Abstract
With the arrival of the Early Neolithic Globular Amphora and Corded Ware cultures into the southeastern Baltic, ca. 2900/2800–2400 cal BC, a new type of economy was introduced, animal husbandry. However, the degree to which this transformed the subsistence economy is unknown. Here, we conducted organic residue analyses of 64 ceramic vessels to identify their contents. The vessels were sampled from 10 Lithuanian archaeological sites dating across the Subneolithic-Neolithic transition to the Early Bronze Age (ca. 2900/2800–1300 cal BC). Our results demonstrate that regardless of location or vessel type, many ceramics were used to process aquatic resources. Against our expectations, this association continued even after marked economic change concurrent with the migration of pastoralists from central and southeastern Europe, as evidenced by recent ancient DNA analysis of human remains. Moreover, we observed dairy fats in pottery from all cultures of the Early Neolithic (i.e. Rzucewo, Globular Amphora and Corded Ware) but unlike other regions of Europe, it seems that these were incorporated into indigenous culinary practices. Furthermore, some vessels were used to process plant foods, and others may have been used for the production and/or storage of birch bark tar. However, evidence for domesticated plant processing, for example millet, was absent. We show that organic residue analysis of pottery provides a different picture of past consumption patterns compared to the stable isotope analysis of human remains from isolated burials where a clear dietary shift is evident.
Highlights
The southeastern Baltic was one of the last regions in Europe to adopt agriculture,1 some 2500–1500 years after it was introduced in adjacent regions to the south
It is perhaps harder to understand the eventual imposition of farming in this region, which is first recorded by the appearance of domesticated animals from ca. 2900/2800– 2400 cal BC with the Early Neolithic Globular Amphora (GAC) and Corded Ware (CWC) cultures (Charniauski 1996; Lõugas et al 2007; Piličiauskas et al 2017a, b, c; Rimantienė 2002), and by crop cultivation in the Middle Bronze Age, ca. 1300 cal BC (Piličiauskas et al 2017c)
The new data presented here adds to a growing corpus of data concerning pottery use throughout Europe during the Early Neolithic where some broad trends can be outlined
Summary
The southeastern Baltic was one of the last regions in Europe to adopt agriculture, some 2500–1500 years after it was introduced in adjacent regions to the south The reasons for this late adoption may seem obvious—the northerly latitudes were far less suitable for growing crops and rearing livestock, whilst indigenous wild game, fish and plants, which characterise the region, could have been procured from these densely forested, and highly productive aquatic ecotones (Piličiauskas 2018). Whilst the GAC peoples from present day Poland and Ukraine are related to Anatolian farmers (Mathieson et al 2018; Tassi et al 2017), the CWC populations had an Eastern European steppe ancestry linking them to the pastoral communities of the Yamnaya Culture (Allentoft et al 2015; Haak et al 2015; Jones et al 2017; Juras et al 2018; Mittnik et al 2018; Saag et al 2017). The aDNA evidence demonstrates that indigenous ‘forager’ populations resided and interacted with incoming ‘farmers’ until at least the mid-3rd millennium BC (Kristiansen et al 2017; Mittnik et al 2018), whilst the modern eastern Baltic population still possess the highest proportion of hunter-gatherer ancestry of all Europeans (Lazaridis et al 2014; Malmström et al 2009)
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