mesopotamia.

Everything written above, including the title of the post, came from simply looking at the fact that a man buried with a crystal dagger was buried with a large number of young women.  In fact, I almost made a comment like this "similar to the tomb of Queen Pu-Abi from the Third Dynasty of Ur".  All of this without any knowledge of what was reported in the Spanish media.

If crystal daggers equal golden 9mm Brownings or gold AK-47's, and golden guns correspond to harems, then a crystal dagger correlates with roughly twenty women.  Oddly enough though, it would seem that these women wouldn't be the mothers of his children (his wives) for the reason that he would want his children to be raised successfully.

So maybe they're virgin priestesses, or the opposite of that.  Or maybe they were his wives and they were all killed by a political enemy at the same time, or an jealous wife. 

Several things I hope to see in the DNA.  1)  Verification that all the skeletal remains are women 

2)  Are the women genetically similar or are they different...flavors (Qaddafi)  3)  What the heck is this man's profile?  4)  Are the two individuals in the smaller tomb his mother and father  5)  Do any of these people cluster with Bell Beakers or other European groups  6)  Is the man racially distinct from the women, or most of them 7)  Are STD's or lethal toxins present or determinable?

Fig 1 from the paper.  Contemporary copper age sites around Valencia de C.

"Assembling the Dead, Gathering the Living: Radiocarbon Dating and Bayesian Modelling for Copper Age Valencia de la Concepcion (Seville, Spain)"  Journal of World History, 2018
Leonardo Garcia Sanjuan et al... https://doi.org/10.1007/s10963-018-9114-2  [link]

Abstract: The great site of Valencina de la Concepcio´n, near Seville in the lower Guadalquivir valley of southwest Spain, is presented in the context of debate about the nature of Copper Age society in southern Iberia as a whole. Many aspects of the layout, use, character and development of Valencina remain unclear, just as there are major unresolved questions about the kind of society represented there and in southern Iberia, from the late fourth to the late third millennium cal BC. This paper discusses 178 radiocarbon dates, from 17 excavated sectors within the c. 450 ha site, making it the best dated in later Iberian prehistory as a whole. Dates are modelled in a Bayesian statistical framework. The resulting formal date estimates provide the basis for both a new epistemological approach to the site and a much more detailed narrative of its development than previously available. Beginning in the 32nd century cal BC, a long-lasting tradition of simple, mainly collective and often successive burial was established at the site. Mud-vaulted tholoi appear to belong to the 29th or 28th centuries cal BC; large stone-vaulted tholoi such as La Pastora appear to date later in the sequence. There is plenty of evidence for a wide range of other activity, but no clear sign of permanent, large-scale residence or public buildings or spaces. Results in general support a model of increasingly competitive but ultimately unstable social relations, through various phases of emergence, social competition, display and hierarchisation, and eventual decline, over a period of c. 900 years.

Corded Ware Language, Culture (Kristiansen et al, 2017)

No lengthy overture.  The papers are here.  See also the summary on Kossinna's Smile.

Many of the bold assertions made in "Re-theorising mobility and the formation of culture and language among the Corded Ware Culture in Europe" are going to be broadly close to truth.  But it will be controversial due to the 'matter of fact' spirit of the piece and the name recognition of the authors.  Academically, it is tantamount to throwing down the gauntlet.

In a way, the hysteria generated in archaeological and linguistic circles as a result of this paper and the two 2015 papers will be good for the genetics community.  Controversy will spawn rebuttals built on additional evidences, which will eventually illuminate more dark areas of history.

Bullets:

1.  The Kristiansen authors refer to the so-far tested Yamnaya as a "best known proxy" for incoming populations into Europe.  Given genetic, economic and cultural similarities between these cultures, they believe a donor ancestor of CWC lived somewhere close to the regions tested thus far.

2.  Crisis in the European Neolithic?  New diseases?  Was Europe weakened in such a way that it became a magnet for immigration?

3.  A cultural and economic framework of Yamnaya is given which explains the unique similarities it has with the highly mobile Corded Ware.

4. Corded Ware males married outsider​ women; abduction is singled out as a contributing factor to male based exogamy.  (I'm guessing abduction becomes more common when doweries or bride price become excessive as is often the case in primative societies.  I'm not sure the economics of abduction make it a good fit for the observed exogamy.)

Nordic Bronze Age

5.  They suggest that pre-proto-Germanic developed out of a late Funnelbeaker presence in Western Jutland and the Danish Islands. (No idea whatsoever)

Alpine Savages, Valencia de Vucedol, Westphalian Weirdos

"Piece of Cake!"

Maybe a soul or two will remember this odd paper by Beau et al, 2017.  It's significance seems lost so far, so here's a simplified narrative: A predatory and expansive ethnic emerged in the MN Michelsberg, apparently a lightly-footed, pit-burying, hunter-heavy Atlantic with short heads.  Either the savages 'hunted' farmers beyond their borders or they represent a localized ethnic stratum, either way they appear genetically distinct from the people they ritually victimized.  Is this genetic apartheid also visible at Blatterhole in Westphalia? (Blätterhof, Blätterhohle)

This culture bleeds influences into a few other successor cultures; important ones that may become more important in this story later.  The Michelsberg mito-profiles are interesting in that light.  A paper by Katrina Dulias et al was due to be published already this month and it will be interesting to see their analysis on the expansion of H1 and H3 from the Southwest.  More on Christina Roth, 2016 with mito-turnover in the Mesetas below. 

Before moving on to Baalbergers, Blatterhohleans and Barcelonans, it might be helpful or not helpful to look back on how American anthropologists viewed the origin of big-bodied brachycephals of the Late Neolithic during this last century.  Earnest Hooton and his students viewed the rugged 'Alpine' racial type to likely be a Mesolithic relict from small pockets of Western Europe that slowly re-emerged through a combination of selection and miscegenation.  Of course they understood that brachycephals were also lightly represented in pockets of the Near East and recognized a general brachycephalization trend, but they also understood that the Late Neolithic saw massive migration from the East into the West of Europe.  Despite this, Hooton preferred the view that this massive physique was more likely a re-emergence of the savage in the horridly barbaric Middle Neolithic.

While modern osteologists working in Central and Eastern Europe are dodgy about the directional origin of the Beaker 'Alpine ethnic', from what I've read of the six or so leading experts in Central Europe, I'd bet they prefer a Western origin of the Beaker physique.  To make the matter more complex is the fact that most ethnic Bell Beakers very likely have substantial Corded Ware ancestry and cultural heritage (if not a majority) even if the communities didn't exactly overlap spatially or chronologically.  And for extra credit to this problem, it's also likely that later ethnic Beakers of the Eastern group intermingled with unrelated Steppe groups (to both themselves or a separate Corded Ware); personally I would point to Szigetszentmiklós (I2787) as direct evidence of a potential Beaker-Yamna hybrid.

The nearly certain Corded Ware ancestry of the North Central Beakers, and really almost all non-Iberian Beakers, is problematic when looking at the Bell Beaker racial type because not many of their distinct features could be attributable to the more slightly built CWC.  OTOH, Beakers clearly have a larger amount of what looks like WHG ancestry and it would necessarily have to be this specific ancestry that accounts for some of their unique features if Corded Ware ancestry represents the entirety of their recent Steppe heritage.  Clearly the Meseta underwent a large change about the time of the Beakers, and these bulbous-headed giants lack a significant Steppe component.  So what the heck does that mean?


Anyhow, when you look at the Baalbergers from Salzmünde or the Blatterhohle Westphalians such as Bla16 I1593, something interesting becomes a possibility.  So for fun, let's pretend for a moment that the so-called Steppe migration did in fact happen in multiple waves instead of a single wave as currently understood by the Allentoft, Haack and Olalde papers.  Would the earliest waves have comparable amounts of CHG compared to the last wave, assuming the Corded Ware represents the last wave?  And what was the make up of the Northwest and Western Black Sea if that was an area that the initial wave formed?

Finally, we go to the Barcelonan Bell Beakers.  The current view is that Iberian Beakers contributed almost nothing to the Continental Beaker ethnic.  This is put forth in "The Bell Beaker Phenomenon and the Genomic Transformation of Northwestern Europe".  That must be a false dichotomy because it is inconceivable on multiple grounds.  Iberian Beakers expanded powerfully into Europe.  That is not the same as 'Iberians expanded powerfully into Europe'.  So like Heyd has written, in broad strokes a picture is forming, but the details might be different than expected.  Right now there is a simple narrative, but by this time next year, we might find ourselves again passing the same tree.

It might be a good idea to, once again, re-read "Kossinna's Smile".