The Origins of Transhumant Pastoralism
in Temperate Southeastern Europe
Elizabeth R. Arnold and Haskel J. Greenfield
BAR International Series 1538, Archaeopress, Oxford, 2006, paperback, ISBN 1-84171-870-6, 160pp with many charts and diagrams, and some black and white reproductions. £38.
Archaeopress has kindly supplied me with a review copy of this scholarly report which sets out to prove that the practice of transhumance – when shepherds move their domesticated flocks and herds (usually goats, sheep or cows) between summer and winter pastures – emerged in southeast Europe in around 3300 BC. This is both earlier and later than some other experts have contended.
The definition of transhumance – which can mean long distance journeys (covering hundreds of miles and taking weeks or months) between fixed points, or between one fixed and one different point, or shorter treks (a few hours or a day at most) between a valley farm and a nearby mountain top – continues to be kicked around seminar rooms like the haggis-shaped ba’ in Kirkwall’s Boxing Day football match. Meanwhile practising shepherds get on with their jobs, and most would never use the word. Instead they would say something like (in English), ‘I’m off with the sheep’ or (in Romanian) ‘am plecat la coada oilor’ (I’m away after the sheep’s tails’).
Thanks to Marija Gimbutas we have the idea that people inhabited the lower Danube basin from 7000 BC, 3500 years before the Indo-European invasions that brought an explosion of semi-nomadic pastoralism to eastern Europe. She coined the term Old Europe for an area which includes today’s Romania, Bulgaria, former Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece. Gimbutas’s book Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974) was a breakthrough in archaeological theory and for feminism; she argued that these Pre Indo-European (PIE) societies – she called them Kurgan after the burial mounds found in the area – were matriarchal. Although the Amazons would get my vote over most male-dominated governments, I’m not entirely convinced and several archaeologists disagree too.
We know that from around 5000 BC many of the PIE peoples lived on tells, man-made hills that stood above flood level on the river plains, and that they sent sheep and cattle to Central Asia. These Stone Age civilisations also created wonderful pottery and metal objects, some of which are shaped like sheep’s knuckle bones, and very similar to the ‘Endless Column’ motif that the sculptor, Constantin Brancusi, developed in wood and his colossal 1937 war memorial, ‘Column of the Infinite’. That may or may not be an irrelevant digression: prehistoric art and folk art are full of simple, decorative designs of which the zigzag or wolf’s tooth is one of the most popular, and the gold ‘knuckle bone’ that I saw recently was only discovered after Brancusi’s death. But it’s tempting to think that the world famous Brancusi, who grew up in a part of Old Europe that is now rural Oltenia, absorbed some of his ground-breaking ideas from sheep.
The pottery and metal pieces from Old Europe are thought to have been made for a mixture of ceremonial, religious and practical uses: in other words nobody really knows what they were for. (See The Lost World of Old Europe, an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.) If farming (growing crops and keeping livestock) began in the warm ‘Fertile Crescent’ of the Near East around 9000 BC and moved steadily west and north across Europe as temperatures rose there too, did pastoralism differ so widely from that of the more aggressive, horse-riding Indo-Europeans who arrived in the Danube Basin around 3500-3300 BC and apparently wiped out the existing settlers? They are the ancestors of modern Europeans – our forebears – Celts, Germanics, Italians, Magyars and Slavs and they moved west after being forced to find new grazing – and land for crops? – when the freshwater lake that was the original Black Sea burst its banks in the great flood of 5600 BC.
While they are aware of the difficulties in interpreting such far-off events, the authors wisely avoid getting bogged down. For them, the evidence for their work lies in the teeth. What follows is a huge simplification of the process they followed but over the past 20 years Arnold and Greenfield have assembled evidence from thousands of (mainly) tooth fragments, some carbon-dated and others not; they have analysed and sorted them and compared them with modern sheeps’ and goats’ teeth from Manitoba. The samples showed them the average ages at which the animals were killed or died.
From the results the authors deduce that it was around 3300 BC, between the Late Neolithic and the Bronze Age, sometimes called the Eneolithic (Copper) Age, that ovicaprines (sheep and goats) from a number of specific sites ranging from south-west Romania to northern Greece, and between Bulgaria and Bosnia and Herzegovina, began to be moved regularly from summer to winter pastures and back again. The system was neither nomadic nor the same as settled agriculture – and they carefully enumerate the five various forms of transhumance that archaeologists have so far identified.
In real life as well as in folklore shepherds and ploughmen have often been at loggerheads – in land without fences, wandering sheep can ruin a precious crop – but livestock not only tilled and fertilised the earth, their grazing maintained the abundance of plant and animal life which has come to be known as biodiversity. Transhumance was an important part of the farming cycle but today is threatened by a tendency for bureaucrats (people whom ‘real’ farmers resent because they sit in offices and never get their hands dirty) to make too many laws which restrict the movement of animals and put small farmers out of business, and by the conflict between nature conservation (the need to plant trees and to save large carnivores from extinction). Life may have been brutish and short for the Neoliths but faced with problems like these, their existence seems enviably free.
Transhumance began earlier on the Mediterranean littoral, where summers were (and are) hotter, than it did inland, but archaeologists often cite the temperate regions and especially the Carpathian Mountains as places where shepherding came into its own. According to ethno-archaeologist John Nandris, sheep folds in the Carpathians are modelled on buildings that date back to the Mesolithic period (quoted in Radu Totoianu, Pastoritul Satelor de pe Valea si din Muntii Sebesului, forthcoming PhD thesis, Universitatea de Lucian Blaga, Sibiu, 2010). In Romania, which is my special area of interest, shepherding is a vital part of the country’s economy and culture and its loss will be very sad. My hope is that Romanians who are incredibly resourceful and have learnt to swing with the punches will find a way of preserving a balanced and respectful relationship with the land instead of killing it stone dead as Britain seems to have done. In Kyrgyzstan a woman farmer told me she had been brought up to honour the gods of nature so that for one thing, she never poisoned a water source or left rubbish lying around: is animism the way forward?
This book is written for the authors’ peers and students rather than the general public. Like true scientists they are neither sentimental nor romantic and the density of the arguments makes it difficult to digest at first bite. To a layperson it seems incredible that analysis of the humble tooth could allow anyone to make such a grand hypothesis as fixing the date for the beginning of transhumance in the area concerned. And in actual fact, they are not insisting on anything. I don’t pretend to follow all the scientific evidence but if I’m right Arnold and Greenfield were covering their backs in studying tooth wear, eruption and cementum (the tissue that covers the roots of a tooth) to make their points. Apparently cementum can show both the age and season of death particularly well. And it’s information about ages and places of death that supports their conclusions. In the authors’ words, to prove the existence of long-distance (or summer and winter) transhumance, there should be “a complementary pattern in season of death of these animals between highland and lowland sites… In a subsistence economy, the age groups that are slaughtered in the highlands and the lowlands will be different. Therefore animal remains should be particularly relevant in answering the question.” (page 2).
They are aware that all these methods are subject to error but their aim is to show that zooarchaeology (the study of animal remains) is a good way to prove the existence of transhumance, whereas in the past it was the preserve of mainstream archaeology, anthropology and history.
Unable to swim in such deep waters, what I cling to about this book is the authors’ lack of arrogance, their concern to further our knowledge about this subject and their suggestions for improving research techniques.
Grassland management isn’t their concern but is high on the conservation agenda. In September 2010, the European Forum for Nature Conservation and Pastoralism and Fundatia Adept are holding a conference in Sibiu, Romania, to discuss the future of subsistence farming. The buzz word is High Nature Value Farmland/Grassland and the aim is to enable small farmers to maintain their pastures on Europe’s mountains when their often meagre livelihoods are threatened not only by the EU (hygiene regulations which are interpreted locally as an opportunity of demanding exorbitant fines for transgressions) but as mentioned above, by zoologists and animal lovers who want to preserve large carnivores on the same mountains.
Arnold and Greenfield may be indifferent to these concerns but their research helps underline the antiquity of the tradition of transhumance. That in itself should help the argument that we still need sheep – and other animals – to graze our hills.
The preface to this book states that during the early 1990s the war in former Yugoslavia almost put paid to the authors’ research. You might wonder if that matters compared to the massacres, murders, maimings and violations which it let loose. Their description of the determination it took to succeed is the one place in this book where their emotion really shows.