How experimental archaeology is showing that Europe's first farmers were also its first carpenters

By ANDREW CURRY

November/December 2014

Not too long ago, archaeologist Rengert Elburg found something that convinced him that “Stone Age sophistication” is not a contradiction in terms. It was a wood-lined well, discovered during construction work in Altscherbitz, near the eastern German city of Leipzig. Buried more than 20 feet underground, preserved for millennia by cold, wet, oxygen–free conditions, the timber box at the bottom of the well was 7,000 years old—the world’s oldest known intact wooden architecture. Elburg’s team at the Saxony State Archaeological Office removed the ancient well in a single 70-ton block, and brought it back to their lab in Dresden for careful excavation, documentation, and preservation. There, they recovered 151 timbers from the well, which, during the Neolithic period, was part of a large settlement that included nearly 100 timber longhouses. Even after so many millennia, the well’s extraordinary state of preservation began to give the researchers clues to the tools and techniques the ancient woodworkers used. They learned, for example, that to reinforce the bottom of the well, prehistoric carpenters had fashioned boards and beams from old-growth oaks three feet thick, then fit them together using tusked mortise-and-tenon joints, a technique not seen again until the Roman Empire, five millennia later. When Elburg examined the wood, he could see not only tree rings but also tool marks. But with nothing to compare these ancient tool marks to, this evidence was hard to understand. Thus, he and a motley collection of archaeologists, amateur woodworkers, historical reenactors, and flintknapping hobbyists have been gathering each spring since 2011 for a most unusual workshop. Held in a forest just outside the town of Ergersheim in the southern German region of Franconia, it’s experimental archaeology with a serious purpose. On the first full day of the 2014 workshop, a late-March Saturday, the woods are the dull brown of dead leaves, with a few tiny white flowers emerging to greet the unseasonably warm sun. It’s easy to spot the workshop participants—they’re all wearing red T-shirts emblazoned with an adze-wielding beaver. Elburg’s brought along a Stone Age woodworking toolkit fashioned by freelance archaeo-technician Wulf Hein, who uses the replica tools he makes to create copies of ancient artifacts. After less than an hour of hacking away at a sturdy, decades-old oak donated by the local authorities, a glancing blow has shattered the sharp end of a basalt wedge, rendering it unusable. Red T-shirts cluster around Elburg as he declares the wedge—a 5.5-pound triangle of stone with a hole in the broad end, attached to a slender wood handle—unsalvageable. It’s one of only a handful they have along. “That’s really a shame,” the archaeologist says with a grimace. “That one was really nicely carved. Too bad. Time for another broad wedge, I guess.” Video: Recreating The Neolithic Toolkit

Soon, the rhythmic pounding of stone against oak picks up again. The workshop’s goal is to reconstruct a few layers of the ancient well from scratch, beginning with chopping down an oak and ending with finishing the joints. Comparing ancient evidence with the byproducts of the participants’ tree clearing and woodworking, such as the chips that litter the ground after a few hours of chopping and chiseling, will help refine what researchers know about Stone Age carpentry. Every once in a while, the noise stops to allow a researcher with a portable 3-D scanner, which looks a bit like a hand mixer with no beaters, to take progress-report scans of the gouges in the trunks. “It’s the first time we’re using the 3-D scanner in the field,” Elburg says. “We can take the records of tool marks from here and compare them to what we have from the well at Altscherbitz.” Experiments such as the Ergersheim workshop have a long history. Over the years, such research, combined with ethnographic studies of people still using stone tools in the modern era, have helped shape how archaeologists understand the cultures that used them in the past. This type of research has been especially illuminating for the European Neolithic. The Neolithic period, also known as the Late Stone Age, began 10,000 years ago in what is today Turkey. It was a time of technological and social change, marking a momentous shift from a mobile, hunter-gatherer lifestyle to settled farming communities. In Europe, this era began about 7,500 years ago, right around the time the Altscherbitz well was dug. Bringing the Neolithic culture to Europe, Elburg explains, was possible in large part because of advanced technology. “Ground-stone tools enabled these first farmers to clear the woods and build the first permanent houses in Central Europe,” he says. Around the time farming started in Germany and Denmark, pollen records show there was a dramatic shift in the European landscape. Tree cover declined, and pollen from grasses and shrubs increased. Archaeologists trying to explain this assumed that shifting climate had reduced the forest cover, making it possible for Neolithic farms to flourish. Given the primitive tools available in the Stone Age, their reasoning went, it was unrealistic to think people could have made much of a dent in the primeval forests. A pollen expert at the Geological Survey of Denmark named Johannes Iversen, however, had his doubts. In 1952, using actual Stone Age flint tools taken from a local museum, he and a few colleagues conducted an experiment in a patch of Danish forest. Photos from the time show them in shirtsleeves, smoking pipes as they swung stone axes. Their first attempts to fell trees were a self-described “fiasco,” according to their journals. “In the course of a few minutes all four of the axes we had brought with us were useless,” the researchers wrote. Video: Recreating The Neolithic Toolkit

Iversen and his colleagues then rethought how the stones might have fit in their wood handles, and refined their cutting techniques. With the help of some local foresters, over the course of a summer, Iversen and a few other middle-aged Danish academics managed to clear-cut 2.5 acres of forest using nothing but stone tools. Based on this experiment, their calculations suggested that it would have taken a single Stone Age farmer only 36 days—or even less—to clear an equivalent area, which would have made open-field agriculture and managed forestry a realistic possibility for Neolithic European farmers. The experiment marked the beginning of a significant shift in the way archaeologists thought about early Europeans and their tools. “The old view was that Neolithic people were more or less ape-men,” Elburg says. “It was a very slow process, but eventually people became aware that the Stone Age was not primitive, and that Stone Age tools were not crude blunt-force instruments, but sophisticated in their own way.” Archaeologist Petra Schweizer-Strobel of the University of Tübingen arrives at Ergersheim armed with ziplock bags and a permanent marker. As workshop participants chop at tree trunks with stone wedges, she kneels nearby and gathers the wood chips, carefully labeling the bags. “I’m noting what tools are being used, what type of wood, and who’s doing the work,” she explains. “A woman will make smaller chips than a man, for example.” Schweizer-Strobel has spent years examining wood, recovered at the bottom of Lake Constance, from the remains of a Neolithic settlement called Hornstaad-Hoernle, which was located on the Rhine River at the northern foot of the Alps some 6,000 years ago. Hornstaad-Hoernle is one of more than 1,000 known “pile-dwelling” settlements, which were built on prehistoric lakeshores using timber pilings to lift houses above the water. Thanks to oxygen–free conditions at the bottom of some lakes, the pilings and wood debris that dropped into the water from the settlements provide well-preserved evidence of prehistoric woodworking. “I have an unbelievable quantity of chips and waste,” says Schweizer-Strobel. “Take them out of the water and you can see every tool mark. If the ax was starting to get chipped or dull, you can see even that in the wood.” Comparing the fresh chips from Ergersheim to the 6,000-year-old wood waste recovered at Hornstaad-Hoernle will help her understand the evidence she’s seeing at the pile-dwelling settlements—who was working where, what kind of work was done in the middle of the settlement, and what kind of work was done off-site. She’s also gained a new appreciation for the tools themselves. “Before, people thought you’d never be able to work with these stone axes. It turns out you can, and pretty well,” Schweizer-Strobel says. “I’d never have thought they were so durable and effective.” Video: Recreating The Neolithic Toolkit