Swiss Bell Beaker population dynamics: eastern or southern influences?
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Swiss Bell Beaker population dynamics: eastern or southern influences? Jocelyne Desideri & Marie Besse
Received: 7 October 2009 / Accepted: 21 May 2010 / Published online: 11 June 2010 # Springer-Verlag 2010
Abstract The Bell Beaker complex is defined, above all, by a ceramic style widespread across Europe during the 3rd millennium BC. Its particularly large geographic distribution has provoked different interpretations: a unique population invading Europe, the long-distance exchange of prestige goods, and the absence of a real Bell Beaker population with only the diffusion of its cultural components. For Switzerland, the Bell Beaker period would have developed following influences varying in significance from both the Mediterranean region and Central Europe. Bioanthropology makes it possible to test the first of these hypotheses, which proposes the diffusion of a culture by population displacement. Here, the choice was made to analyze dental nonmetrics. Our previous research on dental nonmetrics supports the idea, for Switzerland, of a certain harmony in Middle Neolithic populations, and the mobility or a moderate population contribution beginning in the Final Neolithic and continuing more intensely during the Bell Beaker period. The aim here is to identify the provenance of the population contribution at the end of the western Swiss Neolithic, and more specifically during the Bell Beaker period. To do so, we have compared the dental morphology of Swiss pre-Bell Beaker, Bell Beaker, and post-Bell Beaker populations with that of contemporaneous populations found not only in the eastern sphere (Czech Republic and Hungary), but also in the southern sphere (southern France and northern Spain). We are now able to demonstrate that the axis for external population influenJ. Desideri (*) : M. Besse Laboratory of Prehistoric Archaeology and Peopling History, Department of Anthropology and Ecology, University of Geneva, Rue Gustave-Revilliod 12, 1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected]
ces at the end of the western Swiss Neolithic is clearly southern. Keywords Bell Beaker culture . Neolithic . Western Switzerland . Peopling history . Dental nonmetrics
Introduction The Bell Beaker culture initially referred to a pottery style largely widespread in Europe and North Africa during the 3rd millennium BC, a period that corresponds to the end of the Neolithic. It was first defined at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, in Spain, to describe S-profiled vases in the form of an inverted bell. The Bell Beaker culture covers a vast territory from the British Isles to the North African coast for its north–south extent, and from Portugal to Hungary for its east–west extent. The Bell Beaker complex was established on a Europe-wide scale, with quite different preceding local substrates as can be seen through the regions discussed in this paper. In northern Spain for example, the Bell Beaker developed during the recent phase of the Chalcolithic (first half of the 3rd mil
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