Stone Double Axes and Plain Pottery Suggest the Rhine Did Not Split Neolithic Europe

A river that archaeologists treated as a border

For years, many archaeologists have described the late Neolithic of western and central Europe as a patchwork. In one influential account, the Rhine marked a cultural boundary, with a gap between the Michelsberg horizon and the later Bell Beaker horizon. A new study by Sebastian Schultrich, an archaeologist at Kiel University’s ROOTS Cluster of Excellence, argues that the evidence does not support that picture. The work appears in the journal Germania.

Schultrich looked at material from the late fourth and early third millennia BC, roughly 5,000 years ago. He found that three very different kinds of evidence overlap across hundreds of kilometres: prestigious stone axes, humble cooking and storage pottery, and huge collective tombs.

What the finds show

The first strand is the stone battle axe, especially the double-edged type. These polished, carefully worked axes turn up from France and the Alpine region through Germany and Denmark to Scandinavia and Poland. Many were status objects rather than everyday tools. Some were made from distinctive rock. One example is an unfinished 36 centimetre axe of meta-hornblendite from the Kerlevot source in Brittany, found in the Kervadel barrow in Finistere and probably dated to about 3000 to 2700 BC. Stone from that source reached the Netherlands, and double axes from western France have relatives in Switzerland, northern Germany and Denmark.

The second strand is coarse ware, a plain, thick-walled pottery that archaeologists often overlook because it lacks showy decoration. One typical feature is a row of dots or impressions under the rim. Coarse ware spread widely from the middle of the fourth millennium BC. Schultrich points to examples such as a shard from Brodersby-Schonhagen in northern Germany, dated to about 3000 to 2800 BC.

The third strand is burial. Passage graves and gallery graves could hold dozens or even hundreds of people. Their distribution also overlaps with the axes and the pottery, which suggests that distant communities shared ideas about how to treat the dead.

How the connections may have worked

The study does not claim that one people spread across the continent. Instead, it proposes two different mechanisms. Axes look like deliberate copies of a shared idea, which local workshops then reworked in their own style. The pottery looks different. Schultrich suggests that potters in overlapping catchment areas gradually aligned their everyday vessels, so styles converged slowly across great distances.

“There are indications that a convergence of pottery styles across such great distances occurred gradually and unconsciously,” Schultrich says. He also says the result “opens up entirely new possibilities for interpretation,” and he describes a network “characterised by fundamental narratives.” One account of the paper calls this a “narratological continuum,” meaning a web of shared stories and values rather than a single culture.

Unity with local flavour

The finding does not erase regional identity. Each area kept its own traits, in the form of local axe workshops, pottery habits and grave customs. The paper’s title, as listed online, uses the Latin motto “In varietate concordia,” united in diversity, to capture that balance. The shared elements sit on top of real local variety rather than replacing it.

Why it matters

Research on this period often split the record into separate culture groups, with sharp lines on the map. Schultrich’s approach suggests that those lines may reflect modern research traditions, which differ between countries, as much as prehistoric reality. If communities on both banks of the Rhine shared symbols, tool forms and burial ideas, then people, objects and stories probably moved across the river far more freely than the old boundary model allows.

Caveats and open questions

This is an argument based on distribution patterns, and a published summary notes that the pottery evidence is the weakest part of the case. Similar pots and similar axes show contact or shared ideas, but they do not show who carried them, how often, or why. The idea of gradual and unconscious convergence in pottery remains an interpretation. Dating also spans several centuries, so some links may not have existed at the same time. Other researchers will likely test the model with new finds and more precise dating. I could not read the full paper, so details such as exact site counts come from press coverage and an excerpt rather than the article itself.

Sources

• S. Schultrich, study in Germania (Kiel University, ROOTS Cluster of Excellence). Publication details and DOI were not available to me. Related title listing: In varietate concordia (ResearchGate)
• Phys.org: Double axes and coarse pottery reveal connections across the Rhine 5,000 years ago
• HeritageDaily: 5,000-year-old finds challenge idea that the Rhine divided ancient Europe
• Anthropology.net: Neolithic Battle Axes Blur the Rhine Boundary, 3500-2600 BC

Image credit: Sebastian Schultrich, via HeritageDaily.