Bell Beakers, Gimbutas and R1b

[alan]

I think the main take-aways from this discussion are that 1) R1b came into Europe from the East, probably during the Copper Age at the earliest, and 2) its connection to Beaker is enigmatic, since Beaker apparently first arose at the opposite end of Europe.

The mechanics of R1b's entry into Beaker is the chief problem, which will only be resolved by means of ancient y-dna.

I wish the folks getting ancient y-dna would hurry up.

That is pretty well nail on head. There are a number of possibilities but none have a scorched earth trail or a simple clearcut wave that screams out the answer. That is why beaker has no consensus in the overall understanding of how it worked.

If there was one thing I think we can say about beaker is that it established an unexpected phenomenon of interlinking vast areas and apparently spreading and mixing genes from all over Europe together into a modern blend. So, as well as the metals, from a genetic point of view it was clearly also a marriage network of some sort. My best guess is that beakers travelled in small family groups and when they arrived in a destination they married their daughters or sisters to the local chiefs and in return married into their daughters etc.

That would create a system where a lot of mixing would happen. That way you could have families who have their beaker characteristics because they were originally beaker male lines and you could have families who have gotten beaker characteristics because they are locals who have married a beaker woman. If beaker and its exotica were sufficiently attractive then marrying a woman who could make the pots and perhaps the fancy clothes may have been an attractive prospect and indeed the only way of obtaining these things at a time when pots and clothes were home crafts and probably not bought and sold.

In fact, we probably need to remember that a market society, even for metalwork, probably didnt exist in the way we think today and all sorts of mechanism like tribute, dowries, marriage, fosterage, clientship, ritual deposition etc were involved in the distribution of metals so compared to a modern market economy there would have been a far greater need for a human element in the movement of high status goods, while home crafts like pottery, clothing etc also would likely have spread with actual women.

Even as late as Early Christian Ireland the evidence for actual markets is very slight and there are many legal records indicating that goods were distributed in elaborate obligation exchanges of annual tribute from under-kings, clientship, dowries etc. There was a system where gifts were given and other required tribute was returned. I think its called the book of rights. I will see if I can find a copy of it online.

[alan]

Here it is - the two way system of gift and obligation/tribute among the hierachy of Irish kings. It is schematic and idealised but it gives an idea of the sort of system that happened on a slightly less glorified scale in pre-Norman Ireland

http://www.maryjones.us/ctexts/cert.html

[MJost]

So the Copper Age time frame from 3500 to 2300 BC and the R1b-L11 block of 7 would have covered 3427 to P312's age of around 2524 bc. Now assuming Alan's comments stating 'home crafts like pottery, clothing etc also would likely have spread with actual women.', would we see "MtDNA Hot spots" such as western subclades found in central or eastern parts of Europe do to this movement?

MJost

[alan]

So the Copper Age time frame from 3500 to 2300 BC and the R1b-L11 block of 7 would have covered 3427 to P312's age of around 2524 bc. Now assuming Alan's comments stating 'home crafts like pottery, clothing etc also would likely have spread with actual women.', would we see "MtDNA Hot spots" such as western subclades found in central or eastern parts of Europe do to this movement?

MJost

There is all that H which appeared in beaker in central Europe - think it was a study of Germany.

[alan]

It may seem strange to us in modern western societies but access to woman and marriage in traditional societies -even today in many middle eastern cultures-requires a certain amount of wealth and many people cannot get married because they dont have the wealth. Access to marriage partners may have been a major driving force for people with access to prestige goods and skills in a societies where trading was probably not done in the way we think today. Prestige goods, skills and the right connections may have been the only card mobile people with no automatic rights to local lands had when they moved into new territories.

[alan]

Bride price
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_price

[alan]

This is an interesting article on early Irish marriage customs although its fair to say that copper age one's wouldnt have been identitical and indeed travelling beaker people probably had to use some form of mobile wealth to gain a bride

http://www.ucc.ie/celt/marriage_ei.html

This part suggests a pan-Celtic normal marriage form:

The general opinion is that lánamnas comthinchuir was the normal kind of marriage between persons of property in the seventh and eighth centuries. But how old was that institution? Caesar’s brief account of marriage amongst the Gauls appears to refer to two important characteristics which are present in the Irish type: men match the herds which their wives bring as dowries by contributing an equal amount from their own property, and an account is kept of the profits of these conjoint resources (suggesting that each reserved ultimate ownership of what was contributed to the marital fund).[17] If this type of marriage is a common Celtic institution, we may have here a hint as to the meaning of comthinchor ‘common contribution’ that the wife brought a dowry (dos) in herds and that the husband matched that dowry with a payment to his wife of an equal amount from his own resources (donatio ex marito).[18] One need not, of course, assume that such dowries were always in cattle: we have seen that women could acquire real estate and other kinds of property and the glossators, whatever the value of their opinions on this point, note that land could form part of their marital contribution The equality of husband and wife is matched elsewhere and scholars have argued that the Indo-European peoples had always known a variety of marriage which left the wife her husband’s equal partner—and one could compare the Roman marriage without manus and the Germanic marriage in which the husband did not acquire his wife’s mundium.[19]

[MJost]

There is all that H which appeared in beaker in central Europe - think it was a study of Germany.

Thx. But if its this paper, it didn't find much. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4039305/

MJost

[GailT]

So the Copper Age time frame from 3500 to 2300 BC and the R1b-L11 block of 7 would have covered 3427 to P312's age of around 2524 bc. Now assuming Alan's comments stating 'home crafts like pottery, clothing etc also would likely have spread with actual women.', would we see "MtDNA Hot spots" such as western subclades found in central or eastern parts of Europe do to this movement?

The mtDNA mutation rate is slow (estimated to be about 1 mutation in 3600 years) so it's difficult to use mtDNA to do fine scale population analysis. Haplogroup H was probably widely distributed among diverse Neolithic communities, so we would need full sequence results from a very large number of ancient remains to link specific populations to specific subclades of H.

[alan]

This is extracted from a paper that gives a good summary of exchange in early Ireland and probably is the biggest instituation whereby high status portable items moved about in early Ireland


The purpose of exchange in early Ireland was not the mere swapping of goods. Most of the exchange happened to create bonds between individuals. As Charles Doherty points out: ‘Men were bound to each other in a variety of relationships, the outward expression of which was reciprocal agreements by which goods and
services circulated according to the relative status of the parties involved’ (Doherty 1980, 67). In his study on exchange Marcel Mauss describes the mechanism of giftgiving: by giving, one shows oneself as generous, and thus as deserving of respect, by receiving the gift, one shows respect to the giver, and by returning the gift one demonstrates that one's honour is equivalent to that of the original giver. By giving, receiving and returning gifts a moral bond between the persons exchanging gifts is created. The process of gift giving strengthens co-operation, competitiveness, and antagonism (1969).

Exchange was thus a means of creating and upholding bonds. In giving a gift to someone a person stated his superiority, while the acceptance of a gift demonstrated submission. This was the way over-kings tied subject kingdoms under their rule, and lords contracted clients. The subject people and clients reciprocated by paying tribute or renders, which consummated the alliance
(Doherty 1980, 73). The functioning and unity of an early Irish túath was based on a web of reciprocal personal relationships, where the king ‘held the heads of the...