Outside the box: Lithic raw material analysis as an indication of crossing cultural borderlines by the earliest Linear Pottery Culture?

Southern Bavaria marks a marginal area of the earliest Linear Pottery Culture in Central Europe. It is adjacent to the Southern Alpine Foreland, which represents an area for potential interaction with other cultural entities. Neolithic research in this region has largely focused on pottery analysis as a basis for answering chrono-cultural questions, leaving lithic analysis as a proxy for spatial processes at a lower resolution. For comparisons with the preceding Mesolithic however, the study of lithic finds is essential as they are the common denominator between the two periods. To confront this gap in the empirical data, a lithic assemblage from an earliest LBK site in the Isar valley of southern Bavaria was studied with a special focus on raw material analysis and typo-technological aspects of the Knappable Siliceous Sedimentary Rocks (henceforth, KSSR). The objective was to generate high-resolution raw material data obtained by sorting and determination of sedimentary microfacies. Results show that the main raw material components originate from two different regions of Bavaria, the Ortenburg district and the Donau-Altmühl region. Additionally, they reveal bridges across the Alps and into Switzerland, which supports the idea that clear-cut archaeological borders were in fact more permeable and that long-distance importation occurred from non-LBK regions. This opens up a discussion about the agents and processes of long-distance raw material transport, relations between cultural entities as well as the mobility of the earliest LBK itself across its archaeological distribution. Set in a diachronic perspective, it is shown that Southern Bavaria can be viewed as a transitional zone during the earliest phase of the LBK, with mobility occurring for different motives.