Flooding was one way to open up the land. Beavers showed how to do it. A beaver dam made a shallow pond. It drowned and killed trees in the flat basin that it flooded. This change brought in more sunlight, more sun-loving and fruit-bearing edge species, more fruit and nut trees, more game. A better and a quicker way—and one that could be used in uplands as well as on the flats—was fire coppice. By 8000 BC, European people had learned to burn off patches of forest intentionally. In their place came up blackberries, roses, currants, gooseberries, and hazel. People ate all of it, as did deer, aurochs, and other game animals, who were attracted to the open site. As the hazel grew in, it could also be harvested, even with the blunt Mesolithic axe, for poles and for firewood. By timing the burns, people could create a mosaic of woodland in different stages of regrowth, and so create the greatest possibilities for harvest of food, of medicine, of fuel, and of building materials. As the axe improved, a group could cut instead of burn.
The ice sheets of the Pleistocene never reached present-day Hungary, Bulgaria, or most of the rest of southern and eastern Europe. Broadleaf trees like oak, hornbeam, beech, and hazel took refuge in these southern mountains for the duration of the Ice Age. These were among the earliest places in Europe that people learned from the trees how to cut and renew them. In the Mattra and Bruk Mountains of northeastern Hungary, tribes began to manage the woods as long as 10,000 years ago. The forests were rich in hornbeam, which left to itself creates a very dense shade. That light-demanding species like hazel persisted for several thousand years there suggests that the forests were frequently cut. The hornbeam itself was cut to make winter feed for flocks and herds, and it made a good, hot-burning firewood. Hazel (see page 92) had use after use: feed for the animals, nuts for the people, fences, binding, hedging. Oak could be cut on a longer rotation for posts and other building needs, while its smaller branches were lopped for fodder.
In Bulgaria and Greece, more than 8000 years ago, trees were intensively pollarded and coppiced, for winter feed, for firewood, for house posts and beams, and for wattle and daub—a mixture of plaster and brushwood to make walls between the post and beams. Oak was much used, and in some uplands the easily worked dogwood was a principal constituent of wattle and daub. Archaeologists use pollen counts from ancient soil strata to determine what lived in a woodland then. In some areas, the very high counts for shrubs like rose, elderberry, blackberry, and raspberry, along with small trees like dogwood, suggest that the inhabitants had invented hedges—dense linear forests of light-demanding tree and shrubs species—that not only supplied provender but helped contain the stock.
As Mesolithic woodlanders all over Europe learned to live and work with their trees, the peoples grew in numbers, in affluence, and in skills. You had more living relatives, friends from the coppice work group, and people who would trade with you. One family was good at making rope from linden’s inner bark, a few friends were great track weavers, another family was known for its textiles, a fourth specialized in willow, making little fences, and remedies for headache. How were they all to live together?
They did not aim for permanence or monumentality. They aimed for a way to reach, to meet, to talk, to trade and to sing with one another. And so they invented the street. The available wood from their coppiced forests made it possible to build, to repair, to rebuild, to move to a new village, almost at will. In the alpine foothills of what is now France, Switzerland, and Germany, along the edges of lakes and bogs, small settlements arose one after another. Archaeologists have now studied more than a thousand Neolithic settlements there, and that is only a fraction of what must have existed during the time, 65 to 50 centuries ago, when village building was at its height.
Oak was the principal species for building. A first settlement might use an uncut woodland. Thereafter, the posts and beams would be harvested on a ten- to twenty-year coppice cycle. The wood was never of great dimension. One of the posts from which to hang the roof and the walls might be only three to six inches in diameter. It might be of oak, of ash, or of the non-coppiced silver fir. The smaller wood for girts, wall plates and to make the infill for the walls themselves came from a whole group of coppiced leafy trees: from willow, maple, cherry, alder, poplar, birch or apple.
The resulting houses did not last long, nor were they meant to. They were an opportunity for discussion, for know-how, for working together. When a house turned two years old, it usually needed major renovations. Seldom was any dwelling occupied for more than fifteen or twenty years total. Each usually consisted of one or two lines of posts, with a pitched thatched roof. There were one or two rooms, at least one with a hearth or oven, and a covered front porch. Planks or wattle and daub filled in the walls. The floors were of packed clay, often inlaid with bark and moss. As Daniela Hoffman and her colleagues put it in their wonderful article “The Life and Times of the House,” a structure was not so much built as “performed.” Maintenance and renovation were continual. This was not for lack of skill. It was a conscious choice. Europeans had an abundance of material, and the building and rebuilding allowed them to work with their neighbors and to move and resettle as their needs, friendships, and alliances changed.
The oldest houses in a place were impromptu. First, one or two families would build contiguous houses on a site. If the site were good, a few more might join during the following year. Next, a building boom would add one or two dozen more houses over a space of half a decade. A catastrophe like a fire might make everyone start again. More often, the buildings would be gradually abandoned within twenty years, until not a single family remained. The inhabitants might found a new place together, or disperse to join with others in a new habitation. A new generation would likely make a new place to live. It has been claimed that this frequent moving was a result of resource depletion—chiefly of the coppice not being able to keep up with the building and repairs. That may indeed have been a part of the rhythm. Moving meant the area nearest the village could have untouched decades to recover, but it is more likely that the main reason was social: they wanted a change of scene or needed a change of friends.
The oldest settlements were arranged every which way, often with a trackway leading to or through them. There were widely spaced buildings, more or less facing one another. Later, there began to be more definite rows of houses, with a common track between them. You could easily call across the street if you needed to borrow a little butter. In the final centuries of the lakeside settlements, the houses were often tightly packed, one beside another. There was a main street, and there were side streets. Here you could not only call a friend to borrow some butter, but also hear the couple next door’s argument, whether you wanted to or not.
Coppice made it possible to come into a relationship not only with a friend or relative but with neighborhoods. As the street evolved, the covered front porch became an important social meeting point. Houses were arranged with their porches facing the street. When you wanted to talk, you sat out on the porch, just as you might today in an older neighborhood in Davenport, Iowa, or Cocodrie, Louisiana, or San Jose, California. People with common interests or crafts tended to be neighbors. The coppersmiths lived next door to one another, as did the cloth makers. People who worked common pastures or cut a common coppice might live close by one another on the same street. If you needed something, you knew which neighborhood was likely to have it.
The residents all might share the tasks of maintaining the street and the trackways, of renovating a few of the ovens, of rethatching a root, raising a sunken floor, or repairing the wattle and daub. There was time for meeting, for singing, for gossip, for argument, for forming, dissolving, and re-forming a group of friends. Their monument was not a temple or a ziggurat, but the street, enabling a life among neighbors.