HEAS Keynote – Eszter Bánffy

New strategies and coping practices of early farmers taking the Danubian route

(6000-5350 cal BC)

At the advent of the Neolithic in Europe, one major route of the spread of farming in Europe led across the central Balkan Peninsula, over the Carpathian basin and further along the Danube valley to Western Central Europe. Following river valley routes towards the north, some regions seem to have been intensely occupied, while others may have been barely populated. Rapid advances and halts alternated until the descendants of the first Balkan farmers reached the southern Carpathian basin, which is the focus of my talk.

Farmers reached the marginal zones of the alluvial riverine Danube landscape to the cool and wet, wooded hills of the western Carpathian basin at the advent of the 6^th millennium cal BC, where they stopped for different reasons.  This area proves to be key to understand the encounters with locals and re-structuring, resulting major bottlenecks of Neolithic lifeways from the Balkans to Central Europe. I shall focus on elements like networks, settlement patterns, architecture, animal husbandry, ritual customs and new bioarchaeological results, to highlight the nature of the changes, which are is inextricably bound up with the formation of the first farmers’ communities of Central Europe, the Linearbandkeramik (LBK).

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Eszter Bánffy_Poster