Linear Pottery Culture - Geography and Chronology

Geography and Chronology

The LBK did not begin with this range and only reached it toward the end of its time. It began in regions of densest occupation on the middle Danube (Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary) and spread over about 1500 km along the rivers in 360 years. The rate of expansion was therefore about 4 km per year, which can hardly be called an invasion or a wave by the standard of current events, but over archaeological time seems especially rapid.

The LBK was concentrated somewhat inland from the coastal areas; i.e., it is not evidenced in Denmark or the northern coastal strips of Germany and Poland, or the coast of the Black Sea in Romania. The northern coastal regions remained occupied by Mesolithic cultures exploiting the then fabulously rich Atlantic salmon runs. There are lighter concentrations of LBK in the Netherlands, such as at Elsloo, Netherlands with the sites of Darion, Remicourt, Fexhe or Waremme-Longchamps and at the mouths of the Oder and Vistula. Evidently, the Neolithics and Mesolithics were not excluding each other.

The LBK at maximum extent ranged from about the line of the Seine–Oise (Paris Basin) eastward to the line of the Dnieper, and southward to the line of the upper Danube down to the big bend. An extension ran through the Southern Bug valley, leaped to the valley of the Dniester, and swerved southward from the middle Dniester to the lower Danube in eastern Romania, east of the Carpathians.

• Danube lands near Vienna, by Johann Christian Brand, ca. 1760

• The Danube bend in Hungary

• The Elbe

• The Oder