Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T07:05:14.826Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Danube Thoroughfare and the Beginnings of Civilization in Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

V. Gordon Childe
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

While high civilizations were growing up in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Aegean, continental Europe was still recovering from an ice age. Though the glaciers had retreated, the high passes that led across the Alps from the favoured Mediterranean to the interior were still virtually closed by snow. The tundras and steppes where the men of the Old Stone Age had hunted the reindeer were now for the most part covered with a dense forest fostered by the damp climate then ruling. Through the belt of forest and mountain that fenced off northern and western Europe early man could not easily penetrate. To reach Britain or Denmark he must take ship and face the perils of the Atlantic in a dug-out canoe or some only slightly superior craft. But one moving road leads right into the heart of the continent. From the Black Sea to Bavaria the Danube opens out a passage way far safer than the stormy Atlantic. Moreover it leads into territories where the uncongenial primeval forest did not grow so densely nor so inhospitably as on the coasts or highlands.

Large tracts in Central Europe are covered with a deep deposit of fine wind-born dust that had formed during the dry ice ages. This aeolian soil termed “löss” is unfavourable to the growth of heavy timber, incidentally it provides ideal agricultural land.

Type
Research Articles
Information
Antiquity , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , March 1927 , pp. 79 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 1927

References

1 Vinča : M.M. Vassits in P.Z. ii, and BSA, xiv.

2 Polished and fluted wares in Thessaly ; Wace and Thompson, Prehistoric Tḣessaly, pp. 102, 105, 114. The stratification shows that they belong to the second period—not as Tsountas thought to the third.

3 Danubian culture : Childe, Dawn of European Civilization, 1925, pp. 171–183.Google Scholar

4 See Kozlowska, , in Bull. Internat. Acad. Sci. de Cracovie, 1920, B, 1–10.Google Scholar

5 Cf. Duerst, in Pumpelly, Explorations in Turkestan (Carnegie Publications, 73) vol. 11.Google Scholar

6 Bul. Soc. Anthr. Bruxelles, 39, p. 63 n. 2.Google Scholar

7 M.M. Vassits in P.Z. ii, and BSA, xiv.

8 Wace and Thompson, op. cit. p. III.

9 In the British Museum.

10 Childe, Dawn, pp. 177–9.Google Scholar

11 W.P.Z., x, 1-10.

12 Wosinsky, Das prähistorische Schanzwerk von Lengyel.

13 Carchemish : Liv. Annals, vi, pp. 91 ff ; Byblos: Syria, vi, pp. 16 ; Egypt Petrie, Illahun, Kahun and Gurob, pl. xiii.

14 Arch. Ert. xxiv, pp. 85 f ; Archiv f. Anthrop., xv, p. 253, pl.1.

15 “Excavations of the ‘A’ a Cemetery at Kish” Field Museum Anthrop. Memoirs I.

16 Stocký, Praha Pravěká, 1925, p. 21.Google Scholar

17 Zs. f. Ethnol., 1896, p. 80.Google Scholar

18 Childe, Dawn, p. 192.